We both offered reasoned arguments and examples to buttress our diametrically different POV. So far, both our arguments have gotten 5 stars. Let's see if we can pick this apart.
You argument depends on the concept of "other people's money". One set of people pony up the cash, another set merrily invests, yet another profits - the owners- if things go well.
This description is fallacious in this circumstance for a number of reasons, which I'll point out just below, but also, and even more interesting, is the fallacious mental model you used to construct your argument from. That model is what is especially instructive.
About your description of the three separate players. First, the taxes invested are not "other people's (the taxpayer's) money". It is the government's money. That what a tax is. Taxes are not optional, they are the mutually agreed upon - through your legislature- revenue stream of the US government and you never "owned" that money. It's not now nor ever was "your" money, apoint elaborated on by Dean Baker here:
Secondly, the amount of money the government spent on Solyndra was a vanishingly small part of the federal budget, yet the financial payoff to the federal government in advances of either solar technology or the deployment economics of solar energy would be enormous, making this exactly the small-risk/ big-payoff type of investment any wise investor looks for.
The government has bills it pays in a million ways for necessary remedial action as a result of fossil fuels. it pays to protect and undo damage to the environment, to support foreign war wars, to cover the health consequences to the population of burning coal, in the destructive effects of acid rain on buildings and estuaries and rivers and lakes on and on and on.
Three, considering the savings the government would incur if more people used solar, the real winner would not be Solyndra's owners but the government itself. Suppose Solyndra makes its investors a handsome yearly 10% profit on their investment. That 10% is the least of the government's payback for investing because of the nationwide, permanently repeating reduction in the above cited ongoing costs.
Your perspective came from the misinterpretation of the relationship between the government and the people. Your mental model is we are opposing sides in some zero-sum game over a pot of gold. We are not two separate entities. We have a government for, of and by the American people. The government is We The People, for better or for worse. I don't complain about the government in say, Tennessee allowing creationism into the classrooms there. I complain about the stupid Tennesseans who form that majority opinion.
Ditto the tar sands in Alberta and the Federal government.
If you're really worried about the corrupting influence of election money on politicians, then why don't you support publicly funded elections instead of the Citizen's United sewer we live in presently?
Your example of Mitt Romney has built into it the belief that all politicians are and always will be as venal as they can possibly be, harboring no real interest in the public good. There would be no reason to invest in Koch industries given how profitable they are and the economic model - no charge for externalities they impose on society- that's currently working in their favor. So there is no real world upside to such an investment the way there is to investing in solar. Such an investment would indeed be objectionable but only a mind that models the world as only competing political ideologies, a world from which any objective measure of goodness has been removed can possibly equate those two examples.
Finally, as if another argument is needed, you have no
In this case the company got dumped on by the Chinese.
Investment is inherently risky. But we have to invest in our future. Some of those investments will go bust. The ones that don't , like the internet, pay for the ones that do many many many times over.
The only people making a whipping boy of this company are people who 1) reflexively hate anything the President has done or 2) work for oil and gas companies.
that not only aren't people buying the whole "big bad government" schtick along with the whole "everything is some form of private property" schtick but that everyone KNOWS that he has no hope of even a majority of a the minority of the people who vote.
I'm sure we'll see you again next Presidential cycle Ron or perhaps you can do what your sleazy scumbag son did regarding his physician's license-
There's a lot of truth I am not anxious to dispute in what you say. I agree that oversight is critical and currently lacking. Given that we agree on that fact, why are we not a police state like N Korea? The answer , I am arguing, is that the people who wield what might be N Korea style despotic power are not interested in doing that in great enough numbers to pull it off.
Every BAD cop, not every cop, who pulls the shit we saw in the beating video this week is perhaps a candidate for fascism gone amok. But for every BAD cop there are 50 or 100 GOOD cops who do their job the way they should and don't love the BAD cop . And then there's the Feds, who have the power to oversee the cops if needed, and do
I agree with Acton's quote, and I agree we need overview and transparency to guard against the bad luck of having the rotten 2% somehow get it together and take power. But that is not the fault of anyone except mother nature who made bad people bad,
Of relevance here is are also the experiments of Stanley Milgram and his intellectual descendants who showed that just anyone can go bad given the right (wrong) structure and authority. To guard against that , you need a system, a structure that prevents it because just talking and cajoling won't do.
But saying we are already a police state is not just inaccurate, it's destructive also.
If anyone really absorbs that idea and takes it to heart, then psychologically it militates against activism and remedial action, doesn't it? Why get upset over police and governmental misconduct, since it's just what they do anyway all the time ? You can't be upset all the time.. something like donor fatigue sets in.. a sort of outrage fatigue.
Besides, this line of reasoning goes, the system is So corrupt that even writing your congressperson is just going to get you on a governmental list of radicals and undesirables.
These are the lessons anti-government people accidentally instill in anyone who takes their rhetoric seriously.
We have a good system of government comparatively speaking relative to other extant governments and historically. Not participating out of cynicism is a sure way to make it worse. The Machiavellian types ALWAYS show up to the game. Are we going to vacate the field because we already live in a police state?
It helps to imagine yourself charged with the responsibilities of the other side. Your job is to make sure the nuke doesn't go off, what are you going to do?
As far as someone saying if a terrorist has a nuke, he'll pull the trigger if you catch him, nukes are not grenades. You have to acquire the material assemble them . Necessarily, acquiring the material means moving it somehow from point A to point B. Stopping that is what this cop was trying to do.
Finally, as far as my never having had a run in with bad cops, all I can say is you don't know how very very very wrong you are.
I would just this year be catching up in "productivity "what he achieved just last year.
That any group of people could engage such as CRAZY idea about their own relative superiority to those who work for them says a lot about them and nothing about us.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder- it's not just a DSM entry " commentary added:
1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized (and paid !) as superior without commensurate achievements)
2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love ( or pay! )
Translation: Narcissists cultivate solipsistic or "autistic" fantasies, which is to say that they live in their own little worlds (and react with affront when reality dares to intrude)
3. Believes he is "special" and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions.. (and pay! )
Translation: Narcissists think that everyone who is not special and superior is worthless. By definition, normal, ordinary, and average aren't special and superior, and so, to narcissists, they are worthless.
4. Requires excessive admiration (and pay!)
Translation: Excessive in two ways: they want praise, compliments, deference, and expressions of envy all the time, and they want to be told that everything they do is better than what others can do. Sincerity is not an issue here; all that matter are frequency and volume.
5. Has a sense of entitlement (to his pay!)
Translation: They expect automatic compliance with their wishes or especially favorable treatment, such as thinking that they should always be able to go first and that other people should stop whatever they're doing to do what the narcissists want, and may react with hurt or rage when these expectations are frustrated.
6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends (and pay! )
Translation: Narcissists use other people to get what they want without caring about the cost to the other people.
7. Lacks empathy (for the devastation he wreaks on others when his reckless schemes to increase his pay ! destroy innocent people's lives, and proceeds to fight against any type of regulation upon his reckless behaviour)
Translation: They are unwilling to recognize or sympathize with other people's feelings and needs. They "tune out" when other people want to talk about their own problems.
I leave it as an ( easy ) exercise to apply the above definition to the scumbag who is the topic of this slashdot article.
For reasons unknown to me, most of the crazy-energy is found on the right on the spectrum in the US today. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is and has been that way for along long time now (back to FDRs day and of course the Civil War was progressives vs the South...)
Elsewhere there are probably crazy lefties wanting to blow shit up and overturn all reason. Some say Soviet Russia was like that but I think Soviet Russia just became a power grab by sociopaths (Stalin et al) ; that is the thesis of Orwell's Animal Farm. Communist China proves (actually proves a long time ago for whoever such proof was needed) that no matter how much you talk and indoctrinate your population, they'll still be as greedy and corrupt as they can get away with because that is human nature.
Libertarians are in fact mostly right wingers in the US today, but they are also found in lesser numbers on the left- totally suspicious of all government actions and dishing out advice every bit as bad as those on the right. Glenn Greenwald comes to mind here but there are others. The overarching theme is "danger? What danger? The only real danger is the US government!"
I *suspect* that a lot of the fear expressed in reaction to my post here was from people who do pot or X and of course have to transport it to and for and fear - with good reason- the draconic and ridiculous drug laws that would ruin their lives and declare them to be criminals. You don't have to be a libertarian to want to end the drug war and legalize pot and decriminalize other drugs.
Then there's the "snoop your personal computer" laws that are used at traffic stop where of course police are likely to find ripped off music etc etc.
But beyond that, I would like to point out that the opposing side as it showed itself today accidentally made my point for me. I never said that no cops do bad things; what I said was "how else do you want law enforcement to catch the nuke-releasing terrorists?" and " most people in society care about civil rights". The fact that they're so afraid of the people in this country with limited power (cops) only lends support to the rational fear of what assholes who care even less about anything you value at all would do with a much greater power.
I've said this so many times that it's becoming my byline but here it goes again- the first organizing principle of society is not civil liberties or religious liberties or political freedom. It's survival. If survival is threatened then society will jettison those other things to whatever extent is necessary to ensure survival.
They don't see it this way, but cops pulling over cancer patients is their own best hedge against losing everything they claim as their moral basis for objecting to cops pulling over cancer patients.
That's one twist too many for a lot of minds, minds whose owner-operators not coincidentally spend a lot of time smoking dope and dropping X.
Just exactly how do you expect the police to catch the terrorist with a nuke if not deploying such devices?
If this is your level of offense that you take, how are you going to cope with a post-nuclear-bomb-in-NYC security regime that will inevitably be realized?
This is very basic stuff here. I mean a just slightly lateral translation of "A Stitch In Time Saves Nine"
Sometimes I despair of my fellow liberals. Someone they got sold on this anti-government crack. Basically they think because Hoover and Stalin and World Leader In History X created and used the states security apparatus to attack their own people , then it's inevitable any country will follow suit given enough time and power.I guess that's the only lesson a lot of people take away from their history class.There is a danger lurking in too much unchecked power, and we need judicial review and the best efforts of a free press, we really do but wait....but what if they're corrupt too!!
Which brings me to my counter-narrative to the Police State Is Coming meme. The reason you're free as in freedom is mainly because other members of society actually DO value freedom
as much as you do.
Judges, cops, the people in the the press and national security apparatus actually view the world in the same way you do. They LIKE their country and government (sorry Ron Paul!) and LIKE their freedoms and civil liberties and want to continue to have them fro everyone. They're patriots in that way.
They actively DON'T want a government that sends political enemies to work gulags and all the other stuff that characterizes a repressive of society.
The people in our nation who DON'T feel this way really stand out as a lunatic fringe.
I am not saying to just trust your government. I am saying that the reason you can walk down the street isn't because there are laws against murder but mostly because people have internalized the "don't murder" value and don't want to murder each other, and that internalization is what REALLY keeps you safe on a day to day basis and not the laws. The law make it advantageous to internalize it and disadvantageous to fail to do so.
The real thing to worry about is the lunatic right wing historical and social revisionist histories that get people to believes like "This country was founded as a Christian nation" and "Barak Obama is a Islamic communist".
As crazy as that shit sounds, it actually does have the potential to create individuals who DON'T share your values- at all.
Get enough of those types running around and no law is going to keep you safe .
That's why what you say online matters. It's today's public town hall. A good argument influences people to think and see things differently. That process, of talking to each other and changing minds is the ultimate mechanism through which civilization and freedom and democracy are passed.
I would switch to Linux tomorrow if my trackball would work with it.
I saw there was is a book titled "writing drivers for BSD". I had the thought that I'll learn to do that, write my own driver, then switch.. it'll be fun.
Then I remembered I wasn't 17 any more and my previous 17 year old self had the same thoughts about things in the world and led me to the very very fully plate of stuff to do in my lifetime I am trying to execute on now. So I forgot about it and stuck with Windows.
OK I fucked up. Mea culpa. I now RTFA, sorry for he useless advice.
The last thing I would do is go into debt for an education. Assuming that isn't going to happen, I would go for Biz Dev since you're getting out of being a programmer.
First off, you can do it because not every company marches lockstep with the prevailing age-discriminatory practices of Silicon Valley.
There are a ton of shops out there who aren't primarily IT but rely on it. I have a friend who just started programming - in basic and something else I'd never heard of (I think) - for a company that has an inventory system written in such. They need to keep it running the owner/ founder is in his mid-60s early 70s and - get this- doesn't buy into "that whole Windows-GUI thing. " We're talking green screen.
He took it not b/c it's his dream job but because it pays him 60k (he was trending towards destitution) and he can keep his family going on that until he moves on in 5 or so years.
The best thing about your new chosen career is this is DIY like nothing else. Be thinking about entrepreneurism from the start. If you can dream it, you can build it. Then you can sell it to people who find it useful. That last sentence is the missing link in the underwear gnomes puzzle, the one that comes just before "profit".
I just bought a piece of software (a tool) for 70 bucks yesterday. People give money for tools that help them. People who crack software and steal it are either not really your customers (they just want everything and never use it) or are, well thieves. In programming I would say if it's not free as in beer and not overpriced , people pay. I LIKE to pay; it's a respect / pride of ownership thing.
Regarding language, start with C because it's out there by the ton and people are not learning it anymore. Nevermind COBOL... unless you want that to be your niche, which is a possible career path I guess but there's little synergy between it and C C++ C# and Java which are all strongly similar to each other IMO.
Go for it all b/c once you know one language, you can learn others easily. Start with good old fashioned C, not even C++. There are great books out there that older people never had available to them.. Deitel and Dietel come to mind but there are others too. You can't go wrong in the learning department. Perhaps nothing is so well explained and accessible as programming languages in terms of pedagogical material at great prices..
I love the way you throw around the word productive a though it meant anything other than rich. I love the way Ayn Randers equate productive with "reaching the apex of a money-making hierarchy" as though that had a god fucking thing to do with being "productive".
What a fucking joke,. If being well positioned in society were in any way related to "being productive" then every woman in Africa would be a millionaire, a point that was made here:
If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.
The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves â" that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive â" are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible.
Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.
The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves.
He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years.
He found that the consistency of their performance was zero.
"The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill."
Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.
Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him.
"The illusion of skill ⦠is deeply ingrained in their culture."
The CEO f my company made 86 million a year I made 86k. That means his labor was 1000 times more productive than my own. Since I worked not less than 12 hours a day, it's hard to imagine how it could be true. Obviously such people could recreate the last 1000 years of human progress in just one year. Well, at least they think so.
The idea that some cokehead " Hey, I made a yearbook-on-the-internet" "genius" is somehow one of society's "most productive members" is such a joke that we just have to say that anyone who seriously entertains the idea is irremediably idiotic.
People are by nature aggressive, territorial and only somewhat cooperative. If you're not one of us, or you can't be of use to us, then you're marginalized or worse.
Everything else is due to culture and civilization.
I see your POV as a kind of Roussueian "noble savage" argument. The only problem with it is it's wrong, as we now know.
Men compete for women (keeping this hetero for simplicity's sake) and women like men who have power, stuff and territory. That's where aggression comes from . We are all descended from and bear the genes of people who won at a very savage and political game of "who's on top"?
So there is no "natural" state we have gotten away from that was better. We're all bad, and we need to hold our badness in check. That's what society does; that's it's function . We all give up some power and autonomy so we're not playing a perpetual Game of Thrones and society can progress past barbarism.
This guy is nothing special- he's just doing what a lot of people would do if given half the chance and that's the point. The Well Tempered Member of Society would elect not to do what he did. He's going Galt, which is to say reverting , giving into a primitive antisocial impulse. A new kind of superior moral being (Ayn Rand's idea) he's not.
Read a little sociobiology.. and a little David Brooks to temper it with. We're not blank slates. We're whatever evolution shit out it's ass after 200 million years of making "passing on your genes" the only mandate. It's not entirely pretty.
My own POV is we need to start thinking about tweaking genes to take the edge off people- less bellicose and selfish, more pro-social and cooperative. The level f selfishness people came with from the factory is far in excess of what is needed or even safe, given that we now live ina world evolution never saw coming, one filled with nuclear bombs, bio-terrorism nanotechnolgy and the ability to trash our environment through sheer ignorance and denialism.
We've turned technology on every part of our world to make it better except ourselves. That's what the Next Big Thing is for humans. That's the Age of Man we can either enter into or go extinct before we reached.
I urge everyone on this list to read "Merchants of Doubt "if you want to know what the Koch Brothers "have done".
Are we really so naive here that we think evil people don't understand they have to be seen doing good in order to get away with being evil?
Read Merchants of Doubt and see if you agree with me that the Koch Brothers are the single greatest threat to national security today and that National Medal Of Science honoree Frederick Seitz is the single greatest civilian mass murder in human history.
Fuck yes. Die boomers die. Hurry the fuck up and fucking die. Fucking tea bagger Koch brother AEI Heritage Foundation Focus on the Family Crossroads GPS subhuman amoral Santa-God worshipping gay bashing filth. Just fucking die and keep dying and don't stop dying until the earth is finally rid of every fucking baby boomer that was ever fucking born.
Die die die die die die die die.
Do it NOW and shut the fuck up about it. Just die.
Maybe you need to fucking learn what the word "earn" fucking means.
What part of the government paid for R and D in basic science did you EARN ? What part of the infrastructure whose TIT you suck every goddamn day of your miserable useless life did YOU earn?
Fucking none of it.
So STFU about what you EARNED or this coke snorting degenerate thinks he EARNED because if you were going to EARN it, you'd have to start with studying science then recreating everything society has created and given to you as your fucking silverspoon birthright biotch.
You earned jack. You took an inconceivable amount of goods and know-how that generations have paid for in taxes in time in labor in suffering and in blood and thought of it as "yours" just like this puss filled filth sack did. Then you bitch slap everyone who came before and preen and prance around like you invented it all, paid for it all, created it all and "you don't owe no-nobody nuthin!"
Ayn Rand was an amphetamine addict. The process of being an addict of pharmaceutical stimulants systematically degrades you brain in a known and characteristic way- it turns you into a megalomaniac void of higher order emotional cognition. Thus the character of John Galt. Thus this fucking shit bag who, if the FB movie is to be believed, basically coke-snorted away whatever fucking ganglia it was that was passing for his brain
back in the day.
One of the totally legitimate functions of society is to limit - through whatever means are effective- the harm and damage the mentally deranged anti-social psychopaths can inflict on society. I hope this guy dies in the most degrading abasing manner imaginable, preferably at the hands of one of society's most disadvantaged and deprived members, perhaps his drug dealer or one of the whores he has to pay to fuck him
Nothing is worse than listening to Ayn Rand nose-candy freaks celebrate their common, mundane, shared, evolutionary impulse to be as greedy as possible at everyone else's expense as though it were some kind of advance in human moral reasoning and the basis of civilization itself.
Yeah, society and the taxes that run it are a form of looting. I don't think he minded the looting that paid for the infrastructure he depended on every fucking day, and the teachers who educated the people he relied on to get work done, and the military that made sure he wasn't too busy doing the ole Sig Heil to bother with anything else and courts that and system of laws and enforcement of those laws that provided him with the legal framework he needed to make his money or the EPA who made sure he wasn't dead from dioxin exposure or all the other myriad of governmental services..."looters"... who made civilization possible and carry it forward on civil servant wages and the promise of a government pension at the end of a lifetime of service.
This guy is a poster boy for the problems when people become so much more wealthy than the average person. They become selfish, uncompassionate and basically sociopathic.
Permitting these monsters to also hold influence proportionate to their wealth is where most of America's political and social problems come from. I don't give a fuck how tired you are of anything to do with anything "1%", what we have in America is an oligarchyy-kleptocracy being run into the ground economically, environmentally and morally by the scum who could give a shit about anyone or anything so long as he's got access to an all you can eat buffet of his favorite vices.
The super-wealthy twist and distort the system so it works only for them and at everyone else's expense. That's a fact and anyone denying it is just living in a fantasy world in which they're in line to be the next billionaire.
"I got mine, now watch me fuck you all. I don't need you,. and you can't touch me."
That's about the most dangerous thinking process a member of society can develop.
And yes, I do understand that programming and technology are areas that attract a higher than average number of such types. Let the mod down begin.
Fuck you. Read history.
Facebook may be a gigantic spy machine that induces the hapless and naive to surrender bit by bit most intimate details which are then assembled into a dossier to be used to suppress their own political, employment and economic opportunities so the rich can stay rich and keep the poor poor, but it's not going to save the rich from what comes when the system collapses in ecological and economic devastation . They'll share the same fate that all the past and present kings who thought of themselves as "untouchable"- and had better reason to consider themselves so- shared .
How soon until we read about some vet-who-can't-get-treated-by-a-tax-starved-VA taking a six dollar.50 BMG from two klicks away and exploding this fucking narcissistic panty-boy-billionaire's head like a two dollar melon?
Not soon enough.
Ayn Rand's Galt character was just the (cardboard character, cartoonish) embodiment of the desire to have no obligations placed upon by society whatsoever, while of course being permitted
This is like saying that a human never needs to operate the car, no matter what. Absent that strong interpretation of "driverless cars" , the the human still has to "watch out" and "take over" if things get hairy. That is not a "driverless car" anymore than cars are now "no panic breaking" cars. If something happens, you have to stomp on the brake. You'll only know if something is happening if you're watching. If yo're watching and making decisions, then you're driving.
But imagine such a thing as driverless cars existed. What would that look like? It would be something like the rail system- there's "something " in place to keep you in your lane, to avoid contact with stuff that jumps out at you, like humans and bikes and crap in the road.
Do we have driverless trains?
Perhaps it's something like planes- they're basically driverless. Nevertheless we still require trained pilots.
So given that in no other form of transportation do we have driverless anything, and those forms of transportation are LESS risky and obstacle challenged than driving BY FAR, and also MORE price sensitive and therefore motivated to instantiate such a system, how realistic is this?
OK just pretend then. Suspend disbelief. And there's the problem. Suspending disbelief by that amount requires that we talk about a thing whose specifics are unknowable.
Suffice it to say that programs malfunction and "crash" .
The problem is that patents should not be applied to software. Software patents are actually patents on ideas... the patent covers some high level algorithm . Algorithms are not patentable in theory, but patent lawyers and the courts are ignoring that.
Software is already fully protected by copyright. That's enough IP to motivate people to write software and to prevent people from ripping off your code..
There is no "problem" except the will on the part of a certain court- the Court Of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), IP lawyers, corporations and IP maximalists to subvert the patent system to their personal benefit .
It's really nothing more than an agreed-upon defiance of the meaning of very clear law, society's best interests and the express wishes of the vast vast vast majority of software engineers who are allegedly the "beneficiaries" of the system.
Software patents are bad law. IP lawyers are perfectly well aware of this fact which is why they expressly exclude legal arguments and algorithms for tax avoidance from being patentable- they're not going to have done to them what they've done to us.
Either the law will change of the inevitable consequences of the law will collapse the entire system of software creation in the US and anywhere else software patents are permitted, and by collapse I mean monopolist prices accompanied by a lack of innovation, along with a defection of creative types from the field.
If you want to get activist about things, then refuse to sell software in the US. Set up a company in France or the EU and sell only into non-software patent jurisdictions.
If enough of us do that, it will be game over for the lawyers since it will then be completely indisputable that software patents are in fact retarding innovation and driving creators OUT of the US- something the US could not bear the thought of since it's so contrary to our idea of our country.
When the government is forced to pay or back a loan but has no control over the cost, then you get an inflationary where inflationary bubbles.come from.
The bubble in the housing market happened because the government didn't regulate the housing loan market, but ended up on the hook for the defaults anyway. If they had regulated the fly by night lenders and forced banks to adhere to their own standards instead of letting those banks play "pass the trash" , none of the liar loans and NINJA loans would have happened.
If the government could regulate prices of healthcare services the way Japan's government does , then we wouldn't have the industry making up the prices they like and passing the bill to the government.
If the government could have told the universities to go fuck themselves when they started implementing double digit inflationary tuition prices back in the 80s, then we wouldn't have the astronomical, unpaybackable student loans that are presently going to go into massive default.
If the government has to pay, then the government has to be able to control costs. That's the solution the rest of the developed world has come to in healthcare, in education and in housing.
But here if you try to regulate these industries, the tea party crowd has a fucking aneurysm and starts screaming about "socialism".
The opposite anti-socialsm - seems to not be working out so well for anyone except the Angelo Mozilos of the world.
When "coming to fight" basically means paying attention enough to look at a computer screen and press a button at the right time , how exactly do you propose to stop them?
Yeah this is something the cruise industry caught onto a few decades back. If your ship isn't registered in the US and it's not in US territorial waters, then it's not protected by US laws, neither criminal nor civil.
Good luck saying "I was eavesdropped on" or "my software / idea / business model / proprietary information was stolen" or anything like that.
Slashdot Mirror
We both offered reasoned arguments and examples to buttress our diametrically different POV. So far, both our arguments have gotten 5 stars. Let's see if we can pick this apart.
You argument depends on the concept of "other people's money". One set of people pony up the cash, another set merrily invests, yet another profits - the owners- if things go well.
This description is fallacious in this circumstance for a number of reasons, which I'll point out just below, but also, and even more interesting, is the fallacious mental model you used to construct your argument from. That model is what is especially instructive.
About your description of the three separate players. First, the taxes invested are not "other people's (the taxpayer's) money". It is the government's money. That what a tax is. Taxes are not optional, they are the mutually agreed upon - through your legislature- revenue stream of the US government and you never "owned" that money. It's not now nor ever was "your" money, apoint elaborated on by Dean Baker here:
http://deanbaker.net/images/stories/documents/cns.html#9
(More on Dean Baker here: http://bigthink.com/ideas/15481 )
Secondly, the amount of money the government spent on Solyndra was a vanishingly small part of the federal budget, yet the financial payoff to the federal government in advances of either solar technology or the deployment economics of solar energy would be enormous, making this exactly the small-risk/ big-payoff type of investment any wise investor looks for.
The government has bills it pays in a million ways for necessary remedial action as a result of fossil fuels. it pays to protect and undo damage to the environment, to support foreign war wars, to cover the health consequences to the population of burning coal, in the destructive effects of acid rain on buildings and estuaries and rivers and lakes on and on and on.
Three, considering the savings the government would incur if more people used solar, the real winner would not be Solyndra's owners but the government itself. Suppose Solyndra makes its investors a handsome yearly 10% profit on their investment. That 10% is the least of the government's payback for investing because of the nationwide, permanently repeating reduction in the above cited ongoing costs.
Your perspective came from the misinterpretation of the relationship between the government and the people. Your mental model is we are opposing sides in some zero-sum game over a pot of gold. We are not two separate entities. We have a government for, of and by the American people. The government is We The People, for better or for worse. I don't complain about the government in say, Tennessee allowing creationism into the classrooms there. I complain about the stupid Tennesseans who form that majority opinion.
Ditto the tar sands in Alberta and the Federal government.
If you're really worried about the corrupting influence of election money on politicians, then why don't you support publicly funded elections instead of the Citizen's United sewer we live in presently?
Your example of Mitt Romney has built into it the belief that all politicians are and always will be as venal as they can possibly be, harboring no real interest in the public good. There would be no reason to invest in Koch industries given how profitable they are and the economic model - no charge for externalities they impose on society- that's currently working in their favor. So there is no real world upside to such an investment the way there is to investing in solar. Such an investment would indeed be objectionable but only a mind that models the world as only competing political ideologies, a world from which any objective measure of goodness has been removed can possibly equate those two examples.
Finally, as if another argument is needed, you have no
In this case the company got dumped on by the Chinese.
Investment is inherently risky. But we have to invest in our future. Some of those investments will go bust. The ones that don't , like the internet, pay for the ones that do many many many times over.
The only people making a whipping boy of this company are people who 1) reflexively hate anything the President has done or 2) work for oil and gas companies.
I'm sure we'll see you again next Presidential cycle Ron or perhaps you can do what your sleazy scumbag son did regarding his physician's license-
http://allbleedingstops.blogspot.com/2010/06/rand-paul-self-certified-physician.html
and self-certify yourself as President:
You know he would if he could .
Every BAD cop, not every cop, who pulls the shit we saw in the beating video this week is perhaps a candidate for fascism gone amok. But for every BAD cop there are 50 or 100 GOOD cops who do their job the way they should and don't love the BAD cop . And then there's the Feds, who have the power to oversee the cops if needed, and do
I agree with Acton's quote, and I agree we need overview and transparency to guard against the bad luck of having the rotten 2% somehow get it together and take power. But that is not the fault of anyone except mother nature who made bad people bad,
Of relevance here is are also the experiments of Stanley Milgram and his intellectual descendants who showed that just anyone can go bad given the right (wrong) structure and authority. To guard against that , you need a system, a structure that prevents it because just talking and cajoling won't do.
But saying we are already a police state is not just inaccurate, it's destructive also.
If anyone really absorbs that idea and takes it to heart, then psychologically it militates against activism and remedial action, doesn't it? Why get upset over police and governmental misconduct, since it's just what they do anyway all the time ? You can't be upset all the time.. something like donor fatigue sets in.. a sort of outrage fatigue.
Besides, this line of reasoning goes, the system is So corrupt that even writing your congressperson is just going to get you on a governmental list of radicals and undesirables.
These are the lessons anti-government people accidentally instill in anyone who takes their rhetoric seriously.
We have a good system of government comparatively speaking relative to other extant governments and historically. Not participating out of cynicism is a sure way to make it worse. The Machiavellian types ALWAYS show up to the game. Are we going to vacate the field because we already live in a police state?
It helps to imagine yourself charged with the responsibilities of the other side. Your job is to make sure the nuke doesn't go off, what are you going to do?
As far as someone saying if a terrorist has a nuke, he'll pull the trigger if you catch him, nukes are not grenades. You have to acquire the material assemble them . Necessarily, acquiring the material means moving it somehow from point A to point B. Stopping that is what this cop was trying to do.
Finally, as far as my never having had a run in with bad cops, all I can say is you don't know how very very very wrong you are.
Just to put my CEOs pay vs mine into perspective , he is supposedly 1000 times as productive as I am.
That means if I started working in the year 1012- before William The Conquerer was born:
http://www.gohistoric.com/person/william-the-conqueror
I would just this year be catching up in "productivity "what he achieved just last year.
That any group of people could engage such as CRAZY idea about their own relative superiority to those who work for them says a lot about them and nothing about us.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder- it's not just a DSM entry " commentary added:
1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized (and paid !) as superior without commensurate achievements)
2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love ( or pay! )
Translation: Narcissists cultivate solipsistic or "autistic" fantasies, which is to say that they live in their own little worlds (and react with affront when reality dares to intrude)
3. Believes he is "special" and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions.. (and pay! )
Translation: Narcissists think that everyone who is not special and superior is worthless. By definition, normal, ordinary, and average aren't special and superior, and so, to narcissists, they are worthless.
4. Requires excessive admiration (and pay!)
Translation: Excessive in two ways: they want praise, compliments, deference, and expressions of envy all the time, and they want to be told that everything they do is better than what others can do. Sincerity is not an issue here; all that matter are frequency and volume.
5. Has a sense of entitlement (to his pay!)
Translation: They expect automatic compliance with their wishes or especially favorable treatment, such as thinking that they should always be able to go first and that other people should stop whatever they're doing to do what the narcissists want, and may react with hurt or rage when these expectations are frustrated.
6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends (and pay! )
Translation: Narcissists use other people to get what they want without caring about the cost to the other people.
7. Lacks empathy (for the devastation he wreaks on others when his reckless schemes to increase his pay ! destroy innocent people's lives, and proceeds to fight against any type of regulation upon his reckless behaviour)
Translation: They are unwilling to recognize or sympathize with other people's feelings and needs. They "tune out" when other people want to talk about their own problems.
I leave it as an ( easy ) exercise to apply the above definition to the scumbag who is the topic of this slashdot article.
For reasons unknown to me, most of the crazy-energy is found on the right on the spectrum in the US today. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is and has been that way for along long time now (back to FDRs day and of course the Civil War was progressives vs the South...)
Elsewhere there are probably crazy lefties wanting to blow shit up and overturn all reason. Some say Soviet Russia was like that but I think Soviet Russia just became a power grab by sociopaths (Stalin et al) ; that is the thesis of Orwell's Animal Farm. Communist China proves (actually proves a long time ago for whoever such proof was needed) that no matter how much you talk and indoctrinate your population, they'll still be as greedy and corrupt as they can get away with because that is human nature.
Libertarians are in fact mostly right wingers in the US today, but they are also found in lesser numbers on the left- totally suspicious of all government actions and dishing out advice every bit as bad as those on the right. Glenn Greenwald comes to mind here but there are others. The overarching theme is "danger? What danger? The only real danger is the US government!"
I *suspect* that a lot of the fear expressed in reaction to my post here was from people who do pot or X and of course have to transport it to and for and fear - with good reason- the draconic and ridiculous drug laws that would ruin their lives and declare them to be criminals. You don't have to be a libertarian to want to end the drug war and legalize pot and decriminalize other drugs.
Then there's the "snoop your personal computer" laws that are used at traffic stop where of course police are likely to find ripped off music etc etc.
But beyond that, I would like to point out that the opposing side as it showed itself today accidentally made my point for me. I never said that no cops do bad things; what I said was "how else do you want law enforcement to catch the nuke-releasing terrorists?" and " most people in society care about civil rights". The fact that they're so afraid of the people in this country with limited power (cops) only lends support to the rational fear of what assholes who care even less about anything you value at all would do with a much greater power.
I've said this so many times that it's becoming my byline but here it goes again- the first organizing principle of society is not civil liberties or religious liberties or political freedom. It's survival. If survival is threatened then society will jettison those other things to whatever extent is necessary to ensure survival.
They don't see it this way, but cops pulling over cancer patients is their own best hedge against losing everything they claim as their moral basis for objecting to cops pulling over cancer patients.
That's one twist too many for a lot of minds, minds whose owner-operators not coincidentally spend a lot of time smoking dope and dropping X.
Glad it's not up to them.
Just exactly how do you expect the police to catch the terrorist with a nuke if not deploying such devices?
If this is your level of offense that you take, how are you going to cope with a post-nuclear-bomb-in-NYC security regime that will inevitably be realized?
This is very basic stuff here. I mean a just slightly lateral translation of "A Stitch In Time Saves Nine"
Sometimes I despair of my fellow liberals. Someone they got sold on this anti-government crack. Basically they think because Hoover and Stalin and World Leader In History X created and used the states security apparatus to attack their own people , then it's inevitable any country will follow suit given enough time and power.I guess that's the only lesson a lot of people take away from their history class.There is a danger lurking in too much unchecked power, and we need judicial review and the best efforts of a free press, we really do but wait....but what if they're corrupt too!!
Which brings me to my counter-narrative to the Police State Is Coming meme. The reason you're free as in freedom is mainly because other members of society actually DO value freedom as much as you do.
Judges, cops, the people in the the press and national security apparatus actually view the world in the same way you do. They LIKE their country and government (sorry Ron Paul!) and LIKE their freedoms and civil liberties and want to continue to have them fro everyone. They're patriots in that way. They actively DON'T want a government that sends political enemies to work gulags and all the other stuff that characterizes a repressive of society. The people in our nation who DON'T feel this way really stand out as a lunatic fringe.
I am not saying to just trust your government. I am saying that the reason you can walk down the street isn't because there are laws against murder but mostly because people have internalized the "don't murder" value and don't want to murder each other, and that internalization is what REALLY keeps you safe on a day to day basis and not the laws. The law make it advantageous to internalize it and disadvantageous to fail to do so.
The real thing to worry about is the lunatic right wing historical and social revisionist histories that get people to believes like "This country was founded as a Christian nation" and "Barak Obama is a Islamic communist". As crazy as that shit sounds, it actually does have the potential to create individuals who DON'T share your values- at all. Get enough of those types running around and no law is going to keep you safe .
That's why what you say online matters. It's today's public town hall. A good argument influences people to think and see things differently. That process, of talking to each other and changing minds is the ultimate mechanism through which civilization and freedom and democracy are passed.
I saw there was is a book titled "writing drivers for BSD". I had the thought that I'll learn to do that, write my own driver, then switch.. it'll be fun.
Then I remembered I wasn't 17 any more and my previous 17 year old self had the same thoughts about things in the world and led me to the very very fully plate of stuff to do in my lifetime I am trying to execute on now. So I forgot about it and stuck with Windows.
The last thing I would do is go into debt for an education. Assuming that isn't going to happen, I would go for Biz Dev since you're getting out of being a programmer.
First off, you can do it because not every company marches lockstep with the prevailing age-discriminatory practices of Silicon Valley.
There are a ton of shops out there who aren't primarily IT but rely on it. I have a friend who just started programming - in basic and something else I'd never heard of (I think) - for a company that has an inventory system written in such. They need to keep it running the owner/ founder is in his mid-60s early 70s and - get this- doesn't buy into "that whole Windows-GUI thing. " We're talking green screen.
He took it not b/c it's his dream job but because it pays him 60k (he was trending towards destitution) and he can keep his family going on that until he moves on in 5 or so years.
The best thing about your new chosen career is this is DIY like nothing else. Be thinking about entrepreneurism from the start. If you can dream it, you can build it. Then you can sell it to people who find it useful. That last sentence is the missing link in the underwear gnomes puzzle, the one that comes just before "profit".
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park)
I just bought a piece of software (a tool) for 70 bucks yesterday. People give money for tools that help them. People who crack software and steal it are either not really your customers (they just want everything and never use it) or are, well thieves. In programming I would say if it's not free as in beer and not overpriced , people pay. I LIKE to pay; it's a respect / pride of ownership thing.
Regarding language, start with C because it's out there by the ton and people are not learning it anymore. Nevermind COBOL... unless you want that to be your niche, which is a possible career path I guess but there's little synergy between it and C C++ C# and Java which are all strongly similar to each other IMO.
Go for it all b/c once you know one language, you can learn others easily. Start with good old fashioned C, not even C++. There are great books out there that older people never had available to them.. Deitel and Dietel come to mind but there are others too. You can't go wrong in the learning department. Perhaps nothing is so well explained and accessible as programming languages in terms of pedagogical material at great prices..
I love the way you throw around the word productive a though it meant anything other than rich. I love the way Ayn Randers equate productive with "reaching the apex of a money-making hierarchy" as though that had a god fucking thing to do with being "productive".
What a fucking joke,. If being well positioned in society were in any way related to "being productive" then every woman in Africa would be a millionaire, a point that was made here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/07/one-per-cent-wealth-destroyers
If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.
The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves â" that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive â" are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible.
Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.
The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves.
He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years.
He found that the consistency of their performance was zero.
"The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill."
Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.
Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him.
"The illusion of skill ⦠is deeply ingrained in their culture."
The CEO f my company made 86 million a year I made 86k. That means his labor was 1000 times more productive than my own. Since I worked not less than 12 hours a day, it's hard to imagine how it could be true. Obviously such people could recreate the last 1000 years of human progress in just one year. Well, at least they think so.
The idea that some cokehead " Hey, I made a yearbook-on-the-internet" "genius" is somehow one of society's "most productive members" is such a joke that we just have to say that anyone who seriously entertains the idea is irremediably idiotic.
People are by nature aggressive, territorial and only somewhat cooperative. If you're not one of us, or you can't be of use to us, then you're marginalized or worse.
Everything else is due to culture and civilization.
I see your POV as a kind of Roussueian "noble savage" argument. The only problem with it is it's wrong, as we now know.
Men compete for women (keeping this hetero for simplicity's sake) and women like men who have power, stuff and territory. That's where aggression comes from . We are all descended from and bear the genes of people who won at a very savage and political game of "who's on top"?
So there is no "natural" state we have gotten away from that was better. We're all bad, and we need to hold our badness in check. That's what society does; that's it's function . We all give up some power and autonomy so we're not playing a perpetual Game of Thrones and society can progress past barbarism.
This guy is nothing special- he's just doing what a lot of people would do if given half the chance and that's the point. The Well Tempered Member of Society would elect not to do what he did. He's going Galt, which is to say reverting , giving into a primitive antisocial impulse. A new kind of superior moral being (Ayn Rand's idea) he's not.
Read a little sociobiology.. and a little David Brooks to temper it with. We're not blank slates. We're whatever evolution shit out it's ass after 200 million years of making "passing on your genes" the only mandate. It's not entirely pretty .
My own POV is we need to start thinking about tweaking genes to take the edge off people- less bellicose and selfish, more pro-social and cooperative. The level f selfishness people came with from the factory is far in excess of what is needed or even safe, given that we now live ina world evolution never saw coming, one filled with nuclear bombs, bio-terrorism nanotechnolgy and the ability to trash our environment through sheer ignorance and denialism.
We've turned technology on every part of our world to make it better except ourselves. That's what the Next Big Thing is for humans. That's the Age of Man we can either enter into or go extinct before we reached.
Are we really so naive here that we think evil people don't understand they have to be seen doing good in order to get away with being evil?
Read Merchants of Doubt and see if you agree with me that the Koch Brothers are the single greatest threat to national security today and that National Medal Of Science honoree Frederick Seitz is the single greatest civilian mass murder in human history.
Die die die die die die die die.
Do it NOW and shut the fuck up about it. Just die.
Maybe you need to fucking learn what the word "earn" fucking means.
What part of the government paid for R and D in basic science did you EARN ? What part of the infrastructure whose TIT you suck every goddamn day of your miserable useless life did YOU earn?
Fucking none of it.
So STFU about what you EARNED or this coke snorting degenerate thinks he EARNED because if you were going to EARN it, you'd have to start with studying science then recreating everything society has created and given to you as your fucking silverspoon birthright biotch.
You earned jack. You took an inconceivable amount of goods and know-how that generations have paid for in taxes in time in labor in suffering and in blood and thought of it as "yours" just like this puss filled filth sack did. Then you bitch slap everyone who came before and preen and prance around like you invented it all, paid for it all, created it all and "you don't owe no-nobody nuthin!"
Ayn Rand was an amphetamine addict. The process of being an addict of pharmaceutical stimulants systematically degrades you brain in a known and characteristic way- it turns you into a megalomaniac void of higher order emotional cognition. Thus the character of John Galt. Thus this fucking shit bag who, if the FB movie is to be believed, basically coke-snorted away whatever fucking ganglia it was that was passing for his brain back in the day.
One of the totally legitimate functions of society is to limit - through whatever means are effective- the harm and damage the mentally deranged anti-social psychopaths can inflict on society. I hope this guy dies in the most degrading abasing manner imaginable, preferably at the hands of one of society's most disadvantaged and deprived members, perhaps his drug dealer or one of the whores he has to pay to fuck him
Yeah, society and the taxes that run it are a form of looting. I don't think he minded the looting that paid for the infrastructure he depended on every fucking day, and the teachers who educated the people he relied on to get work done, and the military that made sure he wasn't too busy doing the ole Sig Heil to bother with anything else and courts that and system of laws and enforcement of those laws that provided him with the legal framework he needed to make his money or the EPA who made sure he wasn't dead from dioxin exposure or all the other myriad of governmental services ..."looters" ... who made civilization possible and carry it forward on civil servant wages and the promise of a government pension at the end of a lifetime of service.
This guy is a poster boy for the problems when people become so much more wealthy than the average person. They become selfish, uncompassionate and basically sociopathic.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/10/rich-people-compassion-mean-money_n_1416091.html
Permitting these monsters to also hold influence proportionate to their wealth is where most of America's political and social problems come from. I don't give a fuck how tired you are of anything to do with anything "1%", what we have in America is an oligarchyy-kleptocracy being run into the ground economically, environmentally and morally by the scum who could give a shit about anyone or anything so long as he's got access to an all you can eat buffet of his favorite vices.
The super-wealthy twist and distort the system so it works only for them and at everyone else's expense. That's a fact and anyone denying it is just living in a fantasy world in which they're in line to be the next billionaire.
"I got mine, now watch me fuck you all. I don't need you,. and you can't touch me."
That's about the most dangerous thinking process a member of society can develop.
And yes, I do understand that programming and technology are areas that attract a higher than average number of such types. Let the mod down begin.
Fuck you. Read history.
Facebook may be a gigantic spy machine that induces the hapless and naive to surrender bit by bit most intimate details which are then assembled into a dossier to be used to suppress their own political, employment and economic opportunities so the rich can stay rich and keep the poor poor, but it's not going to save the rich from what comes when the system collapses in ecological and economic devastation . They'll share the same fate that all the past and present kings who thought of themselves as "untouchable"- and had better reason to consider themselves so- shared .
How soon until we read about some vet-who-can't-get-treated-by-a-tax-starved-VA taking a six dollar .50 BMG from two klicks away and exploding this fucking narcissistic panty-boy-billionaire's head like a two dollar melon?
Not soon enough. Ayn Rand's Galt character was just the (cardboard character, cartoonish) embodiment of the desire to have no obligations placed upon by society whatsoever, while of course being permitted
Thanks for the info! Generally these are not widely deployed, even in Japan AFAIK...is there a reason I wonder?
Conservatives are evil. Don't be one.
http://hardincountyconservatives.blogspot.com/2012/05/greg-abbott-wins-appeal-tx-ban-on.html
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110614035520AApWGtA
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-13/news/31054067_1_professors-obscenity-first-bill
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/the-rachel-maddow-show/43388331#43388331
http://www.mediaite.com/online/michelle-bachmann-signs-social-conservative-pro-marriage-pledge-that-also-bans-porn/
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/rick-santorum-wants-ban-hardcore-pornography-222833811.html
http://www.newsinenglish.no/2012/05/07/conservatives-back-ban-on-begging/
http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2010/11/wyomings_self-described_conser.html
http://stfuconservatives.net/post/19427221927
This is like saying that a human never needs to operate the car, no matter what. Absent that strong interpretation of "driverless cars" , the the human still has to "watch out" and "take over" if things get hairy. That is not a "driverless car" anymore than cars are now "no panic breaking" cars. If something happens, you have to stomp on the brake. You'll only know if something is happening if you're watching. If yo're watching and making decisions, then you're driving.
But imagine such a thing as driverless cars existed. What would that look like? It would be something like the rail system- there's "something " in place to keep you in your lane, to avoid contact with stuff that jumps out at you, like humans and bikes and crap in the road.
Do we have driverless trains?
Perhaps it's something like planes- they're basically driverless. Nevertheless we still require trained pilots.
So given that in no other form of transportation do we have driverless anything, and those forms of transportation are LESS risky and obstacle challenged than driving BY FAR, and also MORE price sensitive and therefore motivated to instantiate such a system, how realistic is this?
OK just pretend then. Suspend disbelief. And there's the problem. Suspending disbelief by that amount requires that we talk about a thing whose specifics are unknowable.
Suffice it to say that programs malfunction and "crash" .
Software is already fully protected by copyright. That's enough IP to motivate people to write software and to prevent people from ripping off your code..
There is no "problem" except the will on the part of a certain court- the Court Of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), IP lawyers, corporations and IP maximalists to subvert the patent system to their personal benefit .
It's really nothing more than an agreed-upon defiance of the meaning of very clear law, society's best interests and the express wishes of the vast vast vast majority of software engineers who are allegedly the "beneficiaries" of the system.
Software patents are bad law. IP lawyers are perfectly well aware of this fact which is why they expressly exclude legal arguments and algorithms for tax avoidance from being patentable- they're not going to have done to them what they've done to us.
Either the law will change of the inevitable consequences of the law will collapse the entire system of software creation in the US and anywhere else software patents are permitted, and by collapse I mean monopolist prices accompanied by a lack of innovation, along with a defection of creative types from the field.
If you want to get activist about things, then refuse to sell software in the US. Set up a company in France or the EU and sell only into non-software patent jurisdictions.
If enough of us do that, it will be game over for the lawyers since it will then be completely indisputable that software patents are in fact retarding innovation and driving creators OUT of the US- something the US could not bear the thought of since it's so contrary to our idea of our country.
The bubble in the housing market happened because the government didn't regulate the housing loan market, but ended up on the hook for the defaults anyway. If they had regulated the fly by night lenders and forced banks to adhere to their own standards instead of letting those banks play "pass the trash" , none of the liar loans and NINJA loans would have happened.
If the government could regulate prices of healthcare services the way Japan's government does , then we wouldn't have the industry making up the prices they like and passing the bill to the government.
If the government could have told the universities to go fuck themselves when they started implementing double digit inflationary tuition prices back in the 80s, then we wouldn't have the astronomical, unpaybackable student loans that are presently going to go into massive default.
If the government has to pay, then the government has to be able to control costs. That's the solution the rest of the developed world has come to in healthcare, in education and in housing .
But here if you try to regulate these industries, the tea party crowd has a fucking aneurysm and starts screaming about "socialism".
The opposite anti-socialsm - seems to not be working out so well for anyone except the Angelo Mozilos of the world.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/long-after-fall-countrywides-mozilo-defended-his-legacy/
Oh I know -
http://cutekittenvideos.com/
Fuck it then.
It's the Pol Pot theory of political reconstruction-
1) kill everyone (especially the academics) and destroy society as we know it.
2) Make sure you and your buds are the only ones left alive.
3) Start society over, your way this time.
4) Profit
Good luck saying "I was eavesdropped on" or "my software / idea / business model / proprietary information was stolen" or anything like that.
Civilization- it has it's benefits.