Odds are, at most one of those 3000 actually is a terrorist.
I like your post, and what's more -- if 1 in 3,000 were a terrorist, that would mean we would have 100,000 terrorists here in the United States. If we have 100,000 terrorists here in the United States, well, we can't stop them from doing whatever it is they've got up their sleeves. Even if we caught 99.9%, there would still be 100 left undetected to complete the mission.
By that logic, any news is therefore applicable to this site, right.
Any news which also engages our civic duty, yes.
Just to get you up to speed -- the United States has been in decline for about 25 years, with various tonics to alleviate the symptoms from time to time. Those tonics have let the disease fester, and now we are faced with a very difficult road ahead. We all, not just geeks, need to figure out how our skills can help bring the nation about or we will go down. Worse yet, we're so tied into the global economy that we'll probably start a new dark age if we go down hard enough.
So, yeah, any news which indicates a potential civic bug does belong on Slashdot.
Slashdot is for nerds. Law is code. Peculiar behavior in code is a possible bug worth looking into. This is pretty peculiar behavior, and we code specialists should examine it to see if it indicates a bug.
Lawyers have a better grasp on the practice of law, but we are pretty good at analyzing the mechanical aspects. The public should take an interest in ensuring that law does not serve only lawyers, and we geeks have a skill that lets us help with that oversight. It's a duty we should take seriously, IMO.
Redundant, I am absolutely sure, but I've got to say it too.
'To me the problem is the Wikipedia rule of public use,' says Jerry Avenaim, a celebrity photographer. 'If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright.'
"To me the problem is Jerry Avenaim's failure to grasp Wikipedia," says Bob9113, a Slashdot geek. "If he truly wants to get an image posted on Wikipedia, he should license it in a way that suits the principle purpose of Wikipedia."
Wikipedia is a shared public repository of information. The word "shared" in the previous sentence is perhaps the single most significant component in the Wikipedia success story. Removing it would be like taking the engine out of an automobile -- pretty much defeats the purpose.
Wikipedia is not a place to host your portfolio or rack up resume items, it is a Free encyclopedia. You can use it to do the former, but only if you are willing to respect and support the latter.
Second, if distributing GPL'ed software by means that completely preclude it from being used without Windows is not a violation of the GPL, should it not be?
I don't think so. GPL is mostly about granting access and rights to the source, under certain conditions, so you can modify the code to work on your system, not about requiring the author to make it work on your system. If it only runs on Windows, so be it, as long as the source code is Freely available so it can be fixed.
Now, if they're not making the source available through reasonable means, well, that's another problem, and is a violation of the GPL. But the "requires Windows as distributed" thing is the same as lots of GPL software.
BTW, I want to stress that I was not directing the end of that post at you. I really meant that I think you get it, and you seem to be thinking about it *vastly* more deeply than the average politician. But your voice will will never be heard over the din of American Idle when the safe time for a controlled contraction arrives.
The goal of economic stimulus is not to create positive wealth, but to create economic activity.
Certainly mortgages and car loans were encouraged, but the main purpose of freeing up the credit was so companies would have the operating funds needed to stay afloat. It is a pretty standard practice for even large, successful businesses to use credit for much of their short-term operating funds.
Fair enough, and I get the need for an adrenalin shot at the time. The problem is that we've been living on adrenaline shots since Reagan. The collapse was the same thing you'd see if a Tour de France rider was fueling himself on high sugar sports drinks.
Since Reagan we've been running the economy on zero margin. That's fine as long as there is no contraction and we never make a mistake in assessing credit risk. But if a butterfly flaps its wings you get a cascade failure.
We've been at this for twenty five years. At some point we have to stop just creating economic activity and start creating positive wealth. We can be disciplined and hike there, or the economy will shove us there. Last fall it was "we can't let the banks fail" (even though they failed in their sole wealth creation function; managing risk). Over the new year it was "we can't let the auto makers fail" (even though they chose to sell high-margin cotton candy and neglect development of fruits and vegetables). Throughout we've heard clamor of "we can't let people get tossed out in the streets" (even though the homeowners bought beyond their means or leveraged the artificial value beyond their means).
I understand that nobody wants anyone to fail ever. But we can't live on adrenalin shots and high sugar sports drinks forever. There will never be a good time to take that last hit then put the crack pipe away. In the good times, there's no problem with everything running on credit at the limit and banks being 1% away from their reserve requirement. In the bad times, we can't risk the fragile recovery. But some hit has got to be the last hit or we are implicitly choosing for the next collapse to be worse.
You seem to grasp, and really mean it. And maybe the politicians really do get it right now, and really mean it. But everyone says, "I'll quit, I can quit any time, but just not right now. Tomorrow."
The entire point of the Velocity of money is counting the total number of times the money changes hands.
This is a flaw in economic theory, or is a belief in an ideal market. It ignores friction and debt maintenance, and assumes that every transaction involves positive wealth creation. That is not the case in our advertising-driven, buy-more-and-put-it-in-storage economy. Transactions which do not satisfy wants create negative wealth and in our position even the good ones increase the debt maintenance nut. We are spending ourselves into oblivion because we are stuck on the belief that maximizing the number of transactions eliminates the need to live within our means. It is endemic in public and private spending, and gushes from the politicians talking about "freeing up credit" for more inefficient spending even as our public and private debt combined approach 400% of GDP(*) -- 25% higher than in the great depression -- and advertising psychologists create "want it, need it, get it" viral memes to induce impulse spending on big ticket items (cars in that case).
The velocity of money math is sound, as long as you factor all the variables. But when you accept it in its laboratory form, it is as effective as a perpetual motion machine, particularly given our severely damaged economy, crippling debt load, and spendthrift culture.
Our biggest way to avoid this is for ISPs to actually try this on big media...because big media owns a lot more politicians than ISPs, and net neutrality would magically suddenly happen.
Perhaps it would go down this way, but that doesn't explain ClearChannel + radio. Radio pays no royalties, big media tells them what to play, both lobby for net radio to be killed by Congress, and even Slashdarling Pandora gets in on the act by jumping over to support net radio fees in exchange for the $25k minimum annual royalty to kill their independent competition, and a shot at becoming big media's new bitch in the upcoming fight over radio royalties. Big media sees radio dying and is kicking it in the head as it goes down, and Pandora is too full of itself to realize they are cuddling up to a cobra. And we geeks so love genetic algorithms that we're still cheering Pandora even as they begin fondling the RIAA's genitals.
I think big media will figure out that it needs to control the means of distribution and will do whatever it takes to get there. ISPs will realize that owning big-brand media will eliminate the risk of competition and enable them to start a golden age of behavior tracking for the lion's share of the targeted ad revenue. Mom & Pop's WiMax Internet dies, Congress continues to turn a blind eye to behavior tracking and collusion in exchange for more all expense paid "fact finding missions" to the Bahamas, and the RIAA and MPAA successfully regain control of culture manufacturing.
The simplest example is what happens if I put the $600 from my stimulus check under my mattress for a few years? Obviously that money has a very low velocity. On the other hand, if I take that same $600 and spend it on groceries, the money would have a higher velocity, and spending the money on locally produced goods and services would give it an even higher velocity.
So, what if the grocer puts the $600 in food stamps under his mattress? Or, more reasonably, what if that $600 simply pads the wallet of the likes of Mike Duke, Lee Scott, and Robson Walton (key principles of Wal Mart)?
The velocity of the first step is admittedly higher, but that first step is not a productive one. Again, I want to stress that I am not speaking against social nets -- I believe they are a good thing. They do not, however, have inherently higher velocity beyond step one, and step one is at least difficult to justify as economy stimulating. Roads serve many. The unemployed are an obligation of a civilized society, but they do not directly contribute to the economy.
If on the other hand you give the money to the rich, there is very little motivation for them to spend the money at all. What's another $600 when you already make half a million a year? An even better example of this was the TARP program, particularly the first half that was administered under Bush.
There is arbitrarily close to nothing about the initial Bush engineered bailout that I found acceptable. You're preaching to the choir.
As an aside, I was one of those (admittedly extreme, perhaps not pragmatic, certainly not realistic) who was saying it would be good to let the banks collapse. It would have really sucked in the short run, like a forest fire. But like a forest fire, it would have cleared the dead wood and allowed new growth to sprout. We need to clear that dead wood eventually, or the conflagrations will get worse and worse. It is no different from real forest fires in the wake of Smokey The Bear's zero fire tolerance policies.
Organic systems are surprisingly fractal in this regard -- the same patterns recapitulate themselves in areas which are strikingly dissimilar on the surface, yet fascinatingly similar in the abstract. In this, though, I am admittedly radical. It would have been a horrifying short run.
But I digress, as I do.
You are right that there is no 'perfect' stimulus plan, but there are 'good' ones. For example one of the best parts of the original proposed stimulus plan was weatherzation of public schools and other buildings.
Very agreed on the quality of that program. And (at the risk of making you think me a right-leaner again) another benefit: Reducing wasteful energy use reduces energy demand. That results in the efficient price shifting down and to the left. Lower energy prices mean companies can consume more energy to make goods and services. I mention this only because it's a fun one to use on rightists who knee-jerk against advocating energy efficiency. As soon as you point out how it helps business they get all conflicted. It's fun to watch their faces screw up in confusion as the argument in their head blooms.:)
What was I saying? Oh yes: The problem is that you can't get the weatherization program without the free carbon credits for coal-fired power plants program. I wanted to believe. I really did. In fact, I did believe. Audacity of hope indeed; he sure showed me.
Unfortunately, they are probably right, and I suspect that the Dems will continue to be too spineless to do anything about it, even with their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
Not spineless, they're just too busy watering down their carbon legislation and health legislation to please their own corporate masters and keep the campaign contributions, sweetheart jobs for their ne'er do well extended families, zero-interest "pay me back when-never" loans, and five star "fact finding missions" to St. Andrews rolling in.
What is unreasonable is them overselling bandwidth to such an extent they have to do this for everyone. If people use 50% of the bandwidth on average, and spike to 125% once a day or something, we'd have no problem.
Completely agreed. Though to be fair, bandwidth consumption is changing extremely rapidly. They should have seen it coming, for sure, but it is still tough to adapt a business so fast. Still, I agree -- a huge part of the answer is for the ISPs to sell what they advertise and advertise what they sell.
The problem isn't how they decide, the problem is that a) they're so oversold they need to decide every moment of day, and b) they're so oversold they're just randomly capping services.
Hehe - random I wouldn't mind so much. It's the directed capping I have a problem with, particularly when they realize that the intersection of directed capping and Internet access n-opolies (with small n) is a profit center. The big ISPs will make exclusive deals with the big content providers, and the small ISPs and small content providers will wither on the vine.
That said, they aren't deciding what is 'important', they're deciding what makes more customers happier, in theory. It might be more 'important' that you download a security patch, but having 1000 customers have web browsing work 25% faster because your important download is 25% slower is entirely reasonable for a company to do. (It is not, however, reasonable for a company to be in such a situation more than once a blue moon.)
Were I to believe that the pragmatic path forward would include studious observance of your parenthetical ending, I would concede all points. In fact, I'd vote for you as benevolent dictator. My disagreement stems from my distrust (entirely reasonable from evidence, I believe) in Comcast, AT&T, and friends. They have shown time and again that they fall prey to Adam Smith's most significant reservation in advocating a market free from governance -- that the ability to manipulate markets is inevitably followed by the manipulation of markets.
I simply don't trust the big ISPs and big media to play nice. I think they are a little dumb and haven't completely realized they should be colluding yet, but they will get there. While I would love for economic anarchy to work, I believe that in this case neutrality is one of the very few pragmatic solutions to maintaining the full essence of free speech on the Internet. An alternative, if you prefer, is to restore common carrier for data -- then let them make their own choice: Content neutrality or content liability.
I'll respond in full this evening, but in the meantime, can you provide a link to something that backs up your refutation of the concept a 'velocity of money'. From your statement, it seems like you seriously misunderstand the whole point.
No link necessary. Velocity of money describes the behavior of money in the economy, not the behavior of money after a particular type of transaction. The velocity of money after a foodstamps transaction is no different than the velocity of money given to artists in an art-grant program after they buy paint and canvasses, or the velocity of money after paying BART employees, or the velocity of money after funding our ailing schools, or the velocity of money after funding highway maintenance, or any other type of transaction.
To assert that velocity of money implies preference for one type of spending than another, you'd have to demonstrate that the spending in question results in concentrating the velocity of money in the local economy (at whatever scale of local you want to use). I don't think foodstamps do that, because the money is going to agribusiness and national supermarket chains, and from there into the hands of executives and overseas (oil and petrochems from the international market for agriculture, high paid execs and low paid labor for national supermarket chains).
And if you still think I sound like a right winger after that last bit, which I genuinely believe, then you aren't listening.
It is, indeed, reasonable to traffic shape p2p to lower priority, so people's VoIP and even web browsing experience goes better. Shaping traffic so all 'downloads', as in, mostly automated large transfers, get lower priority than interactive traffic, is entirely a good idea. In addition to p2p, they should lower the priority of HTTP files over 1meg and FTP. (Need to watch for YouTube and Hulu and stuff, though.) Interactive first, downloads second.
Come to think of it, how would you shape encrypted tunnels? Could be interactive, could be a download. How do you decide?
It is, indeed, reasonable to traffic shape p2p to lower priority, so people's VoIP and even web browsing experience goes better. Shaping traffic so all 'downloads', as in, mostly automated large transfers, get lower priority than interactive traffic, is entirely a good idea. In addition to p2p, they should lower the priority of HTTP files over 1meg and FTP. (Need to watch for YouTube and Hulu and stuff, though.) Interactive first, downloads second.
I disagree. It is not the ISP's place to decide which traffic gets higher throughput. Frankly, Hulu can suck my dick when I'm trying to get a security patch or pulling a log file to see who is attacking my server. Less colorfully, the ISP does not have the information necessary to decide which bits are more valuable, and so should not have the authority to decide who goes first. There are priort That holds even if ISPs were altruistic actors, which they are not, which leads to the problem of selling preferred access, which will inevitably lead to small businesses getting shut out and the Internet will head toward a radio-like oligopoly.
Sell me bandwidth, sell me guaranteed rate, sell me total transfer. But you cannot tell how important a particular set of bits is to me by looking at it. Then again, perhaps if you just adhere to the DS field in the packet, and let me mark all my packets max priority, I'd be fine with it.
Ok, a couple of points... First, to be nitpicky, 27% + 22% is not "more than half".:-)
True, and "thought it harmed" is not "thought it did not help". If 2% of those who did not think it harmed also did not think it helped, my statement holds.
Second, from briefly browsing their website, the Liberty Fund is either Conservative Republican or Libertarian (I'm guessing the latter), so take that into account when judging anything they say. That's not to say that they can't be trusted, but be sure to consider their biases.
Surely. In reality, the reason I use the figure is to add weight to my own view. My view comes not from accepting the poll, but from the poll (and the chanting of "New Deal" since the crash) leading me to study the works done under the New Deal. Some of them were good, but there were some amazing stinkers in there too. It doesn't take too many bad programs to offset the marginal benefit of a bunch of good ones (considering that the money doesn't come from thin air). Taken as a whole, I fall squarely in the "didn't help" camp by my own deliberation. But since I can't back that up readily in this limited space, I reference the poll.
But regardless of the groups biases, the survey still shows that 49% agreed at least partially with the statement "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression," right? That's one way to look at it, another is that 73% of economists either completely disagreed with the statement, or disagreed "with provisos".
I agree that wording like that can be used creatively, but that particular example would be one hell of a misrepresentation.
Going in to debt during a budget crisis is never an ideal solution, but sometimes you have no choice. Have you ever been unemployed, and had your car break down? You have two choices, fix it by putting the repair on your credit card, or don't fix it, but not be able to make your job interview next week. Unfortunately, sometimes the axiom "desperate times call for desperate measures" is correct. The same is true for the national economy in this case.
Have you ever been unemployed and decided to buy a motorcycle because it uses less gas than your car? I have far less of a problem with deficit spending to keep existing infrastructure and services working than I do with deficit spending on new projects. Moreover, I don't have a problem with well placed stimulus, rather I think D.C. is not adept at placing stimulus well, particularly under duress. When they are being pressured by the public to do something quickly, and pressured by lobbyists and favors to do biased things, the risk of being at or below neutral net benefit is extremely high.
You are correct that if we did nothing, the economy would most likely eventually recover on it's own. But if we did nothing, things would get FAR worse before they got better.
And the terrorists will attack if we don't engage in unfettered surveillance of American citizens and this pebble I carry in my pocket prevents me from getting mugged (has worked perfectly so far). Boogeyman polemics are exceedingly uncompelling rhetoric.
You're right, much of what has been done has been bad, but remember, the Republicans get a big chunk of that blame.
Need I again restate that I don't care which party is worse? I'm looking for good. Less bad is not good enough. Saying the other side is worse is partisan positioning. Show me what your favored actors have done right, don't try to get me to support your side by getting me to dislike the other side more. We have long been on that path and it is destroying us.
For example, they were the ones who insisted on business tax cuts that will have almost no short term economic benefit (something like $1.03 return on every $1.00 spent), but forced the removal of increases to the food stamp programs when those are shown to have just about the largest return on investment of all possible stimulus metho
But I'm still waiting for a citation regarding your comment "More than half of economists think the New Deal didn't help".
Most recently I saw it here:
According to Gene Smiley, writing on the Web site of Liberty Fund,[56], "a number of economists" believe the New Deal delayed economic recovery.[57] A 1995 survey of economic historians asked whether "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression." Of those in economics departments 27% agreed, 22% agreed 'with provisos' (what provisos the survey does not state) and 51% disagreed. Of those in history departments, only 27% agreed and 73% disagreed.[58]
Second, the University of Chicago school of Economics and the economic theories they promote have been the dominant economic worldview over the last 50 years, so presumably a sizable chunk of economists believe in that worldview. Those same theories have lead to things like the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which pretty much directly lead to our current economic downturn.
I too have problems with the Chicago School. And, honestly, with many economists (I think many or most neglect the fundamentals in their fascination with the advanced constructs). But, they're not the worst possible touchstone.
My thought in looking at the modern situation is not that well-placed stimulus would be bad, it is that the government is not sufficiently objective to place stimulus well. They are so twisted by lobbying, favors owed, and the need to be reelected that they are not capable of thinking clearly. And, like the NRA (the New Deal NRA, not the gun guys), I think they will do (and have already done) ridiculous things that we will laugh at in 30 years. Faced with the options of bad intervention or no intervention, I reluctantly choose none. This is particularly so when we are already well beyond what I consider healthy debt -- it's easier to deficit spend when you have a bit more cushion.
I think you definition of "Fiscal Conservative" is flat out wrong. That may be the -theoretical- definition, and that may have been the practical definition thirty years ago, but that definition no longer has any bearing on the policies of the Republican party.
Who was talking about the Republican party? I said I've voted for more Democrats than Republicans, implying that I have (and I have) voted for Repulicans, but I would never give them so high an honor as to call them fiscal conservatives.
And when they refer to themselves as fiscal conservatives, or even conservative on anything other than social law, they should be shouted down for the liars they are. They waste money, they get into foreign entanglements, they mutate The Constitution, they fail to be conservators of the free market, they fail to conserve our natural resources, they fail to conserve our international reputation -- they are conservative of nothing except old-timey religionism and the second amendment.
I wasn't calling Republicans fiscal conservatives, and it's not for politicians to define that term. It's an economic term. If they try to pervert it, fuck 'em. They're wrong, and it betrays ignorance, and we should be calling them ignorant when they do it, not accepting their bad definition.
BTW, I have an equally strong and supportable rant against Democrats, so please don't confuse my ire with Republicans for support of Democrats. A wise and reasonable man can find them both severely lacking.
A recent Canadian Press Harris-Decima poll on ISPs' use of traffic shaping suggests that 60% of survey respondents find the practice reasonable as long as customers are treated fairly, while 22% believe Internet management is unreasonable regardless.
Hmmm, I wonder why it didn't report on people's views on the use of laparoscopy in cases where the risk of trocar injuries is elevated?
Oh! I know! Because that is a question for surgeon's to answer, not the general public.
The major Canadian Internet and phone service provider Rogers, meanwhile, compared 'person-to-person file-sharing to a car that parks in one lane of a busy highway at all times of the day or night, clogging the roadways for everyone unless someone takes action.'
Why P2P? Who not YouTube? Why not all large downloads? Why not all small downloads? What precisely is it about the kind of bits that makes them different than other kinds of bits? If I use P2P to download a 180 meg Debian netinst bundle using bittorrent, is that better or worse than a person who is registered for a couple dozen podcasts on iTunes?
And you, you fools. You keep arguing against capping, against tiering, against anything that would enable ISPs to charge for the number of bits. So they are left with no alternative but the sneaky one that the general public doesn't understand. Argue against them using "unlimited", argue for full disclosure of bandwidth limits, but arguing against the limits themselves is what is causing them (admittedly, happily) to jump back to traffic shaping. This is partly your fault.
If everyone voted this way, then the incumbent would always lose. It would be, in effect, like passing a law that limited all candidates to a single term.
Notice that in my post I said "lately". I do not believe that one-term term-limits are the answer (though I would support term limits of some sort -- maybe four or five terms). I also do not believe that voting out all incumbents every time is a permanent answer. I do, however, believe that the current state of Washington is untenable, and that we must demonstrate a threat to incumbency to fix it. We desperately need a show of no confidence, and of voter authority, to get D.C. working for us again.
If they can keep running an approval rating around 10%, and keep getting reelected at 80% or higher, they have no motivation to fix the infrastructural D.C. issues that transcend party boundaries.
Just so you don't think I'm a complete idiot, though, I do favor the income tax structure from the 30s to 50s, which I think is one of the big factors in the recovery from the crash and the WWII debt. I also think it was a big factor in creating the broadly stable economic base that kept us expanding until Reagan and the Neocons took a giant steaming dump on the idea of having a broad-based economy, and substituted party-hat fiscal liberalness that has been hiding our decline for 25 years while the caste system gets firmly entrenched.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "fiscally liberal"
Fiscal conservative means encouraging saving over debt. For public spending, this means running a balanced budget or even running a surplus to save up for the hard times. For private finance, this means encouraging private saving and running a positive individual savings rate (we're negative right now, have been for years).
if you mean "lots of government spending", then you need to explain your conclusion in light of the effects of government policies between 1928 and 1952.
Happy to: More than half of economists think the New Deal didn't help.
Just so you don't think I'm a complete idiot, though, I do favor the income tax structure from the 30s to 50s, which I think is one of the big factors in the recovery from the crash and the WWII debt. I also think it was a big factor in creating the broadly stable economic base that kept us expanding until Reagan and the Neocons took a giant steaming dump on the idea of having a broad-based economy, and substituted party-hat fiscal liberalness that has been hiding our decline for 25 years while the caste system gets firmly entrenched.
Should we be surprised at all that increased levels of education help people critically analyze and accept/deny scientific theories? Should we still be surprised that the more educated someone is, the more liberal (generally speaking) their political views tend to be?
I think it may explain being socially liberal -- recognizing that moral decisions are inherently difficult to make objectively. I am skeptical, however, that analytical skills correlate (or at least should correlate) strongly with being fiscally liberal. There seems to be decent evidence that being fiscally liberal, particularly in a society in economic decline, is hazardous.
Then again, I guess there is ample evidence that neither Republicans nor Democrats are fiscally conservative.
Slashdot Mirror
Odds are, at most one of those 3000 actually is a terrorist.
I like your post, and what's more -- if 1 in 3,000 were a terrorist, that would mean we would have 100,000 terrorists here in the United States. If we have 100,000 terrorists here in the United States, well, we can't stop them from doing whatever it is they've got up their sleeves. Even if we caught 99.9%, there would still be 100 left undetected to complete the mission.
By that logic, any news is therefore applicable to this site, right.
Any news which also engages our civic duty, yes.
Just to get you up to speed -- the United States has been in decline for about 25 years, with various tonics to alleviate the symptoms from time to time. Those tonics have let the disease fester, and now we are faced with a very difficult road ahead. We all, not just geeks, need to figure out how our skills can help bring the nation about or we will go down. Worse yet, we're so tied into the global economy that we'll probably start a new dark age if we go down hard enough.
So, yeah, any news which indicates a potential civic bug does belong on Slashdot.
Slashdot is for nerds. Law is code. Peculiar behavior in code is a possible bug worth looking into. This is pretty peculiar behavior, and we code specialists should examine it to see if it indicates a bug.
Lawyers have a better grasp on the practice of law, but we are pretty good at analyzing the mechanical aspects. The public should take an interest in ensuring that law does not serve only lawyers, and we geeks have a skill that lets us help with that oversight. It's a duty we should take seriously, IMO.
Dear Ireland,
Jesus wore pantyhose, because he was a tranny.
Yours, Sincerely,
Bob9113
Redundant, I am absolutely sure, but I've got to say it too.
'To me the problem is the Wikipedia rule of public use,' says Jerry Avenaim, a celebrity photographer. 'If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright.'
"To me the problem is Jerry Avenaim's failure to grasp Wikipedia," says Bob9113, a Slashdot geek. "If he truly wants to get an image posted on Wikipedia, he should license it in a way that suits the principle purpose of Wikipedia."
Wikipedia is a shared public repository of information. The word "shared" in the previous sentence is perhaps the single most significant component in the Wikipedia success story. Removing it would be like taking the engine out of an automobile -- pretty much defeats the purpose.
Wikipedia is not a place to host your portfolio or rack up resume items, it is a Free encyclopedia. You can use it to do the former, but only if you are willing to respect and support the latter.
Second, if distributing GPL'ed software by means that completely preclude it from being used without Windows is not a violation of the GPL, should it not be?
I don't think so. GPL is mostly about granting access and rights to the source, under certain conditions, so you can modify the code to work on your system, not about requiring the author to make it work on your system. If it only runs on Windows, so be it, as long as the source code is Freely available so it can be fixed.
Now, if they're not making the source available through reasonable means, well, that's another problem, and is a violation of the GPL. But the "requires Windows as distributed" thing is the same as lots of GPL software.
BTW, I want to stress that I was not directing the end of that post at you. I really meant that I think you get it, and you seem to be thinking about it *vastly* more deeply than the average politician. But your voice will will never be heard over the din of American Idle when the safe time for a controlled contraction arrives.
The goal of economic stimulus is not to create positive wealth, but to create economic activity.
Certainly mortgages and car loans were encouraged, but the main purpose of freeing up the credit was so companies would have the operating funds needed to stay afloat. It is a pretty standard practice for even large, successful businesses to use credit for much of their short-term operating funds.
Fair enough, and I get the need for an adrenalin shot at the time. The problem is that we've been living on adrenaline shots since Reagan. The collapse was the same thing you'd see if a Tour de France rider was fueling himself on high sugar sports drinks.
Since Reagan we've been running the economy on zero margin. That's fine as long as there is no contraction and we never make a mistake in assessing credit risk. But if a butterfly flaps its wings you get a cascade failure.
We've been at this for twenty five years. At some point we have to stop just creating economic activity and start creating positive wealth. We can be disciplined and hike there, or the economy will shove us there. Last fall it was "we can't let the banks fail" (even though they failed in their sole wealth creation function; managing risk). Over the new year it was "we can't let the auto makers fail" (even though they chose to sell high-margin cotton candy and neglect development of fruits and vegetables). Throughout we've heard clamor of "we can't let people get tossed out in the streets" (even though the homeowners bought beyond their means or leveraged the artificial value beyond their means).
I understand that nobody wants anyone to fail ever. But we can't live on adrenalin shots and high sugar sports drinks forever. There will never be a good time to take that last hit then put the crack pipe away. In the good times, there's no problem with everything running on credit at the limit and banks being 1% away from their reserve requirement. In the bad times, we can't risk the fragile recovery. But some hit has got to be the last hit or we are implicitly choosing for the next collapse to be worse.
You seem to grasp, and really mean it. And maybe the politicians really do get it right now, and really mean it. But everyone says, "I'll quit, I can quit any time, but just not right now. Tomorrow."
Sure, cracky, I believe you.
The entire point of the Velocity of money is counting the total number of times the money changes hands.
This is a flaw in economic theory, or is a belief in an ideal market. It ignores friction and debt maintenance, and assumes that every transaction involves positive wealth creation. That is not the case in our advertising-driven, buy-more-and-put-it-in-storage economy. Transactions which do not satisfy wants create negative wealth and in our position even the good ones increase the debt maintenance nut. We are spending ourselves into oblivion because we are stuck on the belief that maximizing the number of transactions eliminates the need to live within our means. It is endemic in public and private spending, and gushes from the politicians talking about "freeing up credit" for more inefficient spending even as our public and private debt combined approach 400% of GDP(*) -- 25% higher than in the great depression -- and advertising psychologists create "want it, need it, get it" viral memes to induce impulse spending on big ticket items (cars in that case).
The velocity of money math is sound, as long as you factor all the variables. But when you accept it in its laboratory form, it is as effective as a perpetual motion machine, particularly given our severely damaged economy, crippling debt load, and spendthrift culture.
* http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cost-of-soaring-private-and-public-debt
Our biggest way to avoid this is for ISPs to actually try this on big media...because big media owns a lot more politicians than ISPs, and net neutrality would magically suddenly happen.
Perhaps it would go down this way, but that doesn't explain ClearChannel + radio. Radio pays no royalties, big media tells them what to play, both lobby for net radio to be killed by Congress, and even Slashdarling Pandora gets in on the act by jumping over to support net radio fees in exchange for the $25k minimum annual royalty to kill their independent competition, and a shot at becoming big media's new bitch in the upcoming fight over radio royalties. Big media sees radio dying and is kicking it in the head as it goes down, and Pandora is too full of itself to realize they are cuddling up to a cobra. And we geeks so love genetic algorithms that we're still cheering Pandora even as they begin fondling the RIAA's genitals.
I think big media will figure out that it needs to control the means of distribution and will do whatever it takes to get there. ISPs will realize that owning big-brand media will eliminate the risk of competition and enable them to start a golden age of behavior tracking for the lion's share of the targeted ad revenue. Mom & Pop's WiMax Internet dies, Congress continues to turn a blind eye to behavior tracking and collusion in exchange for more all expense paid "fact finding missions" to the Bahamas, and the RIAA and MPAA successfully regain control of culture manufacturing.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Especially for the number one cop in the number one country.
The simplest example is what happens if I put the $600 from my stimulus check under my mattress for a few years? Obviously that money has a very low velocity. On the other hand, if I take that same $600 and spend it on groceries, the money would have a higher velocity, and spending the money on locally produced goods and services would give it an even higher velocity.
So, what if the grocer puts the $600 in food stamps under his mattress? Or, more reasonably, what if that $600 simply pads the wallet of the likes of Mike Duke, Lee Scott, and Robson Walton (key principles of Wal Mart)?
The velocity of the first step is admittedly higher, but that first step is not a productive one. Again, I want to stress that I am not speaking against social nets -- I believe they are a good thing. They do not, however, have inherently higher velocity beyond step one, and step one is at least difficult to justify as economy stimulating. Roads serve many. The unemployed are an obligation of a civilized society, but they do not directly contribute to the economy.
If on the other hand you give the money to the rich, there is very little motivation for them to spend the money at all. What's another $600 when you already make half a million a year? An even better example of this was the TARP program, particularly the first half that was administered under Bush.
There is arbitrarily close to nothing about the initial Bush engineered bailout that I found acceptable. You're preaching to the choir.
As an aside, I was one of those (admittedly extreme, perhaps not pragmatic, certainly not realistic) who was saying it would be good to let the banks collapse. It would have really sucked in the short run, like a forest fire. But like a forest fire, it would have cleared the dead wood and allowed new growth to sprout. We need to clear that dead wood eventually, or the conflagrations will get worse and worse. It is no different from real forest fires in the wake of Smokey The Bear's zero fire tolerance policies.
Organic systems are surprisingly fractal in this regard -- the same patterns recapitulate themselves in areas which are strikingly dissimilar on the surface, yet fascinatingly similar in the abstract. In this, though, I am admittedly radical. It would have been a horrifying short run.
But I digress, as I do.
You are right that there is no 'perfect' stimulus plan, but there are 'good' ones. For example one of the best parts of the original proposed stimulus plan was weatherzation of public schools and other buildings.
Very agreed on the quality of that program. And (at the risk of making you think me a right-leaner again) another benefit: Reducing wasteful energy use reduces energy demand. That results in the efficient price shifting down and to the left. Lower energy prices mean companies can consume more energy to make goods and services. I mention this only because it's a fun one to use on rightists who knee-jerk against advocating energy efficiency. As soon as you point out how it helps business they get all conflicted. It's fun to watch their faces screw up in confusion as the argument in their head blooms. :)
What was I saying? Oh yes: The problem is that you can't get the weatherization program without the free carbon credits for coal-fired power plants program. I wanted to believe. I really did. In fact, I did believe. Audacity of hope indeed; he sure showed me.
Unfortunately, they are probably right, and I suspect that the Dems will continue to be too spineless to do anything about it, even with their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
Not spineless, they're just too busy watering down their carbon legislation and health legislation to please their own corporate masters and keep the campaign contributions, sweetheart jobs for their ne'er do well extended families, zero-interest "pay me back when-never" loans, and five star "fact finding missions" to St. Andrews rolling in.
Let me remind you, I don't think th
What is unreasonable is them overselling bandwidth to such an extent they have to do this for everyone. If people use 50% of the bandwidth on average, and spike to 125% once a day or something, we'd have no problem.
Completely agreed. Though to be fair, bandwidth consumption is changing extremely rapidly. They should have seen it coming, for sure, but it is still tough to adapt a business so fast. Still, I agree -- a huge part of the answer is for the ISPs to sell what they advertise and advertise what they sell.
The problem isn't how they decide, the problem is that a) they're so oversold they need to decide every moment of day, and b) they're so oversold they're just randomly capping services.
Hehe - random I wouldn't mind so much. It's the directed capping I have a problem with, particularly when they realize that the intersection of directed capping and Internet access n-opolies (with small n) is a profit center. The big ISPs will make exclusive deals with the big content providers, and the small ISPs and small content providers will wither on the vine.
That said, they aren't deciding what is 'important', they're deciding what makes more customers happier, in theory. It might be more 'important' that you download a security patch, but having 1000 customers have web browsing work 25% faster because your important download is 25% slower is entirely reasonable for a company to do. (It is not, however, reasonable for a company to be in such a situation more than once a blue moon.)
Were I to believe that the pragmatic path forward would include studious observance of your parenthetical ending, I would concede all points. In fact, I'd vote for you as benevolent dictator. My disagreement stems from my distrust (entirely reasonable from evidence, I believe) in Comcast, AT&T, and friends. They have shown time and again that they fall prey to Adam Smith's most significant reservation in advocating a market free from governance -- that the ability to manipulate markets is inevitably followed by the manipulation of markets.
I simply don't trust the big ISPs and big media to play nice. I think they are a little dumb and haven't completely realized they should be colluding yet, but they will get there. While I would love for economic anarchy to work, I believe that in this case neutrality is one of the very few pragmatic solutions to maintaining the full essence of free speech on the Internet. An alternative, if you prefer, is to restore common carrier for data -- then let them make their own choice: Content neutrality or content liability.
I'll respond in full this evening, but in the meantime, can you provide a link to something that backs up your refutation of the concept a 'velocity of money'. From your statement, it seems like you seriously misunderstand the whole point.
No link necessary. Velocity of money describes the behavior of money in the economy, not the behavior of money after a particular type of transaction. The velocity of money after a foodstamps transaction is no different than the velocity of money given to artists in an art-grant program after they buy paint and canvasses, or the velocity of money after paying BART employees, or the velocity of money after funding our ailing schools, or the velocity of money after funding highway maintenance, or any other type of transaction.
To assert that velocity of money implies preference for one type of spending than another, you'd have to demonstrate that the spending in question results in concentrating the velocity of money in the local economy (at whatever scale of local you want to use). I don't think foodstamps do that, because the money is going to agribusiness and national supermarket chains, and from there into the hands of executives and overseas (oil and petrochems from the international market for agriculture, high paid execs and low paid labor for national supermarket chains).
And if you still think I sound like a right winger after that last bit, which I genuinely believe, then you aren't listening.
It is, indeed, reasonable to traffic shape p2p to lower priority, so people's VoIP and even web browsing experience goes better. Shaping traffic so all 'downloads', as in, mostly automated large transfers, get lower priority than interactive traffic, is entirely a good idea. In addition to p2p, they should lower the priority of HTTP files over 1meg and FTP. (Need to watch for YouTube and Hulu and stuff, though.) Interactive first, downloads second.
Come to think of it, how would you shape encrypted tunnels? Could be interactive, could be a download. How do you decide?
It is, indeed, reasonable to traffic shape p2p to lower priority, so people's VoIP and even web browsing experience goes better. Shaping traffic so all 'downloads', as in, mostly automated large transfers, get lower priority than interactive traffic, is entirely a good idea. In addition to p2p, they should lower the priority of HTTP files over 1meg and FTP. (Need to watch for YouTube and Hulu and stuff, though.) Interactive first, downloads second.
I disagree. It is not the ISP's place to decide which traffic gets higher throughput. Frankly, Hulu can suck my dick when I'm trying to get a security patch or pulling a log file to see who is attacking my server. Less colorfully, the ISP does not have the information necessary to decide which bits are more valuable, and so should not have the authority to decide who goes first. There are priort That holds even if ISPs were altruistic actors, which they are not, which leads to the problem of selling preferred access, which will inevitably lead to small businesses getting shut out and the Internet will head toward a radio-like oligopoly.
Sell me bandwidth, sell me guaranteed rate, sell me total transfer. But you cannot tell how important a particular set of bits is to me by looking at it. Then again, perhaps if you just adhere to the DS field in the packet, and let me mark all my packets max priority, I'd be fine with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Prolonged.2Fworsened_the_Depression
Note that section says 49% thought it made it worse.
Ok, a couple of points... First, to be nitpicky, 27% + 22% is not "more than half". :-)
True, and "thought it harmed" is not "thought it did not help". If 2% of those who did not think it harmed also did not think it helped, my statement holds.
Second, from briefly browsing their website, the Liberty Fund is either Conservative Republican or Libertarian (I'm guessing the latter), so take that into account when judging anything they say. That's not to say that they can't be trusted, but be sure to consider their biases.
Surely. In reality, the reason I use the figure is to add weight to my own view. My view comes not from accepting the poll, but from the poll (and the chanting of "New Deal" since the crash) leading me to study the works done under the New Deal. Some of them were good, but there were some amazing stinkers in there too. It doesn't take too many bad programs to offset the marginal benefit of a bunch of good ones (considering that the money doesn't come from thin air). Taken as a whole, I fall squarely in the "didn't help" camp by my own deliberation. But since I can't back that up readily in this limited space, I reference the poll.
But regardless of the groups biases, the survey still shows that 49% agreed at least partially with the statement "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression," right? That's one way to look at it, another is that 73% of economists either completely disagreed with the statement, or disagreed "with provisos".
I agree that wording like that can be used creatively, but that particular example would be one hell of a misrepresentation.
Going in to debt during a budget crisis is never an ideal solution, but sometimes you have no choice. Have you ever been unemployed, and had your car break down? You have two choices, fix it by putting the repair on your credit card, or don't fix it, but not be able to make your job interview next week. Unfortunately, sometimes the axiom "desperate times call for desperate measures" is correct. The same is true for the national economy in this case.
Have you ever been unemployed and decided to buy a motorcycle because it uses less gas than your car? I have far less of a problem with deficit spending to keep existing infrastructure and services working than I do with deficit spending on new projects. Moreover, I don't have a problem with well placed stimulus, rather I think D.C. is not adept at placing stimulus well, particularly under duress. When they are being pressured by the public to do something quickly, and pressured by lobbyists and favors to do biased things, the risk of being at or below neutral net benefit is extremely high.
You are correct that if we did nothing, the economy would most likely eventually recover on it's own. But if we did nothing, things would get FAR worse before they got better.
And the terrorists will attack if we don't engage in unfettered surveillance of American citizens and this pebble I carry in my pocket prevents me from getting mugged (has worked perfectly so far). Boogeyman polemics are exceedingly uncompelling rhetoric.
You're right, much of what has been done has been bad, but remember, the Republicans get a big chunk of that blame.
Need I again restate that I don't care which party is worse? I'm looking for good. Less bad is not good enough. Saying the other side is worse is partisan positioning. Show me what your favored actors have done right, don't try to get me to support your side by getting me to dislike the other side more. We have long been on that path and it is destroying us.
For example, they were the ones who insisted on business tax cuts that will have almost no short term economic benefit (something like $1.03 return on every $1.00 spent), but forced the removal of increases to the food stamp programs when those are shown to have just about the largest return on investment of all possible stimulus metho
But I'm still waiting for a citation regarding your comment "More than half of economists think the New Deal didn't help".
Most recently I saw it here:
According to Gene Smiley, writing on the Web site of Liberty Fund,[56], "a number of economists" believe the New Deal delayed economic recovery.[57] A 1995 survey of economic historians asked whether "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression." Of those in economics departments 27% agreed, 22% agreed 'with provisos' (what provisos the survey does not state) and 51% disagreed. Of those in history departments, only 27% agreed and 73% disagreed.[58]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Prolonged.2Fworsened_the_Depression
Second, the University of Chicago school of Economics and the economic theories they promote have been the dominant economic worldview over the last 50 years, so presumably a sizable chunk of economists believe in that worldview. Those same theories have lead to things like the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which pretty much directly lead to our current economic downturn.
I too have problems with the Chicago School. And, honestly, with many economists (I think many or most neglect the fundamentals in their fascination with the advanced constructs). But, they're not the worst possible touchstone.
My thought in looking at the modern situation is not that well-placed stimulus would be bad, it is that the government is not sufficiently objective to place stimulus well. They are so twisted by lobbying, favors owed, and the need to be reelected that they are not capable of thinking clearly. And, like the NRA (the New Deal NRA, not the gun guys), I think they will do (and have already done) ridiculous things that we will laugh at in 30 years. Faced with the options of bad intervention or no intervention, I reluctantly choose none. This is particularly so when we are already well beyond what I consider healthy debt -- it's easier to deficit spend when you have a bit more cushion.
I think you definition of "Fiscal Conservative" is flat out wrong. That may be the -theoretical- definition, and that may have been the practical definition thirty years ago, but that definition no longer has any bearing on the policies of the Republican party.
Who was talking about the Republican party? I said I've voted for more Democrats than Republicans, implying that I have (and I have) voted for Repulicans, but I would never give them so high an honor as to call them fiscal conservatives.
And when they refer to themselves as fiscal conservatives, or even conservative on anything other than social law, they should be shouted down for the liars they are. They waste money, they get into foreign entanglements, they mutate The Constitution, they fail to be conservators of the free market, they fail to conserve our natural resources, they fail to conserve our international reputation -- they are conservative of nothing except old-timey religionism and the second amendment.
I wasn't calling Republicans fiscal conservatives, and it's not for politicians to define that term. It's an economic term. If they try to pervert it, fuck 'em. They're wrong, and it betrays ignorance, and we should be calling them ignorant when they do it, not accepting their bad definition.
BTW, I have an equally strong and supportable rant against Democrats, so please don't confuse my ire with Republicans for support of Democrats. A wise and reasonable man can find them both severely lacking.
A recent Canadian Press Harris-Decima poll on ISPs' use of traffic shaping suggests that 60% of survey respondents find the practice reasonable as long as customers are treated fairly, while 22% believe Internet management is unreasonable regardless.
Hmmm, I wonder why it didn't report on people's views on the use of laparoscopy in cases where the risk of trocar injuries is elevated?
Oh! I know! Because that is a question for surgeon's to answer, not the general public.
The major Canadian Internet and phone service provider Rogers, meanwhile, compared 'person-to-person file-sharing to a car that parks in one lane of a busy highway at all times of the day or night, clogging the roadways for everyone unless someone takes action.'
Why P2P? Who not YouTube? Why not all large downloads? Why not all small downloads? What precisely is it about the kind of bits that makes them different than other kinds of bits? If I use P2P to download a 180 meg Debian netinst bundle using bittorrent, is that better or worse than a person who is registered for a couple dozen podcasts on iTunes?
And you, you fools. You keep arguing against capping, against tiering, against anything that would enable ISPs to charge for the number of bits. So they are left with no alternative but the sneaky one that the general public doesn't understand. Argue against them using "unlimited", argue for full disclosure of bandwidth limits, but arguing against the limits themselves is what is causing them (admittedly, happily) to jump back to traffic shaping. This is partly your fault.
If everyone voted this way, then the incumbent would always lose. It would be, in effect, like passing a law that limited all candidates to a single term.
Notice that in my post I said "lately". I do not believe that one-term term-limits are the answer (though I would support term limits of some sort -- maybe four or five terms). I also do not believe that voting out all incumbents every time is a permanent answer. I do, however, believe that the current state of Washington is untenable, and that we must demonstrate a threat to incumbency to fix it. We desperately need a show of no confidence, and of voter authority, to get D.C. working for us again.
If they can keep running an approval rating around 10%, and keep getting reelected at 80% or higher, they have no motivation to fix the infrastructural D.C. issues that transcend party boundaries.
Just so you don't think I'm a complete idiot, though, I do favor the income tax structure from the 30s to 50s, which I think is one of the big factors in the recovery from the crash and the WWII debt. I also think it was a big factor in creating the broadly stable economic base that kept us expanding until Reagan and the Neocons took a giant steaming dump on the idea of having a broad-based economy, and substituted party-hat fiscal liberalness that has been hiding our decline for 25 years while the caste system gets firmly entrenched.
To more clearly explain what I'm talking about:
http://beach.traxel.com/img/1954-gdp-adjusted-wikipedia.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Code_of_1954
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "fiscally liberal"
Fiscal conservative means encouraging saving over debt. For public spending, this means running a balanced budget or even running a surplus to save up for the hard times. For private finance, this means encouraging private saving and running a positive individual savings rate (we're negative right now, have been for years).
if you mean "lots of government spending", then you need to explain your conclusion in light of the effects of government policies between 1928 and 1952.
Happy to: More than half of economists think the New Deal didn't help.
Just so you don't think I'm a complete idiot, though, I do favor the income tax structure from the 30s to 50s, which I think is one of the big factors in the recovery from the crash and the WWII debt. I also think it was a big factor in creating the broadly stable economic base that kept us expanding until Reagan and the Neocons took a giant steaming dump on the idea of having a broad-based economy, and substituted party-hat fiscal liberalness that has been hiding our decline for 25 years while the caste system gets firmly entrenched.
Should we be surprised at all that increased levels of education help people critically analyze and accept/deny scientific theories? Should we still be surprised that the more educated someone is, the more liberal (generally speaking) their political views tend to be?
I think it may explain being socially liberal -- recognizing that moral decisions are inherently difficult to make objectively. I am skeptical, however, that analytical skills correlate (or at least should correlate) strongly with being fiscally liberal. There seems to be decent evidence that being fiscally liberal, particularly in a society in economic decline, is hazardous.
Then again, I guess there is ample evidence that neither Republicans nor Democrats are fiscally conservative.