"No one is going to suggest that every facet of copyright law is a perfect fit with our evolving economy and society."
Especially not me. In fact, the whole of copyright law is so embarassingly out of step that it would be downright amusing if the implications weren't so profoundly bad for our society.
You seem to be under the misguided impression that the only "real issue" here is rampant piracy, and artists being ripped off thereby, and that all these other issues are of merely academic interest. First, I would like you to read Lawrence Lessig's account of Alex Alben's creation of a retrospective on Clint Eastwood's career. One thing Lessig never explicitly points out was that the project started out intending to be the first in a series. But after taking a year to clear rights for using Eastwood's movies, the legal barriers were just too high to scale again.
Despite your unsubstantiated rejection, archivists are indeed having difficulties due to draconian copyright law. There are literally thousands of films from the 1930's and 1940's which aren't commercially available. Back then, in order to get a copyright, you had to leave a copy with the Library of Congress. But then there was a loophole that said the owners could borrow back the copy for as long as they wanted and at no cost. Over 5000 of those movies were borrowed, and often they were the only known copy. Maybe the owners are taking good care of them. Maybe they're molding away in a leaky basement somewhere. But we have the technology to preserve them forever, for historians, for fans, for filmmakers looking for inspiration from the past. It's the law that keeps this from happening.
Then there are projects like Project Gutenberg, which goes about digitizing and archiving public domain works. If they don't clear the rights to a work beforehand, they can't even begin. You can't digitize a book without copying it, and copyright law expressly forbids unauthorized copying. Sometimes clearing them is impossible, because the proper records are gone, or because it's impossible to find the person you need to talk to. 95% of the works they are interested in archiving have zero commercial value, but should still be preserved for the future.
I'm talking about real barriers to real creativity and real preservation of culture here. In fact, I would argue that the protection of what you call "a few cases of academic interest" vastly outweigh the dangers of unlicenced copying. The arguments that "I wouldn't have bought it anyways," or "I'm helping make the band more popular" don't justify piracy ethically, but they should still be given consideration when it comes to evaluating actual financial harm. There is a very real possibility that the overall harm to the bottom line is marginal. Again, that doesn't justify the practice, but it certainly would mean that we shouldn't be taking all these extraordinary measures and upsetting necessary balances in copyright law in order to quash the practice.
If every P2P app in the world suddenly shut down, and everyone was obtaining all their content from authorized sources, do you think for one minute that the litigation-happy nitwits that brought us the DMCA would suddenly think, "You know, maybe 28 years is plenty of time to recoup our investment in this film?" Or, "Maybe we should weaken the DRM in this application so that people can pull samples from it and exercise their fair use rights." It's not about money, it's about control, and always has been.
You seem to be going out of your way to be inflammatory. Not everyone who complains about draconian IP laws are simply out to score free stuff, and--despite your comments--you know it.
The laws are not always clear cut, and where they are clear cut, they do not always represent the best interests of fairness, justice, or society as a whole.
Do you think it's right that a documentary maker loses the right to use a shot because it happened to catch a few seconds of a TV playing "The Simpsons?" Do you really think our society is served by keeping "The Grapes of Wrath" under copyright until 2038? What about the literally millions of copyrighted works that no longer have value to the copyright holder, or for whom the copyright holder can't even be found? Should we make sure those works can't be copied either, until those copies which do remain have crumbled into dust? Should researchers face criminal prosecution merely for discussing the copyright protection measures of a new gadget?
If these are the sort of fair laws that you want Boy Scouts to be taught to respect and obey, then your endeavor is doomed. Even a twelve year old can see that "IP law" is just a big, corporate-sponsored power grab, and any attempts to teach them to respect those laws will only result in their losing respect for all laws.
That recent "slashvertisement" for a product that used quantum cryptography to encrypt video conference links? Quite newsworthy. At this point, any commercial use of quantum crypto is novel enough to be newsworthy. It's not something most of us would rush out and buy even if we had $20K to blow, but it's got geek cred up the wazoo.
In my opinion, nothing Alienware does is newsworthy. It's nothing personal against the company. I'm sure they make decent products, and they've made a big name for themselves among the gamers. But all they do is take (admittedly high quality) off-the-shelf PC components, assemble them, tweak them out a little, and sell them to people who have a very large amount of money. It's nothing fundamentally new or astounding. They've made a niche for themselves as the most famous seller of high-end gaming rigs, but that's it.
Now, it seems, they have themselves a Star Wars franchise license. So now we can buy ourselves rigs with pretty pictures on the sides, and a selection of sounds and screensavers. This is about as "cool" as Rob Enderle's Ferrari laptop. If you remember, the only reason that story was posted was so we could all make fun of Rob as he was hypnotized by the glittery-shinies.
I know this doesn't say anything good about me, but I've come to rely on Slashdot as a news source. Short of making mistakes and then refusing to own up (which/. does from time to time), nothing lowers my trust in a news outlet faster than advertisements masquerading as news copy. It happens all the time: An outlet needs something to fill space, so somebody with an agenda sends them a slick, prepackaged story for them to use. Often, the agenda is to promote a product.
I realize that I shouldn't give complete trust to any news organization. But I can't shake the feeling that there is something wrong when they start pumping out stories for reasons other than importance and relevance.
You: The same way [logical impossibility Y] happened.
Me: Why would God have to justify himself to anyone?
You: If your parenting skills were called into question, wouldn't you have to justify yourself?
You, sir, strike me as being very full of your own crap. I don't know you well enough to make a definitive statement on the matter, but the balance of evidence strongly suggests it.
Newton never actually had a theory of gravity. He had a few laws, like f = m*a, and F = G * m1 * m2 / r^2. But those are just formulas he extrapolated from the data at hand. In fact, that's all a law is: you take a bunch of data, and fit a formula to it.
For example, if you got a thousand random adults and lined them up according to height, you might come up with a formula that matched their heights to some bell curve. You would call it "the Law of Height Distribution in Adults" or something.
Laws can be disproven. Laws can be the product of shoddy research. Laws may not hold in all instances (Newton's didn't). A theory is the "why" that explains laws. Newton never had that, and to the end of his days, it confused him to think that "action at a distance" could really exist.
Evolution isn't a "fact", it's a theory. Not "merely a theory" as the creation^H^H^H^H^H^H^HID'ists would say, because that's misapplying the term. Evolution is a theory, and it is backed by so much evidence that nobody actually doing science believes there is a chance of it being overturned.
I think the best word for "Intelligent Design" is "speculation". Anyone who disagrees should propose some piece of evidence that would conclusively disprove the main thrust of ID: That the variety of life we see is the result of the action of an Intelligent Designer.
Precambrian rabbits would disprove evolution nicely.
The Christians I've discussed this with claim that omniscience is an integral attribute of the Creator. It's not a parlor trick God only whips out when he needs to entertain and amuse. God--it is said--exists in all times and in all places, and sees the beginning from the end as a matter of course. To Christians who accept that view, saying that God wasn't using his omniscience when he came up with the Garden of Eden is tantamount to saying that God decided to stop being God for the duration.
You only claim God wasn't using his omniscience because you can't think of any other way out of the apparent logical contradiction this brings up.
The second paragraph of your post strikes me as utterly incoherent. God needs to vindicate himself? To who? If Satan was a perfect angel, how could greed have gotten the better of him? If God knows his plan was perfect, why does he have to justify himself to anyone? How could God know his plan was perfect if he wasn't using his omniscience when he came up with it? What will all this Jesus-sacrificing sturm and drang change? Is God like Emperor Palpatine, consolidating his power until "anyone else who rebels against him can be dealt with on the spot?" If so, does that mean Eve is Padme? Is Adam Obi-Wan?
It's times like these that I'm glad I chose atheism. So very very very much simpler this way.
I do object to your use of the term "Creator". To me, it seems that the term implies some sort of intentionality and even personhood, and I don't believe that is what you're trying to convey.
Not significantly better than your "one line flame," no. Basically, that post was seven one-line flames in sequence. Putting them together, they're no stronger than the sum of their parts.
You compare his work to that of children's authors, claim without support that Firefly somehow rehashes Buffy (what? Do you have the secret scripts from Firefly Season 2 that has Simon losing his soul and trying to kill Kaylee?)
His science is fine. Whedon just isn't bothered when his characters say "fuel" instead of "dilithium crystals". Tech babble is nothing but mindless hand-waving trying to cover up the fact that the writers wrote themselves into a corner and needed a deus ex machina to get them back out. I'm glad that sort of thing was jettisoned for Firefly.
#5 and #7 are basically you saying "I liked these other series better." Yay for you.
Which leaves the fanboy accusation. Sorry, but having seen Firefly, I know beyond reasonable doubt that I would have loved it regardless of whose name was listed under "creator". We like Joss Whedon because he was able to bring certain things to "Buffy" and "Angel" that we came to love and appreciate. If you didn't love or appreciate those things, no skin off my butt. But when you want to convince the fans of a series that the series sucked, saying "the series sucked" seven times without evidence does nothing to promote that goal.
What about L.A. to San Francisco, or to Sacramento? Distancewise, they're pretty comparable to Paris-Lyons, and certainly L.A. and San Francisco have sufficient population densities.
I think it mostly comes down to network effects. The car culture is what perpetuates the car culture.
When you get off the train in Paris, I'm guessing that you can step straight onto the intracity transit system. It's the only thing that makes sense, because all those people flooding in through the train system need somewhere to go. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, everyone drives their own intracity transit system, and few use mass transit because it's not robust enough to handle more than a tiny fraction of the city's transportation needs.
In conclusion, it's not a matter of distances and densities. If it doesn't make sense to build a commuter train between LA and Frisco, it's because once you get off you'll have a hell of a time getting anywhere without a car.
Good points. The cost of living is high at least partly because there is relatively little in the way of living space in the city, compared to the number of jobs available. The solution, in my mind, is that we should build more living space into cities. Otherwise cities are populated with two classes: Those who can afford the inflated real estate prices, and those who can't even afford the more modest real estate of suburbia.
Buses are the only form of mass transit that can easily be retrofitted onto existing city systems. But they're still an option.
Given that Milton Friedman was pushing 90 when this research came out, it's unlikely that he personally did much to verify the results of the research. That's what I was asking: Whether economists by and large considered this research valuable and methodologically sound.
Your comment might have been perfectly appropriate if I'd said, say, "Find me a real economist who doesn't usually favor government intervention." Given that Friedman himself blamed the Great Depression on federal monetary policy, not on the problems cited by this research, I fail to see how Friedman is relevant.
I think the other respondent is unfair to paint you as an elitist. There are more differences between rich and poor than "rich people have more money". Some people who aren't able to hold down good jobs are that way because of real, untreated psychological problems. Wealthier people are either able to afford treatment, have sufficient family support so they can afford not to use mass transit, or they quickly become poor people.
Still, he has a point. As mass transit becomes more mainstream, harassment would be less common. Even if the crazies rode the buses in the same numbers, they'd be swamped by the overall population.
Regarding #2, I see that as an example of why cars are a problem, not why they are necessary. People shouldn't have to spend two hours a day commuting. They do so because we built cities all wrong, without sufficient living areas near major employment centers, and with a transportation system inherently biased towards cars.
Mass transit shouldn't have to solve the problem of everybody living forty miles away from someplace they need to be every single day. Somewhere along the lines, we made some bad decisions, and now they're coming back to bite us.
Why live out in the boonies, though? Either you're out there to do something that requires lots of land (farming, mining, being a forest ranger, etc), or to support those who do. Cars make sense when everything is far far away from everything else, but the vast majority of us live in areas where a good mass transit system could replace cars entirely. Nevertheless, we chose cars anyways, and we have to live with the pollution and expense that choice requires.
We chose to build vast tracts of suburbia, whose only purpose was to store people far away from the cities which provided their livelihoods. That choice necessitated that we build roads to make sure these people could use their cars in the cities. That forced sprawl on the cities themselves, since so much room has to be taken up with roads, parking lots and parking garages, gas stations, etc. It also made the lives of pedestrians and cyclists harder. Things are further apart, and much of a pedestrian's commute is spent waiting for their turn to cross the streets.
Every time we make a decision that increases the usefulness of cars at the expense of alternatives, we make it that much harder to give them up down the road.
Has this research gained a lot of traction among economists, or is it merely the darling of the sorts of right-wingers who accept those studies which oppose government intervention? I don't doubt the researchers are trying to be honest, but unless you're an economist yourself it's arrogant to try and gauge the actual importance of their research.
Central planning is generally pretty dumb, agreed. But as the science of economics advances, they've been getting better. Saying that central planning is doomed to failure because the first attempts failed is like showing those old black and white films of people jumping off ledges with wings strapped to their backs, then using them to conclude that heavier-than-air flight is impossible. Of course, if your economic theories are driven by ideology rather than evidence (as are many theories on the left and the right), you're never going to learn a bloody thing.
Private schools do exist, yes. But they don't have a mandate to serve every child. If a private school can deliver a cheaper education than a public school in the same area, it's partly because the private school doesn't have to take the costliest students.
If I ran a private prison, but only took non-violent, white-collar criminals, I'm sure I could run a very cheap prison.
If a private school can provide a certain number of kids with a better education, I'm not going to begrudge anyone who chooses to send their kids to one. But unless private schools are educating a segment of the population that is comparable to public schools, comparing them is pointless and dishonest.
Despite the first paragraph, the story you cite only indicates that the NIRA was a harmful policy, and doesn't condemn Roosevelt's public works projects. Since the depression ultimately ended thanks to a massive government jobs program called World War II, your failure to extrapolate from that clear fact is surprising.
This is a wonderful idea. I'm also looking forward to the new, remastered version of "Inherit the Wind", where all the compelling dialogue in favor of evolution are replaced with "blah blah blah I'm a godless, heathen commie!"
What ClearPlay is doing sort of nudges up against the concept of "derivative works". What you're suggesting doing drives straight over it. I'm not sure whether it should be illegal. I especially don't think a person should incur financial liability if they're not making money off it. But I worry that we're already in a society where people can tailor their information stream to precisely match their pre-conceived biases. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and if somebody wants to watch "The Day After Tomorrow" without being exposed to the insidious greenie-liberalism of Hollywood, they cross the line.
I've noticed that, most of the time, when someone says they were modded down for "going against slashthink", what they really mean is......they were modded down for being gratuitously insulting.
or...they spent a half hour carefully crafting a post that explained in lengthy detail why they didn't care about the story, and why anyone who did care about it was an idiot.
or...their rebuttal was so riddled with factual inaccuracies that it undermined the point they were trying to make.
Of course, bad moderation happens, and bad moderators exist. But a solid 80% of the time, it's just people being shocked to learn that they're not a tenth as brilliant or convincing as they would like to think.
In your case, you're trying to make much of semantics, and going about it a little wrongheadedly. Since nobody but you called it a "shocking" or "brutal" injustice, you've apparently tried to blow our miffed feelings way out of proportion. Injustices come in a wide variety of sizes, from kicking the family dog to wholesale genocide.
Yeah, it was just a show. But it was a good show, and deserved better treatment than FOX gave it. I think the word "unjust" is apt.
"Would a writer make that investment if he knew that anyone at all would be free to copy his work without compensation?"
From time to time. I'm certainly in favor of some level of copyright protection that maximizes overall creativity. But there are other motivations for creativity than financial ones, and the author can continue to profit even if said author allows uncompensated copying.
Trent Duffy has no future in public life because he sounds like an immature, partisan hack who has bought into the President's delusion of having a "51% mandate", but doesn't understand the issues on which he's representing the administration. On second thought, given the current administration, he's probably fully qualified to be Secretary of State.
This isn't a matter of President Bush filling political appointments with those who share his views. These have never been political positions, the actions of the board have little "red vs. blue" implications, and the only reason the administration would inject politics into them is because they're drunk on power.
BAF? The Bradford Animation Festival? The British Academy of Fencing?
Agreed on #2 and #3. I think #1 would just give us some very pissed GIs. I certainly wouldn't recommend the tactic for any rebel army trying to drum up popular support, though it might be more effective for an insurrection that was just trying to scare people into obedience.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be under the misguided impression that the only "real issue" here is rampant piracy, and artists being ripped off thereby, and that all these other issues are of merely academic interest. First, I would like you to read Lawrence Lessig's account of Alex Alben's creation of a retrospective on Clint Eastwood's career. One thing Lessig never explicitly points out was that the project started out intending to be the first in a series. But after taking a year to clear rights for using Eastwood's movies, the legal barriers were just too high to scale again.
Despite your unsubstantiated rejection, archivists are indeed having difficulties due to draconian copyright law. There are literally thousands of films from the 1930's and 1940's which aren't commercially available. Back then, in order to get a copyright, you had to leave a copy with the Library of Congress. But then there was a loophole that said the owners could borrow back the copy for as long as they wanted and at no cost. Over 5000 of those movies were borrowed, and often they were the only known copy. Maybe the owners are taking good care of them. Maybe they're molding away in a leaky basement somewhere. But we have the technology to preserve them forever, for historians, for fans, for filmmakers looking for inspiration from the past. It's the law that keeps this from happening.
Then there are projects like Project Gutenberg, which goes about digitizing and archiving public domain works. If they don't clear the rights to a work beforehand, they can't even begin. You can't digitize a book without copying it, and copyright law expressly forbids unauthorized copying. Sometimes clearing them is impossible, because the proper records are gone, or because it's impossible to find the person you need to talk to. 95% of the works they are interested in archiving have zero commercial value, but should still be preserved for the future.
I'm talking about real barriers to real creativity and real preservation of culture here. In fact, I would argue that the protection of what you call "a few cases of academic interest" vastly outweigh the dangers of unlicenced copying. The arguments that "I wouldn't have bought it anyways," or "I'm helping make the band more popular" don't justify piracy ethically, but they should still be given consideration when it comes to evaluating actual financial harm. There is a very real possibility that the overall harm to the bottom line is marginal. Again, that doesn't justify the practice, but it certainly would mean that we shouldn't be taking all these extraordinary measures and upsetting necessary balances in copyright law in order to quash the practice.
If every P2P app in the world suddenly shut down, and everyone was obtaining all their content from authorized sources, do you think for one minute that the litigation-happy nitwits that brought us the DMCA would suddenly think, "You know, maybe 28 years is plenty of time to recoup our investment in this film?" Or, "Maybe we should weaken the DRM in this application so that people can pull samples from it and exercise their fair use rights." It's not about money, it's about control, and always has been.
You seem to be going out of your way to be inflammatory. Not everyone who complains about draconian IP laws are simply out to score free stuff, and--despite your comments--you know it.
The laws are not always clear cut, and where they are clear cut, they do not always represent the best interests of fairness, justice, or society as a whole.
Do you think it's right that a documentary maker loses the right to use a shot because it happened to catch a few seconds of a TV playing "The Simpsons?" Do you really think our society is served by keeping "The Grapes of Wrath" under copyright until 2038? What about the literally millions of copyrighted works that no longer have value to the copyright holder, or for whom the copyright holder can't even be found? Should we make sure those works can't be copied either, until those copies which do remain have crumbled into dust? Should researchers face criminal prosecution merely for discussing the copyright protection measures of a new gadget?
If these are the sort of fair laws that you want Boy Scouts to be taught to respect and obey, then your endeavor is doomed. Even a twelve year old can see that "IP law" is just a big, corporate-sponsored power grab, and any attempts to teach them to respect those laws will only result in their losing respect for all laws.
But not all new products are equally newsworthy.
/. does from time to time), nothing lowers my trust in a news outlet faster than advertisements masquerading as news copy. It happens all the time: An outlet needs something to fill space, so somebody with an agenda sends them a slick, prepackaged story for them to use. Often, the agenda is to promote a product.
That recent "slashvertisement" for a product that used quantum cryptography to encrypt video conference links? Quite newsworthy. At this point, any commercial use of quantum crypto is novel enough to be newsworthy. It's not something most of us would rush out and buy even if we had $20K to blow, but it's got geek cred up the wazoo.
In my opinion, nothing Alienware does is newsworthy. It's nothing personal against the company. I'm sure they make decent products, and they've made a big name for themselves among the gamers. But all they do is take (admittedly high quality) off-the-shelf PC components, assemble them, tweak them out a little, and sell them to people who have a very large amount of money. It's nothing fundamentally new or astounding. They've made a niche for themselves as the most famous seller of high-end gaming rigs, but that's it.
Now, it seems, they have themselves a Star Wars franchise license. So now we can buy ourselves rigs with pretty pictures on the sides, and a selection of sounds and screensavers. This is about as "cool" as Rob Enderle's Ferrari laptop. If you remember, the only reason that story was posted was so we could all make fun of Rob as he was hypnotized by the glittery-shinies.
I know this doesn't say anything good about me, but I've come to rely on Slashdot as a news source. Short of making mistakes and then refusing to own up (which
I realize that I shouldn't give complete trust to any news organization. But I can't shake the feeling that there is something wrong when they start pumping out stories for reasons other than importance and relevance.
Me: How did [logical impossibility X] happen?
You: The same way [logical impossibility Y] happened.
Me: Why would God have to justify himself to anyone?
You: If your parenting skills were called into question, wouldn't you have to justify yourself?
You, sir, strike me as being very full of your own crap. I don't know you well enough to make a definitive statement on the matter, but the balance of evidence strongly suggests it.
Newton never actually had a theory of gravity. He had a few laws, like f = m*a, and F = G * m1 * m2 / r^2. But those are just formulas he extrapolated from the data at hand. In fact, that's all a law is: you take a bunch of data, and fit a formula to it.
For example, if you got a thousand random adults and lined them up according to height, you might come up with a formula that matched their heights to some bell curve. You would call it "the Law of Height Distribution in Adults" or something.
Laws can be disproven. Laws can be the product of shoddy research. Laws may not hold in all instances (Newton's didn't). A theory is the "why" that explains laws. Newton never had that, and to the end of his days, it confused him to think that "action at a distance" could really exist.
Evolution isn't a "fact", it's a theory. Not "merely a theory" as the creation^H^H^H^H^H^H^HID'ists would say, because that's misapplying the term. Evolution is a theory, and it is backed by so much evidence that nobody actually doing science believes there is a chance of it being overturned.
I think the best word for "Intelligent Design" is "speculation". Anyone who disagrees should propose some piece of evidence that would conclusively disprove the main thrust of ID: That the variety of life we see is the result of the action of an Intelligent Designer.
Precambrian rabbits would disprove evolution nicely.
Um, he asked for a non-handwavey rebuttal.
The Christians I've discussed this with claim that omniscience is an integral attribute of the Creator. It's not a parlor trick God only whips out when he needs to entertain and amuse. God--it is said--exists in all times and in all places, and sees the beginning from the end as a matter of course. To Christians who accept that view, saying that God wasn't using his omniscience when he came up with the Garden of Eden is tantamount to saying that God decided to stop being God for the duration.
You only claim God wasn't using his omniscience because you can't think of any other way out of the apparent logical contradiction this brings up.
The second paragraph of your post strikes me as utterly incoherent. God needs to vindicate himself? To who? If Satan was a perfect angel, how could greed have gotten the better of him? If God knows his plan was perfect, why does he have to justify himself to anyone? How could God know his plan was perfect if he wasn't using his omniscience when he came up with it? What will all this Jesus-sacrificing sturm and drang change? Is God like Emperor Palpatine, consolidating his power until "anyone else who rebels against him can be dealt with on the spot?" If so, does that mean Eve is Padme? Is Adam Obi-Wan?
It's times like these that I'm glad I chose atheism. So very very very much simpler this way.
I do object to your use of the term "Creator". To me, it seems that the term implies some sort of intentionality and even personhood, and I don't believe that is what you're trying to convey.
Not significantly better than your "one line flame," no. Basically, that post was seven one-line flames in sequence. Putting them together, they're no stronger than the sum of their parts.
You compare his work to that of children's authors, claim without support that Firefly somehow rehashes Buffy (what? Do you have the secret scripts from Firefly Season 2 that has Simon losing his soul and trying to kill Kaylee?)
His science is fine. Whedon just isn't bothered when his characters say "fuel" instead of "dilithium crystals". Tech babble is nothing but mindless hand-waving trying to cover up the fact that the writers wrote themselves into a corner and needed a deus ex machina to get them back out. I'm glad that sort of thing was jettisoned for Firefly.
#5 and #7 are basically you saying "I liked these other series better." Yay for you.
Which leaves the fanboy accusation. Sorry, but having seen Firefly, I know beyond reasonable doubt that I would have loved it regardless of whose name was listed under "creator". We like Joss Whedon because he was able to bring certain things to "Buffy" and "Angel" that we came to love and appreciate. If you didn't love or appreciate those things, no skin off my butt. But when you want to convince the fans of a series that the series sucked, saying "the series sucked" seven times without evidence does nothing to promote that goal.
What about L.A. to San Francisco, or to Sacramento? Distancewise, they're pretty comparable to Paris-Lyons, and certainly L.A. and San Francisco have sufficient population densities.
I think it mostly comes down to network effects. The car culture is what perpetuates the car culture.
When you get off the train in Paris, I'm guessing that you can step straight onto the intracity transit system. It's the only thing that makes sense, because all those people flooding in through the train system need somewhere to go. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, everyone drives their own intracity transit system, and few use mass transit because it's not robust enough to handle more than a tiny fraction of the city's transportation needs.
In conclusion, it's not a matter of distances and densities. If it doesn't make sense to build a commuter train between LA and Frisco, it's because once you get off you'll have a hell of a time getting anywhere without a car.
Good points. The cost of living is high at least partly because there is relatively little in the way of living space in the city, compared to the number of jobs available. The solution, in my mind, is that we should build more living space into cities. Otherwise cities are populated with two classes: Those who can afford the inflated real estate prices, and those who can't even afford the more modest real estate of suburbia.
Buses are the only form of mass transit that can easily be retrofitted onto existing city systems. But they're still an option.
Given that Milton Friedman was pushing 90 when this research came out, it's unlikely that he personally did much to verify the results of the research. That's what I was asking: Whether economists by and large considered this research valuable and methodologically sound.
Your comment might have been perfectly appropriate if I'd said, say, "Find me a real economist who doesn't usually favor government intervention." Given that Friedman himself blamed the Great Depression on federal monetary policy, not on the problems cited by this research, I fail to see how Friedman is relevant.
I think the other respondent is unfair to paint you as an elitist. There are more differences between rich and poor than "rich people have more money". Some people who aren't able to hold down good jobs are that way because of real, untreated psychological problems. Wealthier people are either able to afford treatment, have sufficient family support so they can afford not to use mass transit, or they quickly become poor people.
Still, he has a point. As mass transit becomes more mainstream, harassment would be less common. Even if the crazies rode the buses in the same numbers, they'd be swamped by the overall population.
Regarding #2, I see that as an example of why cars are a problem, not why they are necessary. People shouldn't have to spend two hours a day commuting. They do so because we built cities all wrong, without sufficient living areas near major employment centers, and with a transportation system inherently biased towards cars.
Mass transit shouldn't have to solve the problem of everybody living forty miles away from someplace they need to be every single day. Somewhere along the lines, we made some bad decisions, and now they're coming back to bite us.
Why live out in the boonies, though? Either you're out there to do something that requires lots of land (farming, mining, being a forest ranger, etc), or to support those who do. Cars make sense when everything is far far away from everything else, but the vast majority of us live in areas where a good mass transit system could replace cars entirely. Nevertheless, we chose cars anyways, and we have to live with the pollution and expense that choice requires.
We chose to build vast tracts of suburbia, whose only purpose was to store people far away from the cities which provided their livelihoods. That choice necessitated that we build roads to make sure these people could use their cars in the cities. That forced sprawl on the cities themselves, since so much room has to be taken up with roads, parking lots and parking garages, gas stations, etc. It also made the lives of pedestrians and cyclists harder. Things are further apart, and much of a pedestrian's commute is spent waiting for their turn to cross the streets.
Every time we make a decision that increases the usefulness of cars at the expense of alternatives, we make it that much harder to give them up down the road.
Has this research gained a lot of traction among economists, or is it merely the darling of the sorts of right-wingers who accept those studies which oppose government intervention? I don't doubt the researchers are trying to be honest, but unless you're an economist yourself it's arrogant to try and gauge the actual importance of their research.
Central planning is generally pretty dumb, agreed. But as the science of economics advances, they've been getting better. Saying that central planning is doomed to failure because the first attempts failed is like showing those old black and white films of people jumping off ledges with wings strapped to their backs, then using them to conclude that heavier-than-air flight is impossible. Of course, if your economic theories are driven by ideology rather than evidence (as are many theories on the left and the right), you're never going to learn a bloody thing.
Private schools do exist, yes. But they don't have a mandate to serve every child. If a private school can deliver a cheaper education than a public school in the same area, it's partly because the private school doesn't have to take the costliest students.
If I ran a private prison, but only took non-violent, white-collar criminals, I'm sure I could run a very cheap prison.
If a private school can provide a certain number of kids with a better education, I'm not going to begrudge anyone who chooses to send their kids to one. But unless private schools are educating a segment of the population that is comparable to public schools, comparing them is pointless and dishonest.
Despite the first paragraph, the story you cite only indicates that the NIRA was a harmful policy, and doesn't condemn Roosevelt's public works projects. Since the depression ultimately ended thanks to a massive government jobs program called World War II, your failure to extrapolate from that clear fact is surprising.
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and answered.
I have nothing to add, but ye olde lameness filter requires that I say something.
This is a wonderful idea. I'm also looking forward to the new, remastered version of "Inherit the Wind", where all the compelling dialogue in favor of evolution are replaced with "blah blah blah I'm a godless, heathen commie!"
What ClearPlay is doing sort of nudges up against the concept of "derivative works". What you're suggesting doing drives straight over it. I'm not sure whether it should be illegal. I especially don't think a person should incur financial liability if they're not making money off it. But I worry that we're already in a society where people can tailor their information stream to precisely match their pre-conceived biases. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and if somebody wants to watch "The Day After Tomorrow" without being exposed to the insidious greenie-liberalism of Hollywood, they cross the line.
As there is nothing I can do to improve upon your response, I'm simply adding the guy to my foes list.
Kevin Smith who? Stop trying to alienate me with your obscure references to popular culture!
Someone who quotes Futurama is telling me to get a life. Incontrovertible proof: I'm about as lame as they come.
I've noticed that, most of the time, when someone says they were modded down for "going against slashthink", what they really mean is... ...they were modded down for being gratuitously insulting.
...they spent a half hour carefully crafting a post that explained in lengthy detail why they didn't care about the story, and why anyone who did care about it was an idiot.
...their rebuttal was so riddled with factual inaccuracies that it undermined the point they were trying to make.
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Of course, bad moderation happens, and bad moderators exist. But a solid 80% of the time, it's just people being shocked to learn that they're not a tenth as brilliant or convincing as they would like to think.
In your case, you're trying to make much of semantics, and going about it a little wrongheadedly. Since nobody but you called it a "shocking" or "brutal" injustice, you've apparently tried to blow our miffed feelings way out of proportion. Injustices come in a wide variety of sizes, from kicking the family dog to wholesale genocide.
Yeah, it was just a show. But it was a good show, and deserved better treatment than FOX gave it. I think the word "unjust" is apt.
YMMV, IANAL, PBUH.
Ah. Thank you.
Trent Duffy has no future in public life because he sounds like an immature, partisan hack who has bought into the President's delusion of having a "51% mandate", but doesn't understand the issues on which he's representing the administration. On second thought, given the current administration, he's probably fully qualified to be Secretary of State.
This isn't a matter of President Bush filling political appointments with those who share his views. These have never been political positions, the actions of the board have little "red vs. blue" implications, and the only reason the administration would inject politics into them is because they're drunk on power.
BAF? The Bradford Animation Festival? The British Academy of Fencing?
Agreed on #2 and #3. I think #1 would just give us some very pissed GIs. I certainly wouldn't recommend the tactic for any rebel army trying to drum up popular support, though it might be more effective for an insurrection that was just trying to scare people into obedience.