Maybe they could become the party of fiscal responsibility and small government again
I would certainly hope so. I mean, seriously, I see all these ads about how Democrats are in favor of big government and I can't imagine anyone expanding federal power more than Bush has.
Even FDR did not socialize banking the way Bush has. I think conservatives who foolishly support Bush's domestic surveillance will come around when they realize that Obama will have those same tools as well.
McCain has no shot. A great many Republicans, including myself do not like his random and inconsistent posturing, are offended by his attack ads, and honestly think he has the sort of speechmaking ability that can sell the USA to itself and to the world.
I think the Republican Party needs to lay low for a few years, be an opposition party, and come up with a new plan and a new message. We've played all the old cards and its time to come up with the something new.
Re:Well, we ought to get proof of the sunspot theo
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I fail to see how that money is "blown". Energy efficiency *saves* money, while lowering CO2 emissions in the process
Both US candidates are looking at a carbon reduction deal, and for this reason I'd rather have Obama win so that Republicans won't get stuck with the fallout from this stupid self imposed disaster. When you talk about a 90% reduction in CO2 you are not talking about efficiency, you are talking about impoverishment. So, let's get that on the table right now. You are creating a great depression to save the planet. When people have less, that's called poverty.
fact that over said 50 years, the solar cycle has been uncorrelated with global temperature trends
Correlation doesn't mean anything. To me, the recent wall street meltdown is a repudiation of the use of computer models for forecasting. If the richest banks in the world cannot approximate differential equations to protect their investment then no one can and its back to square one.
Re:Well, we ought to get proof of the sunspot theo
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Another Maunder Minimum elimination of sunspot activity might cool the climate by about -0.2C.
So.. if it gets colder then, by 1C, then, what do you say? You do understand that the wall street crisis was precipitated ultimately by a misplaced faith in computer models. You trot this stuff out as a fact and you have absolutely no control.
The measure of a nation is not in how it treats the powerful and the wealthy, but the poor and unfortunate. And by that measure we have failed.
If you care so much about these people, why don't you go buy them a house or something? Or, let one of them move in with you? This country isn't some abstract thing, its you and its me and if you want to demand that everyone kick in a dime for these poor, as you say, then what's the measure of YOU, who has not done so?
And for the record, we cannot judge if Reagnomics worked because Reagonomics is:
The point of Reagonomics was to increase the amount of goods that people have and can choose to have. The idea was to stimulate production by encouraging investment. To some extent, Reaganomics is the Karl Marx critique of capitalism applied full tilt - overproduction, based on the observation that, if you produce a ton of stuff, competition emerges and prices fall.
Investors can get really rich, but a lot take a beating, thus wealth tends to concentrate. But remember, the name of the game is to get the rich to overproduce. They do, because, they are greedy and want more, and so they invest, and boom. We get the jobs and the benefit of overproduction.
So yeah, in Reaganomics, you get concentrations of wealth but you also get rich people losing everything. You get a very dynamic society where if you get lucky you can get rich very quick or get poor very quick, and, everyone gets tons of stuff.
To map this out to specific policies, these things are the things Reagan does....
--lower the cost of capital first off, allow private capital formation.. then, lower tax rates, lower capital gains in particular, lower interest rates.
--allow it to move freely adopt free trade.
For the most part, we've been on that plan since 1980s.
This has completely worked, and I think its a good deal. We've had a lot of gyrations, dislocations, but as a whole, the world is much, much, richer than it was 40 years ago. Just take a look at what's going in China and India and Eastern Europe...or even Europe once they lowered the corp income tax. In the USA people have way more food and way more stuff than they have ever had before. The world is just richer, and despite a hugely expanded population, everyone has more stuff. That's a huge success.
I think its worth it overall, but a lot of people in this election are fed up with constant social tension all the continuous upheavals cause. , and thus they are willing to sacrifice wealth and opportunity for some sort of stability. And, part of that too is because of an aging society and a more womanly male population. There's just less men willing to take risks and most young guys think like women these days.
Liberal economics : Maxwell House and Folgers Conservative economics : Starbucks and 2000 different kinds of coffee you can buy in stores.
Have you actually -read- Krugman?
Krugman's a liberal but staunch free trader. He's into the free flow of goods and capital and in a way that would be even more deregulated than is today. All he is saying is that he wants to have this huge safety net so that he can open trade completely. In Krugman's world, the GM's go out of business, but the gov't steps in so people can be reassigned. IT's not too shabby except for that part that if your company can go out of business without consequence, then most people won't work. And, this whole "progressive" notion of fair trade in Krugman's eyes is really a sort of protectionism.
The fact is, regardless of how many talking heads on the left wing speak otherwise, the free trade and free flow of capital which characterizes Reaganomics demonstrably elevated the standard of living of the entire world. At the end of 70 year of so-called progressive liberalism, circa, 1980, the west wasn't that much farther better off than the east, much of asia was starving, and even vast tracts of the USA hung barely above the poverty line. After thirty years of it, billions of people have been lifted out of poverty into the middle class, and nearly everyone has more stuff than ever before.
In 1970 even food was hard to get, but now, the world is increasingly getting fat. In 1970, we were lucky to have a small house, and a car, and maybe a set of clothes for the year. Now, home ownership, even after this so-called crisis, is at all an time high, people have better cars, more cars, more bikes, more clothes, toys, and a whole new category of things called consumer electronics.
Reaganomics was alway about putting the most things into people's lives, and it has succeeded so well, that, the only retort liberals have against it is to create an environmental great depression to save mother earth, or, to bemoan a gap between the top and bottom rungs of society. If you measure things directly, in absolute terms, people right now are richer than they have ever been.
Seriously, people wishing the world was simpler like in the early 1970s have no clue just much those days sucked. It's a stalinist worshipping era of oppression that robbed the country of opportunity, relentlessly oppressed dissent, and if those jackasses try and do the same to this America today, I say we rise up and waste them!
If Ubuntu can't uninstall packages, that is Ubuntu's fault, not KDE's. Ubuntu has some terrible KDE packages, and their package manager is responsible for cleanly removing them.
But, as a consumer, I don't care about all of that. I see "Linux". Microsoft doesn't get a pass for bad or non-existent drivers. For years, they point the finger at the driver people and the driver people point their finger back. And consumers generally don't even blame the driver people, they go squarely at Microsoft. That's why Apple is gaining some share. They have a less flexible platform, but at least they have a claim of responsibility for the whole thing.
I used installed KDE 4 two weeks using apt on my Ubuntu box. The fallout was disastrous - broke my x server, busted up my virtual box ose and I don't have time to fix it all, and uninstall doesn't work with the kernel upgrade it snuck in. And at the end of it all, I don't really like what they did with plasma. The fonts are all inconsistent, the iconography is unfinished.. the thing just feels clunky and untrustworthy.
Once its rolling I like Vista better.
You need to get out of the mindset that says that just because use something, it has to be "better". You know, I've been driving American cars for 30 years and I only buy American cars. I'm just a homer that way. Go GM, Ford and Chrysler and I'd rather have my wife sleep with another guy before I put a cent into a Toyota or a VW or a BMW in my house. But I'm not under any illusions that American cars are "better" than their offerings. Toyota quality is legendary, Honda 4's engines are very good and the BMW 6 is legendary. But yet I only buy American cars.
IT's the same thing with Open Source, if you advocate it. Sure, Vista might have better stuff in ways, but, if you like the culture that Open Source represents, that really is all that matters. There doesn't need to be a pissing match over whose OS is "better" or not because with any good "better" is an intangible thing. I mean, if you wanted the "best" food, you could make a pretty good argument that the McDonald's Dollar Menu might well be the best food because it has a very high calories and protein per dollar ratio, but I don't think you are going to get laid taking your girlfriend there.
Gnome isn't doing anything much of note - the desktop is the same as it as ever was over the last few years, and in the meantime, a working KDE 4 is looking to become the Duke Nukem of open source projects.
But in any case, I wouldn't support OOXML at all if I was MS. Like, XML sucks and is so 1990s. I'm ready to go back to binary files.
Well, we ought to get proof of the sunspot theory.
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If the lack of sunspots holds on, then, if we get declining global temperatures, then, we might actually be headed into an ice age. Knowing our luck, this would become evident AFTER we've blown ten trillion dollars to lower our CO2.
Some merit? In many academic institutions, number of papers published in respectable journals is the preferred metric of performance, and will affect your promotion and the status/funding of your institution.
Don't you think this policy is madness? Essentially we are evaluating scientists more by their typing speed than how much they can think about deep problems.
I have this fantasy of writing a program which makes some big combinatorial breakthrough and from time to time to motivate myself I imagine what I might do with such a thing should I actually bumble into creating it.
I looked at scientific journals, and I honestly can't see much of an incentive to appear there. I mean sure, you might get published and that's got some merit, but it seems to me that these journals don't really make a lot of money for the scientists who write the articles. Does Science or Nature pay its writers? It can't be that much, even if they did. So what's the point?
From the scientist's perspective, if they have pure research, then, they can put it on a web site, such as the university web site or even their own, and just skip the b.s. Or, they can sell it. Either option is better to achieve the altruistic or commercial ends of the scientist than being in a magazine.
Lots of hype and no follow through or commitment. Google is a search engine company with lots of half finished technologies they don't have the vision to stick with or continue. Everyone sorta does their own thing, sponging off of search, and there's no real vision to any of it. Hope Sergei likes his spaceship.
You don't want to grow up to be one of the clueless barbarians that cause the trouble we are in and then wonder why people turn on them.
Always with socialists is the threat of violence. Give us your goods, enslave your labors to our cause, or we will kill you.
Has not 500 million dead from socialism been enough for you psychopaths? You people aren't interested in shared ownership, only theft, plunder, and killing.
Even the peacenik theme is a joke. Russia's communists came to power protesting the war in 1917, and wound up killing ten times as many Russians in Gulags.
Socialism is worse than treason, its an innate terrorist assault on society.
The short answer is you are not going to get your dream electric sedan because the technology is not there yet. But really, if any car maker could make it, they would. The thing that conspires against you is not Detroit, its physics.
Hybrids are always going to be more expensive because it has more parts, and some of those parts are extremely expensive to make because of a number of factors including rare materials and worker safety. Battery technology is in its infancy and progress is extremely slow in this field.
There's a great deal in common in non-scientific babble between environmentalists and religious fundamentalists.. banning gay marriages and promoting hybrids cars go hand in hand in anti-scientific lunacy. There will always be gay people, and hybrid cars will always cost more in real economic terms.
Also it is nowhere near a free market if you are talking about sugar, steel, beef, cars and a variety of other things let alone patent trolls.
Strawman. For the most part, the US markets are fairly open and free and you can move your capital to where you want.
It is very bizzare that the principle of doing the best thing for a community without personal profit is seen as a filthy commie plot if it's done by the other team
The point is, if you aren't doing something for a profit, you are hurting everyone in society. That is why socialist countries tend to fall farther and farther behind. You want the labors of the people to be fruitful, and that is all that profit is and has ever meant. It's only the left wing that insults the idea of profit, because they do not want to do it for themselves and so must steal the profits of others.
Socialism is also such things as a profitable fruit canning company owned by farmers - or even simple Christian charity
And in the free market, you can invest in either or, if you so choose. As much as you bemoan religion, you can, in a free market society, choose what company and cultures that you wish to support.
What's interesting is that, as much as socialism obsesses over ownership of the "means of production", and continues to carry this tired argument absurdly in the face of the fact that in the USA more people own the means of the production and have a share in its profits, as a practical matter, than have ever had before in any country anywhere. And, had George Bush's plan to private a sliver of social security been enacted, -everyone- would have had a share of the means of production that you so dwell on.
Better still, you can choose what production you want to own a part of. In a purely socialistic economy, everyone is forced to choose to own a tiny sliver of all of the means of production and are thus essentially powerless. But, in America, you can choose to entirely invest in companies who conduct their business in a way solely consistent with your values.
The bottom line is, the basic economic complaint of Karl Marx's reactionary response to tool carrying craftsmen being replaced by capital intensive industrial machinery has been answered, in fact, by capitalism. The modern stock market allows everyone to participate and own stock if you choose, and with companies such as e-trade charging no minimum balance, anyone genuinely can. The best and most fair chance to have everyone own a piece of the pie, was in fact, to partially privatize social security, but instead, what we got from the left wing was fear mongering.
The bottom line is that any sane person can analyze the economic behavior of the American left wing and ultimately conclude that the objective was never about the worker at all. It was about power. Republicans threw ownership on the table and it was refused. One has to wonder, given the determined efforts by the left wing to not only undermine American wars, but also to constantly attack the very means, the stock market, by which ownership is shared amongst all the people, then, one has to wonder if all of this so-called banking crisis is so accidental after all, and if this sudden rise of the Democrats is an election, or if it is really a coup. Perhaps we shall find that this banking crisis is the Reichstag fire of our time.
You are quite right to say that it is wrong to stay that socialism is risky. IT's not. It's a known, proven, stupid thing to do and if Democrats genuinely get their way, you can expect to see that we shall all be sold the benefits of a sharply reduced standard of living in order to cover for the failures of that system. WE'll all be nice and poor but the earth will be safe, and you won't have to bitch about the rich, because there won't be any... just a few high place appartchiks in government.
You know, its pretty hard to call this the work economic downturn in 100 years when we are all sitting at home on our fancy computers and writing posts on slashdot. If this was the great depression or anything like it, we would be out looking for food and it is probably that we might not even have electricity, let alone Core 2 Duo processes. That we could even call what will likely be a modest economic downturn a "depression" is really indicative of just how successful free enterprise is.
Let us contrast our "worst" of capitalism to some of socialism's supposed successes. Is the living standard of Cuba so high right now? Where's that big explosion of Cuban computer programmers? Similarly, the people in North Korea do not even have electricity at all.
We can say that this big capital meltdown is a disaster, but, let's remember that we did, for this 700B bailout, wind up getting nearly 6 trillion dollars worth of new housing construction and for a country whose population is going to double over the next 50 years, this is not a bad investment to make at all, long term. And, it is very likely, given experience with similar bailouts such as occurred with RTC, the spinoff of Conrail, or even the bailout to Chrysler, that the government will actually take a profit from it.
Why would you work for NASA when you could start a software company, make a billion dollars, and buy yourself your own spaceship.
Who would you rather be, Elon Musk starting off PayPal, selling it, and starting SpaceX, or some 50k a year guy working for NASA or ESA, wasting his best years to satisfy some bullshit bureacracy, all to do some makework crap to keep a 40 year old design flying when everyone else can put people into space for 1/10th of the price?
Who would you rather be? Paul Allen and getting a chunk of a giant software company, and thus funding and rapidly advancing a number of companies ranging in research from private space flight (Spaceship 1 comes to mind), to off the wall concepts in nuclear fusion, and, to top it all off, building a shrine to Jimi Hendrix and owing a sports team. Or, you could be some scientist slogging through 10 layers of management for a national research foundation, waiting decades to get funding to do one fricking experiment.
Yeah, American capitalism has its ups and downs, but I'll take the downs to get the ups, any day of the week. I'd rather hope to be a Paul Allen or a Bill Gates or an Elon Musk any day of the week, rather than the guy whose waited a decade to finally discover some particle in the LHC.
If the Europeans want their stability, they can have it, and I can understand those Americans who live in fear and would prefer to enslave everyone to a big consensus cluster f--- organization of some sort. But I for one would rather throw it on the line, and live to go for the gold.
The genuine situation on the ground is this : if you are smart, have confidence in yourself, can work hard and can sell, America is the best country on the world to be because you don't have to put up with a bunch of idiots holding you back.
You can describe the so-called success of Europe over the last 20 years but the fact of the matter is that Americans have more stuff. WE have bigger cars, larger houses, more electronics, and for that matter, even private gun ownership, and so to that end American economics are better.
Indeed, Americans have historically had 25% of all the raw materials of the planet earth at their disposal and are so rich, even today, that, our diseases are diseases of excess, and, the common criticism of those who favor a European style economy is that Americans consume too much and we should cherish European style frugality. That, right there, the need for European frugality, should tell you everything you need to know about what is wealth and what is not. Frugality and conservation are things that poor people do, and social and environmental policies designed to force Americans to reduce consumption, conserve, and have less are really a back handed way of trying to force Americans to accept a reduced standard of living.
Note this: while the poorest of Americans have about the same standard of living as the poorest of Europeans, the richest of Americans are far, far better off than the richest of Europeans. Richard Branson might be able to buy himself a spaceship, but Bill Gates could buy himself a fleet of them.
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By what logical leap do you conclude the wealthy will gift us with jobs using that extra money?
I've never seen a homeless guy create a job.
If any jobs are created under such policies, they're created off shore, or moved off shore at our expense.
So, what homeless guy are you working for?
I think they should pay me for them, to be honest.
At this point? I'm watching the NLCS.
Maybe they could become the party of fiscal responsibility and small government again
I would certainly hope so. I mean, seriously, I see all these ads about how Democrats are in favor of big government and I can't imagine anyone expanding federal power more than Bush has.
Even FDR did not socialize banking the way Bush has. I think conservatives who foolishly support Bush's domestic surveillance will come around when they realize that Obama will have those same tools as well.
either of them win
McCain has no shot. A great many Republicans, including myself do not like his random and inconsistent posturing, are offended by his attack ads, and honestly think he has the sort of speechmaking ability that can sell the USA to itself and to the world.
I think the Republican Party needs to lay low for a few years, be an opposition party, and come up with a new plan and a new message. We've played all the old cards and its time to come up with the something new.
I fail to see how that money is "blown". Energy efficiency *saves* money, while lowering CO2 emissions in the process
Both US candidates are looking at a carbon reduction deal, and for this reason I'd rather have Obama win so that Republicans won't get stuck with the fallout from this stupid self imposed disaster. When you talk about a 90% reduction in CO2 you are not talking about efficiency, you are talking about impoverishment. So, let's get that on the table right now. You are creating a great depression to save the planet. When people have less, that's called poverty.
fact that over said 50 years, the solar cycle has been uncorrelated with global temperature trends
Correlation doesn't mean anything. To me, the recent wall street meltdown is a repudiation of the use of computer models for forecasting. If the richest banks in the world cannot approximate differential equations to protect their investment then no one can and its back to square one.
Another Maunder Minimum elimination of sunspot activity might cool the climate by about -0.2C .
So.. if it gets colder then, by 1C, then, what do you say? You do understand that the wall street crisis was precipitated ultimately by a misplaced faith in computer models. You trot this stuff out as a fact and you have absolutely no control.
The measure of a nation is not in how it treats the powerful and the wealthy, but the poor and unfortunate. And by that measure we have failed.
If you care so much about these people, why don't you go buy them a house or something? Or, let one of them move in with you? This country isn't some abstract thing, its you and its me and if you want to demand that everyone kick in a dime for these poor, as you say, then what's the measure of YOU, who has not done so?
And for the record, we cannot judge if Reagnomics worked because Reagonomics is:
The point of Reagonomics was to increase the amount of goods that people have and can choose to have. The idea was to stimulate production by encouraging investment. To some extent, Reaganomics is the Karl Marx critique of capitalism applied full tilt - overproduction, based on the observation that, if you produce a ton of stuff, competition emerges and prices fall.
Investors can get really rich, but a lot take a beating, thus wealth tends to concentrate. But remember, the name of the game is to get the rich to overproduce. They do, because, they are greedy and want more, and so they invest, and boom. We get the jobs and the benefit of overproduction.
So yeah, in Reaganomics, you get concentrations of wealth but you also get rich people losing everything. You get a very dynamic society where if you get lucky you can get rich very quick or get poor very quick, and, everyone gets tons of stuff.
To map this out to specific policies, these things are the things Reagan does....
--lower the cost of capital
first off, allow private capital formation.. then, lower tax rates, lower capital gains in particular, lower interest rates.
--allow it to move freely
adopt free trade.
For the most part, we've been on that plan since 1980s.
This has completely worked, and I think its a good deal. We've had a lot of gyrations, dislocations, but as a whole, the world is much, much, richer than it was 40 years ago. Just take a look at what's going in China and India and Eastern Europe...or even Europe once they lowered the corp income tax. In the USA people have way more food and way more stuff than they have ever had before. The world is just richer, and despite a hugely expanded population, everyone has more stuff. That's a huge success.
I think its worth it overall, but a lot of people in this election are fed up with constant social tension all the continuous upheavals cause. , and thus they are willing to sacrifice wealth and opportunity for some sort of stability. And, part of that too is because of an aging society and a more womanly male population. There's just less men willing to take risks and most young guys think like women these days.
Liberal economics : Maxwell House and Folgers
Conservative economics : Starbucks and 2000 different kinds of coffee you can buy in stores.
Have you actually -read- Krugman?
Krugman's a liberal but staunch free trader. He's into the free flow of goods and capital and in a way that would be even more deregulated than is today. All he is saying is that he wants to have this huge safety net so that he can open trade completely. In Krugman's world, the GM's go out of business, but the gov't steps in so people can be reassigned. IT's not too shabby except for that part that if your company can go out of business without consequence, then most people won't work. And, this whole "progressive" notion of fair trade in Krugman's eyes is really a sort of protectionism.
The fact is, regardless of how many talking heads on the left wing speak otherwise, the free trade and free flow of capital which characterizes Reaganomics demonstrably elevated the standard of living of the entire world. At the end of 70 year of so-called progressive liberalism, circa, 1980, the west wasn't that much farther better off than the east, much of asia was starving, and even vast tracts of the USA hung barely above the poverty line. After thirty years of it, billions of people have been lifted out of poverty into the middle class, and nearly everyone has more stuff than ever before.
In 1970 even food was hard to get, but now, the world is increasingly getting fat. In 1970, we were lucky to have a small house, and a car, and maybe a set of clothes for the year. Now, home ownership, even after this so-called crisis, is at all an time high, people have better cars, more cars, more bikes, more clothes, toys, and a whole new category of things called consumer electronics.
Reaganomics was alway about putting the most things into people's lives, and it has succeeded so well, that, the only retort liberals have against it is to create an environmental great depression to save mother earth, or, to bemoan a gap between the top and bottom rungs of society. If you measure things directly, in absolute terms, people right now are richer than they have ever been.
Seriously, people wishing the world was simpler like in the early 1970s have no clue just much those days sucked. It's a stalinist worshipping era of oppression that robbed the country of opportunity, relentlessly oppressed dissent, and if those jackasses try and do the same to this America today, I say we rise up and waste them!
If Ubuntu can't uninstall packages, that is Ubuntu's fault, not KDE's. Ubuntu has some terrible KDE packages, and their package manager is responsible for cleanly removing them.
But, as a consumer, I don't care about all of that. I see "Linux". Microsoft doesn't get a pass for bad or non-existent drivers. For years, they point the finger at the driver people and the driver people point their finger back. And consumers generally don't even blame the driver people, they go squarely at Microsoft. That's why Apple is gaining some share. They have a less flexible platform, but at least they have a claim of responsibility for the whole thing.
I used installed KDE 4 two weeks using apt on my Ubuntu box. The fallout was disastrous - broke my x server, busted up my virtual box ose and I don't have time to fix it all, and uninstall doesn't work with the kernel upgrade it snuck in. And at the end of it all, I don't really like what they did with plasma. The fonts are all inconsistent, the iconography is unfinished.. the thing just feels clunky and untrustworthy.
Once its rolling I like Vista better.
You need to get out of the mindset that says that just because use something, it has to be "better". You know, I've been driving American cars for 30 years and I only buy American cars. I'm just a homer that way. Go GM, Ford and Chrysler and I'd rather have my wife sleep with another guy before I put a cent into a Toyota or a VW or a BMW in my house. But I'm not under any illusions that American cars are "better" than their offerings. Toyota quality is legendary, Honda 4's engines are very good and the BMW 6 is legendary. But yet I only buy American cars.
IT's the same thing with Open Source, if you advocate it. Sure, Vista might have better stuff in ways, but, if you like the culture that Open Source represents, that really is all that matters. There doesn't need to be a pissing match over whose OS is "better" or not because with any good "better" is an intangible thing. I mean, if you wanted the "best" food, you could make a pretty good argument that the McDonald's Dollar Menu might well be the best food because it has a very high calories and protein per dollar ratio, but I don't think you are going to get laid taking your girlfriend there.
When Linux is so busy self destructing.
Gnome isn't doing anything much of note - the desktop is the same as it as ever was over the last few years, and in the meantime, a working KDE 4 is looking to become the Duke Nukem of open source projects.
But in any case, I wouldn't support OOXML at all if I was MS. Like, XML sucks and is so 1990s. I'm ready to go back to binary files.
If the lack of sunspots holds on, then, if we get declining global temperatures, then, we might actually be headed into an ice age. Knowing our luck, this would become evident AFTER we've blown ten trillion dollars to lower our CO2.
Some merit? In many academic institutions, number of papers published in respectable journals is the preferred metric of performance, and will affect your promotion and the status/funding of your institution.
Don't you think this policy is madness? Essentially we are evaluating scientists more by their typing speed than how much they can think about deep problems.
I have this fantasy of writing a program which makes some big combinatorial breakthrough and from time to time to motivate myself I imagine what I might do with such a thing should I actually bumble into creating it.
I looked at scientific journals, and I honestly can't see much of an incentive to appear there. I mean sure, you might get published and that's got some merit, but it seems to me that these journals don't really make a lot of money for the scientists who write the articles. Does Science or Nature pay its writers? It can't be that much, even if they did. So what's the point?
From the scientist's perspective, if they have pure research, then, they can put it on a web site, such as the university web site or even their own, and just skip the b.s. Or, they can sell it. Either option is better to achieve the altruistic or commercial ends of the scientist than being in a magazine.
Lots of hype and no follow through or commitment. Google is a search engine company with lots of half finished technologies they don't have the vision to stick with or continue. Everyone sorta does their own thing, sponging off of search, and there's no real vision to any of it. Hope Sergei likes his spaceship.
You don't want to grow up to be one of the clueless barbarians that cause the trouble we are in and then wonder why people turn on them.
Always with socialists is the threat of violence. Give us your goods, enslave your labors to our cause, or we will kill you.
Has not 500 million dead from socialism been enough for you psychopaths? You people aren't interested in shared ownership, only theft, plunder, and killing.
Even the peacenik theme is a joke. Russia's communists came to power protesting the war in 1917, and wound up killing ten times as many Russians in Gulags.
Socialism is worse than treason, its an innate terrorist assault on society.
The short answer is you are not going to get your dream electric sedan because the technology is not there yet. But really, if any car maker could make it, they would. The thing that conspires against you is not Detroit, its physics.
Hybrids are always going to be more expensive because it has more parts, and some of those parts are extremely expensive to make because of a number of factors including rare materials and worker safety. Battery technology is in its infancy and progress is extremely slow in this field.
There's a great deal in common in non-scientific babble between environmentalists and religious fundamentalists.. banning gay marriages and promoting hybrids cars go hand in hand in anti-scientific lunacy. There will always be gay people, and hybrid cars will always cost more in real economic terms.
Also it is nowhere near a free market if you are talking about sugar, steel, beef, cars and a variety of other things let alone patent trolls.
Strawman. For the most part, the US markets are fairly open and free and you can move your capital to where you want.
It is very bizzare that the principle of doing the best thing for a community without personal profit is seen as a filthy commie plot if it's done by the other team
The point is, if you aren't doing something for a profit, you are hurting everyone in society. That is why socialist countries tend to fall farther and farther behind. You want the labors of the people to be fruitful, and that is all that profit is and has ever meant. It's only the left wing that insults the idea of profit, because they do not want to do it for themselves and so must steal the profits of others.
Socialism is also such things as a profitable fruit canning company owned by farmers - or even simple Christian charity
And in the free market, you can invest in either or, if you so choose. As much as you bemoan religion, you can, in a free market society, choose what company and cultures that you wish to support.
What's interesting is that, as much as socialism obsesses over ownership of the "means of production", and continues to carry this tired argument absurdly in the face of the fact that in the USA more people own the means of the production and have a share in its profits, as a practical matter, than have ever had before in any country anywhere. And, had George Bush's plan to private a sliver of social security been enacted, -everyone- would have had a share of the means of production that you so dwell on.
Better still, you can choose what production you want to own a part of. In a purely socialistic economy, everyone is forced to choose to own a tiny sliver of all of the means of production and are thus essentially powerless. But, in America, you can choose to entirely invest in companies who conduct their business in a way solely consistent with your values.
The bottom line is, the basic economic complaint of Karl Marx's reactionary response to tool carrying craftsmen being replaced by capital intensive industrial machinery has been answered, in fact, by capitalism. The modern stock market allows everyone to participate and own stock if you choose, and with companies such as e-trade charging no minimum balance, anyone genuinely can. The best and most fair chance to have everyone own a piece of the pie, was in fact, to partially privatize social security, but instead, what we got from the left wing was fear mongering.
The bottom line is that any sane person can analyze the economic behavior of the American left wing and ultimately conclude that the objective was never about the worker at all. It was about power. Republicans threw ownership on the table and it was refused. One has to wonder, given the determined efforts by the left wing to not only undermine American wars, but also to constantly attack the very means, the stock market, by which ownership is shared amongst all the people, then, one has to wonder if all of this so-called banking crisis is so accidental after all, and if this sudden rise of the Democrats is an election, or if it is really a coup. Perhaps we shall find that this banking crisis is the Reichstag fire of our time.
You are quite right to say that it is wrong to stay that socialism is risky. IT's not. It's a known, proven, stupid thing to do and if Democrats genuinely get their way, you can expect to see that we shall all be sold the benefits of a sharply reduced standard of living in order to cover for the failures of that system. WE'll all be nice and poor but the earth will be safe, and you won't have to bitch about the rich, because there won't be any... just a few high place appartchiks in government.
You know, its pretty hard to call this the work economic downturn in 100 years when we are all sitting at home on our fancy computers and writing posts on slashdot. If this was the great depression or anything like it, we would be out looking for food and it is probably that we might not even have electricity, let alone Core 2 Duo processes. That we could even call what will likely be a modest economic downturn a "depression" is really indicative of just how successful free enterprise is.
Let us contrast our "worst" of capitalism to some of socialism's supposed successes. Is the living standard of Cuba so high right now? Where's that big explosion of Cuban computer programmers? Similarly, the people in North Korea do not even have electricity at all.
We can say that this big capital meltdown is a disaster, but, let's remember that we did, for this 700B bailout, wind up getting nearly 6 trillion dollars worth of new housing construction and for a country whose population is going to double over the next 50 years, this is not a bad investment to make at all, long term. And, it is very likely, given experience with similar bailouts such as occurred with RTC, the spinoff of Conrail, or even the bailout to Chrysler, that the government will actually take a profit from it.
I see. so every copyright holder on earth has to suffer because you don't like Bruce Springsteen?
I actually like Bruce's older music, but, he ceased to be an artist when he became political.
Whatever happened to going to work for NASA?
Why would you work for NASA when you could start a software company, make a billion dollars, and buy yourself your own spaceship.
Who would you rather be, Elon Musk starting off PayPal, selling it, and starting SpaceX, or some 50k a year guy working for NASA or ESA, wasting his best years to satisfy some bullshit bureacracy, all to do some makework crap to keep a 40 year old design flying when everyone else can put people into space for 1/10th of the price?
Who would you rather be? Paul Allen and getting a chunk of a giant software company, and thus funding and rapidly advancing a number of companies ranging in research from private space flight (Spaceship 1 comes to mind), to off the wall concepts in nuclear fusion, and, to top it all off, building a shrine to Jimi Hendrix and owing a sports team. Or, you could be some scientist slogging through 10 layers of management for a national research foundation, waiting decades to get funding to do one fricking experiment.
Yeah, American capitalism has its ups and downs, but I'll take the downs to get the ups, any day of the week. I'd rather hope to be a Paul Allen or a Bill Gates or an Elon Musk any day of the week, rather than the guy whose waited a decade to finally discover some particle in the LHC.
If the Europeans want their stability, they can have it, and I can understand those Americans who live in fear and would prefer to enslave everyone to a big consensus cluster f--- organization of some sort. But I for one would rather throw it on the line, and live to go for the gold.
The genuine situation on the ground is this : if you are smart, have confidence in yourself, can work hard and can sell, America is the best country on the world to be because you don't have to put up with a bunch of idiots holding you back.
You can describe the so-called success of Europe over the last 20 years but the fact of the matter is that Americans have more stuff. WE have bigger cars, larger houses, more electronics, and for that matter, even private gun ownership, and so to that end American economics are better.
Indeed, Americans have historically had 25% of all the raw materials of the planet earth at their disposal and are so rich, even today, that, our diseases are diseases of excess, and, the common criticism of those who favor a European style economy is that Americans consume too much and we should cherish European style frugality. That, right there, the need for European frugality, should tell you everything you need to know about what is wealth and what is not. Frugality and conservation are things that poor people do, and social and environmental policies designed to force Americans to reduce consumption, conserve, and have less are really a back handed way of trying to force Americans to accept a reduced standard of living.
Note this: while the poorest of Americans have about the same standard of living as the poorest of Europeans, the richest of Americans are far, far better off than the richest of Europeans. Richard Branson might be able to buy himself a spaceship, but Bill Gates could buy himself a fleet of them.