Adam Smith talked about markets with reverence because an open market is a truly free market. When the consumers are able to see the effect of their purchases, they make much better decisions.
The problem with markets today is that they value opaqueness and secrecy above anything else. If a financial institution dared to let any of their investors see the mish mash of VBA slugged excel spreadsheets that are running their lives, they would probably lose half of their customer base overnight. If McDonalds, or any major restaurant for that matter, had to provide origin information for the products it sold, and those slaughterhouses in turn had to show the conditions that their animals live in, or the salary they paid for vegetable picking, or the environmental damage of the pesticides that overwhelm local ecosystems, they would also see a drop in businesses.
The vast majority of modern capitalism is finding some entity to exploit or enslave for a profit, and then covering that up with lies and marketing.
The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.
"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."
What I can't stand is when people start playing semantics and twisting science to support a political point of view. Don't dehumanize a person by calling them collateral damage to make killing them easier to accept. Admit that they're human but that you want to the convenience and the choice.
I'd say after we try to stop killing walking and talking humans for convenience we can focus on stopping late term abortions.
Logic used to be the standard for audio production in Europe and for a lot of enthusiasts in America. It was cross platform and worked with almost any kind of interface.
Apple bought the company, ceased Windows development and support, and left a bunch of people out in the cold. This is the sort of thing that becomes anti-competitive once there's enough market share. It's when a company is so huge that they force people to use their products through acquisitions. It removes competitors from the market place, so the market literally ceases to become a market.
Yes, everyone knows of the tyranny of the metric system! It's lead to nothing but problems for the oppressed masses, unable to squirm out of it's iron maw...
If you'd take a check on a whim like that, I'd like to buy your car. I promise the check is good...
Of course, you're not asking the banker if you can have your money. You're telling him where you want your money sent. I send wires all the time, for amounts great and small, and the only thing that ever stops me is if the funds aren't there.
If the transaction is large, good luck hiding it anyway. Unless you are burying real cash in your backyard, it's difficult to hide during your audit. If it's small, we have cash and debit.
I live in the deep south - far far away from 3G wireless signals. Without giving too much away, I had a friend who was involved a "terroristic threat" lawsuit. He'd left a voicemail saying he was going to whip someone's ass - basically informing the person to stay away from his property or else.
He was nearly convicted on the felony account. Keep in mind, simple battery and simple assault are misdemeanors. So, his lawyer said he'll have less trouble if he just walks over to the guys house and beats him in his front yard than if he threatens to do so.
So, depending on your state, pay respect to the law. Swing first, and ask questions later.
Your attitude would directly increase the chances of more people being blown up in bus bombings.
And the attitude that any person who dislikes Israel should be treated like a criminal and denied basic rights does far more damage than any misguided kid's political views.
There isn't much difference between Israelis complaining about Palestinian violence and early pioneers complaining about Native American violence. If you take someone's land and property with force, they will probably do whatever they can to retaliate. If you don't want them to use terrorist tactics, have the US give the same amount of weapons to Palestine as it does to Israel. I'm sure the two state solution would suddenly be vastly more appealing to the hardliners who still want to steal Palestinian land under the guise of security.
A loose conglomerate of huge corporations that represent corporate viewpoints with rare exception, or a group of journalists with integrity who focus on keeping regular citizens informed and government and business in check?
If Fox news picks the story up, it'll be about how a huge business can't possibly be expected to keep tabs on all of it's subsidiaries. Which will immediately be followed by another story bashing ACORN, all without a hint of irony.
The issue you run into is that there is little incentive for the highly centralized players in fossil fuels to change their ways. It's an oligopoly and they all play by the same rules to ensure they are properly compensated for their massive capital investments. Shell and Exxon would ride our economy to the brink of failure in order to extract more profit. Good for them, not so good for us.
Of course, the government can't just sit on the taxes. They have to use those taxes to invest in new technology to compensate for the damage to the economy for overtaxing the old technology. There's no use risking the entire future of our economy by being afraid of being "too early" to come up with alternatives for something as vital as energy production.
No. They're in the business of promoting family values by having women in hooters halter tops threaten to carpet bomb the middle east to save Christmas from evil Atheists who...
And those of us with memories don't need a reminder.
Remember when we sent weapons to Iraq and trained their army to fight Iran? I mean, remember when we allowed them to gas the Kurds and Saddam Hussein was a secular Islamic leader stemming the tide against the Iranian Revolution and their Russian backers?
Wait, I forgot. Iraq is Evil and Saddam Hussein is Evil. They let Kuwaiti babies die in the floor in the hospital! Well, that turned out to by a lie by a diplomat's daughter. But anyway, we never did anything like that to Iraqi babies, I mean, besides starve them with an embargo for 10 years.
Remember when we invaded Iraq because they helped al Qaeda with plotting 9/11? I mean, remember when we invaded Iraq because they had WMD? I mean, remember when we invaded Iraq to liberate it's people?
A real writing instrument isn't mechanical. It requires the human hand to function, it lives and breathes the soul of a person, revealing their character and mood with every stroke.
Typewriters are machines. They separate you from the page, making each letter exactly the same. They jam. They're too heavy. Sometimes they break./postmodern wit
But for real, use what works for you. Writers fall in love with the tools that let them write, not matter how new or old.
I'd like something in between -- an e-ink screen with a super basic word processor and a USB port for my clicky keyboard, as God intended. Hook up the flash drive, dump it to a laptop to do the final drafts. No distractions, and few limitations for moving text around. I don't care who says what, I can write far faster on a computer than I can with any other method. There's just no comparison.
Sick of that boring old vat hamburger? Dive into Kraft's Ultracheese Burgernator! We genetically modified sentient meat into producing it's own cheese, which layers itself thick and rich with genuine Kraft-like flavor! We promise that it won't cause the zombie apocalypse!*
*Guarantees against the zombie apocalypse not guaranteed.
He should buy some decent fraud/identity theft insurance and just use a reasonably secured distro. All the anguish spent on perfect security is for naught anyway - if someone wants to rob you down there, they're more likely to beat you over the head or hold you hostage than hack into your computer.
It's a quick way to see what the value of a company is. Whether or not you agree with the market, the market says Google is worth roughly 4.5 more than Comcast. And, the "future" value of a company is often built into the price.
Google offers information services that are built on standard protocols, and will survive any permutation of information delivery technology. They can enter new markets by spending a few thousand dollars localizing their services. New products are launched and can scale immediately on their worldwide network of highly available data centers to millions of customers.
Comcast has to dig in the dirt, and is currently limited to delivering data in the slowly growing market of US customers who don't already have their service or something similar.
The BBC is really the gold standard here. A well funded public project to deliver news, more or less autonomous from government, more or less autonomous from corporate influence. As long as their are multiple nation states with their own version of publicly funded news, there will be someone somewhere who can get your story out. Throw in a mix of completely autonomous news sources and local blogs/papers, and I tend to agree that the future doesn't look that bleak.
The NYT and the Post and the rest are still subject to the whims of their advertisers, and are therefore pretty worthless as unbiased sources of information.
Read the Project for a New American Century's statement of principles here. Now read the PNAC letter to Clinton on Iraq here. Note that Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Jeb are all big supporters. Now read about their plans here.
The choice quote is: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."
My theory is that they had intelligence stating that the attack was going to happen. Just as many suspect happened at Pearl Harbor, they deliberately stood down defenses in order to get the catalyzing event that they need in order to enact foreign military operations. They may have done this truly believing it was in the best interests of the country, but the truth needs to come out, and those responsible punished.
I don't think they knew that the towers would collapse. It explains the look on George when he was first told we were under attack, and the look on his face during his address.
Slashdot Mirror
Adam Smith talked about markets with reverence because an open market is a truly free market. When the consumers are able to see the effect of their purchases, they make much better decisions.
The problem with markets today is that they value opaqueness and secrecy above anything else. If a financial institution dared to let any of their investors see the mish mash of VBA slugged excel spreadsheets that are running their lives, they would probably lose half of their customer base overnight. If McDonalds, or any major restaurant for that matter, had to provide origin information for the products it sold, and those slaughterhouses in turn had to show the conditions that their animals live in, or the salary they paid for vegetable picking, or the environmental damage of the pesticides that overwhelm local ecosystems, they would also see a drop in businesses.
The vast majority of modern capitalism is finding some entity to exploit or enslave for a profit, and then covering that up with lies and marketing.
Read about what happened in Portugal.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.
"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."
What I can't stand is when people start playing semantics and twisting science to support a political point of view. Don't dehumanize a person by calling them collateral damage to make killing them easier to accept. Admit that they're human but that you want to the convenience and the choice.
I'd say after we try to stop killing walking and talking humans for convenience we can focus on stopping late term abortions.
If drugs were legalized, it would do a hell of a lot more good for poor communities than any sort of handout.
On the other hand, if abortion were criminalized, many more women would die and the crime rate would spike 15 years later.
Logic used to be the standard for audio production in Europe and for a lot of enthusiasts in America. It was cross platform and worked with almost any kind of interface.
Apple bought the company, ceased Windows development and support, and left a bunch of people out in the cold. This is the sort of thing that becomes anti-competitive once there's enough market share. It's when a company is so huge that they force people to use their products through acquisitions. It removes competitors from the market place, so the market literally ceases to become a market.
Yes, everyone knows of the tyranny of the metric system! It's lead to nothing but problems for the oppressed masses, unable to squirm out of it's iron maw...
if time=x and frequency=y
f(x)= 1/x
x: (0, infinity)
If you'd take a check on a whim like that, I'd like to buy your car. I promise the check is good...
Of course, you're not asking the banker if you can have your money. You're telling him where you want your money sent. I send wires all the time, for amounts great and small, and the only thing that ever stops me is if the funds aren't there.
If the transaction is large, good luck hiding it anyway. Unless you are burying real cash in your backyard, it's difficult to hide during your audit. If it's small, we have cash and debit.
This was post #2 and already modded -1, Redundant.
I live in the deep south - far far away from 3G wireless signals. Without giving too much away, I had a friend who was involved a "terroristic threat" lawsuit. He'd left a voicemail saying he was going to whip someone's ass - basically informing the person to stay away from his property or else.
He was nearly convicted on the felony account. Keep in mind, simple battery and simple assault are misdemeanors. So, his lawyer said he'll have less trouble if he just walks over to the guys house and beats him in his front yard than if he threatens to do so.
So, depending on your state, pay respect to the law. Swing first, and ask questions later.
Your attitude would directly increase the chances of more people being blown up in bus bombings.
And the attitude that any person who dislikes Israel should be treated like a criminal and denied basic rights does far more damage than any misguided kid's political views.
There isn't much difference between Israelis complaining about Palestinian violence and early pioneers complaining about Native American violence. If you take someone's land and property with force, they will probably do whatever they can to retaliate. If you don't want them to use terrorist tactics, have the US give the same amount of weapons to Palestine as it does to Israel. I'm sure the two state solution would suddenly be vastly more appealing to the hardliners who still want to steal Palestinian land under the guise of security.
Just who do you think the media is?
A loose conglomerate of huge corporations that represent corporate viewpoints with rare exception, or a group of journalists with integrity who focus on keeping regular citizens informed and government and business in check?
If Fox news picks the story up, it'll be about how a huge business can't possibly be expected to keep tabs on all of it's subsidiaries. Which will immediately be followed by another story bashing ACORN, all without a hint of irony.
The issue you run into is that there is little incentive for the highly centralized players in fossil fuels to change their ways. It's an oligopoly and they all play by the same rules to ensure they are properly compensated for their massive capital investments. Shell and Exxon would ride our economy to the brink of failure in order to extract more profit. Good for them, not so good for us.
Of course, the government can't just sit on the taxes. They have to use those taxes to invest in new technology to compensate for the damage to the economy for overtaxing the old technology. There's no use risking the entire future of our economy by being afraid of being "too early" to come up with alternatives for something as vital as energy production.
No. They're in the business of promoting family values by having women in hooters halter tops threaten to carpet bomb the middle east to save Christmas from evil Atheists who...
Ahh, Jesus Christ. I've got to lie down now.
And those of us with memories don't need a reminder.
Remember when we sent weapons to Iraq and trained their army to fight Iran? I mean, remember when we allowed them to gas the Kurds and Saddam Hussein was a secular Islamic leader stemming the tide against the Iranian Revolution and their Russian backers?
Wait, I forgot. Iraq is Evil and Saddam Hussein is Evil. They let Kuwaiti babies die in the floor in the hospital! Well, that turned out to by a lie by a diplomat's daughter. But anyway, we never did anything like that to Iraqi babies, I mean, besides starve them with an embargo for 10 years.
Remember when we invaded Iraq because they helped al Qaeda with plotting 9/11? I mean, remember when we invaded Iraq because they had WMD? I mean, remember when we invaded Iraq to liberate it's people?
Wait, what's the story again?
You should've googled it.
Thanks, buddy. I suddenly feel much better about myself.
A real writing instrument isn't mechanical. It requires the human hand to function, it lives and breathes the soul of a person, revealing their character and mood with every stroke.
Typewriters are machines. They separate you from the page, making each letter exactly the same. They jam. They're too heavy. Sometimes they break. /postmodern wit
But for real, use what works for you. Writers fall in love with the tools that let them write, not matter how new or old.
I'd like something in between -- an e-ink screen with a super basic word processor and a USB port for my clicky keyboard, as God intended. Hook up the flash drive, dump it to a laptop to do the final drafts. No distractions, and few limitations for moving text around. I don't care who says what, I can write far faster on a computer than I can with any other method. There's just no comparison.
It's a pain in the ass applying bronze age ethics to modern life, isn't it?
Hey Kids!
Sick of that boring old vat hamburger? Dive into Kraft's Ultracheese Burgernator! We genetically modified sentient meat into producing it's own cheese, which layers itself thick and rich with genuine Kraft-like flavor! We promise that it won't cause the zombie apocalypse!*
*Guarantees against the zombie apocalypse not guaranteed.
He should buy some decent fraud/identity theft insurance and just use a reasonably secured distro. All the anguish spent on perfect security is for naught anyway - if someone wants to rob you down there, they're more likely to beat you over the head or hold you hostage than hack into your computer.
Oblig. XKCD: 538
And you wonder why Apple users start to get an attitude? It's because we've been suffering dolt-ish comments like this for so long.
I thought it was because you were broke...
It's a quick way to see what the value of a company is. Whether or not you agree with the market, the market says Google is worth roughly 4.5 more than Comcast. And, the "future" value of a company is often built into the price.
Google offers information services that are built on standard protocols, and will survive any permutation of information delivery technology. They can enter new markets by spending a few thousand dollars localizing their services. New products are launched and can scale immediately on their worldwide network of highly available data centers to millions of customers.
Comcast has to dig in the dirt, and is currently limited to delivering data in the slowly growing market of US customers who don't already have their service or something similar.
I'd say the market is right on this one.
The BBC is really the gold standard here. A well funded public project to deliver news, more or less autonomous from government, more or less autonomous from corporate influence. As long as their are multiple nation states with their own version of publicly funded news, there will be someone somewhere who can get your story out. Throw in a mix of completely autonomous news sources and local blogs/papers, and I tend to agree that the future doesn't look that bleak.
The NYT and the Post and the rest are still subject to the whims of their advertisers, and are therefore pretty worthless as unbiased sources of information.
Read the Project for a New American Century's statement of principles here. Now read the PNAC letter to Clinton on Iraq here. Note that Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Jeb are all big supporters. Now read about their plans here.
The choice quote is: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."
My theory is that they had intelligence stating that the attack was going to happen. Just as many suspect happened at Pearl Harbor, they deliberately stood down defenses in order to get the catalyzing event that they need in order to enact foreign military operations. They may have done this truly believing it was in the best interests of the country, but the truth needs to come out, and those responsible punished.
I don't think they knew that the towers would collapse. It explains the look on George when he was first told we were under attack, and the look on his face during his address.