HA! - my car weighs 3263 lbs. and I get 18 / 24 MPG
Last year, for my primary car, I paid over $1000 in gas tax and it got better mileage and weighed about the same as my current car.
Please explain to me how I use MORE of the road than a heavier / more fuel efficient vehicle.
Novel idea: If you want to tax based on the WEIGHT of my car, then WEIGH it and tax me. We already have a city by city exise tax based on the VALUE of the car...
The gas tax makes NO sense (how much of the road does your lawnmower / chainsaw / leaf blower / whatever use?) Farmers can buy diesel fuel sans road tax for their tractors (it's dyed red so that DOT can make sure you're using the taxed stuff when you're on the road)... Why must all my gasoline engines pay road tax?
Also, how 'bout those of us that use HUNDREDS of GALLONS at the TRACK each year? Is the State going to start maintaining all of the race tracks? Or perhaps forwarding their tax revenue to the track owners?
Why not put transponder-based tolls on all the highways and eliminate the gas tax? Then tax revenue can be associated with specific sections of road... Plus, when I ride my ATV through the forest on MY property, I won't have to pay tax to maintain a road on the other side of the state...
I don't think GPS is the way to go because that's based on a FEDERAL (military) system and roads are managed at the STATE level. BUT even that makes more sense than a gas tax...
I wasn't really trying to convince anyone - unfortunately, I stupidly convinced myself...
Regardless, I was replying to the observation that scientists didn't seem to have scrutinized their choice of landing sites all that well. From simply looking at the pix I attached, I noticed that there is an abundance of craters visible in that area. As you point out, the ones you can see are very big.
If they assumed they wouldn't run into a crater in the area they selected because they couldn't see too many on a picture with a scale similar to the one I linked to above, that still seems like a pretty dumb assumption..
But you are correct that I was badly mistaken. When I first read about this, I failed to notice that they had picked an area w/in Isidis Planitia. I thought the size of the area they stated (70 x 45 km or whatever) was the size of IP, not just a section w/in.
Again, my mistake was unintentional... I'll try to get my brain to pay more attention in the future:)
[The crater] was only revealed by close-up pictures of the site taken by another NASA orbiter, Mars Global Surveyor, minutes after the British probe was supposed to have landed last Thursday.
"minutes after" ????
here's a mapthat shows a couple (from really far away).
Isidis Planitia is at the equator, 1/4 in from the right - there's a big crater under the "a", but you can see others...
The gray circular area on the right, in the middle, is the area in question - the crater you can see under the letter "a" in the previous map is the one that's just barely cut off on the right in this one... I think the one they think the probe is in is the one slightly north and about an inch to the west of that one.
I'm not sure when these were taken, but I was looking at them back in the spring, so they've been up for a while, i.e., not since only "minutes after" the probe disappeared...
AND, as you can see, it's very easy to tell that there are craters there - and I'm not even a scientist, nor do I have access to ALL the pix of mars...
Marketers have found that advertising leads to increased consumption. It's not a strange or bizarre questions. Camel didn't put out adverts for the sake of Lucky Strike.
Increased consumption of the PRODUCT or of the BRAND? Again, think about motor oil. It's going to be used just as much, but WHICH brand gets used is what the advertisements determine.
The second half of your statement doesn't help your assertion. If Camel ads increased consumption of ALL cigarettes, than you COULD say that a Camel ad helps Lucky Strike. It may not have been their intention, but that is irrelevant.
My criticism is of the study originally quoted. It does NOT show that increased ads in youth magazines increase sales of cigarettes to youths. Just that there is a relation between the two. Causation is NOT addressed, in fact:
"But, from a public health perspective, what matters is whether adolescents are exposed to cigarette advertising that leads them to begin smoking, whether that exposure was intentional or not," said Siegel.
I agree with that statement, but also note that there is NO data in the study cited to show that adolescents exposed to adverts end up smoking more than adolescents with no such exposure.
I think your rain analogy is misplaced. Had they said, "Increased cancer rates are leading people to smoke", than your analogy would be on the spot.
If you back up that claim with a study that simply showed an increase in cancer whenever there was in increase in smoking, the analogy works either way. The study originally cited shows that the brands more youths smoke advertise in places more youths are likely to see. This does NOT show causation, it simply shows a correlation.
The same as my analogy. Turning my statement about rain around: "More rain causes more umbrella use" makes it no more VALID if all you have are stats that show that more umbrellas are used in places where it rains more. Both my original statement and that one are THE SAME. You and I know that rain causes umbrella use, but showing that an increase in one happens whenever an increase in another happens does NOT back this up.
The cigarette study shows that more adverts exist for brands youths smoke.
No conclusion about the actual cause of this logically follows.
Again, I'm not saying the "cigarette adverts cause kids to smoke" statement is valid or invalid, just that it is NOT validated by the study originally cited.
I haven't looked all that hard, but I've never come across a study that DOES support that statement. This study certainly doesn't (and the authors of the study ADMIT that in the quote above!)
Cigarette companies have been targeting youth with their advertising.
I'm not going to say that this is wrong, but the study you site hardly proves this.
the study paraphrased: The brands advertised in magazines that more youths read are the brands that more youths smoke.
So what? It rains more where people use umbrellas. Does this mean that when more people use umbrellas, this causes more rain?
From that study:
King and Siegel acknowledge the difficulty of proving that cigarette companies intended to target youths, even though the data suggest it.
The data merely suggests it - no causation can be concluded.
I'd even think it possible that if a certain brand suddenly got popular with "youths", even if it wasn't advertised in these magazines, more adverts for that brand would then appear.
Then, the fact that more youths smoke BlewScreen brand cigarettes would be the CAUSE for so many BlewScreen adverts.
Think about motor oil. You see a lot of ads for it, but that's not what causes you to use it. It is perhaps the cause that you'll SWITCH from your current brand, but not that you use motor oil to begin with.
The flip side to that is that if you use Valvoline and don't switch, it may be because Valvoline is advertising sufficiently via media you use. This keeps you brand loyal. It doesn't begin your "motor oil addiction"...
So these ads may be to help keep smokers on the SAME brand, not to get them to START smoking...
Like I said though, I don't know, all I do know is that the study you site hardly proves anything...
Next, you'll tell me that cartoon characters used in advertising get kids to smoke. When was the last time you saw a kid buy Owen's Corning fiberglass because they've got the Pink Panther advertising it for them???
If interstate highway development were left to private companies, I bet that it would be much more difficult to get orders from the West to East coast via ground transportation in seven days
Umm... Interstate highway development WAS left to private compaines, and yet, we CAN go from coast to coast in less than 50 hours (at the speed limit, even...)
Read this and then give me something that contradicts:
The best way to understand the notion of private roads is to examine America's own era of private turnpikes. In 1821, there were over 4,000 miles of private roadway in the state of New York. Between 1792 and 1840, some 230 New England turnpike companies built and operated 3,800 miles of roads. It was private enterprise that really got the "show on the road" in America.
As soon and as long as the government gets out and stays out of the internet's infrastructure, things WILL improve here in the US...
Look at the amount of tax you pay your provider (in the form of "fees" that are really just passed through from the gov't). Now multiply that times the number of users in the US and tell me where all that money goes...
Compare that to the tolls they get on gov't run turnpikes and then explain to me how either one has facilitated faster travel...
The gov't doesn't:
* Have an R&D staff to research ways to build longer lasting roads to cut maintenance costs
* Charge more for peak times during the day(like at the movie theater)
* Hire / layoff workers around peak times during the year (like at a resturant / department store)
* Do ALL construction when there is less traffic
* Implement distance based, non-intrusive tolls (i.e., track transponder tags every so many miles and eliminate the time-wasting toll booth)
* Spend ALL money collected in the name of making roads safer / better doing that
There are MANY things a private company would do to improve travel, both at the saftey and speed level that the gov't doesn't / can't...
Do you really want what happened to our roads to happen to the internet? When was the last time traffic / bandwidth increased on the roads near you?
I routinely go through the FastLanes at exit 15 between 40 and 70 mph and not once has my tag failed to work...
remember those commercials: "imagine paying a toll and not having to even slow down... the company that will bring it to you is AT&T" or whatever...
the tags were designed to work at much higher speeds than what's posted - the posted 15 mph is for safety reasons - it wasn't long ago that the toll booth workers' union started complaining that people were going too fast...
Way off topic, but regarding bridges... Here's a list of 15 that fell due to engineering defects.
I grew up a few miles away from the "Schoharie Creek Bridge" in the list. A week after it fell, a bridge a bit further up the creek fell as well. The second abutted my front yard. Both fell due to poor engineering.
In fact, the one next to my house was built across a bend in the creek. When they "fixed" it, (eight years later), they built the new one in the same place. Talk about not learning from past mistakes...
Designing secure and bug-free software is a tedious process, but do-able.
The original argument was that building bridges that don't fall down is also "do-able"... Apparently, that's not the case.
There is no way you can guarentee PERFECTION with ANY amount of checks / tests / standards / whatever. Who's going to run the tests? A HUMAN.
Software or not, humans make mistakes. There's nothing you can do about it. Again, I'm not asserting that MS didn't release a product with "too many" bugs. Just that the goal of "perfection" is WAY beyond reach...
The big sources of greenhouse gasses aren't power plants so much as factories, the ones that make the things than we use to maintain our standard of living.
Well, yes and no...
Here's some
info on greenhouse gasses:
Natural sources of carbon dioxide include the respiration (breathing) of animals and plants, and evaporation from the oceans. Together, these natural sources release about 150 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, far outweighing the 7 billion tonnes of man-made emissions from fossil fuel burning, waste incineration, deforestation and cement manufacture.
So clearing thousands of acres of forest to install solar panels would cut down on animal / plant emissions as well as human, so the world would "benefit" twice...
j/k:)
I think we agree though - if you ignore the 95% that come from natural sources, the majority of the remainder does come from improving our standard of living. In fact, what I read somewhere (sorry, no reference) is that accepting the Kyoto treaty and cutting our emissions by 1/3 would be more devastating to our economy than any recent war or even the Great Depression.
Environmentalism looks a lot more like a religion than a science.
To give an idea of the scope of the deterioration problem, 150 bridges collapse each year in the US
Yeah, that was 1996, but there were "engineering standards" back then...
As far as I can tell, there's nothing that is Perfect... It doesn't matter how many standards you have in place, humans introduce a certain amount of imperfection into whatever they muck with.
Also, consider that (to the best of my knowledge) no one is out trying to cause bridges to collapse. Now Windoze, on the other hand...
Sure, MS shares some of the blame here - they didn't produce a "safe" product because of market demand etc. But SO WHAT? If I went around cutting the brake lines on all the cars in supermarket parking lots, would you really blame the car manufacturers for not "securing" their products?
My point is that there is going to be a way to break something, regardless of how hard you try to secure it. I'm not saying MS necessarily tried hard enough, but you're arguing that they should have created a perfect product and that's simply not possible.
the point I think the author made is that opensource technologies allow funds to be used for other purposes, i.e. that of employment, thus improving productivity for business by hiring more workers instead of renting/buying more software.
So we're defining productivity as what then? If I give money to someone for their labor, rather than giving it to someone else for their labor, I've improved productivity?
You act as if creating software isn't something it takes an "employee" to do...
I have no idea why software is any different than any other product - in fact, I'm confused that anyone would think it is.
The person/people who create software are employees. Perhaps not of the end-user, but of whatever entity sells the software.
If no one is selling the software, and instead it has been made availble for free, the creator(s) can no longer be considered employed.
When Burger King buys a mop, they aren't spending money on something they would have otherwise spent employing people, they are giving money to a company that spends money employing people.
If I volunteer to write software for free - or work for BK for free - someone else will be out of a job. Why would BK pay people to do what others will do for free?
If everyone is working for free, how much money is going to be available?
NONE!!
Employed people are the people who spend money that is used to employ people who spend money that is used to employ... etc.
Giving your labor away for free is not only stupid, it's detrimental to the economy as a whole. All it does is decrease the average value of labor overall.
Giving something away for free does NOT lower unemployment or help the economy...
First off, there is no such thing as "free" in economics. Everything has a cost...
In order to produce software, I need to spend time writing code (or, if the second suggestion in the article is an indication of what's to come, I'm at least spending time using wizards...)
Second, if you exchange something of value for something that has no value (i.e., give something away for "free"), the economy ulimately suffers.
A small business that saves money by using free software has done so because they didn't pay for a competing solution. The folks working for companies that makes competing products aren't going to be too happy. Taken to the extreme, they'll be laid off, and have less money to spend on stuff that would keep other people employed.
If the argument is that the small business can't afford SAP (or whatever), and wouldn't have bought it anyway, then they would have had to spend money on an alternative solution. EVEN IF IT ISN'T SOFTWARE, paying for an alternative puts money into the economy.
Suggesting that we (programmers) write software and then give it away is the same as suggesting that someone who works at Burger King just show up one day a week and work for free. There is NO WAY this can help the economy. All it's going to do is put one of the other employees (who asks to be paid for their time) out of work...
get yourself a pair of carpenter jeans - you'll get that extra pocket on your right leg - just big enough for a cell phone or narrow palm / pocket pc / whatever
The company I worked for recently distributed a policy pertaining to the use of company "assets" such as the email system and the phone system. Essentially, it boils down to: "You will not use company assets for personal reasons without case by case permission from your direct manager."
We've got caller ID here, so I immediately asked the woman responsible for the policy what to do if I saw that my mother was trying to reach me. Should I raise my hand and yell across cube world: "Jack [my manager], can I answer the phone? It's my mother..."
Her response was that there was "obviously" a "mommy exception" to the rule. I asked why that wasn't in the policy and she responded "well, that's just common sense..."
Why isn't that mentioned in the document?
Because she believes the same thing you do... That while on the clock, everything I do HAS TO be work related. Can't you see the absurdity in this? Do you really want to work for someone who determines when you can talk to your own mother?
To be honest... I'm going to do and think things that are NOT work related, regardless of what insane policy is in place. If this is a problem, I'll just have to go work for someone who will allow me to exist as something other than a robot...
By giving the common man your knowledge, all they have to do is have skill and apply it, this means you'll be without a job when you are fired and replaced by joe blow.
and that's exactly why i support government run public skools...:)
If you pay 45% of your income in taxes, you make enough money so that this doesn't apply to you.
So tell me how much YOU pay... 15 % is given to social security in your name (half from you half from your employer... if your employer didn't pay SS, you'd have a higher salary). Then, the feds take their share (let's be VERY conservative and say 26% - part of this is matched by your employer, but we'll leave that out). Then, your state may or may not collect - we'll assume you live in a tax-free state (0%).
We haven't talked about the taxes on phone lines, sales of goods, property, travel, etc. and we're already up to 41%. Is 45% really a HIGH estimate? I thought I was being conservative.
You are correct in your assement of the constitution, but only in the sense that it grants Congress with the ability to collect "to pay Debts and provide for the common Defence and Welfare of the [US]...."
I don't interpret that to mean that they can steal my labor to pay for the welfare of people I've never met. The constitution was written to preserve individual rights, it does not guarentee life, liberty, happiness, AND education, housing, food, clothes, a job, etc.
You really want to improve things? Force...
I am specifically trying NOT to FORCE anyone to do anything that they don't believe is in their best interest. I do not believe that using force to change someone's behavior is moral. If that person is infringing on the rights of others, that person is in the wrong (and force may be waranted to get them to stop). You can worship doorknobs, but if you try to prevent me from entering my house because it would be blasphemous to do so, you've crossed the line. But if you want to participate in an activity that puts no one but yourself in danger, like drinking a beer, smoking a joint, snorting coke, skydiving, playing a video game, watching a movie, target shooting in your back yard etc., then that person should not be in [further] danger of being thrown in jail.
The answer is not to create more laws. The answer is to leave it up to the parent. The parents were completely responsible for getting their children educated 100 years ago in this country. Now, parents can either send their little ones off to be brainwashed by government employees, OR they can homeschool (but then, they have to ensure that their child learns the same things as those being brainwashed so that when they are tested by DSS, they aren't taken from their parents for not being "educated")
I want to improve things, and in my mind, the best way to do that is to leave the family decisions up to the family. The gov't can't deliver our mail on time and we trust them to educate our children. THEN, we're surprised when the same institution that has had a history of problems with their employees (so much so that "go postal" is in the dictionary) has a problem with the children they are supposed to be educating. Blame the parents? I don't think you can. They aren't in charge of deciding what their children learn. That's been left up to the labor thieves that are in charge.
Make it illegal to advertise any product to children.
This is going COMPLETELY overboard. The Joe Camel thing still cracks me up because Owens Corning used the Pink Panther to advertise their insulation. Does this mean that they expect children to buy insulation? I don't think so... How do you propose going about outlawing advertising directed at children? Is it intuitive that the purpose of the electric razor commercials the US is bombarded with during the holiday season are actually designed to get WOMEN to buy razors for their men?
I know that we can't legislate all this, but let's at least try
NO!! - you are not going to use my labor to fund a frivilous experiment. If you'll admit you will fail, then why do you insist on trying?
So what do you propose? We resurrect the idea of debtor's prison?
No, I propose letting people suffer the consequences of their bad choices. Legislating against stupidity (and then protecting the stupid from themselves) is anti-Constitutional, anti-intuitive, and anti-Darwin. I learned not to jump down the stairs in my parents place at an early age when I hurt myself trying. My parents' rule about jumping down the stairs didn't teach me anything. Furthermore, if there were some mechanism that prevented me from getting hurt when I made a bad choice (ex. welfare, bankruptcy etc.), I might not learn NOT to make that choice in the future. In fact, the worst case scenario is that I come to rely on whatever safeguard is in place. When that happens, personal responsibility starts to disappear.
I am not trying to demonize the municipalities that are trying to create these laws, I'm trying to show that their actions are causing more harm than good. I can fully appreciate anyone's desire to shield their children from certain societal ills, but just because you don't think your child should do something doesn't give you the right to prevent my child from doing the same thing. That should be up to me - not whoever has the most clout in the town / city / state I live in...
How is this politicians' faults?... We've created a society where in most families both the parents have to work simply to make ends meet.
Who is "we"? I had no role in deciding that 45% of my income should go to the government. It was that way when I entered the job market. If I kept all of my earnings, there would be no need for a second income to support a child. If the politicians would READ the constitution, they would find that gov't ONLY has the power to tax imported / exported goods. The unconstitutional income tax (the amendment was never ratified) is the direct cause of the situation you're concerned with.
Furthermore, children are not "monitored" sufficiently by their parents because at some point in time, responsibility became a foreign concept in this society. Personally, I'll blame the pols for this as well - our country was founded based on personal responsibility and we've almost completely lost that. If we had never tried to legislate away stupidity, outlaw recreation or mandate education, parents would necessarily be more involved in their children's lives. As it is, the consequences of "failure" have been diminishing with time due to paternalistic laws and increases in welfare / bankruptcy / whatever.
As for the video games - if the parents knew where thier kids were and what they were doing, then it's up to the parents to make sure that the kids are not doing something detrimental. If the place they go has a video game the parent doesn't approve of, the parent if free to ask the owner of the arcade to remove the game if he wishes to retain the kid's business. No need for gov't to get involved. Let them concentrate on delivering the mail on time.
How is Microsoft going to prevent me from competing with them? Short of violence, there isn't much they can do - I'll sell my wares to anyone who will buy them. They can't stop me without breaking the (necessary) laws against violence towards person / property.
On the other hand, if you are referring to their practice of producing a product SUPERIOR (in the eyes of the consumer) to the competition's... (and therefore, lessening / eliminating the number of people who will buy my wares...) well, that's the point of a free market, isn't it?
You're an ideological fool if you think only regulations and taxes are significant
...as are you if you think that you can negate "monopolistic practices" with taxes and regulation.... The original poster implied that if the government can't stand up to Microsoft, no one can... If you are going to try and fix the things that you see as wrong with the way a company manipulates the market by manipulating the market with government regulation, you're just going to exacerbate the problem...
My point is that looking to the government to prevent what you see as an unfair condition from occuring is like playing whack a mole - no mater how many problems you "squash", more will always appear. I think you'll also find that more often than not, the new problems will be the result of the "fixes" that were implemented in the past...(ex. Medicare was meant to allow people cheaper access to healthcare, but in the end, the result was that healthcare came to cost much, much more...)
we will see Microsoft's control rise to such a level that not even the US government can oppose them on any level
Personally, I'm hoping that the US government grows so small that they won't be able to regulate ANYTHING regarding the "free" market...
Think about it, if you removed all of the regualtions on industry today, it would be FAR easier to start a competing business... If it didn't cost millions in taxes (in addition to the "normal" corporate taxes, I have to match all of my employee's payments to the feds and social [in]security), [gov't] licenses etc., it would be easier to compete with those who are already established...
The way I see it, it's not anti-control / anti-trust, rather, the government is more often than not PROTECTING those with established large market-share, more like anti-competition... Have YOU tried to start a business lately?
"Can I still copy it to a cassette tape to play in my Suburban?"
"Yes, mom."
Son of a bitch.... I waited until I could get an mp3 player in my car to upgrade my tape deck. Like mom, I didn't want the hassle of carrying my cd's back and forth, so I burned a bunch of mp3 collections.
Now, if I don't want to carry the cd's back and forth, I'll need to buy two copies of each... And I thought I was buying the right to listen to the music whenever I wanted to...Looks like the MPAA's attitude towards copyrighted material is spreading...
Slashdot Mirror
Last year, for my primary car, I paid over $1000 in gas tax and it got better mileage and weighed about the same as my current car.
Please explain to me how I use MORE of the road than a heavier / more fuel efficient vehicle.
Novel idea: If you want to tax based on the WEIGHT of my car, then WEIGH it and tax me. We already have a city by city exise tax based on the VALUE of the car...
The gas tax makes NO sense (how much of the road does your lawnmower / chainsaw / leaf blower / whatever use?) Farmers can buy diesel fuel sans road tax for their tractors (it's dyed red so that DOT can make sure you're using the taxed stuff when you're on the road)... Why must all my gasoline engines pay road tax?
Also, how 'bout those of us that use HUNDREDS of GALLONS at the TRACK each year? Is the State going to start maintaining all of the race tracks? Or perhaps forwarding their tax revenue to the track owners?
Why not put transponder-based tolls on all the highways and eliminate the gas tax? Then tax revenue can be associated with specific sections of road... Plus, when I ride my ATV through the forest on MY property, I won't have to pay tax to maintain a road on the other side of the state...
I don't think GPS is the way to go because that's based on a FEDERAL (military) system and roads are managed at the STATE level. BUT even that makes more sense than a gas tax...
-bs
Regardless, I was replying to the observation that scientists didn't seem to have scrutinized their choice of landing sites all that well. From simply looking at the pix I attached, I noticed that there is an abundance of craters visible in that area. As you point out, the ones you can see are very big.
If they assumed they wouldn't run into a crater in the area they selected because they couldn't see too many on a picture with a scale similar to the one I linked to above, that still seems like a pretty dumb assumption..
But you are correct that I was badly mistaken. When I first read about this, I failed to notice that they had picked an area w/in Isidis Planitia. I thought the size of the area they stated (70 x 45 km or whatever) was the size of IP, not just a section w/in.
Again, my mistake was unintentional... I'll try to get my brain to pay more attention in the future :)
-bs
From this article:
[The crater] was only revealed by close-up pictures of the site taken by another NASA orbiter, Mars Global Surveyor, minutes after the British probe was supposed to have landed last Thursday.
"minutes after" ????
here's a mapthat shows a couple (from really far away).
Isidis Planitia is at the equator, 1/4 in from the right - there's a big crater under the "a", but you can see others...
and here's a close-up
The gray circular area on the right, in the middle, is the area in question - the crater you can see under the letter "a" in the previous map is the one that's just barely cut off on the right in this one... I think the one they think the probe is in is the one slightly north and about an inch to the west of that one.
I'm not sure when these were taken, but I was looking at them back in the spring, so they've been up for a while, i.e., not since only "minutes after" the probe disappeared...
AND, as you can see, it's very easy to tell that there are craters there - and I'm not even a scientist, nor do I have access to ALL the pix of mars...
-bs
Increased consumption of the PRODUCT or of the BRAND? Again, think about motor oil. It's going to be used just as much, but WHICH brand gets used is what the advertisements determine.
The second half of your statement doesn't help your assertion. If Camel ads increased consumption of ALL cigarettes, than you COULD say that a Camel ad helps Lucky Strike. It may not have been their intention, but that is irrelevant.
My criticism is of the study originally quoted. It does NOT show that increased ads in youth magazines increase sales of cigarettes to youths. Just that there is a relation between the two. Causation is NOT addressed, in fact:
"But, from a public health perspective, what matters is whether adolescents are exposed to cigarette advertising that leads them to begin smoking, whether that exposure was intentional or not," said Siegel.
I agree with that statement, but also note that there is NO data in the study cited to show that adolescents exposed to adverts end up smoking more than adolescents with no such exposure.
I think your rain analogy is misplaced. Had they said, "Increased cancer rates are leading people to smoke", than your analogy would be on the spot.
If you back up that claim with a study that simply showed an increase in cancer whenever there was in increase in smoking, the analogy works either way. The study originally cited shows that the brands more youths smoke advertise in places more youths are likely to see. This does NOT show causation, it simply shows a correlation.
The same as my analogy. Turning my statement about rain around: "More rain causes more umbrella use" makes it no more VALID if all you have are stats that show that more umbrellas are used in places where it rains more. Both my original statement and that one are THE SAME. You and I know that rain causes umbrella use, but showing that an increase in one happens whenever an increase in another happens does NOT back this up.
The cigarette study shows that more adverts exist for brands youths smoke. No conclusion about the actual cause of this logically follows.
Again, I'm not saying the "cigarette adverts cause kids to smoke" statement is valid or invalid, just that it is NOT validated by the study originally cited.
I haven't looked all that hard, but I've never come across a study that DOES support that statement. This study certainly doesn't (and the authors of the study ADMIT that in the quote above!)
I'm not going to say that this is wrong, but the study you site hardly proves this.
the study paraphrased: The brands advertised in magazines that more youths read are the brands that more youths smoke.
So what? It rains more where people use umbrellas. Does this mean that when more people use umbrellas, this causes more rain?
From that study:
King and Siegel acknowledge the difficulty of proving that cigarette companies intended to target youths, even though the data suggest it.
The data merely suggests it - no causation can be concluded.
I'd even think it possible that if a certain brand suddenly got popular with "youths", even if it wasn't advertised in these magazines, more adverts for that brand would then appear. Then, the fact that more youths smoke BlewScreen brand cigarettes would be the CAUSE for so many BlewScreen adverts.
Think about motor oil. You see a lot of ads for it, but that's not what causes you to use it. It is perhaps the cause that you'll SWITCH from your current brand, but not that you use motor oil to begin with.
The flip side to that is that if you use Valvoline and don't switch, it may be because Valvoline is advertising sufficiently via media you use. This keeps you brand loyal. It doesn't begin your "motor oil addiction"...
So these ads may be to help keep smokers on the SAME brand, not to get them to START smoking...
Like I said though, I don't know, all I do know is that the study you site hardly proves anything...
Next, you'll tell me that cartoon characters used in advertising get kids to smoke. When was the last time you saw a kid buy Owen's Corning fiberglass because they've got the Pink Panther advertising it for them???
Umm... Interstate highway development WAS left to private compaines, and yet, we CAN go from coast to coast in less than 50 hours (at the speed limit, even...) Read this and then give me something that contradicts:
The best way to understand the notion of private roads is to examine America's own era of private turnpikes. In 1821, there were over 4,000 miles of private roadway in the state of New York. Between 1792 and 1840, some 230 New England turnpike companies built and operated 3,800 miles of roads. It was private enterprise that really got the "show on the road" in America.
As soon and as long as the government gets out and stays out of the internet's infrastructure, things WILL improve here in the US...
Look at the amount of tax you pay your provider (in the form of "fees" that are really just passed through from the gov't). Now multiply that times the number of users in the US and tell me where all that money goes...
Compare that to the tolls they get on gov't run turnpikes and then explain to me how either one has facilitated faster travel...
The gov't doesn't:
* Have an R&D staff to research ways to build longer lasting roads to cut maintenance costs
* Charge more for peak times during the day(like at the movie theater)
* Hire / layoff workers around peak times during the year (like at a resturant / department store)
* Do ALL construction when there is less traffic
* Implement distance based, non-intrusive tolls (i.e., track transponder tags every so many miles and eliminate the time-wasting toll booth)
* Spend ALL money collected in the name of making roads safer / better doing that
There are MANY things a private company would do to improve travel, both at the saftey and speed level that the gov't doesn't / can't...
Do you really want what happened to our roads to happen to the internet? When was the last time traffic / bandwidth increased on the roads near you?
-bs
I routinely go through the FastLanes at exit 15 between 40 and 70 mph and not once has my tag failed to work...
remember those commercials: "imagine paying a toll and not having to even slow down... the company that will bring it to you is AT&T" or whatever...
the tags were designed to work at much higher speeds than what's posted - the posted 15 mph is for safety reasons - it wasn't long ago that the toll booth workers' union started complaining that people were going too fast...
-bs
yes - now that I've donned my tin-foil hat, you can't see me :)
-bs
I grew up a few miles away from the "Schoharie Creek Bridge" in the list. A week after it fell, a bridge a bit further up the creek fell as well. The second abutted my front yard. Both fell due to poor engineering.
In fact, the one next to my house was built across a bend in the creek. When they "fixed" it, (eight years later), they built the new one in the same place. Talk about not learning from past mistakes...
Designing secure and bug-free software is a tedious process, but do-able.
The original argument was that building bridges that don't fall down is also "do-able"... Apparently, that's not the case.
There is no way you can guarentee PERFECTION with ANY amount of checks / tests / standards / whatever. Who's going to run the tests? A HUMAN.
Software or not, humans make mistakes. There's nothing you can do about it. Again, I'm not asserting that MS didn't release a product with "too many" bugs. Just that the goal of "perfection" is WAY beyond reach...
Well, yes and no... Here's some info on greenhouse gasses:
Natural sources of carbon dioxide include the respiration (breathing) of animals and plants, and evaporation from the oceans. Together, these natural sources release about 150 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, far outweighing the 7 billion tonnes of man-made emissions from fossil fuel burning, waste incineration, deforestation and cement manufacture.
So clearing thousands of acres of forest to install solar panels would cut down on animal / plant emissions as well as human, so the world would "benefit" twice...
j/k :)
I think we agree though - if you ignore the 95% that come from natural sources, the majority of the remainder does come from improving our standard of living. In fact, what I read somewhere (sorry, no reference) is that accepting the Kyoto treaty and cutting our emissions by 1/3 would be more devastating to our economy than any recent war or even the Great Depression.
Environmentalism looks a lot more like a religion than a science.
from this report:
To give an idea of the scope of the deterioration problem, 150 bridges collapse each year in the US
Yeah, that was 1996, but there were "engineering standards" back then...
As far as I can tell, there's nothing that is Perfect... It doesn't matter how many standards you have in place, humans introduce a certain amount of imperfection into whatever they muck with.
Also, consider that (to the best of my knowledge) no one is out trying to cause bridges to collapse. Now Windoze, on the other hand...
Sure, MS shares some of the blame here - they didn't produce a "safe" product because of market demand etc. But SO WHAT? If I went around cutting the brake lines on all the cars in supermarket parking lots, would you really blame the car manufacturers for not "securing" their products?
My point is that there is going to be a way to break something, regardless of how hard you try to secure it. I'm not saying MS necessarily tried hard enough, but you're arguing that they should have created a perfect product and that's simply not possible.
Ah yes - got it... Not enough coffee...
There's no need to assume that the cable would be manufactured on Earth...
If you can get the material you're going to make the cable from out of an asteroid, all you'd need to do is launch whatever would create the cable.
Moving the asteroid into geosynchronous orbit would be cheaper than launching an equilivant mass from Earth.
Then, start the cable on the asteroid and drop it as you go.
The atmosphere might get in the way, but I'm sure someone else can figure out the physics...
So we're defining productivity as what then? If I give money to someone for their labor, rather than giving it to someone else for their labor, I've improved productivity?
You act as if creating software isn't something it takes an "employee" to do...
I have no idea why software is any different than any other product - in fact, I'm confused that anyone would think it is.
The person/people who create software are employees. Perhaps not of the end-user, but of whatever entity sells the software.
If no one is selling the software, and instead it has been made availble for free, the creator(s) can no longer be considered employed.
When Burger King buys a mop, they aren't spending money on something they would have otherwise spent employing people, they are giving money to a company that spends money employing people.
If I volunteer to write software for free - or work for BK for free - someone else will be out of a job. Why would BK pay people to do what others will do for free?
If everyone is working for free, how much money is going to be available?
NONE!!
Employed people are the people who spend money that is used to employ people who spend money that is used to employ... etc.
Giving your labor away for free is not only stupid, it's detrimental to the economy as a whole. All it does is decrease the average value of labor overall.
Giving something away for free does NOT lower unemployment or help the economy...
First off, there is no such thing as "free" in economics. Everything has a cost...
In order to produce software, I need to spend time writing code (or, if the second suggestion in the article is an indication of what's to come, I'm at least spending time using wizards...)
Second, if you exchange something of value for something that has no value (i.e., give something away for "free"), the economy ulimately suffers.
A small business that saves money by using free software has done so because they didn't pay for a competing solution. The folks working for companies that makes competing products aren't going to be too happy. Taken to the extreme, they'll be laid off, and have less money to spend on stuff that would keep other people employed.
If the argument is that the small business can't afford SAP (or whatever), and wouldn't have bought it anyway, then they would have had to spend money on an alternative solution. EVEN IF IT ISN'T SOFTWARE, paying for an alternative puts money into the economy.
Suggesting that we (programmers) write software and then give it away is the same as suggesting that someone who works at Burger King just show up one day a week and work for free. There is NO WAY this can help the economy. All it's going to do is put one of the other employees (who asks to be paid for their time) out of work...
not if the elevator climbs the cable... you only need to pick up the car, the cable remains stationary
get yourself a pair of carpenter jeans - you'll get that extra pocket on your right leg - just big enough for a cell phone or narrow palm / pocket pc / whatever
We've got caller ID here, so I immediately asked the woman responsible for the policy what to do if I saw that my mother was trying to reach me. Should I raise my hand and yell across cube world: "Jack [my manager], can I answer the phone? It's my mother..."
Her response was that there was "obviously" a "mommy exception" to the rule. I asked why that wasn't in the policy and she responded "well, that's just common sense..."
Why isn't that mentioned in the document?
Because she believes the same thing you do... That while on the clock, everything I do HAS TO be work related. Can't you see the absurdity in this? Do you really want to work for someone who determines when you can talk to your own mother?
To be honest... I'm going to do and think things that are NOT work related, regardless of what insane policy is in place. If this is a problem, I'll just have to go work for someone who will allow me to exist as something other than a robot...
-bs
(now self-employed)
By giving the common man your knowledge, all they have to do is have skill and apply it, this means you'll be without a job when you are fired and replaced by joe blow.
and that's exactly why i support government run public skools... :)
So tell me how much YOU pay... 15 % is given to social security in your name (half from you half from your employer... if your employer didn't pay SS, you'd have a higher salary). Then, the feds take their share (let's be VERY conservative and say 26% - part of this is matched by your employer, but we'll leave that out). Then, your state may or may not collect - we'll assume you live in a tax-free state (0%).
We haven't talked about the taxes on phone lines, sales of goods, property, travel, etc. and we're already up to 41%. Is 45% really a HIGH estimate? I thought I was being conservative.
You are correct in your assement of the constitution, but only in the sense that it grants Congress with the ability to collect "to pay Debts and provide for the common Defence and Welfare of the [US]...."
I don't interpret that to mean that they can steal my labor to pay for the welfare of people I've never met. The constitution was written to preserve individual rights, it does not guarentee life, liberty, happiness, AND education, housing, food, clothes, a job, etc.
You really want to improve things? Force...
I am specifically trying NOT to FORCE anyone to do anything that they don't believe is in their best interest. I do not believe that using force to change someone's behavior is moral. If that person is infringing on the rights of others, that person is in the wrong (and force may be waranted to get them to stop). You can worship doorknobs, but if you try to prevent me from entering my house because it would be blasphemous to do so, you've crossed the line. But if you want to participate in an activity that puts no one but yourself in danger, like drinking a beer, smoking a joint, snorting coke, skydiving, playing a video game, watching a movie, target shooting in your back yard etc., then that person should not be in [further] danger of being thrown in jail.
The answer is not to create more laws. The answer is to leave it up to the parent. The parents were completely responsible for getting their children educated 100 years ago in this country. Now, parents can either send their little ones off to be brainwashed by government employees, OR they can homeschool (but then, they have to ensure that their child learns the same things as those being brainwashed so that when they are tested by DSS, they aren't taken from their parents for not being "educated")
I want to improve things, and in my mind, the best way to do that is to leave the family decisions up to the family. The gov't can't deliver our mail on time and we trust them to educate our children. THEN, we're surprised when the same institution that has had a history of problems with their employees (so much so that "go postal" is in the dictionary) has a problem with the children they are supposed to be educating. Blame the parents? I don't think you can. They aren't in charge of deciding what their children learn. That's been left up to the labor thieves that are in charge.
Make it illegal to advertise any product to children.
This is going COMPLETELY overboard. The Joe Camel thing still cracks me up because Owens Corning used the Pink Panther to advertise their insulation. Does this mean that they expect children to buy insulation? I don't think so... How do you propose going about outlawing advertising directed at children? Is it intuitive that the purpose of the electric razor commercials the US is bombarded with during the holiday season are actually designed to get WOMEN to buy razors for their men?
I know that we can't legislate all this, but let's at least try
NO!! - you are not going to use my labor to fund a frivilous experiment. If you'll admit you will fail, then why do you insist on trying?
So what do you propose? We resurrect the idea of debtor's prison?
No, I propose letting people suffer the consequences of their bad choices. Legislating against stupidity (and then protecting the stupid from themselves) is anti-Constitutional, anti-intuitive, and anti-Darwin. I learned not to jump down the stairs in my parents place at an early age when I hurt myself trying. My parents' rule about jumping down the stairs didn't teach me anything. Furthermore, if there were some mechanism that prevented me from getting hurt when I made a bad choice (ex. welfare, bankruptcy etc.), I might not learn NOT to make that choice in the future. In fact, the worst case scenario is that I come to rely on whatever safeguard is in place. When that happens, personal responsibility starts to disappear.
I am not trying to demonize the municipalities that are trying to create these laws, I'm trying to show that their actions are causing more harm than good. I can fully appreciate anyone's desire to shield their children from certain societal ills, but just because you don't think your child should do something doesn't give you the right to prevent my child from doing the same thing. That should be up to me - not whoever has the most clout in the town / city / state I live in...
-bs
Who is "we"? I had no role in deciding that 45% of my income should go to the government. It was that way when I entered the job market. If I kept all of my earnings, there would be no need for a second income to support a child. If the politicians would READ the constitution, they would find that gov't ONLY has the power to tax imported / exported goods. The unconstitutional income tax (the amendment was never ratified) is the direct cause of the situation you're concerned with.
Furthermore, children are not "monitored" sufficiently by their parents because at some point in time, responsibility became a foreign concept in this society. Personally, I'll blame the pols for this as well - our country was founded based on personal responsibility and we've almost completely lost that. If we had never tried to legislate away stupidity, outlaw recreation or mandate education, parents would necessarily be more involved in their children's lives. As it is, the consequences of "failure" have been diminishing with time due to paternalistic laws and increases in welfare / bankruptcy / whatever.
As for the video games - if the parents knew where thier kids were and what they were doing, then it's up to the parents to make sure that the kids are not doing something detrimental. If the place they go has a video game the parent doesn't approve of, the parent if free to ask the owner of the arcade to remove the game if he wishes to retain the kid's business. No need for gov't to get involved. Let them concentrate on delivering the mail on time.
-bs
How is Microsoft going to prevent me from competing with them? Short of violence, there isn't much they can do - I'll sell my wares to anyone who will buy them. They can't stop me without breaking the (necessary) laws against violence towards person / property.
On the other hand, if you are referring to their practice of producing a product SUPERIOR (in the eyes of the consumer) to the competition's... (and therefore, lessening / eliminating the number of people who will buy my wares...) well, that's the point of a free market, isn't it?
You're an ideological fool if you think only regulations and taxes are significant
...as are you if you think that you can negate "monopolistic practices" with taxes and regulation.... The original poster implied that if the government can't stand up to Microsoft, no one can... If you are going to try and fix the things that you see as wrong with the way a company manipulates the market by manipulating the market with government regulation, you're just going to exacerbate the problem...
My point is that looking to the government to prevent what you see as an unfair condition from occuring is like playing whack a mole - no mater how many problems you "squash", more will always appear. I think you'll also find that more often than not, the new problems will be the result of the "fixes" that were implemented in the past...(ex. Medicare was meant to allow people cheaper access to healthcare, but in the end, the result was that healthcare came to cost much, much more...)
we will see Microsoft's control rise to such a level that not even the US government can oppose them on any level
Personally, I'm hoping that the US government grows so small that they won't be able to regulate ANYTHING regarding the "free" market...
Think about it, if you removed all of the regualtions on industry today, it would be FAR easier to start a competing business... If it didn't cost millions in taxes (in addition to the "normal" corporate taxes, I have to match all of my employee's payments to the feds and social [in]security), [gov't] licenses etc., it would be easier to compete with those who are already established...
The way I see it, it's not anti-control / anti-trust, rather, the government is more often than not PROTECTING those with established large market-share, more like anti-competition... Have YOU tried to start a business lately?
"Can I still copy it to a cassette tape to play in my Suburban?"
"Yes, mom."
Son of a bitch.... I waited until I could get an mp3 player in my car to upgrade my tape deck. Like mom, I didn't want the hassle of carrying my cd's back and forth, so I burned a bunch of mp3 collections.
Now, if I don't want to carry the cd's back and forth, I'll need to buy two copies of each... And I thought I was buying the right to listen to the music whenever I wanted to...Looks like the MPAA's attitude towards copyrighted material is spreading...