Oil still costs about $15 to pump out of the ground,
What a bunch of bullcrap. The cost of pumping oil varies from well to well. Sure, it might cost Saudi Arabian Oil Company $15 per barrel, but if they only release enough oil for half the world's demand, other producers have to fill that supply. It can cost those other suppliers much more to pull oil out of the ground. And that high price is going to lift the market price.
but instead of the $25 price before we invaded Iraq, it's pushing $70+ as a "permanent high". Maybe Congress and the White Hosue can exercise some accountability for their totally failed energy policies (including sending us to war) by stopping the price gouging the oil corporations are abusing us with.
Oh really? So they're just going to tell Saudi Arabia or Venezuala to lower their prices? How are they going to force them to do that? Oh, you mean force American Oil companies. Well here's a clue: American oil companies are bench-warmers in the global oil market. The biggest American company, ExxonMobil, ranks just 16th in the world in total reserves. They control about 2% of the worlds oil. Hell, even Petronas, a Malaysian company, is bigger than America's biggest oil company.
And looking at the table you see that the market is dominated by state-owned, national oil companies like Saudi Arabian Oil Company, and Petroleos de Venezuela. The only way you're going to lower the price they charge for oil is to invade and force them. Otherwise they'll sell their oil to the highest bidder.
I know those corporations are their best bribers^Wcontributors, and their foreign sources are our best traitors^Wallies, but Americans will vote on the entire House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate in elections next year. We might be willing to put up with a lot of BS on faith, but there's no denying we're not getting the spoils of all of our "superpower" status.
So your complaint is that Bush hasn't invaded enough countries yet to lower oil prices. Interesting.
The fact is state-run foreign oil companies set the price for oil. There is very little the government of the USA can do about it aside from rushing in with tanks to take their oil fields. Any kind of price control on this oil would mean it would get sold to someone else at a higher price, like the Chinese, for example.
Leading Oil and Gas Companies Around the World
Rank by 2004 Oil Equivalent Reserves Company Worldwide Liquids Reserves, Million Barrels Worldwide Natural Gas Reserves, Billion Cubic Feet Total Reserves in Oil Equivalent Barrels, Million Barrels 1 Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Arabia) 2,3 259,400 234,500 299,485 2 National Iranian Oil Company (Iran) 2,3 125,800 940,000 286,484 3 Qatar General Petroleum Corporation (Qatar) 3 15,207 910,000 170,763 4 Gazprom (Russia) 0 988,892 169,041 5 Iraq National Oil Company (Iraq) 2,3 115,000 110,000 133,803 6 Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (UAE) 3 92,200 196,100 125,721 7 Petroleos de Venezuela.S.A. (Venezuela) 3 78,998 149,891 104,620 8 Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (Kuwait) 3 99,000 55 99,009 9 Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (Nigeria) 2,3 35,255 176,000 65,340 10 National Oil Company (Libya) 2,3 39,000 52,000 47,889 11 Sonatrach (Algeria) 2,3 11,800 160,500 39,236 12 OAO Lukoil (Russia) 23,215 39,089 29,897 13 Petronas (Malaysia) 5,290 85,200 19,854 14 PetroChina Co. Ltd. (China) 10,941 44,554 18,557 15 Petroleos Mexicanos (Mexico) 14,803 14,807 17,334 16 ExxonMobil Corporation (United States) 8,395 31,843 13,838 17 BP Corporation (United Kingdom) 5,775 46,650 13,729 18 Egyptian General Petroleum Corp. (Egypt) 2 3,700 58,500 13,700 19 OAO Yukos (Russia) 10,950 7,800 12,283 20 Petroleo Brasilerio S.A. (Brazil) 2 9,945 11,247 11,868
AI, Music, player input, networking, "worldkeeping"... hell, even rendering is parallelizable.
Rendering is already done in parallel. The trouble is that it's the GPU that's doing it and not the CPU so having multiple threads/cores doesn't help much. Sure, you could switch to CPU rendering, but that is usually much slower than using the GPU.
And with the exception of AI, most of the tasks you listed take very little time, even on a single threaded CPU. And even AI doesn't have to take that much more time. It depends on what algorithms you use.
Now a scene with a lot of vertices might benefit from extra threads/extra cores, but now you've increased the burden on the GPU. It soon becomes the bottleneck.
Researchers have spent a lot of time trying to find ways to make it easy to take advantage of parallel processing. The fact is that their efforts have been fruitless.
Re:I don't care what they call it, it ain't Ma Bel
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 1
And thank $Deity for that. Ma Bell did quite a bit of good, Bell Labs being a prime example, but the modern internet/www/etc wouldn't have been possible without the breakup. At least there's some competition, driving down prices and increasing usability, today.
And don't forget how you weren't even allowed to physically connect a modem to telephone lines. You had to use and acoustic coupler.
The breakup was one big reason modem speeds increased.
There were all sorts of other rules, too. If anything, AT&T is the reason the internet came so late. The Internet was technologically possible for a long time, but the biggest electronic communications network in the country was mostly off-limits.
You pull a few random wackos out of your ass and declare all universities bastions of terrorists and anti-West zealots. I've gone to three university for my various degrees and well, I have to tell you to stop reading the news online and get out of your parents' basement once in a while.
You've probably spent much more time in engineering/sciences than in the humanities. Five minutes with the students and faculty in the Philosphy, Sociology, Anthropology, or History departments and you'll find out how deep the Anti-Americanism runs.
Perhaps the lesson for them would have been not to poker too high with governments. In cases of emergency, any government can temporarily withdraw the priviledge of patents. It does Roche (or other patent holders) no good to gamble on emergencies like this to maximize their profit. Why didn't they come to a agreement with Taiwan? They could have reaped moderate benefits from such an agreement. Instead, they just lost completely now.
It's entirely possible that the government was intentionally low-balling Roche so they could later claim that Roche wasn't cooperating. That way they could null the patent and pay nothing.
Maybe the lesson is, don't bother inventing life saving drugs unless they're for people willing to protect patents and pay you for your work.
This idea that ISPs are being noble here is silly. They're doing what they do for the money as much as anyone.
Fact is, many people that pay for an Internet connection do so in part so they can swap music. Getting free music is part of the value of that connection for them.
Now put yourself in the place of the ISP. You have customers paying you so they can have access to this free music. Why would you want to stop this? You don't have to pay for the music yourself, but you get a financial benefit from it.
So I don't see anything heroic about these ISPs. Helping to make sure their customers can get free music helps their bottom line.
Yeah, just like the diesel engine...oh wait...that one rotted on the shelf until the patent expired. Fancy that. Did Mr. Armstrong(FM radio) a lot of good also. You got it backwards. If not for IP privileges, we might have had this thing fifty years ago or more. IP rewards the first. I'd rather reward the best.
Many inventors have a problem correctly pricing their IP and marketing their IP. Hence the slow adoption of Diesel and FM radio. They simply thought their invention so wonderful that they priced it out of production.
They often believe that their IP is the only important thing in the production of a product. This is like saying writing an outline describing a software application is more difficult than actually producing the software.
In reality the invention itself plays a small role in the production of a useful device.
The soot, ash and other debris blocks out some of the energy from the sun.
Interestingly enough, this may be the reason that temperatures from about 1940-1980 were stable or in decline. There was so much pollution in the air that it reduced sunlight hitting the surface.
With the rise of environmentalism, pollution has been much reduced, and so the increase in temperatures picks up where it left off.
What L3 is doing by filtering out all the route advertisements for alternate paths is preventing many setups from even routing around the break. That's uncalled for.
That explains a lot. So basically if I'm an L3 customer, directly or indirectly, L3 is actively making it impossible for me to reach the Cogent side of things.
I can understand them refusing to peer directly, but cutting them off completely? That's completely inconsistent with the whole point of the internet.
I don't know if this is why L3 cut off the connection, but if it is I think they are in the right. In peering, each side controls a toll road and are letting the others' customers use their road so that their customers can use the other's road. If Cogent's customers are using L3's road but L3's aren't using Cogent's, why should L3 continue the peering relationship? If L3's customers complain, then L3 will have to do something about it. Otherwise, Cogent will have to make a deal with L3 to reopen the pipe - I imagine huge amounts of money may be involved.
L3's customers SHOULD complain. When L3's customers paid for their service, they expected to be able to get access to all the content that's generally available on the internet. That includes the content provided by Cogent's customers.
As I see it, it's the L3s of the world that have been getting a free ride. They get customers to pay them for access to content they had no part in creating or paying for.
There is a lot of emphasis on hard work, but no amount of hard work is going to turn a mediocre intellect into an engineer.
It's a fact that intelligence is heritable. It's also true that the generally more intelligent have decided not to have many or even any children.
At some point the country will be full of mediocre intellects and no amount of hard work or instruction or money for education is going to turn them into good engineers.
Now I'm sure the author of the article is above average. But I suspect he was deceived by inflated grades at public school into believing he had what it takes to be an engineer. There is a degree of innate talent that is required for engineering, but I think he probably lacks this.
It's interesting how ready people are to accept their own lack of talent for running, or throwing, or catching a ball, while also praising another with those talents. There is little envy. But somehow we're all supposed to be equal in intelligence. And if we just "work harder" or have "better teachers" we can all be Einsteins.
This is the first time I've heard anyone make fascism look attractive. Maybe I need to break out of my idiot savant mode and study some political science.
It's not surprising that fascism might look attractive. Dictators don't just come to power with zero support. There have to be enough people to believe in and be attracted to the philosophy. It has to look good for people to accept it. Hitler and Mussolini had plenty of popular support.
What's interesting is how time and again this idea of placing society always before the individual ends with dictatorship. We have our intuitions about how the state can be used to create a utopian society, and these intuitions turn out to be mostly wrong in practice.
Yes, and in the US, it's patriotic to consume, to keep "the economy" going. Are you comfortable with how proud Mussolini would be with our corporatist government?
He would probably be unhappy with how business don't seem to serve society/state enough. Remember that their purpose isn't to serve the owners ultimately. It's to serve the state, according to Mussolini, at least. He would no doubt exercise what he thought was the state's option to directly administer many industries. All in the "pubic's interest", of course. Interestingly, many on the left would make the same complaint about business and offer the same "solution".
Even though we don't have many labor corporations, just unions (which work differently), it's "the merger of state and corporate power". It's certainly not "of, by and for the people".
All unions except informal ones are genuine corporations. They have bylaws and charters and all those things that go along with being a corporation.
And while we don't have a separate legislative body for all those corporations that way fascist Italy did, we do have lobbyists in Washington exercising influence. That includes business corporations, but also all those other corporations, like the NEA, AARP, Sierra Club, etc.
"Under Fascism in Italy, business owners, employees, trades-people, professionals, and other economic classes were organized into 22 guilds, or associations, known as "corporations" according to their industries, and these groups were given representation in a legislative body known as the Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni."
So you see, "the merger of state and corporate power" doesn't just mean businesses. Today such a system might include corporations such as the AFL/CIO and other labor unions. Yes, they are corporations, too.
And business never "owned" government under Fascism. Fascism is primarily about putting the state above the individual, indeed above everything, include businesses.
"The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and usefu [sic] [typo-should be: useful] instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production. State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management. (pp. 135-136) "
Benito Mussolini, 1935, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Rome: 'Ardita' Publishers.
Indeed, this further shows how anti-conservative the Republican Party has become. True conservatives would never support legislation that intrudes so terribly into the lives of innocent citizens. It's against the very ideals that a real conservative holds.
Yep, but that didn't get many Republicans elected, did it?
Face it. "The people" want the largest possible central government to solve all their problems.
Just reflect on the cries that went up after Katrina. The people want a dictator to come in and take care of them and all their problems. You can't have a small, unintrusive government like that.
Most internal combustion engines operate at about 35 per cent efficiency. This means that only 35 per cent of the fuel is fully burned. The rest either turns to carbon corroding the engine or goes out the exhaust pipe as greenhouse gases.
This is BS.
Most of the fuel is already burned. Most inefficiency comes from the fact that a lot of energy is lost as heat that does no work.
Perhaps I'm just not thinking this through enough, but it seems to me that this seems a lot like price-gouging schemes that crop up around gas stations a lot. I'm not an accountant, but it sure as hell seems fishy to me that over $600 per chip is spent on accummulated research and marketing.
Who knows what that $600 per chip is spent on. It doesn't matter. If $600/chip is "too much", then where are all the competitors that would rush in and scoop up all this easy money? As far as I can tell, only AMD is willing to try.
Consider how much money was made during the dot-com explosion. Investors were putting huge amounts of money into companies. Yet, with all the "price-gouging" that Intel does, most investors sit on the sidelines passing up the change to get in on these high prices.
So whatever that $600 is paying for, even if pure profit, it's still not incentive enough to get people to start a new x86 compatible processor companies. Apparently those with the money to do that think it's just too much trouble. Maybe that's really what the $600/processor is paying for -- all the trouble it takes to run a processor company.
The other thing is, what exaclty is "price gouging", except a complaint that you don't like the price? I could make that complaint about nearly everything. "Price gouging" doesn't seem to have much of an objective existance.
Slashdot Mirror
What a bunch of bullcrap. The cost of pumping oil varies from well to well. Sure, it might cost Saudi Arabian Oil Company $15 per barrel, but if they only release enough oil for half the world's demand, other producers have to fill that supply. It can cost those other suppliers much more to pull oil out of the ground. And that high price is going to lift the market price.
but instead of the $25 price before we invaded Iraq, it's pushing $70+ as a "permanent high". Maybe Congress and the White Hosue can exercise some accountability for their totally failed energy policies (including sending us to war) by stopping the price gouging the oil corporations are abusing us with.
Oh really? So they're just going to tell Saudi Arabia or Venezuala to lower their prices? How are they going to force them to do that? Oh, you mean force American Oil companies. Well here's a clue: American oil companies are bench-warmers in the global oil market. The biggest American company, ExxonMobil, ranks just 16th in the world in total reserves. They control about 2% of the worlds oil. Hell, even Petronas, a Malaysian company, is bigger than America's biggest oil company.
And looking at the table you see that the market is dominated by state-owned, national oil companies like Saudi Arabian Oil Company, and Petroleos de Venezuela. The only way you're going to lower the price they charge for oil is to invade and force them. Otherwise they'll sell their oil to the highest bidder.
I know those corporations are their best bribers^Wcontributors, and their foreign sources are our best traitors^Wallies, but Americans will vote on the entire House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate in elections next year. We might be willing to put up with a lot of BS on faith, but there's no denying we're not getting the spoils of all of our "superpower" status.
So your complaint is that Bush hasn't invaded enough countries yet to lower oil prices. Interesting.
The fact is state-run foreign oil companies set the price for oil. There is very little the government of the USA can do about it aside from rushing in with tanks to take their oil fields. Any kind of price control on this oil would mean it would get sold to someone else at a higher price, like the Chinese, for example.
Leading Oil and Gas Companies Around the World
Rank by 2004 Oil Equivalent Reserves Company Worldwide Liquids Reserves, Million Barrels Worldwide Natural Gas Reserves, Billion Cubic Feet Total Reserves in Oil Equivalent Barrels, Million Barrels
1 Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Arabia) 2,3 259,400 234,500 299,485
2 National Iranian Oil Company (Iran) 2,3 125,800 940,000 286,484
3 Qatar General Petroleum Corporation (Qatar) 3 15,207 910,000 170,763
4 Gazprom (Russia) 0 988,892 169,041
5 Iraq National Oil Company (Iraq) 2,3 115,000 110,000 133,803
6 Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (UAE) 3 92,200 196,100 125,721
7 Petroleos de Venezuela.S.A. (Venezuela) 3 78,998 149,891 104,620
8 Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (Kuwait) 3 99,000 55 99,009
9 Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (Nigeria) 2,3 35,255 176,000 65,340
10 National Oil Company (Libya) 2,3 39,000 52,000 47,889
11 Sonatrach (Algeria) 2,3 11,800 160,500 39,236
12 OAO Lukoil (Russia) 23,215 39,089 29,897
13 Petronas (Malaysia) 5,290 85,200 19,854
14 PetroChina Co. Ltd. (China) 10,941 44,554 18,557
15 Petroleos Mexicanos (Mexico) 14,803 14,807 17,334
16 ExxonMobil Corporation (United States) 8,395 31,843 13,838
17 BP Corporation (United Kingdom) 5,775 46,650 13,729
18 Egyptian General Petroleum Corp. (Egypt) 2 3,700 58,500 13,700
19 OAO Yukos (Russia) 10,950 7,800 12,283
20 Petroleo Brasilerio S.A. (Brazil) 2 9,945 11,247 11,868
AI, Music, player input, networking, "worldkeeping"... hell, even rendering is parallelizable.
Rendering is already done in parallel. The trouble is that it's the GPU that's doing it and not the CPU so having multiple threads/cores doesn't help much. Sure, you could switch to CPU rendering, but that is usually much slower than using the GPU.
And with the exception of AI, most of the tasks you listed take very little time, even on a single threaded CPU. And even AI doesn't have to take that much more time. It depends on what algorithms you use.
Now a scene with a lot of vertices might benefit from extra threads/extra cores, but now you've increased the burden on the GPU. It soon becomes the bottleneck.
Researchers have spent a lot of time trying to find ways to make it easy to take advantage of parallel processing. The fact is that their efforts have been fruitless.
And don't forget how you weren't even allowed to physically connect a modem to telephone lines. You had to use and acoustic coupler.
The breakup was one big reason modem speeds increased.
There were all sorts of other rules, too. If anything, AT&T is the reason the internet came so late. The Internet was technologically possible for a long time, but the biggest electronic communications network in the country was mostly off-limits.
Ah, but the government here is being used as a tool by parents, isn't it?
In this case parents are saying "if I'm not with my kid, you can't sell him these games".
Parents have a right to tell other adults not to sell things their kids. The government is an appropriate mechanism for enforcing that.
yeah, 'commie crap' like sharing and helping your neighbor. Damn such talk!
[/sarcsam]
Sharing and helping your neighbor isn't "commie crap" unless you're forced to do it to avoid prison.
Of course that's not true sharing and helping. It's involuntary servitude.
You've probably spent much more time in engineering/sciences than in the humanities. Five minutes with the students and faculty in the Philosphy, Sociology, Anthropology, or History departments and you'll find out how deep the Anti-Americanism runs.
It's entirely possible that the government was intentionally low-balling Roche so they could later claim that Roche wasn't cooperating. That way they could null the patent and pay nothing.
Maybe the lesson is, don't bother inventing life saving drugs unless they're for people willing to protect patents and pay you for your work.
And the lesson for Roche? Get out of the business of inventing life-saving vaccines.
Just how many companies do we need wasting their time on such things?
University Professor Endorses Jihad
Jihad at San Francisco State
CU prof's essay sparks dispute - Prof Ward Churchill says 9/11 victims were not innocent people
USF Professor Sami Al-Arian calls for "Death of Israel" and "Damn America"
University of New Mexico Professor Richard Berthold addressed the terrorist attacks in his morning class on Western Civilization, remarking, "Anyone who can bomb the Pentagon has my vote
US Universities have been especially anti-American since the '60s.
Of course, they don't mind that the government helps to pay their salaries.
Then it's the ISPs the should be paying, shouldn't it?
How much money have they from people that bought an Internet connection so they could get free music?
ISPs have made plenty of money from other people's music and haven't paid them a cent.
This idea that ISPs are being noble here is silly. They're doing what they do for the money as much as anyone.
Fact is, many people that pay for an Internet connection do so in part so they can swap music. Getting free
music is part of the value of that connection for them.
Now put yourself in the place of the ISP. You have customers paying you so they can have access to this free music.
Why would you want to stop this? You don't have to pay for the music yourself, but you get a financial benefit from it.
So I don't see anything heroic about these ISPs. Helping to make sure their customers can get free music helps
their bottom line.
Yeah, just like the diesel engine...oh wait...that one rotted on the shelf until the patent expired. Fancy that. Did Mr. Armstrong(FM radio) a lot of good also. You got it backwards. If not for IP privileges, we might have had this thing fifty years ago or more. IP rewards the first. I'd rather reward the best.
Many inventors have a problem correctly pricing their IP and marketing their IP. Hence the slow adoption of Diesel and FM radio. They simply thought their invention so wonderful that they priced it out of production.
They often believe that their IP is the only important thing in the production of a product. This is like saying writing an outline describing a software application is more difficult than actually producing the software.
In reality the invention itself plays a small role in the production of a useful device.
Interestingly enough, this may be the reason that temperatures from about 1940-1980 were stable or in decline. There was so much pollution in the air that it reduced sunlight hitting the surface.
With the rise of environmentalism, pollution has been much reduced, and so the increase in temperatures picks up where it left off.
Duff's device is a way of forcing C to do a form of loop unrolling. It has nothing to do with coroutines.
What L3 is doing by filtering out all the route advertisements for alternate paths is preventing many setups from even routing around the break. That's uncalled for.
That explains a lot. So basically if I'm an L3 customer, directly or indirectly, L3 is actively making it impossible for me to reach the Cogent side of things.
I can understand them refusing to peer directly, but cutting them off completely? That's completely inconsistent with the whole point of the internet.
I don't know if this is why L3 cut off the connection, but if it is I think they are in the right. In peering, each side controls a toll road and are letting the others' customers use their road so that their customers can use the other's road. If Cogent's customers are using L3's road but L3's aren't using Cogent's, why should L3 continue the peering relationship? If L3's customers complain, then L3 will have to do something about it. Otherwise, Cogent will have to make a deal with L3 to reopen the pipe - I imagine huge amounts of money may be involved.
L3's customers SHOULD complain. When L3's customers paid for their service, they expected to be able to get access to all the content that's generally available on the internet. That includes the content provided by Cogent's customers.
As I see it, it's the L3s of the world that have been getting a free ride. They get customers to pay them for access to content they had no part in creating or paying for.
What is so unusual about 51% of the people screwing the other 49%?
In the board room or at the ballot, you see the same thing.
There is a lot of emphasis on hard work, but no amount of hard work is going to turn a mediocre intellect into an engineer.
It's a fact that intelligence is heritable. It's also true that the generally more intelligent have decided not to have many or even any children.
At some point the country will be full of mediocre intellects and no amount of hard work or instruction or money for education is going to turn them into good engineers.
Now I'm sure the author of the article is above average. But I suspect he was deceived by inflated grades at public school into believing he had what it takes to be an engineer. There is a degree of innate talent that is required for engineering, but I think he probably lacks this.
It's interesting how ready people are to accept their own lack of talent for running, or throwing, or catching a ball, while also praising another with those talents. There is little envy. But somehow we're all supposed to be equal in intelligence. And if we just "work harder" or have "better teachers" we can all be Einsteins.
It doesn't work that way.
Like it or not, intelligence is strongly genetic.
This is the first time I've heard anyone make fascism look attractive.
Maybe I need to break out of my idiot savant mode and study some political science.
It's not surprising that fascism might look attractive. Dictators don't just come to power with zero support. There have to be enough people to believe in and be attracted to the philosophy. It has to look good for people to accept it. Hitler and Mussolini had plenty of popular support.
What's interesting is how time and again this idea of placing society always before the individual ends with dictatorship. We have our intuitions about how the state can be used to create a utopian society, and these intuitions turn out to be mostly wrong in practice.
Yes, and in the US, it's patriotic to consume, to keep "the economy" going. Are you comfortable with how proud Mussolini would be with our corporatist government?
He would probably be unhappy with how business don't seem to serve society/state enough. Remember that their purpose isn't to serve the owners ultimately. It's to serve the state, according to Mussolini, at least. He would no doubt exercise what he thought was the state's option to directly administer many industries. All in the "pubic's interest", of course. Interestingly, many on the left would make the same complaint about business and offer the same "solution".
Even though we don't have many labor corporations, just unions (which work differently), it's "the merger of state and corporate power". It's certainly not "of, by and for the people".
All unions except informal ones are genuine corporations. They have bylaws and charters and all those things that go along with being a corporation.
And while we don't have a separate legislative body for all those corporations that way fascist Italy did, we do have lobbyists in Washington exercising influence. That includes business corporations, but also all those other corporations, like the NEA, AARP, Sierra Club, etc.
"If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern"
You're referring to fascism , "the merger of state and corporate power" (according to Mussolini, its first biggest booster).
"Corporate" doesn't mean what you think it means in this context.
Wikipedia gives a good history of corporatism.
"Under Fascism in Italy, business owners, employees, trades-people, professionals, and other economic classes were organized into 22 guilds, or associations, known as "corporations" according to their industries, and these groups were given representation in a legislative body known as the Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni."
So you see, "the merger of state and corporate power" doesn't just mean businesses. Today such a system might include corporations such as the AFL/CIO and other labor unions. Yes, they are corporations, too.
And business never "owned" government under Fascism. Fascism is primarily about putting the state above the individual, indeed above everything, include businesses.
Doctrine of Fascism
"The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and usefu [sic] [typo-should be: useful] instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.
State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management. (pp. 135-136) "
Benito Mussolini, 1935, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Rome: 'Ardita' Publishers.
Yep, but that didn't get many Republicans elected, did it?
Face it. "The people" want the largest possible central government to solve all their problems.
Just reflect on the cries that went up after Katrina. The people want a dictator to come in and take care of them and all their problems. You can't have a small, unintrusive government like that.
Most internal combustion engines operate at about 35 per cent efficiency. This means that only 35 per cent of the fuel is fully burned. The rest either turns to carbon corroding the engine or goes out the exhaust pipe as greenhouse gases.
This is BS.
Most of the fuel is already burned. Most inefficiency comes from the fact that a lot of energy is lost as heat that does no work.
Who knows what that $600 per chip is spent on. It doesn't matter. If $600/chip is "too much", then where are all the competitors that would rush in and scoop up all this easy money? As far as I can tell, only AMD is willing to try.
Consider how much money was made during the dot-com explosion. Investors were putting huge amounts of money into companies. Yet, with all the "price-gouging" that Intel does, most investors sit on the sidelines passing up the change to get in on these high prices.
So whatever that $600 is paying for, even if pure profit, it's still not incentive enough to get people to start a new x86 compatible processor companies. Apparently those with the money to do that think it's just too much trouble. Maybe that's really what the $600/processor is paying for -- all the trouble it takes to run a processor company.
The other thing is, what exaclty is "price gouging", except a complaint that you don't like the price? I could make that complaint about nearly everything. "Price gouging" doesn't seem to have much of an objective existance.
The government does not count people if they are past the time for receiving unemployment checks. they become non persons and are not counted
Won't this myth die once and for all?
The government does not calculate the unemployment rate on how many people are collecting unemployment checks. Get that straight. Collecting unemployment HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CALCULATING THE UNEMPLOYMENT RATE.
The unemployment rate is determined by a survey of about 60,000 people.