Because redundancy is irritating. It doesn't mean it's wrong, just that it's irritating.
When you mentally expand "Typed my PIN number into the ATM machine" to "Typed my Personal Identification Number number into the Automated Teller Machine machine", it just grates.
Speaking of which, there's no excuse for "ATM machine"; there's nothing to confuse it with.
Earth and Venus are Earth-sized. Mars is considerably smaller, at half the diameter and about 10% of the mass, and Mercury smaller again. If we're saying that a number of items on the wish list are a product of planet size, Mars doesn't fit the bill for a comparison.
For that matter, most of the things in their list are very odd things to choose for a "Rare Earth" argument. Gas giants in the outer solar system- there's no reason to assume that they're rare. Plate tectonics are believed to be a symptom of planet size (so larger-than-Earth rocky planets should have it), and several of Jupiter's moons show tectonic-style surface patterns. A magnetic core- ditto to planet size (where a solid core needs to be formed by pressure), with a possible proviso on planet age and planet chemical composition (influencing how long the core would take to cool). As there are only two Earth-sized planets in the Solar system, it's almost impossible to draw conclusions about frequency of occurrence.
The Moon is just about the only item in that list which I can agree with as being "rare", and as you say, its influence is debatable.
As a long time user of Windows software, I can tell you now that I ALWAYS read the installer screens before clicking "next". Everything short of the EULA.
The number of "click here to not install our toolbar", "click here to not be added to our permanent email mailing list", "click here not to upgrade to our premium prescription package" tick boxes is always depressing.
Making a farmer or teacher responsible for their share in a company they invested partly in for retirement is going too far. They lack the sophistication and access to resources to truly assess risk. Most of that is just long term investment in a big well known company.
Why? Why should teachers and farmers even be buying stakes in companies that they don't understand? It's not like that was common practice more than about 70 years ago. It's encouraged by pro-investors, because investment is like a competition, where you only make money if somebody else loses money- and it's far easier to win if there's lots of amateurs competing with you.
The traditional method of investment for people without the time or expertise to do it properly is to put your money in a bank account (so the bank can invest the money and pay you a cut), or a fund (such as a pension fund) which you do not have direct control or responsibility for. Yes you can make more money investing directly- but that's at the cost of requiring a much more in depth and involved understanding of what you're doing.
I say make the shareholders responsible for the companies that they own. If that puts off amateur investors from doing things they don't understand, all the better. Purging amateur investors might on its own even lead to more rational, better managed markets. And if you want to make the big bucks by investing directly, you can damn well deal with the risks and responsibilities that go with it.
It only takes one of them to break ranks. If you've got 10 "big pharma" companies all selling "treatments", each one will get roughly one tenth of a never ending money train. If you have 9 companies producing "treatments", and one selling a real life miracle cure, you'll have one company selling their product quicker than they can make it, and nine selling bugger all.
Assuming you don't have a cartel in place (which is a big assumption to make), capitalism should in theory force the companies to race each other to the next stage, even if it means their eventual death.
I think he meant the conspiracy in TFA. That is, the fairly scandalous cover up of a safety hazard by a government agency to shore up a company's sales.
I wonder which low life official got a corporate back hander for that one.
I find it tricky to believe that the cost of making gold in a particle accelerator would be greater than the cost of space/tiime-shattering FTL travel. I think it's probably fair to say that once you've achieved technology great enough to break the laws of physics for FTL travel, almost anything else you'd want to do would be a cake walk...
Ah, so you're using the England/Scotland conflict as a model. So our strategy should be to have the British and Afghansitani royal families interbreed, have the British monarch die without an heir, and then have Afghanistan bankrupt itself attempting to colonise Central America. A fool proof plan!
1) Everyone's broke. Do the terms "sub-prime", "Leman's", or "debt ceiling" mean anything to you? 2) France doesn't want out of the eurozone. Sarkozy is currently cheer leading a massively federalist new treaty to shore it up (which will see France lose most of it's fiscal policy powers), along with Merkel. 3) Fair point on Britain/Iraq. Blair was a lying weasel, who should really be sat in a court room at The Hague, if there were any justice...
Seeing as we're playing the fallacy game today, I probably don't need to point out that your post is almost pure ad hominem. By choosing Al Gore as a target, that's most likely Strawman. Possibly a "guilt by association" fallacy, too, depending on how much we're supposed to hate Al Gore.
That is, your only argument against the data, science and predictive mathematical models of climate change is "Al Gore argues the case for it, and he stands to make money if he's correct". It couldn't get more fallacious than "I will gladly deny his shrill, breathless assertions and his oily pitches for pumping money through his world-saving carbon credit cash cow operations as an accurate representation and treatment of the situation."- you don't like the argument because he's shrill and oily?
Three things to remember: 1) Al Gore is not a climate scientist. He is not the one behind the theory, nor the one who produced the models. Attacking him is strawman, when you should be tackling the models themselves. 2) The fact that Al Gore argues for it while also standing to make money if he's right is not in itself an argument against it. A theory and its proponents are not logically linked. 3) Its fairly reasonable to assume that Al Gore might have invested his money in climate change related companies specifically because he believed the science and wanted to support it, or because he believed the science and wanted to invest in what he believed would be the next big thing. That is, the reverse of supporting a theory to bolster existing investments.
It isn't really a slippery slope fallacy in the classic sense. Slippery slope fallacy is about cause and effect- essentially domino effect gone mad.
GP just showed that the GGP's weak defense of his position was vague enough that you could use it to defend any crackpot position. That shows the GGP either has an argument so vague as to be logically invalid, or that the GGP has just stumbled across the world's first universally applicable, perfect argument. I'm going to guess that former.
In this situation, half of the RM's business is profitable, while the other half is loss making. Left to itself, the business as a whole is break-even or better.
What they've done is privatised the profitable part (but without actually selling off anything or making any money from it, as is usually the case with privatisation), while keeping the loss making part government owned. The customer still pays much the same for postage, the service is the same (because the last mile delivery is the same as it's always been), but now the taxpayer is needing to pay subsidies on a scale it never has done before. Seeing as there are several for-profit companies operating in this space where there weren't before this move, you can see those subsidies as essentially going straight into those companies' profits.
The real problem is that not all deliveries cost the same. If you're a company in downtown Houston, Texas, and you want to mail something to the suburbs in Houston, Texas, the cost will be pretty small. If you want to deliver something to Anchorage, Alaska, the actual costs will be much larger.
The point of universal postal service is that it allows businesses to treat all customers as equal. Imagine a situation where the cost to buy something from Amazon was dependent on your distance from an Amazon distribution centre; Amazon's business would quickly fall apart as they would be undercut by a hundred local competitors. Same for banks, mailing out bank statements. Or the cost of mailing your Congressman. Maybe that's a good thing, but the government's usual position is that it is not.
USPS subsidise their tricky long distance deliveries by charging more for their simple local deliveries. If you were to allow private companies to compete on an even keel (but without legally mandating them to provide a universal service), they would simply undercut USPS on the profitable local deliveries, while leaving the taxpayer to carry the can for the expensive deliveries. It's one of those situations where you can't just change it a little bit without massive unintended consequences- if you're going to change it, you're going to need to do a complete overhaul and rethink.
Again, it's deceptive because the nationalised postal services have a mandate to provide universal service, while private companies do not. That is, they need to be able to deliver first class mail to the most remote rural Danish island, the same as they do to downtown Copenhagen. This means that you pay more (with your national service) for simple deliveries to subsidise the more difficult ones.
Privatising (or even liberalising) postal services can lead to several bad consequences. The most obvious would be this situation: the national service is still mandated by law to provide universal service. They still charge more on simple urban deliveries to balance the books. A private service comes in and competes only for the simple jobs- they refuse service to anywhere tricky. As all their deliveries are simple, they can massively undercut the national service on these jobs, depriving the service of it's main revenue stream. Therefore, either "non-simple" jobs become massively more expensive, or taxpayers need to step in to subsidise, or the service goes bust and you lose universal service.
The situation in the UK is even more daft. The Royal Mail is still a monopoly, but they're now required by law to sell their "last mile" delivery capabilities on to competitors- and do so practically at cost. The above paragraph is still true, with the added irony that the RM is still delivering the letters- but for no profit! And they still have to provide universal service to the Outer Hebrides, also at massive loss. Competitors such as UK Mail or TNT cherry pick the profitable routes- and don't even need to worry about having any infrastructure past the sorting office. And obviously it's the taxpayer who picks up the bill.
Spitting firewood and cutting down a tree are different. Can't think of the last time I've seen someone cut down a tree with an axe. Ditto brooms and vacuums are different. Land lines... I haven't had one since '99 actually.
That's kind of the point. Emails and their electronic cousins have certainly stolen a fair chunk of the usage from the postal service, but there are still some uses where the postal service is better. Package delivery, for one. Anything that needs formal recorded delivery for two. Delivery of certificates, official documents, and whatnot for three. They're the "splitting wood" to the postal service's "axe", if you catch my drift.
A diplomat with a micro-film camera is a lot less aggressive than a flying robotic killing machine, in my most humble opinion.
Or to put it another way- there have been Iranian diplomatic staff on US soil before, and I suspect you were not outraged. If Iranian military jet aircraft were circling over Texas, you might be more so.
Just to be pedantic- Pfizer didn't do the work. The drug was invented by a company called Parke-Davis, and the rights have ended up with Pfizer following mergers and buyouts.
Not that that necessarily invalidates your point; when a company buys another, it buys all of its rights. But "Pfizer" has done nothing in the development of this drug; they just bought the rights to it at some point for some price, in the hope that their investment would pay off. Nothing more complicated than if they'd bought stocks in a hedge fund, or stockpiled gold bars.
Doctors prescribe by drug, not by brand. It's up to the pharmacist (or the patient) which brand of that drug they use, presuming they're all the same drug inside the box. And when you get right down to it, pharmacists (especially American ones, private healthcare being what it is) are just retailers. They no more have to stock a given brand of drugs than my grocer has to stock a specific brand of beans.
That said, monopolistic practices are still bad, and I hope the anti-trust lawyers are warming up their litigation mobiles...
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you're joking, or I will be forced to find the US terrifying in a whole new way.
In the UK, Virgin's cable TV package is something like £12.50 a month ($20 or so). $130 a month (US Dollars?) for TV is scandalous.
Because redundancy is irritating. It doesn't mean it's wrong, just that it's irritating.
When you mentally expand "Typed my PIN number into the ATM machine" to "Typed my Personal Identification Number number into the Automated Teller Machine machine", it just grates.
Speaking of which, there's no excuse for "ATM machine"; there's nothing to confuse it with.
Earth and Venus are Earth-sized. Mars is considerably smaller, at half the diameter and about 10% of the mass, and Mercury smaller again. If we're saying that a number of items on the wish list are a product of planet size, Mars doesn't fit the bill for a comparison.
It is possible to be a "bad artist". In the same way as a kangaroo in a Ford pickup is still a "bad driver".
For that matter, most of the things in their list are very odd things to choose for a "Rare Earth" argument. Gas giants in the outer solar system- there's no reason to assume that they're rare. Plate tectonics are believed to be a symptom of planet size (so larger-than-Earth rocky planets should have it), and several of Jupiter's moons show tectonic-style surface patterns. A magnetic core- ditto to planet size (where a solid core needs to be formed by pressure), with a possible proviso on planet age and planet chemical composition (influencing how long the core would take to cool). As there are only two Earth-sized planets in the Solar system, it's almost impossible to draw conclusions about frequency of occurrence.
The Moon is just about the only item in that list which I can agree with as being "rare", and as you say, its influence is debatable.
As a long time user of Windows software, I can tell you now that I ALWAYS read the installer screens before clicking "next". Everything short of the EULA.
The number of "click here to not install our toolbar", "click here to not be added to our permanent email mailing list", "click here not to upgrade to our premium prescription package" tick boxes is always depressing.
Making a farmer or teacher responsible for their share in a company they invested partly in for retirement is going too far. They lack the sophistication and access to resources to truly assess risk. Most of that is just long term investment in a big well known company.
Why? Why should teachers and farmers even be buying stakes in companies that they don't understand? It's not like that was common practice more than about 70 years ago. It's encouraged by pro-investors, because investment is like a competition, where you only make money if somebody else loses money- and it's far easier to win if there's lots of amateurs competing with you.
The traditional method of investment for people without the time or expertise to do it properly is to put your money in a bank account (so the bank can invest the money and pay you a cut), or a fund (such as a pension fund) which you do not have direct control or responsibility for. Yes you can make more money investing directly- but that's at the cost of requiring a much more in depth and involved understanding of what you're doing.
I say make the shareholders responsible for the companies that they own. If that puts off amateur investors from doing things they don't understand, all the better. Purging amateur investors might on its own even lead to more rational, better managed markets. And if you want to make the big bucks by investing directly, you can damn well deal with the risks and responsibilities that go with it.
It only takes one of them to break ranks. If you've got 10 "big pharma" companies all selling "treatments", each one will get roughly one tenth of a never ending money train. If you have 9 companies producing "treatments", and one selling a real life miracle cure, you'll have one company selling their product quicker than they can make it, and nine selling bugger all.
Assuming you don't have a cartel in place (which is a big assumption to make), capitalism should in theory force the companies to race each other to the next stage, even if it means their eventual death.
The summary is only referencing a BBC story. You don't get anymore mainstream than the BBC.
Slashdot is a news aggregator, and you can't really blame them for taking headline tech stories from probably the largest news service in the world.
I think he meant the conspiracy in TFA. That is, the fairly scandalous cover up of a safety hazard by a government agency to shore up a company's sales.
I wonder which low life official got a corporate back hander for that one.
I find it tricky to believe that the cost of making gold in a particle accelerator would be greater than the cost of space/tiime-shattering FTL travel. I think it's probably fair to say that once you've achieved technology great enough to break the laws of physics for FTL travel, almost anything else you'd want to do would be a cake walk...
Ah, so you're using the England/Scotland conflict as a model. So our strategy should be to have the British and Afghansitani royal families interbreed, have the British monarch die without an heir, and then have Afghanistan bankrupt itself attempting to colonise Central America. A fool proof plan!
1) Everyone's broke. Do the terms "sub-prime", "Leman's", or "debt ceiling" mean anything to you?
2) France doesn't want out of the eurozone. Sarkozy is currently cheer leading a massively federalist new treaty to shore it up (which will see France lose most of it's fiscal policy powers), along with Merkel.
3) Fair point on Britain/Iraq. Blair was a lying weasel, who should really be sat in a court room at The Hague, if there were any justice...
There's lots of figures out there, but this article (from some anonymous blog, so buyer beware) was particularly interesting:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
Seeing as we're playing the fallacy game today, I probably don't need to point out that your post is almost pure ad hominem. By choosing Al Gore as a target, that's most likely Strawman. Possibly a "guilt by association" fallacy, too, depending on how much we're supposed to hate Al Gore.
That is, your only argument against the data, science and predictive mathematical models of climate change is "Al Gore argues the case for it, and he stands to make money if he's correct". It couldn't get more fallacious than "I will gladly deny his shrill, breathless assertions and his oily pitches for pumping money through his world-saving carbon credit cash cow operations as an accurate representation and treatment of the situation."- you don't like the argument because he's shrill and oily?
Three things to remember:
1) Al Gore is not a climate scientist. He is not the one behind the theory, nor the one who produced the models. Attacking him is strawman, when you should be tackling the models themselves.
2) The fact that Al Gore argues for it while also standing to make money if he's right is not in itself an argument against it. A theory and its proponents are not logically linked.
3) Its fairly reasonable to assume that Al Gore might have invested his money in climate change related companies specifically because he believed the science and wanted to support it, or because he believed the science and wanted to invest in what he believed would be the next big thing. That is, the reverse of supporting a theory to bolster existing investments.
It isn't really a slippery slope fallacy in the classic sense. Slippery slope fallacy is about cause and effect- essentially domino effect gone mad.
GP just showed that the GGP's weak defense of his position was vague enough that you could use it to defend any crackpot position. That shows the GGP either has an argument so vague as to be logically invalid, or that the GGP has just stumbled across the world's first universally applicable, perfect argument. I'm going to guess that former.
Fair enough.
So you'd be happy if (unarmed) Iranian military jets were circling over Texas, then?
In this situation, half of the RM's business is profitable, while the other half is loss making. Left to itself, the business as a whole is break-even or better.
What they've done is privatised the profitable part (but without actually selling off anything or making any money from it, as is usually the case with privatisation), while keeping the loss making part government owned. The customer still pays much the same for postage, the service is the same (because the last mile delivery is the same as it's always been), but now the taxpayer is needing to pay subsidies on a scale it never has done before. Seeing as there are several for-profit companies operating in this space where there weren't before this move, you can see those subsidies as essentially going straight into those companies' profits.
That is not a sensible move.
The real problem is that not all deliveries cost the same. If you're a company in downtown Houston, Texas, and you want to mail something to the suburbs in Houston, Texas, the cost will be pretty small. If you want to deliver something to Anchorage, Alaska, the actual costs will be much larger.
The point of universal postal service is that it allows businesses to treat all customers as equal. Imagine a situation where the cost to buy something from Amazon was dependent on your distance from an Amazon distribution centre; Amazon's business would quickly fall apart as they would be undercut by a hundred local competitors. Same for banks, mailing out bank statements. Or the cost of mailing your Congressman. Maybe that's a good thing, but the government's usual position is that it is not.
USPS subsidise their tricky long distance deliveries by charging more for their simple local deliveries. If you were to allow private companies to compete on an even keel (but without legally mandating them to provide a universal service), they would simply undercut USPS on the profitable local deliveries, while leaving the taxpayer to carry the can for the expensive deliveries. It's one of those situations where you can't just change it a little bit without massive unintended consequences- if you're going to change it, you're going to need to do a complete overhaul and rethink.
Again, it's deceptive because the nationalised postal services have a mandate to provide universal service, while private companies do not. That is, they need to be able to deliver first class mail to the most remote rural Danish island, the same as they do to downtown Copenhagen. This means that you pay more (with your national service) for simple deliveries to subsidise the more difficult ones.
Privatising (or even liberalising) postal services can lead to several bad consequences. The most obvious would be this situation: the national service is still mandated by law to provide universal service. They still charge more on simple urban deliveries to balance the books. A private service comes in and competes only for the simple jobs- they refuse service to anywhere tricky. As all their deliveries are simple, they can massively undercut the national service on these jobs, depriving the service of it's main revenue stream. Therefore, either "non-simple" jobs become massively more expensive, or taxpayers need to step in to subsidise, or the service goes bust and you lose universal service.
The situation in the UK is even more daft. The Royal Mail is still a monopoly, but they're now required by law to sell their "last mile" delivery capabilities on to competitors- and do so practically at cost. The above paragraph is still true, with the added irony that the RM is still delivering the letters- but for no profit! And they still have to provide universal service to the Outer Hebrides, also at massive loss. Competitors such as UK Mail or TNT cherry pick the profitable routes- and don't even need to worry about having any infrastructure past the sorting office. And obviously it's the taxpayer who picks up the bill.
Spitting firewood and cutting down a tree are different. Can't think of the last time I've seen someone cut down a tree with an axe. Ditto brooms and vacuums are different. Land lines... I haven't had one since '99 actually.
That's kind of the point. Emails and their electronic cousins have certainly stolen a fair chunk of the usage from the postal service, but there are still some uses where the postal service is better. Package delivery, for one. Anything that needs formal recorded delivery for two. Delivery of certificates, official documents, and whatnot for three. They're the "splitting wood" to the postal service's "axe", if you catch my drift.
A diplomat with a micro-film camera is a lot less aggressive than a flying robotic killing machine, in my most humble opinion.
Or to put it another way- there have been Iranian diplomatic staff on US soil before, and I suspect you were not outraged. If Iranian military jet aircraft were circling over Texas, you might be more so.
And why doesn't Green peace protest against BP? Gulf spill comes to mind.
You think they don't?
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/bp/rebranded/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-10771805
Just to be pedantic- Pfizer didn't do the work. The drug was invented by a company called Parke-Davis, and the rights have ended up with Pfizer following mergers and buyouts.
Not that that necessarily invalidates your point; when a company buys another, it buys all of its rights. But "Pfizer" has done nothing in the development of this drug; they just bought the rights to it at some point for some price, in the hope that their investment would pay off. Nothing more complicated than if they'd bought stocks in a hedge fund, or stockpiled gold bars.
Doctors prescribe by drug, not by brand. It's up to the pharmacist (or the patient) which brand of that drug they use, presuming they're all the same drug inside the box. And when you get right down to it, pharmacists (especially American ones, private healthcare being what it is) are just retailers. They no more have to stock a given brand of drugs than my grocer has to stock a specific brand of beans.
That said, monopolistic practices are still bad, and I hope the anti-trust lawyers are warming up their litigation mobiles...