so what does a watt of electricy cost delivered these days, like from the power company? And one traditional silliness about solar power is that by the time you actual install it, the energy cost of the materials exceeds the expected lifetime output of the solar cells. So the green types who install solar are really pretty brown.
The claim that all activities create wealth is pretty extreme. But I sort of respected your barbeque example. It seems to me that you define wealth as that which produces net happiness. I think someone like Pigou, a utilitarian economist, might have something to say to you. But I claim he does not say "that". Why not make a reasonable definition of wealth as first of all something necessary to the physical reproduction of the human race. If people do not have food, they do not raise a new generation of children. So it seems to me food as an example is in a different classification than happiness.
Turning to grain futures, you are right that I consider the costs of the futures market to be waste. It would seem to me that anyone could see a qualitative difference between producing food and producing a piece of paper that is a property title to food.
If I grant you that stock brokers actually insure that capital flows go to those that make best use of it (which you do not quite claim), then stock brokers still do not create wealth by any reasonable physical economy definition. In practice, they go in the category of "waste". If you think public stock companies are necessary to wealth production, which is hard to support, then you might classify stock brokers as "necessary".
Which brings us to school teachers. There are a whole category of processes that are necessary to wealth production, but do not produce wealth. If education produced wealth directly, we would not have any broke PHDs. Examples of necessary activities include education, medical support, and a certain kind of culture, which unfortunately you do not find much coming out of Hollywood.
So your response is I think still from a money equals wealth perspective.
A lot of people have a real fuzzy idea about what wealth is. They usually start by equating it with money. After all, that is what financial economics deals with. On the other hand, physical economy, not much taught, needs to deal with wealth or its actual source. Indeed, the nature of wealth is the question I submit as the fundamental question of economics. In this society we equate wealth with share-holders value, which in practice is not much different than slave-holders value.
Here a few things that do not create wealth:
casinos school teachers stock brokering
Here are a few things that create wealth:
farms residential housing construction manufacturing of machine tools transportation of industrial materials
These lists will perhaps enrage many, but then many think that money is wealth, even knowing about the Weimar republic. I submit that the current economic crisis is because the society is wired to sabotage real wealth production.
What I found striking is the lack of reference to physical economy. Somehow we have to actually produce something useful, and the magically robot references do not cut it for me. We have observed an increasing amount of waste in the economic superstructure while we have lost millions of manufacturing jobs. We are in a casino economy.
I am an old larouchie and back in the old days we used to talk about a society where everyone had engineering level jobs. But aside from having a high level of automation, that also necessitated big investments in education, culture, and real scientific research. But after 30 years of economic mismanagment, it is not going to happen that way. We are in a major economic crash and the urgent item on the agenda is to fund redevelopment of infrastructure, not worrying about odd utopias. Oddly enough, infrastructure redevelopement will also be one of the last things robotized if we get through the present crisises. This is because someone pushing a wheelbarrow on a construction site is a difficult technical problem to robotize.
Science Fiction deals with this sort of tech application on occasion. A term that has arisen to describe it is *pervasive policing*. Fictionally, it is not described as a social good.
I have concluded we have too many laws and the only thing that makes it tolerable is that the laws are not much enforced. Congress critters would take a different view.
The previous respondent starts with the observation that utilities are private companies and from that concludes that federal money should not go into transmission lines. I think this is a fair summary of the argument. However, I note the preamble of the constitution elevates the general welfare to a very high level of consideration. I instead argue that companies allowed to have the potential to impact necessary services be highly regulated, as utilities were historically. One of the aspects of that regulation is that they not be allowed to take down the electrical system by playing fast and loose for the highest profits as seems to be the context for the latest disaster. With high regulation, general fund money can go into transmission lines without lining the pockets of an industry now noted for thievery. I agree with the original author in the following sense: under the current casino operation, the sharks would line their pockets with tax dollars.
Back in the 20's, the business plan for electricity was as a luxury item. Long battles were fought and the government forced it to be modeled as a necessity of life. As a side effect, utilities were the preferred safe investment for the small investor. Now with deregulation, fifty years of stability is out the window and from that comes the latest blackout.
I claim the principle of the general welfare is when followed the only thing that makes a government's actions legit. I invite to consider our abandonment of the general welfare as the context for many of the questionable aspects of the current government, and I will let you pick your own list.
[source: buzz.com, Aug. 16; Rep. Sam Farr, June 20, 2001]
REPULICANS STOPPED TRANSMISSION INVESTMENT TWO YEARS AGO. On the heels of the California black-outs and overall electricity crisis two years ago, Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA) proposed an amendment to the House Appropriations bill, that would have authorized $350 million to fund direct loans and loan guarantees to improve power transmission in California, and elsewhere. The rolling black-outs in California had been directly the result of congestion on the inadequate north-south transmission line known as Path 15. Farr's amendment would have given borrowers 25 years to repay the loans. Rep. Farr stated that "without timely intervention from the federal government, the crisis is likely to spread to other states."
The Republican leadership of the Rules Committee refused to allow the amendment to the bill. House leader Tom Delay (R-TX) described the Democratic initative as "pure demagoguery." [mgf]
[source Fox News Sunday, Aug. 17]
TOM DELAY LIES, AGAIN, BLAMING DEMOCRATS FOR ELECTRICITY FAILURE. Using fallacy of composition and obfuscation, Rep. Tom Delay, House Republican whip, stated on television this morning that it was the fault of the Democrats that investment incentives for improving electricity transmission have not been passed into law. Delay repeated the Republican mantra, that the Democrats are to blame because they don't want a "long-term energy package" sidestepping the issue that the reason is that many (also Republicans in the Senate) don't go along with many of the other provisions in the Administration's massive energy bill.
Delay complained that "the utility companies don't want competition" even though Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), in the previous Fox News segment, had explained that deregulation has meant that investment has gone into generation, (where unregulated companies can make a killing), and out of transmission, which is still state-regulated, so they have to settle for a guaranteed, regulated profit. Delay's solution, is not just Regional Transmission Organizations. Actually, Delay stated, "we ought to have a national transmission authority so companies can sell electricity wheverever the need is." What he really meant, is so companies can sell electricity wherever the highest profit is. Trades are now confined within four regional Interconnections overseen by NERC. Since deregulation, NERC's voluntary oversight has already been destabilized by "economy trades" that overload and threaten the transmission grid. One can't even imagine what a national chaos system would produce. [mgf]
Transmission is a seperate company from power generation under the deregulation scheme. And there has been no investment to speak of in transmission. At the same time, "wheeling" power has increased a great deal, so the transmission lines have little safety margin.
[source: New York Times, Aug 14; Intermagnetics General; files]
TECHNOLOGIES, SUCH AS SUPERCONDUCTING, HAVE BEEN, AND ARE, AVAILABLE TO PREVENT WIDESPREAD OUTAGES. If any of the advanced superconducting technologies, some of which have been under development for 20 years, had been in place on Aug. 14, it is doubtful that an instability in a transmission line would have resulted in cascading outages, blacking out 50 million people.
In the 1970s, Brookhaven National Labs in New York undertook extensive studies on the benefits of deploying superconducting cables to replace copper wires. (Fusion magazine first covered this technology in 1979). Today, nearly 10% of the electricity generated is lost by the dissipation of energy as heat, through the transmission wires, and the longer the trip, the more is lost. A superconducting system, where the wires are cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, eliminates any energy loss. Immediately, more power capacity would be available on the grid, helping to reduce congestion. More recent advances and the creation of higher-temperature superconductors have made this technology even more economical. So far, only small pilot programs have been introduced.
Ironically, on the day of the blackout, the New York Times reported that Intermagnetics General was about to announce that it is building a prototype ``matrix fault current limiter'' which it has developed jointly with the Department of Energy. The system takes advantage of the fact that superconducting wires conduct less energy when they get warmer. In this case, were there a power surge on a transmission line, as there were many leading up to the blackout, the rise in temperature caused by the extra power would reduce the carrying capacity of the superconductor and reduce the surge to the level that a conventional circuit breaker can handle. In the case of the blackout, it appears that the surges overwhelmed some circuit breakers, which could not open circuits quickly enough to disconnect them from the rest of the grid.
Almost no new technology has been introduced into the transmission system, because since deregulation, it is no one's mandated responsibility, and energy companies do not find it profitable to make the investments. [mgf]
[source: Portland Press Herald, (Maine), Washington Post, New York Times, Aug. 16; NERC press conference, Aug. 15]
WORST CASE, THE BLACKOUT COULD HAVE BEEN NATIONWIDE. Asked during the NERC press briefing on Aug. 15, ``What went right? during the blackout, Michael Gent replied that ``the outage was stopped before going further. Theoretically, it could have spread across the country.'' The nation has four major transmission interconnections, and the Eastern Interconnection goes from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains, skirting Texas, which has its own, separate grid system.
As far as can be discerned at this point, the initiating event leading to the instability in the transmission system began in either Ohio or Michigan, through either a fault on the line or in a generator feeding power to the line. When a power line is inoperable, the power generated that cannot go along its expected route looks for the next, best transmission line, which then leads to an overload on the second line. The overload produces instabilities in the wires, immediately sensed by generating plants, which shut down to protect themselves. This further exacerbates the mismatch between generation and transmission, snowballing into more and more shutdowns. The initial problem was not contained when relays did not trip the now-overloaded secondary wires, open the circuits, and isolate the problem.
What should have happened, is what did happen on the outer fringes of the problematical Great Lakes Loop. In Vermont, there was a quick shutdown of transmission lines from New York when the problem was detected, which averted major outages. When New York generating stations went offline, electricity from the New England grid north of New York, automatically
Note for the curious: the very same deregulation pirates that brought us the disaster in California, and the recent blackout in the Northeast, run Arnie Schwarzenegger.
I think a lot of so-called liberals support deregulation. You might note that the California deregulation bill was passed unanimiously. And the law is still hanging around. The actual conflict is between the general welfare and free trade religious ideologies, IMO. And a lot of liberals worship at some variation of the Smith invisible hand.
[source: North American Electric Reliability Council press briefing, press releases Aug. 15; files]
"WE DESIGNED THE SYSTEM FOR THIS NOT TO HAPPEN." At a phone briefing this morning, which had more than 700 reporters on the line, NERC CEO Michael Gent said he was "embarrased" by the widespread black-out yesterday, because NERC was created after the massive 1965 East Coast black-out to prevent such an occurrance from repeating itself. But it is clear that the system NERC's rules were created for no longer exists.
A reporter asked Gent how the system NERC designed has changed under deregulation. "When the industry deregulated," he said, "the owners of transmission and generation were separated. You no longer have transmission to match the generation." Power producers "built for convenience to their system load, without concern for the transmission," he said. This has led to the overloading of power lines and reduced reliability.
{EIR} asked about the impact of the "economy transfers" of bulk power over the system since deregulation, where companies "wheel" cheaper power for hundreds of miles, which the system was never designed for. "They have added congestion," to the system, Gent replied. "We thought we were on top of these added transfers," but they will be looked at during NERC's investigation of the black-out.
In 1965, an outage on a 230-kilovolt transmission line in Canada led to a series of failures that in minutes resulted in power swings that produced a cascaded outage, blacking out 30 million people down the East Coast for up to 13 hours. NERC was formed in response.
In July 1977, when a transmission tower north of New York City was struck by lightning, the system collapsed. While 9 million people in New York City were left in the dark for up to 26 hours, the problem was isolated, and no other systems were affected. The reliability rules NERC had put into effect, worked. "We never have anticipated a cascading outage, since 1965," Gent stated today.
But, that was then, and this is post-dereg. [mgf]
[as above]
NERC INVESTIGATING TEAM WILL WORK TOWARD REPORT NEXT WEEK. Michael Gent announced that he was forming a task force of "forensic experts" to investigate the causes and circumstances of the black-out. He said at the press briefing that while it would take months to have a final report, "we should know next week what happened." [mgf]
[as above]
NOT TERRORISM, BUT COLLAPSE OF INFRASTRUCTURE. During the NERC briefing, Gent explained that while they haven't pinned down the initiating event for the black-out, they do know that the problem was in the transmission loop around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. This Loop connects up-state New York west around Erie to Ohio, north to Detroit, and through Canada back east to New York. This Great Lakes area has been a well-known problem for years, Gent said, and cables under Lake Erie were planned to relieve the congestion, but never built.
On the question of terrorism, Gent said that there was no evidence of any physical attack on any infrastructure. As far as cyber terrorism, he said that they have logs of all communications and computer activities at all critical facilities. If there were a "cyber intrusion," he said, the person would leave tracks. They wouldn't necessarily who did it, but they would know it took place.
Leading to the black-out, the destabilization of the transmission system took only 9 seconds. About 50 million people were affected, as some Canadian and 9 U.S. nuclear plants went off line, as well as more than 80 fossil fuel plants.
Gent said that power was being restored faster than he'd anticipated. According to NERC, at 24 hours after the incident, about 20,000MW of capacity was still down, out of more than 61,000MW lost during the outage, which was about 10% of all the capacity east of the Mississippi River. [mgf]
[source: EIR files]
AMPLE WARNING WAS GIVEN THAT THE GRID WAS AT RISK. For more than a decade, NERC has been sounding alarm a
[source: North American Electric Reliability Council press briefing, press releases Aug. 15; files]
"WE DESIGNED THE SYSTEM FOR THIS NOT TO HAPPEN." At a phone briefing this morning, which had more than 700 reporters on the line, NERC CEO Michael Gent said he was "embarrased" by the widespread black-out yesterday, because NERC was created after the massive 1965 East Coast black-out to prevent such an occurrance from repeating itself. But it is clear that the system NERC's rules were created for no longer exists.
A reporter asked Gent how the system NERC designed has changed under deregulation. "When the industry deregulated," he said, "the owners of transmission and generation were separated. You no longer have transmission to match the generation." Power producers "built for convenience to their system load, without concern for the transmission," he said. This has led to the overloading of power lines and reduced reliability.
{EIR} asked about the impact of the "economy transfers" of bulk power over the system since deregulation, where companies "wheel" cheaper power for hundreds of miles, which the system was never designed for. "They have added congestion," to the system, Gent replied. "We thought we were on top of these added transfers," but they will be looked at during NERC's investigation of the black-out.
In 1965, an outage on a 230-kilovolt transmission line in Canada led to a series of failures that in minutes resulted in power swings that produced a cascaded outage, blacking out 30 million people down the East Coast for up to 13 hours. NERC was formed in response.
In July 1977, when a transmission tower north of New York City was struck by lightning, the system collapsed. While 9 million people in New York City were left in the dark for up to 26 hours, the problem was isolated, and no other systems were affected. The reliability rules NERC had put into effect, worked. "We never have anticipated a cascading outage, since 1965," Gent stated today.
But, that was then, and this is post-dereg. [mgf]
[as above]
NERC INVESTIGATING TEAM WILL WORK TOWARD REPORT NEXT WEEK. Michael Gent announced that he was forming a task force of "forensic experts" to investigate the causes and circumstances of the black-out. He said at the press briefing that while it would take months to have a final report, "we should know next week what happened." [mgf]
[as above]
NOT TERRORISM, BUT COLLAPSE OF INFRASTRUCTURE. During the NERC briefing, Gent explained that while they haven't pinned down the initiating event for the black-out, they do know that the problem was in the transmission loop around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. This Loop connects up-state New York west around Erie to Ohio, north to Detroit, and through Canada back east to New York. This Great Lakes area has been a well-known problem for years, Gent said, and cables under Lake Erie were planned to relieve the congestion, but never built.
On the question of terrorism, Gent said that there was no evidence of any physical attack on any infrastructure. As far as cyber terrorism, he said that they have logs of all communications and computer activities at all critical facilities. If there were a "cyber intrusion," he said, the person would leave tracks. They wouldn't necessarily who did it, but they would know it took place.
Leading to the black-out, the destabilization of the transmission system took only 9 seconds. About 50 million people were affected, as some Canadian and 9 U.S. nuclear plants went off line, as well as more than 80 fossil fuel plants.
Gent said that power was being restored faster than he'd anticipated. According to NERC, at 24 hours after the incident, about 20,000MW of capacity was still down, out of more than 61,000MW lost during the outage, which was about 10% of all the capacity east of the Mississippi River. [mgf]
[source: EIR files]
AMPLE WARNING WAS GIVEN THAT THE GRID WAS AT RISK. For more than a decade, NERC has been sounding ala
A little information from the state of Washington, county of Pierce, regarding the Diebold software. I phoned the auditor's office about this and got a call back from the elected Pierce County Auditor herself. In this county, she is in charge of elections. Now her office in in the process of selecting an electronic voter system as mandated by the feds. She gets to select from four approved systems. The systems are approved by a state commission. The state commission is charged with evaluating the software for security. Diebold is approved and is one of the finalists in this county.
It seems to me the state commission is broken. I have a call in to a person associated with this commission on the technical side, asking for comment. I also sent the pdf to the local auditor at her request and I made a phone call to the local newspaper. I am hoping this story has legs and is covered generally.
If you think also that this story might have legs, make a few phone calls and stir the pot. Software selection is probably going on where you live, since this electronic voting requirement is mandated by the feds.
I work for a small software company too. It is sort of a virtual corporation, as for example, my boss telecommutes from the east coast to the west coast. The company will pick up the cost of DSL, up to $130/month. And business releated phone calls.
On business phone calls, my long distance vendor allow putting in an accounting code after dialing. In fact, it is set up to require the accounting code. So I have one code for work and one code for everything else. The monthly bill is organized around the accounting codes and so it is easy to know what to bill back.
There is an office about 45 minutes away. Currently I go in twice a month to pick up my paycheck and have meetings. The boss comes in about every six weeks but he has to fly. He has some hot cell phone that gives him the internet on his laptop, so he can keep in touch even when on the road.
The product we work on is an internet enabled accounting package and mostly we just use a thin client over the internet. The thin client has a programmer's workbench in it, so we get along okay. It can print locally too.
Hope this is useful to someone.
Oh, shameless plug. We have a product that is sort of a web based employee information product that tells us who is available and contact information and lets us enter our time and expense cards. You could get a full featured copy for a month for free and try it. It cuts down on the paper work part of this virtual thing pretty well. You can look at TOM Software
I am a spamcop subscriber. Thus I pay Julian to keep spam out of my inbox. I also pay for the pleasurer of reporting spam that does get there or is in my held mail web box. No doubt if Julian misbehaves sufficiently in supporting these goals of mine, then I will stop paying him. I suppose if people have other goals or he misbehaves sufficiently, then other people will stop paying him and the Julian problem will be solved.
But he meets my goals pretty well, so there is not a Julian problem for me. I have gotten one spam in my inbox in the past week.
Here is an important technical point: IMO, Julian designated spam ends up in a web held box. I look at this periodically and do things with it. If I want it, I can forward it to my real inbox with a couple clicks. I can also whitelist it so in the future it will go to my inbox not my web held mail box.
It seems to me that being on Julian's spam list is not the end of the world, if your recipient's actually want your mail. On the other hand, Julian "sells" his list to third parties and I do not know what they do with it.
There are some important side effects. Many spammers simply do not send spam to a spamcop address. So I am gradually closing down other accounts and publicizing the spamcop address. And my employer mail server was an open relay and I subscribe through spamcop to a bunch of openrelay lists, and so this unfortunate situation became clear quickly and the server was reconfigured.
All in all, for $30US a year and some time, I figure I am keeping my inbox clean, fighting spam, and receiving the email I want.
The company I work for, TOM Software, ships essentially all its code in source. The exception is some security copy protection stuff. So we end up with a three-tiered system: security, framework software without comments, and application code, with comments. We protect the framework software stuff with NDAs and copyrights that prohibit modification.
I do not know if we have a mission statement, but what money we make comes from the rapid development aspects of the software and the ease of customization of application code.
We sell through a network of dealers (you can be one) who usually deliver the source to the client. The client signs a NDA too.
People do manage to steal from us, and we do not like it, but it is not a day to day concern.
We do accounting software. The application code is called by the framework to do its business, like accept user input for a file maintenance design. The application code tends to be pretty much just business logic that is executed by our framework software. This probably all works for us because we use a third party language product that ties to the server.
So I conclude that shipping source *can* be a viable business model, even with proprietary software. But it is true that the user base is relunctant to upgrade, and this often is because of customization issues. So our new versions have to be pretty compelling to generate an upgrade.
Customization of application code is not otherwise a big problem for us. Usually, we can just talk our resellers through a customization bug. In some cases, we need a copy of the system.
This approach has a history back into the '70s. Application code and designs from that period can still be automatically converted to our current gui system. I think this history merits consideration.
I looked in the same way and did not find bin-laden. This made me think the author was an honest man, since there is no reliable public information connecting bin-laden except his possibly self-serving own bragging. When you parse the bragging, it is not quite a consistent claim, but an expression of pleasure.
US allies have complained that we have not made a case to them that it was bin-laden. And all our extradition cases are failing because we do not have the evidence to convince an *independent* court of law. Note that domestically our government avoids such forums.
That said, the flaw in the author's analysis is that it is the wrong technique. The first thing you should ask in case of a Riechstag fire is who benefits. In this case, it is the clash of civilizations/arc of crisis crowd. More generally, when the economy goes, you *always* get stuff like this.
In the end, nothing the feds have done would have prevented 9/11 and nothing they have done will prevent a repeat of some sort.
Re:"For the benefit of humanity"
on
China Plans Moonbase
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I take the view that governments are legitiment not by how they are chosen, but by what they do. In particular a legitiment action supports the general welfare, often also called the common good, internationally. This sort of argument is where the general welfare references in our own constitution comes from.
A democracy, or representative government, with an electorate of engaged properly educated citizens, is arguably a good approach to ensuring a government that acts for the general welfare. However, it is hard to claim either the precoditions or the results or even the reality of the form for the United States today.
The Chinese on the other hand often suppress freedoms that we think are ultimately essential to a general welfare government, but nevertheless the Chinese do manage to act often in the general welfare. And their lunar colony is an example of that, an argument which can be simply based on our experience with the Apollo program economic multipliers. More generally, by our own historical experience, great science projects of this nature increase the moral and educational level of the population as well as transform the economy.
Suppose you sign up for a 12 month contract. It is non-cancelable due to termination fees. Well, Okay. But then 12 months later it automatically extends for another 12 months, unless you provide notice of termination timely. The extension is under the same terms as the original. So on average, you owe them ~$240 in termination fees unless you pay close attention to business. And even then, you only have a once a year window to economically terminate.
I do not disagree with what you say particularly, but I locate the problem in "utopian" military stategy. In that context the recent call for a "pagan" professional military echos Huntington. On the subject of professional military, read this element in the debate:
[Source: FAZ, Jan. 18, 2002]
> VON BREDOW ATTACKS HUNTINGTON ON "MILITARY PROFESSIONALISM"
> IN FAZ. Days after Andreas von Buelow's attack on the "mad dog"
> Brzezinski, another scion of a leading German family takes on
> Samuel Huntington. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Prof.
> Wilfried von Bredow rips apart Huntington's theses on "military
> professionalism," saying it is not compatible with democratic
> society--the United States is his exemplar. A von Bredow was
> Germany's Chief of Staff in 1934, when he was killed by Hitler's
> goons together with former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, in
> order to eliminate the Reichswehr as a possible source of
> resistance.
> There are two opposing conceptions of the military's role in
> society, von Bredow says: "inner leadership" (the German postwar
> Bundeswehr, which considers the soldier a "citizen in uniform");
> and Samuel P. Huntington's "military professionalism," which
> emphasizes the fundamental opposition between the world outlook
> and the functional procedures of civil society, and those of the
> armed forces.
> Today, he says, this is put into focus in a new way, so that
> we can speak of a "neo-professionalism," where the distance
> between the armed forces and civil society is widening more than
> ever before, as draft armies are being replaced by all-volunteer,
> professional armies, which are being deployed less for
> territorial defense, and much more for international
> interventions far from home, and are well-paid.
> Von Bredow says it is likely that these trends will tend to
> intensify, as the military's principal task is now the war on
> terrorism. "One wonders, if the U.S. Armed Forces are becoming
> some kind of a black box." He ends: saying: "in the long run, no
> democratic society can afford to become alienated from its armed
> forces. This will not be healthy for it or its democratic
> substance, nor will it be healthy for the armed forces and their
> efficiency." [alh]
>
I read the linked message in the original post and saw the phone number to call. After waiting for their normal office hours, I called and talked to a human. I asked that they not rent or sell my personal information or calling patterns internally or with their marketing partners.
The response was that the agent had removed my authorization to share that information among the different parts of qwest. This was not specifically what I asked for. So I called that to his attention and he said he would do that. On questioning about why it had not happened when I first asked for it, he said that you had to specifically ask for it.
Note that in the end, he just said he would take care of it.
I am crankish about snail spam and make it point to do my best about getting off mailing lists and I have learned there a number of sleazy companies out there. For instance, you have to not only get off a mailing list, but specify that your name not be rented or sold. Most people I think would not have caught the qwest deceit.
A good source of information on what to do about snail spam is junkbusters
The participants gave up any mechanism for defending the Euro. It is a pre-programmed diaster waiting to happen. In case you have not noticed, there is a severe world-wide economic disaster taking place and the Euro will go the way the yen is going right now. I think it reasonable that the yen crisis will have to play out a little further before the Euro problems hits the papers, but keep an eye on Poland. Poland can implode anytime now, and the splash back would definitely be noticed in the rest of Europe, even though Poland is not a member of the monetary union.
Reinterating, in our period nations have to be able to implement Hamiltonian protectionist measures to survive, and the Euro intentionally does not have a mechanism for doing this.
Re:I haven't been able to nail it down
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 1
The protesters are IMO part of the problem. So it is easy to get confused if you see them as one side of a two sided debate, which is the way the media always portrays issues.
Let me agree with a point Katz mentioned. Globalism is based on the Venetian model. There is a clear continutity to our present circumstances via the Dutch/British explicitly adopting that model. In its present form globalism is thus a maritime rentier finance system with the particular current characteristics of the "Washington Concensus", which where what we hear about free trade, democracy, and transparency as saving the world comes from. The distinction between the Roman model and the Venitian model is that Rome was a slave society and made its living that way, while the Venitians made their living off of what we could recognize today as free trade. These systems have the common thread that the mass of people were treated as human cattle. Does that sound like "consumerism" and third world sweatshops? That which can stand against this system are nation states acting for the common good. Thus globalism naturally acts nation states.
Let me disagree with Katz. Globalism is not the biggest thing going. The biggest thing going is the Eurasian states working to build interconnecting transporation and development corridors. This is not a maritime system and enhances nation states against rentier finance types and so is in direct opposition to globalism.
It is also an advance in human evolution, in that we have been a latterial-based (sp) species up until now.
Slashdot Mirror
so what does a watt of electricy cost delivered these days, like from the power company? And one traditional silliness about solar power is that by the time you actual install it, the energy cost of the materials exceeds the expected lifetime output of the solar cells. So the green types who install solar are really pretty brown.
The claim that all activities create wealth is pretty extreme. But I sort of respected your barbeque example. It seems to me that you define wealth as that which produces net happiness. I think someone like Pigou, a utilitarian economist, might have something to say to you. But I claim he does not say "that". Why not make a reasonable definition of wealth as first of all something necessary to the physical reproduction of the human race. If people do not have food, they do not raise a new generation of children. So it seems to me food as an example is in a different classification than happiness.
Turning to grain futures, you are right that I consider the costs of the futures market to be waste. It would seem to me that anyone could see a qualitative difference between producing food and producing a piece of paper that is a property title to food.
If I grant you that stock brokers actually insure that capital flows go to those that make best use of it (which you do not quite claim), then stock brokers still do not create wealth by any reasonable physical economy definition. In practice, they go in the category of "waste". If you think public stock companies are necessary to wealth production, which is hard to support, then you might classify stock brokers as "necessary".
Which brings us to school teachers. There are a whole category of processes that are necessary to wealth production, but do not produce wealth. If education produced wealth directly, we would not have any broke PHDs. Examples of necessary activities include education, medical support, and a certain kind of culture, which unfortunately you do not find much coming out of Hollywood.
So your response is I think still from a money equals wealth perspective.
A lot of people have a real fuzzy idea about what wealth is. They usually start by equating it with money. After all, that is what financial economics deals with. On the other hand, physical economy, not much taught, needs to deal with wealth or its actual source. Indeed, the nature of wealth is the question I submit as the fundamental question of economics. In this society we equate wealth with share-holders value, which in practice is not much different than slave-holders value.
Here a few things that do not create wealth:
casinos
school teachers
stock brokering
Here are a few things that create wealth:
farms
residential housing construction
manufacturing of machine tools
transportation of industrial materials
These lists will perhaps enrage many, but then many think that money is wealth, even knowing about the Weimar republic. I submit that the current economic crisis is because the society is wired to sabotage real wealth production.
What I found striking is the lack of reference to physical economy. Somehow we have to actually produce something useful, and the magically robot references do not cut it for me. We have observed an increasing amount of waste in the economic superstructure while we have lost millions of manufacturing jobs. We are in a casino economy.
I am an old larouchie and back in the old days we used to talk about a society where everyone had engineering level jobs. But aside from having a high level of automation, that also necessitated big investments in education, culture, and real scientific research. But after 30 years of economic mismanagment, it is not going to happen that way. We are in a major economic crash and the urgent item on the agenda is to fund redevelopment of infrastructure, not worrying about odd utopias. Oddly enough, infrastructure redevelopement will also be one of the last things robotized if we get through the present crisises. This is because someone pushing a wheelbarrow on a construction site is a difficult technical problem to robotize.
Science Fiction deals with this sort of tech application on occasion. A term that has arisen to describe it is *pervasive policing*. Fictionally, it is not described as a social good.
I have concluded we have too many laws and the only thing that makes it tolerable is that the laws are not much enforced. Congress critters would take a different view.
The previous respondent starts with the observation that utilities are private companies and from that concludes that federal money should not go into transmission lines. I think this is a fair summary of the argument. However, I note the preamble of the constitution elevates the general welfare to a very high level of consideration. I instead argue that companies allowed to have the potential to impact necessary services be highly regulated, as utilities were historically. One of the aspects of that regulation is that they not be allowed to take down the electrical system by playing fast and loose for the highest profits as seems to be the context for the latest disaster. With high regulation, general fund money can go into transmission lines without lining the pockets of an industry now noted for thievery. I agree with the original author in the following sense: under the current casino operation, the sharks would line their pockets with tax dollars.
Back in the 20's, the business plan for electricity was as a luxury item. Long battles were fought and the government forced it to be modeled as a necessity of life. As a side effect, utilities were the preferred safe investment for the small investor. Now with deregulation, fifty years of stability is out the window and from that comes the latest blackout.
I claim the principle of the general welfare is when followed the only thing that makes a government's actions legit. I invite to consider our abandonment of the general welfare as the context for many of the questionable aspects of the current government, and I will let you pick your own list.
[source: buzz.com, Aug. 16; Rep. Sam Farr, June 20, 2001]
REPULICANS STOPPED TRANSMISSION INVESTMENT TWO YEARS AGO. On the heels of the California black-outs and overall electricity crisis two years ago, Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA) proposed an amendment to the House Appropriations bill, that would have authorized $350 million to fund direct loans and loan guarantees to improve power transmission in California, and elsewhere. The rolling black-outs in California had been directly the result of congestion on the inadequate north-south transmission line known as Path 15. Farr's amendment would have given borrowers 25 years to repay the loans. Rep. Farr stated that "without timely intervention from the federal government, the crisis is likely to spread to other states."
The Republican leadership of the Rules Committee refused to allow the amendment to the bill. House leader Tom Delay (R-TX) described the Democratic initative as "pure demagoguery." [mgf]
[source Fox News Sunday, Aug. 17]
TOM DELAY LIES, AGAIN, BLAMING DEMOCRATS FOR ELECTRICITY FAILURE. Using fallacy of composition and obfuscation, Rep. Tom Delay, House Republican whip, stated on television this morning that it was the fault of the Democrats that investment incentives for improving electricity transmission have not been passed into law. Delay repeated the Republican mantra, that the Democrats are to blame because they don't want a "long-term energy package" sidestepping the issue that the reason is that many (also Republicans in the Senate) don't go along with many of the other provisions in the Administration's massive energy bill.
Delay complained that "the utility companies don't want competition" even though Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), in the previous Fox News segment, had explained that deregulation has meant that investment has gone into generation, (where unregulated companies can make a killing), and out of transmission, which is still state-regulated, so they have to settle for a guaranteed, regulated profit. Delay's solution, is not just Regional Transmission Organizations. Actually, Delay stated, "we ought to have a national transmission authority so companies can sell electricity wheverever the need is." What he really meant, is so companies can sell electricity wherever the highest profit is. Trades are now confined within four regional Interconnections overseen by NERC. Since deregulation, NERC's voluntary oversight has already been destabilized by "economy trades" that overload and threaten the transmission grid. One can't even imagine what a national chaos system would produce. [mgf]
Transmission is a seperate company from power generation under the deregulation scheme. And there has been no investment to speak of in transmission. At the same time, "wheeling" power has increased a great deal, so the transmission lines have little safety margin.
TECHNOLOGIES, SUCH AS SUPERCONDUCTING, HAVE BEEN, AND ARE, AVAILABLE TO PREVENT WIDESPREAD OUTAGES. If any of the advanced superconducting technologies, some of which have been under development for 20 years, had been in place on Aug. 14, it is doubtful that an instability in a transmission line would have resulted in cascading outages, blacking out 50 million people.
In the 1970s, Brookhaven National Labs in New York undertook extensive studies on the benefits of deploying superconducting cables to replace copper wires. (Fusion magazine first covered this technology in 1979). Today, nearly 10% of the electricity generated is lost by the dissipation of energy as heat, through the transmission wires, and the longer the trip, the more is lost. A superconducting system, where the wires are cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, eliminates any energy loss. Immediately, more power capacity would be available on the grid, helping to reduce congestion. More recent advances and the creation of higher-temperature superconductors have made this technology even more economical. So far, only small pilot programs have been introduced.
Ironically, on the day of the blackout, the New York Times reported that Intermagnetics General was about to announce that it is building a prototype ``matrix fault current limiter'' which it has developed jointly with the Department of Energy. The system takes advantage of the fact that superconducting wires conduct less energy when they get warmer. In this case, were there a power surge on a transmission line, as there were many leading up to the blackout, the rise in temperature caused by the extra power would reduce the carrying capacity of the superconductor and reduce the surge to the level that a conventional circuit breaker can handle. In the case of the blackout, it appears that the surges overwhelmed some circuit breakers, which could not open circuits quickly enough to disconnect them from the rest of the grid.
Almost no new technology has been introduced into the transmission system, because since deregulation, it is no one's mandated responsibility, and energy companies do not find it profitable to make the investments. [mgf]
[source: Portland Press Herald, (Maine), Washington Post, New York Times, Aug. 16; NERC press conference, Aug. 15]
WORST CASE, THE BLACKOUT COULD HAVE BEEN NATIONWIDE. Asked during the NERC press briefing on Aug. 15, ``What went right? during the blackout, Michael Gent replied that ``the outage was stopped before going further. Theoretically, it could have spread across the country.'' The nation has four major transmission interconnections, and the Eastern Interconnection goes from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains, skirting Texas, which has its own, separate grid system.
As far as can be discerned at this point, the initiating event leading to the instability in the transmission system began in either Ohio or Michigan, through either a fault on the line or in a generator feeding power to the line. When a power line is inoperable, the power generated that cannot go along its expected route looks for the next, best transmission line, which then leads to an overload on the second line. The overload produces instabilities in the wires, immediately sensed by generating plants, which shut down to protect themselves. This further exacerbates the mismatch between generation and transmission, snowballing into more and more shutdowns. The initial problem was not contained when relays did not trip the now-overloaded secondary wires, open the circuits, and isolate the problem.
What should have happened, is what did happen on the outer fringes of the problematical Great Lakes Loop. In Vermont, there was a quick shutdown of transmission lines from New York when the problem was detected, which averted major outages. When New York generating stations went offline, electricity from the New England grid north of New York, automatically
IS THERE A SUCKER BORN EVERY MINUTE?
Note for the curious: the very same deregulation pirates that brought us
the disaster in California, and the recent blackout in the Northeast, run
Arnie Schwarzenegger.
I think a lot of so-called liberals support deregulation. You might note that the California deregulation bill was passed unanimiously. And the law is still hanging around. The actual conflict is between the general welfare and free trade religious ideologies, IMO. And a lot of liberals worship at some variation of the Smith invisible hand.
[source: North American Electric Reliability Council press briefing, press releases Aug. 15; files]
"WE DESIGNED THE SYSTEM FOR THIS NOT TO HAPPEN." At a phone briefing this morning, which had more than 700 reporters on the line, NERC CEO Michael Gent said he was "embarrased" by the widespread black-out yesterday, because NERC was created after the massive 1965 East Coast black-out to prevent such an occurrance from repeating itself. But it is clear that the system NERC's rules were created for no longer exists.
A reporter asked Gent how the system NERC designed has changed under deregulation. "When the industry deregulated," he said, "the owners of transmission and generation were separated. You no longer have transmission to match the generation." Power producers "built for convenience to their system load, without concern for the transmission," he said. This has led to the overloading of power lines and reduced reliability.
{EIR} asked about the impact of the "economy transfers" of bulk power over the system since deregulation, where companies "wheel" cheaper power for hundreds of miles, which the system was never designed for. "They have added congestion," to the system, Gent replied. "We thought we were on top of these added transfers," but they will be looked at during NERC's investigation of the black-out.
In 1965, an outage on a 230-kilovolt transmission line in Canada led to a series of failures that in minutes resulted in power swings that produced a cascaded outage, blacking out 30 million people down the East Coast for up to 13 hours. NERC was formed in response.
In July 1977, when a transmission tower north of New York City was struck by lightning, the system collapsed. While 9 million people in New York City were left in the dark for up to 26 hours, the problem was isolated, and no other systems were affected. The reliability rules NERC had put into effect, worked. "We never have anticipated a cascading outage, since 1965," Gent stated today.
But, that was then, and this is post-dereg. [mgf]
[as above]
NERC INVESTIGATING TEAM WILL WORK TOWARD REPORT NEXT WEEK. Michael Gent announced that he was forming a task force of "forensic experts" to investigate the causes and circumstances of the black-out. He said at the press briefing that while it would take months to have a final report, "we should know next week what happened." [mgf]
[as above]
NOT TERRORISM, BUT COLLAPSE OF INFRASTRUCTURE. During the NERC briefing, Gent explained that while they haven't pinned down the initiating event for the black-out, they do know that the problem was in the transmission loop around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. This Loop connects up-state New York west around Erie to Ohio, north to Detroit, and through Canada back east to New York. This Great Lakes area has been a well-known problem for years, Gent said, and cables under Lake Erie were planned to relieve the congestion, but never built.
On the question of terrorism, Gent said that there was no evidence of any physical attack on any infrastructure. As far as cyber terrorism, he said that they have logs of all communications and computer activities at all critical facilities. If there were a "cyber intrusion," he said, the person would leave tracks. They wouldn't necessarily who did it, but they would know it took place.
Leading to the black-out, the destabilization of the transmission system took only 9 seconds. About 50 million people were affected, as some Canadian and 9 U.S. nuclear plants went off line, as well as more than 80 fossil fuel plants.
Gent said that power was being restored faster than he'd anticipated. According to NERC, at 24 hours after the incident, about 20,000MW of capacity was still down, out of more than 61,000MW lost during the outage, which was about 10% of all the capacity east of the Mississippi River. [mgf]
[source: EIR files]
AMPLE WARNING WAS GIVEN THAT THE GRID WAS AT RISK. For more than a decade, NERC has been sounding alarm a
[source: North American Electric Reliability Council press briefing, press releases Aug. 15; files]
"WE DESIGNED THE SYSTEM FOR THIS NOT TO HAPPEN." At a phone briefing this morning, which had more than 700 reporters on the line, NERC CEO Michael Gent said he was "embarrased" by the widespread black-out yesterday, because NERC was created after the massive 1965 East Coast black-out to prevent such an occurrance from repeating itself. But it is clear that the system NERC's rules were created for no longer exists.
A reporter asked Gent how the system NERC designed has changed under deregulation. "When the industry deregulated," he said, "the owners of transmission and generation were separated. You no longer have transmission to match the generation." Power producers "built for convenience to their system load, without concern for the transmission," he said. This has led to the overloading of power lines and reduced reliability.
{EIR} asked about the impact of the "economy transfers" of bulk power over the system since deregulation, where companies "wheel" cheaper power for hundreds of miles, which the system was never designed for. "They have added congestion," to the system, Gent replied. "We thought we were on top of these added transfers," but they will be looked at during NERC's investigation of the black-out.
In 1965, an outage on a 230-kilovolt transmission line in Canada led to a series of failures that in minutes resulted in power swings that produced a cascaded outage, blacking out 30 million people down the East Coast for up to 13 hours. NERC was formed in response.
In July 1977, when a transmission tower north of New York City was struck by lightning, the system collapsed. While 9 million people in New York City were left in the dark for up to 26 hours, the problem was isolated, and no other systems were affected. The reliability rules NERC had put into effect, worked. "We never have anticipated a cascading outage, since 1965," Gent stated today.
But, that was then, and this is post-dereg. [mgf]
[as above]
NERC INVESTIGATING TEAM WILL WORK TOWARD REPORT NEXT WEEK. Michael Gent announced that he was forming a task force of "forensic experts" to investigate the causes and circumstances of the black-out. He said at the press briefing that while it would take months to have a final report, "we should know next week what happened." [mgf]
[as above]
NOT TERRORISM, BUT COLLAPSE OF INFRASTRUCTURE. During the NERC briefing, Gent explained that while they haven't pinned down the initiating event for the black-out, they do know that the problem was in the transmission loop around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. This Loop connects up-state New York west around Erie to Ohio, north to Detroit, and through Canada back east to New York. This Great Lakes area has been a well-known problem for years, Gent said, and cables under Lake Erie were planned to relieve the congestion, but never built.
On the question of terrorism, Gent said that there was no evidence of any physical attack on any infrastructure. As far as cyber terrorism, he said that they have logs of all communications and computer activities at all critical facilities. If there were a "cyber intrusion," he said, the person would leave tracks. They wouldn't necessarily who did it, but they would know it took place.
Leading to the black-out, the destabilization of the transmission system took only 9 seconds. About 50 million people were affected, as some Canadian and 9 U.S. nuclear plants went off line, as well as more than 80 fossil fuel plants.
Gent said that power was being restored faster than he'd anticipated. According to NERC, at 24 hours after the incident, about 20,000MW of capacity was still down, out of more than 61,000MW lost during the outage, which was about 10% of all the capacity east of the Mississippi River. [mgf]
[source: EIR files]
AMPLE WARNING WAS GIVEN THAT THE GRID WAS AT RISK. For more than a decade, NERC has been sounding ala
It seems to me the state commission is broken. I have a call in to a person associated with this commission on the technical side, asking for comment. I also sent the pdf to the local auditor at her request and I made a phone call to the local newspaper. I am hoping this story has legs and is covered generally.
If you think also that this story might have legs, make a few phone calls and stir the pot. Software selection is probably going on where you live, since this electronic voting requirement is mandated by the feds.
I work for a small software company too. It is sort of a virtual corporation, as for example, my boss telecommutes from the east coast to the west coast. The company will pick up the cost of DSL, up to $130/month. And business releated phone calls.
On business phone calls, my long distance vendor allow putting in an accounting code after dialing. In fact, it is set up to require the accounting code. So I have one code for work and one code for everything else. The monthly bill is organized around the accounting codes and so it is easy to know what to bill back.
There is an office about 45 minutes away. Currently I go in twice a month to pick up my paycheck and have meetings. The boss comes in about every six weeks but he has to fly. He has some hot cell phone that gives him the internet on his laptop, so he can keep in touch even when on the road.
The product we work on is an internet enabled accounting package and mostly we just use a thin client over the internet. The thin client has a programmer's workbench in it, so we get along okay. It can print locally too.
Hope this is useful to someone.
Oh, shameless plug. We have a product that is sort of a web based employee information product that tells us who is available and contact information and lets us enter our time and expense cards. You could get a full featured copy for a month for free and try it. It cuts down on the paper work part of this virtual thing pretty well. You can look at TOM Software
I am a spamcop subscriber. Thus I pay Julian to keep spam out of my inbox. I also pay for the pleasurer of reporting spam that does get there or is in my held mail web box. No doubt if Julian misbehaves sufficiently in supporting these goals of mine, then I will stop paying him. I suppose if people have other goals or he misbehaves sufficiently, then other people will stop paying him and the Julian problem will be solved.
But he meets my goals pretty well, so there is not a Julian problem for me. I have gotten one spam in my inbox in the past week.
Here is an important technical point: IMO, Julian designated spam ends up in a web held box. I look at this periodically and do things with it. If I want it, I can forward it to my real inbox with a couple clicks. I can also whitelist it so in the future it will go to my inbox not my web held mail box.
It seems to me that being on Julian's spam list is not the end of the world, if your recipient's actually want your mail. On the other hand, Julian "sells" his list to third parties and I do not know what they do with it.
There are some important side effects. Many spammers simply do not send spam to a spamcop address. So I am gradually closing down other accounts and publicizing the spamcop address. And my employer mail server was an open relay and I subscribe through spamcop to a bunch of openrelay lists, and so this unfortunate situation became clear quickly and the server was reconfigured.
All in all, for $30US a year and some time, I figure I am keeping my inbox clean, fighting spam, and receiving the email I want.
I do not know if we have a mission statement, but what money we make comes from the rapid development aspects of the software and the ease of customization of application code.
We sell through a network of dealers (you can be one) who usually deliver the source to the client. The client signs a NDA too.
People do manage to steal from us, and we do not like it, but it is not a day to day concern.
We do accounting software. The application code is called by the framework to do its business, like accept user input for a file maintenance design. The application code tends to be pretty much just business logic that is executed by our framework software. This probably all works for us because we use a third party language product that ties to the server.
So I conclude that shipping source *can* be a viable business model, even with proprietary software. But it is true that the user base is relunctant to upgrade, and this often is because of customization issues. So our new versions have to be pretty compelling to generate an upgrade.
Customization of application code is not otherwise a big problem for us. Usually, we can just talk our resellers through a customization bug. In some cases, we need a copy of the system.
This approach has a history back into the '70s. Application code and designs from that period can still be automatically converted to our current gui system. I think this history merits consideration.
I looked in the same way and did not find bin-laden. This made me think the author was an honest man, since there is no reliable public information connecting bin-laden except his possibly self-serving own bragging. When you parse the bragging, it is not quite a consistent claim, but an expression of pleasure.
US allies have complained that we have not made a case to them that it was bin-laden. And all our extradition cases are failing because we do not have the evidence to convince an *independent* court of law. Note that domestically our government avoids such forums.
That said, the flaw in the author's analysis is that it is the wrong technique. The first thing you should ask in case of a Riechstag fire is who benefits. In this case, it is the clash of civilizations/arc of crisis crowd. More generally, when the economy goes, you *always* get stuff like this.
In the end, nothing the feds have done would have prevented 9/11 and nothing they have done will prevent a repeat of some sort.
I take the view that governments are legitiment not by how they are chosen, but by what they do. In particular a legitiment action supports the general welfare, often also called the common good, internationally. This sort of argument is where the general welfare references in our own constitution comes from.
A democracy, or representative government, with an electorate of engaged properly educated citizens, is arguably a good approach to ensuring a government that acts for the general welfare. However, it is hard to claim either the precoditions or the results or even the reality of the form for the United States today.
The Chinese on the other hand often suppress freedoms that we think are ultimately essential to a general welfare government, but nevertheless the Chinese do manage to act often in the general welfare. And their lunar colony is an example of that, an argument which can be simply based on our experience with the Apollo program economic multipliers. More generally, by our own historical experience, great science projects of this nature increase the moral and educational level of the population as well as transform the economy.
Please read the TOS carefully.
Suppose you sign up for a 12 month contract. It is non-cancelable due to termination fees. Well, Okay. But then 12 months later it automatically extends for another 12 months, unless you provide notice of termination timely. The extension is under the same terms as the original. So on average, you owe them ~$240 in termination fees unless you pay close attention to business. And even then, you only have a once a year window to economically terminate.
IMO, they are sleezeballs.
I do not disagree with what you say particularly, but I locate the problem in "utopian" military stategy. In that context the recent call for a "pagan" professional military echos Huntington. On the subject of professional military, read this element in the debate:
[Source: FAZ, Jan. 18, 2002]
> VON BREDOW ATTACKS HUNTINGTON ON "MILITARY PROFESSIONALISM"
> IN FAZ. Days after Andreas von Buelow's attack on the "mad dog"
> Brzezinski, another scion of a leading German family takes on
> Samuel Huntington. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Prof.
> Wilfried von Bredow rips apart Huntington's theses on "military
> professionalism," saying it is not compatible with democratic
> society--the United States is his exemplar. A von Bredow was
> Germany's Chief of Staff in 1934, when he was killed by Hitler's
> goons together with former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, in
> order to eliminate the Reichswehr as a possible source of
> resistance.
> There are two opposing conceptions of the military's role in
> society, von Bredow says: "inner leadership" (the German postwar
> Bundeswehr, which considers the soldier a "citizen in uniform");
> and Samuel P. Huntington's "military professionalism," which
> emphasizes the fundamental opposition between the world outlook
> and the functional procedures of civil society, and those of the
> armed forces.
> Today, he says, this is put into focus in a new way, so that
> we can speak of a "neo-professionalism," where the distance
> between the armed forces and civil society is widening more than
> ever before, as draft armies are being replaced by all-volunteer,
> professional armies, which are being deployed less for
> territorial defense, and much more for international
> interventions far from home, and are well-paid.
> Von Bredow says it is likely that these trends will tend to
> intensify, as the military's principal task is now the war on
> terrorism. "One wonders, if the U.S. Armed Forces are becoming
> some kind of a black box." He ends: saying: "in the long run, no
> democratic society can afford to become alienated from its armed
> forces. This will not be healthy for it or its democratic
> substance, nor will it be healthy for the armed forces and their
> efficiency." [alh]
>
`
I read the linked message in the original post and saw the phone number to call. After waiting for their normal office hours, I called and talked to a human. I asked that they not rent or sell my personal information or calling patterns internally or with their marketing partners.
The response was that the agent had removed my authorization to share that information among the different parts of qwest. This was not specifically what I asked for. So I called that to his attention and he said he would do that. On questioning about why it had not happened when I first asked for it, he said that you had to specifically ask for it.
Note that in the end, he just said he would take care of it.
I am crankish about snail spam and make it point to do my best about getting off mailing lists and I have learned there a number of sleazy companies out there. For instance, you have to not only get off a mailing list, but specify that your name not be rented or sold. Most people I think would not have caught the qwest deceit.
A good source of information on what to do about snail spam is junkbusters
Euro stable?
The participants gave up any mechanism for defending the Euro. It is a pre-programmed diaster waiting to happen. In case you have not noticed, there is a severe world-wide economic disaster taking place and the Euro will go the way the yen is going right now. I think it reasonable that the yen crisis will have to play out a little further before the Euro problems hits the papers, but keep an eye on Poland. Poland can implode anytime now, and the splash back would definitely be noticed in the rest of Europe, even though Poland is not a member of the monetary union.
Reinterating, in our period nations have to be able to implement Hamiltonian protectionist measures to survive, and the Euro intentionally does not have a mechanism for doing this.
The protesters are IMO part of the problem. So it is easy to get confused if you see them as one side of a two sided debate, which is the way the media always portrays issues.
Let me agree with a point Katz mentioned. Globalism is based on the Venetian model. There is a clear continutity to our present circumstances via the Dutch/British explicitly adopting that model. In its present form globalism is thus a maritime rentier finance system with the particular current characteristics of the "Washington Concensus", which where what we hear about free trade, democracy, and transparency as saving the world comes from. The distinction between the Roman model and the Venitian model is that Rome was a slave society and made its living that way, while the Venitians made their living off of what we could recognize today as free trade. These systems have the common thread that the mass of people were treated as human cattle. Does that sound like "consumerism" and third world sweatshops? That which can stand against this system are nation states acting for the common good. Thus globalism naturally acts nation states.
Let me disagree with Katz. Globalism is not the biggest thing going. The biggest thing going is the Eurasian states working to build interconnecting transporation and development corridors. This is not a maritime system and enhances nation states against rentier finance types and so is in direct opposition to globalism.
It is also an advance in human evolution, in that we have been a latterial-based (sp) species up until now.