but I am saying you've just made a direct statement of fact with no justification whatsoever
Yes and no. I think your out would be that if you could address your concerns of concentrations of wealth and externalities without some of federal assumption of ownership, its pretty hard to avoid socialism.
The thing is, that, if you have a government to keep wealth from getting concentrated, it's wealth will get concentrated. If you make the government the sole arbiter of some bit of land or sky, then, it will be corrupted as that arbiter... and that's really foolish from a risk management standpoint.
The whole point of private ownership isn't some magical devotion to Adam Smith (who was totally wrong on trade)... its just that having lots of private entities makes it easier to spread social risk about. If we all had our one acre of land, even if one of us screwed it up, humanity could continue. But if the King owned all the land, then, the King could screw up all the land, and frequently, will.
Really, when it boils down to it, just that the tragedy of commons doesn't look at risk management at all, and so is therefor totally wrong. I'm migrating my site to Linux and once that is done, I'll post a computer simulation about the tragedy of the commons that really makes it stand out why this is so. You have to admit, seeing something like that on the old Freeper will be a heck of a lot more interesting than the boring old "well, golly, that's socialism if we do that!"...
Insightful post. Completely off-topic but, still, you make some damned good points.
Yeah, totally off topic, but inspired somewhat by the commentary that inevitably follows an FOSS product adoption decision made by a major enterprise..., it's like "the movement" won. Maybe the gov't just picked the better product?
The benefit would be that it would make data more transportable at first blush. The problem is clear enough : The whole process of installing an operating system and shipping data to it is a huge waste. Being able to take a drive and transplant it into a newer machine without having to re-install anything is an absolute time saver. I'm still loving Linux that it let me do that without too much fallout, but why couldn't I take a brick and put it on a faster processor, or a lower power processor, or in a friend's virtual machine, or anything... I don't need to be married to CPU architecture...
And that's really where it all falls apart, because you can't possibly ship a computer that has every CPU architecture in every binary.. But maybe you could have a bootstrapper / kernel that always gets all of the possible CPUs, just in case, for enough to be able to boot itself, mount its own file system and get to a network. Then, the operating system would replace the rest of the binaries with new versions, as part of your transplant process, and your computer would just work.
I have a center right wing site. It turns on ASP.NET. I am rewriting it for a Linux hosted roll out because it is better. My reasons are thus.
Windows 7 is a better desktop OS, for sure, but, for programmers, Linux is hands down better.
a) You can transplant Linux, but not Windows. I ripped a hard drive out of an Opteron, put it in a Xeon, and booted my Linux right away. All I had to do was google a bit and comment out sbp2 from/etc/modules because my new motherboard did not have firewire support, and any instability was solved. Microsoft can take its TCO numbers and shove it up their ass, as I'm looking at hours of labor to get Windows up and rolling, versus being done for Linux. Meanwhile, the best answer Microsoft has is to do a Windows 7 REINSTALL, meaning that, my data and applications are completely f--- up, and I still have to come up with a goddamned license key for Windows.
b) Linux has built in support for ISOs and DVD burning and every other file system that there is. I do not have google for 80 different spyware tools to get a utility. I can type sudo apt get install and be done with it.
c) Linux comes with every tool imaginable, and has no baked in limits. With Windows, you develop on a desktop and deploy to a server, and the two are different. Linux -is- the server, so its simpler. There are more languages for linux, more evil things you can do to Apache, more off the wall out of the box ways to get things done. Visual Studio is a great product, but its really all there is. It's like a Versaille, a beautiful building for sure, amazing wonder, but no place to take a shit, because the designers thought shitting was bad. Meanwhile, Linux is the land of trailer parks and porta poddies. Might not smell so good, but at least you aren't shitting your pants.
d) bash is still better than powershell. On paper, powershell is better, but only MS could come up with a shell that requires so much fricking typing and looks so ugly.
e) Linux feels faster.
f) And, Linux yes, is cheaper. I paid 0.0000 dollars for an operating system that works to be transplanted and gives me lots of great tools. I have to lay out almost $1000 for Windows + Visual Studio.
It's like, I can be working on my web site on my new computer now, with an OS that's free and asked me to do little to migrate from one machine to another, or I can pay down a bunch more money to get at the data I already had, just because I'm using a new computer with it. I'm not a big socialist. I don't care about the ideology of FOSS, but Windows, you fucking suck!
Seriously, if Linux gets its act together enough to have a vision where your hard drive is transplantable from computer to computer, like it doesn't matter, with tools, data, operating system, preferences, everything, Wndows is dead meat. And Linux now, is getting very close to that.
Seriously, when the government starts talking about hosting, they can just throw hardware at it. When you are able to print money, the capital costs of anything are pretty much irrelevant.
First off, most leaders of the left wing imagine a future where scarcity is the norm, largely because they see the consumption of natural resources by the West as unethical in a larger world view. In their eyes, Americans already have "too much" and therefor should have to make due with less. This faux-conservatism, coupled with the right wing's stupid devotion to "free trade", is the underlying cause of this current economic crisis. It is that people want more stuff, resources are capped by environmental and ideological considerations, so, prices of goods are shooting up and people have less. Demand falls off, and unemployment shoots up. You add in free trade, and take away America's advantage in energy prices and expose our disadvantage in labor, and the country is totally fucked up.
It's pretty simple, actually.
Let's just think this through for a minute. Let's say that instead of having to borrow or raise taxes to have national health care, the USA simply turned around and issued permits to drill in ANWR and off the coasts. Instead of scraping to come up with 900B to pay for it, we would have that money coming in from ANWR alone, without a tax increase. Let's say for a minute that we build nuclear power plants everywhere, and lowered the price of energy to something like the 2 cents per kwh it is to operate a nuclear plant. Everyone would have effectively a 20% raise because of the energy savings not only for themselves but in the cost of every product or service that they buy, and that in turn would lower the price of medicine. If gasoline were a dollar a gallon, and electric bills not more than $20 a month, and food was cheap as well, everyone would feel pretty darned rich. Consumers would spend, tax revenues to the government would go up, and you could have an administration that throws national health care on the table coupled with a modest tax cut.
Bottom line is, regardless of whether you want to have the government doling out the goodies, or get yourself a tax cut, or even a combination of both, the most effective thing the government could do to do that would be to say screw the environmentalists and get cheap energy, no matter what. Energy -is- wealth, and the more wealth you have, the more stuff you can swing.
If everyone felt rich, than putting a national health care plan would be no big deal.
Instead of Windows, they went with OS/2, which bombed, at least in mainstream terms.
OS/2 Warp was by far a better operating system than Windows 3.x and Windows 95, but Windows then had an easier go of hardware compatibility because it could work with existing DOS based stuff, and OS/2 was a wholesale replacement. The problem with OS/2, was, that Windows NT was better than it.
The banks were forced to make low quality loans under the CRA; it just so happens that they were not the lowest quality loan
It's not the CRA. It's competition from Fannie Mae. That's the truth of the matter. Fannie was too big for banks to compete, so they took what they thought were warranted risks to be more aggressive. What they didn't realize was the extent to which FAnnie Mae itself was being stupid. It was really, Fannie Mae was retarded, so banks thought they had to be more retarded, to compete, and everyone got screwed.
In addition, there was nothing whatsoever that said the loans should be timebombs where the payments balloon to levels
Yes there was. I was offered exactly those loans in the go-go years and I took one and refinanced it down to a normal fixed loan once I got my credit cleaned up a bit.
Certainly nothing forced them to urge first time home buyers to get a McMansion rather than a starter home.
Of course, the left has to say that people are victims, so that it can steal their rights to run their lives from them. "You can't make this decision, look at this mess, therefor, we'll make it for you.." always the refrain of the American left. It's a joke. Those people care less about the average American than anyone else on the planet. To wit: nobody in Obama's car task force could even be bothered to buy an American car, and everyone on the left does nothing but rip the American South and the American South has been the sole producer of new musical genres in the USA for the last 100 years.
It's the sort of thing that makes me wonder if perhaps there is something to the "class warfare" business.
There is class warfare, for sure, there's the academic sector and media sectors of liberalism waging war on the rest of America.
Bullshit. The problem with the housing market was the securitization of mortgage debt, and insurance of that debt in a heavily deregulated market
Fannie Mae popularized mortgage backed securities, that's the point you miss. Fannie Mae floated this crap out to the market noting that they were going to use their existing asset base to raise a trillion dollars (at first), and put a bazillion people into houses. They used that money to seed more loans, and then used the loans they seeded to float even more securities. They've been borrowing money to borrow money now for 20 years and the only people that have been really protesting the chicanery was the right wing.
Still, I don't understand why so many lefties protest this. They got what they wanted to. They've been wanting to destroy capitalism and have the government run housing now for a 100 years and now they've succeeded in some good measure. Fannie Mae is now more than ever property of the US government, many banks have exited the mortgage market, commercial banking, which was the engine of American capitalism, is now dead.
And, not only that, you liberals have every chance to destroy private medicine as well and steal that for the government. So, you should be happy. But instead, oh no, you can't even communicate honestly that the sharp reduction in everyone's standard of living is consistent with your liberal puritanical goals of having everyone be equal but poor.
I -really- like the ribbon bar in Office 2007 so it will be hard to part with it.
But,
1) I'm still so happy that Linux booted up after I transplanted the hard drive from an old opteron into a new xeon with a completely different motherboard, that I'm thinking I can live with Open Office for now. 2) There's still an empty socket for another xeon on my new motherboard. 3) Windows 7, Visual Studio, all start to pile up in terms of costs, or, I could get another xeon, or upgrade my xeons, get more ram...
The poster is indeed wrong that the CRA was the problem, but what you and other left wingers gloss over was the point that Fannie Mae was at fault.
Fannie could write commercial paper to lend based on the implicit guarantee by the US government. So Fannie did exactly that, and really went crazy with it. This money, they used to lend to people with questionable ratings and at interest rates that were, in effect, a subsidy.
Banks, of course, were not "forced" to make the same sorts of loans. They had the choice of either not writing the same junk and lending to the same people as Fannie, or losing the entire mortgage business to the government.
Conservatives did rail on about this for a long time. First off, of course, was the government subsidy of the mortgage business distorting the housing market. But even worse, is that the high returns caused by MBS drowned out investment in other sectors, for decades, so, thanks to the government program, America invested in building houses while other nations built things like manufacturing centers, etc. But of course, those warnings were dismissed and repeatedly by the left using its usual ad-hominem attacks. Opposition to Fannie Mae was mean spirited, racists, etc... Of course, left wing policies have so screwed up minorities in the USA economically that one should argue the left is racist, but I digress...
In any case, the fact of the matter is, if you have a government subsidizing a quasi public institution, you create a bubble for it, screw up investment in the economy at large, and of course, Democrats, undeterred by the total destruction of our housing market, are about to do it to health care.
It's just stupid.
Or is it?
Frankly, I would be willing to bet that the left -deliberately- ignores dangers created to the private sector by the federal programs because if the private sector is destroyed, we can all be socialized. It's like, all you hear from the left is this rhetoric about how free enterprise is evil,
So, in my mind, I would think you lefties would at least be honest revolutionaries and say that yes, your programs will eventually replace the private sector with the public sector and you are in favor of it. It's what you want, why lie about it?
It's about MS locking out Datel's product because it's 4x the storage (expandable to like.. 64x with a micro SDHC card
I'm ok with that so long as those network effects can be used to benefit American companies to the exclusion of foreign competitors.
Pfft... slippery slope. In this case, the company (Datel) already CREATED a working solution
For all we know the original story is a press release from Datel basically arguing that MS should keep the same format so Datel won't have to change (er, be locked out!)
Locking out the competitor's product should be illegal.
No, because, this is a subsidy of the competition. Next thing you know, you'd have to hold your competitor's hand, work together on some product, watch your own share evaporate....
Seriously, does anybody really think that government is made up of the country's smartest people?
The private sector could easily do something this stupid. It's just that, we have only one government, and in the private sector, stupid businesses are supposed to fail, unless they happen to be banks.
Social Security is not welfare, it's insurance. Disability is not welfare, it's insurance. Medicare/Medicaid is not welfare, it's insurance.
Only in the sense that you have changed the definition of insurance.
Social Security is not insurance. In insurance, you pay a premium to manage the financial risk of an exceptional event occurring. If the event happens, you get some big payment commensurate with the premium that you paid and level of risk. There is no "risk factor" to social security, so you get old.
Medicare/Medicaid are not insurance. In the case of Medicare, again, there is no risk management. You get old, you sign up for Medicare. It's not insurance.
Disability is not insurance in the SSI sense because the people who are on disability tend to be permanently disabled. Again, what's the "risk" that someone who is blind will need continued federal support. It's not insurance, it's welfare.
If you're going to peddle right-wing bullshit, try to make it plausible right-wing bullshit, OK?
How about, the left wing tells the truth about something, anything, please. For the life of me I do not understand why you self-styled lefties have to pathologically lie about everything you promote? It's so obvious that entitlements are welfare, and yet, you can't even be bothered to call them for what they are.
Even now, you call "health insurance reform" "insurance", when its not. You say insurers should "cover" pre-existing conditions, or buy prescription drugs, or mammograms, when none of those are -risk- factors. If you want to have a national welfare program for mammograms and doctors visits, call it that, and then, have insurance be just what it is - a financial vehicle for risk management. But stop going around and telling people that "insurance" is just another way to get something for free, when all that free stuff really is, is welfare.
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but I am saying you've just made a direct statement of fact with no justification whatsoever
Yes and no. I think your out would be that if you could address your concerns of concentrations of wealth and externalities without some of federal assumption of ownership, its pretty hard to avoid socialism.
The thing is, that, if you have a government to keep wealth from getting concentrated, it's wealth will get concentrated. If you make the government the sole arbiter of some bit of land or sky, then, it will be corrupted as that arbiter... and that's really foolish from a risk management standpoint.
The whole point of private ownership isn't some magical devotion to Adam Smith (who was totally wrong on trade)... its just that having lots of private entities makes it easier to spread social risk about. If we all had our one acre of land, even if one of us screwed it up, humanity could continue. But if the King owned all the land, then, the King could screw up all the land, and frequently, will.
Really, when it boils down to it, just that the tragedy of commons doesn't look at risk management at all, and so is therefor totally wrong. I'm migrating my site to Linux and once that is done, I'll post a computer simulation about the tragedy of the commons that really makes it stand out why this is so. You have to admit, seeing something like that on the old Freeper will be a heck of a lot more interesting than the boring old "well, golly, that's socialism if we do that!"...
I think the "anonymous softie", the over use of colloquial communication's - "you know", shows that this interview was entirely made up.
Insightful post. Completely off-topic but, still, you make some damned good points.
Yeah, totally off topic, but inspired somewhat by the commentary that inevitably follows an FOSS product adoption decision made by a major enterprise..., it's like "the movement" won. Maybe the gov't just picked the better product?
Externalities, Concentrations of Wealth, etc... is a made up word excuse for socialism.
The benefit would be that it would make data more transportable at first blush. The problem is clear enough : The whole process of installing an operating system and shipping data to it is a huge waste. Being able to take a drive and transplant it into a newer machine without having to re-install anything is an absolute time saver. I'm still loving Linux that it let me do that without too much fallout, but why couldn't I take a brick and put it on a faster processor, or a lower power processor, or in a friend's virtual machine, or anything... I don't need to be married to CPU architecture...
And that's really where it all falls apart, because you can't possibly ship a computer that has every CPU architecture in every binary.. But maybe you could have a bootstrapper / kernel that always gets all of the possible CPUs, just in case, for enough to be able to boot itself, mount its own file system and get to a network. Then, the operating system would replace the rest of the binaries with new versions, as part of your transplant process, and your computer would just work.
I have a center right wing site. It turns on ASP.NET. I am rewriting it for a Linux hosted roll out because it is better. My reasons are thus.
Windows 7 is a better desktop OS, for sure, but, for programmers, Linux is hands down better.
a) You can transplant Linux, but not Windows. I ripped a hard drive out of an Opteron, put it in a Xeon, and booted my Linux right away. All I had to do was google a bit and comment out sbp2 from /etc/modules because my new motherboard did not have firewire support, and any instability was solved. Microsoft can take its TCO numbers and shove it up their ass, as I'm looking at hours of labor to get Windows up and rolling, versus being done for Linux. Meanwhile, the best answer Microsoft has is to do a Windows 7 REINSTALL, meaning that, my data and applications are completely f--- up, and I still have to come up with a goddamned license key for Windows.
b) Linux has built in support for ISOs and DVD burning and every other file system that there is. I do not have google for 80 different spyware tools to get a utility. I can type sudo apt get install and be done with it.
c) Linux comes with every tool imaginable, and has no baked in limits. With Windows, you develop on a desktop and deploy to a server, and the two are different. Linux -is- the server, so its simpler. There are more languages for linux, more evil things you can do to Apache, more off the wall out of the box ways to get things done. Visual Studio is a great product, but its really all there is. It's like a Versaille, a beautiful building for sure, amazing wonder, but no place to take a shit, because the designers thought shitting was bad. Meanwhile, Linux is the land of trailer parks and porta poddies. Might not smell so good, but at least you aren't shitting your pants.
d) bash is still better than powershell. On paper, powershell is better, but only MS could come up with a shell that requires so much fricking typing and looks so ugly.
e) Linux feels faster.
f) And, Linux yes, is cheaper. I paid 0.0000 dollars for an operating system that works to be transplanted and gives me lots of great tools. I have to lay out almost $1000 for Windows + Visual Studio.
It's like, I can be working on my web site on my new computer now, with an OS that's free and asked me to do little to migrate from one machine to another, or I can pay down a bunch more money to get at the data I already had, just because I'm using a new computer with it. I'm not a big socialist. I don't care about the ideology of FOSS, but Windows, you fucking suck!
Seriously, if Linux gets its act together enough to have a vision where your hard drive is transplantable from computer to computer, like it doesn't matter, with tools, data, operating system, preferences, everything, Wndows is dead meat. And Linux now, is getting very close to that.
Seriously, when the government starts talking about hosting, they can just throw hardware at it. When you are able to print money, the capital costs of anything are pretty much irrelevant.
First off, most leaders of the left wing imagine a future where scarcity is the norm, largely because they see the consumption of natural resources by the West as unethical in a larger world view. In their eyes, Americans already have "too much" and therefor should have to make due with less. This faux-conservatism, coupled with the right wing's stupid devotion to "free trade", is the underlying cause of this current economic crisis. It is that people want more stuff, resources are capped by environmental and ideological considerations, so, prices of goods are shooting up and people have less. Demand falls off, and unemployment shoots up. You add in free trade, and take away America's advantage in energy prices and expose our disadvantage in labor, and the country is totally fucked up.
It's pretty simple, actually.
Let's just think this through for a minute. Let's say that instead of having to borrow or raise taxes to have national health care, the USA simply turned around and issued permits to drill in ANWR and off the coasts. Instead of scraping to come up with 900B to pay for it, we would have that money coming in from ANWR alone, without a tax increase. Let's say for a minute that we build nuclear power plants everywhere, and lowered the price of energy to something like the 2 cents per kwh it is to operate a nuclear plant. Everyone would have effectively a 20% raise because of the energy savings not only for themselves but in the cost of every product or service that they buy, and that in turn would lower the price of medicine. If gasoline were a dollar a gallon, and electric bills not more than $20 a month, and food was cheap as well, everyone would feel pretty darned rich. Consumers would spend, tax revenues to the government would go up, and you could have an administration that throws national health care on the table coupled with a modest tax cut.
Bottom line is, regardless of whether you want to have the government doling out the goodies, or get yourself a tax cut, or even a combination of both, the most effective thing the government could do to do that would be to say screw the environmentalists and get cheap energy, no matter what. Energy -is- wealth, and the more wealth you have, the more stuff you can swing.
If everyone felt rich, than putting a national health care plan would be no big deal.
Instead of Windows, they went with OS/2, which bombed, at least in mainstream terms.
OS/2 Warp was by far a better operating system than Windows 3.x and Windows 95, but Windows then had an easier go of hardware compatibility because it could work with existing DOS based stuff, and OS/2 was a wholesale replacement. The problem with OS/2, was, that Windows NT was better than it.
Oh, I see, you mean Microsoft taking an 80% profit margin on the exact same hard drives imported from Taiwan and locked down.
I guess they unload them from the ship with a Ford Truck, I can hope for that.
The banks were forced to make low quality loans under the CRA; it just so happens that they were not the lowest quality loan
It's not the CRA. It's competition from Fannie Mae. That's the truth of the matter. Fannie was too big for banks to compete, so they took what they thought were warranted risks to be more aggressive. What they didn't realize was the extent to which FAnnie Mae itself was being stupid. It was really, Fannie Mae was retarded, so banks thought they had to be more retarded, to compete, and everyone got screwed.
In addition, there was nothing whatsoever that said the loans should be timebombs where the payments balloon to levels
Yes there was. I was offered exactly those loans in the go-go years and I took one and refinanced it down to a normal fixed loan once I got my credit cleaned up a bit.
Certainly nothing forced them to urge first time home buyers to get a McMansion rather than a starter home.
Of course, the left has to say that people are victims, so that it can steal their rights to run their lives from them. "You can't make this decision, look at this mess, therefor, we'll make it for you.." always the refrain of the American left. It's a joke. Those people care less about the average American than anyone else on the planet. To wit: nobody in Obama's car task force could even be bothered to buy an American car, and everyone on the left does nothing but rip the American South and the American South has been the sole producer of new musical genres in the USA for the last 100 years.
It's the sort of thing that makes me wonder if perhaps there is something to the "class warfare" business.
There is class warfare, for sure, there's the academic sector and media sectors of liberalism waging war on the rest of America.
Bullshit. The problem with the housing market was the securitization of mortgage debt, and insurance of that debt in a heavily deregulated market
Fannie Mae popularized mortgage backed securities, that's the point you miss. Fannie Mae floated this crap out to the market noting that they were going to use their existing asset base to raise a trillion dollars (at first), and put a bazillion people into houses. They used that money to seed more loans, and then used the loans they seeded to float even more securities. They've been borrowing money to borrow money now for 20 years and the only people that have been really protesting the chicanery was the right wing.
Still, I don't understand why so many lefties protest this. They got what they wanted to. They've been wanting to destroy capitalism and have the government run housing now for a 100 years and now they've succeeded in some good measure. Fannie Mae is now more than ever property of the US government, many banks have exited the mortgage market, commercial banking, which was the engine of American capitalism, is now dead.
And, not only that, you liberals have every chance to destroy private medicine as well and steal that for the government. So, you should be happy. But instead, oh no, you can't even communicate honestly that the sharp reduction in everyone's standard of living is consistent with your liberal puritanical goals of having everyone be equal but poor.
Microsoft's strong point has always been weird hardware, applications and development tools, since day 1 of Microsoft.
I -really- like the ribbon bar in Office 2007 so it will be hard to part with it.
But,
1) I'm still so happy that Linux booted up after I transplanted the hard drive from an old opteron into a new xeon with a completely different motherboard, that I'm thinking I can live with Open Office for now.
2) There's still an empty socket for another xeon on my new motherboard.
3) Windows 7, Visual Studio, all start to pile up in terms of costs, or, I could get another xeon, or upgrade my xeons, get more ram...
The hardware argument is pretty compelling...
The private sector is already doing something much more stupid
Stupid for you, not for me. I don't like that kind of glass. If I don't want my car to get hot, I roll the windows down.
The poster is indeed wrong that the CRA was the problem, but what you and other left wingers gloss over was the point that Fannie Mae was at fault.
Fannie could write commercial paper to lend based on the implicit guarantee by the US government. So Fannie did exactly that, and really went crazy with it. This money, they used to lend to people with questionable ratings and at interest rates that were, in effect, a subsidy.
Banks, of course, were not "forced" to make the same sorts of loans. They had the choice of either not writing the same junk and lending to the same people as Fannie, or losing the entire mortgage business to the government.
Conservatives did rail on about this for a long time. First off, of course, was the government subsidy of the mortgage business distorting the housing market. But even worse, is that the high returns caused by MBS drowned out investment in other sectors, for decades, so, thanks to the government program, America invested in building houses while other nations built things like manufacturing centers, etc. But of course, those warnings were dismissed and repeatedly by the left using its usual ad-hominem attacks. Opposition to Fannie Mae was mean spirited, racists, etc... Of course, left wing policies have so screwed up minorities in the USA economically that one should argue the left is racist, but I digress...
In any case, the fact of the matter is, if you have a government subsidizing a quasi public institution, you create a bubble for it, screw up investment in the economy at large, and of course, Democrats, undeterred by the total destruction of our housing market, are about to do it to health care.
It's just stupid.
Or is it?
Frankly, I would be willing to bet that the left -deliberately- ignores dangers created to the private sector by the federal programs because if the private sector is destroyed, we can all be socialized. It's like, all you hear from the left is this rhetoric about how free enterprise is evil,
So, in my mind, I would think you lefties would at least be honest revolutionaries and say that yes, your programs will eventually replace the private sector with the public sector and you are in favor of it. It's what you want, why lie about it?
It's about MS locking out Datel's product because it's 4x the storage (expandable to like.. 64x with a micro SDHC card
I'm ok with that so long as those network effects can be used to benefit American companies to the exclusion of foreign competitors.
Pfft... slippery slope. In this case, the company (Datel) already CREATED a working solution
For all we know the original story is a press release from Datel basically arguing that MS should keep the same format so Datel won't have to change (er, be locked out!)
Locking out the competitor's product should be illegal.
No, because, this is a subsidy of the competition. Next thing you know, you'd have to hold your competitor's hand, work together on some product, watch your own share evaporate....
Seriously, does anybody really think that government is made up of the country's smartest people?
The private sector could easily do something this stupid. It's just that, we have only one government, and in the private sector, stupid businesses are supposed to fail, unless they happen to be banks.
Let's replace HTML with proprietary WPF stuff ... while dragging our feet on HTML standards..
What a bunch of tools..
Not true he can write a book and do a Star Trek cameo
Yeah but you don't need a nobel prize to write a book. Now, to get on Star Trek, that's a different story....
Jesus was a socialist.
No he wasn't, because socialists do not believe in God.
Social Security is not welfare, it's insurance.
Disability is not welfare, it's insurance.
Medicare/Medicaid is not welfare, it's insurance.
Only in the sense that you have changed the definition of insurance.
Social Security is not insurance. In insurance, you pay a premium to manage the financial risk of an exceptional event occurring. If the event happens, you get some big payment commensurate with the premium that you paid and level of risk. There is no "risk factor" to social security, so you get old.
Medicare/Medicaid are not insurance. In the case of Medicare, again, there is no risk management. You get old, you sign up for Medicare. It's not insurance.
Disability is not insurance in the SSI sense because the people who are on disability tend to be permanently disabled. Again, what's the "risk" that someone who is blind will need continued federal support. It's not insurance, it's welfare.
If you're going to peddle right-wing bullshit, try to make it plausible right-wing bullshit, OK?
How about, the left wing tells the truth about something, anything, please. For the life of me I do not understand why you self-styled lefties have to pathologically lie about everything you promote? It's so obvious that entitlements are welfare, and yet, you can't even be bothered to call them for what they are.
Even now, you call "health insurance reform" "insurance", when its not. You say insurers should "cover" pre-existing conditions, or buy prescription drugs, or mammograms, when none of those are -risk- factors. If you want to have a national welfare program for mammograms and doctors visits, call it that, and then, have insurance be just what it is - a financial vehicle for risk management. But stop going around and telling people that "insurance" is just another way to get something for free, when all that free stuff really is, is welfare.
Give this man (and his colleagues) the Nobel prize already! This is some freaking impressive science.
There's no consumer products to be made from his discovery, so, no prize.