France, Germany, Scandanavia and even the UK are all much more "socialistic" than the US (as far as the government supporting those who fail in education/employment) and still have consistently better education systems and higher test scores than the US.
I've been to Hawaii and to Maine. Everybody speaks the same language, thinks the same way, learns the same things in school, drives the same cars, listens to the same music, watches the same films, eats at the same McDonalds, and shops at the same Wal-Mart.
Roundtrip airfare New York to Paris: $500 (expedia, departing Dec 6 returning Dec 13) Five nights in a Paris youth hostel: $150 (see hostels.com) Food: Even if you're pretty extravagant you can get by on $30 a day. Other: The Louvre is about $12, other museums generally cheaper, but say $12 per day. $860 is not particularly expensive for most Americans, and certainly doesn't require saving up all year.
I've travelled pretty extensively on both sides of the Atlantic and I've actually found travel in the US to be more expensive. There are very few youth hostels or any accommodation in city centers for less than $100 a night. Motels are cheaper but generally require a taxi ride out of the city. Another non-negligible expense was freqently having to pay $10 for Starbucks wifi and a token purchase since there are far fewer internet cafes in most of the US. Flights within the US are also substantially more expensive than Easyjet/Ryanair (though strangely enough Amtrak and Greyhound are cheaper per km travelled than the European equivalents). Food is much cheaper in the US but not enough to offset the increased cost of accommodation.
Obviously it is more convenient for Americans to travel in the US, but I don't see any justification for your statement that travel in Europe is prohibitively more expensive.
they don't have proper roads and cable tv and microwaves and cell phones.
In Tanzania, where I live, at least in urban areas a large proportion of the population has cell phones. The $20 for a prepaid phone is large (about half the monthly minimum wage) but manageable expense. There is essentially no landline phone system so these are essentially the only means of communication available to most people, and are common even in areas with only unreliable electricy and little other infrastructure. IMHO mobile phones have greatly increased the standard of living of many, as well as facilitating commerce, medical care, etc.
I'm studying at university in the UK, and there are still occasional situations when one needs to use a cheque. I had to pay my tuition bill with a cheque (since the university is not willing to pay the transaction fees involved in debit card or bank transfer payments) and was paid by cheque when I sold an old computer to a friend, but aside from such rare situations I never use cheques. My parents live in the US and tell me they hardly ever use cheques either, their salaries are deposited into their bank accounts and they pay their bills with their bank's online bill-pay feature. Not sure what all the USians here are talking about, cheques seem to be dead almost everywhere.
with a max of about 300 before they were taken over
Some institutions have managed to last substantially longer. For instance, many of the older colleges at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were originally founded to pray for their founders, and still say a prayer for them every night before dinner, as much as 800 years later. If you're not picky about the prayer bit, there are institutions and cities (e.g. Alexandria) carrying their founder's name thousands of years later.
Most people make less than the mean income (since a few people make a whole lot more than the mean income and this pulls the mean up). Therefore, if taxes were efficiently and fairly allocated to services which benefited everybody equally, most people would profit (even ignoring the economies of scale gained by grouping everybody's needs together). Of course, there's a lot of inefficiency and unfairness in any government, but I'd still be willing to bet that the fraction of his taxes that goes to the wifi is substantially less than what it would cost him if the government didn't provide it.
Openoffice.org2 now compiles natively on amd64. I have a pure 64-bit version running right now, no 32bit libraries required. And why on earth would you want to pollute a nice browser like firefox with flash and acroread?
If you have every used wine, you know that it is nowhere close to complete win32 compatability. Relatively few applications run correctly at all, and none run at native speed. Wine is also a pain to set up (by windows/mac standards) and porting isn't going to change that. There will be no need for Microsoft to try to kill wine.
He was talking about Microsoft buying off the Bush DoJ. The Microsoft folks are actually pretty liberal too, but they bought of both the potential Gore DoJ and the potential Bush DoJ before the 2000 election to ensure that they'd get no more than a slap on the wrist no matter what.
Oil produces negative externalities in the form of pollution. This is a textbook case of market failure, the market overprovides oil because it takes into account on the private cost of oil consumption and not the societal cost. The simplest solution is to tax oil at a rate sufficient to clean up pollution or build non-polluting transport, as Europe does.
The free market is a very useful tool for serving the public good, but there are some things it can't sort out.
The Nuclear Option would have applied only to judicial nominees. If it had succeeded, the Democrats could simply have filibustered all (non-essential) legislative issues, preventing the Republicans from exercising too much power.
I am entirely capable of writing a script, but I prefer to point and grunt. I guess that makes me naive for using tools to make my life easier. Silly me:( Which is easier, telling somebody would you want them to do, or trying to explain it to them with points, gestures, and grunts? Of course, the trouble with telling them what to do is that you have to know the language, but you said you already knew that, so I doubt you are really making your life easier.
Congratulations, over 2000 characters of stating the obvious. Yes, people are stupid. Yes, there is a lot of market failure and collusion in the US that the government is bribed not to fix. How does this hurt you? You don't buy products from winzip or intel or microsoft or dell, so what do you care if they collude? The only way the mass of stupidity can hurt you is through the stupid corporate-owned government they've elected, but you can just move to another country.
I really don't understand why Slashdotters get so worked up about the market share of Linux or Firefox or whatever. We will be free to use and improve good tools no matter what crap other people are using, so why worry about them?
The * is interpreted by the shell (as `ls` or similar) before being sent to rm. Therefore the command amounted to "rm -f -r bin boot dev etc home lib...". This recursively removed every other file in/, but the "-r" had already been interpreted as an option rather than a file to be removed, and so was not removed. It was presumably the only writable file left on the system.
The x86 Macs will be able to dual-boot Windows, so you can buy Apple hardware and still play your games. Apple makes money on the hardware and doesn't really care whether you use their OS on it or not.
You ignored his first point, which was that some regulations are needed to prevent corporations/powerful people from exploiting average people (by polluting their water, or enslaving them, etc). Once you create a government that can regulate the corporations/powerful people and stop them from doing this, the corporations/powerful people turn around and try to use the government itself as a tool to exploit the average people, but this slows them down and even with the government's they are rarely able to exploit people as well as they could if no government regulations existed.
An unfortunate truth of human affairs in general and politics in particular is that once power is granted, it is nearly impossible to rescind.
The US government gave up the power to prohibit the consumption of alcohol by adults. It gave up the power to restrict voting on the basis of sex, race, or age over 18. It gave up the power to raise congressmen's salaries without an intervening election. The Bill of Rights itself is a list of powers the US government gave up (though it did so without ever really trying to exercise those powers). Outside the US examples are even starker. The Monarch of the UK, over the course of several centuries, gave up every one of his/her powers, some to Parliament (e.g. the right to create legislation) and some to nobody (e.g. the right to condemn people to death). Through glasnost and perestroika, the government of the USSR gave up many of it's powers over its citizens social and economic freedoms.
Governments do give up their powers, and have difficulty holding on to a power for very long without support from the people.
The grandparent was referring to the fact that the US government watches and restricts you from cradle to grave without actually feeding or clothing you along the way. Worst of both worlds, really, but the voting public seems to get a kick out of having their freedoms taken away without getting any benefits in return.
This is in contrast to the European (especially Scandanavian) "cradle to grave" model where the government gives you the right to free necessities in addition to allowing you more freedom with respect to speech, drugs, or anything except money. You are correct that the US has almost none of this sort of "cradle to grave" care, and could probably use more.
Where in Tanzania do you live, exactly? I get the impression that there's a giant gap between urban and rural life in terms of access to technology and integration in the economy. Is this true in Kenya and Tanzania? I live in Arusha, a city of around 250,000 people (though counts vary). The gap between urban and rural areas is indeed large.
In urban areas, mobile phones are ubiquitous (housemaids and night watchmen paid $50 a month still have phones), satellite TV and internet are available, and electricity and running water are widely available (although rather unreliable). In the four years since I moved here, Arusha has gained its first supermarket, fast food restaurant, and small shopping mall, and rumour has it there will soon be a proper cinema (the current cinema shows pirate VCDs, mostly bollywood).
In rural areas, there isn't enough electricity to refrigerate vaccinations, much less run televisions. In many areas there is essentially no cash economy, with people simply subsisting on whatever food they can grow.
I'm not very familiar with Kenya, but I'm told that the cash economy has penetrated rural areas more than in Tanzania, and urban areas are also more developed (Nairobi has hypermarkets, large shopping malls, and several multi-screen cinemas). So yes, there is a giant gap between urban and rural life in East Africa.
I live in Tanzania, just south of the Kenyan border, but from frequent visits to Kenya it appears to me that the situation with technology is even more advanced there. Here, the GSM mobile phone network is already very developed, better in many ways than the US one (better rates, no contracts/lock-in). Mobile phone ownership is also surprisingly widespread, even making less than 25 cents an hour have mobile phones. Those who can't afford a phone can purchase a simcard and use it to send/receive SMS messages from a public phone. I would wager that every one of those 54 students' families owns at least one mobile phone. Spending aid funds on mobile phones is unnecessary because for the most part they're already there.
About four years ago I moved from a public school in the US to an international school in Tanzania. I found students learned a lot more and worked a lot harder at the international school than they had where I lived in the US. While this was partially due to self-selection, the main factor was the rigorous, externally-graded exams (IGCSE and IB) taken every few years in the international system. Exams covered everything one learned in the years leading up to the exam, in every subject (there were even art and music composition exams). This kept students and teachers accountable and required them to cover a full range of material, or face being held back or fired.
In the US, I observed very little accountability, with students graduating who could hardly read and teachers never assigning or grading any homework. Aside from the easy and poorly written SAT tests and the slightly better but rarely used AP tests, there was no externally assessment of students, and teachers could therefore inflate grades enormously with no negative consequences. Universities are apparenlty forced to judge students on ridiculous things like extracurriculars due to lack of accurate academic measurements. It seems to me that the system could be greatly improved by requiring all students to take difficult, comprehensive, externally-graded exams.
Slashdot Mirror
France, Germany, Scandanavia and even the UK are all much more "socialistic" than the US (as far as the government supporting those who fail in education/employment) and still have consistently better education systems and higher test scores than the US.
I've been to Hawaii and to Maine. Everybody speaks the same language, thinks the same way, learns the same things in school, drives the same cars, listens to the same music, watches the same films, eats at the same McDonalds, and shops at the same Wal-Mart.
Roundtrip airfare New York to Paris: $500 (expedia, departing Dec 6 returning Dec 13)
Five nights in a Paris youth hostel: $150 (see hostels.com)
Food: Even if you're pretty extravagant you can get by on $30 a day.
Other: The Louvre is about $12, other museums generally cheaper, but say $12 per day.
$860 is not particularly expensive for most Americans, and certainly doesn't require saving up all year.
I've travelled pretty extensively on both sides of the Atlantic and I've actually found travel in the US to be more expensive. There are very few youth hostels or any accommodation in city centers for less than $100 a night. Motels are cheaper but generally require a taxi ride out of the city. Another non-negligible expense was freqently having to pay $10 for Starbucks wifi and a token purchase since there are far fewer internet cafes in most of the US. Flights within the US are also substantially more expensive than Easyjet/Ryanair (though strangely enough Amtrak and Greyhound are cheaper per km travelled than the European equivalents). Food is much cheaper in the US but not enough to offset the increased cost of accommodation.
Obviously it is more convenient for Americans to travel in the US, but I don't see any justification for your statement that travel in Europe is prohibitively more expensive.
they don't have proper roads and cable tv and microwaves and cell phones.
In Tanzania, where I live, at least in urban areas a large proportion of the population has cell phones. The $20 for a prepaid phone is large (about half the monthly minimum wage) but manageable expense. There is essentially no landline phone system so these are essentially the only means of communication available to most people, and are common even in areas with only unreliable electricy and little other infrastructure. IMHO mobile phones have greatly increased the standard of living of many, as well as facilitating commerce, medical care, etc.
I'm studying at university in the UK, and there are still occasional situations when one needs to use a cheque. I had to pay my tuition bill with a cheque (since the university is not willing to pay the transaction fees involved in debit card or bank transfer payments) and was paid by cheque when I sold an old computer to a friend, but aside from such rare situations I never use cheques. My parents live in the US and tell me they hardly ever use cheques either, their salaries are deposited into their bank accounts and they pay their bills with their bank's online bill-pay feature. Not sure what all the USians here are talking about, cheques seem to be dead almost everywhere.
with a max of about 300 before they were taken over
Some institutions have managed to last substantially longer. For instance, many of the older colleges at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were originally founded to pray for their founders, and still say a prayer for them every night before dinner, as much as 800 years later. If you're not picky about the prayer bit, there are institutions and cities (e.g. Alexandria) carrying their founder's name thousands of years later.
Don't you have to walk over to it to put the disk/tape in anyway?
Most people make less than the mean income (since a few people make a whole lot more than the mean income and this pulls the mean up). Therefore, if taxes were efficiently and fairly allocated to services which benefited everybody equally, most people would profit (even ignoring the economies of scale gained by grouping everybody's needs together). Of course, there's a lot of inefficiency and unfairness in any government, but I'd still be willing to bet that the fraction of his taxes that goes to the wifi is substantially less than what it would cost him if the government didn't provide it.
Openoffice.org2 now compiles natively on amd64. I have a pure 64-bit version running right now, no 32bit libraries required. And why on earth would you want to pollute a nice browser like firefox with flash and acroread?
If you have every used wine, you know that it is nowhere close to complete win32 compatability. Relatively few applications run correctly at all, and none run at native speed. Wine is also a pain to set up (by windows/mac standards) and porting isn't going to change that. There will be no need for Microsoft to try to kill wine.
- Vista Secure Edition
http://www.openbsd.org/
- Vista Compact Edition
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
- Vista Instant Edition
http://www.knoppix.org/
- Vista Grandmother Edition
http://www.apple.com/
- Vista Open Edition
http://www.debian.org/
He was talking about Microsoft buying off the Bush DoJ. The Microsoft folks are actually pretty liberal too, but they bought of both the potential Gore DoJ and the potential Bush DoJ before the 2000 election to ensure that they'd get no more than a slap on the wrist no matter what.
Oil produces negative externalities in the form of pollution. This is a textbook case of market failure, the market overprovides oil because it takes into account on the private cost of oil consumption and not the societal cost. The simplest solution is to tax oil at a rate sufficient to clean up pollution or build non-polluting transport, as Europe does.
The free market is a very useful tool for serving the public good, but there are some things it can't sort out.
The Nuclear Option would have applied only to judicial nominees. If it had succeeded, the Democrats could simply have filibustered all (non-essential) legislative issues, preventing the Republicans from exercising too much power.
I am entirely capable of writing a script, but I prefer to point and grunt. I guess that makes me naive for using tools to make my life easier. Silly me :(
Which is easier, telling somebody would you want them to do, or trying to explain it to them with points, gestures, and grunts? Of course, the trouble with telling them what to do is that you have to know the language, but you said you already knew that, so I doubt you are really making your life easier.
Congratulations, over 2000 characters of stating the obvious. Yes, people are stupid. Yes, there is a lot of market failure and collusion in the US that the government is bribed not to fix. How does this hurt you? You don't buy products from winzip or intel or microsoft or dell, so what do you care if they collude? The only way the mass of stupidity can hurt you is through the stupid corporate-owned government they've elected, but you can just move to another country.
I really don't understand why Slashdotters get so worked up about the market share of Linux or Firefox or whatever. We will be free to use and improve good tools no matter what crap other people are using, so why worry about them?
Gabber is taken... they might call it Google Buzz or similar.
The * is interpreted by the shell (as `ls` or similar) before being sent to rm. Therefore the command amounted to "rm -f -r bin boot dev etc home lib ...". This recursively removed every other file in /, but the "-r" had already been interpreted as an option rather than a file to be removed, and so was not removed. It was presumably the only writable file left on the system.
The x86 Macs will be able to dual-boot Windows, so you can buy Apple hardware and still play your games. Apple makes money on the hardware and doesn't really care whether you use their OS on it or not.
You ignored his first point, which was that some regulations are needed to prevent corporations/powerful people from exploiting average people (by polluting their water, or enslaving them, etc). Once you create a government that can regulate the corporations/powerful people and stop them from doing this, the corporations/powerful people turn around and try to use the government itself as a tool to exploit the average people, but this slows them down and even with the government's they are rarely able to exploit people as well as they could if no government regulations existed.
An unfortunate truth of human affairs in general and politics in particular is that once power is granted, it is nearly impossible to rescind.
The US government gave up the power to prohibit the consumption of alcohol by adults. It gave up the power to restrict voting on the basis of sex, race, or age over 18. It gave up the power to raise congressmen's salaries without an intervening election. The Bill of Rights itself is a list of powers the US government gave up (though it did so without ever really trying to exercise those powers). Outside the US examples are even starker. The Monarch of the UK, over the course of several centuries, gave up every one of his/her powers, some to Parliament (e.g. the right to create legislation) and some to nobody (e.g. the right to condemn people to death). Through glasnost and perestroika, the government of the USSR gave up many of it's powers over its citizens social and economic freedoms.
Governments do give up their powers, and have difficulty holding on to a power for very long without support from the people.
The grandparent was referring to the fact that the US government watches and restricts you from cradle to grave without actually feeding or clothing you along the way. Worst of both worlds, really, but the voting public seems to get a kick out of having their freedoms taken away without getting any benefits in return.
This is in contrast to the European (especially Scandanavian) "cradle to grave" model where the government gives you the right to free necessities in addition to allowing you more freedom with respect to speech, drugs, or anything except money. You are correct that the US has almost none of this sort of "cradle to grave" care, and could probably use more.
Where in Tanzania do you live, exactly? I get the impression that there's a giant gap between urban and rural life in terms of access to technology and integration in the economy. Is this true in Kenya and Tanzania?
I live in Arusha, a city of around 250,000 people (though counts vary). The gap between urban and rural areas is indeed large.
In urban areas, mobile phones are ubiquitous (housemaids and night watchmen paid $50 a month still have phones), satellite TV and internet are available, and electricity and running water are widely available (although rather unreliable). In the four years since I moved here, Arusha has gained its first supermarket, fast food restaurant, and small shopping mall, and rumour has it there will soon be a proper cinema (the current cinema shows pirate VCDs, mostly bollywood).
In rural areas, there isn't enough electricity to refrigerate vaccinations, much less run televisions. In many areas there is essentially no cash economy, with people simply subsisting on whatever food they can grow.
I'm not very familiar with Kenya, but I'm told that the cash economy has penetrated rural areas more than in Tanzania, and urban areas are also more developed (Nairobi has hypermarkets, large shopping malls, and several multi-screen cinemas). So yes, there is a giant gap between urban and rural life in East Africa.
I live in Tanzania, just south of the Kenyan border, but from frequent visits to Kenya it appears to me that the situation with technology is even more advanced there. Here, the GSM mobile phone network is already very developed, better in many ways than the US one (better rates, no contracts/lock-in). Mobile phone ownership is also surprisingly widespread, even making less than 25 cents an hour have mobile phones. Those who can't afford a phone can purchase a simcard and use it to send/receive SMS messages from a public phone. I would wager that every one of those 54 students' families owns at least one mobile phone. Spending aid funds on mobile phones is unnecessary because for the most part they're already there.
About four years ago I moved from a public school in the US to an international school in Tanzania. I found students learned a lot more and worked a lot harder at the international school than they had where I lived in the US. While this was partially due to self-selection, the main factor was the rigorous, externally-graded exams (IGCSE and IB) taken every few years in the international system. Exams covered everything one learned in the years leading up to the exam, in every subject (there were even art and music composition exams). This kept students and teachers accountable and required them to cover a full range of material, or face being held back or fired.
In the US, I observed very little accountability, with students graduating who could hardly read and teachers never assigning or grading any homework. Aside from the easy and poorly written SAT tests and the slightly better but rarely used AP tests, there was no externally assessment of students, and teachers could therefore inflate grades enormously with no negative consequences. Universities are apparenlty forced to judge students on ridiculous things like extracurriculars due to lack of accurate academic measurements. It seems to me that the system could be greatly improved by requiring all students to take difficult, comprehensive, externally-graded exams.