i notice you have a reagan signature. maybe you would enjoy his numerous speeches about the virtuous god-fearing mujahideen freedom fighters, and their battle against the godless communist aggressors in the 1980s? because there are a large number of such speeches. they are at the reagan archives, you can google them.
Your post seems to be replying to its grandparent rather than its parent, so I'll assume you're saying that Reagan's speeches are incompatible with the former's statement about "Islam shaping up to be a modern day Nazi movement." The statement needs to distinguish between Islam and Islamism, true, but "this ideology is shaping up to be bad in general" does not contradict "these particular people who hold that ideology are good."
Don't forget the picture of Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld (one of the architects of the 2003 Iraq invasion and then special envoy of Reagan) shaking hands in 1983.
Funny, I could swear I've seen pictures of FDR sitting next to Mr. Gulag himself, Josef Stalin. If you're already in a conflict with scumbag X, and slightly-less-scummy-guy Y starts fighting him too, you might have to hold your nose and help Y in the short term.
I was interested when I read this story elsewhere, but what is it doing on Slashdot? Our school lunch experiences are more along these lines. That or getting our lunch money stolen by brawnier members of the student body.
Read a theory a while ago (by some psychologist whose name I wish I could recall so I could give proper credit) that stated that fear of things like radiation, chemicals, and germs stems from the same underlying source as the older fear of witchcraft -- people tend to be more afraid of something they can't understand and/or can't see, compared to things which are objectively more dangerous but which they can see and comprehend. Hence things like the fear and revulsion generated by poison gas usage in WW1, even though you were many times more likely to be killed by bullets or shells. In this case of the article, people hear "radiation" and react viscerally without any further thought.
Saw it after I posted, and was going to reply after dinner, but since you did me the courtesy of replying to me directly...:)
If the carriers can't be bothered to buld/can't make a profit from building the necessary infrastructure, then permit the farmers themselves to do it.
Many farmers put up towers already for a wide variety of reasons, such as wind generators, and agricultural fuel pumps/water towers.
Allowing them to put a simple mesh extender/repeater up there so that they can help service their neighbors, with the subsidy going to the telecom upstream to not throttle the exit pipes, and the money stays where you want it to stay, and the people impacted pay for the infrastructure themselves.
Sounds like a very good idea to me, in particular your mentioning (in the other post) about freeing up spectrum for it. I expect there'd be a fair amount of red tape and lawyering involved, unfortunately. What's needed here is a spectrum equivalent of the Homesteading Act -- except that instead of building or farming to establish ownership of land, you'd need to provide access to establish ownership of spectrum. Give whoever currently owns it a certain period to start providing access on that spectrum in that area, and if they fail to do so, they forfeit it.
Of course, that's awefully close to filthy communism..... once a functional mesh network servicing a large pool of users springs up, rest assured somebody would rush in to extract tolls on the thing.
That's how shit like that works.
If the farmers who put up the towers want to recoup their investment, that's capitalism, and I'm all for that.
Of course. Because Internet Connectivity is the same thing has having a Domino's store nearby.
They are both luxuries, yes. Hard as it is for those of us in the tech world to grasp, there are quite a few people who can get along just fine without a network connection. For that matter, we're not talking about connectivity vs. lack of it, we're talking about broadband vs. dialup/satellite. Actually, the original article was about a lack of 3G coverage. These aren't areas where you're isolated from the world because you can't use email or instant messaging, these are areas where you can't watch YouTube on your cell phone. Call me hard-hearted if you like, but that doesn't come close to justifying intervention in the market, by my standards.
You are, of course, right when you say that the market doesn't make the decision I want it to make. Duh. It makes the decisions that the companies who make up the market want to make. Which, in turn, are predicated on the needs and desires of customers in said market.
Now that we have the Captain Obvious commentary out of the way, why don't we focus on the actual problem?
Your assertion was that the free market didn't "fix" the situation. My point was that just because you think something is a problem, doesn't mean that it is a problem that requires fixing.
Namely, that Internet connectivity these days is a lot more like electricity and roads: a fundamental infrastructure whose cost is far outweighed by the network effect it promotes. At that point, the question of ROI trumps all, and arguing that the market knows best is a ridiculously short-sighted answer.
That's your as-yet-unproven assertion. Failing to see the same things that you do does not qualify as "short-sighted" unless those things are actually there.
Finally, your argument that people choose to live there means they ought to just suck it up... even ignoring the incredible amount of Not-My-Problem attitude that this displays,
As I pointed out, everyone has costs that they have to "suck up", as well as benefits, based on where they live. Those people living someplace should bear those costs as well as reaping those benefits. There's already far too much subsidizing of some areas at the expense of others. We should be rolling such things back, not adding more.
it also ignores the fact that moving has significant costs attached to it: emotional costs of rebuilding your social life, monetary costs of actually moving, and even the requirement of actually finding and having a job in the new area before moving. Those are all real costs that are easy to quantify for someone who is pondering moving.
Putting aside the idea that people in urban areas should be subsidizing wireless broadband for people in rural (or in many cases, near-wilderness) areas in order to spare those folks the costs of moving out of such places, which i absolutely reject, I think you have a major misconception about who lives in these areas. Although I suppose it's theoretically possible, I highly doubt there is anyone living out in the middle of the Mojave, miles away from anybody else, due to being too poor to move to the city; anyone without the ability (and requisite income) to regularly visit a population center for supplies is going to die. Anyone else would save money by moving into town. In Nevada, at least (where I'm at, hence my example bias), the major source of rural employment is mining, whose average salary is almost double the overall average for the state. They don't need other people subsidizing them. Another reason people live in those regions is to get away from the city. Well, if the most important things to you are clean air, privacy, elbow room, being able to see the stars at night, and being able to fire off your guns without anyone caring, go for it. Just be prepared for poor wireless coverage, and don't ask other people to pay for it.
It is the free market at work. Not enough people out there to justify building the infrastructure. Less people, less money.
There might not be enough people to justify it for the profit motives of those companies, but those motives are by nature selfish and don't give a damn about the larger socioeconomic picture. What might those few people be able to contribute to society if they actually enjoyed the same connectedness as their urban comrades?
And how much money might be sunk into providing higher-capacity connectivity to those people, only to find that that they don't contribute anything, tovarisch?
Like the GP said, the free market has tunnel vision and doesn't fix shit.
Rather, it doesn't make the decisions you want it to make. The people living there choose to do so, knowing the various trade-offs that come with that. They have the pluses of better air quality and less noise, and the minuses of crappy connectivity and more-expensive groceries. I'm sure pizza delivery service sucks out there, too. Going to force Dominos to open stores out in those parts of Nevada where population density drops below half a person per square mile?
You cannot do anything without having some effect on interstate commerce.
Entropy of whole universe must increase with time, so everything is connected including interstate commerce and your poop.
It's even worse than that, actually. In Wickard vs. Filburn, the case which started this nonsense back in 1942, doing a thing which isn't interstate commerce can be considered interstate commerce because if you didn't do that thing you might have engaged in interstate commerce instead. So not only is it interstate commerce if you poop, it's also interstate commerce if you hold it in and don't poop.
I can't remember the exact quote, nor who it was that said it, but it goes something like this:
Everything he said was accurate, and not a word of it was true.
Do we really want random doctors performing do-it-yourself stem cell treatments on the fly with no oversight?
Whether "we" want this or not, isn't the issue that was raised. The question was "is this really interstate commerce?" Those who don't want constraints on the scope of Congress' regulatory power should be honest about it, propose an amendment to the Constitution that says "Congress shall have the power to regulate whatever the fuck it wants to regulate", and get it passed. Put an end to the FDR-spawned charade of callings things interstate commerce which, by any non-silly definition, aren't. I doubt that even the people who use that argument actually believe it, for the most part.
The fact that you consider the question "just deflecting" illustrates the point: you think it's a good idea for Congress to do this, so you apparently don't think it's necessary to define where the power for them to do so is enumerated in the Constitution. All the more reason to pass something like the Enumerated Powers Act.
...but it's not a press freedom issue just because some journalists get swept up in it.
...and why isn't it?
Because the goal of the action is something other than silencing the journalists. Press freedom is violated when something bad is done to someone because they are a journalist, not when something is done to someone who merely happens to be a journalist. If I'm a news cameraman covering a story, and someone takes my camera to stop me from covering it, that's a violation of press freedom. If they take it because it's valuable and they want to sell it, it's not. That isn't to say it's not a bad thing, it just doesn't have anything to do with journalism qua journalism. To use the report's complaint about India, if Kashmiri separatists round up a bunch of people, one of whom is a reporter, and machinegun them, that's an atrocity, but it has nothing to do with press freedom. If another reporter comes along, takes pictures, and they shoot him to stop him from getting the story out, that is a press freedom issue.
I'm not going to claim that the US is perfect with regards to the press, but most of RSF's complaints seem questionable to me -- in particular, those regarding covering the Occupy movement. If you put yourself in the middle of a crowd control situation, you risk being lumped in with the crowd, even if you're just covering it, especially since there were a fair number of people who were part of the protest movement while operating in a quasi-journalist mode as well (taking pics/vids to post, etc). Whether you agree with (say) the police clearing out a park where the protestors are camped, someone who is ordered to get out and doesn't, is going to get arrested, whether they're a report or not. I'm not condoning police getting out of control, but it's not a press freedom issue just because some journalists get swept up in it.
There are a few more things like that, regarding countries other than the United States, in the full report. For example, India gets dinged because "journalists were exposed to violence stemming from the persistent conflicts in the states of Chhattisgarh and Jammu and Kashmir." Umm, if you go into a war zone, you run the risk of being "exposed to violence." It's as if RSF expects journalists to be surrounded by some sort of holy aura whenever they go into chaotic or even deadly situations. Don't get me wrong, I have great admiration for the reporters brave enough to cover a war, but it's only a violation of press freedom if they get targeted because they're journalists.
What exactly is Google trying to accomplish with their "real name" policy, anyway? I don't see what they hope to gain that's even worth the trouble of enforcing it, not even considering the ill will they're piling up.
I don't think I ever claimed people who disagreed with me must be stupid or evil. I brought up Cheney because it seemed you had implied I thought people who disagreed with me were stupid. Cheney isn't. Probably the smartest guy I ever met is on the conservative end of the spectrum, and he seemed like a nice guy to me.
Good that you're able to recognize that. However, it doesn't square with your previous statement that Bush's policies show him to be an idiot. (I definitely don't agree that Cheney is evil, at least any more so than the average politician, but I'm trying to to stay on the topic of intelligence as much as possible). I'll narrow things down to the Iraq War, since that's the most controversial. By any standard that judged Obama to be intelligent, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Bolton, and Rumsfeld would have to be as well. They all agreed with the policy and the arguments given for it. So did quite a few similarly-intelligent leaders outside the US. If the policy or the reasons for it brand Bush as stupid, wouldn't they all have to be stupid and/or evil? What about, say, (then) President Aleksander Kwaniewski of Poland (incidentally, Distinguished Scholar at Georgetown U)? And unless all of them are stupid or evil, how does it follow that Bush is?
All that notwithstanding, it is clear to me that there is one end of the liberal/conservative spectrum that is rabidly anti-intellectual, and one that isn't.
In my experience, people on the right are much more likely to have read the important books of the left, than vice-versa. Your average conservative is much more likely to have read Marx or Keynes than the average liberal is to have read Hayek or Bastiat (again, among those I've met or had discussions with). It is true that a lot of the right distrusts intellectuals, but that's not the same thing as a dislike of intellect/intelligence. Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society goes into great depth on that very distinction.
Bush did his best to impersonate a "just plain folks" kind of everyman for his entire public life. I believe part of it was political theater (nobody needs to clear that much brush) and the other part was the fact that (IMHO again) he was and is completely incurious.
I don't see how one can judge whether someone is incurious or not, without seeing how they react to an idea presented to them. Give me some examples to indicate why you think Obama is curious and Bush isn't, please.
His success never depended on brainpower, so he never did much with what he had. Maybe he could have been another Einstein, but he didn't need to develop whatever grey matter he has, much as I might be a helluva mammoth hunter, but I've never had to find out.
If by that you mean "he's from a rich and powerful family and never had to develop his brain", then you have to apply that to quite a few people that the left holds up as geniuses: all three of the Kennedy brothers, Al Gore, and FDR, to name a few. Interestingly enough, your theory is at odds with no less a leftist than Lenin, who formulated his "vanguard of the proletariat" doctrine based on the theory that the workers didn't have enough spare time to think and therefore needed intellectuals to lead them in the proper direction. Personally I think the both theories have a bit of truth in them but wind up being a wash.
In any case, as I said, my original assertion wasn't that Bush had a higher IQ than Obama, or anything in that vein. It was that, as a pilot, Bush has previously interacted with technology in a way that more-closely resembles what an average Slashdot reader does than Obama has. To give one of the shorter examples from the F-102 Pilot's Manual:
Well, I probably had a more pronounced accent than Bush (and not one of the ones people tend to associate with intelligence), so I'm not bashing him on that.
Noted. Wasn't referring to you specifically, just what I see as the common underlying fallacies.
As to the second point, listen to the actors when they're being interviewed (i.e., when they don't have a script). Significant difference for some, not for others. Draw your own conclusions.
Yes, but I still don't assume high intelligence on the part of those who speak well unscripted. Speaking is a talent, like any other. I've heard far too many people who can make something idiotic sound good, and people who have excellent ideas but who can't articulate them well, to believe that there's any correlation with speaking ability and overall intelligence.
I assume the final point is that good old homespun nonsense about how Obama is just "book smart" as opposed to the inherently superior smarts possessed by those without a degree ("real world" is my favorite bullshit adjective for that). In my experience, that doesn't hold water. Trying to denigrate academics by referring to them as being in an "ivory tower" does nothing to elevate the people outside the tower.
I'm not denigrating the source of his knowledge, but the fact that it was formed in isolation from the things that it supposedly applies to. Except for fields at the extreme abstract end of the abstract/applied continuum, theories have to be validated by use and exposure to unforeseen circumstances, the same way that a physical device would need to be. People in academia tend to have their ideas challenged only by their peers' ideas, not by reality. In my own field (software), I've run into plenty of people whose degrees greatly overstate their knowledge and skill, and whose instruction bore little or no resemblance to how things actually work. To cite two historical examples from the political field, there are Lenin's attempt (per Marxist theory) to completely abolish private enterprise prior to relenting and establishing the NEP, and the Khmer Student's Union leadership of the Khmer Rouge forcibly implementing their PhD theses in Cambodia. And no, I am not calling Obama a Marxist, it just happens that the two most-prominent examples I can think of involve them.
In any case, I have yet to see any evidence of the genius Obama's fans claim he possesses. It all boils down to "he agrees with me", not any new or novel ideas, or even new rationales for old ideas.
You can chalk it all up to political differences if you like, but the decisions Bush made (or, IMHO, received from Cheney - I'd rate him genuinely smart but condensed evil) and his manner in general suggested lizard-brain fear-based thinking rather than deep analysis.
You need to give more consideration to the possibility that someone disagreeing with you doesn't necessarily make them stupid or evil. Every one of Bush's policies was agreed with by plenty of people who (by the standards you seem to apply to Obama) are very intelligent -- and, I don't deny, disagreed with by a lot of other people just as smart. Policies don't usually boil down neatly to "stupid" and "smart"; in economics, for example, you could take just about any issue and find multiple Nobel Econ winners on both (or more) sides.
Really?? Not trying to flame/troll, and I'm almost tired of calling Bush an idiot myself, but holy crap!
And I've gotten very tired of hearing it, because there's no basis for it, and the assertion almost always boils down to some combination of "he talks with accent", "he's religious", "he misspoke" (even when what he meant is pretty clear), "he has different ideas than me and the people I talk to", and "he's done things which I don't think should have been done."
Aside: the accent issue is part of a general bias among some folks that isn't specific to Bush or to conservatives/Republicans. Truman, Johnson, and to a lesser degree Carter got the "I'll look down my nose at this stupid hick" treatment from a lot of the media and the rest as well. Speaking of Carter, recall how the way Bush says "nuc-u-lar" is considered irrefutable proof of his stupidity, even though Carter, who went to reactor school in the Navy, pronounces it the same way.
I never felt like he was any kind of deep thinker, on any level. In my opinion, you can learn a lot about a person's intellect by listening to that person speak. No, it's not a perfect litmus test, but rarely are well-spoken people idiots and rarely do brain surgeons have a hard time putting together a 10-word answer to a simple question.
Which is why the smartest people in any given company are the salesmen, and the smartest people in general are actors and TV anchors?
I'd put more money on a well-educated person (who didn't get to college by virtue of his dad's influence) with a purely artistic background than a Bush type "consumer" of technology. Honestly, I can't imagine a scenario where I'd bet on Bush beating Obama where brain function was involved.
I can't imagine it, either, assuming we live in world where the US has 57 states, the people in Afghanistan primarily speak Arabic, Hawaii is part of Asia, and the Navy employs "corpse-men" to treat the wounded. Cheap shots? Certainly, but they're on par with the sort of stuff that's considered damning when said by Bush.
In any case, as I specifically stated, I'm not talking about which man is smarter than the other. I'm talking about something else -- call it "hands-on" vs. "ivory tower."
I know this is heresy, but if you put aside your policy opinions and his verbal gaffes, Bush is much closer to the average Slashdot reader than is Obama when it comes to working with technology. Specifically, I'm talking about what he had to learn to fly an F-102. Yes, it was primarily analog tech, but it's still quite complicated, and you can't fly the plane unless you're capable of interpreting that data in real time. Also, part of pilot training is understanding the aircraft's systems, knowing what can go wrong with them, and being able to troubleshoot them -- not to the same degree as the ground crew, but a pilot has to be able to figure out what problem he's dealing with and what can be done about it. Being able to approach problems that way transcends specifics in technology, and is more similar to dealing with a network issue or fixing a software bug or the rest of a techie's everyday experience than anything Obama is likely to have done.
Let me put it this way: sit Bush and Obama down. Give each one a motherboard, hard drive, and all the other makings of a PC. I'd bet decent odds that Bush would have the thing working first.
(Note: I am not asserting that either man is smarter than the other, just that Bush is more experienced with, and more likely to be comfortable with, dealing with technology shorn of its user-friendly trappings. Sending emails on a Blackberry doesn't qualify).
Indeed, Knittel asserts, given consumer preferences in autos, larger changes in fleet-wide gas mileage will occur only when policies change, too. 'It’s the policymakers’ responsibility to create a structure that leads to these technologies being put toward fuel economy,'
Indeed, I assert, given Mr. Knittel's preference for having his priorities enshrined in (presumably) government policies and imposed on people explicitly against their will, it is the responsibility of voters to create election results that lead politicians who agree with Mr. Knittel as far away from power as possible.
Of course, that same freedom does not apply to REMOVING applications. unless I root my phone, there are several applications pre-installed that I cannot remove, and nag me every few weeks to buy.
The reason you can't remove them is that they're installed as part of the core OS; you can't uninstall them any more than you can Dialer or Settings Storage. Whether a non-rooted phone should have that restriction is a separate question (there are good arguments for not wanting the average user to be able to do those things), but still, the offender is the phone manufacturer or provider for putting the crap apps in, not Google for requiring root access to modify the core.
Because liberals realize without small things like state-financed universities, companies like Amazon would never exist in the first place.
Funny, I know many successful programmers (myself included) who are self-taught, and even those whom I know with degrees tend to get more use out of skills they learned on the job or on their own initiative rather than in class -- they learned a lot of things on their own before college, then went there and learned theory which they mostly never used again, and then went to work and started honing practical skills.
Based on what I've seen, most programmers learn to code the way Quentin Tarantino learned to make movies: "When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'" You see things that inspire you, figure out how to do those things yourself, and along the way start getting inspirations of your own. This isn't to say that a university education isn't useful, especially in some niche areas, but it's hardly essential.
I agree, but I was asking in the hopes of finding what the left expects to get out of it, beyond fun. From outside, it just looks like "let's get together and jeer and boo and hiss at someone we hate." Nothing wrong with that, if you enjoy it. I wouldn't mind a Noam Chomsky dartboard for my loft, myself. But in the equivalent position I wouldn't be making as big a deal out of this as they are unless there was something politically useful to be gained.
I'm not likely to agree politically with the crowd of DailyKos readers or whatnot who are so into this, but even if I did, why the big interest in Palin's official emails rather than, say, Mitt Romney's, Tim Pawlenty's, or Gary Johnson's? They're ex-governors as well, and they're actually running, while Palin isn't and probably won't be.
Slashdot Mirror
i notice you have a reagan signature. maybe you would enjoy his numerous speeches about the virtuous god-fearing mujahideen freedom fighters, and their battle against the godless communist aggressors in the 1980s? because there are a large number of such speeches. they are at the reagan archives, you can google them.
Your post seems to be replying to its grandparent rather than its parent, so I'll assume you're saying that Reagan's speeches are incompatible with the former's statement about "Islam shaping up to be a modern day Nazi movement." The statement needs to distinguish between Islam and Islamism, true, but "this ideology is shaping up to be bad in general" does not contradict "these particular people who hold that ideology are good."
Don't forget the picture of Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld (one of the architects of the 2003 Iraq invasion and then special envoy of Reagan) shaking hands in 1983.
Funny, I could swear I've seen pictures of FDR sitting next to Mr. Gulag himself, Josef Stalin. If you're already in a conflict with scumbag X, and slightly-less-scummy-guy Y starts fighting him too, you might have to hold your nose and help Y in the short term.
I don't know. Awe shit! Did I just blow the rhetorical question there here?
That's "aww, shit" -- unless, of course, you just looked into the toilet and are indeed in awe of what you beheld there.
I was interested when I read this story elsewhere, but what is it doing on Slashdot? Our school lunch experiences are more along these lines. That or getting our lunch money stolen by brawnier members of the student body.
Read a theory a while ago (by some psychologist whose name I wish I could recall so I could give proper credit) that stated that fear of things like radiation, chemicals, and germs stems from the same underlying source as the older fear of witchcraft -- people tend to be more afraid of something they can't understand and/or can't see, compared to things which are objectively more dangerous but which they can see and comprehend. Hence things like the fear and revulsion generated by poison gas usage in WW1, even though you were many times more likely to be killed by bullets or shells. In this case of the article, people hear "radiation" and react viscerally without any further thought.
See my reply above.
Saw it after I posted, and was going to reply after dinner, but since you did me the courtesy of replying to me directly... :)
If the carriers can't be bothered to buld/can't make a profit from building the necessary infrastructure, then permit the farmers themselves to do it.
Many farmers put up towers already for a wide variety of reasons, such as wind generators, and agricultural fuel pumps/water towers.
Allowing them to put a simple mesh extender/repeater up there so that they can help service their neighbors, with the subsidy going to the telecom upstream to not throttle the exit pipes, and the money stays where you want it to stay, and the people impacted pay for the infrastructure themselves.
Sounds like a very good idea to me, in particular your mentioning (in the other post) about freeing up spectrum for it. I expect there'd be a fair amount of red tape and lawyering involved, unfortunately. What's needed here is a spectrum equivalent of the Homesteading Act -- except that instead of building or farming to establish ownership of land, you'd need to provide access to establish ownership of spectrum. Give whoever currently owns it a certain period to start providing access on that spectrum in that area, and if they fail to do so, they forfeit it.
Of course, that's awefully close to filthy communism..... once a functional mesh network servicing a large pool of users springs up, rest assured somebody would rush in to extract tolls on the thing.
That's how shit like that works.
If the farmers who put up the towers want to recoup their investment, that's capitalism, and I'm all for that.
Of course. Because Internet Connectivity is the same thing has having a Domino's store nearby.
They are both luxuries, yes. Hard as it is for those of us in the tech world to grasp, there are quite a few people who can get along just fine without a network connection. For that matter, we're not talking about connectivity vs. lack of it, we're talking about broadband vs. dialup/satellite. Actually, the original article was about a lack of 3G coverage. These aren't areas where you're isolated from the world because you can't use email or instant messaging, these are areas where you can't watch YouTube on your cell phone. Call me hard-hearted if you like, but that doesn't come close to justifying intervention in the market, by my standards.
You are, of course, right when you say that the market doesn't make the decision I want it to make. Duh. It makes the decisions that the companies who make up the market want to make. Which, in turn, are predicated on the needs and desires of customers in said market.
Now that we have the Captain Obvious commentary out of the way, why don't we focus on the actual problem?
Your assertion was that the free market didn't "fix" the situation. My point was that just because you think something is a problem, doesn't mean that it is a problem that requires fixing.
Namely, that Internet connectivity these days is a lot more like electricity and roads: a fundamental infrastructure whose cost is far outweighed by the network effect it promotes. At that point, the question of ROI trumps all, and arguing that the market knows best is a ridiculously short-sighted answer.
That's your as-yet-unproven assertion. Failing to see the same things that you do does not qualify as "short-sighted" unless those things are actually there.
Finally, your argument that people choose to live there means they ought to just suck it up... even ignoring the incredible amount of Not-My-Problem attitude that this displays,
As I pointed out, everyone has costs that they have to "suck up", as well as benefits, based on where they live. Those people living someplace should bear those costs as well as reaping those benefits. There's already far too much subsidizing of some areas at the expense of others. We should be rolling such things back, not adding more.
it also ignores the fact that moving has significant costs attached to it: emotional costs of rebuilding your social life, monetary costs of actually moving, and even the requirement of actually finding and having a job in the new area before moving. Those are all real costs that are easy to quantify for someone who is pondering moving.
Putting aside the idea that people in urban areas should be subsidizing wireless broadband for people in rural (or in many cases, near-wilderness) areas in order to spare those folks the costs of moving out of such places, which i absolutely reject, I think you have a major misconception about who lives in these areas. Although I suppose it's theoretically possible, I highly doubt there is anyone living out in the middle of the Mojave, miles away from anybody else, due to being too poor to move to the city; anyone without the ability (and requisite income) to regularly visit a population center for supplies is going to die. Anyone else would save money by moving into town. In Nevada, at least (where I'm at, hence my example bias), the major source of rural employment is mining, whose average salary is almost double the overall average for the state. They don't need other people subsidizing them. Another reason people live in those regions is to get away from the city. Well, if the most important things to you are clean air, privacy, elbow room, being able to see the stars at night, and being able to fire off your guns without anyone caring, go for it. Just be prepared for poor wireless coverage, and don't ask other people to pay for it.
It is the free market at work. Not enough people out there to justify building the infrastructure. Less people, less money.
There might not be enough people to justify it for the profit motives of those companies, but those motives are by nature selfish and don't give a damn about the larger socioeconomic picture. What might those few people be able to contribute to society if they actually enjoyed the same connectedness as their urban comrades?
And how much money might be sunk into providing higher-capacity connectivity to those people, only to find that that they don't contribute anything, tovarisch?
Like the GP said, the free market has tunnel vision and doesn't fix shit.
Rather, it doesn't make the decisions you want it to make. The people living there choose to do so, knowing the various trade-offs that come with that. They have the pluses of better air quality and less noise, and the minuses of crappy connectivity and more-expensive groceries. I'm sure pizza delivery service sucks out there, too. Going to force Dominos to open stores out in those parts of Nevada where population density drops below half a person per square mile?
You cannot do anything without having some effect on interstate commerce. Entropy of whole universe must increase with time, so everything is connected including interstate commerce and your poop.
It's even worse than that, actually. In Wickard vs. Filburn, the case which started this nonsense back in 1942, doing a thing which isn't interstate commerce can be considered interstate commerce because if you didn't do that thing you might have engaged in interstate commerce instead. So not only is it interstate commerce if you poop, it's also interstate commerce if you hold it in and don't poop.
I can't remember the exact quote, nor who it was that said it, but it goes something like this:
Everything he said was accurate, and not a word of it was true.
Do we really want random doctors performing do-it-yourself stem cell treatments on the fly with no oversight?
Whether "we" want this or not, isn't the issue that was raised. The question was "is this really interstate commerce?" Those who don't want constraints on the scope of Congress' regulatory power should be honest about it, propose an amendment to the Constitution that says "Congress shall have the power to regulate whatever the fuck it wants to regulate", and get it passed. Put an end to the FDR-spawned charade of callings things interstate commerce which, by any non-silly definition, aren't. I doubt that even the people who use that argument actually believe it, for the most part.
The fact that you consider the question "just deflecting" illustrates the point: you think it's a good idea for Congress to do this, so you apparently don't think it's necessary to define where the power for them to do so is enumerated in the Constitution. All the more reason to pass something like the Enumerated Powers Act.
...but it's not a press freedom issue just because some journalists get swept up in it.
...and why isn't it?
Because the goal of the action is something other than silencing the journalists. Press freedom is violated when something bad is done to someone because they are a journalist, not when something is done to someone who merely happens to be a journalist. If I'm a news cameraman covering a story, and someone takes my camera to stop me from covering it, that's a violation of press freedom. If they take it because it's valuable and they want to sell it, it's not. That isn't to say it's not a bad thing, it just doesn't have anything to do with journalism qua journalism. To use the report's complaint about India, if Kashmiri separatists round up a bunch of people, one of whom is a reporter, and machinegun them, that's an atrocity, but it has nothing to do with press freedom. If another reporter comes along, takes pictures, and they shoot him to stop him from getting the story out, that is a press freedom issue.
I'm not going to claim that the US is perfect with regards to the press, but most of RSF's complaints seem questionable to me -- in particular, those regarding covering the Occupy movement. If you put yourself in the middle of a crowd control situation, you risk being lumped in with the crowd, even if you're just covering it, especially since there were a fair number of people who were part of the protest movement while operating in a quasi-journalist mode as well (taking pics/vids to post, etc). Whether you agree with (say) the police clearing out a park where the protestors are camped, someone who is ordered to get out and doesn't, is going to get arrested, whether they're a report or not. I'm not condoning police getting out of control, but it's not a press freedom issue just because some journalists get swept up in it.
There are a few more things like that, regarding countries other than the United States, in the full report. For example, India gets dinged because "journalists were exposed to violence stemming from the persistent conflicts in the states of Chhattisgarh and Jammu and Kashmir." Umm, if you go into a war zone, you run the risk of being "exposed to violence." It's as if RSF expects journalists to be surrounded by some sort of holy aura whenever they go into chaotic or even deadly situations. Don't get me wrong, I have great admiration for the reporters brave enough to cover a war, but it's only a violation of press freedom if they get targeted because they're journalists.
What exactly is Google trying to accomplish with their "real name" policy, anyway? I don't see what they hope to gain that's even worth the trouble of enforcing it, not even considering the ill will they're piling up.
I don't think I ever claimed people who disagreed with me must be stupid or evil. I brought up Cheney because it seemed you had implied I thought people who disagreed with me were stupid. Cheney isn't. Probably the smartest guy I ever met is on the conservative end of the spectrum, and he seemed like a nice guy to me.
Good that you're able to recognize that. However, it doesn't square with your previous statement that Bush's policies show him to be an idiot. (I definitely don't agree that Cheney is evil, at least any more so than the average politician, but I'm trying to to stay on the topic of intelligence as much as possible). I'll narrow things down to the Iraq War, since that's the most controversial. By any standard that judged Obama to be intelligent, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Bolton, and Rumsfeld would have to be as well. They all agreed with the policy and the arguments given for it. So did quite a few similarly-intelligent leaders outside the US. If the policy or the reasons for it brand Bush as stupid, wouldn't they all have to be stupid and/or evil? What about, say, (then) President Aleksander Kwaniewski of Poland (incidentally, Distinguished Scholar at Georgetown U)? And unless all of them are stupid or evil, how does it follow that Bush is?
All that notwithstanding, it is clear to me that there is one end of the liberal/conservative spectrum that is rabidly anti-intellectual, and one that isn't.
In my experience, people on the right are much more likely to have read the important books of the left, than vice-versa. Your average conservative is much more likely to have read Marx or Keynes than the average liberal is to have read Hayek or Bastiat (again, among those I've met or had discussions with). It is true that a lot of the right distrusts intellectuals, but that's not the same thing as a dislike of intellect/intelligence. Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society goes into great depth on that very distinction.
Bush did his best to impersonate a "just plain folks" kind of everyman for his entire public life. I believe part of it was political theater (nobody needs to clear that much brush) and the other part was the fact that (IMHO again) he was and is completely incurious.
I don't see how one can judge whether someone is incurious or not, without seeing how they react to an idea presented to them. Give me some examples to indicate why you think Obama is curious and Bush isn't, please.
His success never depended on brainpower, so he never did much with what he had. Maybe he could have been another Einstein, but he didn't need to develop whatever grey matter he has, much as I might be a helluva mammoth hunter, but I've never had to find out.
If by that you mean "he's from a rich and powerful family and never had to develop his brain", then you have to apply that to quite a few people that the left holds up as geniuses: all three of the Kennedy brothers, Al Gore, and FDR, to name a few. Interestingly enough, your theory is at odds with no less a leftist than Lenin, who formulated his "vanguard of the proletariat" doctrine based on the theory that the workers didn't have enough spare time to think and therefore needed intellectuals to lead them in the proper direction. Personally I think the both theories have a bit of truth in them but wind up being a wash.
In any case, as I said, my original assertion wasn't that Bush had a higher IQ than Obama, or anything in that vein. It was that, as a pilot, Bush has previously interacted with technology in a way that more-closely resembles what an average Slashdot reader does than Obama has. To give one of the shorter examples from the F-102 Pilot's Manual:
This is one more reason why I'm not going back to visit until they start giving the mullahs the Benito Mussolini/Nicolae Ceauescu treatment.
Well, I probably had a more pronounced accent than Bush (and not one of the ones people tend to associate with intelligence), so I'm not bashing him on that.
Noted. Wasn't referring to you specifically, just what I see as the common underlying fallacies.
As to the second point, listen to the actors when they're being interviewed (i.e., when they don't have a script). Significant difference for some, not for others. Draw your own conclusions.
Yes, but I still don't assume high intelligence on the part of those who speak well unscripted. Speaking is a talent, like any other. I've heard far too many people who can make something idiotic sound good, and people who have excellent ideas but who can't articulate them well, to believe that there's any correlation with speaking ability and overall intelligence.
I assume the final point is that good old homespun nonsense about how Obama is just "book smart" as opposed to the inherently superior smarts possessed by those without a degree ("real world" is my favorite bullshit adjective for that). In my experience, that doesn't hold water. Trying to denigrate academics by referring to them as being in an "ivory tower" does nothing to elevate the people outside the tower.
I'm not denigrating the source of his knowledge, but the fact that it was formed in isolation from the things that it supposedly applies to. Except for fields at the extreme abstract end of the abstract/applied continuum, theories have to be validated by use and exposure to unforeseen circumstances, the same way that a physical device would need to be. People in academia tend to have their ideas challenged only by their peers' ideas, not by reality. In my own field (software), I've run into plenty of people whose degrees greatly overstate their knowledge and skill, and whose instruction bore little or no resemblance to how things actually work. To cite two historical examples from the political field, there are Lenin's attempt (per Marxist theory) to completely abolish private enterprise prior to relenting and establishing the NEP, and the Khmer Student's Union leadership of the Khmer Rouge forcibly implementing their PhD theses in Cambodia. And no, I am not calling Obama a Marxist, it just happens that the two most-prominent examples I can think of involve them.
In any case, I have yet to see any evidence of the genius Obama's fans claim he possesses. It all boils down to "he agrees with me", not any new or novel ideas, or even new rationales for old ideas.
You can chalk it all up to political differences if you like, but the decisions Bush made (or, IMHO, received from Cheney - I'd rate him genuinely smart but condensed evil) and his manner in general suggested lizard-brain fear-based thinking rather than deep analysis.
You need to give more consideration to the possibility that someone disagreeing with you doesn't necessarily make them stupid or evil. Every one of Bush's policies was agreed with by plenty of people who (by the standards you seem to apply to Obama) are very intelligent -- and, I don't deny, disagreed with by a lot of other people just as smart. Policies don't usually boil down neatly to "stupid" and "smart"; in economics, for example, you could take just about any issue and find multiple Nobel Econ winners on both (or more) sides.
Really?? Not trying to flame/troll, and I'm almost tired of calling Bush an idiot myself, but holy crap!
And I've gotten very tired of hearing it, because there's no basis for it, and the assertion almost always boils down to some combination of "he talks with accent", "he's religious", "he misspoke" (even when what he meant is pretty clear), "he has different ideas than me and the people I talk to", and "he's done things which I don't think should have been done."
Aside: the accent issue is part of a general bias among some folks that isn't specific to Bush or to conservatives/Republicans. Truman, Johnson, and to a lesser degree Carter got the "I'll look down my nose at this stupid hick" treatment from a lot of the media and the rest as well. Speaking of Carter, recall how the way Bush says "nuc-u-lar" is considered irrefutable proof of his stupidity, even though Carter, who went to reactor school in the Navy, pronounces it the same way.
I never felt like he was any kind of deep thinker, on any level. In my opinion, you can learn a lot about a person's intellect by listening to that person speak. No, it's not a perfect litmus test, but rarely are well-spoken people idiots and rarely do brain surgeons have a hard time putting together a 10-word answer to a simple question.
Which is why the smartest people in any given company are the salesmen, and the smartest people in general are actors and TV anchors?
I'd put more money on a well-educated person (who didn't get to college by virtue of his dad's influence) with a purely artistic background than a Bush type "consumer" of technology. Honestly, I can't imagine a scenario where I'd bet on Bush beating Obama where brain function was involved.
I can't imagine it, either, assuming we live in world where the US has 57 states, the people in Afghanistan primarily speak Arabic, Hawaii is part of Asia, and the Navy employs "corpse-men" to treat the wounded. Cheap shots? Certainly, but they're on par with the sort of stuff that's considered damning when said by Bush.
In any case, as I specifically stated, I'm not talking about which man is smarter than the other. I'm talking about something else -- call it "hands-on" vs. "ivory tower."
Your point is taken, but I was referring to the knowledge necessary to be a pilot, not to serve in the military.
I know this is heresy, but if you put aside your policy opinions and his verbal gaffes, Bush is much closer to the average Slashdot reader than is Obama when it comes to working with technology. Specifically, I'm talking about what he had to learn to fly an F-102. Yes, it was primarily analog tech, but it's still quite complicated, and you can't fly the plane unless you're capable of interpreting that data in real time. Also, part of pilot training is understanding the aircraft's systems, knowing what can go wrong with them, and being able to troubleshoot them -- not to the same degree as the ground crew, but a pilot has to be able to figure out what problem he's dealing with and what can be done about it. Being able to approach problems that way transcends specifics in technology, and is more similar to dealing with a network issue or fixing a software bug or the rest of a techie's everyday experience than anything Obama is likely to have done.
Let me put it this way: sit Bush and Obama down. Give each one a motherboard, hard drive, and all the other makings of a PC. I'd bet decent odds that Bush would have the thing working first.
(Note: I am not asserting that either man is smarter than the other, just that Bush is more experienced with, and more likely to be comfortable with, dealing with technology shorn of its user-friendly trappings. Sending emails on a Blackberry doesn't qualify).
Indeed, Knittel asserts, given consumer preferences in autos, larger changes in fleet-wide gas mileage will occur only when policies change, too. 'It’s the policymakers’ responsibility to create a structure that leads to these technologies being put toward fuel economy,'
Indeed, I assert, given Mr. Knittel's preference for having his priorities enshrined in (presumably) government policies and imposed on people explicitly against their will, it is the responsibility of voters to create election results that lead politicians who agree with Mr. Knittel as far away from power as possible.
Of course, that same freedom does not apply to REMOVING applications. unless I root my phone, there are several applications pre-installed that I cannot remove, and nag me every few weeks to buy.
The reason you can't remove them is that they're installed as part of the core OS; you can't uninstall them any more than you can Dialer or Settings Storage. Whether a non-rooted phone should have that restriction is a separate question (there are good arguments for not wanting the average user to be able to do those things), but still, the offender is the phone manufacturer or provider for putting the crap apps in, not Google for requiring root access to modify the core.
Qualifying Krugman as a "prominent Keynesian economist" is like calling Stephen Hawking a "prominent Einsteinian physicist". I call shenanigans.
A better analogy would be "like calling John Edward a 'prominent television psychic.'"
Because liberals realize without small things like state-financed universities, companies like Amazon would never exist in the first place.
Funny, I know many successful programmers (myself included) who are self-taught, and even those whom I know with degrees tend to get more use out of skills they learned on the job or on their own initiative rather than in class -- they learned a lot of things on their own before college, then went there and learned theory which they mostly never used again, and then went to work and started honing practical skills.
Based on what I've seen, most programmers learn to code the way Quentin Tarantino learned to make movies: "When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'" You see things that inspire you, figure out how to do those things yourself, and along the way start getting inspirations of your own. This isn't to say that a university education isn't useful, especially in some niche areas, but it's hardly essential.
I agree, but I was asking in the hopes of finding what the left expects to get out of it, beyond fun. From outside, it just looks like "let's get together and jeer and boo and hiss at someone we hate." Nothing wrong with that, if you enjoy it. I wouldn't mind a Noam Chomsky dartboard for my loft, myself. But in the equivalent position I wouldn't be making as big a deal out of this as they are unless there was something politically useful to be gained.
I'm not likely to agree politically with the crowd of DailyKos readers or whatnot who are so into this, but even if I did, why the big interest in Palin's official emails rather than, say, Mitt Romney's, Tim Pawlenty's, or Gary Johnson's? They're ex-governors as well, and they're actually running, while Palin isn't and probably won't be.