Except such an idea is the will of the mob. Whatever is popular will pass. Whatever is unpopular will not pass. Consider things like slavery and the Civil Rights Act. In both cases, a minority (blacks) were being either exploited or oppressed by a majority (whites). In your "perfect" system, the minority can never prevail over the majority unless you can convince the majority of a "higher purpose."
How else do you expect a society to progress? When the slaves were freed, they went from one type of bondage to another. And considering the imprisonment rate of minorities, some would argue it's still in place after the civil rights act. Listen, if you don't like a democracy, the only other option is going to be totalitarianism, and you'd better drop your support of the free market.
Keep in mind that racism in colonial America was fomented by the rich, since the indentured servants and slaves and Indians realized that they were all being treated the same, and started to revolt. Racism and war and religion are the designs of the powerful, because they offer simple control mechanisms to turn the people they exploit on each other.
History doesn't exactly shine with examples of that working.
Yes, the last hundred years of American history are proof that democracy doesn't work. But not in the way you'd think.
As it is, the representative democracy that is the United States abolished slavery and passed the Civil Rights Act even though there was never a majority of the population in favor of it. Your system would've denied that.
Less wealth disparity? Please explain to me why it's a bad thing that somebody has more money than somebody else?
What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can be flourishing and happy if the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. -Adam Smith
This is cursory and almost innate knowledge to anyone who has looked at, say, any history, at all, ever. From the Romans to the French Revolution to WWII - wealth disparity is a very bad thing.
Why should I care two damns how many billions of dollars Bill Gates has in his pocket? Does it prevent me from earning my own billion? No it does not.
It does if he spends that billion dollars making sure that the laws are written for himself and his friends, and telling you to go fuck yourself.
"Wealth disparity" is just a more slippery, fuzzy name for "wealth envy." Even though Bill Gates's billions don't hurt (or benefit) you directly in any way, you just don't like that he has them and you don't. So you despise the wealthy and dream up terms like "wealth disparity" to make you feel righteous in your hatred of anyone who has more toys than you.
It's unfortunate that you don't have a clue about what you're saying. Find one respected economist who will state unequivocally that wealth disparity can never be a problem.
And if you want to talk about "colonial" and use the US and UK as examples -- and France, Germany, and Italy as counter-examples -- then perhaps you should acquaint yourself with France's colonial history, or the German-Italian Axis powers of WWII. You see quite selective in your history, either out of ignorance or malice. I'm going to give you benefit of the doubt and assume you're just too ignorant to know better.
I usually speak in postwar terms, as does the rest of the world. If you want to live inside of a history experiment, that's okay. It's probably the only place that your ideas will have any merit.
Canada has the most stable banking system in the world today. Because it is the most regulated banking system in the world.
If America reduced it's oil consumption and developed new technologies to do so, not only would it be more efficient and competitive in the future, when rising oil prices are inevitable, it can also sell the technologies to other developing countries.
You're basically arguing that we shouldn't work on computer technology, because if we do we'll have less money for beer. I imagine those who invest in technology instead of getting shitfaced will do better in the future.
True. One billion billion barrels gone, one billion billion to go. According to the man who predicted, to the year, the day the United States peaked it's production. Since 1970, no matter how many resources you throw at it, you guess less oil out each year in the United States.
The trouble is that the market is unpredictable. No one knows the year when people realize oil really is going to run out. Once that happens, the oil shock last year is going to look like a tea party. $150 a barrel cost the average american $2500 extra per year. Imagine $300 a barrel. Now keep in mind that other modern industrial economies use seven times less. Would you rather prepare our economy for this eventuality or let the market that gave us suburbs provide the solution?
Whenever we start to get close to running out of oil we will find alternative energy sources. To date, there is no energy source that is cheaper, more efficient and profitable other than oil.
So there's no energy source more efficient, but we don't need to worry about running out? At least you got the profitable part right.
And by the way, energy conversion from oil to gasoline to moving your car is about 30%. We're just lucky it's so dense.
Government funding only go so far, and most of the time it ends up wasting tax dollars for an undefined goal and leads to many dead ends. Let the free market do it and you will have a solution. Let the government do it and you will end up with even more wasted tax dollars and a broken "solution".
How has the free market solution to health care been working out? How has the free market solution to financial instruments been working out?
Let's think about the free market solution to very complicated problems, like cancer. Firstly, remember that the free market doesn't give a shit about cancer. As long as they make more money treating it, there's no real incentive to cure it. Last year, the US Government invested 5 billion dollars into cancer research. Pharmaceutical companies spent 4.4 billion in advertising for their products, mostly things like Viagra, which had a $122 million dollar marketing campaign.
I wasn't able to find any figures on private cancer funding, but the options look like non-profit organizations. Why is this? Why doesn't Pfizer want to cure cancer? The answer is they have no economic incentive to do so. The costs of the research outweigh the possible reward. How do you expect a society to progress in this sort of state?
Government projects only work with a defined goal. Just think of our space program, there was a definite goal of putting a man on the moon within a few years. It was quickly accomplished. On the other hand projects with little to no goals such as the war in Iraq end up wasting money, time and lives.
So, just make the goal "Let's make a battery this efficient and this recyclable" or "let's design a light rail system that can run on daily solar power."
Iraq has been a success. American companies have access to Iraqi oil, and America has more permanent military bases in the middle east, so they can control what's left of it.
Public transport also raises a lot of other questions. Not only the general pain of having to deal with the hobo who is sitting in his own pee
Here's where I like your post, because it illustrates something. Namely, your hatred of the disadvantaged. There's a 1 in 4 chance that hobo is a vet, but I doubt it matters much to you.
but also disease transmission. If swine flu had been a real lethal pandemic and we had mostly public transportation it would spread and wipe out a lot of the population much more quickly than most people being confined to cars for day-to-day travel.
To arrive in buildings to work together? Does any scientist support your theory, or are you just talk
I think our society needs to begin to understand that all of the dense, useful energy they are pulling out of the ground took hundreds of millions of years to create. Wasting such a valuable finite resource is useful if and only if it is used to transition to an energy system that uses that day's sun energy to do that day's tasks.
The energy problem is quite simple. Stop zoning cities for cars. As soon as the economy is back in swing, slowly raise the gas tax and funnel all of that money directly into solar and battery technology research. Raise electric consumption taxes for all fossil fuel burning power plants to fund the construction of solar and wind. Build some trains that run off of solar energy sources on main highways. Connect those to neighborhoods with short range electric buses, bikes, and small sugar cane burning scooters.
Denial of human rights doesn't work, whether through communism or oligarchy parading as democracy.
Once people demand and establish direct democracy and stay active in it, no other solution will come close. The more decentralized enforcement it has, the longer it will last. You'll notice how countries where people stay active in unions - France, Germany, Italy - have less wealth disparity, happier citizens, and have tended to be more pacifistic and less colonialist than the UK and the US.
Marx had it right in some ways - workers must have a huge stake in the places they work. Capitalists have it right in some ways - where there is a sensible regulated market, which allows competition by making everyone play by fair and moral rules, you will have a more efficient economy.
The problem is that for thousands of years a very small class of people has had control over the direction of the world, and unsurprisingly, they try to force it to bend to benefit themselves. Technology is undoing their hold on what can be valuable, and the internet is taking their control over propaganda away. The printing press destroyed monarchies and the catholic church. I think the internet will destroy corporatism and fundamentalism.
I was thinking DisplayPort or something useful. It may have a cheesy video out that shows what video is playing, but you cannot use a secondary monitor as a display on any of the iPod models.
But if you look at the iPod Touch, and you look at where people are going with these days, you'll notice that the sales of netbooks are absolutely skyrocketing. Apple doesn't have any product that takes advantage of this new market. So, as a company dedicated to profit, they may make one.
My prediction: Macbook Touch. Atom Processor. Bluetooth, Wifi, also available with wireless broadband. $799 with no provider, or for $499 with a contract from AT&T or whomever. Compatible with apps made for the iPhone, running Snow Leopard.
They'll probably fuck it up by including just one USB port and no video out. But hey, that's Apple.
This is really, really fucking easy. In fact, it's so easy, I'm amazed I even have these conversations, because the facts are so obvious.
Does the American government care if people are denied freedom under fundamentalist interpretations of muslim law? If they did, why did they support the Taleban before 9/11? Why do they continue to support Saudi Arabia? Why aren't they lobbying for human rights in muslim countries in Africa?
Does the American government care if a leader is massacring his own people? If they did, they wouldn't have given Saddam the biochemical agents to gas the Kurds, or given Suharto in Indonesia the arms he needed to kill East Timorese, or stood by while the Rwanda descended into hell in and genocide.
So what is all this bullshit about freedom and liberty? A nice way to sell the lie to the American people that deploying the military is helping someone besides our paranoid military planners and the corporations who are rewarded with tens of billions of dollars when we are at war, and with hundreds of billions of dollars every year in "defense" spending.
What is the truth? The truth is that the Pentagon supports whatever country is doing as they are told. When they lose control, they send in the CIA to foment a coup, or in cases where they can propagandize the public enough, they send in the troops. This is the definition of tyranny, and America has been living it for 60 years.
You want statistics? Add up how many Americans have been killed by foreigners on US soil. Add up how many foreigners have been killed by Americans on their soil. I don't even have to do the math, and unless you are Sean Hannity, you already know what the result is going to be.
And unfortunately, even comparing the embargo before 2003 to the casualties during the war and after will reveal that we did far more damage than Saddam.
The picture in Iraq is not rosy. It will take them decades to get back to where they were in 2002. Watch the video below. Eight minutes in she says, "Everything you see that looks like water is not. It is sewage... According to the GAO, the children who are age 15 and younger are less literate than their parents... over 25% of primary school age children do not attend school."
No. The bankruptcy of the US will depend on two things: on the amount and destinations of public expenditures, and on whether the US continues to sabotage its economic base.
First, provide a single study saying that Keynesian economics doesn't work. Now explain why the US, who has been engaged in that economic policy since the 50s with military spending, is still the most productive in the world. You'll have to be more specific with "economic base." If you mean tax rates on the very rich, they are the lowest in modern US history. Still far lower than when Reagan was in office, even if you don't count tax loopholes. The "sky is falling" mentality is a product of sincerely ignorant people who don't bother to venture even 30 years into history.
A resilient US economy can easily survive more expensive oil... As for your other points, the only real concern is sudden, permanent changes in the oil economy. Merely being dependent on unstable government produced oil is not that significant.
It's significant enough to send us to war twice in less than 20 years. Why do you think the only enemies of the state you hear about on the news sit on top or near a bunch of oil? Furthermore, one of the best ways to stop terrorism is to cut it's funding. You can only do that if you stop sending billions of dollars to Saudi Arabia every year.
Europeans use on average 13% of the oil of an average American. Do you think if oil prices hit $200 or $300 a barrel, we will remain competitive in a global market?
Yes, the freedom to produce an "inefficient" car is that important. People have freedom. Governments and societies should not.
If you actually believed that, I would be surprised. How is it that you trust a government with nuclear arms and not minimum fuel efficiencies? Again, you're free to play word games in historical mind experiments. That doesn't mean you're doing anything useful.
And if you want to play historical mind experiment, please read the Federalist papers again. There are sections entirely devoted to why a "vigorous" federal government is necessary when dealing with commerce. I've quoted sections of it already. Can you please provide any quotation from any of the founding documents that provide more evidence on the other side?
As CrimsonAvenger pointed out, we don't spend a plurality of our budget on warfare, but rather on entitlements. And given that the US enjoys the greatest benefits from the US hegemony, then it is reasonable that it bears the greatest burdens.
That trick only works if you include social security. I supplied him with links. If you want to ignore the facts to keep your worldview intact, you're welcome to it.
And let me address hegemony. If you think that the average American is better off than the average Swede, Briton, German, Frenchman, Dutch, Dane, or Norwegian, you could spend all of 10 minutes in the CIA world factbook to set that misconception straight. The top 1% of American society may be doing very well, but that was also the case with pre-revolutionary France and Stalinist Russia.
The thing that is missed here is that if there isn't natural economic pressure, then probably there shouldn't be government pressure either. Sitting there and doing nothing may indeed be the smartest thing the government can do. As I see it, the only real problem the government can help with is rapid, permanent changes. The US has six months of buffer against a complete shutdown of oil, both domestic and import. Frankly, I see that as good enough especially since one considers that domestic and friendly production isn't going to go away that suddenly.
If you think you can find an alternative to plastics, fertilizer, gasoline transportation, and how to get coal from the mountain to the power plant - all of these in 6 months -- I'm real happy for you. Some of us believe it would take quite a bit longer. Tell me so
Well, if you don't count money spend in Iraq and Afghanistan as war spending, and if you can't extrapolate that the figures from Wikipedia were compiled from government sources, trying to show you facts is close to useless.
If you really want to know what social security is, and learn why it shouldn't be lumped in with the rest of the budget, you can read this:
Social security is not federal income tax. That's why it's a separate line item on your pay stub, and it's not lumped into the general fund, unless you mean by the way the government lends social security funds to itself through treasury bonds. Social security is huge, and is included in federal budgets because it very nicely makes it seem like we spend a lot of money on social services, when we actually spend very little.
Wouldn't surprise me. Something like 90% of the "suspected terrorists" rounded up in Afghanistan were turned in for cash, usually by rival tribes or by the very people attacking them. That's the way the first man we tortured to death was caught, anyway.
The real ethical problem with this is that a fully autonomous robot army, or even a semi-autonomous one remotely controlled by humans, further removes the people who benefit from warfare from it's reality.
Imagine if someone has real intelligence stating that there is a nuclear - not dirty - bomb in possession of a terrorist, and if we kill these two thousand people tonight, there's a 99% chance that one of the casualties will be the suspect. If you're sending in a bunch of robots to break down the doors and shoot people in the face, what decision do you think will be made?
When the only thing holding the Pentagon back is their own set of ethical questions, we are all fucked.
If you drop a fucking robot into a village where a vast majority of the people don't know how to read, what do you think they're going to do? They'll shoot at it, get the backs of their heads blown off, and then everyone will say, "Well, the dumbass shouldn't have shot at the robot!"
If this war on terror is so important, sign up. If you can't, get your brother or sister or even better, sign your kids up. If they're not of age yet, they'd better be in the JROTC. Then you can talk to me about how using drones and missiles isn't the dominion of motherfucking cowards. It's for freedom lovers defending freedom!
And if you think it isn't, imagine what the headlines would be if China landed a few thousand autonomous tanks and droids in Los Angeles. Oh, but that's right. This is about principles for others to follow, and for us to ignore.
How do you "spend" Social Security? We pay into Social Security, and we get money back out. The question is what our tax dollars are spent on. Including it in a discretionary budget is dishonest at best. Plus, you're lumping in the VA and warfare interest with non-war budgetary items.
If you add the DoD, nuclear arms spending in the DoE, and funding provided to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's one trillion dollars per year, according to official government sources. Also according to official government sources, they can't account for about 25% of that. Donald Rumsfeld stated in 2001 that there was possibly 2.3 trillion dollars that they couldn't account for.
If the constitution is irrelevant whenever it disagrees with modern practice, why does it matter what some dead guy argued 220 years ago? If you're going to ignore the foundational documents, you may as well not bother with appeals to that authority, and just make arguments that stand on their own merits.
I made both. I supplied a quotation from the founding documents supporting my side of the argument, in addition to stating why that quotation is largely irrelevant. It's you who have yet to supply any quotation from any original source that supports the other side.
The point is that the commerce in question is not interstate. But I suppose all of those state legislatures are just engaging in a historical mind experiment.
You think the commerce in question is not interstate. SCOTUS disagrees. Typically, to save time and avoid political posturing and squabbling about commerce - an aim of the founding fathers, in my opinion, when there is a disagreement - our legislative branch picks the side of the Federal Government.
Those state legislatures are engaged in wholesale political posturing. If they actually cared about the constitutional powers of the Federal government, why are guns, abortion, and gay marriage the only issues they ever bring up? When the Dept of Homeland Security was formed, there wasn't a peep about more concentration of Federal power.
My view is the the Federal Government is too centralized and powerful. I think the institutions that deny due process like the CIA and NSA and DHS should be vehemently attacked for being unconstitutional, and then we can worry about things of lesser importance. I think that's a more principled stance that the people who claim to have principles, but are in fact extraordinary hypocrites. When it comes to unconstitutionality, regulating minimum fuel efficiency isn't even on my radar.
Doesn't work that way -- or at least it wasn't supposed to. The US Constitution specifies the limited set of powers given to the federal government, and reserves everything else to the sates and the people. Unless you can find something in there that indicates this SHOULD be a federal responsibility, it shouldn't... You're right about the CIA, NSA, CDC and FEMA; they can't be justified constitutionally. With the possible exception of the CDC they're also agencies which are often found infringing on civil liberties. The FBI is also pretty questionable.
So, it doesn't work that way, or it does? I'm not interested in political theory, necessarily. The Constitutionality of the federal government is only professed when someone doesn't like something about the federal program. My original point was that the creation of a standard minimum of gas efficiency has more of constitutional basis than the CIA, given the view expressed in the Federalist papers that a regulation of commerce in the interests of the union trumps state rights.
If we as a nation really think we need those agencies, and we need them to be part of the federal executive branch, then we should ratify the appropriate constitutional amendments to allow them to be created, rather than simply ignoring the founding document.
That would never be approved by the people. That's why questioning the constitutionality of the CIA or NSA isn't allowable discussion.
The Constitution intended the bulk of non-naval national defense to be performed via state militias. National Guard units can (and do) provide air power.
I'm not a Federalist scholar, but there is this bit from No. 13:
If, in addition to the consideration of a plurality of civil lists, we take into view the number of persons who must necessarily be employed to guard the inland communication between the different confederacies against illicit trade, and who in time will infallibly spring up out of the necessities of revenue; and if we also take into view the military establishments which it has been shown would unavoidably result from the jealousies and conflicts of the several nations into which the States would be divided, we shall clearly discover that a separation would be not less injurious to the economy, than to the tranquillity, commerce, revenue, and liberty of every part.
The full-time federal military forces should be a tiny fraction of what they are. Among other things, reducing them to a Constitutional level would remove the temptation to deploy them all over the world to meddle in the affairs of others. That would be a good thing since no president, from either party, seems to be able to resist that temptation.
No disagreements there. Again, this would be in line with actual constitutional theory, which in practice, has no bearing on modern US politics.
The sovereign states are empowered to respond to threats, both individually and collectively. And if the states collectively feel that it's necessary to give additional power to the federal government, then the states can do that, through the amendment process.
This view is totally antiquated. In practice, for hundreds of years now, all national defense is handled by the federal government. If you want to perform a historical mind experiment, go ahead. But it's a waste of time, in my opinion.
There's a simple and completely constitutional mechanism to address these issues: Congress can tax imports. They should put a $50 per barrel tax on imported oil. This would provide the motivation for more efficient cars as well as boosting focus on exploiting local oil resources (oil shale, tar sands, etc.) and use of renewable energy sources.
They could. In the current economic situation, do you want to raise energy costs to our economy by a few hundred billion dollars, or require that automakers se
This is just wrong. Fossil fuels haven't been "bankrupting" the US.
It depends on how dearly you value government propaganda. Did we invade Iraq to stop Saddam, or to liberate it's people? Do we continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars that mostly goes to wars that are fought in the Middle East because we like the natives, or because they sit on top of 80% of what's left of the most important natural resource in the entire world?
If the US government does enter bankruptcy, it won't be because of the modest contribution from oil to the US's current account deficit. Instead, it'll be because the US government has created huge liabilities (debt and obligations like the entitlements) while sabotaging the productivity of the US economy.
It will be because we spend the plurality, probably even a majority of our budget on warfare. We outspend the rest of the world combined every year. Do you think that's reasonable?
I don't understand the desire to fabricate a single point of view for a body of people with diverse opinion on what government should and shouldn't do.
That's why I called it ridiculous to request right after I said it.
My viewpoint is that the US government hasn't demonstrated a need for regulating the gas consumption of vehicles, especially since such regulation would only apply to cars and not other consumption of foreign imported fossil fuels. Even if some sort of regulation is required, it's obvious that a gas or even a carbon tax is a more effective means of passing on the externalities of oil consumption than regulating the oil consumption of vehicles directly.
The entire point of government regulation is to apply economic pressure where there is none naturally. Imagine if someone said your society is entirely dependent on a resource that is quickly becoming less reliably obtained, more expensive, and is usually found in politically unstable areas of the world. Is the smart thing to do just sit there with your thumb up your ass, or to take preventative measures by leveraging technology to decrease your need for this particular resource?
It's debatable whether a consumption tax would be more effective, but I think in the current economic situation, it's better to aim high for fuel efficiency in five or six years - fuel efficiency that is already present in every other industrialized country in the world - than to increase the cost of doing business tomorrow.
Sure, buddy. Just provide a single quote, footnote, or anything supporting your claim that the founding fathers would be against this particular regulation. Seems rather ridiculous, doesn't it?
There's no direct constitutional support for the CIA, NSA, Air Force, CDC, FDA, FEMA... the list is pretty long. The founding fathers could not conceive of of much of our modern world. So, did they in particular have a propensity to deny states certain rights that threatened the prosperity and security of the nation? I would say yes.
Does dependence on a finite fuel which has been bankrupting our country for decades count as a danger? Is the freedom to produce an inefficient car that important in comparison? Again, I would say that the "freedom" to have a Hummer matters far less than the freedom to be free of entangling alliances and dependence on foreign nations for basic transportation.
But you can stick to your petty little remarks, if you like. Or say something meaningful, if you disagree. It's up to you.
I couldn't find it in the article. But in the Globe article it stated some incredibly stupid "facts." The first was that we import more oil now than we did in 1975. That's because we produce far less oil. US oil production peaked in 1970, as predicted by oil geologist Hubbard. Then it states that we now use more oil than ever. Amazing. I wonder if that has anything to do with the population being larger? Or the fact that there are more cars on the road?
Sorry. Forcing all new cars to have better fuel economy just means when people do trade in, they will be using less gas, and thus less oil. And in 5 years, there's a very good chance they will be plugin electrics with gas generators which use almost no oil and far less oil-dependent components, like belts, transmissions, motor oil, and so on.
The powers [of the federal government] included in the THIRD class are those which provide for the harmony and proper intercourse among the States....to wit: to regulate commerce among the several States and the Indian tribes; to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin; to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the current coin and secureties of the United States; to fix the standard of weights and measures; to establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws of bankruptcy, to prescribe the manner in which the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of each State shall be proved, and the effect they shall have in other States; and to establish post offices and post roads.
I haven't read the Federalist papers in a bit, but what historical evidence have you found that makes you believe that the primary goal was liberty from regulations?
I used to work at an ISP in the dirty dirty, back in the days when all we had were 8 external modems on a card table.
There was a cable cut that took out our T1 connection, and soon frantic calls from end users were coming in. For whatever reason, people just didn't accept that the "whole internet" could be inaccessible because our connection to it was severed.
We just started telling people that the internet was on fire. And for some reason, they would say "Oh, okay" and hang up.
That doesn't beat the time when a customer told me that the "computer inside his computer" was making funny noises. Looking back though, it sort of makes sense.
It's a hobby desktop, for sure. If you need a stable box with an ethernet plug to run server software on, you can't ask for anything better than Linux. If you want a stable desktop for anything beyond basic e-mail and web surfing, Linux is unfortunately the worst choice out of the three major options. It's far far better than it was even two or three years ago, but a lack of professional native GUI applications and Xorg are still the achilles heel of desktop Linux.
I was fiddling with Ubuntu this weekend, and decided I wanted to sit back and watch a DVD that I'd ripped. So, I sat back in my chair, fullscreened VLC, and then Xorg quit, the display went dead, and when I rebooted, I had a choice: boot into Windows 7 and go about my business, or possibly lose the rest of the entire day on a wild goose chase through forums, config files, and god knows what else.
On one of my only afternoons off, guess what option I chose?
Now, I see that I may just have to disable xv in gstreamer - fair enough, and I'll probably give it another shot. But imagine an average user having to do that over and over again.
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Except such an idea is the will of the mob. Whatever is popular will pass. Whatever is unpopular will not pass. Consider things like slavery and the Civil Rights Act. In both cases, a minority (blacks) were being either exploited or oppressed by a majority (whites). In your "perfect" system, the minority can never prevail over the majority unless you can convince the majority of a "higher purpose."
How else do you expect a society to progress? When the slaves were freed, they went from one type of bondage to another. And considering the imprisonment rate of minorities, some would argue it's still in place after the civil rights act. Listen, if you don't like a democracy, the only other option is going to be totalitarianism, and you'd better drop your support of the free market.
Keep in mind that racism in colonial America was fomented by the rich, since the indentured servants and slaves and Indians realized that they were all being treated the same, and started to revolt. Racism and war and religion are the designs of the powerful, because they offer simple control mechanisms to turn the people they exploit on each other.
History doesn't exactly shine with examples of that working.
Yes, the last hundred years of American history are proof that democracy doesn't work. But not in the way you'd think.
As it is, the representative democracy that is the United States abolished slavery and passed the Civil Rights Act even though there was never a majority of the population in favor of it. Your system would've denied that.
You are lying.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/1964_civil_rights_act.htm
Less wealth disparity? Please explain to me why it's a bad thing that somebody has more money than somebody else?
What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can be flourishing and happy if the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. -Adam Smith
This is cursory and almost innate knowledge to anyone who has looked at, say, any history, at all, ever. From the Romans to the French Revolution to WWII - wealth disparity is a very bad thing.
Why should I care two damns how many billions of dollars Bill Gates has in his pocket? Does it prevent me from earning my own billion? No it does not.
It does if he spends that billion dollars making sure that the laws are written for himself and his friends, and telling you to go fuck yourself.
"Wealth disparity" is just a more slippery, fuzzy name for "wealth envy." Even though Bill Gates's billions don't hurt (or benefit) you directly in any way, you just don't like that he has them and you don't. So you despise the wealthy and dream up terms like "wealth disparity" to make you feel righteous in your hatred of anyone who has more toys than you.
It's unfortunate that you don't have a clue about what you're saying. Find one respected economist who will state unequivocally that wealth disparity can never be a problem.
And if you want to talk about "colonial" and use the US and UK as examples -- and France, Germany, and Italy as counter-examples -- then perhaps you should acquaint yourself with France's colonial history, or the German-Italian Axis powers of WWII. You see quite selective in your history, either out of ignorance or malice. I'm going to give you benefit of the doubt and assume you're just too ignorant to know better.
I usually speak in postwar terms, as does the rest of the world. If you want to live inside of a history experiment, that's okay. It's probably the only place that your ideas will have any merit.
Canada has the most stable banking system in the world today. Because it is the most regulated banking system in the world.
If America reduced it's oil consumption and developed new technologies to do so, not only would it be more efficient and competitive in the future, when rising oil prices are inevitable, it can also sell the technologies to other developing countries.
You're basically arguing that we shouldn't work on computer technology, because if we do we'll have less money for beer. I imagine those who invest in technology instead of getting shitfaced will do better in the future.
There is a massive amount of oil still left.
True. One billion billion barrels gone, one billion billion to go. According to the man who predicted, to the year, the day the United States peaked it's production. Since 1970, no matter how many resources you throw at it, you guess less oil out each year in the United States.
The trouble is that the market is unpredictable. No one knows the year when people realize oil really is going to run out. Once that happens, the oil shock last year is going to look like a tea party. $150 a barrel cost the average american $2500 extra per year. Imagine $300 a barrel. Now keep in mind that other modern industrial economies use seven times less. Would you rather prepare our economy for this eventuality or let the market that gave us suburbs provide the solution?
Whenever we start to get close to running out of oil we will find alternative energy sources. To date, there is no energy source that is cheaper, more efficient and profitable other than oil.
So there's no energy source more efficient, but we don't need to worry about running out? At least you got the profitable part right.
And by the way, energy conversion from oil to gasoline to moving your car is about 30%. We're just lucky it's so dense.
Government funding only go so far, and most of the time it ends up wasting tax dollars for an undefined goal and leads to many dead ends. Let the free market do it and you will have a solution. Let the government do it and you will end up with even more wasted tax dollars and a broken "solution".
How has the free market solution to health care been working out? How has the free market solution to financial instruments been working out?
Let's think about the free market solution to very complicated problems, like cancer. Firstly, remember that the free market doesn't give a shit about cancer. As long as they make more money treating it, there's no real incentive to cure it. Last year, the US Government invested 5 billion dollars into cancer research. Pharmaceutical companies spent 4.4 billion in advertising for their products, mostly things like Viagra, which had a $122 million dollar marketing campaign.
I wasn't able to find any figures on private cancer funding, but the options look like non-profit organizations. Why is this? Why doesn't Pfizer want to cure cancer? The answer is they have no economic incentive to do so. The costs of the research outweigh the possible reward. How do you expect a society to progress in this sort of state?
Government projects only work with a defined goal. Just think of our space program, there was a definite goal of putting a man on the moon within a few years. It was quickly accomplished. On the other hand projects with little to no goals such as the war in Iraq end up wasting money, time and lives.
So, just make the goal "Let's make a battery this efficient and this recyclable" or "let's design a light rail system that can run on daily solar power."
Iraq has been a success. American companies have access to Iraqi oil, and America has more permanent military bases in the middle east, so they can control what's left of it.
Public transport also raises a lot of other questions. Not only the general pain of having to deal with the hobo who is sitting in his own pee
Here's where I like your post, because it illustrates something. Namely, your hatred of the disadvantaged. There's a 1 in 4 chance that hobo is a vet, but I doubt it matters much to you.
but also disease transmission. If swine flu had been a real lethal pandemic and we had mostly public transportation it would spread and wipe out a lot of the population much more quickly than most people being confined to cars for day-to-day travel.
To arrive in buildings to work together? Does any scientist support your theory, or are you just talk
I think our society needs to begin to understand that all of the dense, useful energy they are pulling out of the ground took hundreds of millions of years to create. Wasting such a valuable finite resource is useful if and only if it is used to transition to an energy system that uses that day's sun energy to do that day's tasks.
The energy problem is quite simple. Stop zoning cities for cars. As soon as the economy is back in swing, slowly raise the gas tax and funnel all of that money directly into solar and battery technology research. Raise electric consumption taxes for all fossil fuel burning power plants to fund the construction of solar and wind. Build some trains that run off of solar energy sources on main highways. Connect those to neighborhoods with short range electric buses, bikes, and small sugar cane burning scooters.
Denial of human rights doesn't work, whether through communism or oligarchy parading as democracy.
Once people demand and establish direct democracy and stay active in it, no other solution will come close. The more decentralized enforcement it has, the longer it will last. You'll notice how countries where people stay active in unions - France, Germany, Italy - have less wealth disparity, happier citizens, and have tended to be more pacifistic and less colonialist than the UK and the US.
Marx had it right in some ways - workers must have a huge stake in the places they work. Capitalists have it right in some ways - where there is a sensible regulated market, which allows competition by making everyone play by fair and moral rules, you will have a more efficient economy.
The problem is that for thousands of years a very small class of people has had control over the direction of the world, and unsurprisingly, they try to force it to bend to benefit themselves. Technology is undoing their hold on what can be valuable, and the internet is taking their control over propaganda away. The printing press destroyed monarchies and the catholic church. I think the internet will destroy corporatism and fundamentalism.
I was thinking DisplayPort or something useful. It may have a cheesy video out that shows what video is playing, but you cannot use a secondary monitor as a display on any of the iPod models.
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=193127&cid=15847027
Okay. That was probably dumb luck.
But if you look at the iPod Touch, and you look at where people are going with these days, you'll notice that the sales of netbooks are absolutely skyrocketing. Apple doesn't have any product that takes advantage of this new market. So, as a company dedicated to profit, they may make one.
My prediction: Macbook Touch. Atom Processor. Bluetooth, Wifi, also available with wireless broadband. $799 with no provider, or for $499 with a contract from AT&T or whomever. Compatible with apps made for the iPhone, running Snow Leopard.
They'll probably fuck it up by including just one USB port and no video out. But hey, that's Apple.
This is really, really fucking easy. In fact, it's so easy, I'm amazed I even have these conversations, because the facts are so obvious.
Does the American government care if people are denied freedom under fundamentalist interpretations of muslim law? If they did, why did they support the Taleban before 9/11? Why do they continue to support Saudi Arabia? Why aren't they lobbying for human rights in muslim countries in Africa?
Does the American government care if a leader is massacring his own people? If they did, they wouldn't have given Saddam the biochemical agents to gas the Kurds, or given Suharto in Indonesia the arms he needed to kill East Timorese, or stood by while the Rwanda descended into hell in and genocide.
So what is all this bullshit about freedom and liberty? A nice way to sell the lie to the American people that deploying the military is helping someone besides our paranoid military planners and the corporations who are rewarded with tens of billions of dollars when we are at war, and with hundreds of billions of dollars every year in "defense" spending.
What is the truth? The truth is that the Pentagon supports whatever country is doing as they are told. When they lose control, they send in the CIA to foment a coup, or in cases where they can propagandize the public enough, they send in the troops. This is the definition of tyranny, and America has been living it for 60 years.
You want statistics? Add up how many Americans have been killed by foreigners on US soil. Add up how many foreigners have been killed by Americans on their soil. I don't even have to do the math, and unless you are Sean Hannity, you already know what the result is going to be.
And unfortunately, even comparing the embargo before 2003 to the casualties during the war and after will reveal that we did far more damage than Saddam.
The picture in Iraq is not rosy. It will take them decades to get back to where they were in 2002. Watch the video below. Eight minutes in she says, "Everything you see that looks like water is not. It is sewage... According to the GAO, the children who are age 15 and younger are less literate than their parents... over 25% of primary school age children do not attend school."
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5519287956645135226
Who's doing their business plan? Apple??
No. The bankruptcy of the US will depend on two things: on the amount and destinations of public expenditures, and on whether the US continues to sabotage its economic base.
First, provide a single study saying that Keynesian economics doesn't work. Now explain why the US, who has been engaged in that economic policy since the 50s with military spending, is still the most productive in the world. You'll have to be more specific with "economic base." If you mean tax rates on the very rich, they are the lowest in modern US history. Still far lower than when Reagan was in office, even if you don't count tax loopholes. The "sky is falling" mentality is a product of sincerely ignorant people who don't bother to venture even 30 years into history.
A resilient US economy can easily survive more expensive oil... As for your other points, the only real concern is sudden, permanent changes in the oil economy. Merely being dependent on unstable government produced oil is not that significant.
It's significant enough to send us to war twice in less than 20 years. Why do you think the only enemies of the state you hear about on the news sit on top or near a bunch of oil? Furthermore, one of the best ways to stop terrorism is to cut it's funding. You can only do that if you stop sending billions of dollars to Saudi Arabia every year.
Europeans use on average 13% of the oil of an average American. Do you think if oil prices hit $200 or $300 a barrel, we will remain competitive in a global market?
Yes, the freedom to produce an "inefficient" car is that important. People have freedom. Governments and societies should not.
If you actually believed that, I would be surprised. How is it that you trust a government with nuclear arms and not minimum fuel efficiencies? Again, you're free to play word games in historical mind experiments. That doesn't mean you're doing anything useful.
And if you want to play historical mind experiment, please read the Federalist papers again. There are sections entirely devoted to why a "vigorous" federal government is necessary when dealing with commerce. I've quoted sections of it already. Can you please provide any quotation from any of the founding documents that provide more evidence on the other side?
As CrimsonAvenger pointed out, we don't spend a plurality of our budget on warfare, but rather on entitlements. And given that the US enjoys the greatest benefits from the US hegemony, then it is reasonable that it bears the greatest burdens.
That trick only works if you include social security. I supplied him with links. If you want to ignore the facts to keep your worldview intact, you're welcome to it.
And let me address hegemony. If you think that the average American is better off than the average Swede, Briton, German, Frenchman, Dutch, Dane, or Norwegian, you could spend all of 10 minutes in the CIA world factbook to set that misconception straight. The top 1% of American society may be doing very well, but that was also the case with pre-revolutionary France and Stalinist Russia.
The thing that is missed here is that if there isn't natural economic pressure, then probably there shouldn't be government pressure either. Sitting there and doing nothing may indeed be the smartest thing the government can do. As I see it, the only real problem the government can help with is rapid, permanent changes. The US has six months of buffer against a complete shutdown of oil, both domestic and import. Frankly, I see that as good enough especially since one considers that domestic and friendly production isn't going to go away that suddenly.
If you think you can find an alternative to plastics, fertilizer, gasoline transportation, and how to get coal from the mountain to the power plant - all of these in 6 months -- I'm real happy for you. Some of us believe it would take quite a bit longer. Tell me so
He heard it on Fox News.
Well, if you don't count money spend in Iraq and Afghanistan as war spending, and if you can't extrapolate that the figures from Wikipedia were compiled from government sources, trying to show you facts is close to useless.
If you really want to know what social security is, and learn why it shouldn't be lumped in with the rest of the budget, you can read this:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98jul/socsec.htm
Social security is not federal income tax. That's why it's a separate line item on your pay stub, and it's not lumped into the general fund, unless you mean by the way the government lends social security funds to itself through treasury bonds. Social security is huge, and is included in federal budgets because it very nicely makes it seem like we spend a lot of money on social services, when we actually spend very little.
Wouldn't surprise me. Something like 90% of the "suspected terrorists" rounded up in Afghanistan were turned in for cash, usually by rival tribes or by the very people attacking them. That's the way the first man we tortured to death was caught, anyway.
When can we drop one in your backyard?
The real ethical problem with this is that a fully autonomous robot army, or even a semi-autonomous one remotely controlled by humans, further removes the people who benefit from warfare from it's reality.
Imagine if someone has real intelligence stating that there is a nuclear - not dirty - bomb in possession of a terrorist, and if we kill these two thousand people tonight, there's a 99% chance that one of the casualties will be the suspect. If you're sending in a bunch of robots to break down the doors and shoot people in the face, what decision do you think will be made?
When the only thing holding the Pentagon back is their own set of ethical questions, we are all fucked.
If you drop a fucking robot into a village where a vast majority of the people don't know how to read, what do you think they're going to do? They'll shoot at it, get the backs of their heads blown off, and then everyone will say, "Well, the dumbass shouldn't have shot at the robot!"
If this war on terror is so important, sign up. If you can't, get your brother or sister or even better, sign your kids up. If they're not of age yet, they'd better be in the JROTC. Then you can talk to me about how using drones and missiles isn't the dominion of motherfucking cowards. It's for freedom lovers defending freedom!
And if you think it isn't, imagine what the headlines would be if China landed a few thousand autonomous tanks and droids in Los Angeles. Oh, but that's right. This is about principles for others to follow, and for us to ignore.
How do you "spend" Social Security? We pay into Social Security, and we get money back out. The question is what our tax dollars are spent on. Including it in a discretionary budget is dishonest at best. Plus, you're lumping in the VA and warfare interest with non-war budgetary items.
If you add the DoD, nuclear arms spending in the DoE, and funding provided to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's one trillion dollars per year, according to official government sources. Also according to official government sources, they can't account for about 25% of that. Donald Rumsfeld stated in 2001 that there was possibly 2.3 trillion dollars that they couldn't account for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
http://www.warresisters.org/federalpiechartdetails
If the constitution is irrelevant whenever it disagrees with modern practice, why does it matter what some dead guy argued 220 years ago? If you're going to ignore the foundational documents, you may as well not bother with appeals to that authority, and just make arguments that stand on their own merits.
I made both. I supplied a quotation from the founding documents supporting my side of the argument, in addition to stating why that quotation is largely irrelevant. It's you who have yet to supply any quotation from any original source that supports the other side.
The point is that the commerce in question is not interstate. But I suppose all of those state legislatures are just engaging in a historical mind experiment.
You think the commerce in question is not interstate. SCOTUS disagrees. Typically, to save time and avoid political posturing and squabbling about commerce - an aim of the founding fathers, in my opinion, when there is a disagreement - our legislative branch picks the side of the Federal Government.
Those state legislatures are engaged in wholesale political posturing. If they actually cared about the constitutional powers of the Federal government, why are guns, abortion, and gay marriage the only issues they ever bring up? When the Dept of Homeland Security was formed, there wasn't a peep about more concentration of Federal power.
My view is the the Federal Government is too centralized and powerful. I think the institutions that deny due process like the CIA and NSA and DHS should be vehemently attacked for being unconstitutional, and then we can worry about things of lesser importance. I think that's a more principled stance that the people who claim to have principles, but are in fact extraordinary hypocrites. When it comes to unconstitutionality, regulating minimum fuel efficiency isn't even on my radar.
Doesn't work that way -- or at least it wasn't supposed to. The US Constitution specifies the limited set of powers given to the federal government, and reserves everything else to the sates and the people. Unless you can find something in there that indicates this SHOULD be a federal responsibility, it shouldn't... You're right about the CIA, NSA, CDC and FEMA; they can't be justified constitutionally. With the possible exception of the CDC they're also agencies which are often found infringing on civil liberties. The FBI is also pretty questionable.
So, it doesn't work that way, or it does? I'm not interested in political theory, necessarily. The Constitutionality of the federal government is only professed when someone doesn't like something about the federal program. My original point was that the creation of a standard minimum of gas efficiency has more of constitutional basis than the CIA, given the view expressed in the Federalist papers that a regulation of commerce in the interests of the union trumps state rights.
If we as a nation really think we need those agencies, and we need them to be part of the federal executive branch, then we should ratify the appropriate constitutional amendments to allow them to be created, rather than simply ignoring the founding document.
That would never be approved by the people. That's why questioning the constitutionality of the CIA or NSA isn't allowable discussion.
The Constitution intended the bulk of non-naval national defense to be performed via state militias. National Guard units can (and do) provide air power.
I'm not a Federalist scholar, but there is this bit from No. 13:
If, in addition to the consideration of a plurality of civil lists, we take into view the number of persons who must necessarily be employed to guard the inland communication between the different confederacies against illicit trade, and who in time will infallibly spring up out of the necessities of revenue; and if we also take into view the military establishments which it has been shown would unavoidably result from the jealousies and conflicts of the several nations into which the States would be divided, we shall clearly discover that a separation would be not less injurious to the economy, than to the tranquillity, commerce, revenue, and liberty of every part.
The full-time federal military forces should be a tiny fraction of what they are. Among other things, reducing them to a Constitutional level would remove the temptation to deploy them all over the world to meddle in the affairs of others. That would be a good thing since no president, from either party, seems to be able to resist that temptation.
No disagreements there. Again, this would be in line with actual constitutional theory, which in practice, has no bearing on modern US politics.
The sovereign states are empowered to respond to threats, both individually and collectively. And if the states collectively feel that it's necessary to give additional power to the federal government, then the states can do that, through the amendment process.
This view is totally antiquated. In practice, for hundreds of years now, all national defense is handled by the federal government. If you want to perform a historical mind experiment, go ahead. But it's a waste of time, in my opinion.
There's a simple and completely constitutional mechanism to address these issues: Congress can tax imports. They should put a $50 per barrel tax on imported oil. This would provide the motivation for more efficient cars as well as boosting focus on exploiting local oil resources (oil shale, tar sands, etc.) and use of renewable energy sources.
They could. In the current economic situation, do you want to raise energy costs to our economy by a few hundred billion dollars, or require that automakers se
This is just wrong. Fossil fuels haven't been "bankrupting" the US.
It depends on how dearly you value government propaganda. Did we invade Iraq to stop Saddam, or to liberate it's people? Do we continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars that mostly goes to wars that are fought in the Middle East because we like the natives, or because they sit on top of 80% of what's left of the most important natural resource in the entire world?
If the US government does enter bankruptcy, it won't be because of the modest contribution from oil to the US's current account deficit. Instead, it'll be because the US government has created huge liabilities (debt and obligations like the entitlements) while sabotaging the productivity of the US economy.
It will be because we spend the plurality, probably even a majority of our budget on warfare. We outspend the rest of the world combined every year. Do you think that's reasonable?
I don't understand the desire to fabricate a single point of view for a body of people with diverse opinion on what government should and shouldn't do.
That's why I called it ridiculous to request right after I said it.
My viewpoint is that the US government hasn't demonstrated a need for regulating the gas consumption of vehicles, especially since such regulation would only apply to cars and not other consumption of foreign imported fossil fuels. Even if some sort of regulation is required, it's obvious that a gas or even a carbon tax is a more effective means of passing on the externalities of oil consumption than regulating the oil consumption of vehicles directly.
The entire point of government regulation is to apply economic pressure where there is none naturally. Imagine if someone said your society is entirely dependent on a resource that is quickly becoming less reliably obtained, more expensive, and is usually found in politically unstable areas of the world. Is the smart thing to do just sit there with your thumb up your ass, or to take preventative measures by leveraging technology to decrease your need for this particular resource?
It's debatable whether a consumption tax would be more effective, but I think in the current economic situation, it's better to aim high for fuel efficiency in five or six years - fuel efficiency that is already present in every other industrialized country in the world - than to increase the cost of doing business tomorrow.
Sure, buddy. Just provide a single quote, footnote, or anything supporting your claim that the founding fathers would be against this particular regulation. Seems rather ridiculous, doesn't it?
There's no direct constitutional support for the CIA, NSA, Air Force, CDC, FDA, FEMA... the list is pretty long. The founding fathers could not conceive of of much of our modern world. So, did they in particular have a propensity to deny states certain rights that threatened the prosperity and security of the nation? I would say yes.
Does dependence on a finite fuel which has been bankrupting our country for decades count as a danger? Is the freedom to produce an inefficient car that important in comparison? Again, I would say that the "freedom" to have a Hummer matters far less than the freedom to be free of entangling alliances and dependence on foreign nations for basic transportation.
But you can stick to your petty little remarks, if you like. Or say something meaningful, if you disagree. It's up to you.
I couldn't find it in the article. But in the Globe article it stated some incredibly stupid "facts." The first was that we import more oil now than we did in 1975. That's because we produce far less oil. US oil production peaked in 1970, as predicted by oil geologist Hubbard. Then it states that we now use more oil than ever. Amazing. I wonder if that has anything to do with the population being larger? Or the fact that there are more cars on the road?
Sorry. Forcing all new cars to have better fuel economy just means when people do trade in, they will be using less gas, and thus less oil. And in 5 years, there's a very good chance they will be plugin electrics with gas generators which use almost no oil and far less oil-dependent components, like belts, transmissions, motor oil, and so on.
The powers [of the federal government] included in the THIRD class are those which provide for the harmony and proper intercourse among the States. ...to wit: to regulate commerce among the several States and the Indian tribes; to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin; to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the current coin and secureties of the United States; to fix the standard of weights and measures; to establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws of bankruptcy, to prescribe the manner in which the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of each State shall be proved, and the effect they shall have in other States; and to establish post offices and post roads.
I haven't read the Federalist papers in a bit, but what historical evidence have you found that makes you believe that the primary goal was liberty from regulations?
I used to work at an ISP in the dirty dirty, back in the days when all we had were 8 external modems on a card table.
There was a cable cut that took out our T1 connection, and soon frantic calls from end users were coming in. For whatever reason, people just didn't accept that the "whole internet" could be inaccessible because our connection to it was severed.
We just started telling people that the internet was on fire. And for some reason, they would say "Oh, okay" and hang up.
That doesn't beat the time when a customer told me that the "computer inside his computer" was making funny noises. Looking back though, it sort of makes sense.
It's a hobby desktop, for sure. If you need a stable box with an ethernet plug to run server software on, you can't ask for anything better than Linux. If you want a stable desktop for anything beyond basic e-mail and web surfing, Linux is unfortunately the worst choice out of the three major options. It's far far better than it was even two or three years ago, but a lack of professional native GUI applications and Xorg are still the achilles heel of desktop Linux.
I was fiddling with Ubuntu this weekend, and decided I wanted to sit back and watch a DVD that I'd ripped. So, I sat back in my chair, fullscreened VLC, and then Xorg quit, the display went dead, and when I rebooted, I had a choice: boot into Windows 7 and go about my business, or possibly lose the rest of the entire day on a wild goose chase through forums, config files, and god knows what else.
On one of my only afternoons off, guess what option I chose?
Now, I see that I may just have to disable xv in gstreamer - fair enough, and I'll probably give it another shot. But imagine an average user having to do that over and over again.