Want to see FUD? Look no further than the mainstream media which portrays drone strikes killing innocents as needed, never questions the status quo, has laughable coverage of the rest of the world that portrays it as a dark, dangerous place (when the statistics show a different story) and maintain a silly idea that the US is a beacon of freedom and that other countries "hate us because of our freedom".
Conspiracy theories are the natural result of having a government that isn't transparent, a government that imprisons its citizens without cause, a government which kills its own citizens and a government hell-bent at destroying every last shred of freedom. When the government has lied to the people about everything, it is no doubt that "conspiracy theories" abound. Its no doubt that people are worried about Obamacare, look at what happened when the government offered to give "free health care" to the residents of Tuskegee, Alabama... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
Which is a large enough number to include just about every major and semi-major political activist. Keep in mind that there is only a turnout of about 64-ish percent for most presidential elections.
It should be worrying that the US courts approve even 1 secret surveillance order, let alone 30,000.
Its impossible to say what could have been because so much capital and research would have been shifted around, but its mostly just that the principle stands that the free market would have provided a way to get internet to a good chunk of the people who lived in places of low population density, it just would have looked differently. Sure, its possible it might have not been as good of internet or it might have been better or mostly the same. But one thing is for sure that there would not be only one ISP controlling everything like there is today in much of the rural market.
I really didn't like cable either, but the amount of streaming content on Netflix was just pathetic. I regularly follow a good chunk of British TV
(I can't find it on cable) and so I figured that Netflix would have a lot of it. Nope, can't even find British Comedies from the '70s that regularly show up on my local PBS station. And forget about anything more obscure than that...
I seem to be perpetually disappointed with online distribution because I expect it to be a truly global place where things that aren't worth the trouble of "localizing" or the cost of distributing or marketing would be. For example, Nintendo's Virtual Console service I was hoping would be filled to the brim with all sorts of stuff that never made it out of Japan... Not so much.
Which, in the absence of subsidies leaves a huge opportunity for companies to creatively find solutions. Who knows what could have happened. Large scale wi-fi networks? Large investments in cell phone technology to have had 3G in the 90s? Better satellite internet? Of course it didn't (and doesn't) make sense to run cable to each individual house in low population density environments but the free market would have undoubtedly found a way.
Exactly. I looked at getting Netflix and getting rid of cable because most of the shows I watch are rarely on TV anyways... But it was about a month and then I canceled my subscription it had nothing on that I really wanted to watch.
I was really optimistic that the rise of things like Netflix, Hulu, etc. would make it easy for me to watch some foreign shows (legally), but alas, not so much
If you look at the sole provider markets, the vast, vast, vast, majority of them were given money either by the federal, state or local government to get a "head start" and were either given a monopoly or given such a large amount of money for infrastructure to effectively prevent any other competitors. It is only through the destruction of the free market that sole provider markets have been able to establish themselves and thrive.
No, only the free market can break that stranglehold. The problem is, we don't have a free market with ISPs we have a lot of state, local and federal $$$$$ invested in the infrastructure for a single ISP. If we had a free market and true competition between ISPs (beyond competing for government money). For example, if Comcast made Netflix unusable, customers would leave Comcast for other ISPs. It is only because of the lack of a free market that people would continue to use Comcast if Netflix was unusable (assuming they enjoyed watching Netflix)
First, a $100 bill is worthless and represents nothing. If we had a sane monetary system, that $100 bill would be $100 worth of gold, but that is beside the point.
Secondly, if we had a sane monetary system, that $100 would be the same thing as a check and while you should be able to legally copy it, it should not be able to be used as a $100 bill because there is not $100 extra worth of gold in the treasury. In the same vein, you're free to take a copy of my check and to take as many copies as you'd like, but you can't go to the bank and cash any but the original. The laws that govern that are separate from intellectual "property", fraud has always been wrong even before the advent of intellectual "property".
And thirdly, I don't pirate music, I've got rather obscure tastes and so I buy the music I listen to (and attend their concerts when they tour anywhere close!). I have nothing against people making money off of their talents the difference is -how- they should be making money off of them. Rather than hiding behind laws and protecting imaginary property money should be made through performance and advance payment the same way that people have for thousands of years. For example, if I'm a fan of X band, not only would I go to concerts but because I liked their songs I'd fund the development of their next album in the same way that I'd go to an artist to get a portrait painted. I liked their past work, so I'm willing to pay for their future work. No one is going to pay $$$$ for a portrait without seeing their past work and in the same way no one is going to support a singer without hearing their songs.
But "science" also deals with the realm of things that cannot be immediately verified and confirmed or refuted by (easy) experimentation. No one has in their lifetime, seen an organism give birth to a distinctly different organism (when 2 of the same organisms have mated), for example, no one has seen 2 cats mate and then give birth to a dog. Same thing with climate change, we only have a few sets of data we cannot look at the weather reports (beyond a few scattered accounts) of life in the 13th century. And so a lot of information has to be taken from the known and transported into the unknown, exactly like politics where we can take the known (what happened after a policy changed was made) and apply it to the unknown (what will happen if a similar policy change was made today).
Some people aren't sold on the theory. It really doesn't make any sense to a lot of people because 2 controdictory things must happen: the organism must first be best adapted to the environment, and the organism also must have mutations (most of which are not immediately beneficial) to continue change.
I think that TLDs are a good idea in theory because there might be 2 (or more) sites with the same generic name.
For example, lets say there is McDonalds (the fast food joint), McDonalds (a farm) and McDonalds (a family tree website for people with the last name of McDonalds) so McDonalds the fast food might be McDonalds.com, McDonalds the farm might be McDonalds.us and McDonalds the family tree might be McDonalds.org. Otherwise you end up with stupidly long domain names (McDonaldsRestaraunt, McDonaldsFarms, McDonaldsFamily) which defeat the entire point of having domain names.
But all these new TLDs add absolutely nothing of benefit other than scammers.
While a good idea in theory is to teach 2 (or more) sides to every issue, you'll always have teachers who believe one way or the other (just like any of us) and will always skew things towards that one way.
You're going to get some teachers skeptical of evolution and some teachers who are die-hard man-made global warming believers. Chances are slim that you are going to get much of any intelligent debate of either of those issues. Same thing with politics, etc.
Every single property system be it capitalism, communism, etc. relies on the one defining characteristic of property: it can only be used to its fullest one way.
For example, neither me and my neighbor can get 100% enjoyment out of one car. If I want to take the car and drive to Canada and my neighbor wants to take the same car and go to Mexico at the same time, we can't. I cannot have a piece of land and grow beans on it and someone else put a parking lot on that same land. I cannot have a DVD and play it at my speed starting it at 1 PM and have my neighbor start the same physical disk at 1:30 PM and watch them both at the same time (assuming the movie is longer than 30 minutes!).
Intellectual "property" doesn't have the same restrictions. A copy of song.mp3 does not replace my copy of song.mp3. If a thief steals my car, it deprives me of that car. If someone makes a copy of my car, it in no way deprives me of that car.
If it can be copied with no loss to the original, it is not property. Property by definition cannot be used fully in two different ways at the same time with both parties getting everything they want.
The more TLDs we create, the more opportunities there are for Phishers. For example, let's say there is a hypothetical TLD for.bank . And so someone registers Bankofamerica.bank as a phishing site. Well, lets say there is another one that is.finance, etc. So now as a precaution if you are Bank of America you have to register bankofamerica.com,.org,.net,.us,.bank,.finance, etc. all to redirect to your main site to stop phishers. Now then you've got to worry about typos... etc.
What's wrong with just having.org,.net,.com, a handful of others and then country coded ones?
Yeah, and the only reason people are using those drugs is because "normal" drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and others are so restricted. No one would choose "bath salts" over conventional drugs. There was a time in the US when all drugs were legal, of course there were people that abused them but you saw none of the violence that is associated with the drug culture today. Are drugs good? Hell no. And I wouldn't touch any of them (including the legal ones such as tobacco and synthetic drugs) with a ten foot pole. Drugs destroy families not just because of the devastating effects but because of the huge financial cost to keeping the habit alive caused by the "drug war". It costs thousands of lives, most of them unaffiliated with "drug lords" or the police. We can never fully ban any drug, we can only increase its price and increase policing. The more we increase the price, the more people seek substitutes such as the "bath salts" that caused the incident you described. The more we increase the price, the more violence we create. Tobacco is quite addictive but since it is legal you see next to no violence involving it. We today see little violence associated with alcohol but during prohibition, when alcohol was illegal, there was massive violence associated with it. The drug war has failed, by continuing to ban drugs we condemn families and thousands of innocents to death. Legalizing drugs does not make them any more morally acceptable or a good idea, but it means we will not see the violence associated with the drug trade.
Geography isn't a barrier anymore to any sort of.com startup. Heck, it makes more sense to start a business outside of the US than within it. To be honest, it makes more sense to even go outside of Austin and start up a smaller place in a suburb or even a more rural area. Why settle for a studio condo for $90K when you can get a smaller sized house for $90K? Low crime, lower prices, and often highly educated people. I really don't understand why people form businesses and live in highly urban areas (or states like California and New York).
Yes, living in a midwestern state I don't understand why people pay $2,000 a month in rent for a crappy studio apartment just because they are in a "big city". Sure, I could be making "better money" if I moved to the city, but I can live in a house (with quite a bit of land) for $250,000 that would cost nearly $750,000 if I lived in a big city. I pay a lot less taxes, thanks to the internet I can still get 100% of the items that people get in the "big city", gas is cheaper, food is cheaper, and the crime levels are quite low. I'm also probably a bit more advanced in my career living in a midwestern state than I would be if I lived in a big city with more competition. Sure, in raw dollar terms I'm making less money, but I have a much higher quality of life and have a heck of a lot more income I can use for what I want that doesn't have to go towards rent, higher food prices or higher gas prices.
We could easily have 100% employment if we abolished the minimum wage laws (of course this is something OWS is completely against!).
Lets say the minimum wage is $7.50 (plus any applicable fees/taxes/etc.) an hour. Anyone who made their employer more than $7.50 an hour would be hired if they wanted the job. Anyone who made less than $7.50 would not be hired. Lets face it, a lot of people aren't worth the $7.50 and so they have no job. This isn't to say they are worthless but rather the services they provide really only produce $4 or $5 per hour rather than $7.50 or more to justify hiring them. Why should I as a business owner have to take a loss simply to provide someone with a "job"? It would make much more sense and would provide for full employment if we would simply abolish the minimum wage laws and reduce or eliminate any employment taxes. Because the wants of humanity are limitless, the possibilities for employment are limitless, it is only because of artificial controls that we have unemployment.
If you look at -why- Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and why they even wanted to build a huge empire was because the US (along with other nations) had already interfered with things such as the US stopping trade with Japan and the naval treaties which made sure that Japan would always have a smaller fleet of battleships when compared to their Western counterparts. WWII was basically caused because of the aftermath of WWI, the Cold War and their associated conflicts (Korea, Vietnam, etc.) were caused by the aftermath of WWII, the "war on terror" is simply the aftermath of the Cold War. War brings war. Violence brings violence.
What really needs to happen is we, as a society, need to realize that intellectual "property" is not property at all and we should stop treating it as such. IP and property have nothing in common.
So let me guess, media companies are going to complain about all the "lost" revenue due to "piracy" and completely ignore the fact most of the highest grossing films have been in the internet age....
American interference in world affairs has -always- ended up bad for America and even worse for the rest of the world. Look at the Iran Iraq war where the US and UK allied themselves with Saddam's Iraq and supplied arms to them! The US (and other Western nations) prop up dictators and then later have to take them down in a perpetual war.
The problem with "Occupy Wall-Street" was there is no ideological unity and some of the protesters simply were idiotic (same thing with the "Tea Party" movement, but at least that had ideological unity) you get some sane signs protesting the bailout and then you simply get some absolute moronic signs like the one saying "a job is a right". I'm sure the Tiananmen Square protesters were much the same way, but looking at it from a foreign perspective it is much easier to generalize.
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Want to see FUD? Look no further than the mainstream media which portrays drone strikes killing innocents as needed, never questions the status quo, has laughable coverage of the rest of the world that portrays it as a dark, dangerous place (when the statistics show a different story) and maintain a silly idea that the US is a beacon of freedom and that other countries "hate us because of our freedom".
Conspiracy theories are the natural result of having a government that isn't transparent, a government that imprisons its citizens without cause, a government which kills its own citizens and a government hell-bent at destroying every last shred of freedom. When the government has lied to the people about everything, it is no doubt that "conspiracy theories" abound. Its no doubt that people are worried about Obamacare, look at what happened when the government offered to give "free health care" to the residents of Tuskegee, Alabama... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
Which is a large enough number to include just about every major and semi-major political activist. Keep in mind that there is only a turnout of about 64-ish percent for most presidential elections.
It should be worrying that the US courts approve even 1 secret surveillance order, let alone 30,000.
Its impossible to say what could have been because so much capital and research would have been shifted around, but its mostly just that the principle stands that the free market would have provided a way to get internet to a good chunk of the people who lived in places of low population density, it just would have looked differently. Sure, its possible it might have not been as good of internet or it might have been better or mostly the same. But one thing is for sure that there would not be only one ISP controlling everything like there is today in much of the rural market.
I really didn't like cable either, but the amount of streaming content on Netflix was just pathetic. I regularly follow a good chunk of British TV (I can't find it on cable) and so I figured that Netflix would have a lot of it. Nope, can't even find British Comedies from the '70s that regularly show up on my local PBS station. And forget about anything more obscure than that...
I seem to be perpetually disappointed with online distribution because I expect it to be a truly global place where things that aren't worth the trouble of "localizing" or the cost of distributing or marketing would be. For example, Nintendo's Virtual Console service I was hoping would be filled to the brim with all sorts of stuff that never made it out of Japan... Not so much.
Which, in the absence of subsidies leaves a huge opportunity for companies to creatively find solutions. Who knows what could have happened. Large scale wi-fi networks? Large investments in cell phone technology to have had 3G in the 90s? Better satellite internet? Of course it didn't (and doesn't) make sense to run cable to each individual house in low population density environments but the free market would have undoubtedly found a way.
Exactly. I looked at getting Netflix and getting rid of cable because most of the shows I watch are rarely on TV anyways... But it was about a month and then I canceled my subscription it had nothing on that I really wanted to watch.
I was really optimistic that the rise of things like Netflix, Hulu, etc. would make it easy for me to watch some foreign shows (legally), but alas, not so much
If you look at the sole provider markets, the vast, vast, vast, majority of them were given money either by the federal, state or local government to get a "head start" and were either given a monopoly or given such a large amount of money for infrastructure to effectively prevent any other competitors. It is only through the destruction of the free market that sole provider markets have been able to establish themselves and thrive.
No, only the free market can break that stranglehold. The problem is, we don't have a free market with ISPs we have a lot of state, local and federal $$$$$ invested in the infrastructure for a single ISP. If we had a free market and true competition between ISPs (beyond competing for government money). For example, if Comcast made Netflix unusable, customers would leave Comcast for other ISPs. It is only because of the lack of a free market that people would continue to use Comcast if Netflix was unusable (assuming they enjoyed watching Netflix)
First, a $100 bill is worthless and represents nothing. If we had a sane monetary system, that $100 bill would be $100 worth of gold, but that is beside the point.
Secondly, if we had a sane monetary system, that $100 would be the same thing as a check and while you should be able to legally copy it, it should not be able to be used as a $100 bill because there is not $100 extra worth of gold in the treasury. In the same vein, you're free to take a copy of my check and to take as many copies as you'd like, but you can't go to the bank and cash any but the original. The laws that govern that are separate from intellectual "property", fraud has always been wrong even before the advent of intellectual "property".
And thirdly, I don't pirate music, I've got rather obscure tastes and so I buy the music I listen to (and attend their concerts when they tour anywhere close!). I have nothing against people making money off of their talents the difference is -how- they should be making money off of them. Rather than hiding behind laws and protecting imaginary property money should be made through performance and advance payment the same way that people have for thousands of years. For example, if I'm a fan of X band, not only would I go to concerts but because I liked their songs I'd fund the development of their next album in the same way that I'd go to an artist to get a portrait painted. I liked their past work, so I'm willing to pay for their future work. No one is going to pay $$$$ for a portrait without seeing their past work and in the same way no one is going to support a singer without hearing their songs.
But "science" also deals with the realm of things that cannot be immediately verified and confirmed or refuted by (easy) experimentation. No one has in their lifetime, seen an organism give birth to a distinctly different organism (when 2 of the same organisms have mated), for example, no one has seen 2 cats mate and then give birth to a dog. Same thing with climate change, we only have a few sets of data we cannot look at the weather reports (beyond a few scattered accounts) of life in the 13th century. And so a lot of information has to be taken from the known and transported into the unknown, exactly like politics where we can take the known (what happened after a policy changed was made) and apply it to the unknown (what will happen if a similar policy change was made today).
Some people aren't sold on the theory. It really doesn't make any sense to a lot of people because 2 controdictory things must happen: the organism must first be best adapted to the environment, and the organism also must have mutations (most of which are not immediately beneficial) to continue change.
I think that TLDs are a good idea in theory because there might be 2 (or more) sites with the same generic name.
For example, lets say there is McDonalds (the fast food joint), McDonalds (a farm) and McDonalds (a family tree website for people with the last name of McDonalds) so McDonalds the fast food might be McDonalds.com, McDonalds the farm might be McDonalds.us and McDonalds the family tree might be McDonalds.org. Otherwise you end up with stupidly long domain names (McDonaldsRestaraunt, McDonaldsFarms, McDonaldsFamily) which defeat the entire point of having domain names.
But all these new TLDs add absolutely nothing of benefit other than scammers.
While a good idea in theory is to teach 2 (or more) sides to every issue, you'll always have teachers who believe one way or the other (just like any of us) and will always skew things towards that one way.
You're going to get some teachers skeptical of evolution and some teachers who are die-hard man-made global warming believers. Chances are slim that you are going to get much of any intelligent debate of either of those issues. Same thing with politics, etc.
Every single property system be it capitalism, communism, etc. relies on the one defining characteristic of property: it can only be used to its fullest one way.
For example, neither me and my neighbor can get 100% enjoyment out of one car. If I want to take the car and drive to Canada and my neighbor wants to take the same car and go to Mexico at the same time, we can't. I cannot have a piece of land and grow beans on it and someone else put a parking lot on that same land. I cannot have a DVD and play it at my speed starting it at 1 PM and have my neighbor start the same physical disk at 1:30 PM and watch them both at the same time (assuming the movie is longer than 30 minutes!).
Intellectual "property" doesn't have the same restrictions. A copy of song.mp3 does not replace my copy of song.mp3. If a thief steals my car, it deprives me of that car. If someone makes a copy of my car, it in no way deprives me of that car.
If it can be copied with no loss to the original, it is not property. Property by definition cannot be used fully in two different ways at the same time with both parties getting everything they want.
The more TLDs we create, the more opportunities there are for Phishers. For example, let's say there is a hypothetical TLD for .bank . And so someone registers Bankofamerica.bank as a phishing site. Well, lets say there is another one that is .finance, etc. So now as a precaution if you are Bank of America you have to register bankofamerica.com, .org, .net, .us, .bank, .finance, etc. all to redirect to your main site to stop phishers. Now then you've got to worry about typos... etc.
.org, .net, .com, a handful of others and then country coded ones?
What's wrong with just having
Yeah, and the only reason people are using those drugs is because "normal" drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and others are so restricted. No one would choose "bath salts" over conventional drugs. There was a time in the US when all drugs were legal, of course there were people that abused them but you saw none of the violence that is associated with the drug culture today. Are drugs good? Hell no. And I wouldn't touch any of them (including the legal ones such as tobacco and synthetic drugs) with a ten foot pole. Drugs destroy families not just because of the devastating effects but because of the huge financial cost to keeping the habit alive caused by the "drug war". It costs thousands of lives, most of them unaffiliated with "drug lords" or the police. We can never fully ban any drug, we can only increase its price and increase policing. The more we increase the price, the more people seek substitutes such as the "bath salts" that caused the incident you described. The more we increase the price, the more violence we create. Tobacco is quite addictive but since it is legal you see next to no violence involving it. We today see little violence associated with alcohol but during prohibition, when alcohol was illegal, there was massive violence associated with it. The drug war has failed, by continuing to ban drugs we condemn families and thousands of innocents to death. Legalizing drugs does not make them any more morally acceptable or a good idea, but it means we will not see the violence associated with the drug trade.
Geography isn't a barrier anymore to any sort of .com startup. Heck, it makes more sense to start a business outside of the US than within it. To be honest, it makes more sense to even go outside of Austin and start up a smaller place in a suburb or even a more rural area. Why settle for a studio condo for $90K when you can get a smaller sized house for $90K? Low crime, lower prices, and often highly educated people. I really don't understand why people form businesses and live in highly urban areas (or states like California and New York).
Yes, living in a midwestern state I don't understand why people pay $2,000 a month in rent for a crappy studio apartment just because they are in a "big city". Sure, I could be making "better money" if I moved to the city, but I can live in a house (with quite a bit of land) for $250,000 that would cost nearly $750,000 if I lived in a big city. I pay a lot less taxes, thanks to the internet I can still get 100% of the items that people get in the "big city", gas is cheaper, food is cheaper, and the crime levels are quite low. I'm also probably a bit more advanced in my career living in a midwestern state than I would be if I lived in a big city with more competition. Sure, in raw dollar terms I'm making less money, but I have a much higher quality of life and have a heck of a lot more income I can use for what I want that doesn't have to go towards rent, higher food prices or higher gas prices.
And people still think we need to continue the "war on drugs". Just legalize everything already!
We could easily have 100% employment if we abolished the minimum wage laws (of course this is something OWS is completely against!).
Lets say the minimum wage is $7.50 (plus any applicable fees/taxes/etc.) an hour. Anyone who made their employer more than $7.50 an hour would be hired if they wanted the job. Anyone who made less than $7.50 would not be hired. Lets face it, a lot of people aren't worth the $7.50 and so they have no job. This isn't to say they are worthless but rather the services they provide really only produce $4 or $5 per hour rather than $7.50 or more to justify hiring them. Why should I as a business owner have to take a loss simply to provide someone with a "job"? It would make much more sense and would provide for full employment if we would simply abolish the minimum wage laws and reduce or eliminate any employment taxes. Because the wants of humanity are limitless, the possibilities for employment are limitless, it is only because of artificial controls that we have unemployment.
If you look at -why- Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and why they even wanted to build a huge empire was because the US (along with other nations) had already interfered with things such as the US stopping trade with Japan and the naval treaties which made sure that Japan would always have a smaller fleet of battleships when compared to their Western counterparts. WWII was basically caused because of the aftermath of WWI, the Cold War and their associated conflicts (Korea, Vietnam, etc.) were caused by the aftermath of WWII, the "war on terror" is simply the aftermath of the Cold War. War brings war. Violence brings violence.
What really needs to happen is we, as a society, need to realize that intellectual "property" is not property at all and we should stop treating it as such. IP and property have nothing in common.
So let me guess, media companies are going to complain about all the "lost" revenue due to "piracy" and completely ignore the fact most of the highest grossing films have been in the internet age....
American interference in world affairs has -always- ended up bad for America and even worse for the rest of the world. Look at the Iran Iraq war where the US and UK allied themselves with Saddam's Iraq and supplied arms to them! The US (and other Western nations) prop up dictators and then later have to take them down in a perpetual war.
The problem with "Occupy Wall-Street" was there is no ideological unity and some of the protesters simply were idiotic (same thing with the "Tea Party" movement, but at least that had ideological unity) you get some sane signs protesting the bailout and then you simply get some absolute moronic signs like the one saying "a job is a right". I'm sure the Tiananmen Square protesters were much the same way, but looking at it from a foreign perspective it is much easier to generalize.