I'm really curious how you think you know this-
As I said: in a free market economy, without gov't meddling, 'gaming' is not a problem.
This is a statement about the real world and how it operates. So how do you know it's true?
Also you can kick around notions like "free market" but it really has no definition that reasonable can agree on in its specific details. It's just a complex, aggregate noun phrase with no specific real world referent.
People act as though the mere naming of an imaginary abstract entity somehow makes that entity a real thing. Like unicorn.
I have to disagree somewhat. It's not that easy to suppress a rebellion and what's more no one wants to be pushed to that. Ask Assad how it's going for him. People don't use their guns because they don't want to. I didn't like Bush v Gore one bit or Citizen's United either but it's not gun time. The system gives the results it gives because the electorate is genuinely divided on these issues and everyone can see that. If a politician really wanted to pass a genuinely unpopular law- like the reinstatement of indentured servitude the way Ron Paul would , then you'd see what elections can do when we're all agreed on a topic.
Revolutions only happen when there is pathological unfairness, not disagreement. That's why it's important to work for policies that favor egalitarian RESULTS, not fake hypothetical "opportunities" or adherence to partisan interpretations of "first principles" That's what holds nations together.
Some issues have the long term outlook of increasing inequality so strongly that they have to be fought tooth and nail, the worst type of inequality of course being -I live and you die.
Then should we roll back all limits on campaign contributions by individuals also? Is that next for this Supreme Court of the United States (for my Canadian friend who does not like the SCOTUS POTUS designations)
I don't get why we have to make ourselves artificially stupid when we consider these things. As a matter of fact, campaign contributions ARE a form of quid pro quo between government and corporations because corporations are PROHIBITED by law from spending their money on other than maximizing revenue.
So the corporation gets laws passed that help its corporate officers get rich and the politician gets re-elected. What can possibly be the problem here?
Someone tell me why society should be compelled I have to act as though it doesn't know this true fact about the world. You know what you call a person who ignores reality in favor of some narrow unyielding doctrinaire interpretation of events? A fanatic.
Elections should be publicly financed from tax dollars. Corporations are a legal fiction to begin with and a specific embodiment of of "association of people" with very specific and unique properties. There are all kinds of laws that prohibit, limit and require what they can and cannot do don't apply to real "associations of people" . The reason for this is because society understands that corporations are not merely "associations of people", but something with unique characteristics which need to be addressed in law.
The argument put forth here and in the ruling, that corporations are merely free associations of people and as such has all the free speech rights as any other association of people is a joke on the face of it.
Under this interpretation, a church is free is to tell it's parishioners who to vote for also. Is that next?
Sorry, I cant will myself to be simply stupid about the world. For people like Clarence Thomas who nearly NEVER says ANYTHING at all from the bench because he KNOWS what's likely to come out of his mouth prove to all how absolutely unfit he is for his position, I understand that there is no effort needed to will yourself into stupidity and ignorance, it comes quite easily and is in fact your natural state.
Gaming the system isn't a problem as long as there is a way for other people in the economy to set up competing systems and set their own rules, try and do that today.
Uh, no. Gaming the system is an English language phrase which denotes a negative consequence has in fact been reached through devious means.
What your're saying is they are not gaming the system, they're playing by the rules and it's not a real problem.
Always say what you mean.
With over hundred thousand regulations in banking, finance and investment industries, with things like the Federal reserve with its fake money spigot, fake interest rates, fake insurance by gov't (like FDIC, FHA, SS, Medicare, etc.),
Oh yes as opposed to REAL money and REAL interest rates and REAL insurance.
All these things are fictions in their very nature, as is money itself. "fake money" is money that people don't agree to treat as money. All others are REAL including that which issues from the Fed.
Here is the problem with your thinking: you think greed is bad, inherently terrible and humans are irrational, but then immediately you want to give more power to the government
Here is the problem with your thinking. You don't realize that people behave differently depending on what context they're put in. If you're a CEO then that's one context and you make decisions based on one set of values as we've been discussing here. If you're a lawmaker or a judge or a congressperson, then you make decisions based on other definitions of value. We only have humans to work with, so the challenge is to create and then make structural those contingencies which tend to cause humans to behave in pro-social ways.
We're all bad under some set of contingencies - rewards and punishments- and all good under other sets of contingencies, where "all" really means the vast vast majority of us.
The people who are now operating outside of those would be contingencies and are currently being incentivized by things those contingencies would forbid FIGHT LIKE CRAZY to stop those contingencies from being put in place. They're like junkies or crack heads who want to keep feeling good in just the way they've become addicted to, no matter the consequences for everyone else.
The agenda is always the same- learn - through various means experience, and science being the best ones , how to construct contingencies in society so that pro-social ends are achieved by the everyday economic and social activity of humans. Then make those contingencies structural by passing laws. There is no other way to organize society.
So people are irrational and greedy, but government will be rational and selfless for the benefit of all?
It works that way MORE when there's democratic government and LESS when there is not democractic government, that's what we can say.
I don't think so, I disagree with you, history disagrees with you, there is no example in history where the government with power was not abusing it,
Strictly speaking, there is no population of individuals who has not abused another population to the limits of what they think they can get away with with or without government. As we organize more closely and democratic governments and the democracy they make possible take hold. there is LESS violence, LESS war and LESS human conflict and MORE progress .
Non democratic governance schemes based on irrational beleif systems- Communism, Bolshvism, North Korea etc etc cannot be compared to democracies. The forgoing in fact are what human life devolves into when there is no strong democratic government. When there is, you get Finland.
Stop reading Rousseau- we now know he was just wrong.
I don't trust government, I don't trust people, I don't trust people in government. I much rather see the same people that I
Also, incorporation is literally a product the government sells to people. You give the government money and then you can have protection from it's justice system. If you have a problem with corporations you have a problem with government.
No, actually, I can approve of some government actions and policies and disapprove of others.
Hope I.... I don't know.... broadened your mind and thinking here today
Here is the problem with your thinking: you think greed is bad, inherently terrible and humans are irrational, but then immediately you want to give more power to the government by reducing freedoms of individuals (and while corporations are fiction, not real entities, people behind them - the owners, they are real) to use all of their abilities and property to fight the system and get the best outcome in this rigged environment.
So people are irrational and greedy, but government will be rational and selfless for the benefit of all?
Get real. Yes the government is a deliberative body that acts slowly and after debate and until lately, compromise. and yes now very imperfectly but that's a HELL of a lot different than the forces that govern the actions of individual humans.
Sorry but the rule of law, the administration of law, the courts, the process of lawmaking and our government are awesome creations of the human mind on par with any science or technology you care to point to.
People without government has a name- it's called Somolia.
You VASTLY underestimate the complexity of what it is the government deals with every day and the types of problems is solves. Humans and the regulation of human conduct and intercourse including the calculated limiting of opportunities for individual and group despotism is by FAR a more complex undertaking than ANYTHING in any hard science since it itself is the end product of the collective effects of all those sciences and , frankly, all the good experiments on society and people which would would give clear results are immoral and illegal, and rightly so.
I am still reading your post and THIS is some unintended irony on your part:
and it's always worse for people when it's their government, that abuses power over the people, than any particular individual or company, because individuals and companies do not have legal standing to abuse you
Yeah and just exactly why do you think that is? Because government , the collective we, makes laws that prevents them from abusing you and behind those laws are men and women with guns and a legal system with jails.
I think people have a hard time imagining what their reality would be if we all actually did a Ron Paul and just let the greedheads and corporations and the rich and powerful rip.
In some sense all this kind of thinking is some form of sign the Tea Partier was holding which read:
.
"Keep your government hands off my social security. !!!"
Right exactly mod up a bunch. Just because during the process of lawmaking we struck on a convenient analogy to frame and facilitate our thinking about corporations with respect to SOME LIMITED aspects of their relation to the rest of the world, that does NOT mean that we are somehow obligated as law makers to import every single follow on implication of that analogy . Whose is driving the cart here, the horse or the human?
We make laws and the entire concept of a limited liability corporation is a fiction on our part springing from our creative minds and not nature or Ayn Rand's crotch or any other such place.
We decide what properties a corporation will and wont' have . The whole idea of a corporation came about for a purely utilitarian- no ideological- purpose. Even rich people won't invest in ventures which would benefit society if they risk that venture's failure bankrupting them personally. So we developed this FICTION of limited liability entity which to render the useful effect of forming a legal bulwark against financial claims against corporate investors and officers.
To listen to the Republicans tell the story, God Herself came down and created the corporation right after he was done with Adam and Eve and a corporation MUST of biological and moral necessity have all the rights of a natural person.
OK now go online and make yourself a bumper sticker and tell everyone you saw it here on good old Slashdot first:
Corporations are not people and you're not my friend.
No one is saying you cannot exercise your free speech rights, you just can't donate unlimited money for the purpose of electing your candidate. If we're not all limited in spending some amount of money.that a large majority of people could, with some pain, conceivably spend then you get elections which are warped by the voices of a minority. That is a fact about the world. Trumping this issue up into First Principles and trying to muster a defense of it there is a the thinnest of thin veils behind which anti-democratic forces are hiding.
Laws have consequences, and if those consequences have patently ridiculous consequences in the real world which strongly to pervert democracy, then the law or decision is by definition bad, and there is no other definition we need to appeal to.
We live in the real world, not an Aristotlean hypothetical construct. In the real world, people have limited lifespans during which they have a right to expect achieve a decent life. Citizens v FEC is a decision on par with the Dred Scott decision . A complete and utter perversion of justice and reasoning, an incendiary partisan stroke which has the effect of ripping the country apart and pushing us further towards civil war. This is exactly what Citizens v FEC does, since it gives effectively unlimited power to just those voices who are littering our public discourse with outright lies about the one issue that WILL send this country into civil war- global warming.
Reality is one way, not many ways, not as many ways as there are opinions. That reality can be personified as a son of a bitch with a bad attitude and a 14 inch strap on. You really don't want to get into an argument with reality, because the consequences are both horrendous and inescapable. But that's exactly what these power brokers are doing and the Citizens United decision is the force of law they needed to continue to elect their candidates to office in exchange for the continued denial of a reality that will not be denied.
Citizens United will truly go down as one of the landmark events that led the United States of America into its Second Civil War.
Right. We have a word for a "person" who is solely concerned for profit and whose "speech" is only concerned with inducing others to give them money.
That word is sociopath.
Since corporations are people entitled to free speech, it's instructive to compare the requirement that corporations MUST invest their money and conduct themselves ONLY for the the purpose of maximizing profits for themselves and their shareholders , as opposed to helping other people or serving some abstract good::
A condition characterized by repetitive behavioral patterns that are contrary to usual moral and ethical standards and cause a person to experience continuous conflict with society.
Symptoms include aggression, callousness, impulsiveness, irresponsibility, hostility, a low frustration level, marked emotional immaturity, and poor judgment.
A person who has this disorder overlooks the rights of others, is incapable of loyalty to others or to social values, is unable to experience guilt or to learn from past behaviors, is impervious to punishment, and tends to rationalize his or her behavior or to blame it on others. Also called antisocial reaction...
Oh and one more thing that differentiates this sociopath from real humans- it's rich beyond 99.9999% of humans and it never dies.
In a more romantic time, Mary Shelly called this Frankenstein.
Look the purpose of the stock market is to facilitate the trading of securities. The societal good of that is that it frees up and allocates money to companies that are producing more value , or doing it more efficiently. This is a way to reward smart companies and incentivize new technologies.
This shit has nothing to do with any of that. They're gaming the system for a purpose to which it was never meant to be put and further, they're endangering everyone else while they're at it. Those are just the facts.. none of that was my opinion.
This is where Citizen United matters a lot . Romney is promising to re-Bushify the stock market if he gets elected. That means Wall Street is going Romney. That means huge sums of money are being poured into his campaign and if he wins , the market stands a good chance of cratering the economy again.
Greed has located a positive feedback loop and is exploiting it in a predictably greedy fashion.
The thing is, this is obviously reckless and has nothing to do with free markets. It's as if we threw away any concept of a social good except the servicing of the impulses of richest greediest people our society can produce.
Greed is an innate flaw in human thinking under most circumstances. It's not some magic rocket fuel that impels society towards greater wealth and innovation. That's a bullshit narrative told to you by drug addicts who don't want to be separated from their drug . And nothing more.
The thing is, the fanaticism on the right is also in a positive feedback loop with the right wing noise machine. Even though their economic deregulatory policies cratered the economy, they are taught how to deny that fact by the right wing noise machine. This clears them to vote more of the same into office.
We've effectively turned our economy over to people with a a group of compulsive gamblers and risk junkies. This is a completely different thing than supporting risk taking entrepreneurs.
Look societies live, grow and die. They die because they become captive to an entrenched minority who games the social cultural political system and secures for itself some positive feedback loop that reinforces their power and permits them to write the rules of society to their personal, narrow advantage. Thenceforward, at every decision point, their local, short terms needs are serviced first and in our case, almost exclusively.
We may be living in a dying society that will catastrophically implode . Our refusal to address global warming in more of the same dynamic with the oil and coal companies finding a positive feedback loop in their campaign contributions and right wing noise machine.
Citizen's United matters more than you think. SCOTUS overturned a hundred years of hard won lessons about politics and money and democracy this week in their Montana decision , which is nothing more than en extension of their Citizen's United decision. This from a political wing which claims to abhor the ideologically driven, no-nothing meddling of Big Government into the policies of the States and of business and other boots-on-the-ground forms of hard won, real world knowledge.
Money isn't speech and corporations aren't people. These are two more -in-your-face patent absurdities that future generations, if there are any, will laugh out loud at in middle school classes and serve as the Cliff Notes on Why America Collapsed 101.
You have to understand that rational thinking and reasoning about even the basic, obvious facts of the world does NOT come naturally to people. As proof of this I offer a recent story about an ongoing cause for mass murder in Africa- Penis Shrinkage Through Sorcery.
I 'll link to the Reuters story because otherwise you might suppose I am accidentally reporting satire.
For a certain type of person this is true. For another type of person, factory work is souless and interacting and helping customers is more varied and interesting.
It's too much to ask of young girls- and this is who this is aimed at- to forgo and deny their innate aspirations to be seen as sexually desirable in all major social contexts in which they may meet a suitable mate, such as their careers.
Men have exactly the same thing with CSI and NUMB#RS and Lie To Me the new Sherlock Holmes etc etc where a deliberate attempt to portray them as BOTH highly intelligent, even intellectual, and sexually powerful and desirable.
We like to pretend we're not sexual in certain contexts, but we're really one horny species, always on the make, always with the radar going.
So this is saying in a way that's too clumsy for some adults- hey girls, being smart is not about giving up your desirability to the opposite (or same) sex. You can have it all! As well they should.
Adults who are getting shitty pants over this need to develop a more realistic model of who and what human beings are, how they conduct themselves and what their persistent, ubiquitous and biologically compelling concerns really are.
I think what the poster is saying is that if the pay were good generally, there wouldn't be the turn over. Turnover happens due to pay / responsibility imbalances. There is nothing about retail that is inherently worse than factory work , but factory workers hang on for decades because of the middle class wages such jobs used to pay.
Glad the incident that is destined to change sane, sober, science loving and technologically progressive individuals away from the perception that GM is generally safe to the perception that it's safety cannot be reliably established involved cattle and not people.
Kensington and Logitech for not supporting trackballs in *nix
NVIDIA as per Linus's remarks
Since for the most part, my computer - to me- is my screen and my input devices , I'd say there is basically a deliberate and con$scious effort to starve *nix of a decent user experience and that such concerted effort is probably not coincidental or driven even by market forces, seeing as the implied beneficiary of such a "starve the beast" approach is clearly micro$soft who has been caught, tried and convicted in a court of law of just exactly the tactic of wielding it monopoly power in order to effect "starve the competition from access to users":
For those too young for the events to have been contemporary and in personal memory, the BBC tells it like it is:
From Judge Jackson's Finds of Fact regarding micro$oft's coercive practices:
With respect to OEMs, Microsoft's campaign proceeded on three fronts.
First, Microsoft bound Internet Explorer to Windows with contractual and, later, technological shackles in order to ensure the prominent (and ultimately permanent) presence of Internet Explorer on every Windows user's PC system, and to increase the costs attendant to installing and using Navigator on any PCs running Windows.
Second, Microsoft imposed stringent limits on the freedom of OEMs to reconfigure or modify Windows 95 and Windows 98 in ways that might enable OEMs to generate usage for Navigator in spite of the contractual and technological devices that Microsoft had employed to bind Internet Explorer to Windows.
Finally, Microsoft used incentives and threats to induce especially important OEMs to design their distributional, promotional and technical efforts to favor Internet Explorer to the exclusion of Navigator.
Microsoft's actions increased the likelihood that pre-installation of Navigator onto Windows would cause user confusion and system degradation, and therefore lead to higher support costs and reduced sales for the OEMs.
Internet Explorer is not demonstrably the current "best of breed" Web browser, nor is it likely to be so at any time in the immediate future
Not willing to take actions that would jeopardize their already slender profit margins, OEMs felt compelled by Microsoft's actions to reduce drastically their distribution and promotion of Navigator.
The substantial inducements that Microsoft held out to the largest OEMs only further reduced the distribution and promotion of Navigator in the OEM channel
The response of OEMs to Microsoft's efforts had a dramatic, negative impact on Navigator's usage share.
The drop in usage share, in turn, has prevented Navigator from being the vehicle to open the relevant market to competition on the merits.
2. Maintenance of Monopoly Power by Anticompetitive Means
...
Microsoft early on recognized middleware as the Trojan horse that, once having, in effect, infiltrated the applications barrier, could enable rival operating systems to enter the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems unimpeded.
Middleware [like Netscape's browser] threatened to demolish Microsoft's coveted monopoly power
Simply put, middleware threatened to demolish Microsoft's coveted monopoly power. Alerted to the threat, Microsoft strove over a period of approximately four years to prevent middleware technologies from fostering the development of enough full-featured, cross-platform applications to erode the applications barrier.
Microsoft's campaign succeeded in preventing - for several years, and perhaps permanently - Navigator and Java from fulfilling their potential to open the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems to competition on the m
OK so everyone already knew this was true only because it's stands to reason. So let's play a game. Why was this:story released as "news"?
Here's my guess. The government is trying to send a message to young geeks. Hey kids- don't think that your hacker skills or career path are orthogonal to becoming a spy! We're very interested in your skills and you can be part of something that really matters.
"Terrify more moderate voters"? Palin's views and beliefs are very much main-stream American
What a joke of a statement. The last thing Palin's views are in "mainstream". No matter how much the right wing tries to pass Palin (and themselves) off as "normal", no one is buying it:
From Wikipedia:
A February 2010 ABC News/Washington Post poll showed 71% of Americans felt Palin lacked the qualifications necessary to be President of the United States.[10]
A public opinion survey commissioned by USA Today and conducted by Gallup January 14â"16, 2011, showed that Palin was perceived favorably by 38% of those polled and unfavorably by 53%, the highest unfavorable rating since Palin entered national politics.[108][109]
It's the whole Goebbels thing, right? The bigger the lie you tell, the more people will believe it.
You do your intellectual fore-bearers proud, liar.
The top hits for the top racially
charged searches are nearly all textbook examples of antilocution, a majority group's sharing stereotype-based jokes using coarse language outside a minority group's presence. This
was determined as the ïrst and crucial stage of prejudice in Allport's (1979) classic treatise.
From 2004-2007, the searches were most popular in West Virginia; upstate New York; rural
Illinois; eastern Ohio; southern Mississippi; western Pennsylvania; and southern Oklahoma.
I have more than a little passing familiarity with one or more of those places and I can tell you that "n*gger jokes " and hatred of minority groups as well as gays is alive and well quite as if it were still 60 years ago.
I just couldn't bring myself to continue to live there when I had the chance a few times for just this reason.
I travel around with my job and these places are some of the most regressive places in the nation. I can't imagine living in Birmingham AL or Syracuse NY or Pittsburgh PA or Akron OH or any of those places. They're horrifying to tell you the truth and it's the people themselves (sorry to everyone who lives there and is now offended.) .
I was standing on a street corner in Syracuse, just standing there, and some car full of teenages goes by in the middle of the day and shouts' "fucking queer" ((not, actually) and throws a beer bottle out the window at me. Just standing there waiting for the light to change. What a regressive shit hole.
We went to a place in rural Penn. and the guy I was working with was black but not obviously so - whatever that means- to our host - we we're in our host's living room with his kids there for cirssakes- because he started in as a kind of "getting to know you" ice breaker with n*gger jokes....and then did back flip over back flip trying to extricate himself when I pointed out (I couldn't help myself) that my coworker was, in fact, African-American. Yeah, and he had to work with us for the next three months...
In another one of these places I was standing with my friend talking with a guitar vendor about guitars and getting advice about different vendors around town I was going to be visiting while I was there and he said "oh stay away from X, he'll Jew you every chance he gets". Yeah, that's right the girl I was standing with was *quite* Jewish. Her faced turned bright red and she stood there for a while while I explained the situation to Mr FootInMouth. Then she left to go cry somewhere, and he left to go smoke a cigarette outside, where we ran into him again on the way out, which sent him scurrying away like a rat.
This is how it is in these places.. this is how these people grow up and carry it on, generation after generation.
No surprise that the FM music stations are all apparently also caught in a time warp of around 1979.... Lynrd Skynrd and Journey and all that (no I don't care if they're still around) .
What is it with these Places That Time Forgot? What's the dynamic? IS it just *that* offensive enough that anyone with any progressive impulse just flees and they start inbreeding amongst themselves?
Ahh read the other (wiki) page I supplied for what dual theory is. IT's not about how we talk when we're pissed off or emotional.
Most people know digital music as shorthand for downloadable digital music and use "non-digital" to refer to CDs to. That's just how it is now , as another poster pointed on in this thread.
All done now, but it was nice discussing shit with you. Cheers!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm really curious how you think you know this- As I said: in a free market economy, without gov't meddling, 'gaming' is not a problem.
This is a statement about the real world and how it operates. So how do you know it's true?
Also you can kick around notions like "free market" but it really has no definition that reasonable can agree on in its specific details. It's just a complex, aggregate noun phrase with no specific real world referent.
People act as though the mere naming of an imaginary abstract entity somehow makes that entity a real thing. Like unicorn.
Revolutions only happen when there is pathological unfairness, not disagreement. That's why it's important to work for policies that favor egalitarian RESULTS, not fake hypothetical "opportunities" or adherence to partisan interpretations of "first principles" That's what holds nations together.
Some issues have the long term outlook of increasing inequality so strongly that they have to be fought tooth and nail, the worst type of inequality of course being -I live and you die.
Then should we roll back all limits on campaign contributions by individuals also? Is that next for this Supreme Court of the United States (for my Canadian friend who does not like the SCOTUS POTUS designations)
I don't get why we have to make ourselves artificially stupid when we consider these things. As a matter of fact, campaign contributions ARE a form of quid pro quo between government and corporations because corporations are PROHIBITED by law from spending their money on other than maximizing revenue.
So the corporation gets laws passed that help its corporate officers get rich and the politician gets re-elected. What can possibly be the problem here?
Someone tell me why society should be compelled I have to act as though it doesn't know this true fact about the world. You know what you call a person who ignores reality in favor of some narrow unyielding doctrinaire interpretation of events? A fanatic.
Elections should be publicly financed from tax dollars. Corporations are a legal fiction to begin with and a specific embodiment of of "association of people" with very specific and unique properties. There are all kinds of laws that prohibit, limit and require what they can and cannot do don't apply to real "associations of people" . The reason for this is because society understands that corporations are not merely "associations of people", but something with unique characteristics which need to be addressed in law.
The argument put forth here and in the ruling, that corporations are merely free associations of people and as such has all the free speech rights as any other association of people is a joke on the face of it.
Under this interpretation, a church is free is to tell it's parishioners who to vote for also. Is that next?
Sorry, I cant will myself to be simply stupid about the world. For people like Clarence Thomas who nearly NEVER says ANYTHING at all from the bench because he KNOWS what's likely to come out of his mouth prove to all how absolutely unfit he is for his position, I understand that there is no effort needed to will yourself into stupidity and ignorance, it comes quite easily and is in fact your natural state.
Publicly financed elections. That's the solution.
Gaming the system isn't a problem as long as there is a way for other people in the economy to set up competing systems and set their own rules, try and do that today.
Uh, no. Gaming the system is an English language phrase which denotes a negative consequence has in fact been reached through devious means .
What your're saying is they are not gaming the system, they're playing by the rules and it's not a real problem.
Always say what you mean.
With over hundred thousand regulations in banking, finance and investment industries, with things like the Federal reserve with its fake money spigot, fake interest rates, fake insurance by gov't (like FDIC, FHA, SS, Medicare, etc.),
Oh yes as opposed to REAL money and REAL interest rates and REAL insurance.
All these things are fictions in their very nature, as is money itself. "fake money" is money that people don't agree to treat as money. All others are REAL including that which issues from the Fed.
Here is the problem with your thinking: you think greed is bad, inherently terrible and humans are irrational, but then immediately you want to give more power to the government
Here is the problem with your thinking. You don't realize that people behave differently depending on what context they're put in. If you're a CEO then that's one context and you make decisions based on one set of values as we've been discussing here. If you're a lawmaker or a judge or a congressperson, then you make decisions based on other definitions of value. We only have humans to work with, so the challenge is to create and then make structural those contingencies which tend to cause humans to behave in pro-social ways.
We're all bad under some set of contingencies - rewards and punishments- and all good under other sets of contingencies, where "all" really means the vast vast majority of us.
The people who are now operating outside of those would be contingencies and are currently being incentivized by things those contingencies would forbid FIGHT LIKE CRAZY to stop those contingencies from being put in place. They're like junkies or crack heads who want to keep feeling good in just the way they've become addicted to, no matter the consequences for everyone else.
The agenda is always the same- learn - through various means experience, and science being the best ones , how to construct contingencies in society so that pro-social ends are achieved by the everyday economic and social activity of humans. Then make those contingencies structural by passing laws. There is no other way to organize society.
So people are irrational and greedy, but government will be rational and selfless for the benefit of all?
It works that way MORE when there's democratic government and LESS when there is not democractic government, that's what we can say.
I don't think so, I disagree with you, history disagrees with you, there is no example in history where the government with power was not abusing it,
Strictly speaking, there is no population of individuals who has not abused another population to the limits of what they think they can get away with with or without government. As we organize more closely and democratic governments and the democracy they make possible take hold. there is LESS violence, LESS war and LESS human conflict and MORE progress . Non democratic governance schemes based on irrational beleif systems- Communism, Bolshvism, North Korea etc etc cannot be compared to democracies. The forgoing in fact are what human life devolves into when there is no strong democratic government. When there is, you get Finland.
Stop reading Rousseau- we now know he was just wrong.
I don't trust government, I don't trust people, I don't trust people in government. I much rather see the same people that I
Also, incorporation is literally a product the government sells to people. You give the government money and then you can have protection from it's justice system. If you have a problem with corporations you have a problem with government.
No, actually, I can approve of some government actions and policies and disapprove of others.
Hope I.... I don't know.... broadened your mind and thinking here today
Here is the problem with your thinking: you think greed is bad, inherently terrible and humans are irrational, but then immediately you want to give more power to the government by reducing freedoms of individuals (and while corporations are fiction, not real entities, people behind them - the owners, they are real) to use all of their abilities and property to fight the system and get the best outcome in this rigged environment. So people are irrational and greedy, but government will be rational and selfless for the benefit of all?
Get real. Yes the government is a deliberative body that acts slowly and after debate and until lately, compromise. and yes now very imperfectly but that's a HELL of a lot different than the forces that govern the actions of individual humans.
Sorry but the rule of law, the administration of law, the courts, the process of lawmaking and our government are awesome creations of the human mind on par with any science or technology you care to point to.
People without government has a name- it's called Somolia.
You VASTLY underestimate the complexity of what it is the government deals with every day and the types of problems is solves. Humans and the regulation of human conduct and intercourse including the calculated limiting of opportunities for individual and group despotism is by FAR a more complex undertaking than ANYTHING in any hard science since it itself is the end product of the collective effects of all those sciences and , frankly, all the good experiments on society and people which would would give clear results are immoral and illegal, and rightly so.
I am still reading your post and THIS is some unintended irony on your part:
and it's always worse for people when it's their government, that abuses power over the people, than any particular individual or company, because individuals and companies do not have legal standing to abuse you
Yeah and just exactly why do you think that is? Because government , the collective we, makes laws that prevents them from abusing you and behind those laws are men and women with guns and a legal system with jails.
I think people have a hard time imagining what their reality would be if we all actually did a Ron Paul and just let the greedheads and corporations and the rich and powerful rip.
In some sense all this kind of thinking is some form of sign the Tea Partier was holding which read:
. "Keep your government hands off my social security. !!!"
It's all I ask. It's the only thing holding me back. I have Ubuntu on my machine right now. I just need my programmable Trackball to work.
"Corporations aren't people and you're not my friend"
into the public domain and the publishing of this comment by slashdot shall serve as a binding legal agreement to the above.
We make laws and the entire concept of a limited liability corporation is a fiction on our part springing from our creative minds and not nature or Ayn Rand's crotch or any other such place.
We decide what properties a corporation will and wont' have . The whole idea of a corporation came about for a purely utilitarian- no ideological- purpose. Even rich people won't invest in ventures which would benefit society if they risk that venture's failure bankrupting them personally. So we developed this FICTION of limited liability entity which to render the useful effect of forming a legal bulwark against financial claims against corporate investors and officers.
To listen to the Republicans tell the story, God Herself came down and created the corporation right after he was done with Adam and Eve and a corporation MUST of biological and moral necessity have all the rights of a natural person.
OK now go online and make yourself a bumper sticker and tell everyone you saw it here on good old Slashdot first:
Corporations are not people and you're not my friend.
No one is saying you cannot exercise your free speech rights, you just can't donate unlimited money for the purpose of electing your candidate. If we're not all limited in spending some amount of money .that a large majority of people could, with some pain, conceivably spend then you get elections which are warped by the voices of a minority. That is a fact about the world. Trumping this issue up into First Principles and trying to muster a defense of it there is a the thinnest of thin veils behind which anti-democratic forces are hiding.
Laws have consequences, and if those consequences have patently ridiculous consequences in the real world which strongly to pervert democracy, then the law or decision is by definition bad, and there is no other definition we need to appeal to.
We live in the real world, not an Aristotlean hypothetical construct. In the real world, people have limited lifespans during which they have a right to expect achieve a decent life. Citizens v FEC is a decision on par with the Dred Scott decision . A complete and utter perversion of justice and reasoning, an incendiary partisan stroke which has the effect of ripping the country apart and pushing us further towards civil war. This is exactly what Citizens v FEC does, since it gives effectively unlimited power to just those voices who are littering our public discourse with outright lies about the one issue that WILL send this country into civil war- global warming.
Reality is one way, not many ways, not as many ways as there are opinions. That reality can be personified as a son of a bitch with a bad attitude and a 14 inch strap on. You really don't want to get into an argument with reality, because the consequences are both horrendous and inescapable. But that's exactly what these power brokers are doing and the Citizens United decision is the force of law they needed to continue to elect their candidates to office in exchange for the continued denial of a reality that will not be denied.
Citizens United will truly go down as one of the landmark events that led the United States of America into its Second Civil War.
Right. We have a word for a "person" who is solely concerned for profit and whose "speech" is only concerned with inducing others to give them money.
That word is sociopath.
Since corporations are people entitled to free speech, it's instructive to compare the requirement that corporations MUST invest their money and conduct themselves ONLY for the the purpose of maximizing profits for themselves and their shareholders , as opposed to helping other people or serving some abstract good::
http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/09/articles/series/special-comment/ebay-v-newmark-al-franken-was-right-corporations-are-legally-required-to-maximize-profits/
with the definition of sociopath:
From http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Sociopathic+personality+disorder
A condition characterized by repetitive behavioral patterns that are contrary to usual moral and ethical standards and cause a person to experience continuous conflict with society.
Symptoms include aggression, callousness, impulsiveness, irresponsibility, hostility, a low frustration level, marked emotional immaturity, and poor judgment.
A person who has this disorder overlooks the rights of others, is incapable of loyalty to others or to social values, is unable to experience guilt or to learn from past behaviors, is impervious to punishment, and tends to rationalize his or her behavior or to blame it on others. Also called antisocial reaction ...
Oh and one more thing that differentiates this sociopath from real humans- it's rich beyond 99.9999% of humans and it never dies.
In a more romantic time, Mary Shelly called this Frankenstein.
Look the purpose of the stock market is to facilitate the trading of securities. The societal good of that is that it frees up and allocates money to companies that are producing more value , or doing it more efficiently. This is a way to reward smart companies and incentivize new technologies.
This shit has nothing to do with any of that. They're gaming the system for a purpose to which it was never meant to be put and further, they're endangering everyone else while they're at it. Those are just the facts.. none of that was my opinion.
This is where Citizen United matters a lot . Romney is promising to re-Bushify the stock market if he gets elected. That means Wall Street is going Romney. That means huge sums of money are being poured into his campaign and if he wins , the market stands a good chance of cratering the economy again.
Greed has located a positive feedback loop and is exploiting it in a predictably greedy fashion.
The thing is, this is obviously reckless and has nothing to do with free markets. It's as if we threw away any concept of a social good except the servicing of the impulses of richest greediest people our society can produce.
Greed is an innate flaw in human thinking under most circumstances. It's not some magic rocket fuel that impels society towards greater wealth and innovation. That's a bullshit narrative told to you by drug addicts who don't want to be separated from their drug . And nothing more.
The thing is, the fanaticism on the right is also in a positive feedback loop with the right wing noise machine. Even though their economic deregulatory policies cratered the economy, they are taught how to deny that fact by the right wing noise machine. This clears them to vote more of the same into office.
We've effectively turned our economy over to people with a a group of compulsive gamblers and risk junkies. This is a completely different thing than supporting risk taking entrepreneurs.
Look societies live, grow and die. They die because they become captive to an entrenched minority who games the social cultural political system and secures for itself some positive feedback loop that reinforces their power and permits them to write the rules of society to their personal, narrow advantage. Thenceforward, at every decision point, their local, short terms needs are serviced first and in our case, almost exclusively.
We may be living in a dying society that will catastrophically implode . Our refusal to address global warming in more of the same dynamic with the oil and coal companies finding a positive feedback loop in their campaign contributions and right wing noise machine.
Citizen's United matters more than you think. SCOTUS overturned a hundred years of hard won lessons about politics and money and democracy this week in their Montana decision , which is nothing more than en extension of their Citizen's United decision. This from a political wing which claims to abhor the ideologically driven, no-nothing meddling of Big Government into the policies of the States and of business and other boots-on-the-ground forms of hard won, real world knowledge.
Money isn't speech and corporations aren't people. These are two more -in-your-face patent absurdities that future generations, if there are any, will laugh out loud at in middle school classes and serve as the Cliff Notes on Why America Collapsed 101.
You have to understand that rational thinking and reasoning about even the basic, obvious facts of the world does NOT come naturally to people. As proof of this I offer a recent story about an ongoing cause for mass murder in Africa- Penis Shrinkage Through Sorcery.
I 'll link to the Reuters story because otherwise you might suppose I am accidentally reporting satire.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/04/23/us-witchcraft-idUSN2319603620080423
Long story short, m
For a certain type of person this is true. For another type of person, factory work is souless and interacting and helping customers is more varied and interesting.
It's too much to ask of young girls- and this is who this is aimed at- to forgo and deny their innate aspirations to be seen as sexually desirable in all major social contexts in which they may meet a suitable mate, such as their careers.
Men have exactly the same thing with CSI and NUMB#RS and Lie To Me the new Sherlock Holmes etc etc where a deliberate attempt to portray them as BOTH highly intelligent, even intellectual, and sexually powerful and desirable.
We like to pretend we're not sexual in certain contexts, but we're really one horny species, always on the make, always with the radar going.
So this is saying in a way that's too clumsy for some adults- hey girls, being smart is not about giving up your desirability to the opposite (or same) sex. You can have it all! As well they should.
Adults who are getting shitty pants over this need to develop a more realistic model of who and what human beings are, how they conduct themselves and what their persistent, ubiquitous and biologically compelling concerns really are.
I think what the poster is saying is that if the pay were good generally, there wouldn't be the turn over. Turnover happens due to pay / responsibility imbalances. There is nothing about retail that is inherently worse than factory work , but factory workers hang on for decades because of the middle class wages such jobs used to pay.
Glad the incident that is destined to change sane, sober, science loving and technologically progressive individuals away from the perception that GM is generally safe to the perception that it's safety cannot be reliably established involved cattle and not people.
I know I am one such person.
Switching sides in three, two, one.. .... now!
just watch me...
Kensington and Logitech for not supporting trackballs in *nix
NVIDIA as per Linus's remarks
Since for the most part, my computer - to me- is my screen and my input devices , I'd say there is basically a deliberate and con$scious effort to starve *nix of a decent user experience and that such concerted effort is probably not coincidental or driven even by market forces, seeing as the implied beneficiary of such a "starve the beast" approach is clearly micro$soft who has been caught, tried and convicted in a court of law of just exactly the tactic of wielding it monopoly power in order to effect "starve the competition from access to users":
For those too young for the events to have been contemporary and in personal memory, the BBC tells it like it is:
From Judge Jackson's Finds of Fact regarding micro$oft's coercive practices:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/business/2000/microsoft/700702.stm
. The OEM Channel
With respect to OEMs, Microsoft's campaign proceeded on three fronts.
First, Microsoft bound Internet Explorer to Windows with contractual and, later, technological shackles in order to ensure the prominent (and ultimately permanent) presence of Internet Explorer on every Windows user's PC system, and to increase the costs attendant to installing and using Navigator on any PCs running Windows.
Second, Microsoft imposed stringent limits on the freedom of OEMs to reconfigure or modify Windows 95 and Windows 98 in ways that might enable OEMs to generate usage for Navigator in spite of the contractual and technological devices that Microsoft had employed to bind Internet Explorer to Windows.
Finally, Microsoft used incentives and threats to induce especially important OEMs to design their distributional, promotional and technical efforts to favor Internet Explorer to the exclusion of Navigator.
Microsoft's actions increased the likelihood that pre-installation of Navigator onto Windows would cause user confusion and system degradation, and therefore lead to higher support costs and reduced sales for the OEMs.
Internet Explorer is not demonstrably the current "best of breed" Web browser, nor is it likely to be so at any time in the immediate future
Not willing to take actions that would jeopardize their already slender profit margins, OEMs felt compelled by Microsoft's actions to reduce drastically their distribution and promotion of Navigator.
The substantial inducements that Microsoft held out to the largest OEMs only further reduced the distribution and promotion of Navigator in the OEM channel
The response of OEMs to Microsoft's efforts had a dramatic, negative impact on Navigator's usage share.
The drop in usage share, in turn, has prevented Navigator from being the vehicle to open the relevant market to competition on the merits.
2. Maintenance of Monopoly Power by Anticompetitive Means
...
Microsoft early on recognized middleware as the Trojan horse that, once having, in effect, infiltrated the applications barrier, could enable rival operating systems to enter the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems unimpeded.
Middleware [like Netscape's browser] threatened to demolish Microsoft's coveted monopoly power
Simply put, middleware threatened to demolish Microsoft's coveted monopoly power. Alerted to the threat, Microsoft strove over a period of approximately four years to prevent middleware technologies from fostering the development of enough full-featured, cross-platform applications to erode the applications barrier.
Microsoft's campaign succeeded in preventing - for several years, and perhaps permanently - Navigator and Java from fulfilling their potential to open the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems to competition on the m
Don't buy it.
Problem solved.
Just another excuse for my boss to keep drinking.
Yeah The Trouble With Tribbles from the original series....
Duh Of The Week.
OK so everyone already knew this was true only because it's stands to reason. So let's play a game. Why was this :story released as "news"?
Here's my guess. The government is trying to send a message to young geeks. Hey kids- don't think that your hacker skills or career path are orthogonal to becoming a spy! We're very interested in your skills and you can be part of something that really matters.
Just my guess.
"Terrify more moderate voters"? Palin's views and beliefs are very much main-stream American
What a joke of a statement. The last thing Palin's views are in "mainstream". No matter how much the right wing tries to pass Palin (and themselves) off as "normal", no one is buying it:
From Wikipedia:
A February 2010 ABC News/Washington Post poll showed 71% of Americans felt Palin lacked the qualifications necessary to be President of the United States.[10]
A public opinion survey commissioned by USA Today and conducted by Gallup January 14â"16, 2011, showed that Palin was perceived favorably by 38% of those polled and unfavorably by 53%, the highest unfavorable rating since Palin entered national politics.[108][109]
It's the whole Goebbels thing, right? The bigger the lie you tell, the more people will believe it.
You do your intellectual fore-bearers proud, liar.
The social conservatives supported McCain before, but only on the grounds that he wasn't a democrat.
Sort of like election you mean?
From the study:
The top hits for the top racially charged searches are nearly all textbook examples of antilocution, a majority group's sharing stereotype-based jokes using coarse language outside a minority group's presence. This was determined as the ïrst and crucial stage of prejudice in Allport's (1979) classic treatise. From 2004-2007, the searches were most popular in West Virginia; upstate New York; rural Illinois; eastern Ohio; southern Mississippi; western Pennsylvania; and southern Oklahoma.
I have more than a little passing familiarity with one or more of those places and I can tell you that "n*gger jokes " and hatred of minority groups as well as gays is alive and well quite as if it were still 60 years ago.
I just couldn't bring myself to continue to live there when I had the chance a few times for just this reason.
I travel around with my job and these places are some of the most regressive places in the nation. I can't imagine living in Birmingham AL or Syracuse NY or Pittsburgh PA or Akron OH or any of those places. They're horrifying to tell you the truth and it's the people themselves (sorry to everyone who lives there and is now offended.) .
I was standing on a street corner in Syracuse, just standing there, and some car full of teenages goes by in the middle of the day and shouts' "fucking queer" ((not, actually) and throws a beer bottle out the window at me. Just standing there waiting for the light to change. What a regressive shit hole.
We went to a place in rural Penn. and the guy I was working with was black but not obviously so - whatever that means- to our host - we we're in our host's living room with his kids there for cirssakes- because he started in as a kind of "getting to know you" ice breaker with n*gger jokes ....and then did back flip over back flip trying to extricate himself when I pointed out (I couldn't help myself) that my coworker was, in fact, African-American. Yeah, and he had to work with us for the next three months...
In another one of these places I was standing with my friend talking with a guitar vendor about guitars and getting advice about different vendors around town I was going to be visiting while I was there and he said "oh stay away from X, he'll Jew you every chance he gets". Yeah, that's right the girl I was standing with was *quite* Jewish. Her faced turned bright red and she stood there for a while while I explained the situation to Mr FootInMouth. Then she left to go cry somewhere, and he left to go smoke a cigarette outside, where we ran into him again on the way out, which sent him scurrying away like a rat.
This is how it is in these places.. this is how these people grow up and carry it on, generation after generation.
No surprise that the FM music stations are all apparently also caught in a time warp of around 1979.... Lynrd Skynrd and Journey and all that (no I don't care if they're still around) .
What is it with these Places That Time Forgot? What's the dynamic? IS it just *that* offensive enough that anyone with any progressive impulse just flees and they start inbreeding amongst themselves?
Ahh read the other (wiki) page I supplied for what dual theory is. IT's not about how we talk when we're pissed off or emotional.
Most people know digital music as shorthand for downloadable digital music and use "non-digital" to refer to CDs to. That's just how it is now , as another poster pointed on in this thread.
All done now, but it was nice discussing shit with you. Cheers!