It's funny listening to Obama preaching about raising taxes. Assuming American companies said "Gee, Obama is right, we should pay more taxes!", which companies does Obama think could afford to pay those taxes?
Even with the existing tax havens, traditional American companies like GM and Chrysler are going broke and selling their bits and pieces to foreign companies. How many trillions have the US federal government paid in the last six months to save American corporations?
Oh, OK, go ahead, raise those taxes. Raise $200 billion more in taxes and pay $200 billion more in bailouts, is that how it's supposed to work?
If you can't make a profit playing by the rules then stop trying to make a profit and die
This is more or less what's happenning to the USA as a whole. American companies simply cannot compete against foreign companies, that's why the industrial sector is moving to Asia. It's useless to say "stop trying to make a profit and die", they died a quarter century ago.
It's the US government at all levels, federal, state, and local, that should learn to live by the rules. When the corporations are moving overseas to places with lower taxes this means your taxes are too high, you should cut government spending and taxes at the same time.
Your parents did a very good business. After correcting for inflation, those 6000 pounds became 80000, which means your parents got 6.5% / year interest in real value plus free rent for over 40 years.
Using key logging tends to set a bad precedent and the whole of school experience is part of their education, including accepted practices by government and respect for the privacy of individuals.
Besides, it's ineffective for a sufficiently creative student and I can tell you that some students are very creative when it comes to cheating at exams. I knew guys in college that if they spent as much time studying as they did inventing clever ways of cheating they would have perfect grades.
In Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" there was a moment when one character was in jail where his notebook could be watched. He installed a driver that accepted input from morse code in a shift key and the output was the scrollock led blinking morse code.
If youtube offered full-length feature films with good quality, then I'd be ready to pay a reasonable amount. Let's say about the same price I pay to rent a DVD for a 700 MB download. The DVD has a better quality, but downloading is more convenient.
It's about time the media industry learned about this thing they call a "market". It's up to the seller to set a price but it's the buyer who accepts to pay the price or not.
Of course, TFA may have got it wrong, but "The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years" sounds quite impossible. Perhaps they mean it would need to be refueled once every 12 to 14 years.
Other than spacecraft there aren't many systems that can run 12 years unattended. To make things worse, there's the extreme climate conditions. Right, what can possibly go wrong?
Yeah, they are trying to rename it. In 1918 they renamed as "Spanish" a flu that actually started in Kansas. Now this weird alphanumeric code won't stick. We must find a proper name for it.
It is sad that there are so many who don't place a value on the most valuable asset we have -- creativity.
Ideas have an immense value. The value of an idea can be so great it's meaningless to compare it with monetary value. How much is the concept of a wheel worth? The idea of using a fire to cook food? The idea of defining an alphabet of symbols to represent spoken sounds?
Price is a different matter. You want to sell something, set a price for it. If the potential buyers agree that it's a fair price then a business transaction results, it's as simple as that. However, if the buyers don't agree it's a fair price, no business results and you are stuck with an unsold item.
Consider a simple idea: a steel nail. Anyone can make nails with a roll of steel wire, pliers to cut it, and a hammer and anvil to make a head and a point. But does anyone make nails at home? No. Why? With the price of nails at the hardware store, homemade nails make no sense.
If an industry that has no "intellectual property" on something that anyone can make at home can compete on price, then why can't the musicians and film producers underprice their amateur competitors?
I a could download a song for $0.10 or a film for $1.00 I'd buy plenty of music and films online. But at $0.99 for a song or $14.95 for a film I refuse to buy anything. If I can copy songs and films for free I copy them, if I couldn't copy them I'd live without them.
In any case this makes no difference at all to the producers. They prefer to get $0.00 of my business and complain of "piracy" instead of admitting their prices are an order of magnitude higher than what the market will bear.
Did these "evil pirates" kill the music industry, as was proclaimed they would?
They sure did! In the 1890s there was a great market for piano rolls. Where can you buy piano rolls today? Conclusion: pirates killed the music industry.
young people with healthy immune systems were the primary people exposed to the flu, especially since they tended to be crowded together in barracks, ships, and trains where it could easily spread.
Except that the US mobilized 4.3 million soldiers and 50 million people died of the flu.
Being crowded together could get all of those soldiers contaminated, but then each one of them would have to infect twelve other non-soldier people after being released from that togetherness.
Let's see, from your link, counting from 1797 until 1927, there were ten recessions in 130 years, an average of one recession every 13 years. After 1929, not counting the great depression, there were eight recessions. From 1939 until 2009, there was one recession every 8.75 years.
13 > 8.75
If you wish, count the great depression in the old system, making it 14 recessions in 142 years, 10.1 is still more than 8.75. The old days may not have been perfect, but the economy was certainly more stable than in the current system of government regulation.
What are you talking about? The international banking system collapsed just a few months ago.
That's wrong. The US federal government has not allowed banks to collapse since 1933
In America, pre-depression economics was a vicious cycle of boom and bust.
[citation needed]. Have you tried getting some hard data to back this claim?
I recently gave a course on Python programming to some coworkers and used data from that site in my examples. It's weird how you can plot data of wages vs. cost of living for centuries and see a slow but constant progress, interrupted only by wars, until 1914. The silver and gold standard caused the economy to be *very* stable.
Then, after WWI, the UK eliminated the gold standard. A big market bubble arose, followed by collapse in 1929 and regulation in the 1930s. Afterwards it's very difficult to plot anything due to inflation, you cannot determine accurately what should be the worth of things. So, that "vicious cycle of boom and bust" that you mention actually was one boom from 1919 to 1929 and one bust from 1930 to mid-30s and was the result of a government trying to regulate away the economic consequences of war.
You can try every combination of factors you want, plot wages, cost of living, stock prices against GDP, price index, gold prices, whatever. Government intervention in the economy only makes things worse. An interesting plot is wages vs. cost of living in the UK from the 14th to the 19th century. You can see every time when a king changed the amount of silver in a penny in that graph. Do you want an efficient economy? Take away the power of the government to print money. The only regulation needed is a standard defining the mass of one gram, let the market define how much a gram of silver or gold is worth and the rest is consequence.
I think the only reason why people defend government intervention in the economy is because no one today remembers the age when the market was free. And, unfortunately, when you allow intervention in the economy, intervention in other areas is inevitable. There has never existed a communist government, one that does not allow a free market to exist, that didn't end up as a dictatorship. Allow the government to take over the economy and no one will have the means to start an opposition movement.
What I don't get is why mostly conservatives support this kind of thing. They don't trust the gov't to monitor banks, to manage trade, to run healthcare, etc. YET they trust it to snoop fairly?
It seems to me that the best government should be the smallest *practical* size. Having no government at all wouldn't work, it would be jungle law.
We don't need the government to monitor banks, manage trade, run healthcare, etc, because those tasks can be performed by private institutions regulated by market forces. What the government needs to do is to set the smallest possible set of rules to ensure that no distortions will arise in the market.
The question of how this system is working is debatable, I admit. Current regulations today are completely unbalanced. Healthcare in the US, for instance, has been a victim of runaway medical malpractice suits. In order to avoid liability, doctors order so many unneeded tests that healthcare costs have run out of control. Or take the electrical power system. In several places they deregulated the quality of service, but kept prices regulated, guess what happened to the resulting quality?
Now, OTOH, justice and police work is something that cannot be privatized. You can privatize security services, you can privatize jail administration, but you cannot privatize courts or police investigation. It's not possible to have judges bidding among themselves for presiding lawsuits. It's not possible to have detectives bidding among themselves to investigate murders.
In conclusion, I think the government is more justified in trying to seek more power to perform criminal investigations than to seek more power to control the market.
This political position might be called "conservative" in the US and UK and "liberal" everywhere else, but it must be understood that, like any political position, it should be tempered with caution. I do not want to concede absolute power to the government in crime fighting just as I do not want to take away all the power the government has to regulate the private corporations. But I think the main reason for the existence of the government is to make sure justice is applied correctly, not to replace market forces.
Wholesale surveillance is not limited by good will, it's limited by technology.
While technology is becoming cheaper for them, it's becoming cheaper for us also.
If this trend of recording everything becomes a nuisance, people could have programs doing random web accesses all the time. Get address lists from spammers and make your system send fake emails at random. With enough broadband, this would create an unmanageable amount of traffic for the surveillance systems.
Making it worse, the true criminals could use steganography on top of all that. If a machine sends a million emails and browses a million websites, what kind of surveillance would find the few messages that contain hidden information?
Face the facts. Linux runs, it's a practical reality. Linux *is* the Operating System. GNU is a set of auxiliary libraries and utilities.
Perhaps, this being Slashdot, a car analogy will explain things better. A car needs a set of wheels and tyres to run, but no one will say his car is a "Bridgestone/Chevrolet".
Slashdot Mirror
Very simple: grow your grain with the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels. Oil or coal that are millions of years old have very little C-14.
It's funny listening to Obama preaching about raising taxes. Assuming American companies said "Gee, Obama is right, we should pay more taxes!", which companies does Obama think could afford to pay those taxes?
Even with the existing tax havens, traditional American companies like GM and Chrysler are going broke and selling their bits and pieces to foreign companies. How many trillions have the US federal government paid in the last six months to save American corporations?
Oh, OK, go ahead, raise those taxes. Raise $200 billion more in taxes and pay $200 billion more in bailouts, is that how it's supposed to work?
This is more or less what's happenning to the USA as a whole. American companies simply cannot compete against foreign companies, that's why the industrial sector is moving to Asia. It's useless to say "stop trying to make a profit and die", they died a quarter century ago.
It's the US government at all levels, federal, state, and local, that should learn to live by the rules. When the corporations are moving overseas to places with lower taxes this means your taxes are too high, you should cut government spending and taxes at the same time.
To better understand it, you should read the explanations in the backside of the chart. Awesome!
You should study something about economics. Start here.
Your parents did a very good business. After correcting for inflation, those 6000 pounds became 80000, which means your parents got 6.5% / year interest in real value plus free rent for over 40 years.
You can get the official consumer price index, from 1913 up to now here. $6 in 1969 would translate to approximately $36 today.
For older historical data, plus many other interesting historical data about prices and economic indicators, this site is very interesting.
Besides, it's ineffective for a sufficiently creative student and I can tell you that some students are very creative when it comes to cheating at exams. I knew guys in college that if they spent as much time studying as they did inventing clever ways of cheating they would have perfect grades.
In Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" there was a moment when one character was in jail where his notebook could be watched. He installed a driver that accepted input from morse code in a shift key and the output was the scrollock led blinking morse code.
The question is not "IF", but "HOW MUCH".
If youtube offered full-length feature films with good quality, then I'd be ready to pay a reasonable amount. Let's say about the same price I pay to rent a DVD for a 700 MB download. The DVD has a better quality, but downloading is more convenient.
It's about time the media industry learned about this thing they call a "market". It's up to the seller to set a price but it's the buyer who accepts to pay the price or not.
Of course, TFA may have got it wrong, but "The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years" sounds quite impossible. Perhaps they mean it would need to be refueled once every 12 to 14 years.
Other than spacecraft there aren't many systems that can run 12 years unattended. To make things worse, there's the extreme climate conditions. Right, what can possibly go wrong?
It would be quite a mutation, to allow them to swim 20000km from the Antarctic to the Arctic...
Let's keep things straight, this misnaming has already caused too much harm.
Yeah, they are trying to rename it. In 1918 they renamed as "Spanish" a flu that actually started in Kansas. Now this weird alphanumeric code won't stick. We must find a proper name for it.
Any volunteers? Colbert, are you there?
Ideas have an immense value. The value of an idea can be so great it's meaningless to compare it with monetary value. How much is the concept of a wheel worth? The idea of using a fire to cook food? The idea of defining an alphabet of symbols to represent spoken sounds?
Price is a different matter. You want to sell something, set a price for it. If the potential buyers agree that it's a fair price then a business transaction results, it's as simple as that. However, if the buyers don't agree it's a fair price, no business results and you are stuck with an unsold item.
Consider a simple idea: a steel nail. Anyone can make nails with a roll of steel wire, pliers to cut it, and a hammer and anvil to make a head and a point. But does anyone make nails at home? No. Why? With the price of nails at the hardware store, homemade nails make no sense.
If an industry that has no "intellectual property" on something that anyone can make at home can compete on price, then why can't the musicians and film producers underprice their amateur competitors?
I a could download a song for $0.10 or a film for $1.00 I'd buy plenty of music and films online. But at $0.99 for a song or $14.95 for a film I refuse to buy anything. If I can copy songs and films for free I copy them, if I couldn't copy them I'd live without them.
In any case this makes no difference at all to the producers. They prefer to get $0.00 of my business and complain of "piracy" instead of admitting their prices are an order of magnitude higher than what the market will bear.
They sure did! In the 1890s there was a great market for piano rolls. Where can you buy piano rolls today? Conclusion: pirates killed the music industry.
Maybe not, but cars have been removed from the market for similar reasons. Notoriously insecure systems should never be used in hospitals.
Except that the US mobilized 4.3 million soldiers and 50 million people died of the flu.
Being crowded together could get all of those soldiers contaminated, but then each one of them would have to infect twelve other non-soldier people after being released from that togetherness.
They used real life people in that game.
If no one in your family ever died, DO NOT ASSUME IT'S A SMALL THING TO LIVE WITH THE LOSS.
Asshole.
n/t
Let's see, from your link, counting from 1797 until 1927, there were ten recessions in 130 years, an average of one recession every 13 years. After 1929, not counting the great depression, there were eight recessions. From 1939 until 2009, there was one recession every 8.75 years.
13 > 8.75
If you wish, count the great depression in the old system, making it 14 recessions in 142 years, 10.1 is still more than 8.75. The old days may not have been perfect, but the economy was certainly more stable than in the current system of government regulation.
That's wrong. The US federal government has not allowed banks to collapse since 1933
[citation needed]. Have you tried getting some hard data to back this claim?
I recently gave a course on Python programming to some coworkers and used data from that site in my examples. It's weird how you can plot data of wages vs. cost of living for centuries and see a slow but constant progress, interrupted only by wars, until 1914. The silver and gold standard caused the economy to be *very* stable.
Then, after WWI, the UK eliminated the gold standard. A big market bubble arose, followed by collapse in 1929 and regulation in the 1930s. Afterwards it's very difficult to plot anything due to inflation, you cannot determine accurately what should be the worth of things. So, that "vicious cycle of boom and bust" that you mention actually was one boom from 1919 to 1929 and one bust from 1930 to mid-30s and was the result of a government trying to regulate away the economic consequences of war.
You can try every combination of factors you want, plot wages, cost of living, stock prices against GDP, price index, gold prices, whatever. Government intervention in the economy only makes things worse. An interesting plot is wages vs. cost of living in the UK from the 14th to the 19th century. You can see every time when a king changed the amount of silver in a penny in that graph. Do you want an efficient economy? Take away the power of the government to print money. The only regulation needed is a standard defining the mass of one gram, let the market define how much a gram of silver or gold is worth and the rest is consequence.
I think the only reason why people defend government intervention in the economy is because no one today remembers the age when the market was free. And, unfortunately, when you allow intervention in the economy, intervention in other areas is inevitable. There has never existed a communist government, one that does not allow a free market to exist, that didn't end up as a dictatorship. Allow the government to take over the economy and no one will have the means to start an opposition movement.
I wish that were true: goodbye spambots...
It seems to me that the best government should be the smallest *practical* size. Having no government at all wouldn't work, it would be jungle law.
We don't need the government to monitor banks, manage trade, run healthcare, etc, because those tasks can be performed by private institutions regulated by market forces. What the government needs to do is to set the smallest possible set of rules to ensure that no distortions will arise in the market.
The question of how this system is working is debatable, I admit. Current regulations today are completely unbalanced. Healthcare in the US, for instance, has been a victim of runaway medical malpractice suits. In order to avoid liability, doctors order so many unneeded tests that healthcare costs have run out of control. Or take the electrical power system. In several places they deregulated the quality of service, but kept prices regulated, guess what happened to the resulting quality?
Now, OTOH, justice and police work is something that cannot be privatized. You can privatize security services, you can privatize jail administration, but you cannot privatize courts or police investigation. It's not possible to have judges bidding among themselves for presiding lawsuits. It's not possible to have detectives bidding among themselves to investigate murders.
In conclusion, I think the government is more justified in trying to seek more power to perform criminal investigations than to seek more power to control the market.
This political position might be called "conservative" in the US and UK and "liberal" everywhere else, but it must be understood that, like any political position, it should be tempered with caution. I do not want to concede absolute power to the government in crime fighting just as I do not want to take away all the power the government has to regulate the private corporations. But I think the main reason for the existence of the government is to make sure justice is applied correctly, not to replace market forces.
While technology is becoming cheaper for them, it's becoming cheaper for us also.
If this trend of recording everything becomes a nuisance, people could have programs doing random web accesses all the time. Get address lists from spammers and make your system send fake emails at random. With enough broadband, this would create an unmanageable amount of traffic for the surveillance systems.
Making it worse, the true criminals could use steganography on top of all that. If a machine sends a million emails and browses a million websites, what kind of surveillance would find the few messages that contain hidden information?
Your rant is just an update on something that was written in Greek 2500 years ago.
Face the facts. Linux runs, it's a practical reality. Linux *is* the Operating System. GNU is a set of auxiliary libraries and utilities.
Perhaps, this being Slashdot, a car analogy will explain things better. A car needs a set of wheels and tyres to run, but no one will say his car is a "Bridgestone/Chevrolet".