...people could just grow a pair of balls, vote, and stop buying music.
Any idiot can run for office. Just because people are dumb suckers who are attached at the hip to a party or morons who vote for the guy with the best marketing scheme doesn't mean the democracy is dysfunctional. The dysfunction is in the people. The people could vote for anyone they damn well pleased, but they just don't. If you can't get people off their lazy asses to vote, good luck starting the violent revolution. The system is in place to remove these people peacefully. You just need a fraction of the population to get off their asses and act. Hell, you don't even need a majority of the people to rock the boat.
The only thing easier then voting in new politicians is toppling corporations. Corporations are pushovers, especially on the consumer side. If the people collectively decided to topple Walmart, the corporations in league with the MPAA or RIAA, or any other corporation, it would be a trivial matter. Just don't buy their shit. If everyone decided not to buy from one of these companies, these companies would be out of business in a week. Even if people kept buying their shit they would flee the US in a few weeks. Corporations need cash flow. Cutting off a corporation's cash flow for even a few days is enough to kill off most corporations.
The US won't have a violent revolution any time in the foreseeable future because all of the mechanisms to fix these problems already exist, and they are a hell of a lot easier to use then taking on the US military. The problem is that people are just dumb cows who don't want to be bothered to use these mechanisms. Everything need for change is there, it just takes people to stop buying shit they don't need for a few minutes and voting like they have a brain.
After getting Morrowind the day it came out, I am very glad to hear they are holding back. Morrowind was one of the best/worst games I have ever played. It is the sort of game that had so much potential and possibility, but was so terribly flawed due to its lack of content, shitty shitty shitty combat engine, and bugs up the ass. It was like seeing an unfinished masterpiece.
I am excited for Oblivion, as I really hope that they took all that potential that Morrowind had and ran with it. If it takes them a few more months to get it right and not deliver another empty shell, I can wait.
Please. He is donating money to Africa to fight a disease that affects the poor in a massively disproportionate numbers. If he wanted to make money for Microsoft, there are five other continents far more worthy of sucking up to. Hell, make that six. Antarctic researches might need an OS to run their laptops. Africa is massively impoverished, has a massively impoverished population, and rampant piracy. The level of government corruption is completely off of the chart in most Africa nations. When you can't run get a vaguely functioning non-corrupt bureaucracy going, it is laughable to think that you can get people in the bureaucracy to start paying their licensing fee for their OS.
In other words, this is philanthropy, pure and simple. The most Gates has to gain out of this is a better name in general for himself. Even then, if Gates really was looking to make a better name for himself in the US, malaria falls roughly on the bottom of the list. Try and remember that Gates is still human. If you had a few billion dollars sitting around, would you only give it away for nefarious and evil purposes, or would a warm tingly feeling in your gut be enough?
You point out that the worth of the foundation goes up as time goes on like that is a bad thing. Sure, they could just dump everything they have in a single year and only replenish then funds they have by directly receiving more money from Gates. When Gates makes less money, the charity would have less to spend. When Gates dies, the charity would die after it spent whatever money Gates left it....OR...
They could do the exact same thing as above, but instead only spend part of the money they take in and invest the rest. This way, the net funds the charity has to spend actually GROWS over time. Even if Bill one day contributes less, the charity would continue to grow and spend more. When Bill dies, the charity will continue on long after his corpse has rotted away.
The latter option is just taking a long term view. If Gates really just wanted a publicity stunt, he could just directly donate. If he wants to do real good in the world long after he is dead, he can set up a charity that has the ability to grow and expand long after he is dead. Personally, I prefer the later.
It isn't funny. It is a tired joke with absolutely no wit. I really wish people would only mod 'funny' if it is actually funny. Instead, the funny mod gets thrown at anything even trying to be funny, making the moderation relatively worthless.
It isn't interesting/insightful/informative no matter how you slice or dice it. You could copy and paste this post into any Slashdot topic. There isn't even the vague semblance of an intelligent point trying to be made. It is the same old tired point being made. Yes, Bush and Iraq are bad. Got it. Now for the love of god, stop posting that in every single topic no matter how unrelated it is. I swear, there could be a Slashdot story on Zelda cheat codes and someone would find a way to post about how much they hate Bush/Iraq War. I wish people would keep that tired crap in the topics that it belongs AND maybe even try and make a vaguely interesting point while they are doing it.
Which brings me to why it is not even worthy of an off topic mod. An off topic mod at least implies that there is something of substance in the post. If someone posted and intelligent post about how much hybrid cars rock, that would be worthy of an off topic mod because it has substance, but is not really related. The grant parent of this post said absolutely nothing of substance. It was a troll pure and simple. He could have pretty much spamed that post into every single news story. With just minor modifications.
Personally, I wish crap like this would get weeded out as the trolls they are instead of getting mod points for being 'funny'. It would be a miracle of all of the +5 funny stuff out there was actually funny. It has nothing to do with wether or not people agree, it is just a stupid an inane comment, pure and simple. The mods that mod it as a troll are doing their job.
It isn't the loving that makes me nervous. If you read Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines, he sets out a time line in it. For all practical purposes, humans as we know them are extinct by 2050. After 2050 or so there is an event where technology advancement accelerates so fast that it is beyond our current comprehension what happens afterwards. It isn't exactly a bad future, it is just a future that rushes up out of nowhere and blindsides everyone. Kurzweil is actually down right optimistic about it. It is just that I wouldn't naturally predict the end of humanity as we know it within my life time.
The eerie piece is that the timeline he set up in 1999 is being followed pretty much to the T. Six years might not sound like a long time to predict the future, but I remember reading that book in 1999 and thinking "no fucking way will things be that far along". The deeper into his timeline that we go, the more seriously I start to take his book. Catching the leading edge of a life shattering technological revolution (for good or for ill) is a little unnerving.
Forcing American ideals of free speech on foreign countries wouldn't deserve praise, either.
Forcing free speech? That one is a chuckle. You can only force someone NOT to have free speech. In this case, it is China doing the forcing against its own population. Further, this isn't exactly an American ideal. Hell, a great American hero is Rosa Parks who just recently died. She is celebrated for breaking the law of a sovereign nation (namely the US). Sovereign nations have no great moral authority. People do. Supporting the people in another nation and utterly ignoring form of government they have is a-okay.
If the sovereign is the highest moral authority, then you must be down right happy with how things turned out in Sudan and Rwanda. It seems everyone else agreed with you and sided with the idea that a sovereign nation is not to be interfered with. Of course, the tens of millions of people that died and tens of millions more that were raped and tortured might disagree with you.
What happened in those nations brings shame to the entire world. That we would let sovereigns do such terrible things simply because in one hunk of land they had the most guns and claimed control is nothing short of horrific.
Everyone jokes at the prospect of robots, but just the other day I saw what was easily one of the most chilling commercials I have seen in a long time. It was a commercial for that new little vacuum Robot they are selling at Wal-Mart (or wharever). The robot was made by a company called iRobot and had a bunch of people giving testimonials about how much they love their robot. It creeped me right the fuck out. I went over and grabbed a copy of my Age of Spiritual Machines and glanced over the part that predicts the first simple robots hitting the mass market. He is pretty much dead on.
Personally, I think we are living in a very interesting time. Granted, it is a little fucked up and creepy and there are a lot of horrible ways things can go wrong. I personally think that we are on the brink of a technological revolution that is going to blow us all away. After that little Wal-Mart commercial, I take the idea of a singularity a lot more seriously.
First, it isn't a crime in most nations to start cursing like a sailor.
Second, even if it was a crime, it is pretty clear that if a translation program goes nuts and starts spouting obscenities, it is the translation program's fault. A tech might get sacked for failing to set up the program properly, but that is about it. That is like asking what would happen if someone hired a person to act as a translator and the translator started mistranslating things into obscenities. Uh, the translator gets fired.
Really, this is pretty common sense stuff. Only in bad sitcoms do such misunderstanding last for more then a few seconds.
There actually IS a lot of repetition of work. Generally though, the way it goes is that one person does the trail blazing work, and then when the work is published. After it is published, someone reads it and is inspired to take that work further or in a new direction. When they go to take that work off in a new direction, they first repeat the results of the work that their work is based on. So, work is very often repeated, it just takes time and it usually is not repeated just for the sake of repetition.
I>Well, it should be like this - in theory. Now imagine a slashdotter 50 years from now. He's been reading slashdot since teen years, his main source of information is TV, of which he prefers simpsons (or something like this), and from national geographic channel he finds out, that leaves of tree in autumn are supposed to be yellow. [It is known fact that many people who live their whole lives in big cities (New York, etc.) have never seen stars - smog covers sky at all times.] Now tell me - just how much wisdom and what kind of experience you could get from such person? Pop-culture is named like this because it is popular, not because it brings wisdom.
I wasn't talking about the 'wisdom' gained from watching 200 years worth of TV. I was talking about very real and very practical benefits of having been around for a while. If I knew I was going to live 200+ years, I would go back to school every 50 or so years. I would start to accumulate vast reservoirs of knowledge. I would have worked in dozens of companies by the time I was 100. In addition to another degree or three, I would have decades of experience working in one field or another. On top of that, I would have decades of experience simply dealing with and managing people. A 150 year old man (or woman) still in the prime of their health with such experience would be an invaluable asset to society.
There will also be 200 year old scientist with the foresight to set their research goals to span centuries. There will likely be people much more active in politics who are not politicians by trade because they have the time to build a reserve of wealth large enough to run for office and have the practical wisdom that a centenary or two of living brings.
Will there be 200 year old pop culture addicted burger flippers? Probably, but that is just how society is. Not everyone aspires to be a scientist, engineering, doctor, or something of that nature. Of course, a 200 year old burger flipper might very well decide that he has had enough and get an education. Further, I would hope that after 200 years of burger flipping such a person would find a way to climb up the ladder a little maybe snag a management position. 200 years is a pretty damn long time to do the same thing and never learn anything.
And the most insidious unintended consequence of our advance in medicine, most people don't appreciate, we have extended our life spans, if you have the money, to the point that we live much longer than we should, we have people living a poor quality of life for decades in their 80's and 90's draining societies resources, and worse we are producing an exploding population. I'm not sure near technology synthesized immortality is such a great thing. There is benefit in the renewal that comes with the old dieing and letting young, fresh people take over.
I think you are looking at life expansion from entirely the wrong perspective. First, life expansion does NOT create a population boom. All of the rich western European nation are in a death cycle right now. Their populations are shrinking. Wealth and the ability to live a long time causes people to simply choose to not have as many children. This is an extremely well documented correlation. The US itself would be in a death cycle like Europe if it wasn't for its influx of immigrants.
Life expansion does not result in a drastically lower standard of living. Being old isn't what makes being old suck. Having your organs fail, your bones become brittle, mental illness, and muscle loss are the reasons why being old is no fun. Fortunately, extending life requires dealing with all of the above. If you have ever watched a National Geographic on a tribe with low life expectancy, you will notice that a 35 year old man looks like an 80 year old American or European. That isn't to suggest that we keep people alive beyond what they would be able to be naturally in the same state, but it isn't right to assume that when people were dying at the age of 40 they were dying looking and feeling like a 40 year old of today.
More importantly, life expansion these days almost entirely revolves around "solving" old age. If someone was to live to be 200 years old, you can bet that they have 'solved' old age and that 200 year old person probably looks about 30. You simply can't extend peoples' lives much longer without curing the natural degradation that your body suffers as you get older.
Finally, I think you drastically overlook the social good that old age offers. In a society where people become older and older, you have people building up vast reservoirs of experience and knowledge. The only social ill old age brings is retirement, and as you see people living longer and healthier lives, you are going to see the retirement age kicked out further. I wouldn't be surprised in a decade or two when life expansion hits its next big surge that our way of thinking about retirement gets radically altered. I wouldn't be surprised if one day the normal mode of 'retirement' is to take a few years off from work every decade or two, but never permanently retire.
would America (and by america i mean the right wing and left wing traitors to the constitution) like it if say China controlled major aspects of the internet? how about North Korea?
No, and that is kind of the point. No, the US does not want two nations famous for their censorship of the Internet to have any more control then they already do.
And lookie here. http://www.wgig.org/docs/WGIGREPORT.doc The original report on Internet governance. Hrm, who signed this merry little report... China, Cuba, Egypt, Russia, and Saudi Arabia to name a few. Now, I now the US is the great Satan and all, but do you really want those nations to dictate internet governance? Me personally? I'll pass and take my chances with the nation that has seemed to have done a marvelous job keeping their hands completely off of ICANN.
The US has already taken the 'liberalized' approach to the Internet. The US handed it off to a not-for-profit company to manage it under some strict 'keep your damn hands off' guidelines.
This stupid battle over "control" of the Internet is at best the EU and UN trying to compare dick sizes with the US to see who is the bigger man, and at worst an attempt by some UN nations to exercise higher levels of taxation and censorship on the Internet. Chances are it is probably a little bit of both.
Personally, I am not interested in who has the bigger cock, and I am even less interested in the UN's attempting to tax and censor the Internet. ICANN has done a fine job running things as they are and has had a strictly hands off policy. Things should remain as they are until ICANN does something wrong.
I once knew a girl who was this sweet southern bell who moved to the northeast. You would think she was the sweetest person in the world until every now and then she would open her mouth and say something horrible. I recall one time I was standing in line with her. There were some irritating loudly black kids standing in line in front of us shouting at the top of their lungs. She turned to me and goes, "I don't mean to sound racist," and I winced, because I knew the next thing out of her mouth WOULD be racist, "but I fucking hate black people. They are so god damn loud."
The point of that little anecdote? Every time someone opens their mouth and says, I am a strong believer in the First Amendment and in free speech, but...I know the next thing out of their mouth is going to prove otherwise. I know the next thing out of their mouth is going to be some exception where THEY don't think free speech is really all that important.
Personally, I am completely baffled as to how the first amendment got so thoroughly trounced. Granted, it seems to hold off the worst of the insane attempts to limit speech, but I thought the "shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech" is pretty clear. It almost reminds me of that Onion article where during an interview with God he expresses how utterly dismayed that the 10 commandments are not followed. In particular, god thought the "Thy shall not kill" was pretty damn clear, yet people kept making up exceptions to the rule.
You can't call what the Americans do fascism. Fascism is utterly obsessed with the preservation and control from a strong central state. Fascism and socialism have more to do with each other then the American system does. Fascism tends to have extremely strong social protection models. I wouldn't call what the Americans have a terribly strong social protection model.
The Americans on the other hand have something else entirely. I personally think it is too soon to really define it, as I think the system is still working itself out. The Americans also have a very strong set of civil institutions that are close impossible to uproot that makes them relatively unique and very different from China.
You are right though in that the corporation has a lot of influence. The corporation is easily the defining entity in American life. That said, I think you vastly simplify the complexity of the system if you believe that there is a singular corporate interest that is ruling all. There system is extremely complex and involves not just competing corporate interests, but civil institutions, government institutions, and all manner of complexities. It might very well find its equilibrium of competing interests in some place totally unexpected.
Personally, I am morbidly curious to see how the whole thing turns out. I would kill to be able to look back at this time in history a 100 years from now to see a dispassionate and detached analysis of this era. I personally think that this convergence of technology, communication, and economics is going to produce something no one expects. Will it be good or bad? Eh, who knows. I bet whatever it is, it will at least be very unique.
I'll take my American'poor' or Chinese 'poor' any day of the week. American and European poor die of obesity because they watch too much TV, eat too much food, and burn a few dinos a day in electricity. When the Chinese poor have to worry about dying of over eating and American poor flee the China in cargo crates, then I'll be impressed. Until then, 250,000 Chinese no longer in poverty just means that the government fiddled with the definition of poverty, sent out a few corrupt officials who lied on their census data, had some officials over them fudge a few more figures, then had the CCP propaganda wing fudge the numbers once more, then finally blasted the numbers on the state television after one final fudging by the news 'reporters'.
I think you are confusing capitalistic anarchy for libertarianism. Libertarians DO believe that the government has a role. They just differ as to the extent of that role. There are things where libertarians have no problem involving the government. A car that explodes due to negligence isn't the right of the car company unless the car company told you that they were selling you an exploding car. If you really wanted an exploding car, you of course welcome to buy one and use it on your own property, but if a car company sells you a bomb and calls it a car, libertarians would be all for throwing them in jail and litigating them out of existence. In a libertarian society you do not have the right to misrepresent a product any more then you can in this society.
As for drugs, it isn't government permission you need. What you need is to agree to not sue the drug company that sells you the heroin when it puts you in a hospital. If a drug company sells you heroin and doesn't bother to mention that their product is lethal, in a libertarian society you are free to litigate against them. Libertarians DO believe that the government is an arbiter in contract law. A libertarian would not be against mandating that when entering a contract to use a substance that has a great possibility of being lethal and addictive, that the user must go through a training program that fully explains the dangers of the drug before they can use it.
Libertarians have no notion of "public property".
That simply isn't true. I have yet to hear any libertarian advocate private ownership of air. Further, you are taking libertarianism to its fullest extreme. That is like accusing a socialist of being insane because nations NEEED currency to function, all the while having the socialist looking at you like an idiot because he never advocated the banishment of currency. The extreme farthest end of socialism might demand money be done away with, but no sane socialist would advocate doing it because we have yet to develop a method of better assigning value better then money when confronted multiple economic options.
They do have the notion of, "if the air is above my land, it's my air. Stop by if you want to discuss the issue. You have three choices, you can pay me to not pollute my own air, you can get the hell of my land, or you can say hello to my double-barrel shotgun."
Pollution is generally some form of waste, but even if pollution were unavoidable in certain manufacturing processes, strongly enforced property rights would force polluters to either clean up or close shop. By definition, pollution is a trespass against someone's property or person.
If you want to get technical and take libertarianism to its extreme, in this case if a company that is spewing HCl into the air and that HCl floats over your property line and causes you to vomit blood, you get to sue them out of existence and throw them in jail for causing you bodily harm. Dumping onto private property that is not yours is absolutely forbidden in a libertarian society. As you have already noted, libertarians take the concept of private property very seriously, and dumping your waste onto property other then your own is a massive violation of private property. In the most extreme of libertarian societies were literally everything was owned, polluting would be almost impossible. Every scrap of pollutant you create, you would need to withhold on your own property. If any of that pollution seeped off of your property, you would be immediately held fully liable for it and it would be treated as if you drove a dump truck onto someone's law and dumped toxic waste into intentionally. If you want to talk about extremes, in a truly libertarian society pollution is completely impossible.
Of course, such a society would cease to function. Society needs to be able to pollute to at least some d
Arguing over which economic model is like arguing which religion is right, so I will spare you. To be honest, I wouldn't want a 'true' libertarian society and would label myself a moderate libertarian. That said, you have some misconceptions as to what true libertarian ideals involve.
Libertarians are not against consumer protection. If you bought a car in a libertarian society and the second you hit the breaks the car exploded, that would be a criminal act. Libertarians have no problem with inflicting retribution on corporations that sell defective or dangerous products. The difference is that in a perfect utopian libertarian society, if you truly wanted a dangerous product that would only harm yourself, you would be allowed to take it providing that you fully understood the risks involved.
This is most notable when talking about drugs. A crazy ultra libertarian society would let you do heroine. They might make it so that you have to stand before a witness and consent to the health risks involved, but providing it was your own life you were looking to trash, in a libertarian society they would not stop you. This is the key point about consumer protection. Faulty products are inexcusable. On the other hand, doing something potentially life threatening once you consent to the consequences (regardless if its eating a BigMac or doing cocaine) is acceptable.
As far as toxic waste dumping and other environmental topics, libertarians take a slightly different approach. Their approach is to create ownership wherever possible and to focus on the ends of environmental goals. CO2 emissions are a nice example. CO2 is dumped into the air. No one owns the air. A traditional approach might be to order all coal plants to build scrubbers to scrub some fraction of the CO2 and further mandate that no plant can dump more then X amount of CO2. A libertarian approach would be to decide how much CO2 society is reasonably willing to accept being dumped into the air, then sell off the rights to dump CO2 to the highest bidder. The idea behind that is this is that those CO2 rights will be allocated in the most efficient manner possible because now there is an economic drive to reduce CO2 emissions.
Hell, imagine if every single car had to BUY CO2 emission rights? Now when you go to buy your car, you have to also buy CO2 dumping rights at market value so that you can drive the damn thing. Do you think this would make consumers a hell of a lot more aware of how their polluting effects the environment? You betcha. As it stands, consumers are not forced to think about the impact of their SUV. Emissions only get lowered as auto companies, environmentalist, and politicians fight it out. This method brings home the cost of the environment. This is how a libertarian would want to deal with the environment. Yeah, it sounds horrible, but they would want to commodify the commons, set a limit as to how much society is willing to damage the environment, then make anyone who wants to do the damage pay.
All of that said, you are right, libertarianism is not ideal. Libertarians have some great ideas. They are extreme, and like all extremist, they are willing to pick ideology over utility. Personally, I would rather see a more libertarian world. I don't want anarcho-capitalism, but I wouldn't mind if the some power was snatched from the politicians' hands. Most of the 'capitalism' that liberals rail against these days is anything but. If farm subsides in developed nations, land grants via the government to businesses, mother-fucking possession of land for redevelopment (hey, PS. fuck you supreme court), and various kickbacks and tax breaks to some companies but not others is "Laissez-Faire Capitalism, Randism, Libertarianism", then I must have exceedingly poor reading skills. Everything I have read seems to suggest that those are examples of an overly powerful authoritative government, not libertarianism taking hold.
No offense, but you have absolutely no clue in the world what in the hell you are talking about. Go do a Google search with "libertarian intellectual property". Now before you post anything else, read a few of the hits you get.
Oh... what is this? It turns out that libertarians actually fall somewhere between against IP laws or vaguely in favor of weakened IP laws. I know that +1 insightful karma tastes wonderful, as you did manage to throw in a bunch of libertarian buzz words combined with IP law and disparaging remarks, but you can do it without posting in complete ignorance.
The libertarian position in IP law is weak at best. They do NOT have a universal stance on the issue. Libertarians do NOT like the idea of a government enforced monopoly via IP laws. Only the utility of IP laws has led some libertarians to abandon the extreme position of no IP laws at all to favor something more limited. In other words, your average libertarian is more likely somewhere left of your average democrat on the issue. The most pro-IP law libertarians are moderates at best.
So, thanks for your ignorance. It really livened up my day. Hey, how about you make a post showing that libertarians are pro-war and how they love drug laws. I bet you can score another insightful post off that ignorant bullshit too.
I think the larger point is that global warming might very well make the world a nicer place over all. The problem is that we are not set up for a nicer world. We are set up for the world we have. So, global warming might very well increase the amount of farm land available world wide, but that doesn't do some third world nation any good if that also destroys their substance crops. For developed nations, the worst global warming will bring is a few more natural disasters and higher sea levels. That is expensive, but not the end of the world. If the climate shifts, then developed nation farms can change what they grow with a minimal amount of pain. Utilizing farm land is something that developed nations are extremely good at, and global warming will not change this.
The real pain of global warm occurs in developing nations. In a developing nation it is much harder to suddenly change the types of crops being grown and easily switch over to importing what you need. So, lets say you are living in central Africa. You grow a subsistence crop that is good for the climate there. Suddenly, the climate shifts such that that crop no longer grows. Now, the climate shift might have made that land suitable for an even better crop, but if you are living in a poor village with a non-existent central government run by a military dictator, are you going to know that you need to change what you are growing? No. You are far more likely to simply starve as the food you relied on is now gone. Even if you did know you need to change crops, would you have the money for the seed or the knowledge as to how to farm this new crop?
So, the world might be a better place overall, but that doesn't mean that all of humanity will be in a good position to take advantage of any improvements that might be seen. If anything, it could potentially increase human suffering for those nations that are slow at adapting or lack of the financial resources to do so. With that in mind, the only really 'fair' thing to do is to simply try and maintain the status quo. It is a lot easier on the developing world to have a stable climate then it is to have a radically shifting climate, even if that shift is technically beneficial.
The bottom line is that climate shifts ravage the poor, regardless of which direction they go. If the climate shifts you need to be educated as to how to deal with it and have the financing to make appropriate changes. If you don't have those two things, you are shit out of luck.
If there is a market a billion big, and the only way you can play in it is to filter yourself, companies will filter themselves. Period, end of story.
Companies are stupid and mindless entities. In general, they follow the letter of the law without fail. The problem is that in general they follow the letter of the law and not a step beyond. Sure, some companies do build in their own 'laws' to govern their behavior, but these are often for the sake of convincing people to buy from them. Nokia for instance has laws against sweatshop labor and sends inspectors over to China to inspect the plants there. It isn't that Nokia has much of a conscience; they just think that they will convince more people to buy from them if they can say that their phones are not made with sweatshop labor.
Companies do one thing very well. Companies manage and allocate resources with extreme efficiency. There is a reason why there are only a very small number of truly socialistic countries left in this world. Most nations rely wholly on the superior efficiency of corporations to process resources into final goods. Sure, they might have a few utilities and industries socialized that they consider vital (public transportation comes to mind), but for the most part, most nations have corporations handle resources, and for good reason.
The thing that people need to realize is that companies work like cogs in machine. They do their job very well and with great efficiency, but they do it mindlessly. If for instance suppression of free speech bothers you, you need to access your democracies to stop it. Corporations will not develop a collective conscience to do it for you. Don't like Chinese suppression of free speech? Ban corporations from participating in such activity. Don't like the idea of corporations fleeing your nation to go live in China so that they can continue their activities? Get together with other major powers like the EU and the US to pass a unified set of treaties.
If a company is given a choice between Norway or China, Norway will get the shaft. If a corporation is given a choice between working in the EU and US or China, China is the one that is going to be getting the shaft. The EU and the US has plenty of power to exercise against China. The problem is that the EU and the US have absolutely no desire to. Hell, the EU is trying to sell weapons to the People's Liberation Army (you know, the one that liberated the people of their lives in Tiananmen Square?). The US might be a little bit more active in advocating change in China in terms of rhetoric and a few watered down pro-democracy programs, but you sure as hell don't see the US reigning in its own companies doing suppressive work in China.
You think China would abuse this power if it was given to them? I can't believe it. Just the other night I was watching a great documentary on Tiananmen Square. Do you know where the worst of the slaughter was? It wasn't actually Tiananmen Square. It was on a road called "the road of eternal peace" leading into Tiananmen Square. The Peoples Liberation Army opened fire on the peoples that had come to block them via human shielding from Tiananmen Square and the heart of the protest.
Okay, I will give you that the Chinese might not be totally into freedom speech, but you at least have to respect their powers of irony. Come on, using the People Liberation Army to slaughter unarmed people on the road of eternal peace MUST score them some points.
Let the Chinese have the Internet, what could possibly go wrong?
For example, do we really want our elections to be for sale to the highest bidder (more so than they already are, that is)? An unlimited amount of money poured into a campaign can effectively buy a certain outcome, given how susceptible the general population is to advertising.
I think that is part of the problem. If the average voter hears one message one time and hears another message 10 times, is he going to vote for the message he hears the most regardless of its contents? If that is the case, why on earth are we even having elections? Elections are supposed to pick out the superior leader to represent the people, but if the people can be suckered in so easily by just seeing the same message a few times, doesn't that strongly suggest that democracies are worthless?
Instead of picking the best leader based upon the collective intelligence of the people, we have simply developed a game that picks leaders. If alls that democratic politics is, is a game that does not harness the collective intelligence of the population (if there even is any), then why even bother with these silly rule around funding? Why not simply remake the game so that it at least picks good leaders, instead of picking who is better at managing their advertisement funding? Hell, with this line of logic you would think that democracies are better off simply giving the entire population some sort of personality and intelligence test, and taking the people who score the highest to be their leaders. At least this game would select for intelligence and leadership qualities.
If the only thing it takes to make the game of democracy break, someone wake me up when someone figures out a better way to select leaders other then democracy. Democracy is broken. The only consolation is that every other form of governance is just as broken or even worse off.
Okay, I surrender. You win. The Soviet economy did not collapse. The Soviet Union was a happy fairytale land where all was right and magical....but still I am curious as to what exactly is your explanation is as to why the government was toppled and all the satellite states that the Soviet Union had gobbled up ran like hell to get as far away from Russia as they could? What is it that provoked the happy and joy filled little empire to crumble practically over night?
Slashdot Mirror
...people could just grow a pair of balls, vote, and stop buying music.
Any idiot can run for office. Just because people are dumb suckers who are attached at the hip to a party or morons who vote for the guy with the best marketing scheme doesn't mean the democracy is dysfunctional. The dysfunction is in the people. The people could vote for anyone they damn well pleased, but they just don't. If you can't get people off their lazy asses to vote, good luck starting the violent revolution. The system is in place to remove these people peacefully. You just need a fraction of the population to get off their asses and act. Hell, you don't even need a majority of the people to rock the boat.
The only thing easier then voting in new politicians is toppling corporations. Corporations are pushovers, especially on the consumer side. If the people collectively decided to topple Walmart, the corporations in league with the MPAA or RIAA, or any other corporation, it would be a trivial matter. Just don't buy their shit. If everyone decided not to buy from one of these companies, these companies would be out of business in a week. Even if people kept buying their shit they would flee the US in a few weeks. Corporations need cash flow. Cutting off a corporation's cash flow for even a few days is enough to kill off most corporations.
The US won't have a violent revolution any time in the foreseeable future because all of the mechanisms to fix these problems already exist, and they are a hell of a lot easier to use then taking on the US military. The problem is that people are just dumb cows who don't want to be bothered to use these mechanisms. Everything need for change is there, it just takes people to stop buying shit they don't need for a few minutes and voting like they have a brain.
After getting Morrowind the day it came out, I am very glad to hear they are holding back. Morrowind was one of the best/worst games I have ever played. It is the sort of game that had so much potential and possibility, but was so terribly flawed due to its lack of content, shitty shitty shitty combat engine, and bugs up the ass. It was like seeing an unfinished masterpiece.
I am excited for Oblivion, as I really hope that they took all that potential that Morrowind had and ran with it. If it takes them a few more months to get it right and not deliver another empty shell, I can wait.
Please. He is donating money to Africa to fight a disease that affects the poor in a massively disproportionate numbers. If he wanted to make money for Microsoft, there are five other continents far more worthy of sucking up to. Hell, make that six. Antarctic researches might need an OS to run their laptops. Africa is massively impoverished, has a massively impoverished population, and rampant piracy. The level of government corruption is completely off of the chart in most Africa nations. When you can't run get a vaguely functioning non-corrupt bureaucracy going, it is laughable to think that you can get people in the bureaucracy to start paying their licensing fee for their OS.
In other words, this is philanthropy, pure and simple. The most Gates has to gain out of this is a better name in general for himself. Even then, if Gates really was looking to make a better name for himself in the US, malaria falls roughly on the bottom of the list. Try and remember that Gates is still human. If you had a few billion dollars sitting around, would you only give it away for nefarious and evil purposes, or would a warm tingly feeling in your gut be enough?
You point out that the worth of the foundation goes up as time goes on like that is a bad thing. Sure, they could just dump everything they have in a single year and only replenish then funds they have by directly receiving more money from Gates. When Gates makes less money, the charity would have less to spend. When Gates dies, the charity would die after it spent whatever money Gates left it. ...OR...
They could do the exact same thing as above, but instead only spend part of the money they take in and invest the rest. This way, the net funds the charity has to spend actually GROWS over time. Even if Bill one day contributes less, the charity would continue to grow and spend more. When Bill dies, the charity will continue on long after his corpse has rotted away.
The latter option is just taking a long term view. If Gates really just wanted a publicity stunt, he could just directly donate. If he wants to do real good in the world long after he is dead, he can set up a charity that has the ability to grow and expand long after he is dead. Personally, I prefer the later.
It isn't funny. It is a tired joke with absolutely no wit. I really wish people would only mod 'funny' if it is actually funny. Instead, the funny mod gets thrown at anything even trying to be funny, making the moderation relatively worthless.
It isn't interesting/insightful/informative no matter how you slice or dice it. You could copy and paste this post into any Slashdot topic. There isn't even the vague semblance of an intelligent point trying to be made. It is the same old tired point being made. Yes, Bush and Iraq are bad. Got it. Now for the love of god, stop posting that in every single topic no matter how unrelated it is. I swear, there could be a Slashdot story on Zelda cheat codes and someone would find a way to post about how much they hate Bush/Iraq War. I wish people would keep that tired crap in the topics that it belongs AND maybe even try and make a vaguely interesting point while they are doing it.
Which brings me to why it is not even worthy of an off topic mod. An off topic mod at least implies that there is something of substance in the post. If someone posted and intelligent post about how much hybrid cars rock, that would be worthy of an off topic mod because it has substance, but is not really related. The grant parent of this post said absolutely nothing of substance. It was a troll pure and simple. He could have pretty much spamed that post into every single news story. With just minor modifications.
Personally, I wish crap like this would get weeded out as the trolls they are instead of getting mod points for being 'funny'. It would be a miracle of all of the +5 funny stuff out there was actually funny. It has nothing to do with wether or not people agree, it is just a stupid an inane comment, pure and simple. The mods that mod it as a troll are doing their job.
It isn't the loving that makes me nervous. If you read Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines, he sets out a time line in it. For all practical purposes, humans as we know them are extinct by 2050. After 2050 or so there is an event where technology advancement accelerates so fast that it is beyond our current comprehension what happens afterwards. It isn't exactly a bad future, it is just a future that rushes up out of nowhere and blindsides everyone. Kurzweil is actually down right optimistic about it. It is just that I wouldn't naturally predict the end of humanity as we know it within my life time.
The eerie piece is that the timeline he set up in 1999 is being followed pretty much to the T. Six years might not sound like a long time to predict the future, but I remember reading that book in 1999 and thinking "no fucking way will things be that far along". The deeper into his timeline that we go, the more seriously I start to take his book. Catching the leading edge of a life shattering technological revolution (for good or for ill) is a little unnerving.
Forcing American ideals of free speech on foreign countries wouldn't deserve praise, either.
Forcing free speech? That one is a chuckle. You can only force someone NOT to have free speech. In this case, it is China doing the forcing against its own population. Further, this isn't exactly an American ideal. Hell, a great American hero is Rosa Parks who just recently died. She is celebrated for breaking the law of a sovereign nation (namely the US). Sovereign nations have no great moral authority. People do. Supporting the people in another nation and utterly ignoring form of government they have is a-okay.
If the sovereign is the highest moral authority, then you must be down right happy with how things turned out in Sudan and Rwanda. It seems everyone else agreed with you and sided with the idea that a sovereign nation is not to be interfered with. Of course, the tens of millions of people that died and tens of millions more that were raped and tortured might disagree with you.
What happened in those nations brings shame to the entire world. That we would let sovereigns do such terrible things simply because in one hunk of land they had the most guns and claimed control is nothing short of horrific.
Everyone jokes at the prospect of robots, but just the other day I saw what was easily one of the most chilling commercials I have seen in a long time. It was a commercial for that new little vacuum Robot they are selling at Wal-Mart (or wharever). The robot was made by a company called iRobot and had a bunch of people giving testimonials about how much they love their robot. It creeped me right the fuck out. I went over and grabbed a copy of my Age of Spiritual Machines and glanced over the part that predicts the first simple robots hitting the mass market. He is pretty much dead on.
Personally, I think we are living in a very interesting time. Granted, it is a little fucked up and creepy and there are a lot of horrible ways things can go wrong. I personally think that we are on the brink of a technological revolution that is going to blow us all away. After that little Wal-Mart commercial, I take the idea of a singularity a lot more seriously.
Are you serious?
First, it isn't a crime in most nations to start cursing like a sailor.
Second, even if it was a crime, it is pretty clear that if a translation program goes nuts and starts spouting obscenities, it is the translation program's fault. A tech might get sacked for failing to set up the program properly, but that is about it. That is like asking what would happen if someone hired a person to act as a translator and the translator started mistranslating things into obscenities. Uh, the translator gets fired.
Really, this is pretty common sense stuff. Only in bad sitcoms do such misunderstanding last for more then a few seconds.
There actually IS a lot of repetition of work. Generally though, the way it goes is that one person does the trail blazing work, and then when the work is published. After it is published, someone reads it and is inspired to take that work further or in a new direction. When they go to take that work off in a new direction, they first repeat the results of the work that their work is based on. So, work is very often repeated, it just takes time and it usually is not repeated just for the sake of repetition.
I>Well, it should be like this - in theory. Now imagine a slashdotter 50 years from now. He's been reading slashdot since teen years, his main source of information is TV, of which he prefers simpsons (or something like this), and from national geographic channel he finds out, that leaves of tree in autumn are supposed to be yellow. [It is known fact that many people who live their whole lives in big cities (New York, etc.) have never seen stars - smog covers sky at all times.] Now tell me - just how much wisdom and what kind of experience you could get from such person? Pop-culture is named like this because it is popular, not because it brings wisdom.
I wasn't talking about the 'wisdom' gained from watching 200 years worth of TV. I was talking about very real and very practical benefits of having been around for a while. If I knew I was going to live 200+ years, I would go back to school every 50 or so years. I would start to accumulate vast reservoirs of knowledge. I would have worked in dozens of companies by the time I was 100. In addition to another degree or three, I would have decades of experience working in one field or another. On top of that, I would have decades of experience simply dealing with and managing people. A 150 year old man (or woman) still in the prime of their health with such experience would be an invaluable asset to society.
There will also be 200 year old scientist with the foresight to set their research goals to span centuries. There will likely be people much more active in politics who are not politicians by trade because they have the time to build a reserve of wealth large enough to run for office and have the practical wisdom that a centenary or two of living brings.
Will there be 200 year old pop culture addicted burger flippers? Probably, but that is just how society is. Not everyone aspires to be a scientist, engineering, doctor, or something of that nature. Of course, a 200 year old burger flipper might very well decide that he has had enough and get an education. Further, I would hope that after 200 years of burger flipping such a person would find a way to climb up the ladder a little maybe snag a management position. 200 years is a pretty damn long time to do the same thing and never learn anything.
And the most insidious unintended consequence of our advance in medicine, most people don't appreciate, we have extended our life spans, if you have the money, to the point that we live much longer than we should, we have people living a poor quality of life for decades in their 80's and 90's draining societies resources, and worse we are producing an exploding population. I'm not sure near technology synthesized immortality is such a great thing. There is benefit in the renewal that comes with the old dieing and letting young, fresh people take over.
I think you are looking at life expansion from entirely the wrong perspective. First, life expansion does NOT create a population boom. All of the rich western European nation are in a death cycle right now. Their populations are shrinking. Wealth and the ability to live a long time causes people to simply choose to not have as many children. This is an extremely well documented correlation. The US itself would be in a death cycle like Europe if it wasn't for its influx of immigrants.
Life expansion does not result in a drastically lower standard of living. Being old isn't what makes being old suck. Having your organs fail, your bones become brittle, mental illness, and muscle loss are the reasons why being old is no fun. Fortunately, extending life requires dealing with all of the above. If you have ever watched a National Geographic on a tribe with low life expectancy, you will notice that a 35 year old man looks like an 80 year old American or European. That isn't to suggest that we keep people alive beyond what they would be able to be naturally in the same state, but it isn't right to assume that when people were dying at the age of 40 they were dying looking and feeling like a 40 year old of today.
More importantly, life expansion these days almost entirely revolves around "solving" old age. If someone was to live to be 200 years old, you can bet that they have 'solved' old age and that 200 year old person probably looks about 30. You simply can't extend peoples' lives much longer without curing the natural degradation that your body suffers as you get older.
Finally, I think you drastically overlook the social good that old age offers. In a society where people become older and older, you have people building up vast reservoirs of experience and knowledge. The only social ill old age brings is retirement, and as you see people living longer and healthier lives, you are going to see the retirement age kicked out further. I wouldn't be surprised in a decade or two when life expansion hits its next big surge that our way of thinking about retirement gets radically altered. I wouldn't be surprised if one day the normal mode of 'retirement' is to take a few years off from work every decade or two, but never permanently retire.
would America (and by america i mean the right wing and left wing traitors to the constitution) like it if say China controlled major aspects of the internet? how about North Korea?
e nts/APCITY/UNPAN016881.pdf
No, and that is kind of the point. No, the US does not want two nations famous for their censorship of the Internet to have any more control then they already do.
Oh... what is this fine gem from the UN? http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/docum
Is this China asking for more control over the Internet?
And lookie here.
http://www.wgig.org/docs/WGIGREPORT.doc
The original report on Internet governance. Hrm, who signed this merry little report... China, Cuba, Egypt, Russia, and Saudi Arabia to name a few. Now, I now the US is the great Satan and all, but do you really want those nations to dictate internet governance? Me personally? I'll pass and take my chances with the nation that has seemed to have done a marvelous job keeping their hands completely off of ICANN.
The US has already taken the 'liberalized' approach to the Internet. The US handed it off to a not-for-profit company to manage it under some strict 'keep your damn hands off' guidelines.
This stupid battle over "control" of the Internet is at best the EU and UN trying to compare dick sizes with the US to see who is the bigger man, and at worst an attempt by some UN nations to exercise higher levels of taxation and censorship on the Internet. Chances are it is probably a little bit of both.
Personally, I am not interested in who has the bigger cock, and I am even less interested in the UN's attempting to tax and censor the Internet. ICANN has done a fine job running things as they are and has had a strictly hands off policy. Things should remain as they are until ICANN does something wrong.
I once knew a girl who was this sweet southern bell who moved to the northeast. You would think she was the sweetest person in the world until every now and then she would open her mouth and say something horrible. I recall one time I was standing in line with her. There were some irritating loudly black kids standing in line in front of us shouting at the top of their lungs. She turned to me and goes, "I don't mean to sound racist," and I winced, because I knew the next thing out of her mouth WOULD be racist, "but I fucking hate black people. They are so god damn loud."
The point of that little anecdote? Every time someone opens their mouth and says, I am a strong believer in the First Amendment and in free speech, but...I know the next thing out of their mouth is going to prove otherwise. I know the next thing out of their mouth is going to be some exception where THEY don't think free speech is really all that important.
Personally, I am completely baffled as to how the first amendment got so thoroughly trounced. Granted, it seems to hold off the worst of the insane attempts to limit speech, but I thought the "shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech" is pretty clear. It almost reminds me of that Onion article where during an interview with God he expresses how utterly dismayed that the 10 commandments are not followed. In particular, god thought the "Thy shall not kill" was pretty damn clear, yet people kept making up exceptions to the rule.
You can't call what the Americans do fascism. Fascism is utterly obsessed with the preservation and control from a strong central state. Fascism and socialism have more to do with each other then the American system does. Fascism tends to have extremely strong social protection models. I wouldn't call what the Americans have a terribly strong social protection model.
The Americans on the other hand have something else entirely. I personally think it is too soon to really define it, as I think the system is still working itself out. The Americans also have a very strong set of civil institutions that are close impossible to uproot that makes them relatively unique and very different from China.
You are right though in that the corporation has a lot of influence. The corporation is easily the defining entity in American life. That said, I think you vastly simplify the complexity of the system if you believe that there is a singular corporate interest that is ruling all. There system is extremely complex and involves not just competing corporate interests, but civil institutions, government institutions, and all manner of complexities. It might very well find its equilibrium of competing interests in some place totally unexpected.
Personally, I am morbidly curious to see how the whole thing turns out. I would kill to be able to look back at this time in history a 100 years from now to see a dispassionate and detached analysis of this era. I personally think that this convergence of technology, communication, and economics is going to produce something no one expects. Will it be good or bad? Eh, who knows. I bet whatever it is, it will at least be very unique.
I'll take my American'poor' or Chinese 'poor' any day of the week. American and European poor die of obesity because they watch too much TV, eat too much food, and burn a few dinos a day in electricity. When the Chinese poor have to worry about dying of over eating and American poor flee the China in cargo crates, then I'll be impressed. Until then, 250,000 Chinese no longer in poverty just means that the government fiddled with the definition of poverty, sent out a few corrupt officials who lied on their census data, had some officials over them fudge a few more figures, then had the CCP propaganda wing fudge the numbers once more, then finally blasted the numbers on the state television after one final fudging by the news 'reporters'.
I think you are confusing capitalistic anarchy for libertarianism. Libertarians DO believe that the government has a role. They just differ as to the extent of that role. There are things where libertarians have no problem involving the government. A car that explodes due to negligence isn't the right of the car company unless the car company told you that they were selling you an exploding car. If you really wanted an exploding car, you of course welcome to buy one and use it on your own property, but if a car company sells you a bomb and calls it a car, libertarians would be all for throwing them in jail and litigating them out of existence. In a libertarian society you do not have the right to misrepresent a product any more then you can in this society.
As for drugs, it isn't government permission you need. What you need is to agree to not sue the drug company that sells you the heroin when it puts you in a hospital. If a drug company sells you heroin and doesn't bother to mention that their product is lethal, in a libertarian society you are free to litigate against them. Libertarians DO believe that the government is an arbiter in contract law. A libertarian would not be against mandating that when entering a contract to use a substance that has a great possibility of being lethal and addictive, that the user must go through a training program that fully explains the dangers of the drug before they can use it.
Libertarians have no notion of "public property".
That simply isn't true. I have yet to hear any libertarian advocate private ownership of air. Further, you are taking libertarianism to its fullest extreme. That is like accusing a socialist of being insane because nations NEEED currency to function, all the while having the socialist looking at you like an idiot because he never advocated the banishment of currency. The extreme farthest end of socialism might demand money be done away with, but no sane socialist would advocate doing it because we have yet to develop a method of better assigning value better then money when confronted multiple economic options.
They do have the notion of, "if the air is above my land, it's my air. Stop by if you want to discuss the issue. You have three choices, you can pay me to not pollute my own air, you can get the hell of my land, or you can say hello to my double-barrel shotgun."
From http://www.cato.org/pubs/chapters/marlib23.html
Pollution is generally some form of waste, but even if pollution were unavoidable in certain manufacturing processes, strongly enforced property rights would force polluters to either clean up or close shop. By definition, pollution is a trespass against someone's property or person.
If you want to get technical and take libertarianism to its extreme, in this case if a company that is spewing HCl into the air and that HCl floats over your property line and causes you to vomit blood, you get to sue them out of existence and throw them in jail for causing you bodily harm. Dumping onto private property that is not yours is absolutely forbidden in a libertarian society. As you have already noted, libertarians take the concept of private property very seriously, and dumping your waste onto property other then your own is a massive violation of private property. In the most extreme of libertarian societies were literally everything was owned, polluting would be almost impossible. Every scrap of pollutant you create, you would need to withhold on your own property. If any of that pollution seeped off of your property, you would be immediately held fully liable for it and it would be treated as if you drove a dump truck onto someone's law and dumped toxic waste into intentionally. If you want to talk about extremes, in a truly libertarian society pollution is completely impossible.
Of course, such a society would cease to function. Society needs to be able to pollute to at least some d
Arguing over which economic model is like arguing which religion is right, so I will spare you. To be honest, I wouldn't want a 'true' libertarian society and would label myself a moderate libertarian. That said, you have some misconceptions as to what true libertarian ideals involve.
Libertarians are not against consumer protection. If you bought a car in a libertarian society and the second you hit the breaks the car exploded, that would be a criminal act. Libertarians have no problem with inflicting retribution on corporations that sell defective or dangerous products. The difference is that in a perfect utopian libertarian society, if you truly wanted a dangerous product that would only harm yourself, you would be allowed to take it providing that you fully understood the risks involved.
This is most notable when talking about drugs. A crazy ultra libertarian society would let you do heroine. They might make it so that you have to stand before a witness and consent to the health risks involved, but providing it was your own life you were looking to trash, in a libertarian society they would not stop you. This is the key point about consumer protection. Faulty products are inexcusable. On the other hand, doing something potentially life threatening once you consent to the consequences (regardless if its eating a BigMac or doing cocaine) is acceptable.
As far as toxic waste dumping and other environmental topics, libertarians take a slightly different approach. Their approach is to create ownership wherever possible and to focus on the ends of environmental goals. CO2 emissions are a nice example. CO2 is dumped into the air. No one owns the air. A traditional approach might be to order all coal plants to build scrubbers to scrub some fraction of the CO2 and further mandate that no plant can dump more then X amount of CO2. A libertarian approach would be to decide how much CO2 society is reasonably willing to accept being dumped into the air, then sell off the rights to dump CO2 to the highest bidder. The idea behind that is this is that those CO2 rights will be allocated in the most efficient manner possible because now there is an economic drive to reduce CO2 emissions.
Hell, imagine if every single car had to BUY CO2 emission rights? Now when you go to buy your car, you have to also buy CO2 dumping rights at market value so that you can drive the damn thing. Do you think this would make consumers a hell of a lot more aware of how their polluting effects the environment? You betcha. As it stands, consumers are not forced to think about the impact of their SUV. Emissions only get lowered as auto companies, environmentalist, and politicians fight it out. This method brings home the cost of the environment. This is how a libertarian would want to deal with the environment. Yeah, it sounds horrible, but they would want to commodify the commons, set a limit as to how much society is willing to damage the environment, then make anyone who wants to do the damage pay.
All of that said, you are right, libertarianism is not ideal. Libertarians have some great ideas. They are extreme, and like all extremist, they are willing to pick ideology over utility. Personally, I would rather see a more libertarian world. I don't want anarcho-capitalism, but I wouldn't mind if the some power was snatched from the politicians' hands. Most of the 'capitalism' that liberals rail against these days is anything but. If farm subsides in developed nations, land grants via the government to businesses, mother-fucking possession of land for redevelopment (hey, PS. fuck you supreme court), and various kickbacks and tax breaks to some companies but not others is "Laissez-Faire Capitalism, Randism, Libertarianism", then I must have exceedingly poor reading skills. Everything I have read seems to suggest that those are examples of an overly powerful authoritative government, not libertarianism taking hold.
No offense, but you have absolutely no clue in the world what in the hell you are talking about. Go do a Google search with "libertarian intellectual property". Now before you post anything else, read a few of the hits you get.
Oh... what is this? It turns out that libertarians actually fall somewhere between against IP laws or vaguely in favor of weakened IP laws. I know that +1 insightful karma tastes wonderful, as you did manage to throw in a bunch of libertarian buzz words combined with IP law and disparaging remarks, but you can do it without posting in complete ignorance.
The libertarian position in IP law is weak at best. They do NOT have a universal stance on the issue. Libertarians do NOT like the idea of a government enforced monopoly via IP laws. Only the utility of IP laws has led some libertarians to abandon the extreme position of no IP laws at all to favor something more limited. In other words, your average libertarian is more likely somewhere left of your average democrat on the issue. The most pro-IP law libertarians are moderates at best.
So, thanks for your ignorance. It really livened up my day. Hey, how about you make a post showing that libertarians are pro-war and how they love drug laws. I bet you can score another insightful post off that ignorant bullshit too.
I think the larger point is that global warming might very well make the world a nicer place over all. The problem is that we are not set up for a nicer world. We are set up for the world we have. So, global warming might very well increase the amount of farm land available world wide, but that doesn't do some third world nation any good if that also destroys their substance crops. For developed nations, the worst global warming will bring is a few more natural disasters and higher sea levels. That is expensive, but not the end of the world. If the climate shifts, then developed nation farms can change what they grow with a minimal amount of pain. Utilizing farm land is something that developed nations are extremely good at, and global warming will not change this.
The real pain of global warm occurs in developing nations. In a developing nation it is much harder to suddenly change the types of crops being grown and easily switch over to importing what you need. So, lets say you are living in central Africa. You grow a subsistence crop that is good for the climate there. Suddenly, the climate shifts such that that crop no longer grows. Now, the climate shift might have made that land suitable for an even better crop, but if you are living in a poor village with a non-existent central government run by a military dictator, are you going to know that you need to change what you are growing? No. You are far more likely to simply starve as the food you relied on is now gone. Even if you did know you need to change crops, would you have the money for the seed or the knowledge as to how to farm this new crop?
So, the world might be a better place overall, but that doesn't mean that all of humanity will be in a good position to take advantage of any improvements that might be seen. If anything, it could potentially increase human suffering for those nations that are slow at adapting or lack of the financial resources to do so. With that in mind, the only really 'fair' thing to do is to simply try and maintain the status quo. It is a lot easier on the developing world to have a stable climate then it is to have a radically shifting climate, even if that shift is technically beneficial.
The bottom line is that climate shifts ravage the poor, regardless of which direction they go. If the climate shifts you need to be educated as to how to deal with it and have the financing to make appropriate changes. If you don't have those two things, you are shit out of luck.
If there is a market a billion big, and the only way you can play in it is to filter yourself, companies will filter themselves. Period, end of story.
Companies are stupid and mindless entities. In general, they follow the letter of the law without fail. The problem is that in general they follow the letter of the law and not a step beyond. Sure, some companies do build in their own 'laws' to govern their behavior, but these are often for the sake of convincing people to buy from them. Nokia for instance has laws against sweatshop labor and sends inspectors over to China to inspect the plants there. It isn't that Nokia has much of a conscience; they just think that they will convince more people to buy from them if they can say that their phones are not made with sweatshop labor.
Companies do one thing very well. Companies manage and allocate resources with extreme efficiency. There is a reason why there are only a very small number of truly socialistic countries left in this world. Most nations rely wholly on the superior efficiency of corporations to process resources into final goods. Sure, they might have a few utilities and industries socialized that they consider vital (public transportation comes to mind), but for the most part, most nations have corporations handle resources, and for good reason.
The thing that people need to realize is that companies work like cogs in machine. They do their job very well and with great efficiency, but they do it mindlessly. If for instance suppression of free speech bothers you, you need to access your democracies to stop it. Corporations will not develop a collective conscience to do it for you. Don't like Chinese suppression of free speech? Ban corporations from participating in such activity. Don't like the idea of corporations fleeing your nation to go live in China so that they can continue their activities? Get together with other major powers like the EU and the US to pass a unified set of treaties.
If a company is given a choice between Norway or China, Norway will get the shaft. If a corporation is given a choice between working in the EU and US or China, China is the one that is going to be getting the shaft. The EU and the US has plenty of power to exercise against China. The problem is that the EU and the US have absolutely no desire to. Hell, the EU is trying to sell weapons to the People's Liberation Army (you know, the one that liberated the people of their lives in Tiananmen Square?). The US might be a little bit more active in advocating change in China in terms of rhetoric and a few watered down pro-democracy programs, but you sure as hell don't see the US reigning in its own companies doing suppressive work in China.
You think China would abuse this power if it was given to them? I can't believe it. Just the other night I was watching a great documentary on Tiananmen Square. Do you know where the worst of the slaughter was? It wasn't actually Tiananmen Square. It was on a road called "the road of eternal peace" leading into Tiananmen Square. The Peoples Liberation Army opened fire on the peoples that had come to block them via human shielding from Tiananmen Square and the heart of the protest.
Okay, I will give you that the Chinese might not be totally into freedom speech, but you at least have to respect their powers of irony. Come on, using the People Liberation Army to slaughter unarmed people on the road of eternal peace MUST score them some points.
Let the Chinese have the Internet, what could possibly go wrong?
For example, do we really want our elections to be for sale to the highest bidder (more so than they already are, that is)? An unlimited amount of money poured into a campaign can effectively buy a certain outcome, given how susceptible the general population is to advertising.
I think that is part of the problem. If the average voter hears one message one time and hears another message 10 times, is he going to vote for the message he hears the most regardless of its contents? If that is the case, why on earth are we even having elections? Elections are supposed to pick out the superior leader to represent the people, but if the people can be suckered in so easily by just seeing the same message a few times, doesn't that strongly suggest that democracies are worthless?
Instead of picking the best leader based upon the collective intelligence of the people, we have simply developed a game that picks leaders. If alls that democratic politics is, is a game that does not harness the collective intelligence of the population (if there even is any), then why even bother with these silly rule around funding? Why not simply remake the game so that it at least picks good leaders, instead of picking who is better at managing their advertisement funding? Hell, with this line of logic you would think that democracies are better off simply giving the entire population some sort of personality and intelligence test, and taking the people who score the highest to be their leaders. At least this game would select for intelligence and leadership qualities.
If the only thing it takes to make the game of democracy break, someone wake me up when someone figures out a better way to select leaders other then democracy. Democracy is broken. The only consolation is that every other form of governance is just as broken or even worse off.
Okay, I surrender. You win. The Soviet economy did not collapse. The Soviet Union was a happy fairytale land where all was right and magical. ...but still I am curious as to what exactly is your explanation is as to why the government was toppled and all the satellite states that the Soviet Union had gobbled up ran like hell to get as far away from Russia as they could? What is it that provoked the happy and joy filled little empire to crumble practically over night?