Every corporation has a responsibility to protect its employees. This is all about mitigating risk and lowering their liability. Removing the video had nothing to do with limiting the speech of Nick Gisburne.
You were doing fine until the last sentence, but that is just plain stupid. Of course it had to do with limiting Nick Gisburne's speech. Even if we stipulate your point about the company's responsibility to protect its employees, that means that the Islamists' violent intimidation worked--not implicitly or indirectly, but explicitly because the YouTube's reaction was directly based on the threat of violence.
Are people really not going to get it until Christians, Hindus and so on start murdering their critics and demanding that other critics not be allowed to speak publicly? Or will the rest of us be like Martin Niemoeller, without anyone left to speak up when it's our turn?
A better comparison than yours would be this:
Imagine I stand in front of your store and read a book by the light that is coming out of your shopping window. You tell me to go away, because I am using your light. I return the next day and again read in the light that is coming out of your shop. You call the cops and have me thrown in jail.
In fact that's a very poor comparison. The light that comes out the window is already "wasted", and it costs the store nothing extra for you to use it. The right comparison is plugging into an electrical outlet, in which case you are drawing power that they will have to pay for. You don't have a right to steal that power just because you're physically able to access it, anymore than you have the right to steal a bicycle because it's left out on the lawn.
In the case of the WAP, you're connecting to it is not cost-free in any sense whatever. The device can handle a finite number of connections, and you're using one up. The store has purchased a finite amount of bandwidth, and you're using up what is probably a significant percentage. They've bought both of these things with the intent of attracting paying customers to come in regularly. You're specifically circumventing that goal, and they have every right to insist that you stop. If you don't, you are (or should be) guilty of a crime.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you may not be a native English speaker, and therefore didn't see the adjective in front of the word 'descendents'. In which case my post would have made no sense and should have led you to take another stab at understanding it. But hey, why go to all that effort when it's so much easier to dismiss it with a flip accusation of "rascism".
I'm sure Niemoller would love to read your post, though you might have to explain to him that the people that "they" came for are modern-day fascists and ideological descendents of the Nazis who came for Niemoller, and that "they" are the Americans, Brits etc. who ultimately rescued the survivors of the Holocaust.
Practice in front of the mirror a couple times -if you can still face yourself, I'm sure you'd do fine.
For anyone who's worked for the government or on-site as a federal contractor, you know that there's, shall we say, a certain political bent much in evidence among ordinary government workers. According to the article, the committees that are being revamped are advisory committees reporting to HHS, which is a huge federal agency. In particular, notice how the very first claim made by the HHS employee interviewed in the article is that they haven't seen anything like this since...Reagan. I'll guarantee you they have. The large agency I work with has undergone several such shuffles in the past 12 months and only slightly less in the preceding year. Putting some right-leaning public figures or even industry insiders on those committees will more likely add balance to the final product, not take it away.
...the users will save things to their local hard drive anyway because "the network is too slow" etc. And then not only will you still not be backing up their day-to-day work files, you'll also have at least two copies of everything -the "official" copy on the workgroup server and the "unofficial" (aka "real") copy on the user's HD. And you'll be lucky if there's only one "real" copy instead of one on each of the five PCs belonging to users who are working on that document.
When I worked in a medium-sized office we had a fairly simple plan: backup-exec every PC's My Documents to a tape drive in the server room overnight. We explained -as often as necessary- to each user that their files would be backed up every night but only if it was in My Documents (and their computer was left turned on). Most of them got it right away and the rest learned fast after their first experience of losing a file because the HD crashed (or whatever) and it wasn't in the backed-up directory:-)
Seriously, getting users to do something efficient like store and work on documents out of a central repository is a separate issue. Backups are about disaster recovery, and the way to do it is to accomodate your solution to the way people work right now, not the way they really should work but won't because it's too much bother and their computers don't crash often enough to keep it in their minds everyday.
...when it makes its main point, which is not so much that our physical plant is vulnerable as that (nonsensically, IMHO) the internet, cable news etc. makes our entire society into one superconsciousness that instantly spreads fear and doubt throughout the nation in the event of a terrorist attack. I'd remind them that the first thing the internet spread on 9-11 was the news that airplanes were being crashed into buildings, which then caused the passengers on one airplane to fight it into the ground rather than become pawns for raghead assholes.
Beware of doomsayers, esp. in the foreign policy/diplomacy community as these are the same people who managed to miss the fact that 60% (according to polls) of the "arab street" approves of terrorism including 9-11, and hopes there will be more of it. They don't know their head from a hole in the ground...
One simple reason why it won't work:
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1, Interesting
common-currency zones must have two things: free movement of capital and free movement of labor. When the factories in Detroit lay people off they can move to Dallas, LA, etc. But when people are layed off in Paris they won't be able to chase jobs to Berlin. It's not a problem if both countries have their own currency that they can devalue to discount their products, but with a common currency the country with high unemployment will be stuck, much like Argentina's problem when they pegged their currency to the US dollar and therefore priced themselves out of competition with other south american nations.
Unless people can freely move to where the jobs are, all Euro-using countries will start to look like Argentina in 10 years.
Actually, it's fairly simple (in theory). The idea is that countries will a.) eliminate or at least equalize all tariffs, so that only the "natural" (climate, cost and availability of materials, etc.)differences in production cost will differentiate a widget made in Detroit from one made in Morocco; and b.) eliminate or equalize immigration law so that people (labor) can move freely to where their services are in demand.
The end result should be a kind of global United States, NOT that the US will take over the world (down anarchist-boy, down) but that -like in the US- the laws governing labor, industry and consumption will be substantially the same everywhere you go, even while the local culture may vary widely (ex: Appalachia v. Manhattan). In the globalized world of the future, moving from the eastern seaboard to Kandahar will be more like moving from upstate NY to Piedmont NC than well, moving from the US to Afghanistan.
Not to mention which, ELF must be cooler than I thought if it can send signals from Michigan and Wisconsin through 1500 miles of dirt and rock to the oceans for submarines to hear;-)
Re:Seniority vs. Ability
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
Both sides are right. 1.) Unions were largely responsible for the 5-day work week, 8-hour day, benefits, etc. and 2.) Unions are largely run by corrupt, sometimes mob-connected strongmen who rule by intimidation and take an extra tax from their members (you can't work at a union shop unless you join the union) without much of any accountability as to how they spend it or what issues they advocate for.
As someone else here said, unions work best for jobs where the worker can be quickly and easily replaced without any loss of quality. Most of the jobs represented by unions today don't fall into this category, but in the beginning, they did. The entire point of mass production as envisaged by Henry Ford and others was to boil the process down to a set of simple procedures that even a monkey could do correctly (there's a great charlie chaplin film about a factory worker who goes nuts from twisting the same wrench half a turn all day).
Turn-of-the-century factory workers were horribly exploited, and unions were instrumental in turning that around. The result was a big expansion of the middle class. However, this just doesn't apply to knowledge workers. You can't replace a good network admin the next day, or even the next month. Good programmers are even harder to find, and the life of a business literally depends on the efficiency of its network and software. There will never be huge legions of these workers, because human intelligence remains constant over time. As jobs get more and more complicated, fewer people can do them. This is the real dividing line between white and blue collar. Pride-in-your-work aside, anybody can do a blue collar job with a high-quality result, but most white-collar jobs require some skill and innate talent to do well. Even the secretarial types (anyone who's had or worked with an administrative assistant can tell you that's not a monkey's job). High turnover in these jobs is extremely disruptive for a business, and union-or-no, there will never be over-the-top exploitation of these fields.
Modern union organizers should concentrate on the lower classes, not people who are already in the middle class. Of course, burger-flippers don't have much money to pay in dues...
In other words, in case the ASP goes under (but nooo, that NEVER happens!), you get their source code which you then have to be able to compile (if necessary, and it probably will be), host and run in order to keep using your existing data; alternatively, you have to run it long enough to convert your data to a format you can use with X application, whether another ASP or something local to your LAN. Now tell me again where the savings are? The security?
No sane person will ever agree as long as one of the tenets of people promoting these silly treaties is that it should be harsh on the US. We'll fight you first, we'll win and you'll be poorer and have a smaller megaphone. Get rid of the anti-American BS first, then talk to us about cutting pollution.
Re:In case you forgot your high school physics tea
on
How Solar Sails Work
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· Score: 1
Speaking of things you forgot in high school, how about algebra. 'F = ma' is the same as 'a = f/m'. Thank you, thank you. please hold your applause.
This has nothing to do with production schedules. The problem is that a pilot (and presumably other associated induhviduals) were faced with a machine containing a.) a cutting-edge (no pun intended), incredibly complex mechanical plant of a type never attempted before, and b.) a complex but _really_ not leading-edge computer program to help him control all that machinery. When a problem occurred, the pilot apparantly felt, against all logic, that the problem was more likely with the fairly simple computer than the brutally complicated mechanism it was connected to.
Apart from the highly debatable logic of rebooting the computer in mid-flight in a fly-by-wire aircraft, the question we should be asking is "why did this guy automatically assume the computer was at fault?" My theories: a.) Computers have that big a reputation for unreliability. b.) MS software has taught the world of users that ctrl-alt-del is the answer to everything. c.) (this is the worst) our society is so narrowly focused on computers and software that even a Marine, someone who lives his daily life as close to nature and physical reality as you can get and still be in the United States, chose in a moment of crisis to think that it must be the computer's fault.
I doubt it. The thing about chauvenism is that it requires that the oppressed have some easily identifiable characteristic to set them apart, so that the rednecks who go around hating them can pick them out of a crowd. A clone will look, talk, walk and act *exactly* like any other human being, will have grown up the same way, have its own unique thoughts and memories... basically, a clone will be simply a twin like any other twin, only not born at the same time. This isn't a sci-fi fantasy where people spring forth fully grown from test tubes with belly buttons on their necks, or are duplicated xerox-style by a Big Evil Machine under the watchful eye of a cackling mad scientist. You nor anyone else will be able to know a clone from Adam, and so they won't have any more trouble than anyone else. Put it this way: the minority group suffering the least oppression -even in countries much more oppressive than the US- is gays. Why? You can't tell by looking. You can only tell by observing their slightly different lifestyle. Clones won't even have the lifestyle to set them apart...
We had this discussion in my senior philosophy class. Pretty interesting really. The idea is you don't own your past or future self, but only your present self (Right now, today, this minute). Why? Because if you did own yourself, you could sell yourself into slavery and it would be perfectly ethical. And we can't have slavery be found to be ethical now, can we. I don't know if this level of abstraction would make it into a courtroom debate, but the point is that before you rush off to claim rights to your body, be aware that there are these practiced schools of thought out there in academia that will oppose you...
When's the last time that happened? The US government implemented a bunch of welfare-state programs 70 years ago supposedly to fight poverty, and not only have they failed, but in most cases they've been shown to actually increase poverty and dependency. But has the rest of the world seen how silly it is? hahahahaha, you're killing me! Here's the real question: which is worse, gps speed limiters, video surveillance on every street corner, dna databanks, or that nifty australian law that lets the cops hack into your computer, do whatever they want and then get away without ever having to tell you they were there? Keep on rockin' in the "free" world...
They've been up to this crap since just after the civil war, when Pinkerton agents ran southern farmers off their land (so the railroad could come through) like Nazis chasing Jews out of Poland. The James Gang rose up pretty much as a reaction to that (so who's the one creating serial killers?). Now these pigs are after you. I'm all for law enforcement but this is more like those automatic red-light-runner cameras. It's all about the money. Sabotage, sabotage, sabotage!!!
California's problem is that environmental regulations and other liberal BS prevented them from building *any* new power plants in the past 10 years, while they added 5+ million people to their population, and Silicon Valley to their major energy consumers. Oops. They've had to buy power from other states to meet their basic needs for years now, and when they deregulated under these circumstances, the demand v. native supply equation caused prices to soar and CA utilities to use up all their cash buying power during peak demand. Bigger Oops. Just keep this in mind the next time the Sierra Club comes around telling you how *industry* will cause the lights to go out...
I'd swap your stated roles for corporations and the government. Corporations care about making money, nothing else. Anything they do, just ask yourself how it helps them make money and you'll understand it fine. The government on the other hand is run by elected politicians who largely care about their image above all (thus passing new laws to respond to sensational crimes instead of the less sexy option of more enforcement of existing laws, etc.) and staffed by (mainly liberal atm) idealogues who take every chance they get to make policy through regulations without going through that pesky democratic process. Much harder to scope these people's motives. And compared to some other countries often cited as being "more free" (i.e. less capitalist):
*Australia passed a law last year allowing police to hack into a citizen's computer without a warrant or any other notification, take any data and then cover their tracks. They don't have to tell you before, during or after.
*London, England has surveillance cameras on a large percentage of all intersections and sidewalks in the city. Who watches the footage and what do they use it for? That's classified. England also has no binding constitution or bill of rights. The government respects the Magna Carta by tradition, but if they decided not to, hey. People have been put in jail for weapons violations after using hand tools to defend themselves against muggers. Etc.
*Canada and most west European countries charge ridiculous taxes to pay for a social safety net (mainly medical care) that, yes, does a good job on the basics, but people from these countries who can afford it often come to the US for advanced procedures which they either can't get (no private health insurance at home -if the govt doesn't think you need it, sorry) or would have to wait months-years for at home.
*It's no accident that the economic boom that's made us so much richer happened here instead of "there". "There" (wherever it is) has such a steep regulatory ladder for companies to climb that startups can't get started, small business can't afford to buy equipment and big business can't hire and fire as it needs to in order to adapt to a new economy.
For my money (I choose that phrase for a reason) I'll take the good ol' US of A, big ugly warts and all.
Communist USSR: no unemployment, no homelessness. Everybody provided for (albeit not grandly).
Wow, I've not seen so much human misery swept aside in so few words since Lenin said "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette". That "everyone provided for" (should you choose to believe it at all) came, let's try not to forget, at the expense of over 100 million murders. In the gulags, in secret police barracks, in the middle of the night, keeping the communist system going in the face of the natural human desire to get ahead required constant state terror against the population of poor schmucks just trying to make a living. And don't give me that BS about how 'real communism was never tried' etc. -The communist governments chose to be like that, thousands of people subjugated by them chose to risk death (and more often than not lose the bet) to escape it, and every single one of the communist countries around the world were like that. I'll take credit card debt and annoying monopolies over the Stasi, KGB, Red Guards etc. any day.
And while we're on the subject, isn't the real problem with cable/phone companies the fact that they own and can control access to the actual lines? The government builds roads and this fits into capitalism just fine because it's a public good -something excessively expensive for the private market to provide but absolutely necessary for people to live and work. The telephone monopolies were created originally by a deal between the government and corporations that said if the corporations promised to wire every office building, farm house and outhouse in America (they did), they'd get a monopoly in return, and it would undoubtedly be done more cheaply and efficiently that way than if the government did the build-out itself. Why and how did cable companies get the same deal? Because the infrastructure is the same kind of thing -too expensive for private companies to build on speculation, and the government doesn't want to be in that business. So why not let the government build the wire network and companies compete on a level field to provide service over it? That way they could even compete to provide repair/tech support, with only a small standards-enforcing bureaucracy to make sure they weren't breaking it in the process. This is what we're moving towards in electric utilities, so why not cable and phone? Make sense to anyone else?
Slashdot Mirror
...was disappointed
Every corporation has a responsibility to protect its employees. This is all about mitigating risk and lowering their liability. Removing the video had nothing to do with limiting the speech of Nick Gisburne.
You were doing fine until the last sentence, but that is just plain stupid. Of course it had to do with limiting Nick Gisburne's speech. Even if we stipulate your point about the company's responsibility to protect its employees, that means that the Islamists' violent intimidation worked--not implicitly or indirectly, but explicitly because the YouTube's reaction was directly based on the threat of violence.
Are people really not going to get it until Christians, Hindus and so on start murdering their critics and demanding that other critics not be allowed to speak publicly? Or will the rest of us be like Martin Niemoeller, without anyone left to speak up when it's our turn?
In fact that's a very poor comparison. The light that comes out the window is already "wasted", and it costs the store nothing extra for you to use it. The right comparison is plugging into an electrical outlet, in which case you are drawing power that they will have to pay for. You don't have a right to steal that power just because you're physically able to access it, anymore than you have the right to steal a bicycle because it's left out on the lawn.
In the case of the WAP, you're connecting to it is not cost-free in any sense whatever. The device can handle a finite number of connections, and you're using one up. The store has purchased a finite amount of bandwidth, and you're using up what is probably a significant percentage. They've bought both of these things with the intent of attracting paying customers to come in regularly. You're specifically circumventing that goal, and they have every right to insist that you stop. If you don't, you are (or should be) guilty of a crime.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you may not be a native English speaker, and therefore didn't see the adjective in front of the word 'descendents'. In which case my post would have made no sense and should have led you to take another stab at understanding it. But hey, why go to all that effort when it's so much easier to dismiss it with a flip accusation of "rascism".
I'm sure Niemoller would love to read your post, though you might have to explain to him that the people that "they" came for are modern-day fascists and ideological descendents of the Nazis who came for Niemoller, and that "they" are the Americans, Brits etc. who ultimately rescued the survivors of the Holocaust.
Practice in front of the mirror a couple times -if you can still face yourself, I'm sure you'd do fine.
really? forks are related to the direction of a project??
For anyone who's worked for the government or on-site as a federal contractor, you know that there's, shall we say, a certain political bent much in evidence among ordinary government workers. According to the article, the committees that are being revamped are advisory committees reporting to HHS, which is a huge federal agency. In particular, notice how the very first claim made by the HHS employee interviewed in the article is that they haven't seen anything like this since ...Reagan. I'll guarantee you they have. The large agency I work with has undergone several such shuffles in the past 12 months and only slightly less in the preceding year. Putting some right-leaning public figures or even industry insiders on those committees will more likely add balance to the final product, not take it away.
...the users will save things to their local hard drive anyway because "the network is too slow" etc. And then not only will you still not be backing up their day-to-day work files, you'll also have at least two copies of everything -the "official" copy on the workgroup server and the "unofficial" (aka "real") copy on the user's HD. And you'll be lucky if there's only one "real" copy instead of one on each of the five PCs belonging to users who are working on that document.
:-)
When I worked in a medium-sized office we had a fairly simple plan: backup-exec every PC's My Documents to a tape drive in the server room overnight. We explained -as often as necessary- to each user that their files would be backed up every night but only if it was in My Documents (and their computer was left turned on). Most of them got it right away and the rest learned fast after their first experience of losing a file because the HD crashed (or whatever) and it wasn't in the backed-up directory
Seriously, getting users to do something efficient like store and work on documents out of a central repository is a separate issue. Backups are about disaster recovery, and the way to do it is to accomodate your solution to the way people work right now, not the way they really should work but won't because it's too much bother and their computers don't crash often enough to keep it in their minds everyday.
...when it makes its main point, which is not so much that our physical plant is vulnerable as that (nonsensically, IMHO) the internet, cable news etc. makes our entire society into one superconsciousness that instantly spreads fear and doubt throughout the nation in the event of a terrorist attack. I'd remind them that the first thing the internet spread on 9-11 was the news that airplanes were being crashed into buildings, which then caused the passengers on one airplane to fight it into the ground rather than become pawns for raghead assholes.
Beware of doomsayers, esp. in the foreign policy/diplomacy community as these are the same people who managed to miss the fact that 60% (according to polls) of the "arab street" approves of terrorism including 9-11, and hopes there will be more of it. They don't know their head from a hole in the ground...
common-currency zones must have two things: free movement of capital and free movement of labor. When the factories in Detroit lay people off they can move to Dallas, LA, etc. But when people are layed off in Paris they won't be able to chase jobs to Berlin. It's not a problem if both countries have their own currency that they can devalue to discount their products, but with a common currency the country with high unemployment will be stuck, much like Argentina's problem when they pegged their currency to the US dollar and therefore priced themselves out of competition with other south american nations.
Unless people can freely move to where the jobs are, all Euro-using countries will start to look like Argentina in 10 years.
Actually, it's fairly simple (in theory). The idea is that countries will a.) eliminate or at least equalize all tariffs, so that only the "natural" (climate, cost and availability of materials, etc.)differences in production cost will differentiate a widget made in Detroit from one made in Morocco; and b.) eliminate or equalize immigration law so that people (labor) can move freely to where their services are in demand.
The end result should be a kind of global United States, NOT that the US will take over the world (down anarchist-boy, down) but that -like in the US- the laws governing labor, industry and consumption will be substantially the same everywhere you go, even while the local culture may vary widely (ex: Appalachia v. Manhattan). In the globalized world of the future, moving from the eastern seaboard to Kandahar will be more like moving from upstate NY to Piedmont NC than well, moving from the US to Afghanistan.
Not to mention which, ELF must be cooler than I thought if it can send signals from Michigan and Wisconsin through 1500 miles of dirt and rock to the oceans for submarines to hear ;-)
Both sides are right. 1.) Unions were largely responsible for the 5-day work week, 8-hour day, benefits, etc. and 2.) Unions are largely run by corrupt, sometimes mob-connected strongmen who rule by intimidation and take an extra tax from their members (you can't work at a union shop unless you join the union) without much of any accountability as to how they spend it or what issues they advocate for.
As someone else here said, unions work best for jobs where the worker can be quickly and easily replaced without any loss of quality. Most of the jobs represented by unions today don't fall into this category, but in the beginning, they did. The entire point of mass production as envisaged by Henry Ford and others was to boil the process down to a set of simple procedures that even a monkey could do correctly (there's a great charlie chaplin film about a factory worker who goes nuts from twisting the same wrench half a turn all day).
Turn-of-the-century factory workers were horribly exploited, and unions were instrumental in turning that around. The result was a big expansion of the middle class. However, this just doesn't apply to knowledge workers. You can't replace a good network admin the next day, or even the next month. Good programmers are even harder to find, and the life of a business literally depends on the efficiency of its network and software. There will never be huge legions of these workers, because human intelligence remains constant over time. As jobs get more and more complicated, fewer people can do them. This is the real dividing line between white and blue collar. Pride-in-your-work aside, anybody can do a blue collar job with a high-quality result, but most white-collar jobs require some skill and innate talent to do well. Even the secretarial types (anyone who's had or worked with an administrative assistant can tell you that's not a monkey's job). High turnover in these jobs is extremely disruptive for a business, and union-or-no, there will never be over-the-top exploitation of these fields.
Modern union organizers should concentrate on the lower classes, not people who are already in the middle class. Of course, burger-flippers don't have much money to pay in dues...
In other words, in case the ASP goes under (but nooo, that NEVER happens!), you get their source code which you then have to be able to compile (if necessary, and it probably will be), host and run in order to keep using your existing data; alternatively, you have to run it long enough to convert your data to a format you can use with X application, whether another ASP or something local to your LAN. Now tell me again where the savings are? The security?
No sane person will ever agree as long as one of the tenets of people promoting these silly treaties is that it should be harsh on the US. We'll fight you first, we'll win and you'll be poorer and have a smaller megaphone. Get rid of the anti-American BS first, then talk to us about cutting pollution.
Speaking of things you forgot in high school, how about algebra. 'F = ma' is the same as 'a = f/m'. Thank you, thank you. please hold your applause.
This has nothing to do with production schedules. The problem is that a pilot (and presumably other associated induhviduals) were faced with a machine containing a.) a cutting-edge (no pun intended), incredibly complex mechanical plant of a type never attempted before, and b.) a complex but _really_ not leading-edge computer program to help him control all that machinery. When a problem occurred, the pilot apparantly felt, against all logic, that the problem was more likely with the fairly simple computer than the brutally complicated mechanism it was connected to.
Apart from the highly debatable logic of rebooting the computer in mid-flight in a fly-by-wire aircraft, the question we should be asking is "why did this guy automatically assume the computer was at fault?" My theories: a.) Computers have that big a reputation for unreliability. b.) MS software has taught the world of users that ctrl-alt-del is the answer to everything. c.) (this is the worst) our society is so narrowly focused on computers and software that even a Marine, someone who lives his daily life as close to nature and physical reality as you can get and still be in the United States, chose in a moment of crisis to think that it must be the computer's fault.
I doubt it. The thing about chauvenism is that it requires that the oppressed have some easily identifiable characteristic to set them apart, so that the rednecks who go around hating them can pick them out of a crowd. A clone will look, talk, walk and act *exactly* like any other human being, will have grown up the same way, have its own unique thoughts and memories... basically, a clone will be simply a twin like any other twin, only not born at the same time. This isn't a sci-fi fantasy where people spring forth fully grown from test tubes with belly buttons on their necks, or are duplicated xerox-style by a Big Evil Machine under the watchful eye of a cackling mad scientist. You nor anyone else will be able to know a clone from Adam, and so they won't have any more trouble than anyone else. Put it this way: the minority group suffering the least oppression -even in countries much more oppressive than the US- is gays. Why? You can't tell by looking. You can only tell by observing their slightly different lifestyle. Clones won't even have the lifestyle to set them apart...
We had this discussion in my senior philosophy class. Pretty interesting really. The idea is you don't own your past or future self, but only your present self (Right now, today, this minute). Why? Because if you did own yourself, you could sell yourself into slavery and it would be perfectly ethical. And we can't have slavery be found to be ethical now, can we. I don't know if this level of abstraction would make it into a courtroom debate, but the point is that before you rush off to claim rights to your body, be aware that there are these practiced schools of thought out there in academia that will oppose you...
attaches itself to existing system, prevents it from interacting with noninfected systems...
When's the last time that happened? The US government implemented a bunch of welfare-state programs 70 years ago supposedly to fight poverty, and not only have they failed, but in most cases they've been shown to actually increase poverty and dependency. But has the rest of the world seen how silly it is? hahahahaha, you're killing me! Here's the real question: which is worse, gps speed limiters, video surveillance on every street corner, dna databanks, or that nifty australian law that lets the cops hack into your computer, do whatever they want and then get away without ever having to tell you they were there? Keep on rockin' in the "free" world...
They've been up to this crap since just after the civil war, when Pinkerton agents ran southern farmers off their land (so the railroad could come through) like Nazis chasing Jews out of Poland. The James Gang rose up pretty much as a reaction to that (so who's the one creating serial killers?). Now these pigs are after you. I'm all for law enforcement but this is more like those automatic red-light-runner cameras. It's all about the money. Sabotage, sabotage, sabotage!!!
California's problem is that environmental regulations and other liberal BS prevented them from building *any* new power plants in the past 10 years, while they added 5+ million people to their population, and Silicon Valley to their major energy consumers. Oops. They've had to buy power from other states to meet their basic needs for years now, and when they deregulated under these circumstances, the demand v. native supply equation caused prices to soar and CA utilities to use up all their cash buying power during peak demand. Bigger Oops. Just keep this in mind the next time the Sierra Club comes around telling you how *industry* will cause the lights to go out...
I'd swap your stated roles for corporations and the government. Corporations care about making money, nothing else. Anything they do, just ask yourself how it helps them make money and you'll understand it fine. The government on the other hand is run by elected politicians who largely care about their image above all (thus passing new laws to respond to sensational crimes instead of the less sexy option of more enforcement of existing laws, etc.) and staffed by (mainly liberal atm) idealogues who take every chance they get to make policy through regulations without going through that pesky democratic process. Much harder to scope these people's motives. And compared to some other countries often cited as being "more free" (i.e. less capitalist): *Australia passed a law last year allowing police to hack into a citizen's computer without a warrant or any other notification, take any data and then cover their tracks. They don't have to tell you before, during or after. *London, England has surveillance cameras on a large percentage of all intersections and sidewalks in the city. Who watches the footage and what do they use it for? That's classified. England also has no binding constitution or bill of rights. The government respects the Magna Carta by tradition, but if they decided not to, hey. People have been put in jail for weapons violations after using hand tools to defend themselves against muggers. Etc. *Canada and most west European countries charge ridiculous taxes to pay for a social safety net (mainly medical care) that, yes, does a good job on the basics, but people from these countries who can afford it often come to the US for advanced procedures which they either can't get (no private health insurance at home -if the govt doesn't think you need it, sorry) or would have to wait months-years for at home. *It's no accident that the economic boom that's made us so much richer happened here instead of "there". "There" (wherever it is) has such a steep regulatory ladder for companies to climb that startups can't get started, small business can't afford to buy equipment and big business can't hire and fire as it needs to in order to adapt to a new economy. For my money (I choose that phrase for a reason) I'll take the good ol' US of A, big ugly warts and all.
Communist USSR: no unemployment, no homelessness. Everybody provided for (albeit not grandly).
Wow, I've not seen so much human misery swept aside in so few words since Lenin said "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette". That "everyone provided for" (should you choose to believe it at all) came, let's try not to forget, at the expense of over 100 million murders. In the gulags, in secret police barracks, in the middle of the night, keeping the communist system going in the face of the natural human desire to get ahead required constant state terror against the population of poor schmucks just trying to make a living. And don't give me that BS about how 'real communism was never tried' etc. -The communist governments chose to be like that, thousands of people subjugated by them chose to risk death (and more often than not lose the bet) to escape it, and every single one of the communist countries around the world were like that. I'll take credit card debt and annoying monopolies over the Stasi, KGB, Red Guards etc. any day.
And while we're on the subject, isn't the real problem with cable/phone companies the fact that they own and can control access to the actual lines? The government builds roads and this fits into capitalism just fine because it's a public good -something excessively expensive for the private market to provide but absolutely necessary for people to live and work. The telephone monopolies were created originally by a deal between the government and corporations that said if the corporations promised to wire every office building, farm house and outhouse in America (they did), they'd get a monopoly in return, and it would undoubtedly be done more cheaply and efficiently that way than if the government did the build-out itself. Why and how did cable companies get the same deal? Because the infrastructure is the same kind of thing -too expensive for private companies to build on speculation, and the government doesn't want to be in that business. So why not let the government build the wire network and companies compete on a level field to provide service over it? That way they could even compete to provide repair/tech support, with only a small standards-enforcing bureaucracy to make sure they weren't breaking it in the process. This is what we're moving towards in electric utilities, so why not cable and phone? Make sense to anyone else?