Yes, I do realize this, but it would get rid of the Taliban for a while, thereby give some breathing space to actually start creating a local market, and would entice the local population to cooperate with creating such a market way more effectively than putting a gun to their heads.
In a free market, not anyone can be the wolf. If there are already two wolves, and there is no government intervention, the existing wolves will have put barriers to entry in place. If you climb those barriers and still have money left, the existing wolves will suddenly start to compete with you and sell their goods or services at a price way below cost. They will keep this up as long as they've got money. They are fat wolves as they've been eating lots of sheep, this will take years. Only if you survive this, you will be welcomed to the club, and there will be three wolves.
However, to be able to survive all this, you need to have more capital than the existing wolves combined, as you need to take the barrier to entry and be able to sell goods or services at below cost for longer than the existing wolves can. Only wolves have that kind of capital. So, in a free market, the only way to become a wolf is to find a new market, the existing markets are only there for existing wolves. Only the government can level the playing field and forcefully create a competitive market (which is better than a free market) by making practices such as sketched above illegal (which they are, for good reason).
Of course the burglar is responsible for the burglary. Also, Ewoks live on Endor. But what does it have to do with the case where information is so shoddily hidden that a leak is likely to be leaked before? Try this for an analogy: suppose that you have information that, if it fell in the wrong hands, could kill people that trust you. You build 'windows', 'doors' and all other conveniences to be able to share this information with millions of others who you implicitly trust not to tell anyone (yes, literally millions have access to documents labelled 'secret').
Your 19 year old nephew takes this information and gives this to some Australian who subsequently shares it with billions, including people you actually do not want it to see.
Should you not be a bit embarrassed about your procedure and the carelessness in which you put lives in the hands of your retarded 19 year old nephew? Do you now expect that this is the first and only instance of the information falling in the wrong hands? Do you consider yourself blameless?
Yes indeed, so it is fundamentally stupid that the US is spending money on hunting down poppy farms, instead of simply buying the produce for outrageous prices, making all the farmers well-off. Bye-bye Taliban economy.
Furthermore, if only 10% of the money that is spent on the US military in Afghanistan is spent on simply bribing everyone, from Karzai down to the most lowly peasant, the Taliban would not have a leg to stand on.
Compute. yearly spending on contracts and pay alone in Afghanistan in 2009 was $43.2 billion (source ). The Afghanistan GDP was $10.6 billion in 2006. So, simply dumping 4.2 billion dollar per year in the population would lift the GDP by a third!
Better yet, there are 27 million people in Afghanistan, spreading out $4.3 billion will give each Afghani, man, woman and child, a check of $1600 dollars annually. Given that the per capita income of the Afghani was a mere $800 in 2008, this will mean a 200% rise in income. Promise the same amount for the next 10 years (1 year of warfare), and focus on building an infrastructure that works. Of course, in Taliban controlled areas, the check cannot be paid out. And witness what the population will do.
It might not solve the problem, bribery and buying drugs is morally reprehensible (killing apparently isn't), but it seems to be a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to shoot your way out.
Sure they will. They will just compete on issues they agree to compete on, like awards programs. At a certain point it is for all large enough parties more profitable to exploit their customers than to try to annihilate the other. Free market: it's where two wolves and a flock of sheep decide what's for dinner.
Nothing except a free market economy will ever be able to cope with black swans.
Why is this exactly? What exact mechanism is there in an unregulated market that would prevent major boom-bust cycles?? It might be the case that government makes things worse at times, but the free market is fully capable of creating boom-bust cycles on its own. It is very simple: greed create booms, busts follow.
Seems like a sensible policy to me. You live in Jesusland, land of bible and creation. Thus it makes more sense to educate the illegals as they actually contribute to society.
Ah, the concept that a human isn't human because it's still in inside its mother. Tell me, are there other places a human can be where they aren't human? Maybe we could re-define Gitmo as a womb, from a legal standpoint, so that the prisoners held there don't have to be treated humanely.
No, wrong, Abortion is the concept that murder is acceptable when the human being murdered is less than -20 weeks of age. It is thought that given the unripe age of the human, this type of murder can be decided upon by the mother whose life is inflicted by the eventual birth of the human. Compared with the practice of many governments to murder humans of whatever age on the basis of some random court proceedings heavily tilted against humans of color, it is thought that abortion is a very light-weight form of murder, to be accepted in any society.
As for Gitmo, it seems that the US society still needs a bit of civilization to realize that it is more humane to actually kill people than to let them rot is a cell without any hope of court or due process. It is the hope of many that the US will at some point realize this and either let the poor buggers go, or to give them a mercy killing. Any of them will do, as most of them are brown anyway.
I think the clearest explanation of the failure was in the words of Alan Greenspan, who was expecting that the banking world would take care of itself, i.e., would not leverage itself into bankruptcy. Boy, was he, and everyone from Milton Freedman to the random free market fundie, wrong.
My problem with the Wikipedia article is that it doesn't abide by the NPOV rules. The original author has done a fine job of presenting one view, but gives short shrift to opposing views. If I thought it was a worthwhile effort, I'd add the additional sources. But, I don't have the time for the edit wars that always occur on Wikipedia if someone challenges the group-think.
Man, you do give up easily. There's one author that has a particular view, but you will not get into a discussion with this person because you suspect there's a group involved somewhere? Grow a spine.
Temperature does not matter that much. Sea level does. If the sea level changes appreciably, literally billions of people will lose their homes and income (most of the population of earth lives near the sea/ocean). You might want to imagine what shiny place this world will become when that happens. No we will not all just pick up our stuff and move up the hill somewhat more. It will be a tiny bit more violent than that.
You know. People get upset if they think that opinions will cost lives. Since African governments have stated that they don't believe that HIV causes Aids (and that condoms have little holes in it. Oh no, that was the catholic church), the HIV/AIDS connection has become politicial. This puts extra strain on the science, in the sense that the view that goes against the scientific consensus (but does follow political convenience) better be 100% well-researched. Given that this was a conference, I'm pretty sure that Karry Mullis' paper was not of that 100% well-researched quality. Not that the other work on the conference was, but at least their work would not have been used by African dictators to change policy in such a way that millions of lives would be lost.
Same happened with irreducible complexity. When this came up, scientists were actively at the lookout for papers claiming mathematical proofs of irreducible complexity. At some point I got a message from some colleagues pointing out that some were circulating. Although this sounds very sneaky and bad, what we wanted to make sure was that in none of the journals on evolution, life, and complexity ID'ers would succeed in publishing these papers. This is not because we were this afraid of accepting a paper with a wrong proof, because such papers get published all the time, no, this was because of the political effect of publishing such papers.
The moment a paper of this nature gets published, it will become political and used as an argument to bring God back in science class. Again, when an issue gets politicized, science needs to become extra careful. This because there are major consequences. In this case it was about education, not death.
Global warming, similar. Issue is heavily politicized, public convenience is heavily weighted against the scientific consensus, and any scientific credibility that the opposing viewpoint receives will be blown out of all proportion and will be used to ensure political inaction. And now there are billions of lives at stake. Guess why not every 'funny' theory is being discussed?
I've worked in science when there was a political battle going on, and I've worked in science when there wasn't. If the issue is not politicized, opinions bordering on crack-pottery are welcomed and will be discussed on their merits, if only for a good laugh. When the science is politicized however, scientists become more careful, and somewhat overprotective. This is not a trend, but this is trying to keep the science working and to try to not let it be swallowed by the beast of public politics.
Sure have, in fact I wrote the Wikipedia article on it. Where does it state that you can indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen?
Don't worry, they'll get around to that eventually. For me as a European regularly travelling to the US, I know I am entering a place refusing to give me the same basic protection that my country is extending to Americans. Ah well, so is Uganda.
No, that is not the way Op Ed pieces work. The only thing you can conclude is that the paper decided that the opinion is worth to be expressed, be it because of the content or because of the messenger (both are important here).
Do you really think that if there's a debate raging through the pages of the Post that there is an actual battle of opinions going on between the chief editor and himself?
I think that in this particular case, 'international law' signifies the understanding that each country has the right to create their own laws. The author is saying here that the US will not abide the laws of the country Assange is residing in.
Ah, another microevolutionist. Here's the challenge for you: explain how you can have hundreds of thousands of undirected changes in successive versions of an organism (microevolutionary steps) without leading to a radically different organism (a new species if you will). Mathematically, this will happen with unbounded changes (however small), but it seems that you believe that there is some mechanism that keeps species within well-defined bounds during millenia of microevolution. So, please, define these bounds, and also propose a mechanism that keeps species within such bounds. Given that species turns out to be hopelessly ill-defined, I wish you good luck with the first part, I doubt you'll ever get to the second part.
Oh man, this is funny. You seriously argue that the puritans left England because they thought their King was rude to the pope?? The puritans weren't even catholic!
Okay, here's a brief history of where the puritans came from and how you got your first amendment. Henry VIII started the Anglican Church of England. His first wife was the daughter of the emperor, Spanish, and a catholic. The Anglican Church, was, and still is, very close to catholic church. They've got bishops and wear purple and all that jazz. At the same time the protestants (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) were denying the role of the pope and the papal hierarchy. They even went so far as to print Bibles in the native tongues, so that people could actually start reading the thing.
Fast forward a bit, until England is again ruled by a catholic King (Charles the first, from Mary of Scots from the first wife of Henry Tudor, you know, the Spanish one). Oliver Cromwell takes over, beheads the king (a novelty at the time, later practised with great success by the French), and the puritans (very fundamentalist protestants) have a free reign in England and Scotland. What do they do now they've got the upper hand. Of course, kill the catholics! And the Anglicans. And then they start to fight amongs themselves. Ever wonder why there are so many different protestant churches? That started all then and they fought like mad.
Not very nice, so after Cromwell dies and Charles II becomes king (again a catholic), the protestants that did all this killing are being actively encouraged to go to a different continent to preach their religion. These are you puritans: kicked out of England largely because their persecution of other religions made them impossible to keep in the country.
How this leads to the first Amendment? Remember they were fighting amongst themselves. Guess what, they continued to do so in the Americas, and your founding fathers tried to stop this in the constitution.
So, bottom line, the first Amendment is there because the puritans where the most religiously intolerant breed that England ever saw, and they needed to be kept in check because they would kill themselves without it.
Maybe under some definitions of hobbies, me not collecting stamps qualifies as well.
But more seriously, I can believe that there are religions that reject the belief in the existence of deities. That does not mean that all atheists are members of these religions. A religion is organised, the rejection of deities does not automatically come with a club card.
Maybe if the US would stop with the rhetoric that their attacking countries to 'liberate' them from 'nasty dictators', the rest of the world will stop pointing at other countries with equally nasty dictators and ask the US to make it stop there as well.
So simply, stop being two-faced hypocrites, and you'd get more respect.
You look at our history pre WWII and we pretty much tried to stay out of everyone else's business for the most part.
Actually, the US pre WWII tried to be involved in everyone else's business. The US didn't like the military option because that was thought to be bad for business, although, when a country refused to do business with the US, the US wasn't above sending the navy in to gently change their minds.
The point remains that copyright doesn't need to be 70+ years after the artists death to be profitable. It should be fairly easy to compute the number of years of copyright a movie should have to lose at most 1% of the total value that can be drawn from the movie. Averaged over all movies, that probably will not be more than 10 years. What is this 70+ based on? I personally do not think that a copyright term of at most 10 years for movies would actually slow down the creation of media personalities and special-effect extravaganzas. Why should they if my hunch is right and 99% of the value is made in those first 10 years?
As long as these companies are willing to only sell their produce in NZ this could happen. However, the moment the companies try to sell anything in the US or in any other part of the world that has a patent on the software, they will have to pay up or move out.
This is good news for developers that want to sell locally in NZ without being afraid to be sued for creating software. Anyone that wants to sell in the US has to abide US law.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I do realize this, but it would get rid of the Taliban for a while, thereby give some breathing space to actually start creating a local market, and would entice the local population to cooperate with creating such a market way more effectively than putting a gun to their heads.
However, to be able to survive all this, you need to have more capital than the existing wolves combined, as you need to take the barrier to entry and be able to sell goods or services at below cost for longer than the existing wolves can. Only wolves have that kind of capital. So, in a free market, the only way to become a wolf is to find a new market, the existing markets are only there for existing wolves. Only the government can level the playing field and forcefully create a competitive market (which is better than a free market) by making practices such as sketched above illegal (which they are, for good reason).
Should you not be a bit embarrassed about your procedure and the carelessness in which you put lives in the hands of your retarded 19 year old nephew? Do you now expect that this is the first and only instance of the information falling in the wrong hands? Do you consider yourself blameless?
Furthermore, if only 10% of the money that is spent on the US military in Afghanistan is spent on simply bribing everyone, from Karzai down to the most lowly peasant, the Taliban would not have a leg to stand on.
Compute. yearly spending on contracts and pay alone in Afghanistan in 2009 was $43.2 billion (source ). The Afghanistan GDP was $10.6 billion in 2006. So, simply dumping 4.2 billion dollar per year in the population would lift the GDP by a third!
Better yet, there are 27 million people in Afghanistan, spreading out $4.3 billion will give each Afghani, man, woman and child, a check of $1600 dollars annually. Given that the per capita income of the Afghani was a mere $800 in 2008, this will mean a 200% rise in income. Promise the same amount for the next 10 years (1 year of warfare), and focus on building an infrastructure that works. Of course, in Taliban controlled areas, the check cannot be paid out. And witness what the population will do.
It might not solve the problem, bribery and buying drugs is morally reprehensible (killing apparently isn't), but it seems to be a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to shoot your way out.
Sure they will. They will just compete on issues they agree to compete on, like awards programs. At a certain point it is for all large enough parties more profitable to exploit their customers than to try to annihilate the other. Free market: it's where two wolves and a flock of sheep decide what's for dinner.
Uncontrolled growth is rarely, if ever, a good thing.
So true. In tissue it is called a cancer.
Nothing except a free market economy will ever be able to cope with black swans.
Why is this exactly? What exact mechanism is there in an unregulated market that would prevent major boom-bust cycles?? It might be the case that government makes things worse at times, but the free market is fully capable of creating boom-bust cycles on its own. It is very simple: greed create booms, busts follow.
Seems like a sensible policy to me. You live in Jesusland, land of bible and creation. Thus it makes more sense to educate the illegals as they actually contribute to society.
abortion
Ah, the concept that a human isn't human because it's still in inside its mother. Tell me, are there other places a human can be where they aren't human? Maybe we could re-define Gitmo as a womb, from a legal standpoint, so that the prisoners held there don't have to be treated humanely.
No, wrong, Abortion is the concept that murder is acceptable when the human being murdered is less than -20 weeks of age. It is thought that given the unripe age of the human, this type of murder can be decided upon by the mother whose life is inflicted by the eventual birth of the human. Compared with the practice of many governments to murder humans of whatever age on the basis of some random court proceedings heavily tilted against humans of color, it is thought that abortion is a very light-weight form of murder, to be accepted in any society.
As for Gitmo, it seems that the US society still needs a bit of civilization to realize that it is more humane to actually kill people than to let them rot is a cell without any hope of court or due process. It is the hope of many that the US will at some point realize this and either let the poor buggers go, or to give them a mercy killing. Any of them will do, as most of them are brown anyway.
Back to reading Adam Smith I guess.
My problem with the Wikipedia article is that it doesn't abide by the NPOV rules. The original author has done a fine job of presenting one view, but gives short shrift to opposing views. If I thought it was a worthwhile effort, I'd add the additional sources. But, I don't have the time for the edit wars that always occur on Wikipedia if someone challenges the group-think.
Man, you do give up easily. There's one author that has a particular view, but you will not get into a discussion with this person because you suspect there's a group involved somewhere? Grow a spine.
Temperature does not matter that much. Sea level does. If the sea level changes appreciably, literally billions of people will lose their homes and income (most of the population of earth lives near the sea/ocean). You might want to imagine what shiny place this world will become when that happens. No we will not all just pick up our stuff and move up the hill somewhat more. It will be a tiny bit more violent than that.
Same happened with irreducible complexity. When this came up, scientists were actively at the lookout for papers claiming mathematical proofs of irreducible complexity. At some point I got a message from some colleagues pointing out that some were circulating. Although this sounds very sneaky and bad, what we wanted to make sure was that in none of the journals on evolution, life, and complexity ID'ers would succeed in publishing these papers. This is not because we were this afraid of accepting a paper with a wrong proof, because such papers get published all the time, no, this was because of the political effect of publishing such papers. The moment a paper of this nature gets published, it will become political and used as an argument to bring God back in science class. Again, when an issue gets politicized, science needs to become extra careful. This because there are major consequences. In this case it was about education, not death.
Global warming, similar. Issue is heavily politicized, public convenience is heavily weighted against the scientific consensus, and any scientific credibility that the opposing viewpoint receives will be blown out of all proportion and will be used to ensure political inaction. And now there are billions of lives at stake. Guess why not every 'funny' theory is being discussed?
I've worked in science when there was a political battle going on, and I've worked in science when there wasn't. If the issue is not politicized, opinions bordering on crack-pottery are welcomed and will be discussed on their merits, if only for a good laugh. When the science is politicized however, scientists become more careful, and somewhat overprotective. This is not a trend, but this is trying to keep the science working and to try to not let it be swallowed by the beast of public politics.
Sure have, in fact I wrote the Wikipedia article on it. Where does it state that you can indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen?
Don't worry, they'll get around to that eventually. For me as a European regularly travelling to the US, I know I am entering a place refusing to give me the same basic protection that my country is extending to Americans. Ah well, so is Uganda.
I would say it makes it worse.
No, that is not the way Op Ed pieces work. The only thing you can conclude is that the paper decided that the opinion is worth to be expressed, be it because of the content or because of the messenger (both are important here). Do you really think that if there's a debate raging through the pages of the Post that there is an actual battle of opinions going on between the chief editor and himself?
I think that in this particular case, 'international law' signifies the understanding that each country has the right to create their own laws. The author is saying here that the US will not abide the laws of the country Assange is residing in.
Ah, another microevolutionist. Here's the challenge for you: explain how you can have hundreds of thousands of undirected changes in successive versions of an organism (microevolutionary steps) without leading to a radically different organism (a new species if you will). Mathematically, this will happen with unbounded changes (however small), but it seems that you believe that there is some mechanism that keeps species within well-defined bounds during millenia of microevolution. So, please, define these bounds, and also propose a mechanism that keeps species within such bounds. Given that species turns out to be hopelessly ill-defined, I wish you good luck with the first part, I doubt you'll ever get to the second part.
Okay, here's a brief history of where the puritans came from and how you got your first amendment. Henry VIII started the Anglican Church of England. His first wife was the daughter of the emperor, Spanish, and a catholic. The Anglican Church, was, and still is, very close to catholic church. They've got bishops and wear purple and all that jazz. At the same time the protestants (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) were denying the role of the pope and the papal hierarchy. They even went so far as to print Bibles in the native tongues, so that people could actually start reading the thing.
Fast forward a bit, until England is again ruled by a catholic King (Charles the first, from Mary of Scots from the first wife of Henry Tudor, you know, the Spanish one). Oliver Cromwell takes over, beheads the king (a novelty at the time, later practised with great success by the French), and the puritans (very fundamentalist protestants) have a free reign in England and Scotland. What do they do now they've got the upper hand. Of course, kill the catholics! And the Anglicans. And then they start to fight amongs themselves. Ever wonder why there are so many different protestant churches? That started all then and they fought like mad.
Not very nice, so after Cromwell dies and Charles II becomes king (again a catholic), the protestants that did all this killing are being actively encouraged to go to a different continent to preach their religion. These are you puritans: kicked out of England largely because their persecution of other religions made them impossible to keep in the country.
How this leads to the first Amendment? Remember they were fighting amongst themselves. Guess what, they continued to do so in the Americas, and your founding fathers tried to stop this in the constitution.
So, bottom line, the first Amendment is there because the puritans where the most religiously intolerant breed that England ever saw, and they needed to be kept in check because they would kill themselves without it.
But more seriously, I can believe that there are religions that reject the belief in the existence of deities. That does not mean that all atheists are members of these religions. A religion is organised, the rejection of deities does not automatically come with a club card.
So simply, stop being two-faced hypocrites, and you'd get more respect.
You look at our history pre WWII and we pretty much tried to stay out of everyone else's business for the most part.
Actually, the US pre WWII tried to be involved in everyone else's business. The US didn't like the military option because that was thought to be bad for business, although, when a country refused to do business with the US, the US wasn't above sending the navy in to gently change their minds.
The point remains that copyright doesn't need to be 70+ years after the artists death to be profitable. It should be fairly easy to compute the number of years of copyright a movie should have to lose at most 1% of the total value that can be drawn from the movie. Averaged over all movies, that probably will not be more than 10 years. What is this 70+ based on? I personally do not think that a copyright term of at most 10 years for movies would actually slow down the creation of media personalities and special-effect extravaganzas. Why should they if my hunch is right and 99% of the value is made in those first 10 years?
Case in point: the Debian ssl fiasco, rendering all Debian as well as derivatives vulnerable to a simple attack for 2 years.
This is good news for developers that want to sell locally in NZ without being afraid to be sued for creating software. Anyone that wants to sell in the US has to abide US law.