You've chosen to utterly miss my point. My point isn't that different people in different places believe different things and omigod isn't that amazing. My point is that society can only work if we get off our collective high horses, and accept the fact that we don't have the right to control everyone else's behavior. For some reason, Mr. Fortuny thinks people involved in BDSM need to be outed to their friends, family, co-workers, etc., so that... I'm not entirely clear what the benefit is supposed to be. But barring strong evidence that their private behavior is causing serious harm to the rest of us, it's not up to him to police the private lives of consenting adults.
What, precisely, was the crime that the victims (a word you choose to put scare quotes around, even though many of them will undoubtedly have their lives ruined by this) committed? Where is the law against BDSM? Does Oregon have a law criminalizing adultery, and if so how many decades has it been since someone was successfully prosecuted under it?
On the other hand, it's very likely that the guy who exposed them did commit a crime, and will get sued. While the aggregate results of the survey might have been newsworthy, the contact information of the individuals isn't. Morally, this isn't far from outing a list of gay folk you collected off a message board somewhere.
Hmm... sequel, prequel-and-book-movification, sequel. Hollywood really is running out of ideas, isn't it?
Actually, T4 could cover some interesting ground. At this point, their only choice is to start covering the actual war against the machines. Plus, with The Governator distracted, it can't be another Schwartzenegger vehicle. So despite the tendency for a movie franchise to get worse over time, it could easily be better than T3.
I thought that Fortuny had done something horribly cruel and needlessly sadistic to a bunch of strangers, by announcing their sexual fetishes to the world. I thought there was no more horrific form of public shaming.
When you say, "They deserve it," what you really mean is, "I believe they deserve it." You may believe it strongly. You may be able to come up with all sorts of valid reasons for that belief. Beliefs are fine.
The guy who pulled this vile stunt went beyond that, by deciding that he had the right to act on his beliefs, to carry out the sentence he believed these poor saps deserved.
His victims behaved stupidly. Nobody is disputing that. But there's too much stupidity in the world to make stupidity alone a punishable offense.
There are lots of people in this discussion who sound like they would be thrilled if Jason Fortuny was discovered bludgeoned to death in a back alley somewhere. I'm probably one of them. But the difference between believing he deserves such treatment, and actually giving him such treatment, is the foundation of a society based on the rule of law.
What I'd love to see is someone announcing, "I sent in five responses, using contact information I ripped out of the phone book. Figuring out which men on the list are being framed is an exercise left to the readers."
That argument would apply to the ADA as a whole, and for me that's enough to dismiss your reasoning outright. The fact is, there are some choices business owners just shouldn't be able to make. For example, the decision to not serve hispanics, or to dump toxic waste into the sewers. The decision to not make a place of business accessible to the disabled qualifies.
Now, what constitutes 'reasonable accomodations' for website design is up for debate, but I can't imagine that they'd have had a problem if they'd followed the w3c guidelines.
Target? I love that you're not Wal-Mart and everything, but please just stop fighting this and add the damned alt tags.
Perhaps true, but do we really want all elections decided by people who are too stupid to recognize that?:)
And of course, thanks to the arbitrary lines we drew on a map over the last few hundred years, some people will have a great deal more say over who will control Congress than others. If you're living in an area with a close race, your individual decision to go to the polls matters a lot. If you're living in Utah like me, you get to watch a good candidate--one who really seems to understand what this country needs to do to preserve democracy--get thumped by a politician-for-life with a massive warchest and a desire to let the RIAA blow up my computer.
I'm going to the polls to help out in whatever races I can, and to cast my traditional "vote out all sitting judges" ballot. I'll also be voting for Pete Ashdown, if only to brand myself as one of those damned liberals. But my point is, if you live in a close race, you should be especially motivated to get out and vote.
Extra, extra! Read all about it! Businesses want to make money!
Okay, that's enough sarcasm for this post.
I think what you're ignoring is that threads like this make for exceptional market research for Blizzard. Even if they don't actually use all the information you're whining about people whining about, they're certainly better off for knowing what the "disgruntled market" is looking for, and having thought about why they're not doing it.
There are several good reasons why Blizzard never publicly admits to the attitude you describe, and anyhow they must have pretty thick skins over there. If you want to help them, remember that all these griping posts are a statement of, "here's what you'd have to do to get my dollars," and that's information Blizzard wants.
I think this really cuts to the heart of the great philosophical question, "Of what use is an education?" What, in short, is the public education system really supposed to be churning out? People with the skills businesses are looking for? Informed and active citizens? Unthinking, obedient drones? Marxist revolutionaries? Amoral sociopaths? (ask some of the more reactionary Christians, and you'll get one of the last two answers.)
Public education will always be--at least in part--a vehicle for promoting the goals of whoever is running it. If Microsoft is in charge of designing curricula and pedagogy, then they'll do so with an end goal of producing people who will fit well into the systems of the business world (and perhaps even their particular corporate culture). Organizational and management skills certainly have broader applications that will serve the students well. But I don't think society has adequately discussed this belief that the purpose of education is to churn out cogs for the corporate machine.
To be fair, a lot of that cost would have to be experimental, custom technology whose marginal cost would be relatively low if it's successful enough to use in other schools. When you think of it as a school, then yes it's an obviously irresponsible waste of resources. When you think of it as a laboratory for new educational techniques...
Also, it looks really bad to attribute the entire cost of long-term infrastructure (the cost of the land and building, for example) to the first crop of students.
Finally, the school is expected to ultimately serve about four times as many students as it does now. While the whole endeavor is probably a waste of money by administrators hypnotized by shiny things, it's not correct to imply that each student is getting fifty odd times her normal allotment of resources.
The "market-leading" operating systems book I'm using this semester claims that "open source" means that the code base is "in the public domain," and that Java has no concept of global data "because it is a purely object-oriented language". As a bonus, there are numerous spelling and grammatical errors, and a couple of really bizarre throwaway lines about the uselessness of government and lawyers.
Some textbooks gain a reputation for being stunningly good, while others gain a reputation for being awful. I think that once the dust settles and wiki-enabled textbooks are recognized as a valid alternative, we'll end up with the same situation.
I think the worst part of this whole discussion has been the implicit assumption that 'wikified' means 'zero control over what the book says.' The people running the project can still decide things like who is allowed to contribute, what sort of approval is required before a change is accepted, and what sort of guidelines determine when a book has hit '1.0'. Further, thanks to various share-alike licenses, you can allow people to 'modify and redistribute' without touching your version, or even allowing them to brand it in a way that would be confusingly similar to the books you're publishing.
I think that if people understood those things, a lot of the common objections to open source textbooks would be recognized as hogwash.
I'm not sure I'm understanding your post correctly, because it basically sounds like you're making the argument that "understanding of context is an AI-complete problem, therefore there is no way my cell phone can automatically go silent when I enter a movie theater." The first problem the IBM'ers were trying to solve amounts to "Is now a good time to interrupt the user?" which would seem to require some sort of mind-reading API. But it seems like there are so many situations where obtaining context is trivial, and using it is beneficial.
When you get right down to it, any input a system receives could be considered "context." The motherboard that shuts down when its CPU thermometer goes too high is exhibiting context sensitivity. A car's cruise control does the same thing. It seems fruitless to even have a discussion of 'context' in general terms, much less to condemn all context as hogwash. But again, I may be totally misunderstanding you.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't saying that the Network Neutrality Bill didn't warrant evenhanded coverage. I was saying that this story (which is primarily about the commercial, not the bill itself) didn't warrant it. My objection is that the commercial is a pack of lies and unsubstantiated scaremongering, and I don't believe anyone could make a reasonable case otherwise.
Perhaps a good case can be made against the bill. If you tried to do so, I think it would be more helpful than whining about how Slashdot has become a mouthpiece for 'the left wing,' especially given that the editors simply republished the comments of the submitting user. Frankly, I don't want to talk about Slashdot biases. They're--how did you put it--less and less interesting. Instead, let me put this question to you in as biased a fashion as I can: How does it promote competition when we allow telcos the ability to charge prohibitively high fees for certain types of traffic that might undermine their cash cows?
"If you really consider that terrorism." What the hell? Honestly, what definition of the term do you use, such that McVeigh doesn't qualify?
The analogy from the talking head also fails to make sense, because we're not looking for the nineteen guys who executed the September 11th hijackings. We already know what happened to them, and they're beyond the reach of our justice. What we're looking for are people who might be attempting to do something similar. A less superficial analogy would have your one-armed bank robber cracking his skull open on the sidewalk as he exited the bank, and having the bank respond by demanding all people with missing limbs undergo a background check before opening a checking account.
There are a dozen reasons why racial profiling is counterproductive. My primary objection is that it feeds the belief among many Muslims that the "War on Terror" is really a war on Islam, and as such it makes even moderate Muslims more inclined to be our enemies than our allies.
But even if we ignore that it may be creating new potential attackers, it's ineffective at thwarting a given attack. First, there is the fact that whatever profile you select, the attackers will be able to learn how not to match the profile, even if that requires skin lightener, fake IDs, and voice training. More likely, though, the attackers would look for someone who sympathized with the cause, but didn't fit the profile. Beyond that, a focus on skin color is going to distract from more useful indicators, like behavior. Given the choice between screening the scruffy Arab and the white businessman, I'd search the one who is shaking and sweating like the proverbial whore in Sunday School.
In the end, the best way to avoid another September 11 is not to seek out and destroy those who hate us, or to closely scrutinize every person who reminds us of someone who hated us in the past. We can't lock down the 'bad guys' to the point where the 'good guys' are completely safe, because there is no such clear distinction, and we're in danger of losing our freedom as we make the attempt. Consider that it won't be remotely possible to secure every conceivable vector of attack. If we lock down air travel, our buses are still vulnerable. If we stop everyone from buying explosives and their precursors, they can fall back on our abundant firearms. If we protect our stadiums, they can go after malls, hospitals, dams, etc. Targeted assassinations, random arson, destruction of fiber optic cables and power lines... and that's leaving out the scenarios where something manufactured abroad is snuck into the country.
No, our best defense is to reduce the number of people who passionately hate us, and are willing to act on their anger. Killing them doesn't work--not on the scale that any reasonable person is willing to contemplate--because even the people who hate us are still people, people with families and friends who will learn hate as they watch us butcher their loved ones.
No, if fewer people are flying, that's de facto proof that evil terrists have frightened us away from air travel. Therefore, we'll need to open up a new front in the War on Terr in the form of massive bailouts of the airline industry.
But that's assuming that a noticeable number of people stop flying. Boycotts have always seemed pretty ineffective to me.
Whatever. You're entitled to your opinion, no matter how wrong it may be.
The fact is, the commercial is bought and paid for by the telcos, it makes no attempt to convey information and every attempt to scare the listener into agreement, and it blatantly lies about the effects of the bill and the motivations of the opposition. Your response? "You need to be more 'fair and balanced' to the telcos, and by the way you dropped an 'o' back there." In this case, I think a great deal of bias is justified.
Home insurance is basically unavoidable so long as you still have a mortgage. The bank wants its collateral protected. It's illegal in most states to drive without auto insurance (of course, you can get away with liability-only). Medical insurance is certainly a necessity, but nearly 40 million Americans are doing without.
So, yes, they're necessities. But you should practice self-insurance against non-catastrophic losses. Extended warranties and product replacement plans are usually bad deals. If you lose a $600 phone, do you really need to replace it with another $600 phone? Or can you get by with a $50 model? Or will a $300 model from another company provide what you need? Self-insurance lets you choose how you want to fix what's broken, avoids the hassle of dealing with the company, and avoids what often amounts to a 'stupid/scared user tax.'
If there is a risk out there that could collapse your finances like a house of cards, whether it be a medical illness, a fire, or a car accident, then you certainly should insure against it. If the loss of a $600 phone is such a risk for you, then yes you should insure against it, but the better solution is to not have such precarious finances in the first place.
1) Everyone pays taxes, but not everyone pays them in equal amounts. If poor people pay little in taxes, but have high energy bills because they can't afford the up-front costs of CFLs, then that segment of the population will only benefit.
2) In fact, most every tax bracket would benefit. There are long-term cost savings for the consumer, and those savings should more than counterbalance the taxes for the vast majority of taxpayers.
3) The size of the bureaucracy has very little to do with the amount of money being spent. The expense of implementing the program might be minimal, if the government just writes a few big checks to major CFL manufacturers. It could be huge, if they implement a monstrous, complex system where individuals apply for rebates, and each applicant needs to be vetted to make sure they qualify for the program. Your assumption of 20% inefficiency seems both arbitrary, and arbitrarily high.
4) Subsidies early on could jump-start demand for CFLs, increasing production capacity, improving manufacturing techniques, and enabling them to compete more successfully in the market when the subsidies are eventually removed. We're already seeing this in the solar panel market, where government subsidies increase demand and give producers the money they need to increase capacity and drive down cost.
5) The demands of the market aren't always the oracles we should be looking to for guidance. In this case, consumers are suckered in by the low up-front purchase price of standard incandescent bulbs, and ignoring the long term energy savings and associated benefits (which can't be reflected in the purchase price without intervening in the market). IOW, the public really seems to be making the wrong decision. In such cases, government intervention can sometimes be beneficial.
"Natural" is a bit of an awkward word, and misleading at times. After all, there are 100% natural things that will kill you if you eat them. But don't kid yourself with the whole "anything humans do is natural" argument. It's every bit as tired and misleading as the idea that 'natural' always equates to 'better.' Nor have we been evolving 'naturally,' for at least the last 50,000 years.
But why would anyone argue that 'natural' foods are better? Because to a first approximation, they are. Look at the history of "artificial food." Back in the 1800's, when they figured out that your body needed three separate substances (protein, fat, and starch) to be healthy, they thought they'd unlocked the key to the dietary needs of mankind. Now imagine how long a person would last on an artificially-designed food from that era.
Next we discovered a litany of vitamins. We thought we had the problem of human dietary needs licked. Anything that processing takes out of the foods, we figured we could just add back in. Hence, the widespread use of fortified flour, and the emergence of cereals like Total, that try to give you all your nutritional needs. But they're still discovering micronutrients galore. Even things in our diet that are generally considered dangerous are frequently discovered to have beneficial effects on the body in the quantities often found in nature.
I'm not arguing that "natural" foods are mystically imbued with the spirit of Gaia, or some other anti-scientific nonsense. I'm arguing that we don't yet have a complete picture of what our bodies need in order to maintain ideal health, but evolution has spent millions of years optimizing our bodies to the substances commonly found in nature. When we process foods, when we raise cows on an all-corn diet instead of the grass they're suited to, when we build vast, monocultural farms and protect the plants from their natural predators through pesticides, the end result is food that is somewhat different from the stuff we were engineered to eat.
We still don't know for sure how different, or how important the differences are. But that's the "scientific" argument for natural foods in a nutshell.
Animal cruelty is a major ethical issue for meat production, but it's not the only one.
Growing animals without brains--or just growing their muscle tissues in vats--would eliminate animal suffering. But you still have to deal with the economic, environmental, and health effects of a high-meat diet. The short version: If we stopped feeding all this grain to cows and started feeding it to people, our population would be quite a bit healthier and our farms more ecologically friendly (simply because we'd have to produce so much less grain, with so many fewer steps in the process).
The market has a built-in bias against that plan, because investors demand that companies expand the market. Since there are only a finite number of people, and each person has a finite stomach volume, there are only three ways to keep the market expanding:
1) Produce more people. 2) Convince people to eat more 3) Find ways to turn cheap food into expensive food
The population itself is taking care of #1, while Saturday morning cartoons and the Coke/Pepsi wars are working on #2. There are lots of ways to "add value" to food to fulfill #3. For example, cheap grain can be turned into expensive meat or alcohol, which people will pay more for. Or you can pre-package it in some way that adds value, such as canning it, or adding sugar and baking it into fun marshmallow shapes that are part of this balanced breakfast.
Getting back to the point of this rant: there are ethical issues involved with turning cheap food into expensive food, especially in a world where many people cannot afford the necessities of life.
There are lots of factors that go into pricing of "organic" products, and the term can mean many different things.
I believe that all you absolutely have to do to get certified as "organic" beef is to feed the cows organic grain (that is, corn that hasn't been sprayed with chemicals), and avoid pumping them full of the antibiotics that allow factory-farmed cows to survive the squalor they're kept in. "Organic" doesn't mean that the cows are allowed to stroll around a big pasture, or that they're being fed the grass that their bodies are designed to ingest.
"Organic" meat is still a good thing, because many of the pesticides used on grain tend to bioaccumulate in the cows that eat it. But the 'organic' label alone tells you surprisingly little about how the animals are raised, fed, and slaughtered. Some of the price difference could be due to such differences. Or it could be the simple realization that when you mark two similar items a different price, people contort their brains all sorts of ways to justify the difference. Anyhow, it's important to go deeper to find out how the animals are actually treated.
Slashdot Mirror
You very nearly sold me on America's Attic. Before I start the immigration process, what is your incumbent re-election rate?
Down here, it's 98%. A senator is more likely to die in office than to be ousted by a challenger.
You're hired!
You've chosen to utterly miss my point. My point isn't that different people in different places believe different things and omigod isn't that amazing. My point is that society can only work if we get off our collective high horses, and accept the fact that we don't have the right to control everyone else's behavior. For some reason, Mr. Fortuny thinks people involved in BDSM need to be outed to their friends, family, co-workers, etc., so that... I'm not entirely clear what the benefit is supposed to be. But barring strong evidence that their private behavior is causing serious harm to the rest of us, it's not up to him to police the private lives of consenting adults.
What, precisely, was the crime that the victims (a word you choose to put scare quotes around, even though many of them will undoubtedly have their lives ruined by this) committed? Where is the law against BDSM? Does Oregon have a law criminalizing adultery, and if so how many decades has it been since someone was successfully prosecuted under it?
On the other hand, it's very likely that the guy who exposed them did commit a crime, and will get sued. While the aggregate results of the survey might have been newsworthy, the contact information of the individuals isn't. Morally, this isn't far from outing a list of gay folk you collected off a message board somewhere.
Hmm... sequel, prequel-and-book-movification, sequel. Hollywood really is running out of ideas, isn't it?
Actually, T4 could cover some interesting ground. At this point, their only choice is to start covering the actual war against the machines. Plus, with The Governator distracted, it can't be another Schwartzenegger vehicle. So despite the tendency for a movie franchise to get worse over time, it could easily be better than T3.
I thought that Fortuny had done something horribly cruel and needlessly sadistic to a bunch of strangers, by announcing their sexual fetishes to the world. I thought there was no more horrific form of public shaming.
Until I saw this.
You're a stone cold bastard, Zork.
When you say, "They deserve it," what you really mean is, "I believe they deserve it." You may believe it strongly. You may be able to come up with all sorts of valid reasons for that belief. Beliefs are fine.
The guy who pulled this vile stunt went beyond that, by deciding that he had the right to act on his beliefs, to carry out the sentence he believed these poor saps deserved.
His victims behaved stupidly. Nobody is disputing that. But there's too much stupidity in the world to make stupidity alone a punishable offense.
There are lots of people in this discussion who sound like they would be thrilled if Jason Fortuny was discovered bludgeoned to death in a back alley somewhere. I'm probably one of them. But the difference between believing he deserves such treatment, and actually giving him such treatment, is the foundation of a society based on the rule of law.
What I'd love to see is someone announcing, "I sent in five responses, using contact information I ripped out of the phone book. Figuring out which men on the list are being framed is an exercise left to the readers."
That argument would apply to the ADA as a whole, and for me that's enough to dismiss your reasoning outright. The fact is, there are some choices business owners just shouldn't be able to make. For example, the decision to not serve hispanics, or to dump toxic waste into the sewers. The decision to not make a place of business accessible to the disabled qualifies.
Now, what constitutes 'reasonable accomodations' for website design is up for debate, but I can't imagine that they'd have had a problem if they'd followed the w3c guidelines.
Target? I love that you're not Wal-Mart and everything, but please just stop fighting this and add the damned alt tags.
Perhaps true, but do we really want all elections decided by people who are too stupid to recognize that? :)
And of course, thanks to the arbitrary lines we drew on a map over the last few hundred years, some people will have a great deal more say over who will control Congress than others. If you're living in an area with a close race, your individual decision to go to the polls matters a lot. If you're living in Utah like me, you get to watch a good candidate--one who really seems to understand what this country needs to do to preserve democracy--get thumped by a politician-for-life with a massive warchest and a desire to let the RIAA blow up my computer.
I'm going to the polls to help out in whatever races I can, and to cast my traditional "vote out all sitting judges" ballot. I'll also be voting for Pete Ashdown, if only to brand myself as one of those damned liberals. But my point is, if you live in a close race, you should be especially motivated to get out and vote.
Extra, extra! Read all about it! Businesses want to make money!
Okay, that's enough sarcasm for this post.
I think what you're ignoring is that threads like this make for exceptional market research for Blizzard. Even if they don't actually use all the information you're whining about people whining about, they're certainly better off for knowing what the "disgruntled market" is looking for, and having thought about why they're not doing it.
There are several good reasons why Blizzard never publicly admits to the attitude you describe, and anyhow they must have pretty thick skins over there. If you want to help them, remember that all these griping posts are a statement of, "here's what you'd have to do to get my dollars," and that's information Blizzard wants.
I think this really cuts to the heart of the great philosophical question, "Of what use is an education?" What, in short, is the public education system really supposed to be churning out? People with the skills businesses are looking for? Informed and active citizens? Unthinking, obedient drones? Marxist revolutionaries? Amoral sociopaths? (ask some of the more reactionary Christians, and you'll get one of the last two answers.)
Public education will always be--at least in part--a vehicle for promoting the goals of whoever is running it. If Microsoft is in charge of designing curricula and pedagogy, then they'll do so with an end goal of producing people who will fit well into the systems of the business world (and perhaps even their particular corporate culture). Organizational and management skills certainly have broader applications that will serve the students well. But I don't think society has adequately discussed this belief that the purpose of education is to churn out cogs for the corporate machine.
To be fair, a lot of that cost would have to be experimental, custom technology whose marginal cost would be relatively low if it's successful enough to use in other schools. When you think of it as a school, then yes it's an obviously irresponsible waste of resources. When you think of it as a laboratory for new educational techniques...
Also, it looks really bad to attribute the entire cost of long-term infrastructure (the cost of the land and building, for example) to the first crop of students.
Finally, the school is expected to ultimately serve about four times as many students as it does now. While the whole endeavor is probably a waste of money by administrators hypnotized by shiny things, it's not correct to imply that each student is getting fifty odd times her normal allotment of resources.
The "market-leading" operating systems book I'm using this semester claims that "open source" means that the code base is "in the public domain," and that Java has no concept of global data "because it is a purely object-oriented language". As a bonus, there are numerous spelling and grammatical errors, and a couple of really bizarre throwaway lines about the uselessness of government and lawyers.
Some textbooks gain a reputation for being stunningly good, while others gain a reputation for being awful. I think that once the dust settles and wiki-enabled textbooks are recognized as a valid alternative, we'll end up with the same situation.
I think the worst part of this whole discussion has been the implicit assumption that 'wikified' means 'zero control over what the book says.' The people running the project can still decide things like who is allowed to contribute, what sort of approval is required before a change is accepted, and what sort of guidelines determine when a book has hit '1.0'. Further, thanks to various share-alike licenses, you can allow people to 'modify and redistribute' without touching your version, or even allowing them to brand it in a way that would be confusingly similar to the books you're publishing.
I think that if people understood those things, a lot of the common objections to open source textbooks would be recognized as hogwash.
I'm not sure I'm understanding your post correctly, because it basically sounds like you're making the argument that "understanding of context is an AI-complete problem, therefore there is no way my cell phone can automatically go silent when I enter a movie theater." The first problem the IBM'ers were trying to solve amounts to "Is now a good time to interrupt the user?" which would seem to require some sort of mind-reading API. But it seems like there are so many situations where obtaining context is trivial, and using it is beneficial.
When you get right down to it, any input a system receives could be considered "context." The motherboard that shuts down when its CPU thermometer goes too high is exhibiting context sensitivity. A car's cruise control does the same thing. It seems fruitless to even have a discussion of 'context' in general terms, much less to condemn all context as hogwash. But again, I may be totally misunderstanding you.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't saying that the Network Neutrality Bill didn't warrant evenhanded coverage. I was saying that this story (which is primarily about the commercial, not the bill itself) didn't warrant it. My objection is that the commercial is a pack of lies and unsubstantiated scaremongering, and I don't believe anyone could make a reasonable case otherwise.
Perhaps a good case can be made against the bill. If you tried to do so, I think it would be more helpful than whining about how Slashdot has become a mouthpiece for 'the left wing,' especially given that the editors simply republished the comments of the submitting user. Frankly, I don't want to talk about Slashdot biases. They're--how did you put it--less and less interesting. Instead, let me put this question to you in as biased a fashion as I can: How does it promote competition when we allow telcos the ability to charge prohibitively high fees for certain types of traffic that might undermine their cash cows?
"If you really consider that terrorism." What the hell? Honestly, what definition of the term do you use, such that McVeigh doesn't qualify?
The analogy from the talking head also fails to make sense, because we're not looking for the nineteen guys who executed the September 11th hijackings. We already know what happened to them, and they're beyond the reach of our justice. What we're looking for are people who might be attempting to do something similar. A less superficial analogy would have your one-armed bank robber cracking his skull open on the sidewalk as he exited the bank, and having the bank respond by demanding all people with missing limbs undergo a background check before opening a checking account.
There are a dozen reasons why racial profiling is counterproductive. My primary objection is that it feeds the belief among many Muslims that the "War on Terror" is really a war on Islam, and as such it makes even moderate Muslims more inclined to be our enemies than our allies.
But even if we ignore that it may be creating new potential attackers, it's ineffective at thwarting a given attack. First, there is the fact that whatever profile you select, the attackers will be able to learn how not to match the profile, even if that requires skin lightener, fake IDs, and voice training. More likely, though, the attackers would look for someone who sympathized with the cause, but didn't fit the profile. Beyond that, a focus on skin color is going to distract from more useful indicators, like behavior. Given the choice between screening the scruffy Arab and the white businessman, I'd search the one who is shaking and sweating like the proverbial whore in Sunday School.
In the end, the best way to avoid another September 11 is not to seek out and destroy those who hate us, or to closely scrutinize every person who reminds us of someone who hated us in the past. We can't lock down the 'bad guys' to the point where the 'good guys' are completely safe, because there is no such clear distinction, and we're in danger of losing our freedom as we make the attempt. Consider that it won't be remotely possible to secure every conceivable vector of attack. If we lock down air travel, our buses are still vulnerable. If we stop everyone from buying explosives and their precursors, they can fall back on our abundant firearms. If we protect our stadiums, they can go after malls, hospitals, dams, etc. Targeted assassinations, random arson, destruction of fiber optic cables and power lines... and that's leaving out the scenarios where something manufactured abroad is snuck into the country.
No, our best defense is to reduce the number of people who passionately hate us, and are willing to act on their anger. Killing them doesn't work--not on the scale that any reasonable person is willing to contemplate--because even the people who hate us are still people, people with families and friends who will learn hate as they watch us butcher their loved ones.
No, if fewer people are flying, that's de facto proof that evil terrists have frightened us away from air travel. Therefore, we'll need to open up a new front in the War on Terr in the form of massive bailouts of the airline industry.
But that's assuming that a noticeable number of people stop flying. Boycotts have always seemed pretty ineffective to me.
Whatever. You're entitled to your opinion, no matter how wrong it may be.
The fact is, the commercial is bought and paid for by the telcos, it makes no attempt to convey information and every attempt to scare the listener into agreement, and it blatantly lies about the effects of the bill and the motivations of the opposition. Your response? "You need to be more 'fair and balanced' to the telcos, and by the way you dropped an 'o' back there." In this case, I think a great deal of bias is justified.
A duopoly is not a free market.
Home insurance is basically unavoidable so long as you still have a mortgage. The bank wants its collateral protected. It's illegal in most states to drive without auto insurance (of course, you can get away with liability-only). Medical insurance is certainly a necessity, but nearly 40 million Americans are doing without.
So, yes, they're necessities. But you should practice self-insurance against non-catastrophic losses. Extended warranties and product replacement plans are usually bad deals. If you lose a $600 phone, do you really need to replace it with another $600 phone? Or can you get by with a $50 model? Or will a $300 model from another company provide what you need? Self-insurance lets you choose how you want to fix what's broken, avoids the hassle of dealing with the company, and avoids what often amounts to a 'stupid/scared user tax.'
If there is a risk out there that could collapse your finances like a house of cards, whether it be a medical illness, a fire, or a car accident, then you certainly should insure against it. If the loss of a $600 phone is such a risk for you, then yes you should insure against it, but the better solution is to not have such precarious finances in the first place.
1) Everyone pays taxes, but not everyone pays them in equal amounts. If poor people pay little in taxes, but have high energy bills because they can't afford the up-front costs of CFLs, then that segment of the population will only benefit.
2) In fact, most every tax bracket would benefit. There are long-term cost savings for the consumer, and those savings should more than counterbalance the taxes for the vast majority of taxpayers.
3) The size of the bureaucracy has very little to do with the amount of money being spent. The expense of implementing the program might be minimal, if the government just writes a few big checks to major CFL manufacturers. It could be huge, if they implement a monstrous, complex system where individuals apply for rebates, and each applicant needs to be vetted to make sure they qualify for the program. Your assumption of 20% inefficiency seems both arbitrary, and arbitrarily high.
4) Subsidies early on could jump-start demand for CFLs, increasing production capacity, improving manufacturing techniques, and enabling them to compete more successfully in the market when the subsidies are eventually removed. We're already seeing this in the solar panel market, where government subsidies increase demand and give producers the money they need to increase capacity and drive down cost.
5) The demands of the market aren't always the oracles we should be looking to for guidance. In this case, consumers are suckered in by the low up-front purchase price of standard incandescent bulbs, and ignoring the long term energy savings and associated benefits (which can't be reflected in the purchase price without intervening in the market). IOW, the public really seems to be making the wrong decision. In such cases, government intervention can sometimes be beneficial.
"Natural" is a bit of an awkward word, and misleading at times. After all, there are 100% natural things that will kill you if you eat them. But don't kid yourself with the whole "anything humans do is natural" argument. It's every bit as tired and misleading as the idea that 'natural' always equates to 'better.' Nor have we been evolving 'naturally,' for at least the last 50,000 years.
But why would anyone argue that 'natural' foods are better? Because to a first approximation, they are. Look at the history of "artificial food." Back in the 1800's, when they figured out that your body needed three separate substances (protein, fat, and starch) to be healthy, they thought they'd unlocked the key to the dietary needs of mankind. Now imagine how long a person would last on an artificially-designed food from that era.
Next we discovered a litany of vitamins. We thought we had the problem of human dietary needs licked. Anything that processing takes out of the foods, we figured we could just add back in. Hence, the widespread use of fortified flour, and the emergence of cereals like Total, that try to give you all your nutritional needs. But they're still discovering micronutrients galore. Even things in our diet that are generally considered dangerous are frequently discovered to have beneficial effects on the body in the quantities often found in nature.
I'm not arguing that "natural" foods are mystically imbued with the spirit of Gaia, or some other anti-scientific nonsense. I'm arguing that we don't yet have a complete picture of what our bodies need in order to maintain ideal health, but evolution has spent millions of years optimizing our bodies to the substances commonly found in nature. When we process foods, when we raise cows on an all-corn diet instead of the grass they're suited to, when we build vast, monocultural farms and protect the plants from their natural predators through pesticides, the end result is food that is somewhat different from the stuff we were engineered to eat.
We still don't know for sure how different, or how important the differences are. But that's the "scientific" argument for natural foods in a nutshell.
Animal cruelty is a major ethical issue for meat production, but it's not the only one.
Growing animals without brains--or just growing their muscle tissues in vats--would eliminate animal suffering. But you still have to deal with the economic, environmental, and health effects of a high-meat diet. The short version: If we stopped feeding all this grain to cows and started feeding it to people, our population would be quite a bit healthier and our farms more ecologically friendly (simply because we'd have to produce so much less grain, with so many fewer steps in the process).
The market has a built-in bias against that plan, because investors demand that companies expand the market. Since there are only a finite number of people, and each person has a finite stomach volume, there are only three ways to keep the market expanding:
1) Produce more people.
2) Convince people to eat more
3) Find ways to turn cheap food into expensive food
The population itself is taking care of #1, while Saturday morning cartoons and the Coke/Pepsi wars are working on #2. There are lots of ways to "add value" to food to fulfill #3. For example, cheap grain can be turned into expensive meat or alcohol, which people will pay more for. Or you can pre-package it in some way that adds value, such as canning it, or adding sugar and baking it into fun marshmallow shapes that are part of this balanced breakfast.
Getting back to the point of this rant: there are ethical issues involved with turning cheap food into expensive food, especially in a world where many people cannot afford the necessities of life.
There are lots of factors that go into pricing of "organic" products, and the term can mean many different things.
I believe that all you absolutely have to do to get certified as "organic" beef is to feed the cows organic grain (that is, corn that hasn't been sprayed with chemicals), and avoid pumping them full of the antibiotics that allow factory-farmed cows to survive the squalor they're kept in. "Organic" doesn't mean that the cows are allowed to stroll around a big pasture, or that they're being fed the grass that their bodies are designed to ingest.
"Organic" meat is still a good thing, because many of the pesticides used on grain tend to bioaccumulate in the cows that eat it. But the 'organic' label alone tells you surprisingly little about how the animals are raised, fed, and slaughtered. Some of the price difference could be due to such differences. Or it could be the simple realization that when you mark two similar items a different price, people contort their brains all sorts of ways to justify the difference. Anyhow, it's important to go deeper to find out how the animals are actually treated.