How ironic that you say his argument is damaged by his exxagerations.
One might argue that your argument is damaged by being followed by " The "HIV==AIDS" hypothesis is the biggest medical fraud in human history. http://www.virusmyth.net/ "
With places like Mercedes it's quite common in Germany at least that after you ordered your car (and waited a couple of weeks) you actually go to the factory, get a tour, and then pick up "your" car that was manufactured as you specified.
I'm sure other car-makers are similarly capable of producing custom made cars... eg VW or Smart
and many others... I think the difference for this guy is that he will source components from lots of different manufacturers, though i'm not sure how that's better than VW or DaimlerChrysler who also choose their components from sub-contractors and get them cheap in bulk
I think there should be digital libraries. The traditional kind where you have to bring items back. You could for example have to right to have 10 CDs worth of music at any time, or maybe two or three computer games, or a couple of books. We know it's possible by mail (NetFlix) it should be even simpler electronically.
All that is needed is a DRM solution that lets you check-out and check-in items. The provider then needs sufficient licenses to cope with parallel use. For anything that's not particularly new, i'm sure there are never more than a couple of hundred people world-wide listening to the same track at the same time...
If you have 100 Mn subscribers for say 10 dollars/month you have a lot of money to buy licenses (+profit!)
Same thing really... because the system exploits them while they're vulnerable, they demand a high pay-back later. This just backs up my argument that if you treat them better earlier, you won't need to pay them as high in the end...
If your education is free, maybe even with a grant to cover living expenses while studying, you don't need to earn as much afterwards. At the moment, medics and lawyers need to make a fortune to pay off loans. Of course once they have done that, they won't take any less and get obscenely rich. (with some justification, they invested a lot in their education after all)
Overall, it's cheaper for society to give them a free education (cost say $ 200,000) but then pay them substantially less for the rest of their working lives (justification: we've given you a free education). Say, a medic would earn 100 000/year rather than 150 000, the state got the money back in 4 years.
Of course as an inidividual the best thing to do is to get a free education in Europe but then work in the US at wages made for those having to pay back huge loans:).
The US is by far the most expensive country for healthcare, all of which is due to high wages of medics and lawyers(!), as i believe a huge proportion of the cost is due to malpractice insurance.
>> you pay $X per gallon of water, you pay $Y per megawatt of electricity. This causes certain >> actions, such as conservation of water and electricity, which are beneficial as these are >> limited resources.
> Hogwash.
> Let's sort out terminology first. Bandwidth is the diameter of the pipe that bits flow through. > It is NOT the amount of bits.
Don't know what you're complaining about, Bandwidth is equivalent to megawatts (ok, one's the definition, one's the unit). While the parent is mistaken if he believes anyone pays "per megawatt" (hint, you pay for energy, not power -> MW-hours) at least this duplication of error makes him almost internally consistent:)
I'm sure a regional government is under more scrutiny than a publicly owned company. Also, if shareholders cast out the Exec. every time a company took an MS offer over a rival one that is 50% cheaper (eg Linux) no CEO would be in his job for very long...
I also very much doubt MS will go to the WTO, seeing they would lose any number of bids if they somehow forced everyone to go for the lowest price. There are many factors affecting what IT solution you choose for your organization, and price is just one of them.
Also, what makes you think Redhat was "not considered"? Surely it is up to them to respond to the public tender. Besides, I'm not sure Redhat Germany has the resources to provide support and services for a project this big. For Linux in Germany IBM + SuSE is probably hard to beat. Besides, IBM is not a german company last time i checked...
Doesn't this set a very dangerous precedent for MS? I'm not sure how public news about individual contracts normally is, but won't every major organization now try to get a 50% discount by claiming they want to switch to Linux, whether they plan to or not?
I imagine if a big corporate customer (say, Daimlery Chrysler, GE,...) came up for a new contract and threatened to use LINUX and make it very public, they could get an even bigger reduction in license fees (they might already, who knows?)
I always thought it very dangerous to give discounts in "special cases" as it pisses of all your other customers and essentially sets a precedent as to what the "real" price should be...
Who modded this as "funny". More like "insightful" if you ask me... This was my immediate thought as i read the original article...
From a stationary reference frame there are two possibilities:
The solar sail is moving away from the light source -> light will be red-shifted
The solar sail is moving towards the light source -> light will be blue-shifted.
This is kind of obvious when you consider that in the frame of reference of the mirror the frequency of the reflected light stays the same, and then you treat it as a moving light source (well, actually the effect is twice that as the light is also seen red/blue shifted by the mirror, as it's the opposite direction they're additive)
How about this Gedankenexperiment: Two perfect mirrors approach each other in space such that their reflective surfaces are facing each other. A light is directed from one to the other so that light is reflected back and forth, slowing both mirrors down. It should increase its frequency in the process... This should eventually stop and even push apart the mirrors (while dumping all their kinetic energy into the photons)...
so were they not "perfectly balanced" in the past when copyright had a term of 28 years?
Music for example lives and always has lived of variations on earlier themes. But if in 100 years someone writes a piece that picks up some theme of say Jackson's Thriller, there is a good chance some great-grandson of Michael is going to come out and sue him for copyright infringement....
I understand the point of having a fixed term copyright, to reward the author for his work. How this could possibly necessitate the extension of copyright 70n years after his death, I can not follow...
> who the hell decided that he was worth $25 more?
Everyone who went to the concert obviously did:).
Unlike "canned music" a "live performance" is a scarce resource, seats are actually limited, so a market can exist. They raise the price until they can't fill the venue...
> Given that music is no worse or better than before, decline in cd > sales is looking more like a result of Kazaa, etc and cd burners.
so is the increase in concert attendence also a result of Kazaa and CD burners? Your argument makes no sense. I'm saying people spend a pretty invariant amount of money on entertainment, but that patterns shift.
What I mean is that at a time where canned music is ubiquitous, when the really popular songs are played on the radio every half hour, people don't go and buy a CD as much as before, but want something special.
I don't have the time to sit down and listen to a CD (nor an MP3 playlist as for that) and can't remember the last time I did. But I listen to stuff on the radion in the car/ at work/... and for a treat I'm a lot more likely to spend 30 dollars on a concert than on two CDs... just like i'm more likely to go to the cinema than buy or rent a dvd.
> Your comment shows a a disturbing lack of respect for a basic freedom.
which basic freedom will this be? The freedom to spend money on things i enjoy maybe?
> While music sales have dropped for three years in a row, from $13 billion to $11.5 billion in >2002, hurt by Napster-style digital piracy and a lackluster flow of hot new acts, the tour >business has climbed for four years straight, from $1.3 billion in 1998 to $2.1 billion last year
So in total, money spent on music has gone down from 14.3 to 13.6 billion. A small change in a time of economic uncertainty. I imagine people will always spend a similar amount of money for entertainment, just the patterns of expenditure change. Ripping an MP3 off the net will never compare to a live performance.
Similarly, movie studios don't have to worry. Seeing a decent movie on DivX makes me want to go to the cinema for the proper experience. LOTR, Matrix,... just have to be seen on a big screen.
Anyway, the studios should make money where the consumer wants to spend it, and stop whinging when their lack of innovation stops them from earning.
A lot of big companies keep their markets quite seperate. What do you think the whole region encoding on DVDs was about? They try to maximise their profits, which in some instances might mean different pricing levels or different release dates in different markets.
These companies don't only frown on grey market imports, they do everything in their power to stop them. Particularly bad are car manufaturers (ridiculous price differences for the same thing even inside Europe, very restrictive sales practices to "authorised dealers" etc) and clothing/shoes people (I seem to remember Reebok stopping supermarkets in Germany from re-importing from China, as it would "dilute their brand" or something).
Anyway, the big companies want globalisation, have factories where the work is cheapest etc. Lawmakers should make sure that individuals have the same capabilities, and for instance make things like "region encoding" illegal.
First post in the whole thread to touch on the real problem:
Everyone is talking about globalisation, but it's not happening, because the global companies do NOT want global customers. They stop the free market because they can milk regions far more effectively. Why?
You can seel a CD for 16 pounds in England. If you try charging the equivalent amount in India you won't have much luck. The cost of many products has nothing to do with what it costs to produce them.
E.g. "beaty products" or almost any clothes. You can guarantee that less than 10% of the price is production. There have been examples where companies have "re-imported" say Reebok shoes from China, where they were sold much cheaper. Reebok used some laws to stop them as it would "dilute their brand".
In a global world, everyone should have the right to buy and sell where-ever they want. Everyone in this case should include customers and small companies, not multinationals.
The reason the free market doesn't work is that there isn't one...
How can you rant about a semantics thread by starting with "Semantics aside"?
Your argument is along the lines of "it's bad so it's stealing". So what if I get my hair cut and run out without paying? Can you "steal" a hair-cut? Yes, it's illegal, but it's a different "crime". Just like murder is different from vandalism.
Semantics are important in this case, because people have a much stronger response to "theft" than to "copyright violation". So the author of the original article used incorrect language intentionally to convince the reader. It is perfectly legitimate to point this out, and every single poster in this thread has acknowledged that they think copyright violation *should* be illegal.
How does it work at the moment? I kind of assumed the accuser would have to pay the defendents cost if he cannot prove his case, just like is the case most everywhere else in the world... is that not so in the US?
> What some inventors will do is patent the idea then pitch it to companies hoping they will > purchase the rights to the patent and produce the product.
That's different from patenting something and then sitting still until someone else "invents" it as well, then come out and sue them.
If you pitch your idea to companies you *do* have the intention of implementing it...
> Nice try, but the end result is the same: you are using software that you haven't paid for. > Whether or not you could have afforded what you have stolen is irrelevant.
It is in terms of whether it's illegal what you do. Where it is relevant is where companies asses the damage caused by the copying.
The assumption is that every student who downloads $20 000 worth of software would have boought it otherwise, which is not true. In reality the student would have most likely used free tools (possibly switching to linux in the process) or simly not bothered making that really cool picture where he did that really cool thing...
Anyway. point is that it *is* a relevant argument in terms of damage, though not for reasons of legality.
The difference between illegal copying and stealing is that the only loss in copying is the sale which did not take place, there is no physical loss as there would be if you stole a car...
I think it won't be difficult to build a good offensive robot. It won't be pretty or strategic but effective:
1) increase framerate of video capture to a rate such that you can block any shot from the next row
2) beef up the motors etc to be able to react to any shot from the next row
3) whenever the opponent shoots, whack the ball in a random forward direction...
I reckon the game would be so confusing and fast that no human player would stand a chance. Plus, if you can't score you can't win.. machines don't get tired and make no mistakes.
> [...] rushlimaugh.com [...] >shouldn't it be \. so the slash leans to the left like most of the readers?
If you think Rush limbaugh is centre ground then i really hope most/. readers are leaning left from your perspective..
> good statistics on who pays what taxes a) those figures are a from the IRS, and thus take into account taxable income only, the main argument by "the left" is that these people avoid paying taxes, usually by reducing their "taxable income" by more or less legal schemes.
b) social justice is not just to do with the tax system. While it is accepted that some differential in pay is necessary to encourage economic activity, the disparity between rich and poor has grown completely out of proportion in the US. Go back to Limbaugh's website, and see what he has to say about income. (pointer: top 1% get on avg. ~70x as much as bottom half!)
And again, this is just the taxable income declared to the IRS, not including, for example., capital gains that have not been realised yet.
> The "punishment" for Germany isn't leaving them open to attack from the Swiss. It's the US >not spending tens of billions of tax dollars every year in their country anymore. But you knew that.
I know. But it's still ironic that withdrawing your troops can be a threat:). Not sure about military cash flow, but I imagine that overall the balance for the US (economy) must still be positive, if only for sale of hardware, air force in particular.
> Personally, I think they should bring all the troops in Europe back to the US.
I don't know, I think some integrated NATO operations/bases will be useful as long as NATO exists, both in Europe and elsewhere. The 70,000 US troops in Germany are probably not necessary anymore since the end of the cold war.
> The CIA isn't governing Iraq, the military is. The military has a much better record of "nation > building" than the CIA or State Dept.
I'm not sure how relevant the precedents of Japan and Germany really are if these are the ones you refer to. For a start the military of 60 years ago is a very different beast compared to todays. Both Germany and Japan had been through years of hell on a completely different scale to Iraq so the only reaction was relief (and the relief of not ending up under Russian rule). There certainly were no "Ami go home" protest 2 weeks after the end of WWII. Also, at least in Germany you didn't have that serious a clash of cultures, nor the threat of a religious state coming up through free elections.
Anyway, we'll see. As wrong as I (still) think it was to fight this war, i hope things will work out in the middle east.
I imagine this is what the parent poster was asking for... and will no doubt now point to the 70,000 US troops still stationed in Germany 60 years later.
As an interesting aside: Bizarrely the US are now going to "punish" Germany for being against the Iraq war by moving their Eurpean bases further east... what a threat! I mean, how are the Germans going to defend themselfes? What if the Danes invaded Germany?!? Or the Swiss!!! or the French...?
But seriously, the US are already saying they might move out of Saudi Arabian bases and possibly relocate their middle east operations more to Iraq (cnn, bbc etc.). The US are not going to leave Iraq any time sooon. My personal prediction is that there also won't be "free" elections in Iraq for quite a while, as people there would potentially create an islamic state if they could. Kind of like the US stopped elections in Vietnam before the Vietnam war due to the change of the commies winning them.
The United States have no ambitions to give people self-control, at least not unless they then choose to do "the right thing". CIA etc. have interfered in several democratically elected governments (e.g. Chile) , and cooperated with a great many dictators. Whether a Regime is supported or not depends solely on their attitudes to the US, and not on the mode by which it came into power.
Didn't you see the state of the union address? Bush said that in x years our kids will be driving hydrogen powered cars and the whole country will be clean, no more fossil fuels. If Dubya says so, it must be true!
Slashdot Mirror
How ironic that you say his argument is damaged by his exxagerations.
One might argue that your argument is damaged by being followed by " The "HIV==AIDS" hypothesis is the biggest medical fraud in human history. http://www.virusmyth.net/ "
I'm sure at least some do it already...
With places like Mercedes it's quite common in Germany at least that after you ordered your car (and waited a couple of weeks) you actually go to the factory, get a tour, and then pick up "your" car that was manufactured as you specified.
I'm sure other car-makers are similarly capable of producing custom made cars... eg
VW or
Smart
and many others... I think the difference for this guy is that he will source components from lots of different manufacturers, though i'm not sure how that's better than VW or DaimlerChrysler who also choose their components from sub-contractors and get them cheap in bulk
Ponxx
I think there should be digital libraries. The traditional kind where you have to bring items back. You could for example have to right to have 10 CDs worth of music at any time, or maybe two or three computer games, or a couple of books. We know it's possible by mail (NetFlix) it should be even simpler electronically.
All that is needed is a DRM solution that lets you check-out and check-in items. The provider then needs sufficient licenses to cope with parallel use. For anything that's not particularly new, i'm sure there are never more than a couple of hundred people world-wide listening to the same track at the same time...
If you have 100 Mn subscribers for say 10 dollars/month you have a lot of money to buy licenses (+profit!)
Ponxx
indeed, but it's an electronic implementation of a traditional library (e.g. if someone takes the item out, no-one else can have it until it's back).
I think this is a great idea!
Ponxx
Same thing really... because the system exploits them while they're vulnerable, they demand a high pay-back later. This just backs up my argument that if you treat them better earlier, you won't need to pay them as high in the end...
ponxx
If your education is free, maybe even with a grant to cover living expenses while studying, you don't need to earn as much afterwards. At the moment, medics and lawyers need to make a fortune to pay off loans. Of course once they have done that, they won't take any less and get obscenely rich. (with some justification, they invested a lot in their education after all)
:).
Overall, it's cheaper for society to give them a free education (cost say $ 200,000) but then pay them substantially less for the rest of their working lives (justification: we've given you a free education). Say, a medic would earn 100 000/year rather than 150 000, the state got the money back in 4 years.
Of course as an inidividual the best thing to do is to get a free education in Europe but then work in the US at wages made for those having to pay back huge loans
The US is by far the most expensive country for healthcare, all of which is due to high wages of medics and lawyers(!), as i believe a huge proportion of the cost is due to malpractice insurance.
Ponxx
>> you pay $X per gallon of water, you pay $Y per megawatt of electricity. This causes certain
:)
>> actions, such as conservation of water and electricity, which are beneficial as these are
>> limited resources.
> Hogwash.
> Let's sort out terminology first. Bandwidth is the diameter of the pipe that bits flow through.
> It is NOT the amount of bits.
Don't know what you're complaining about, Bandwidth is equivalent to megawatts (ok, one's the definition, one's the unit). While the parent is mistaken if he believes anyone pays "per megawatt" (hint, you pay for energy, not power -> MW-hours) at least this duplication of error makes him almost internally consistent
Ponxx
I'm sure a regional government is under more scrutiny than a publicly owned company. Also, if shareholders cast out the Exec. every time a company took an MS offer over a rival one that is 50% cheaper (eg Linux) no CEO would be in his job for very long...
I also very much doubt MS will go to the WTO, seeing they would lose any number of bids if they somehow forced everyone to go for the lowest price. There are many factors affecting what IT solution you choose for your organization, and price is just one of them.
Also, what makes you think Redhat was "not considered"? Surely it is up to them to respond to the public tender. Besides, I'm not sure Redhat Germany has the resources to provide support and services for a project this big. For Linux in Germany IBM + SuSE is probably hard to beat. Besides, IBM is not a german company last time i checked...
Doesn't this set a very dangerous precedent for MS? I'm not sure how public news about individual contracts normally is, but won't every major organization now try to get a 50% discount by claiming they want to switch to Linux, whether they plan to or not?
...) came up for a new contract and threatened to use LINUX and make it very public, they could get an even bigger reduction in license fees (they might already, who knows?)
I imagine if a big corporate customer (say, Daimlery Chrysler, GE,
I always thought it very dangerous to give discounts in "special cases" as it pisses of all your other customers and essentially sets a precedent as to what the "real" price should be...
Ponxx
Who modded this as "funny". More like "insightful" if you ask me... This was my immediate thought as i read the original article...
From a stationary reference frame there are two possibilities:
The solar sail is moving away from the light source -> light will be red-shifted
The solar sail is moving towards the light source -> light will be blue-shifted.
This is kind of obvious when you consider that in the frame of reference of the mirror the frequency of the reflected light stays the same, and then you treat it as a moving light source (well, actually the effect is twice that as the light is also seen red/blue shifted by the mirror, as it's the opposite direction they're additive)
How about this Gedankenexperiment:
Two perfect mirrors approach each other in space such that their reflective surfaces are facing each other. A light is directed from one to the other so that light is reflected back and forth, slowing both mirrors down. It should increase its frequency in the process... This should eventually stop and even push apart the mirrors (while dumping all their kinetic energy into the photons)...
ponxx
> No, they are (and should be) perfectly balanced
so were they not "perfectly balanced" in the past when copyright had a term of 28 years?
Music for example lives and always has lived of variations on earlier themes. But if in 100 years someone writes a piece that picks up some theme of say Jackson's Thriller, there is a good chance some great-grandson of Michael is going to come out and sue him for copyright infringement....
I understand the point of having a fixed term copyright, to reward the author for his work. How this could possibly necessitate the extension of copyright 70n years after his death, I can not follow...
Ponxx
> who the hell decided that he was worth $25 more?
:).
Everyone who went to the concert obviously did
Unlike "canned music" a "live performance" is a scarce resource, seats are actually limited, so a market can exist. They raise the price until they can't fill the venue...
Ponxx
> Given that music is no worse or better than before, decline in cd
... and for a treat I'm a lot more likely to spend 30 dollars on a concert than on two CDs... just like i'm more likely to go to the cinema than buy or rent a dvd.
> sales is looking more like a result of Kazaa, etc and cd burners.
so is the increase in concert attendence also a result of Kazaa and CD burners? Your argument makes no sense. I'm saying people spend a pretty invariant amount of money on entertainment, but that patterns shift.
What I mean is that at a time where canned music is ubiquitous, when the really popular songs are played on the radio every half hour, people don't go and buy a CD as much as before, but want something special.
I don't have the time to sit down and listen to a CD (nor an MP3 playlist as for that) and can't remember the last time I did. But I listen to stuff on the radion in the car/ at work/
> Your comment shows a a disturbing lack of respect for a basic freedom.
which basic freedom will this be? The freedom to spend money on things i enjoy maybe?
Ponxx
I found this interesting from the article:
... just have to be seen on a big screen.
> While music sales have dropped for three years in a row, from $13 billion to $11.5 billion in
>2002, hurt by Napster-style digital piracy and a lackluster flow of hot new acts, the tour
>business has climbed for four years straight, from $1.3 billion in 1998 to $2.1 billion last year
So in total, money spent on music has gone down from 14.3 to 13.6 billion. A small change in a time of economic uncertainty. I imagine people will always spend a similar amount of money for entertainment, just the patterns of expenditure change. Ripping an MP3 off the net will never compare to a live performance.
Similarly, movie studios don't have to worry. Seeing a decent movie on DivX makes me want to go to the cinema for the proper experience. LOTR, Matrix,
Anyway, the studios should make money where the consumer wants to spend it, and stop whinging when their lack of innovation stops them from earning.
Ponxx
A lot of big companies keep their markets quite seperate. What do you think the whole region encoding on DVDs was about? They try to maximise their profits, which in some instances might mean different pricing levels or different release dates in different markets.
These companies don't only frown on grey market imports, they do everything in their power to stop them. Particularly bad are car manufaturers (ridiculous price differences for the same thing even inside Europe, very restrictive sales practices to "authorised dealers" etc) and clothing/shoes people (I seem to remember Reebok stopping supermarkets in Germany from re-importing from China, as it would "dilute their brand" or something).
Anyway, the big companies want globalisation, have factories where the work is cheapest etc. Lawmakers should make sure that individuals have the same capabilities, and for instance make things like "region encoding" illegal.
Ponxx
First post in the whole thread to touch on the real problem:
Everyone is talking about globalisation, but it's not happening, because the global companies do NOT want global customers. They stop the free market because they can milk regions far more effectively. Why?
You can seel a CD for 16 pounds in England. If you try charging the equivalent amount in India you won't have much luck. The cost of many products has nothing to do with what it costs to produce them.
E.g. "beaty products" or almost any clothes. You can guarantee that less than 10% of the price is production. There have been examples where companies have "re-imported" say Reebok shoes from China, where they were sold much cheaper. Reebok used some laws to stop them as it would "dilute their brand".
In a global world, everyone should have the right to buy and sell where-ever they want. Everyone in this case should include customers and small companies, not multinationals.
The reason the free market doesn't work is that there isn't one...
Ponxx
> Semantics aside [...]
How can you rant about a semantics thread by starting with "Semantics aside"?
Your argument is along the lines of "it's bad so it's stealing". So what if I get my hair cut and run out without paying? Can you "steal" a hair-cut? Yes, it's illegal, but it's a different "crime". Just like murder is different from vandalism.
Semantics are important in this case, because people have a much stronger response to "theft" than to "copyright violation". So the author of the original article used incorrect language intentionally to convince the reader. It is perfectly legitimate to point this out, and every single poster in this thread has acknowledged that they think copyright violation *should* be illegal.
ponxx
How does it work at the moment? I kind of assumed the accuser would have to pay the defendents cost if he cannot prove his case, just like is the case most everywhere else in the world... is that not so in the US?
> What some inventors will do is patent the idea then pitch it to companies hoping they will
> purchase the rights to the patent and produce the product.
That's different from patenting something and then sitting still until someone else "invents" it as well, then come out and sue them.
If you pitch your idea to companies you *do* have the intention of implementing it...
Ponxx
> Nice try, but the end result is the same: you are using software that you haven't paid for.
...
> Whether or not you could have afforded what you have stolen is irrelevant.
It is in terms of whether it's illegal what you do. Where it is relevant is where companies asses the damage caused by the copying.
The assumption is that every student who downloads $20 000 worth of software would have boought it otherwise, which is not true. In reality the student would have most likely used free tools (possibly switching to linux in the process) or simly not bothered making that really cool picture where he did that really cool thing
Anyway. point is that it *is* a relevant argument in terms of damage, though not for reasons of legality.
The difference between illegal copying and stealing is that the only loss in copying is the sale which did not take place, there is no physical loss as there would be if you stole a car...
Ponxx
I think it won't be difficult to build a good offensive robot. It won't be pretty or strategic but effective:
1) increase framerate of video capture to a rate such that you can block any shot from the next row
2) beef up the motors etc to be able to react to any shot from the next row
3) whenever the opponent shoots, whack the ball in a random forward direction...
I reckon the game would be so confusing and fast that no human player would stand a chance. Plus, if you can't score you can't win.. machines don't get tired and make no mistakes.
Ponxx
> [...] rushlimaugh.com [...]
/. readers are leaning left from your perspective..
>shouldn't it be \. so the slash leans to the left like most of the readers?
If you think Rush limbaugh is centre ground then i really hope most
> good statistics on who pays what taxes
a) those figures are a from the IRS, and thus take into account taxable income only, the main argument by "the left" is that these people avoid paying taxes, usually by reducing their "taxable income" by more or less legal schemes.
b) social justice is not just to do with the tax system. While it is accepted that some differential in pay is necessary to encourage economic activity, the disparity between rich and poor has grown completely out of proportion in the US. Go back to Limbaugh's website, and see what he has to say about income. (pointer: top 1% get on avg. ~70x as much as bottom half!)
And again, this is just the taxable income declared to the IRS, not including, for example., capital gains that have not been realised yet.
> The "punishment" for Germany isn't leaving them open to attack from the Swiss. It's the US
:). Not sure about military cash flow, but I imagine that overall the balance for the US (economy) must still be positive, if only for sale of hardware, air force in particular.
>not spending tens of billions of tax dollars every year in their country anymore. But you knew that.
I know. But it's still ironic that withdrawing your troops can be a threat
> Personally, I think they should bring all the troops in Europe back to the US.
I don't know, I think some integrated NATO operations/bases will be useful as long as NATO exists, both in Europe and elsewhere. The 70,000 US troops in Germany are probably not necessary anymore since the end of the cold war.
> The CIA isn't governing Iraq, the military is. The military has a much better record of "nation
> building" than the CIA or State Dept.
I'm not sure how relevant the precedents of Japan and Germany really are if these are the ones you refer to. For a start the military of 60 years ago is a very different beast compared to todays. Both Germany and Japan had been through years of hell on a completely different scale to Iraq so the only reaction was relief (and the relief of not ending up under Russian rule). There certainly were no "Ami go home" protest 2 weeks after the end of WWII. Also, at least in Germany you didn't have that serious a clash of cultures, nor the threat of a religious state coming up through free elections.
Anyway, we'll see. As wrong as I (still) think it was to fight this war, i hope things will work out in the middle east.
I imagine this is what the parent poster was asking for... and will no doubt now point to the 70,000 US troops still stationed in Germany 60 years later.
As an interesting aside: Bizarrely the US are now going to "punish" Germany for being against the Iraq war by moving their Eurpean bases further east... what a threat! I mean, how are the Germans going to defend themselfes? What if the Danes invaded Germany?!? Or the Swiss!!! or the French...?
But seriously, the US are already saying they might move out of Saudi Arabian bases and possibly relocate their middle east operations more to Iraq (cnn, bbc etc.). The US are not going to leave Iraq any time sooon. My personal prediction is that there also won't be "free" elections in Iraq for quite a while, as people there would potentially create an islamic state if they could. Kind of like the US stopped elections in Vietnam before the Vietnam war due to the change of the commies winning them.
The United States have no ambitions to give people self-control, at least not unless they then choose to do "the right thing". CIA etc. have interfered in several democratically elected governments (e.g. Chile) , and cooperated with a great many dictators. Whether a Regime is supported or not depends solely on their attitudes to the US, and not on the mode by which it came into power.
Didn't you see the state of the union address? Bush said that in x years our kids will be driving hydrogen powered cars and the whole country will be clean, no more fossil fuels. If Dubya says so, it must be true!