Even the Austrian school of economic theory recognizes the need for intervention to keep monopolies from limiting the efficient allocation of resources, and that monopolies are the natural result of largely imperfect markets (like this one, where the huge *natural* barrier to entry makes it so).
is, I'm pretty sure, flat-out wrong. According to the Austrians true monopolies only arise if government mandated or protected. Thus intervention in the marketplace, according to them, by the government is what gives rise to monopolies, not that intervention must stop them.
Additionally,
Monopolies are the natural consequence of unregulated markets, since there is no such thing as an ideal free market.
is a non sequitur; the conclusion is not following from the premise in any way I can see.
I'm not surprised their playerbase went up--with numbers as low as they had, there's not much more you can go than up.
I'm sure the game is still total garbage. Listen to us (the people that made the mistake of buying AoC)--NEVER, EVER buy a Funcom game. The bugs, the imbalance, the itemization, the missing features, the unimplemented stats, the game would have been comical had I not paid 50 bucks for the box and 15 more for a month's worth of playtime.
I agree with you; I was giving a short history lesson on what the founding fathers thought as per the basis of the Bill of Rights. My positions held are in-line with natural law but I do not have the natural law basis for them. I do not believe in tolerating incompatible ethical codes, either.
I am not a believer in natural law, but let me put it this way: do you believe that what is right is not always the law, and what is the law is not always right? That the law is not something to be obeyed because it is the law? That some ethical principles, however derived, transcend whatever the government or society thinks...?
The American founding fathers, from whom the Bill of Rights came, viewed rights a inherent to all individuals and not something granted by men. Either from God, or inherent in nature (or actually both, to my understanding).
These rights are what is referred to as "negative rights". Basically put, that you can do just about anything so long as it doesn't infringe on another's well-being. Everything in the Bill of Rights demonstratably follows from that--that the government shall not interfere. But it doesn't grant you special privileges, either--nothing that requires one else give it to you (well, with some exceptions like right to a speedy trial).
To then go on to talk about a Bill of Rights as some arbitrarily-agreed upon standards is ridiculous and on some level scary, because it implies your humans rights and worth is something up for democratic debate and potentially is yet another chip on the political bargaining table.
You don't have to be an adherent to natural law (I'm not) to feel or believe in that. No so-called "Bill of Rights" should demand that other private entities ought to give you special privileges or concessions based on some mob rule decision. No wonder Democrats so frequently assume that the 2nd amendment means something that it doesn't--they believe (or at least, appear to believe) that rights and apparently human dignity are government-granted...!
No, seriously, look it up for yourself--we do not even really know why we sleep. As I mentioned, there is a huge confound between sleep deprivation being the actual cause and stress from lack of sleep. Sleep deprivation taken alone may not be what kills you. I am not so impressed by you trotting out an expert because there is no universal agreement in the field of sleep studies.
There are also the occasional strange case studies where some people need little-to-no sleep at all and apparently do just fine.
As for sleep apnea, I was thinking more along the lines of sleep studies where people went long periods without sleep, not chronic sleep deprivation, so I am probably wrong there.
Your anecdote isn't worth that much. Your last statement almost reminds me of some of the people that argue for homeopathy.
From a neurobiological perspective that will not be answered satisfactorily until we know at a basic biochemical level what happens during sleep to "recharge" the brain to its normal function.
Actually, it's rather contentious over whether sleep is recuperative in function or just an evolved "standby"/energy conservation mode, or what exactly its function is.
Sleep deprivation will kill you, and it will also seriously degrade your mental capabilities.
Actually, the scientific evidence for this is not at all clear and experimental results have been inconsistent.
As mentioned elsewhere here, there's a large confound with stress hormones and actual sleep deprivation. This is particularly suspect:
After being fitted with a cpap mask and sleep machine to pump air into my mouth and nose while I slept it took me three weeks of normal sleep to recover my mental faculties.
Recovery from sleep deprivation is rather quick--it seems that sleep is more efficient after sleep deprivation. If this was caused by sleep deprivation, it is very atypical!
It should be noted that sleep deprivation in humans for similar periods of time has not let to death or ill health.
A leading view of sleep nowadays is that it's a sort of evolved standby function that has some application to memory consolidation but otherwise isn't really necessary. At least to my understanding.
Damn you! You beat me to the punch. Even pointing out the rising cortisol levels! Damn you again, I wanted that Score 5, Informative/Interesting.
I will affirm everything the parent says.
In a sleep-deprivation study with rats where they would be awakened if they fell asleep by dunking them in a rotating platoform, control rats that could avoid getting dunked stayed much healthier than the rats awokened by being dunked in water (which would be much more stressful!)
Again, the people that are defending the Guatemalan president are leftists. If Tony Soprano gave Joe Schmoe a free car they'd probably look the other way too.
The only reason people aren't willing to believe it's the president is because the president is a left-winger. Leftists, despite their rhetoric of "equality" and such, strongly support their "dear leaders" as they view them as paternalistic figures giving them free stuff.
Sticking a device on someone's car, at the very least, would be some sort of vandalism of property; also it is conceivable that someone might want to put their car in a private garage away from view or even drive onto private land in the country.
Additionally, a bug means someone is watching and you don't know they are watching.
Those are usually out of date so there's often no good reason to just use them.
Putting a PC together is easy, though. Parent greatly exaggerates the difficulty of putting together a PC. True, you can't forget the importance of doing research for compatibility ahead of time, but it's generally really easy to do. Especially nowadays that heatsinks just pop in instead of that older-style nonsense with those ridiculous clips.
Hah! You should see how Apple nerds defend the cost of iPods verus other personal media devices.
They'll go on and on how about easy the Nano is to use and how it *LACKING* certain features is a good thing because it keeps it less complicated, but won't have a problem shoving under your nose the little features it has that the competition doesn't.
Take for example the Nano vs. Fuze. the Fuze has better sound quality, expansion port for microSDHC cards (! double your space !), a microphone, FM tuner, ogg and flac support, etc, at around a half to two thirds the price of the ipod. But oh no! All that extra stuff makes it so much more complicated--AND, iTunes, YAAAAY!
Holy crap! You must be getting really old, or something. Losing eyesight there, old geezer? No longer have a steady hand? Putting a computer together is really easy, especially nowadays. If you've had THAT much trouble, you're doing something wrong.
"Since we don't have a fully scientific answer, it's magic! I don't know who broke into my car last night but since a 'materialist' account doesn't have an answer it must be the interdimensional greminlins!"
Slashdot Mirror
Haha, he's got a very little "Cheney", am i doing this right?
I'm not a supporter of the Austrian school, but
is, I'm pretty sure, flat-out wrong. According to the Austrians true monopolies only arise if government mandated or protected. Thus intervention in the marketplace, according to them, by the government is what gives rise to monopolies, not that intervention must stop them.
Additionally,
is a non sequitur; the conclusion is not following from the premise in any way I can see.
Congratulations, you played the first 20 levels. Now play the rest of the game.
Don't forget pissant volunteer GMs.
And I could just as easily point out the federal government doing medical marijuana raids in areas that have legalized it or decriminalized it.
*yawn*
I'm not surprised their playerbase went up--with numbers as low as they had, there's not much more you can go than up.
I'm sure the game is still total garbage. Listen to us (the people that made the mistake of buying AoC)--NEVER, EVER buy a Funcom game. The bugs, the imbalance, the itemization, the missing features, the unimplemented stats, the game would have been comical had I not paid 50 bucks for the box and 15 more for a month's worth of playtime.
I agree with you; I was giving a short history lesson on what the founding fathers thought as per the basis of the Bill of Rights. My positions held are in-line with natural law but I do not have the natural law basis for them. I do not believe in tolerating incompatible ethical codes, either.
I am not a believer in natural law, but let me put it this way: do you believe that what is right is not always the law, and what is the law is not always right? That the law is not something to be obeyed because it is the law? That some ethical principles, however derived, transcend whatever the government or society thinks...?
That is my position.
The American founding fathers, from whom the Bill of Rights came, viewed rights a inherent to all individuals and not something granted by men. Either from God, or inherent in nature (or actually both, to my understanding).
These rights are what is referred to as "negative rights". Basically put, that you can do just about anything so long as it doesn't infringe on another's well-being. Everything in the Bill of Rights demonstratably follows from that--that the government shall not interfere. But it doesn't grant you special privileges, either--nothing that requires one else give it to you (well, with some exceptions like right to a speedy trial).
To then go on to talk about a Bill of Rights as some arbitrarily-agreed upon standards is ridiculous and on some level scary, because it implies your humans rights and worth is something up for democratic debate and potentially is yet another chip on the political bargaining table.
You don't have to be an adherent to natural law (I'm not) to feel or believe in that. No so-called "Bill of Rights" should demand that other private entities ought to give you special privileges or concessions based on some mob rule decision. No wonder Democrats so frequently assume that the 2nd amendment means something that it doesn't--they believe (or at least, appear to believe) that rights and apparently human dignity are government-granted...!
No, seriously, look it up for yourself--we do not even really know why we sleep. As I mentioned, there is a huge confound between sleep deprivation being the actual cause and stress from lack of sleep. Sleep deprivation taken alone may not be what kills you. I am not so impressed by you trotting out an expert because there is no universal agreement in the field of sleep studies.
There are also the occasional strange case studies where some people need little-to-no sleep at all and apparently do just fine.
As for sleep apnea, I was thinking more along the lines of sleep studies where people went long periods without sleep, not chronic sleep deprivation, so I am probably wrong there.
Your anecdote isn't worth that much. Your last statement almost reminds me of some of the people that argue for homeopathy.
From a neurobiological perspective that will not be answered satisfactorily until we know at a basic biochemical level what happens during sleep to "recharge" the brain to its normal function.
Actually, it's rather contentious over whether sleep is recuperative in function or just an evolved "standby"/energy conservation mode, or what exactly its function is.
Sorta. After 32 days the damage got to be deadly.
Most of the damage to the rats was likely due to extremely high levels of stress and not actual sleep deprivation
Sleep deprivation will kill you, and it will also seriously degrade your mental capabilities.
Actually, the scientific evidence for this is not at all clear and experimental results have been inconsistent.
As mentioned elsewhere here, there's a large confound with stress hormones and actual sleep deprivation. This is particularly suspect:
After being fitted with a cpap mask and sleep machine to pump air into my mouth and nose while I slept it took me three weeks of normal sleep to recover my mental faculties.
Recovery from sleep deprivation is rather quick--it seems that sleep is more efficient after sleep deprivation. If this was caused by sleep deprivation, it is very atypical!
It should be noted that sleep deprivation in humans for similar periods of time has not let to death or ill health.
A leading view of sleep nowadays is that it's a sort of evolved standby function that has some application to memory consolidation but otherwise isn't really necessary. At least to my understanding.
Damn you! You beat me to the punch. Even pointing out the rising cortisol levels! Damn you again, I wanted that Score 5, Informative/Interesting.
I will affirm everything the parent says.
In a sleep-deprivation study with rats where they would be awakened if they fell asleep by dunking them in a rotating platoform, control rats that could avoid getting dunked stayed much healthier than the rats awokened by being dunked in water (which would be much more stressful!)
Again, the people that are defending the Guatemalan president are leftists. If Tony Soprano gave Joe Schmoe a free car they'd probably look the other way too.
The only reason people aren't willing to believe it's the president is because the president is a left-winger. Leftists, despite their rhetoric of "equality" and such, strongly support their "dear leaders" as they view them as paternalistic figures giving them free stuff.
I keep hearing this, and it's not true anymore.
Chances are, if XP or Vista crash it's due to drivers, not the OS. Vista/XP are actually pretty stable.
And you've just lost at wit.
Sticking a device on someone's car, at the very least, would be some sort of vandalism of property; also it is conceivable that someone might want to put their car in a private garage away from view or even drive onto private land in the country.
Additionally, a bug means someone is watching and you don't know they are watching.
Those are usually out of date so there's often no good reason to just use them.
Putting a PC together is easy, though. Parent greatly exaggerates the difficulty of putting together a PC. True, you can't forget the importance of doing research for compatibility ahead of time, but it's generally really easy to do. Especially nowadays that heatsinks just pop in instead of that older-style nonsense with those ridiculous clips.
Hah! You should see how Apple nerds defend the cost of iPods verus other personal media devices.
They'll go on and on how about easy the Nano is to use and how it *LACKING* certain features is a good thing because it keeps it less complicated, but won't have a problem shoving under your nose the little features it has that the competition doesn't.
Take for example the Nano vs. Fuze. the Fuze has better sound quality, expansion port for microSDHC cards (! double your space !), a microphone, FM tuner, ogg and flac support, etc, at around a half to two thirds the price of the ipod. But oh no! All that extra stuff makes it so much more complicated--AND, iTunes, YAAAAY!
Apple nerds are an abomination.
Holy crap! You must be getting really old, or something. Losing eyesight there, old geezer? No longer have a steady hand? Putting a computer together is really easy, especially nowadays. If you've had THAT much trouble, you're doing something wrong.
"Since we don't have a fully scientific answer, it's magic! I don't know who broke into my car last night but since a 'materialist' account doesn't have an answer it must be the interdimensional greminlins!"
Yeah, this guy is bonkers and probably is a creationist disguising his views because he knows what the reaction will be.
He believes in immaterial magic for rather philosophically laughable reasons. He's shot his credibility, that's for sure.