The government's job is to protect the people. That's what the people create and maintain governments to do. Especially when a government fails to ensure the legal system works properly, the government sometimes needs to intervene in economic affairs in order to protect the people from the consequences. Especially when one administration fails catastrophically, the next administration that replaces it might have to intervene economically to protect the people.
Which is precisely what happened in the US, in its car industry. The US car industry is highly integrated into the entire US economy, from millions of workers in dependency on it to the entire huge and strategic manufacturing sector. And from there everything else, far beyond the economics.
None of that is a substitute for a healthy and fair legal system. But when the sick and unfair legal system fails, the economic intervention has a chance of protecting the people. Rebuilding the legal system, though it is at least as important, cannot protect the people quickly enough to succeed.
the simple fact of the matter is that human rights abuses are more likely to happen where people are poverty stricken and trying to claw their way out of it.
Wrong. The simple fact is that when humans are too poor to protect their rights, they get abused. Typically more by the people organized enough to get relatively rich from abusing them. Which is why they abuse them.
Don't blame the poor for the human rights abuses when the evidence it's done to the poor by the less poor is everywhere.
No, I'm thinking of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 that "repealed part of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, opening up the market among banking companies, securities companies and insurance companies. The Glass–Steagall Act prohibited any one institution from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company.". The "firewall" that protected financial institutions from collapse in one sector spreading like wildfire to the other sectors, a lesson learned all too well from the 1929 Crash, was torn down for a quick buck. I note that the 1929 Crash was produced by a banking system ruled through the 1920s by a Republican president and his solid Republican Congressional majorities.
Yes, it was signed by President Clinton. Which, in partisan terms, was known at the time (and since) as "Clinton selling out to the Republicans". Because when you're a president with a Congress so rabidly partisan that it impeaches you over a blowjob, and they hand you the chance to make grateful banks $TRILLIONS while you're running an economy spreading those $TRILLIONS around pretty good, you sell out to the Republicans with alarming frequency.
Of course the GLB Act and followups didn't actually destroy the economy until a solid decade run practically exclusively by Republicans followed it. The partisan point here is that "the Republican Way" is so dominant in America that it's not exclusive to Republicans - though practically every Republican is part of (and necessary for) it.
It's cheaper for Citigroup to spin its way out of this mess than for it to pay for real security. Because real security requires people with some sense throughout the chain with access to the organization. And that kind of person is a threat to the entire way of doing business that banks like Citigroup do it.
Remember that Citigroup is exactly the bank for which Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) wrote the 1998 bank deregulation bill that left the global economy exposed to exactly the kind of collapse the 1934 regulations had protected us from since the last time the banks gave unregulated credit until they collapsed. They have learned from the 2008 Crash that they will be given only more money when they fail, so they don't work hard to avoid the risk. The kind of "moral hazard" that banks use to excuse paying their insurance obligations, but which define their own businesses now.
When Bill McKibben brought back Carter's solar roof panels (that had been stored in Maine since Reagan took them down), Obama promised to put them back up.
That was last year. Obama's got a week and a half before he misses the deadline announced by Energy Secretary Chu back in October 2010, June 21st.
reducing demand, and the only way to do that through the grid is to turn people's stuff off whether they like it or not. Do not want.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Apart from many ways already to store energy generated during low demand at more efficient plants, there's all kinds of ways to conserve electricity with no noticeable decrease in work done by it. In fact the "smart" techniques tend to upgrade the electrical system for better control that improves the value of the work done by it, even as it conserves waste. And then there's the really smart techniques that "turn people's stuff off" only when they want (or don't care about) it.
Just because you don't have the imagination (or research, or hipness to daily news) to realize that smart grids improve the electrical value to its users precisely as it's cutting its consumption, doesn't mean it's not already available. Find out what's beyond your own ability to do yourself before you earn the privilege of dispensing sarcasm about it.
You're right - we should leave networking the grid into efficiency among its many monopolies all to Enron. A private corp will do it right. And quickly, too - none of this waiting around for the government to get around to taking the risks no one else has. Enron will never abuse the market it hosts. It will spend its profits reinvesting in innovation and efficiencies. Keep your government paws off my Enron!
No, the difference between them and me is that I'm doing what I'm doing to stop someone else from harming me. They're just selfishly indulging themself; they don't even think about the harm. I can assure you that when I'm confronting these selfish jerks, I'm thinking about the harm I am, and could be, causing them.
It does matter how polite I am - not just the words, but the tone - when I ask the first time. You might not be able to appreciate that actually being polite, which I said I was, does not equal only the words. I, a well adjusted adult, am perfectly capable of asking truly politely, even when expecting the worst, and being ready to defend myself from a surprise punch (which has never happened). But also while being ready and open to the typical response to a polite request about an obviously reasonable matter: compliance, and sometimes a quick "sorry". Which is what happens, oh, 80% of the time. Though I expect that jerks who respond to a polite request with either explicit rudeness, or just ignoring the request, get the "inevitable" response from me (or others like me) that warns I'll not be polite the third time, think it's the only possible outcome. BTW, I've seen others stand up as I do, and I thank them too.
If they're incapable of being polite even when treated politely, then I've only wasted both our time going through the original polite request. I do it anyway, because I'm feeling much more strongly connected to the rest of the audience who have been watching the movie with manners.
Another difference is that other people in the theater are protected from the same harm I'm protecting myself from. There's no one but real sociopaths thinking "yeah, don't let him do you like that" about the phone jerk; I often have people thanking me for standing up, sometimes joining me right away, but more often waiting until the confrontation ends with the phone jerk slinking away. Can you see the difference between what people appreciate about my standing up, vs what people might appreciate about the person with the phone?
And to show I'm being polite as I respond to your attempt to "put me in the category" of those people, despite my emotional response to it and your other belligerent mistakes in your post, I'll leave for last that somehow I'm "creating their behavior", which kicked off with them shining a light in a dark theater, is the kind of absurd we call "preposterous".
I like my clothes washer and dryer machines. But until they've got an un/loading folding machine that empties the hamper and stocks the closet, my wardrobe will be trapped by the 20th Century. Someone's got to turn machine vision (or some other folding sensor) into a replacement for this drudgery.
No, I don't. "Total" prick wouldn't have the redeeming virtue of shutting down the offender.
But if it does, then it just demonstrates to the prick with the phone that "there's always a bigger prick", and you're inviting it to fuck you harder than you can stand it when you take your little prick out in public.
Yes, it's pretty messed up that people like this lady insist on ruining movies for dozens or hundreds of other people. And even more messed up that people at concerts ruin it for others by interfering with the music or viewing the performance.
When people have a light on in the theater I'm in, I ask them politely (and quietly) to turn it off. If they persist, I ask them again, a little less politely, and warn them that the next time I won't be polite at all. If I need to intervene a third time, I tell them I'll throw them out if they don't stop. Then I get the usher, unless it's obvious the first time or two that I'll have to get the usher.
Sometimes they get violent with me when I'm asking them - pushing me, getting in my face with "what you gonna do about it?", things like that. I am all too willing to stay in their face when that happens - pushing back, telling them I'm going to retaliate, even kill them if they get tough with me.
I get into it with viciously obnoxious people in movie theaters on average a few times a year. It's been getting worse for about 20 years now. And for the past 5 years I've had to stop people from waving their lit-up phones backwards in my face at concerts that are mostly dark, even during quiet parts with no light show that is also very disruptive. What's most shocking is finding out while interacting with these morons that they cannot realize that they're bothering other people, since it's not bothering them.
Maybe I'm nuts to care about protecting my entertainment time, or more importantly demanding minimum respect or defending myself from animals whose response to polite requests is threats of violence. But I do. And if someone wants their day ruined by testing whether I'm nuts, they're going to get vastly more trouble than an annoying light in a dark movie theater.
Just because you can't understand the perfectly reasonable basis and implications of a study like this doesn't make it "bizarre". It makes you anti-intellectual, or at least it does when you dismiss it out of your own ignorance and lack of imagination.
Yeah, if by "discover" you mean "associate with a totally vague and nearly useless other fact". And then "after which some idiot would use it to boss around your entire life". You bible people really would think that "existence is mental" = "physical and emotional pain are neurologically the same", if someone waved a bible at you and said "what god really meant to say was..."
You can "discover" even more things pretty early from the day's horoscope, too.
Physical pain and emotional pain are very clearly distinguishable sensations, even if they feel similar. That means that they are not using identical pathways. Because the pathway and the experience are just two sides of the same thing. Identical pathways = identical experience. Since the experiences are not at all identical, the pathways cannot be.
There might be a lot in common. But they are not the same.
Nobody asked mathematicians to slow down. And what's "extremely odd" is that you tried ranking what's more important with an obnoxious question after I explained why I'm interested in an application if it exists. What the hell is wrong with wanting an application in addition to humanity taking 1 step forward?
If you can't understand that from what I posted, I expect you have absolutely nothing to offer in helping solve the hailstone sequence. So just shut up. You're holding humanity back with your infinitesimal contribution.
I had a use for a reverse "etymological mathematics dictionary" just this past week. I was trying to collect from people working on projects the "base projects" in the dependency network of all their projects. I was looking for the complementary word to "dependent" in the dependencies. After a while I discovered "pendent", which is the thing on which a dependency depends, from geometry.
But I don't see myself ever again buying a printed dictionary of any subject, except for collectible sake. Because I need hyperlinks and searching in any reference document for it to be useful. Maybe a bathroom book to open at "random", though that would disadvantage terms at the extreme ends of the alphabet. And soon enough ruin a $50 purchase.
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The government's job is to protect the people. That's what the people create and maintain governments to do. Especially when a government fails to ensure the legal system works properly, the government sometimes needs to intervene in economic affairs in order to protect the people from the consequences. Especially when one administration fails catastrophically, the next administration that replaces it might have to intervene economically to protect the people.
Which is precisely what happened in the US, in its car industry. The US car industry is highly integrated into the entire US economy, from millions of workers in dependency on it to the entire huge and strategic manufacturing sector. And from there everything else, far beyond the economics.
None of that is a substitute for a healthy and fair legal system. But when the sick and unfair legal system fails, the economic intervention has a chance of protecting the people. Rebuilding the legal system, though it is at least as important, cannot protect the people quickly enough to succeed.
Wrong. The simple fact is that when humans are too poor to protect their rights, they get abused. Typically more by the people organized enough to get relatively rich from abusing them. Which is why they abuse them.
Don't blame the poor for the human rights abuses when the evidence it's done to the poor by the less poor is everywhere.
No, I'm thinking of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 that "repealed part of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, opening up the market among banking companies, securities companies and insurance companies. The Glass–Steagall Act prohibited any one institution from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company.". The "firewall" that protected financial institutions from collapse in one sector spreading like wildfire to the other sectors, a lesson learned all too well from the 1929 Crash, was torn down for a quick buck. I note that the 1929 Crash was produced by a banking system ruled through the 1920s by a Republican president and his solid Republican Congressional majorities.
Yes, it was signed by President Clinton. Which, in partisan terms, was known at the time (and since) as "Clinton selling out to the Republicans". Because when you're a president with a Congress so rabidly partisan that it impeaches you over a blowjob, and they hand you the chance to make grateful banks $TRILLIONS while you're running an economy spreading those $TRILLIONS around pretty good, you sell out to the Republicans with alarming frequency.
Of course the GLB Act and followups didn't actually destroy the economy until a solid decade run practically exclusively by Republicans followed it. The partisan point here is that "the Republican Way" is so dominant in America that it's not exclusive to Republicans - though practically every Republican is part of (and necessary for) it.
It's cheaper for Citigroup to spin its way out of this mess than for it to pay for real security. Because real security requires people with some sense throughout the chain with access to the organization. And that kind of person is a threat to the entire way of doing business that banks like Citigroup do it.
Remember that Citigroup is exactly the bank for which Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) wrote the 1998 bank deregulation bill that left the global economy exposed to exactly the kind of collapse the 1934 regulations had protected us from since the last time the banks gave unregulated credit until they collapsed. They have learned from the 2008 Crash that they will be given only more money when they fail, so they don't work hard to avoid the risk. The kind of "moral hazard" that banks use to excuse paying their insurance obligations, but which define their own businesses now.
Of course the WSJ's promises are false. It was bought by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News, back in 2007.
I note that the world never needed accurate Wall Street reporting more than in the years starting in 2007. And instead it got Murdoch reporting.
When Bill McKibben brought back Carter's solar roof panels (that had been stored in Maine since Reagan took them down), Obama promised to put them back up.
That was last year. Obama's got a week and a half before he misses the deadline announced by Energy Secretary Chu back in October 2010, June 21st.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Apart from many ways already to store energy generated during low demand at more efficient plants, there's all kinds of ways to conserve electricity with no noticeable decrease in work done by it. In fact the "smart" techniques tend to upgrade the electrical system for better control that improves the value of the work done by it, even as it conserves waste. And then there's the really smart techniques that "turn people's stuff off" only when they want (or don't care about) it.
Just because you don't have the imagination (or research, or hipness to daily news) to realize that smart grids improve the electrical value to its users precisely as it's cutting its consumption, doesn't mean it's not already available. Find out what's beyond your own ability to do yourself before you earn the privilege of dispensing sarcasm about it.
Thank you, one dimensional Republican.
You're right - we should leave networking the grid into efficiency among its many monopolies all to Enron. A private corp will do it right. And quickly, too - none of this waiting around for the government to get around to taking the risks no one else has. Enron will never abuse the market it hosts. It will spend its profits reinvesting in innovation and efficiencies. Keep your government paws off my Enron!
I care about them. I also care about the rules against all-caps shouting in posts.
Thanks!
Precisely.
No, I tell them that. And it's not for using their phone, it's for getting tough with me.
Seriously, learn to read before you project your fears on what I write.
No, the difference between them and me is that I'm doing what I'm doing to stop someone else from harming me. They're just selfishly indulging themself; they don't even think about the harm. I can assure you that when I'm confronting these selfish jerks, I'm thinking about the harm I am, and could be, causing them.
It does matter how polite I am - not just the words, but the tone - when I ask the first time. You might not be able to appreciate that actually being polite, which I said I was, does not equal only the words. I, a well adjusted adult, am perfectly capable of asking truly politely, even when expecting the worst, and being ready to defend myself from a surprise punch (which has never happened). But also while being ready and open to the typical response to a polite request about an obviously reasonable matter: compliance, and sometimes a quick "sorry". Which is what happens, oh, 80% of the time. Though I expect that jerks who respond to a polite request with either explicit rudeness, or just ignoring the request, get the "inevitable" response from me (or others like me) that warns I'll not be polite the third time, think it's the only possible outcome. BTW, I've seen others stand up as I do, and I thank them too.
If they're incapable of being polite even when treated politely, then I've only wasted both our time going through the original polite request. I do it anyway, because I'm feeling much more strongly connected to the rest of the audience who have been watching the movie with manners.
Another difference is that other people in the theater are protected from the same harm I'm protecting myself from. There's no one but real sociopaths thinking "yeah, don't let him do you like that" about the phone jerk; I often have people thanking me for standing up, sometimes joining me right away, but more often waiting until the confrontation ends with the phone jerk slinking away. Can you see the difference between what people appreciate about my standing up, vs what people might appreciate about the person with the phone?
And to show I'm being polite as I respond to your attempt to "put me in the category" of those people, despite my emotional response to it and your other belligerent mistakes in your post, I'll leave for last that somehow I'm "creating their behavior", which kicked off with them shining a light in a dark theater, is the kind of absurd we call "preposterous".
I like my clothes washer and dryer machines. But until they've got an un/loading folding machine that empties the hamper and stocks the closet, my wardrobe will be trapped by the 20th Century. Someone's got to turn machine vision (or some other folding sensor) into a replacement for this drudgery.
Theaters removing people who insist on turning lights on during the movie keep you from going to theaters? Thank you for staying away.
You sound like someone with pretension of being "down to earth". How awfully Texan of you.
No, I don't. "Total" prick wouldn't have the redeeming virtue of shutting down the offender.
But if it does, then it just demonstrates to the prick with the phone that "there's always a bigger prick", and you're inviting it to fuck you harder than you can stand it when you take your little prick out in public.
Yes, it's pretty messed up that people like this lady insist on ruining movies for dozens or hundreds of other people. And even more messed up that people at concerts ruin it for others by interfering with the music or viewing the performance.
When people have a light on in the theater I'm in, I ask them politely (and quietly) to turn it off. If they persist, I ask them again, a little less politely, and warn them that the next time I won't be polite at all. If I need to intervene a third time, I tell them I'll throw them out if they don't stop. Then I get the usher, unless it's obvious the first time or two that I'll have to get the usher.
Sometimes they get violent with me when I'm asking them - pushing me, getting in my face with "what you gonna do about it?", things like that. I am all too willing to stay in their face when that happens - pushing back, telling them I'm going to retaliate, even kill them if they get tough with me.
I get into it with viciously obnoxious people in movie theaters on average a few times a year. It's been getting worse for about 20 years now. And for the past 5 years I've had to stop people from waving their lit-up phones backwards in my face at concerts that are mostly dark, even during quiet parts with no light show that is also very disruptive. What's most shocking is finding out while interacting with these morons that they cannot realize that they're bothering other people, since it's not bothering them.
Maybe I'm nuts to care about protecting my entertainment time, or more importantly demanding minimum respect or defending myself from animals whose response to polite requests is threats of violence. But I do. And if someone wants their day ruined by testing whether I'm nuts, they're going to get vastly more trouble than an annoying light in a dark movie theater.
Just because you can't understand the perfectly reasonable basis and implications of a study like this doesn't make it "bizarre". It makes you anti-intellectual, or at least it does when you dismiss it out of your own ignorance and lack of imagination.
Yeah, if by "discover" you mean "associate with a totally vague and nearly useless other fact". And then "after which some idiot would use it to boss around your entire life". You bible people really would think that "existence is mental" = "physical and emotional pain are neurologically the same", if someone waved a bible at you and said "what god really meant to say was..."
You can "discover" even more things pretty early from the day's horoscope, too.
Physical pain and emotional pain are very clearly distinguishable sensations, even if they feel similar. That means that they are not using identical pathways. Because the pathway and the experience are just two sides of the same thing. Identical pathways = identical experience. Since the experiences are not at all identical, the pathways cannot be.
There might be a lot in common. But they are not the same.
Nobody asked mathematicians to slow down. And what's "extremely odd" is that you tried ranking what's more important with an obnoxious question after I explained why I'm interested in an application if it exists. What the hell is wrong with wanting an application in addition to humanity taking 1 step forward?
If you can't understand that from what I posted, I expect you have absolutely nothing to offer in helping solve the hailstone sequence. So just shut up. You're holding humanity back with your infinitesimal contribution.
Thanks for the explanation of the name.
I had a use for a reverse "etymological mathematics dictionary" just this past week. I was trying to collect from people working on projects the "base projects" in the dependency network of all their projects. I was looking for the complementary word to "dependent" in the dependencies. After a while I discovered "pendent", which is the thing on which a dependency depends, from geometry.
But I don't see myself ever again buying a printed dictionary of any subject, except for collectible sake. Because I need hyperlinks and searching in any reference document for it to be useful. Maybe a bathroom book to open at "random", though that would disadvantage terms at the extreme ends of the alphabet. And soon enough ruin a $50 purchase.