Google around. There are some scripts out there that do the job (and some that don't, so back up your email first). I successfully migrated from Kmail to Thunderbird with them.
Points on my credit card (i.e. free money/miles/ etc)
Those points are smoke in mirrors. Credit card companies get the money to give you perks in part because they charge businesses a couple percent for credit card transactions. In turn, the businesses charge the customers -- either directly like Verizon or indirectly by raising rates. I'd gladly move to a system with lower credit card charges and without perks (debit cards kind of fit the bill).
In communism, one takes from people according to their ability, and distributes according to their need. The only way to accomplish this is through violence.
The redistribution could happen voluntarily; that has worked on small scales before. That said, I agree with you that it's not going to happen on large scales, so I won't argue this further.
But capitalism IS possible. We had it in the US from the end of Reconstruction until 1913... Just because some power hungry people conspire to gain power and money illegitimately under capitalism doesn't mean capitalism is evil.
As you kind of acknowledge, the question isn't whether it's possible; the question is how stable it is. If the power hungry can knock capitalism off course in ~50 years (Reconstruction until 1913), that's not all that impressive.
It's perfectly plausible that pure capitalism could be tempered for better stability (e.g. with bank capital requirements). Slightly slower growth may be the price (that said, the period you refer to had it's share of economic panics, so it's not clear that slightly more regulation would have hurt growth), but the gain in stability could outweigh the price.
No, ideological communism is very different from Stalinism. Marx wasn't envisioning mass executions and people in gulags.
Moreover, the question isn't how similar they are, it's whether one follows from the other. We've seen that trying communism usually leads to some type of despotism (Stalinism, Maoism, etc.) Does crony capitalism always follow from trying to do capitalism?
It's interesting that some people used to say similar things about the Eastern Bloc, "They have stalinism; the word 'communism' doesn't belong anywhere near it!" The response to that statement would be that stalinist despotism leads inexorably from communism.
I hope the equivalent statement isn't true for linking crony capitalism and pure capitalism; I don't think the claim can be dismissed out of hand. (Speaking as a libertarian leaning moderate.)
I think this is a symptom of a bigger problem that doesn't have a good solution: there are many more people than there are useful things for people to do. Eventually this will correct itself -- people will have fewer children because they have less money, but the time lag involved (~20 years for the kids already in the pipeline to get out) could mean unpleasant times ahead.
The fact of the matter is that lots of jobs are being automated away, from lawyers to factory workers. In the past, a field being automated meant people moved to working in an unautomated field, but we're out of them. Even many of the unautomated jobs could be automated. The only reason a person scans and bags your groceries is because people are still cheaper at doing that job than a machine. If the minimum wage gets raised too much, or those workers are required to have expensive health benefits, then machines may well be the cheaper option.
Apologies for going somewhat off topic, but I've become convinced by this pessimistic view, and I don't see any good solutions to the symptoms because I don't see a good solution to the problem -- barring some technological breakthrough that makes everything so cheap that it doesn't matter what people do.
However where I live they don't let asian immigrants (or humans of any race) in unless they're part of the judeo-christian tradition. christian asian immigrant = OK, buddhist or free = No.
I don't believe you. Buddhists have been in Boy Scouts since 1920. I can't speak for the troops near you, but I knew Asian immigrants in scouts. If they really are blocking Asian immigrants, then it should be reported to the national organization, who will no doubt put an end to it.
You've got to be careful with the word "mandated". It has more than one definition. One means authorized; another means mandatory. In the case of the postoffice, congress is authorized to create one but not required to.
"The Congress shall have power... to establish Post Offices and post Roads;"
Again, congress can establish a post office, but they don't have to.
You can get unlimited data and 3G on Sprint; it's just branded Virgin mobile (Virgin used to be a partner, but Sprint bought them out). There are other trade-offs to going with Virgin (like lower end phones), but I've been happy with the service.
Nature isn't publishing an article about Humanities PHDs; they're talking about STEM.
I've heard these type of claims for biology and related fields: you can get so caught up on the minutia of your project that you don't learn generally applicable techniques; you only learn how to tackle your very specific problem and that makes it difficult to do anything else. I don't know if it's true, but I remember seeing several opinion pieces on it recently (although I can't find the links ATM).
That said, I agree that in a lot of the sciences the PHD is the equivalent of driver's license -- I've seen people move all over my field (condensed matter physics). However, there certainly are limits; I couldn't jump in to high energy physics. Also condensed matter is a broad field with a lot of overlap between subfields. The same may not be true for other areas of Physics. On top of all that, although it might be a license, it still could be for a field in which supply exceeds demand.
I think there are some useful things they could do for email that are similar to the services they provide for snail mail, and this could make email more useful for official tasks.
For example, the postal service provides proof of delivery. Needless to say, that's very useful if you need to prove that you sent someone an official document. I don't know if there's an equivalent for email. Since the postal service is a trusted 3rd party, they could run mail servers and verify that the message made it to the server of the recipient. Maybe they'd reply to the sender with a signed message listing the sender, recipient, and hash of the message.
Another thing they could do is provide an authentication service. You go to the post office, shown them your ID, and then they can somehow provide proof that you are who you say you are (maybe they sign your public key). If they could do something like this and make it simple enough, maybe encryption usage would finally expand, that would negate any privacy problems with the government handling your email (although I feel these problems are overblown; they already handle your mail and that's not a problem, and it's not like a corporation would be better.)
I'm sure there are other services they could provide, but those are the two that popped in to my head first.
Although it has its problems, it's about as "generalist" as you can get. I get to program (for simulation, equipment control, and data analysis), do math, make electronics, layout parts in CAD, work in a machine shop, do nano-fabrication in a clean room, etc. Heck, I've done most of those things in the past week alone. I like that for the same reason I liked the project based engineering classes available as an undergrad. However, I'm guessing that many of the engineers who took those classes are now sitting in front of a computer doing just one thing...
Hitting the shareholders' pocketbooks is what should motivate them to keep douchebags out of leadership positions in the company.
That can work (although it's harder to do than it should be), but it's mostly a second order effect; hit the shareholders who then hit the wrongdoers. Why not just hit the wrongdoers directly? That's almost guaranteed to be more effective. As mentioned before, it also has the advantage of not hitting the non-wrongdoers.
When a company is fined, who pays the price? For public companies (most of the companies we care about), the answer is basically shareholders -- almost all of whom had no part in the wrongdoing. So the main effect is that some people in the company do something wrong, then all shareholders get fined. I think more fines should be leveled on the people who actually did the wrongdoing (although fining the company is still somewhat useful as it does provide an incentive not to break the law -- it's just that the burden of the fine is mostly misplaced).
Is the flip side that if you do know who a given key belongs to, you can link a lot of stuff to that person?
I may not be understanding the system, but wouldn't you find that out if you do a transaction with a person? I can see geting around that by changing keys often, but wouldn't that make it hard to do business? (Since your private key allows you to prove you are who you say your are, if you're always changing it, that would make it hard to identify yourself).
When user A transfers some to user B, A relinquishes ownership on them by adding B’s public key (address) to those coins, signing them with his own private key, and broadcasting this transaction in an appropriate message on the peer-to-peer network. The rest of the network nodes validate the cryptographic signatures and amounts of the transaction before accepting it.
If it weren't that way there'd be no way for other people to know that you no longer had the money you sent to B; in other words, you'd be able to spend the same money multiple times.
Slashdot Mirror
Google around. There are some scripts out there that do the job (and some that don't, so back up your email first). I successfully migrated from Kmail to Thunderbird with them.
Points on my credit card (i.e. free money/miles/ etc)
Those points are smoke in mirrors. Credit card companies get the money to give you perks in part because they charge businesses a couple percent for credit card transactions. In turn, the businesses charge the customers -- either directly like Verizon or indirectly by raising rates. I'd gladly move to a system with lower credit card charges and without perks (debit cards kind of fit the bill).
In communism, one takes from people according to their ability, and distributes according to their need. The only way to accomplish this is through violence.
The redistribution could happen voluntarily; that has worked on small scales before. That said, I agree with you that it's not going to happen on large scales, so I won't argue this further.
But capitalism IS possible. We had it in the US from the end of Reconstruction until 1913... Just because some power hungry people conspire to gain power and money illegitimately under capitalism doesn't mean capitalism is evil.
As you kind of acknowledge, the question isn't whether it's possible; the question is how stable it is. If the power hungry can knock capitalism off course in ~50 years (Reconstruction until 1913), that's not all that impressive.
It's perfectly plausible that pure capitalism could be tempered for better stability (e.g. with bank capital requirements). Slightly slower growth may be the price (that said, the period you refer to had it's share of economic panics, so it's not clear that slightly more regulation would have hurt growth), but the gain in stability could outweigh the price.
No, ideological communism is very different from Stalinism. Marx wasn't envisioning mass executions and people in gulags.
Moreover, the question isn't how similar they are, it's whether one follows from the other. We've seen that trying communism usually leads to some type of despotism (Stalinism, Maoism, etc.) Does crony capitalism always follow from trying to do capitalism?
It's interesting that some people used to say similar things about the Eastern Bloc, "They have stalinism; the word 'communism' doesn't belong anywhere near it!" The response to that statement would be that stalinist despotism leads inexorably from communism.
I hope the equivalent statement isn't true for linking crony capitalism and pure capitalism; I don't think the claim can be dismissed out of hand. (Speaking as a libertarian leaning moderate.)
I was going to say the same thing. Here's the official site:
http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/default.aspx
There are states without _any_ sales tax. I would be surprised if they implemented this.
I think this is a symptom of a bigger problem that doesn't have a good solution: there are many more people than there are useful things for people to do. Eventually this will correct itself -- people will have fewer children because they have less money, but the time lag involved (~20 years for the kids already in the pipeline to get out) could mean unpleasant times ahead.
The fact of the matter is that lots of jobs are being automated away, from lawyers to factory workers. In the past, a field being automated meant people moved to working in an unautomated field, but we're out of them. Even many of the unautomated jobs could be automated. The only reason a person scans and bags your groceries is because people are still cheaper at doing that job than a machine. If the minimum wage gets raised too much, or those workers are required to have expensive health benefits, then machines may well be the cheaper option.
Apologies for going somewhat off topic, but I've become convinced by this pessimistic view, and I don't see any good solutions to the symptoms because I don't see a good solution to the problem -- barring some technological breakthrough that makes everything so cheap that it doesn't matter what people do.
However where I live they don't let asian immigrants (or humans of any race) in unless they're part of the judeo-christian tradition.
christian asian immigrant = OK, buddhist or free = No.
I don't believe you. Buddhists have been in Boy Scouts since 1920. I can't speak for the troops near you, but I knew Asian immigrants in scouts. If they really are blocking Asian immigrants, then it should be reported to the national organization, who will no doubt put an end to it.
http://www.scouting.org/About/FactSheets/operating_orgs/Buddhist.aspx
http://www.scouting.org/filestore/pdf/02-209.pdf
You've got to be careful with the word "mandated". It has more than one definition. One means authorized; another means mandatory. In the case of the postoffice, congress is authorized to create one but not required to.
"The Congress shall have power... to establish Post Offices and post Roads;"
Again, congress can establish a post office, but they don't have to.
If by Slavic you mean North Germanic,[ 1] then yes.
It was initially a partnership between Sprint and Virgin Mobile, but sprint bought them out and paid to keep the name.
You can get unlimited data and 3G on Sprint; it's just branded Virgin mobile (Virgin used to be a partner, but Sprint bought them out). There are other trade-offs to going with Virgin (like lower end phones), but I've been happy with the service.
Nature isn't publishing an article about Humanities PHDs; they're talking about STEM.
I've heard these type of claims for biology and related fields: you can get so caught up on the minutia of your project that you don't learn generally applicable techniques; you only learn how to tackle your very specific problem and that makes it difficult to do anything else. I don't know if it's true, but I remember seeing several opinion pieces on it recently (although I can't find the links ATM).
That said, I agree that in a lot of the sciences the PHD is the equivalent of driver's license -- I've seen people move all over my field (condensed matter physics). However, there certainly are limits; I couldn't jump in to high energy physics. Also condensed matter is a broad field with a lot of overlap between subfields. The same may not be true for other areas of Physics. On top of all that, although it might be a license, it still could be for a field in which supply exceeds demand.
I think there are some useful things they could do for email that are similar to the services they provide for snail mail, and this could make email more useful for official tasks.
For example, the postal service provides proof of delivery. Needless to say, that's very useful if you need to prove that you sent someone an official document. I don't know if there's an equivalent for email. Since the postal service is a trusted 3rd party, they could run mail servers and verify that the message made it to the server of the recipient. Maybe they'd reply to the sender with a signed message listing the sender, recipient, and hash of the message.
Another thing they could do is provide an authentication service. You go to the post office, shown them your ID, and then they can somehow provide proof that you are who you say you are (maybe they sign your public key). If they could do something like this and make it simple enough, maybe encryption usage would finally expand, that would negate any privacy problems with the government handling your email (although I feel these problems are overblown; they already handle your mail and that's not a problem, and it's not like a corporation would be better.)
I'm sure there are other services they could provide, but those are the two that popped in to my head first.
is expected to generate 392 MW of solar power
FTFY
Although it has its problems, it's about as "generalist" as you can get. I get to program (for simulation, equipment control, and data analysis), do math, make electronics, layout parts in CAD, work in a machine shop, do nano-fabrication in a clean room, etc. Heck, I've done most of those things in the past week alone. I like that for the same reason I liked the project based engineering classes available as an undergrad. However, I'm guessing that many of the engineers who took those classes are now sitting in front of a computer doing just one thing...
Bush coalition-building / nation-building = bad
Obama coalition-building / nation-building = good
Wait, what?
So with those two lines you're trying to make Obama's coalition building and Bush's coalition building look similar...
The fact that the French took the lead on this says volumes about how big of a pussy Obama really is.
and then you're criticizing Obama for not building/leading the coalition? Are you claiming that he's building the coalition or not?
Hitting the shareholders' pocketbooks is what should motivate them to keep douchebags out of leadership positions in the company.
That can work (although it's harder to do than it should be), but it's mostly a second order effect; hit the shareholders who then hit the wrongdoers. Why not just hit the wrongdoers directly? That's almost guaranteed to be more effective. As mentioned before, it also has the advantage of not hitting the non-wrongdoers.
if corporations lack personhood then they can't be charged with crimes.
Why do you say that? What's to stop the government from passing such laws?
When a company is fined, who pays the price? For public companies (most of the companies we care about), the answer is basically shareholders -- almost all of whom had no part in the wrongdoing. So the main effect is that some people in the company do something wrong, then all shareholders get fined. I think more fines should be leveled on the people who actually did the wrongdoing (although fining the company is still somewhat useful as it does provide an incentive not to break the law -- it's just that the burden of the fine is mostly misplaced).
Is the flip side that if you do know who a given key belongs to, you can link a lot of stuff to that person?
I may not be understanding the system, but wouldn't you find that out if you do a transaction with a person? I can see geting around that by changing keys often, but wouldn't that make it hard to do business? (Since your private key allows you to prove you are who you say your are, if you're always changing it, that would make it hard to identify yourself).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Transactions
When user A transfers some to user B, A relinquishes ownership on them by adding B’s public key (address) to those coins, signing them with his own private key, and broadcasting this transaction in an appropriate message on the peer-to-peer network. The rest of the network nodes validate the cryptographic signatures and amounts of the transaction before accepting it.
If it weren't that way there'd be no way for other people to know that you no longer had the money you sent to B; in other words, you'd be able to spend the same money multiple times.
You're right, I got the rows and columns mixed up. One small thing: 67/(67+122)=35.450%, not 32%.
-Leon
GOP: 210/67 (y/n) -> 75.812% yes
DEM: 26/122 (y/n) -> 17.568% yes
http://www.gop.gov/votes/112/1/26