Are you willing to pay 20 bucks for a CD, including a 3 buck breakage fee, because the suppliers do price-fixing and hinder any form of free market? If copyright-infringement is stealing, cartel-formation is murder, the victim being the market. Why do you condone murder?
Someone else in this thread set this before, but the best way to get this across to the general public would probably be that 'Al Quaida could make Bin Laden president'.
Obviously the best way to protest is to start shooting at random at those poor policemen that might actually agree with you. They will surely not fire back in self-defense, right? Standing up unarmed and protest, protest more, and keeping on protesting is however much more effective. You might eventually get the police and the military on your side and affect a real change, instead of just a blood-bath and the label of terrorist.
I fail to see the mutually exclusiveness of his position. He wants the Americans to stay for two reasons: (a) to help him out with the sunnis, and (b) to get killed by the shiites. It would be mutually exclusive if he wanted the Americans to stay and to leave at the same time, but that's not what he wants: he wants them to stay. The killing of Americans might give him entertainment of sorts. Don't know. He's a moron, but not inconsistent.
Actually, the most egregious case cited in the document is the case of a reporter of Al-Jazeera, who is held at Gitmo since 2002 without trial. That's the Gulag for you. Whatever your opinions about Al-jazeera, they are a news source, and possibly less biased than Fox news. Here's the rundown of US badness towards the press, from TFA:
Freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf was imprisoned when he refused to hand over his video archives. Sudanese cameraman Sami al-Haj, who works for the pan-Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera, has been held without trial since June 2002 at the US military base at Guantanamo, and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein has been held by US authorities in Iraq since April this year.
Netherlands, top ranked. Was military involved in Iraq, still involved in Afghanistan. Several political murders in the last few years (Fortuyn, Van Gogh). Has a large Arab population with at least one terrorist group that was involved in one of said assasinations and that was also planning large scale mayhem. Several big economic scandals, lots of unrest. Sure, nothing is going on there.
One other thing that makes GPL attractive for corporations is the fact that source cannot be closed up again. Imagine these companies contributing to Linux and seeing their competitors close up that investment. No way. In that sense, BSD-style licenses are corporation unfriendly, as corporation supported development can only occur in stuff that's deemed 100% unstrategic and without value for the company.
Well, if you want to go about it this way, you should also make sure that a particular candidate will actually deliver what he promises, because 'I don't believe a word candidate X says' is a valid opinion to not vote for candidate X. Not knowing what stuff he is promising now is irrelevant for me believing him. Then, if you require by law that a candidate delivers on the promises that the voters are supposed to be aware of in order to vote, why the hell would you actually need a candidate at all? Let the voters simply vote on the issues and be done with it. Direct democracy, horrible idea.
Bottom line: representative democracy is more a matter of trust in the representation than a matter of well-defined policy. If I don't trust a politician, I don't trust what he promises. In general I do not trust any politician to deliver on their promises, as they always seem to find a way to do something else. So what's left? Voting for the one you 'guess' does least damage and has the right general idea. Not the one with lots of specific ideas that I might actually agree with.
Such stockmarkets already exist, and prove to be fairly accurate. Basic idea is to open a futures market for two events, say 'Rebs/Dems will obtain the majority in congress in November'. Set the liquidation value (profit) for the winning contract to 1 buck, and 0 for the losing side. Now let the trading begin: the market value for the contracts will determine the perceived odds for those events. Current situation:
Rebs more than 231 seats: last trade 4 cents
Rebs between 217 and 231 seats: last trade 29 cents
Rebs less than 217 seats: last trade 67.9 cents
Note it adds up to close to one buck although there is no explicit synchronization present. Arbitration. It doesn't add up exactly as the 'Rebs win' contract is very illiquid at the moment, i.e., no-one wants to buy (bid price 2.7 cents).
Not really. What he's demonstrating is that randomness (luck in this case) makes it more difficult to find the actual expert. In the case of surgeons, the difference in quality between the experts (999 out of 1000 operations are successful) and non-experts (0 out of 1000) is sufficiently big to reliably pick out experts even after a few observations. As there's no random component in doing a successful surgery (there is one in doing an unsuccessful one though), you only have to observe a successfull operation once to be sure who's the expert.
However, to pick out a 60% correct stockpicker from a batch of 2000 coin-flipping monkeys with high reliability needs a very large amount of evidence to weed out the lucky coin-flippers. In this particular case you would need about 1300 observations per individual to pick out the expert from the monkeys with 99.99% certainty. That's 6.5 years in trading days, given that every day a trade is made by all 2001 individuals. The expert would have retired by that time.
Until you're very sure about who's the expert (can only happen with many observations), you're better off with following the crowd (which contains the expert. This gives you a very slight positive bias), than to pick the observed best and follow that, as the observed best after few observations (say 100), is most likely to be a coin-flipper. The number of observations needed grows with both the number of participants in the observation, the desired probability of picking out the right expert, and the true difference in skill between experts and non-experts. In stock-trading, this latter difference is usually sufficiently small to make the whole exercise futile. You will not be able to pick out the expert, and you're better off following an index.
I'm pretty sure you would care if the libel at your address would bring your neighbours up in arms to drive you from their (your) neighbourhood. You know, for the safety of the children. A well executed persecution can easily drive you out of your home.
Indeed, the military Geneva conventions doesn't apply anymore. You are no longer at war, you are an occupying nation. Congratulations. Now you are stuck with the civilian part of the Geneva conventions. You're no longer dealing with soldiers, but with organized crime. It is a question of quelling the crime/rebellion and you can do one of two things: establish law and order by rigorous prosecution and fair trial, or by trying to stump out the rebellion by sheer force and brutality. So you've taken the second choice. Congrats, you've lost control, and are on your way out.
I'm not sure which other developed country actually grows and subsidizes cotton. It surely isn't grown in Europe because of the climate. So why does the US subsidize cotton again?
In general, if the US would unilaterally stop subsidizing its agriculture and put import tariffs on the subsidized agriculture of other countries equal or higher than the subsidies themselves, the US would be better off, as the government would not need to pour money into its farmers, and the import tariffs would be a source of income, while the domestic playground would be level. As for export: almost by definition, subsidized export actually costs money.
Not entirely true, or more accurately, entirely untrue. US agriculture + shipping is in no way cheaper than localized agriculture in Africa. The reason it comes on the market cheaper is that your tax dollars are spent to buy a surplus for the high US price, to ship it to Africa for free, and to sell it there for a lower price. The only reason that US agriculture kills domestic agriculture in Africa is because the income of all Americans is used to make that happen. For instance, the US IT industry subsidizes American food export, and the suppression of the makings of an African economy. At the same time, import tariffs are used to keep that part of African agriculture out that is competitive with this practice. All in all, international food trade in no way resembles a free nor a competitive market, and arguments to that effect hold no water. Unless this situation is rectified, there's no chance in hell that Africa will ever be able to build up its own economy.
Ah this is a fun game. An interesting statistic is dollars per (suitably chosen) unit of energy, and see which country gets most bang out of their oil. The unit is chosen such that the US will get 1 buck per unit of energy, with the GDP given by this table, while the consumption of energy was given by the GP's table. Some countries:
USA: 1
Luxembourg: 1.016
Netherlands: 1.099
Belgium: 0.954
Germany: 1.678
France: 1.596
Japan: 1.314
Italy: 1.139
Norway: 1.846
China: 0.559
Burundi: 0.430
Israel: 0.683
Poland: 1.021
And I left of there. Not really easy to find a general trend here: highly developed densely populated countries are on parity with the US (at least for the benelux). Highly developed, sparesly populated countries are much more energy efficient than the US (Japan, Norway, Germany, France), except for Italy. (non-)Developing countries are very wasteful (China, Burundi). And let's not forget about Poland!
Oil is not only used for fueling cars. Heavy industry takes quit a bit, as well as manufacturing. Farming takes a load as well. Practically any form of industry is driven by oil. Given that Europe in general has heavy taxes on energy (compared with the US), the European industry is very much constrained to be careful with energy use, and industry needs less energy per production unit than the US.
My guess is that your numbers would look almost exactly the same if you would take out the entire consumption of oil by automotion of the population out of the equation.
I don't have the links handy, but a while ago I researched a bit about this exact relationship between the US and Germany. My results (without any backup of random links on the internet) showed that Germany had around 80-85% of the GDP per capita of the US, and consumed about 60-70% of the energy per capita of the US. So the inverse (arg!)Styopa number would be: USA 1, Germany between 1.14 and 1.42 (higher is better, so I'm taking dollars per unit of energy as my guide). I'm pretty sure that an exhaustive list would put the US at the lower end of the western nations, simply because taxes on energy are much higher outside the US and thus the need for resource awareness is well established elsewhere. Energy intake is a great boost for productivity, but not quite linear. The US is encountering diminishing returns for the extra energy they take in.
It would even be easier to remove the entire chad business, by removing any form of mechanical voting. Give a person a paper form and a pencil, and there's not much margin of error as many advanced societies show. The punch-card and lever based machines are just as much a failure as the computer based vote. Paper and pencil, that's all it takes.
And then, after you measure B, you find that the outcome in B is completely different from what your exit polls tell you, and the closer that B is to a draw, the larger the difference. What does this say?
As others said: if the exit polls show that 80% of the population are low-income black and voting Republican, and the outcome in that same district is Democrat, what would be the conclusion to draw? All low-income and blacks lie on an exit poll? Try again.
On the contrary, my claim would be that all you have in life and reasoning is belief. It is just that this belief needs to be well-founded, this in contrast with faith. If you will, I take life fully probabilistically: everything, including things I take for granted, have a degree of belief, uncertainty. This belief can be close to certainty, yet certainty is never attainable, nor desired. Having knowledge (100% belief in truth or falseness of a certain proposition) is always wrong as it is irreversible: 0.9999999999....... is quite enough.
This is what I mean with disentangling: religion has made such a mockery of the simple concept of belief and systematic uncertainty by muddied it with faith, that people, especially in the US, will confuse any form of uncertainty with a complete lack of knowledge. This just isn't so. Belief is a lack of absolute certainty, but it can be quantified: faith is a claim to absolute certainty, knowledge the same. The last two are both wrong.
The exit polls in the Ukraine were less off than the ones in the US, yet they triggered the orange revolution. What would it take for the US to disbelieve the official statements? 20% off, 50?
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Are you willing to pay 20 bucks for a CD, including a 3 buck breakage fee, because the suppliers do price-fixing and hinder any form of free market? If copyright-infringement is stealing, cartel-formation is murder, the victim being the market. Why do you condone murder?
Get Bin Laden in the House. That should raise a few eyebrows.
Someone else in this thread set this before, but the best way to get this across to the general public would probably be that 'Al Quaida could make Bin Laden president'.
Obviously the best way to protest is to start shooting at random at those poor policemen that might actually agree with you. They will surely not fire back in self-defense, right? Standing up unarmed and protest, protest more, and keeping on protesting is however much more effective. You might eventually get the police and the military on your side and affect a real change, instead of just a blood-bath and the label of terrorist.
I fail to see the mutually exclusiveness of his position. He wants the Americans to stay for two reasons: (a) to help him out with the sunnis, and (b) to get killed by the shiites. It would be mutually exclusive if he wanted the Americans to stay and to leave at the same time, but that's not what he wants: he wants them to stay. The killing of Americans might give him entertainment of sorts. Don't know. He's a moron, but not inconsistent.
I'm sorry, but this is a pretty lousy record.
Netherlands, top ranked. Was military involved in Iraq, still involved in Afghanistan. Several political murders in the last few years (Fortuyn, Van Gogh). Has a large Arab population with at least one terrorist group that was involved in one of said assasinations and that was also planning large scale mayhem. Several big economic scandals, lots of unrest. Sure, nothing is going on there.
One other thing that makes GPL attractive for corporations is the fact that source cannot be closed up again. Imagine these companies contributing to Linux and seeing their competitors close up that investment. No way. In that sense, BSD-style licenses are corporation unfriendly, as corporation supported development can only occur in stuff that's deemed 100% unstrategic and without value for the company.
Bottom line: representative democracy is more a matter of trust in the representation than a matter of well-defined policy. If I don't trust a politician, I don't trust what he promises. In general I do not trust any politician to deliver on their promises, as they always seem to find a way to do something else. So what's left? Voting for the one you 'guess' does least damage and has the right general idea. Not the one with lots of specific ideas that I might actually agree with.
Rebs more than 231 seats: last trade 4 cents
Rebs between 217 and 231 seats: last trade 29 cents
Rebs less than 217 seats: last trade 67.9 cents
Note it adds up to close to one buck although there is no explicit synchronization present. Arbitration. It doesn't add up exactly as the 'Rebs win' contract is very illiquid at the moment, i.e., no-one wants to buy (bid price 2.7 cents).
However, to pick out a 60% correct stockpicker from a batch of 2000 coin-flipping monkeys with high reliability needs a very large amount of evidence to weed out the lucky coin-flippers. In this particular case you would need about 1300 observations per individual to pick out the expert from the monkeys with 99.99% certainty. That's 6.5 years in trading days, given that every day a trade is made by all 2001 individuals. The expert would have retired by that time.
Until you're very sure about who's the expert (can only happen with many observations), you're better off with following the crowd (which contains the expert. This gives you a very slight positive bias), than to pick the observed best and follow that, as the observed best after few observations (say 100), is most likely to be a coin-flipper. The number of observations needed grows with both the number of participants in the observation, the desired probability of picking out the right expert, and the true difference in skill between experts and non-experts. In stock-trading, this latter difference is usually sufficiently small to make the whole exercise futile. You will not be able to pick out the expert, and you're better off following an index.
Yes it would.
Hmm, and how should we call such a law that punishes frivolous claims. Libel?
I'm pretty sure you would care if the libel at your address would bring your neighbours up in arms to drive you from their (your) neighbourhood. You know, for the safety of the children. A well executed persecution can easily drive you out of your home.
Indeed, the military Geneva conventions doesn't apply anymore. You are no longer at war, you are an occupying nation. Congratulations. Now you are stuck with the civilian part of the Geneva conventions. You're no longer dealing with soldiers, but with organized crime. It is a question of quelling the crime/rebellion and you can do one of two things: establish law and order by rigorous prosecution and fair trial, or by trying to stump out the rebellion by sheer force and brutality. So you've taken the second choice. Congrats, you've lost control, and are on your way out.
In general, if the US would unilaterally stop subsidizing its agriculture and put import tariffs on the subsidized agriculture of other countries equal or higher than the subsidies themselves, the US would be better off, as the government would not need to pour money into its farmers, and the import tariffs would be a source of income, while the domestic playground would be level. As for export: almost by definition, subsidized export actually costs money.
Not entirely true, or more accurately, entirely untrue. US agriculture + shipping is in no way cheaper than localized agriculture in Africa. The reason it comes on the market cheaper is that your tax dollars are spent to buy a surplus for the high US price, to ship it to Africa for free, and to sell it there for a lower price. The only reason that US agriculture kills domestic agriculture in Africa is because the income of all Americans is used to make that happen. For instance, the US IT industry subsidizes American food export, and the suppression of the makings of an African economy. At the same time, import tariffs are used to keep that part of African agriculture out that is competitive with this practice. All in all, international food trade in no way resembles a free nor a competitive market, and arguments to that effect hold no water. Unless this situation is rectified, there's no chance in hell that Africa will ever be able to build up its own economy.
USA: 1
Luxembourg: 1.016
Netherlands: 1.099
Belgium: 0.954
Germany: 1.678
France: 1.596
Japan: 1.314
Italy: 1.139
Norway: 1.846
China: 0.559
Burundi: 0.430
Israel: 0.683
Poland: 1.021
And I left of there. Not really easy to find a general trend here: highly developed densely populated countries are on parity with the US (at least for the benelux). Highly developed, sparesly populated countries are much more energy efficient than the US (Japan, Norway, Germany, France), except for Italy. (non-)Developing countries are very wasteful (China, Burundi). And let's not forget about Poland!
My guess is that your numbers would look almost exactly the same if you would take out the entire consumption of oil by automotion of the population out of the equation.
I don't have the links handy, but a while ago I researched a bit about this exact relationship between the US and Germany. My results (without any backup of random links on the internet) showed that Germany had around 80-85% of the GDP per capita of the US, and consumed about 60-70% of the energy per capita of the US. So the inverse (arg!)Styopa number would be: USA 1, Germany between 1.14 and 1.42 (higher is better, so I'm taking dollars per unit of energy as my guide). I'm pretty sure that an exhaustive list would put the US at the lower end of the western nations, simply because taxes on energy are much higher outside the US and thus the need for resource awareness is well established elsewhere. Energy intake is a great boost for productivity, but not quite linear. The US is encountering diminishing returns for the extra energy they take in.
It would even be easier to remove the entire chad business, by removing any form of mechanical voting. Give a person a paper form and a pencil, and there's not much margin of error as many advanced societies show. The punch-card and lever based machines are just as much a failure as the computer based vote. Paper and pencil, that's all it takes.
And then, after you measure B, you find that the outcome in B is completely different from what your exit polls tell you, and the closer that B is to a draw, the larger the difference. What does this say?
As others said: if the exit polls show that 80% of the population are low-income black and voting Republican, and the outcome in that same district is Democrat, what would be the conclusion to draw? All low-income and blacks lie on an exit poll? Try again.
This is what I mean with disentangling: religion has made such a mockery of the simple concept of belief and systematic uncertainty by muddied it with faith, that people, especially in the US, will confuse any form of uncertainty with a complete lack of knowledge. This just isn't so. Belief is a lack of absolute certainty, but it can be quantified: faith is a claim to absolute certainty, knowledge the same. The last two are both wrong.
The exit polls in the Ukraine were less off than the ones in the US, yet they triggered the orange revolution. What would it take for the US to disbelieve the official statements? 20% off, 50?