Yes, it should be equivalent in the economic sense. The main differences between tarriffs and unreliable shipping would be seen in the political arena.
Sorry, hairyfeet, but he's use denialism correctly. When you choose to believe discredited arguments because you don't want the alternative to be true, you're living in denial.
The truth is that there's 14 different lines of evidence that indicate that climate change is occurring and 12 different lines of evidence that indicates that it's humans doing it. It's going to be extremely difficult for anyone to disprove all of those different lines of evidence. Too many people seize on one issue with one line of evidence and then proclaim because one issue exists that global warming no longer exists. They think if they can find one flaw in one line of evidence they can disprove all of the evidence in every line. In the public's mind that is possible, but in reality you would need to disprove nearly all of the separate lines of evidence. That's the reason why despite there by a full industry in denying that global warming, only a few of those people actually publish papers. And the ones who do publish articles that try to poke holes in AGW are usually proven to have made serious mistakes shortly after publication.
The opposition to AGW is driven by fears over what having to adapt to AGW will mean, not by skeptical evaluation of the evidence for and against AGW. Mostly because the evidence is overwhelmingly for AGW and anyone who's actually skeptical ends up agreeing that the theory is most likely true.
ndeed, an increase in CO2 will impact the third world. Particularly very dry places. They will become more fertile. More plants will grow. More plants is the same as more food.
That's just idiocy. Have you ever worked a garden? Do you own any plants? Because you should know that there's a very vital resource that plants need that is scarce in "very dry places", and in most of those areas global warming will mean less water not more. Good luck growing your crops in the middle of the desert with no irragation.
Now, what is the purpose of a green house?
To keep plants warm enough so that they don't freeze. You seem to be suffering from a serious case of Dunning-Kruger. Greenhouses do not use less earth and less water. Hydroponic farming uses less earth, but more water. You have to water plants in a green house or they die, just like everywhere else. Green houses will often use more water than other systems.
The fact that the action they are demanding is killing people today (that is knowledge, not a "ma happen") seems to hold no relevance.
That's because those death exist entirely in your imagination.
Your argument is identical to the "we don't know how it was done. so God done it" argument of the creationist crowd
Actually his argument is identical to every scientific argument ever proposed: "Here is a theory that explains the evidence, if you've got something better spit it out". The God of the Gaps argument is "we can't explain this scientifically right now, so it must be god magic". Real scientists understand that theories may not be perfect, but you use the ones that do the best job of explaining the observations.
changes that we know have very serious and negative consequences.
Actually, the changes will have minor negative consequences. The best economic predictions is that starting the changes now, would save at least trillions of dollars over the next century. Of course, if you're old and hate people, like say Rupert Murdoch, you just might be interested in putting it off as long as you can to screw over all the people you really hate, which is everyone.
We don't need to imagine what will happen if the green nuts get their will and we start putting food into our gas tanks.
Interestingly enough, bio-fuel can actually work if done correctly, however, it's been hijacked by American farmers who can get better prices for subsidized corn based bio-fuel than they can get selling the corn as food. It's not environmentalists who are pushing corn biofuel, it's farmers. The reason it doesn't seem rational to you is because you're not considering that it's in their best interest to get the most money they can for their product. It's the same issue with high-fructose corn syrup, it's heavily subsidized because the farm lobby has convinced the government to subsidize their income at everyone else's expense.
What you're saying doesn't sound wrong at all, it's not incompatible at all with what I'm saying. You're absolutely right that most people would end up paying higher prices for things that used to be made in China under that scenario, however, 80% of U.S. - China trade is American imports. I'm not sure if there is a point where one-sided free trade ceases to be a good thing, there's probably some economic papers looking into that issue. And eventually the conditions that allow the Chinese trade imbalance to occur will correct themselves (wages are rising at a rate of 10-12% per year in China).
Tarriffs have a big drawback, in that you risk starting a chain reaction where everyone else also raises their tarriff rates and you end up stifling international trade. That's why I was talking about the shipping being expensive and unreliable (and it will almost certainly become more expensive as oil prices rise), rather than imposing tarriffs. The question is whether the good results of increased manufacturing employment in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada would outweigh the downsides of higher prices. If trade were split 50-50 between North America and China the answer would almost certainly be no. But when it's split 80-20, the answer might be different.
No, you're not. Or are you going to come over to my house and clean for free? Because you're saying you deserve their hard work for free, so why don't I deserve your hard work for free?
On the flip side, you're claiming that if I clean your house, I should get paid every time it's clean again. That's intellectual property law. The author's work is writing the book, once that's done he does no additional work to create copies of that work whether or not it's covered by copyright. And since copyright is a limited time, all copyrights are going to expire. I don't see how you can justify calling copying a book on Tuesday immoral and theft, when the copyright expires on Wednesday and suddenly it's moral and not theft. Nothing real has changed.
You really can't stand that can you?
No, I can't stand assholes like you not only deciding that you deserve the fruits of their labor for free, but getting all uppity about it, like somehow you are the one in the right. That anyone who would call you out on your childishness is wrong.
Your argument would be more persuasive and less childish if you refrained from insulting people who disagree with you. I haven't said anything about deserving the fruits of anyone's labor. I've said that once you publish a story, the story enters the commons and is no longer owned by the author. This is true. The author now owns the copyright on the story, which is not the same as the story. The copyright is a limited duration monopoly on who can copy the work.
The truth is that it's not their work.
No, it is. They are the ones that created it. All you did was sit on your ass. If you want to put stuff out in the Public Domain, you are completely free to. But that would involve you actually getting off your ass and doing something.
You obviously don't understand the terminology here. By publishing a story, you lose ownership of it. Pure and simple. As the author you retain certain rights with respect to it, but you lose ownership of the story.
A labourer doesn't get paid every time someone walks on the bridge he helped build
So? He does get paid every time he builds a bridge.
So you agree that an author should get paid every time he writes a book and not every time someone reads a copy of it. So why are you being so churlish?
Demanding compensation over and over and over again is the real theft.
No, it's not. You are perfectly free to go without. But that never occurred to you, did it? Your childish little mind thought that you should have everything you want, doesn't it?
Of course it does, apparently it never occurred to you that I might actually by a paying customer of many different content providers. It never occurred to you that I can hold the view that a reasonable copyright duration is beneficial but that charging children to sing 70 year old songs is sociopathy of the worst sort. You jump to conclusions and insults because you apparently know nothing about copyright but feel entitled to spit out your ignorance and bile at anyone who dares disagree with your deep ignorance.
This middle men stealing from the public, pure and simple and they have the gall to call the people thieves.
No. Just no. You are demanding access to someone else's work, and you are acting quite upset when they ask you to compensate them for it. You're the one with the gall here, not them.
I am not demanding anything. The vast majority of authors gladly put their work in the commons, whether it's because they believe the copyright offers sufficient financial reward, because they want to share the work, or because they have some other reason to do so. However, when th
Increasing the marginal income tax rate by 3% for the super-rich would bring in an extra $100 billion per year. That's income tax only, and that hardly seems like "a pointless waste of time and effort".
Hmm. For most of us when we "invest $100" in Company X we are actually buying shares, and in most cases, none of the money you paid for your shares goes to the company. It goes the person who currently own the shares.
So company X makes an 80% profit. Goverment taxes the corporation at 37% (in theory, due to subsidies and tax loopholes). The company probably doesn't pay dividends, so you get nothing from it. However, the company is very profitable so the amount other people are offering for the stock increases to $150. You sell your stock and are taxed on $50 of the $150 you were paid. That is the capital gain. Corporate taxes don't matter at all in the normal course because the company has given you no money at all.
You might be thinking of dividends, which are an entirely different beast.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
The collateral. If he never sells the stock that backs the loan he never pays the taxes on it. He just gives the stock to the bank instead of paying the loan.
Which would decrease sales of the imported items and make locally produced goods more attractive, which would strengthen local farmers and unions which primarily benefits the middle class. There's a lot of knock-on effects to consider. If shipping from China were expensive and unreliable, it might cause the manufacturing sector in the U.S. and Mexico to boom, which might solve the unemployment crisis and the immigration crisis in one fell swoop.
I think you missed the point. The property taxes pay for things that allow the house to have a high value. For example, a house with no police service is worth much less (to most people) than one with police service because it will be difficult to keep anything of value in it. If you live in an area where fires are simply allowed to spread from house to house with no fire department to contain the fires, the house is going to worth less, possibly because it burned down before it was inherited.
The people saying he shouldn't have to pay taxes are either free loaders or ignoramuses. They either don't want to pay their fair share, or they don't understand what taxes pay for (or the value of what taxes pay for).
the retarded orphans will be thrown out into the streets along with all the mentally disturbed people because the taxpayers would rather fund military adventurism than social services and institutions for the mentally ill.
Yes, you are. You can't own ideas, you can't own words, you can't own music. You get all scrunched up inside because somebody is enjoying something without paying for it. You really can't stand that can you?
The truth is that it's not their work. It's our work. They don't own it*. They are granted a limited time monopoly on the right to copy it. We, the people, own it. So who's stealing from whom? Demanding compensation over and over and over again is the real theft. A labourer doesn't get paid every time someone walks on the bridge he helped build, yet, ASCAP wants a big fat check every time someone sings happy birthday.
It's time to let the myth of the hard working artist die. This middle men stealing from the public, pure and simple and they have the gall to call the people thieves.
* The own the materials the work is printed on, for example, but not the work itself. As soon as you publish, you lose ownership of the work.
From my experiences, many of them have fully adopted the righteous victim mentality. They honestly believe this stuff is true and will unrepentantly attack anyone who disagrees with them. The use of biased terms helps them feed into that myopic righteousness where anything they do is justified because somebody else did something first. Effectively, they seem to share the same siege mentality that the average "persecuted" cult member has and reasoning with them is equally futile. But that's just from my experience.
Actually, I remember reading that Netflix, iTunes and Steam had probably had reduced the piracy rate. Turns out if you make it easy and cheap to access your content people will pay you for it. Apparently, most people are willing to pay to have well curated access to content.
Strangely enough, the few people who won't don't matter because they either poor enough that they can't afford to pay, or are willing to spend their valuable time doing work someone else could be doing for cheaper (because of economies of scale, for example). The copyright war being waged by the RIAA and the MPAA is self-defeating.
The problem with people like you is that you are a control freak. Companies and authors are perfectly willing to give free copies of their stuff in the name of promoting it, but if someone copies it on their own, suddenly they're a criminal who deserves a life sentence in prison for unauthorised reading.
People like you need to learn that you can't control the entire world. You can't force scarcity onto a medium built to copy information. More often than not, piracy actually improves the revenues of the pirated. In today's world, popularity is power and power is money. The RIAA and their cronies are missing opportunities because they're blinded by copyrage.
Lying by omission is NOT lying, so long as all the statements are factually correct.
Sorry, if you intentionally leave out material information, it is deliberate deception and thus morally equivalent to lying.
After all, by your reasoning saying "It's perfectly safe" isn't lying as long as I'm only leaving out the words "as long as you don't fall into the pit of rabid wolves".
I doubt the network usage policy includes a clause "you agree not to discuss or complain about arbitrary tuition increases online". It looks like the "spam" was a notification that someone sent out about a petition against the University raising tuition, and being the good business people that they are, they figured the simplest solution was to prevent anyone on campus from being able to see the petition (and the site it was hosted on).
That goes well beyond "according to the network usage policy".
I don't know. It seems like a number of the Patents fall into the category of "Blindly obvious" and "overly broad". I mean really? They have a patent on using sentences on a screen on a thermostat?
It looks like Nest's real crime is making a inexpensive competitor to Honeywell's expensive proprietary technology. To someone who knows very little about the situation, it looks like Honeywell has been bilking it's higher end customers and using patents to generate monopoly rents. How come Honeywell doesn't have a product like the Nest thermostat? Most thermostats I've seen have really terrible interfaces.
You forgot to mention that the "land of the free" has 23% of the world's prison population along from it's 5% of the world population (60% of whom are in prison for non-violent crimes).
I'm sure they would, however, the Iraqis were unable to start a revolution against their armed government without American intervention. The Afghanis could not throw off the yoke of the Taliban without American intervention and Vietnam was a quagmire where nearly 60,000 American soldiers died and between 1 and 3 million Vietnamese.
None of them fit the bill for showing how a citizen army can overthrow an armed government with vastly superior forces. The revolutionaries in Libya almost lost and without NATO intervention likely would have. Likewise the government appears to be winning the Syrian conflict even with defections from the military.
America's supposed failures in each of the theatres you list has more to do with America unwillingness to pay for wars with little relevance to Americans than to real failures of the American forces. A situation which would be altogether different if the U.S. were torn again by revolution or civil war.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it should be equivalent in the economic sense. The main differences between tarriffs and unreliable shipping would be seen in the political arena.
Sorry, hairyfeet, but he's use denialism correctly. When you choose to believe discredited arguments because you don't want the alternative to be true, you're living in denial.
The truth is that there's 14 different lines of evidence that indicate that climate change is occurring and 12 different lines of evidence that indicates that it's humans doing it. It's going to be extremely difficult for anyone to disprove all of those different lines of evidence. Too many people seize on one issue with one line of evidence and then proclaim because one issue exists that global warming no longer exists. They think if they can find one flaw in one line of evidence they can disprove all of the evidence in every line. In the public's mind that is possible, but in reality you would need to disprove nearly all of the separate lines of evidence. That's the reason why despite there by a full industry in denying that global warming, only a few of those people actually publish papers. And the ones who do publish articles that try to poke holes in AGW are usually proven to have made serious mistakes shortly after publication.
The opposition to AGW is driven by fears over what having to adapt to AGW will mean, not by skeptical evaluation of the evidence for and against AGW. Mostly because the evidence is overwhelmingly for AGW and anyone who's actually skeptical ends up agreeing that the theory is most likely true.
ndeed, an increase in CO2 will impact the third world. Particularly very dry places. They will become more fertile. More plants will grow. More plants is the same as more food.
That's just idiocy. Have you ever worked a garden? Do you own any plants? Because you should know that there's a very vital resource that plants need that is scarce in "very dry places", and in most of those areas global warming will mean less water not more. Good luck growing your crops in the middle of the desert with no irragation.
Now, what is the purpose of a green house?
To keep plants warm enough so that they don't freeze. You seem to be suffering from a serious case of Dunning-Kruger. Greenhouses do not use less earth and less water. Hydroponic farming uses less earth, but more water. You have to water plants in a green house or they die, just like everywhere else. Green houses will often use more water than other systems.
The fact that the action they are demanding is killing people today (that is knowledge, not a "ma happen") seems to hold no relevance.
That's because those death exist entirely in your imagination.
Your argument is identical to the "we don't know how it was done. so God done it" argument of the creationist crowd
Actually his argument is identical to every scientific argument ever proposed: "Here is a theory that explains the evidence, if you've got something better spit it out". The God of the Gaps argument is "we can't explain this scientifically right now, so it must be god magic". Real scientists understand that theories may not be perfect, but you use the ones that do the best job of explaining the observations.
changes that we know have very serious and negative consequences.
Actually, the changes will have minor negative consequences. The best economic predictions is that starting the changes now, would save at least trillions of dollars over the next century. Of course, if you're old and hate people, like say Rupert Murdoch, you just might be interested in putting it off as long as you can to screw over all the people you really hate, which is everyone.
We don't need to imagine what will happen if the green nuts get their will and we start putting food into our gas tanks.
Interestingly enough, bio-fuel can actually work if done correctly, however, it's been hijacked by American farmers who can get better prices for subsidized corn based bio-fuel than they can get selling the corn as food. It's not environmentalists who are pushing corn biofuel, it's farmers. The reason it doesn't seem rational to you is because you're not considering that it's in their best interest to get the most money they can for their product. It's the same issue with high-fructose corn syrup, it's heavily subsidized because the farm lobby has convinced the government to subsidize their income at everyone else's expense.
What you're saying doesn't sound wrong at all, it's not incompatible at all with what I'm saying. You're absolutely right that most people would end up paying higher prices for things that used to be made in China under that scenario, however, 80% of U.S. - China trade is American imports. I'm not sure if there is a point where one-sided free trade ceases to be a good thing, there's probably some economic papers looking into that issue. And eventually the conditions that allow the Chinese trade imbalance to occur will correct themselves (wages are rising at a rate of 10-12% per year in China).
Tarriffs have a big drawback, in that you risk starting a chain reaction where everyone else also raises their tarriff rates and you end up stifling international trade. That's why I was talking about the shipping being expensive and unreliable (and it will almost certainly become more expensive as oil prices rise), rather than imposing tarriffs. The question is whether the good results of increased manufacturing employment in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada would outweigh the downsides of higher prices. If trade were split 50-50 between North America and China the answer would almost certainly be no. But when it's split 80-20, the answer might be different.
Yes, you are.
No, you're not. Or are you going to come over to my house and clean for free? Because you're saying you deserve their hard work for free, so why don't I deserve your hard work for free?
On the flip side, you're claiming that if I clean your house, I should get paid every time it's clean again. That's intellectual property law. The author's work is writing the book, once that's done he does no additional work to create copies of that work whether or not it's covered by copyright. And since copyright is a limited time, all copyrights are going to expire. I don't see how you can justify calling copying a book on Tuesday immoral and theft, when the copyright expires on Wednesday and suddenly it's moral and not theft. Nothing real has changed.
You really can't stand that can you?
No, I can't stand assholes like you not only deciding that you deserve the fruits of their labor for free, but getting all uppity about it, like somehow you are the one in the right. That anyone who would call you out on your childishness is wrong.
Your argument would be more persuasive and less childish if you refrained from insulting people who disagree with you. I haven't said anything about deserving the fruits of anyone's labor. I've said that once you publish a story, the story enters the commons and is no longer owned by the author. This is true. The author now owns the copyright on the story, which is not the same as the story. The copyright is a limited duration monopoly on who can copy the work.
The truth is that it's not their work.
No, it is. They are the ones that created it. All you did was sit on your ass. If you want to put stuff out in the Public Domain, you are completely free to. But that would involve you actually getting off your ass and doing something.
You obviously don't understand the terminology here. By publishing a story, you lose ownership of it. Pure and simple. As the author you retain certain rights with respect to it, but you lose ownership of the story.
A labourer doesn't get paid every time someone walks on the bridge he helped build
So? He does get paid every time he builds a bridge.
So you agree that an author should get paid every time he writes a book and not every time someone reads a copy of it. So why are you being so churlish?
Demanding compensation over and over and over again is the real theft.
No, it's not. You are perfectly free to go without. But that never occurred to you, did it? Your childish little mind thought that you should have everything you want, doesn't it?
Of course it does, apparently it never occurred to you that I might actually by a paying customer of many different content providers. It never occurred to you that I can hold the view that a reasonable copyright duration is beneficial but that charging children to sing 70 year old songs is sociopathy of the worst sort. You jump to conclusions and insults because you apparently know nothing about copyright but feel entitled to spit out your ignorance and bile at anyone who dares disagree with your deep ignorance.
This middle men stealing from the public, pure and simple and they have the gall to call the people thieves.
No. Just no. You are demanding access to someone else's work, and you are acting quite upset when they ask you to compensate them for it. You're the one with the gall here, not them.
I am not demanding anything. The vast majority of authors gladly put their work in the commons, whether it's because they believe the copyright offers sufficient financial reward, because they want to share the work, or because they have some other reason to do so. However, when th
Increasing the marginal income tax rate by 3% for the super-rich would bring in an extra $100 billion per year. That's income tax only, and that hardly seems like "a pointless waste of time and effort".
That's a pretty feeble argument. Reducing the perceived value of an item is not the same as taxing it.
Hmm. For most of us when we "invest $100" in Company X we are actually buying shares, and in most cases, none of the money you paid for your shares goes to the company. It goes the person who currently own the shares.
So company X makes an 80% profit.
Goverment taxes the corporation at 37% (in theory, due to subsidies and tax loopholes).
The company probably doesn't pay dividends, so you get nothing from it.
However, the company is very profitable so the amount other people are offering for the stock increases to $150.
You sell your stock and are taxed on $50 of the $150 you were paid. That is the capital gain.
Corporate taxes don't matter at all in the normal course because the company has given you no money at all.
You might be thinking of dividends, which are an entirely different beast.
The collateral. If he never sells the stock that backs the loan he never pays the taxes on it. He just gives the stock to the bank instead of paying the loan.
Which would decrease sales of the imported items and make locally produced goods more attractive, which would strengthen local farmers and unions which primarily benefits the middle class. There's a lot of knock-on effects to consider. If shipping from China were expensive and unreliable, it might cause the manufacturing sector in the U.S. and Mexico to boom, which might solve the unemployment crisis and the immigration crisis in one fell swoop.
Rich people don't benefit more from society than anyone else. Probably less if you think about it.
The wealth of the rich is increasing faster than the wealth of everyone else, so they are, by definition, benefiting more than everyone else.
I think you missed the point. The property taxes pay for things that allow the house to have a high value. For example, a house with no police service is worth much less (to most people) than one with police service because it will be difficult to keep anything of value in it. If you live in an area where fires are simply allowed to spread from house to house with no fire department to contain the fires, the house is going to worth less, possibly because it burned down before it was inherited.
The people saying he shouldn't have to pay taxes are either free loaders or ignoramuses. They either don't want to pay their fair share, or they don't understand what taxes pay for (or the value of what taxes pay for).
the retarded orphans will be thrown out into the streets along with all the mentally disturbed people because the taxpayers would rather fund military adventurism than social services and institutions for the mentally ill.
Isn't that the real problem?
Yes, you are. You can't own ideas, you can't own words, you can't own music. You get all scrunched up inside because somebody is enjoying something without paying for it. You really can't stand that can you?
The truth is that it's not their work. It's our work. They don't own it*. They are granted a limited time monopoly on the right to copy it. We, the people, own it. So who's stealing from whom? Demanding compensation over and over and over again is the real theft. A labourer doesn't get paid every time someone walks on the bridge he helped build, yet, ASCAP wants a big fat check every time someone sings happy birthday.
It's time to let the myth of the hard working artist die. This middle men stealing from the public, pure and simple and they have the gall to call the people thieves.
* The own the materials the work is printed on, for example, but not the work itself. As soon as you publish, you lose ownership of the work.
From my experiences, many of them have fully adopted the righteous victim mentality. They honestly believe this stuff is true and will unrepentantly attack anyone who disagrees with them. The use of biased terms helps them feed into that myopic righteousness where anything they do is justified because somebody else did something first. Effectively, they seem to share the same siege mentality that the average "persecuted" cult member has and reasoning with them is equally futile. But that's just from my experience.
Actually, I remember reading that Netflix, iTunes and Steam had probably had reduced the piracy rate. Turns out if you make it easy and cheap to access your content people will pay you for it. Apparently, most people are willing to pay to have well curated access to content.
Strangely enough, the few people who won't don't matter because they either poor enough that they can't afford to pay, or are willing to spend their valuable time doing work someone else could be doing for cheaper (because of economies of scale, for example). The copyright war being waged by the RIAA and the MPAA is self-defeating.
The problem with people like you is that you are a control freak. Companies and authors are perfectly willing to give free copies of their stuff in the name of promoting it, but if someone copies it on their own, suddenly they're a criminal who deserves a life sentence in prison for unauthorised reading.
People like you need to learn that you can't control the entire world. You can't force scarcity onto a medium built to copy information. More often than not, piracy actually improves the revenues of the pirated. In today's world, popularity is power and power is money. The RIAA and their cronies are missing opportunities because they're blinded by copyrage.
Lying by omission is NOT lying, so long as all the statements are factually correct.
Sorry, if you intentionally leave out material information, it is deliberate deception and thus morally equivalent to lying.
After all, by your reasoning saying "It's perfectly safe" isn't lying as long as I'm only leaving out the words "as long as you don't fall into the pit of rabid wolves".
I doubt the network usage policy includes a clause "you agree not to discuss or complain about arbitrary tuition increases online". It looks like the "spam" was a notification that someone sent out about a petition against the University raising tuition, and being the good business people that they are, they figured the simplest solution was to prevent anyone on campus from being able to see the petition (and the site it was hosted on).
That goes well beyond "according to the network usage policy".
I don't know. It seems like a number of the Patents fall into the category of "Blindly obvious" and "overly broad". I mean really? They have a patent on using sentences on a screen on a thermostat?
It looks like Nest's real crime is making a inexpensive competitor to Honeywell's expensive proprietary technology. To someone who knows very little about the situation, it looks like Honeywell has been bilking it's higher end customers and using patents to generate monopoly rents. How come Honeywell doesn't have a product like the Nest thermostat? Most thermostats I've seen have really terrible interfaces.
You forgot to mention that the "land of the free" has 23% of the world's prison population along from it's 5% of the world population (60% of whom are in prison for non-violent crimes).
"Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby." - Penn Jillette
I'm sure they would, however, the Iraqis were unable to start a revolution against their armed government without American intervention. The Afghanis could not throw off the yoke of the Taliban without American intervention and Vietnam was a quagmire where nearly 60,000 American soldiers died and between 1 and 3 million Vietnamese.
None of them fit the bill for showing how a citizen army can overthrow an armed government with vastly superior forces. The revolutionaries in Libya almost lost and without NATO intervention likely would have. Likewise the government appears to be winning the Syrian conflict even with defections from the military.
America's supposed failures in each of the theatres you list has more to do with America unwillingness to pay for wars with little relevance to Americans than to real failures of the American forces. A situation which would be altogether different if the U.S. were torn again by revolution or civil war.
That was exactly the point that that was supposed to convey.