Except, of course, that our world contains people exactly like Rupert Murdoch, who might use their 60% ownership of media in a country to blare the statistically insignificant scenario across the front page of dozens of newspapers and air it on rotation on 24 hour news channels to defeat any politician who won't bow before them.
It's only statistically insignificant when you consider one person, when you consider all of the people in a country, you might notice that every country has people running for office. When you combine this lack of privacy with media consolidation you start to see an inevitable pattern of corruption. The end results of this aren't pretty. The rioting in England? Mostly lower class, poor young people. The kind of people who tend to be hurt worst by the policies pushed by Rupert Murdoch, and the candidates he's backed. The S&P rating downgrade? S&P essentially blamed it on the Tea Party, the very people that Murdoch's Fox News helped to win their elections.
This type of gotcha information could be very dangerous in the right (or wrong) hands.
I'm going to suggest something revolutionary. I know this is a Slashdot flame war about operating systems but here's my two suggestions:
1) Ask someone at the charity what they would like to have on the computer. or 2) Donate whatever you would be happier giving to them.
In either case you should follow the advice above about formatting the drive. You never know if there are cached credit card numbers or something else that could get you into serious trouble, so you should always format. Depending on whether the charity is keeping the computer for their own use or donating it to the children, they may prefer it unformatted or not care what OS is installed. If the charity is going to use the computer internally they may have their own IT person (or people) who may install whatever OS they normally use, regardless of what you give them.
So I repeat: ask them what they want, if they don't care, don't know, or you can't get a hold of them, give them whatever you want to give them.
I, on the other hand, expect it is a consequence of being human and having your hopes dashed.
And you need to think very carefully about whether you really want what you think you want. It seems to me that the people looting the stores of goods they could never afford are, in fact, taking responsibility for their own well-being. They've learned the lessons of capitalism and capitalists well. There is a long history of capitalists resorting to violence when they're losing.
A government can survive for years with civil unrest, as long as it can maintain the pretense that the unrest is caused by "vile criminals" and not "the good people of this country". Of course, the heavy foot of government always takes it's toll and the government will eventually collapse, but it can linger for a very long time as a quasi-police state.
You just need to look at the Middle East. The U.S. hadn't invaded Iraq, Saddam might still be dictator there (or maybe he would have been another victim of the "Arab Spring"), Iran has managed to maintain control despite obviously faking election results. Syria is attempting to use the military to stamp out civil unrest. Gaddafi is still holding on in Libya despite losing half the country. Saudi Arabia is run by a repressive monarchy. The list goes on and on. It's not the fact that there's civil unrest, it's the magnitude and duration of the civil unrest that eventually topples a government.
If suddenly they can no longer afford tuition, and their life plans are now derailed, they certainly might think they have little to lose. I expect this merely another consequence of the British austerity package.
The other ratings agencies are sticking to their guns- they haven't followed suit in reducing their ratings.
You left out the word "yet". The could lower it tomorrow, and you would then have to start making excuses about how it's "only" a downgrade to AA+. Many Americans are still in stage one: denial.
Don't forget that they were cutting taxes at the same time. It's the double-Santa strategy: Increase spending, lower taxes and pray it doesn't explode until after they're out of office. Then the other guys have to play the Grinch by either raising taxes or lowering spending. At the same time, they tell their own guys that it's all part of a great plan: they're going to bankrupt the country to save it from the scary "socialists", because they would bankrupt the country if it weren't for the valiant republicans who will do it first but with more tax cuts.
It's a sick and cynical game that the Republicans are playing.
I think it kind of is. Shooting me in the face is a lot more serious a crime than brandishing a firearm, of course. But you said "ethically." Is threatening me with a gun really ethically better than shooting me, if it achieves the same end?
It certainly gets complicated pretty quickly. So far Google hasn't even threatened anyone, they've just let everyone know that they've purchased some guns. That may deter you from playing ball in their front yard, but that's not their actual intent. The guns are supposed to deter the local armed thugs from trying to shake them down for money.
It's not significant at all, they're moving from FibreChannel drives which are notoriously small and expensive to SSDs. My last employer had a FibreChannel disk array. If I remember the prices, we were faced with a choice like 240 GB FibreChannel for $1000 each or 2 TB IDE drives for $100 each. It was obvious that moving to anything that wasn't FibreChannel was a good idea, because for the same price we could get either 480 GB of FibreChannel or 40 TB of IDE.
Your statements aren't mutually exclusive. Anonymous comments can and do get modded up, if they're really good, but most of them deserve to be obscure.
But there is a difference between anonymity and pseudonymity, which might be confused here.
Re:Then Why Are We Seeing the Same Negative Effect
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 1
The debt of the US has been and remains the safest in the world
Actually, Canada's debt is rated at the same level as the U.S. debt. with no warnings about a future potential downgrade. So it might be more accurate to say the U.S. debt remains among the safest in the world. I'm sure there are a few other countries as well who have triple-A ratings and better economic outlooks than the U.S. The chance of the U.S. losing it's rating is real, and getting worse. The cuts from this deal will backfire a little on the U.S. so cutting 2.4 trillion from the budget will also reduce revenues as well, unless the U.S. economy starts performing much better. As long as the Republicans have power and near-unanimously oppose discussing raising taxes or at least stopping tax cuts, the U.S. is pretty likely to lose it's rating and that means the percentage of spending on servicing the debt will rise substancially.
The issue with Greece and the like are not actually the amount of debt, but their inability to control how fast it's growing, and the ratings agencies have made it worse by increasing the amount those countries have to pay to service their debts. Greece owes less per capita than the U.S.
Re:For a revolutionary workers party!
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 1
One problem with abolishing business taxes is it allows corporations to be used as "money-cans" where the wealthy funnel their income into the business and then disperse it to themselves when needed and avoid the higher income taxes. Even if you tax dividends and capital gains at the regular income rate, it can be very useful put off paying taxes on it until later.
Additionally, business taxes actually subsidize employment. If a company is going to pay 25% of their profit in taxes, hiring an additional worker is effectively 25% cheaper. Lowering business taxes can actually have a suppressing effect on employment.
That might be the case, government moves slowly, the question is whether it was a monopoly when the government started it's prosecution. That prosecution often has the effect of the curbing a companies worst excesses which means the prosecution may be enough to correct the company's behavior, regardless of the outcome.
There are no monopolies in free markets?
Is this because, by (your) definition free markets don't have monopolies, or because any market that has a monopoly is therefore not actually free? Free markets can develop all kinds of monopolies. That's why we have the phrase "natural monopoly" and "cornering the market".
There's no such thing as a natural monopoly?
Economist beg to differ.
Any economist who agrees with something the government said is a charlatan?
That's one way to dismiss anyone who disagrees with you out of hand.
Government anti-trust laws are always motivated by inferior competitors?
I supposed this does follow from your insane beliefs. If there are no monopolies that are not government mandated then, of course, there can be no legitimate basis for anti-trust laws. A monopoly that doesn't exist can't illegitimately hurt a competitor. Of course, if monopolies can develop in free markets then it stands to reason that their is a rational basis for anti-trust law because a monopoly which does exist can illegitimately use it monopoly power against competitors.
It seems to me that you've got a series of circular arguments, and frankly, I haven't seen any arguments this bad since the Microsoft anti-trust days when people (often paid by Microsoft) told me "the best solution is always the one the market chooses" because "the market always chooses the best solution". Apparently, no other considerations were allowed.
I've already done so. At one point I would buy practically any Blizzard game that came out, now, I don't buy any. Blizzard just isn't Blizzard anymore. All the games they've produced since being bought by Vivendi seem to be designed to extract the maximum amount of money from their customers for the minimum amount of effort. After World of Warcraft, they've gone on the same list as Ubisoft and EA. Companies who I actively avoid buying games from, because their names are marks of overpriced and poor quality games.
It's worse than you think. Energy prices are in the hands of shadowy capital funs and petro-dictatorships. The (relatively) nice guys in the petro-dictatorship group are the petro-kleptocrats. The rest of them buy stability for their repressive regimes by funding and exporting terrorists. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran have been arming terrorists, giving them small piles of cash and pointing them at countries they don't like for decades. Often that country is the United States.
The invasion of Iraq is one of the biggest tragedies in this entire debacle. Ignoring what's actually been done to Iraq and it's people, the primary result (so far) of the invasion of Iraq was to give American money to the same people who funded 9/11 (by increasing oil prices and increasing America's usage of oil), and weaken the U.S. The Bush tax cuts were to stimulate the economy after 9/11 (they failed to do so), and combined with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, those policies have led directly to the current U.S. debt crisis. The invasion of Iraq has strengthened America's enemies and weakened America and it's allies.
Where am I equating unreliable with automatically wrong?
Right here:
If we go by your logical fallacies? Answer : Yes, and I should be prostrating myself in front of my deity of choice right this instant.
If you went by what the other poster said, you would not be "prostrating [yourself] in front of [your] deity of choice", you would be ignoring Richard Dawkins, there's a world of difference between those two positions. Your statement heavily implies that you should believe the opposite of what an unreliable source says. Unless you're saying that the only reason you're an Atheist is because of Richard Dawkins, in which case you left out the word "still".
christ you're an idiot, aren't you.
No, I'm the fool who's trying to educate an idiot.
An increase in gas taxes won't get through congress thanks to Grover Norquist. As I understand it, roughly 95% of currently elected Republicans have signed Grover's pledge that they will never, ever, raise taxes. They are not even allowed to close tax loopholes that are being exploited to evade taxes unless they lower the general tax rate to compensate.
So increasing the gas tax can't happen unless Congress, the Senate and the Presidency are all controlled by the Democrats*.
* Technically that would people who are not committed to holding up Grover Norquist's pledge, but that's effectively the Democrats, for the time being.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I agree with the rioters, but the status quo isn't exactly working to their benefit. And that, I think, is the root cause of the problem.
Combine that with media consolidation. How do you like the idea of Rupert Murdoch deciding who wins (almost) every election?
I don't like it, because when one man has enough power to influence the results of elections, the winners serve that man, and not the voters.
Except, of course, that our world contains people exactly like Rupert Murdoch, who might use their 60% ownership of media in a country to blare the statistically insignificant scenario across the front page of dozens of newspapers and air it on rotation on 24 hour news channels to defeat any politician who won't bow before them.
It's only statistically insignificant when you consider one person, when you consider all of the people in a country, you might notice that every country has people running for office. When you combine this lack of privacy with media consolidation you start to see an inevitable pattern of corruption. The end results of this aren't pretty. The rioting in England? Mostly lower class, poor young people. The kind of people who tend to be hurt worst by the policies pushed by Rupert Murdoch, and the candidates he's backed. The S&P rating downgrade? S&P essentially blamed it on the Tea Party, the very people that Murdoch's Fox News helped to win their elections.
This type of gotcha information could be very dangerous in the right (or wrong) hands.
I'm going to suggest something revolutionary. I know this is a Slashdot flame war about operating systems but here's my two suggestions:
1) Ask someone at the charity what they would like to have on the computer.
or
2) Donate whatever you would be happier giving to them.
In either case you should follow the advice above about formatting the drive. You never know if there are cached credit card numbers or something else that could get you into serious trouble, so you should always format. Depending on whether the charity is keeping the computer for their own use or donating it to the children, they may prefer it unformatted or not care what OS is installed. If the charity is going to use the computer internally they may have their own IT person (or people) who may install whatever OS they normally use, regardless of what you give them.
So I repeat: ask them what they want, if they don't care, don't know, or you can't get a hold of them, give them whatever you want to give them.
I don't know, but I think it takes a lot of anger to spend your nights smashing and burning.
I, on the other hand, expect it is a consequence of being human and having your hopes dashed.
And you need to think very carefully about whether you really want what you think you want. It seems to me that the people looting the stores of goods they could never afford are, in fact, taking responsibility for their own well-being. They've learned the lessons of capitalism and capitalists well. There is a long history of capitalists resorting to violence when they're losing.
A government can survive for years with civil unrest, as long as it can maintain the pretense that the unrest is caused by "vile criminals" and not "the good people of this country". Of course, the heavy foot of government always takes it's toll and the government will eventually collapse, but it can linger for a very long time as a quasi-police state.
You just need to look at the Middle East. The U.S. hadn't invaded Iraq, Saddam might still be dictator there (or maybe he would have been another victim of the "Arab Spring"), Iran has managed to maintain control despite obviously faking election results. Syria is attempting to use the military to stamp out civil unrest. Gaddafi is still holding on in Libya despite losing half the country. Saudi Arabia is run by a repressive monarchy. The list goes on and on. It's not the fact that there's civil unrest, it's the magnitude and duration of the civil unrest that eventually topples a government.
If suddenly they can no longer afford tuition, and their life plans are now derailed, they certainly might think they have little to lose. I expect this merely another consequence of the British austerity package.
The other ratings agencies are sticking to their guns- they haven't followed suit in reducing their ratings.
You left out the word "yet". The could lower it tomorrow, and you would then have to start making excuses about how it's "only" a downgrade to AA+. Many Americans are still in stage one: denial.
Cutting education funding is double edged sword. If you do it wrong, you end with ill-educated adults who can't hold a job.
Well ok, you end up with even more ill-educated adults who can't hold a job.
Don't forget that they were cutting taxes at the same time. It's the double-Santa strategy: Increase spending, lower taxes and pray it doesn't explode until after they're out of office. Then the other guys have to play the Grinch by either raising taxes or lowering spending. At the same time, they tell their own guys that it's all part of a great plan: they're going to bankrupt the country to save it from the scary "socialists", because they would bankrupt the country if it weren't for the valiant republicans who will do it first but with more tax cuts.
It's a sick and cynical game that the Republicans are playing.
I think it kind of is. Shooting me in the face is a lot more serious a crime than brandishing a firearm, of course. But you said "ethically." Is threatening me with a gun really ethically better than shooting me, if it achieves the same end?
It certainly gets complicated pretty quickly. So far Google hasn't even threatened anyone, they've just let everyone know that they've purchased some guns. That may deter you from playing ball in their front yard, but that's not their actual intent. The guns are supposed to deter the local armed thugs from trying to shake them down for money.
It's not significant at all, they're moving from FibreChannel drives which are notoriously small and expensive to SSDs. My last employer had a FibreChannel disk array. If I remember the prices, we were faced with a choice like 240 GB FibreChannel for $1000 each or 2 TB IDE drives for $100 each. It was obvious that moving to anything that wasn't FibreChannel was a good idea, because for the same price we could get either 480 GB of FibreChannel or 40 TB of IDE.
Your statements aren't mutually exclusive. Anonymous comments can and do get modded up, if they're really good, but most of them deserve to be obscure.
But there is a difference between anonymity and pseudonymity, which might be confused here.
The debt of the US has been and remains the safest in the world
Actually, Canada's debt is rated at the same level as the U.S. debt. with no warnings about a future potential downgrade. So it might be more accurate to say the U.S. debt remains among the safest in the world. I'm sure there are a few other countries as well who have triple-A ratings and better economic outlooks than the U.S. The chance of the U.S. losing it's rating is real, and getting worse. The cuts from this deal will backfire a little on the U.S. so cutting 2.4 trillion from the budget will also reduce revenues as well, unless the U.S. economy starts performing much better. As long as the Republicans have power and near-unanimously oppose discussing raising taxes or at least stopping tax cuts, the U.S. is pretty likely to lose it's rating and that means the percentage of spending on servicing the debt will rise substancially.
The issue with Greece and the like are not actually the amount of debt, but their inability to control how fast it's growing, and the ratings agencies have made it worse by increasing the amount those countries have to pay to service their debts. Greece owes less per capita than the U.S.
One problem with abolishing business taxes is it allows corporations to be used as "money-cans" where the wealthy funnel their income into the business and then disperse it to themselves when needed and avoid the higher income taxes. Even if you tax dividends and capital gains at the regular income rate, it can be very useful put off paying taxes on it until later.
Additionally, business taxes actually subsidize employment. If a company is going to pay 25% of their profit in taxes, hiring an additional worker is effectively 25% cheaper. Lowering business taxes can actually have a suppressing effect on employment.
That sounds like a bunch of ideological bullshit.
Governments do not provide solutions?
That might be the case, government moves slowly, the question is whether it was a monopoly when the government started it's prosecution. That prosecution often has the effect of the curbing a companies worst excesses which means the prosecution may be enough to correct the company's behavior, regardless of the outcome.
There are no monopolies in free markets?
Is this because, by (your) definition free markets don't have monopolies, or because any market that has a monopoly is therefore not actually free? Free markets can develop all kinds of monopolies. That's why we have the phrase "natural monopoly" and "cornering the market".
There's no such thing as a natural monopoly?
Economist beg to differ.
Any economist who agrees with something the government said is a charlatan?
That's one way to dismiss anyone who disagrees with you out of hand.
Government anti-trust laws are always motivated by inferior competitors?
I supposed this does follow from your insane beliefs. If there are no monopolies that are not government mandated then, of course, there can be no legitimate basis for anti-trust laws. A monopoly that doesn't exist can't illegitimately hurt a competitor. Of course, if monopolies can develop in free markets then it stands to reason that their is a rational basis for anti-trust law because a monopoly which does exist can illegitimately use it monopoly power against competitors.
It seems to me that you've got a series of circular arguments, and frankly, I haven't seen any arguments this bad since the Microsoft anti-trust days when people (often paid by Microsoft) told me "the best solution is always the one the market chooses" because "the market always chooses the best solution". Apparently, no other considerations were allowed.
I've already done so. At one point I would buy practically any Blizzard game that came out, now, I don't buy any. Blizzard just isn't Blizzard anymore. All the games they've produced since being bought by Vivendi seem to be designed to extract the maximum amount of money from their customers for the minimum amount of effort. After World of Warcraft, they've gone on the same list as Ubisoft and EA. Companies who I actively avoid buying games from, because their names are marks of overpriced and poor quality games.
It's worse than you think. Energy prices are in the hands of shadowy capital funs and petro-dictatorships. The (relatively) nice guys in the petro-dictatorship group are the petro-kleptocrats. The rest of them buy stability for their repressive regimes by funding and exporting terrorists. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran have been arming terrorists, giving them small piles of cash and pointing them at countries they don't like for decades. Often that country is the United States.
The invasion of Iraq is one of the biggest tragedies in this entire debacle. Ignoring what's actually been done to Iraq and it's people, the primary result (so far) of the invasion of Iraq was to give American money to the same people who funded 9/11 (by increasing oil prices and increasing America's usage of oil), and weaken the U.S. The Bush tax cuts were to stimulate the economy after 9/11 (they failed to do so), and combined with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, those policies have led directly to the current U.S. debt crisis. The invasion of Iraq has strengthened America's enemies and weakened America and it's allies.
How about:
<sarcasm>Wait, the market is providing the exact same solution as the government. How is that possible?</sarcasm>
Where am I equating unreliable with automatically wrong?
Right here:
If we go by your logical fallacies? Answer : Yes, and I should be prostrating myself in front of my deity of choice right this instant.
If you went by what the other poster said, you would not be "prostrating [yourself] in front of [your] deity of choice", you would be ignoring Richard Dawkins, there's a world of difference between those two positions. Your statement heavily implies that you should believe the opposite of what an unreliable source says. Unless you're saying that the only reason you're an Atheist is because of Richard Dawkins, in which case you left out the word "still".
christ you're an idiot, aren't you.
No, I'm the fool who's trying to educate an idiot.
if it's at a slightly slower pace than expected, doesn't that falsify the original hypothesis?
The hypothesis on how fast the planet will warm? Yes.
The hypothesis that the world is getting warmer? No.
Grover Norquist apparently owns the balls of most Republicans, and he says "no" to any tax increases. When he squeezes, they also say no.
How much are you willing to bet that 10K miles of gas will cost $900 10 years from now?
An increase in gas taxes won't get through congress thanks to Grover Norquist. As I understand it, roughly 95% of currently elected Republicans have signed Grover's pledge that they will never, ever, raise taxes. They are not even allowed to close tax loopholes that are being exploited to evade taxes unless they lower the general tax rate to compensate.
So increasing the gas tax can't happen unless Congress, the Senate and the Presidency are all controlled by the Democrats*.
* Technically that would people who are not committed to holding up Grover Norquist's pledge, but that's effectively the Democrats, for the time being.