Teleportation is a good point. How could we possibly get a spaceship that close to a pulsar? Maybe our spaceship is made out of diamonds to begin with?
Hmm... It would be an ideal place for a planetary computer. You have a diamond, or maybe "metalic carbon" substrate for a planet the size of jupiter. Then you have a pulsar clock, and powersource.
That's correct. Asteroids have trillions of dollars worth of minable minerals. After being hollowed out, they make reasonably good habitats as they can hold oxygen inside.
So we could turn asteroids into mines, factories, and even houses.
I think the conservatives would, but just barely. It would be a phyrric victory. We need one another to balance out our respective weaknesses, which is why both strains evolved together in the first place.
We wouldn't have more than one election if the person with the most extreme views won every time.
The author of the study is comparing apples and oranges. It isn't comparable between 4 of 6 Gb per second to the 28.8 baud modems that used to cost $20 a month (about the same as $40 -$50 a month today given inflation!)
Don't tell me that capitalism has failed, when the author has failed to make a point at all. This is Marxist B.S., meant to encourage government ownership of broadband connections so they can spy on us and charge us through the roof.
If Google.cn "closes", it won't close, it will just be Google being blocked by China. Google doesn't need to pretend that they left, they will simply watch and report to the people of China that China no longer allows them to Google.
To say that Google backing out of China wouldn't affect china is clearly a lie.
If nothing else, it would certainly mean a lot to America. There have been many cases of smaller companies boycotting governments to far greater effect. IMHO, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google could work together on this, and pull out before the Olympics, if they wanted. Totalitarian governments cannot stand being disrespected, as that is the only source of their power. Whereas in a democratic-republic like America, we don't respect our gov't much at all, and it is the most powerful gov't on Earth.
The key here is showing the world how legitimate we think China's doublespeak is on Tieneman Square and every other issue of note. Their press is full of lies, and now our search engines only return those lies. That's the definition of propping them up. No wonder they don't use America's search engines - they return nothing true or useful at all, and Wikipedia is mostly blocked.
This will probably crush a couple of small startups - like my previous job here:
www.ndma.us (National Digital Medical Archive) NDMA never did get all the bugs out. It was a little slow and lacked some key xml protocol sharing features. Security and never losing a file are a legitimately difficult task, in itself, and that was addressed. Maybe Microsoft will come up with better ideas than NDMA did. The protocol for the application there was terribly slow, but the website to access the information eventually came through.
Selling anonymous data is, unfortunately, a necessary evil. It's already happening, all Hospitals require you to sign things on joining that will give them rights to sell your data, with your name and ID numbers removed. Doctors do truly need that information, especially for disease outbreaks and drug treatment information. This system by Microsoft just makes it more practical.
With Microsoft entering, it probably means Oracle, IBM, and maybe Sun will as well. There's tens of billions of dollars to be made.
Nice post, but your words contradict themselves here: "Personally, I stick to category 1 and am a devout atheist."
You can't possibly prove or observe the non-existence of all possible deities. That's a category 3 assumption! Unless you can show we are all there is, which can't physically be done, as we could always be part of a bigger deity's plan in some form, or even co-existing with entities that fit the definition of deities.
This is atheism's great logical problem. You say its up to believers to prove each of their individual deities. Since they can't, you go off and claim none exists. Uh... But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The positive assumption that "no gods exist" is itself exactly as unprovable as the assumption that any one or any set of deities does.
You could be a wishy-washy agnostic:) That's consistent with having only faith in assumptions in the "1" category.
Until then, you have to at least assume one thing - that it matters what you believe! Or, put another way, you have to assume that there is truth or meaning in anything, or how could you have even made your post?
That's the real reason why faith in G-d won't die, and its the reason why birth rates in majority atheist countries typically fall through the floor. Atheism's core assumption is just as much of an assumption as anything in Scientology, to be blunt. And atheism, unlike most other ways of looking at the world, offers no compelling reason to exist at all!
Hard to say if the vietnamese war promoted freedom or saved lives. But it was not a vacuum. Communists were trying to commit mass murder of millions, like the 60 million or so they had already killed by that point. So we tried to stop them - but failed to do so. Mostly because (despite what you heard), the Vietnamese people couldn't defend themselves, and the murders continued.
Those who say its all America's fault - look what happened when America left. Is America responsible for everything that ever happens after they withdraw? Certainly not legally, not morally either.
North Vietnam "reunited" with South Vietnam, killing hundreds of thousands. But the Khmer Rouge committed genocide against their own people, with some Chinese aid. China invaded Vietnam, and lost. The Hmong were massacred, and became refugees scattered through the world. I don't remember democracies and free people committing such atrocities against their own people. Communists had no problem doing it, though.
Your argument may be that we treated a worldwide cancer. But it was so bloody and so awful in the end, that no one comes out clean. In the end, America was neither terribly good or evil. Just trying to continue to exist and help a friend, and thwart an enemy. But who can exonerate the evil that communism did in the region? Sure, American bombs killed civilians. But the Americans (under Democratic administrations, btw) weren't trying to do so - the communists clearly were.
You'd wish the Vietnamese people would have realized the hell they put on themselves, and that they would have stood united against communism, even supported a right-wing dictator against them. It would have cost far less lives. But if people were rational, communism would have never existed in the first place - or would have been a non-violent experiment in a single country that others would have watched for accurate reports of success or failure.
But, sadly, the real failure in Vietnam, and in Iraq, is the clear, unadulterated stupidity and ignorance of the people of those countries. You want communism? Screw you. America will wait 50 years and a million lives until you crawl out of that hole. You want terrorism? Screw you. We'll stand back, bomb you when you bomb us, and wait until you wake up and realize your G-d doesn't love your more when you blow yourself up with innocents.
We gave you a chance for a better way. We tried. You failed. Blame us all you want. But when you're tired of lies and propaganda, starvation and economic stagnation, military burdens and dictators... we'll come by and help you if you ask.
Jim, isn't Christianity based on logic and reason?
Either a person who is reasonable will try to reconcile what is seen and what is believed, or he will not. The Pope reconciled the two by accepting evolution, and that it was divinely inspired, and by reconsidering the creation stories to be allegorical or apocryphal. Many Jews (myself included) do likewise.
Another way to reconcile it is to say science has mis-interpreted the evidence and the only logical truth is what the bible literally says. That's what these folks in the museum are doing.
Are you saying that we shouldn't try to reconcile reason and religion? That may work - actually, and it makes a little more sense then some of the "creation science" arguments. But it seems a little difficult to swallow completely. After all, if you do say that they shouldn't be reconciled, then isn't either science or religion extraneous?
I suppose there's another way - to say that the world is made of illusion, and that a deeper reality exists which we can find by communing with the deity. Thus, since science can only see the illusion, there is no real contradiction that it doesn't see the real truth. Is this what you subscribe to? Just a question.
No, a quantum scientist would say that he KNOWS Quantum entanglement exists. After all, that's what he studies and if he doesn't know it, noone else would.
If Jim says he knows something, then let's at least give him the courtesy of taking him at his word. He says that he knows of G-d's existence - don't assign him a different set of words, just because you want him to be politically correct, and somehow accept the possiblity of it not being so. Jim is simply stating that, as far as he is concerned, G-d exists and he cannot be wrong on that point.
In this house, we obey the second law of thermodynamics!
Seriously, if we had a system that "created energy", you could have it power itself. Let's say you powered a flywheel with this "free energy". Every second, it would generate a calorie of heat, then double that the next second (because friction increases exponentially as power on the wheel increases lineraly.) The flywheel burns down the entire Earth in a matter of minutes (a billion calories in just 30 seconds, roughly 2^30th).
"Free energy", if it actually did exist, would destroy the universe - end of story. No matter how small the amount, a free energy system would end up powering an ever-increasing exponential system.
Or, if you prefer - you just attach your free energy motor to a rocket. And look, it goes faster and faster. But its mass approaches infity as it approaches the speed of light. And when your free energy rocket gets to be the mass of the universe, so much for the universe.
Actually, their goal is world domination under their hardline view of Islam.
Like many other totalitarians, they think little of inconveniencing or killing human life, as long as their goals are getting met. Terror is a tool. Inconvenience just another tool.
And destroying the US and Israel is their initial goal, to be followed shortly by world domination. They target the US and Israel because, in theory, we oppose their horrifying goals and have the balls to stop them. Of course, if we give in and put on our burqas and shut up and praise Allah, they might just settle for forcing us to convert.
If you took all the crazy twentieth century mistakes, and laid them next to communism, you would see that communism not only tops the list of crazy mistakes, it surpasses all it's brother ideas put together in terms of bad ideas.
It's not that communism itself is stupid, which it is. It is that it sounds intelligent and intellectual. It can make even a half-hearted student into a great communist philosopher with a couple of easy to digest papers. In other words, it was alluring as an idea, easy to understand, quick to learn, and popular to research. It was easy to grasp, yet seemed intellectually satisfying. That it was incorrect was discoverable immediately, but that it still seemed worthy of study was undeniable.
Even today backyard communist theorists demand "further research." As if the clinical trials leaving behind millions dead were so close to being successful for perfecting mankind that we need to do that again. Throw your brothers on the hot stove again, it didn't hurt US. It just killed the subsistance farmers.
Imagine if communism was a drug that claimed to cure cancer. Or a model prison designed to cure criminals. Would we still be sending people to a communist establishment with a track record of a hundred million deaths for treatment?
Using AI -controlled extra metal arms seems like a much cooler way to fix this problem of controlling the reaction to prevent outbursts. Plus you can beat up superheroes.
Surely, I couldn't agree more - it is not a perfect system, and G-d didn't hand it to us. It is our responsibility as humans to help those who cannot help themselves, and we shouldn't look to capitalism to fix all that is wrong in the world. We need charities and minimal gov't social safety nets as well. But remember that those aren't perfect either, and nothing is perfect in this world.
"Well, no, because the extremists on both ends go too far. This doesn't invalidate the concern that the pro-Wal-Mart extremists (i.e. the people Wal-Mart is paying) are winning."
I guess I'm a pro Wal-Mart extremist, by your definition. Where's my check? Somehow I didn't receive it!
"Big red flag here: first, you're pretending that the only options are for Wal-Mart to exist in its current form, or not at all."
Correct. If Wal-mart didn't have the business model, slogan, and attitude "always low prices, always," then they might as well not exist at all. They'd just be another slightly lower priced chain store. I like the fact that we aren't forcing them to be the "sometimes low prices" store! Why should we force them to be something they don't want to be? Why should we force them to give better benifits than they can afford in their current business model?
What makes walmart unique and valuable to our economy is exactly the fact that they viciously and mercilessly cut prices and costs everywhere. It's what makes them a place worth shopping at. Many goods and services would be priced out of potential customer's reach if they didn't do exactly what they are doing.
-Ben
Walmart bashing is really just anti-capitalism
on
Wal-mart's Wikipedia War
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What have we learned?
Walmart is nothing but a free company in a capitalist society. Those complaining about Walmart are really complaining about capitalism itself.
Yes, walmart prices some American manufacturers out of business. But that is allowing a switch from manufacturing to service based economy. And, thanks to low prices at places like Walmart, more Americans than ever are able to own a house, and stock that house with Tvs, DVDs, Mp3 players and Cell Phones - even at the salary paid by Walmart!
Yes, Walmart buys Chinese. In fact, it is China's leading trading partner and is giving China a real capitalist change from within - a growing middle class in China is coming up. Millions have benefitted there, and I fail to see how this is a bad thing for anyone.
Yes, Walmart doesn't give the very best health benefits. But it beats having unemployment and medicaid. And if Walmart wasn't providing "low paying" jobs, we'd be paying for them in taxes, instead of collecting tax revenue from them.
I checked the Walmart page and Walmart was called "The great satan" in the first line. Why? Because they decided to sell inexpensive, yet usable goods to a mass market?
I rarely shop there, don't work there, don't own stock - but I'm glad they exist. Because they show, better than anything, the hypocracy of anti-capitalist whiners. You know the type - those who complain that they are entitled to everything the world has to offer, for free from the government.
Walmart has shown that the goverment need not provide every citizen with a DVD player. Instead, Walmart has shown the real way for every American who wants a DVD player to get one - is to make it cheaply and sell it cheap enough.
And that's really why people hate Walmart - it shows that capitalism does what utopian socialism never could.
The vehicle seems like it could like a small rocket. With long cables, you'd simply hold the rocket vertically upwards, at a slight angle. During launch, the rocket could get around the blimp, and the rocket wouldn't need to carry nearly as much fuel at a higher altitude.
In the history of mankind, there have been some aweful regimes. But which regime has murderred the most of its own people?
It's the current Chinese one. 40 million. In fact, it has killed more people than any other regime in history. And it continues to kill people for "treason" or "talking against the regime". It sponsorred Pol Pot and the Korean despots who killed further millions. And it has nuclear weapons.
Google has a promise to "not be evil". What evil is China not guilty of? Forced abortions, environmental massacres, aggression towards neighbors, genocide of Tibettans, and so forth.
What does the Chinese regime have to do to be considderred evil? Google has a responsiblity to look at its relation with China in respect to its promisses.
Solar/ Motion powerred jackets. Charge the devices from your incoming light and motion. The only problems with this are the expense of the jackets and the need for a universal power jack that the jacket would have to output.
Our hero, Milton Feng, has discoverred a plot by the evil Terahertz gang to break the Universe's barier.
Pseudomorphic, the evil gang leader, has invented a new device to break through the barrier. "I will cause the failure of all the communication devices and computers." He cries. His sidekick, Heterojunction, says "I will collect the indium the we need to finish our ultimate machine!" Pseudo's girlfriend, Bipolar Transistor, has a bag full of arsenide and is on the lookout to kill anyone foolish enough to interfere.
Milton stealthily invades the enemy base, where he overhears that the Terahertz gang will strike the bandgap in selected areas. After he finds this out, he speeds his electron flow to warn the others.
But what he doesn't know is that while his group of heroes is made of dissimilar and equally spunky men, the Pseudomorphic has his gang thoroughly doped.
Can our hero improve the compositional grading of the transistor components enough?
Or will the PseudoMoprh defeat them with his awesome signal charging time?
Slashdot Mirror
Teleportation is a good point. How could we possibly get a spaceship that close to a pulsar? Maybe our spaceship is made out of diamonds to begin with?
Hmm... It would be an ideal place for a planetary computer. You have a diamond, or maybe "metalic carbon" substrate for a planet the size of jupiter.
Then you have a pulsar clock, and powersource.
Perhaps that's really what we are looking at?
-Ben
That's correct. Asteroids have trillions of dollars worth of minable minerals. After being hollowed out, they make reasonably good habitats as they can hold oxygen inside.
So we could turn asteroids into mines, factories, and even houses.
I think the conservatives would, but just barely. It would be a phyrric victory. We need one another to balance out our respective weaknesses, which is why both strains evolved together in the first place.
We wouldn't have more than one election if the person with the most extreme views won every time.
The author of the study is comparing apples and oranges. It isn't comparable between 4 of 6 Gb per second to the 28.8 baud modems that used to cost $20 a month (about the same as $40 -$50 a month today given inflation!)
Don't tell me that capitalism has failed, when the author has failed to make a point at all. This is Marxist B.S., meant to encourage government ownership of broadband connections so they can spy on us and charge us through the roof.
If you work in manufacturing, do your country a favor and leave your union. If only everyone would do that, we could restart US manufacturing again.
IT is not unionized, and I hope it will never be.
The lie underneath all of this is that China is claiming that Google will be denying website access to all Chinese in the People's Republic of China.
Last I checked, Google was available to anyone. If China doesn't let its people use Google, that's their decision.
If Google.cn "closes", it won't close, it will just be Google being blocked by China. Google doesn't need to pretend that they left, they will simply watch and report to the people of China that China no longer allows them to Google.
Google, last I checked, was available to all.
-Ben
To say that Google backing out of China wouldn't affect china is clearly a lie.
If nothing else, it would certainly mean a lot to America. There have been many cases of smaller companies boycotting governments to far greater effect. IMHO, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google could work together on this, and pull out before the Olympics, if they wanted. Totalitarian governments cannot stand being disrespected, as that is the only source of their power. Whereas in a democratic-republic like America, we don't respect our gov't much at all, and it is the most powerful gov't on Earth.
The key here is showing the world how legitimate we think China's doublespeak is on Tieneman Square and every other issue of note. Their press is full of lies, and now our search engines only return those lies. That's the definition of propping them up. No wonder they don't use America's search engines - they return nothing true or useful at all, and Wikipedia is mostly blocked.
-Ben
This will probably crush a couple of small startups - like my previous job here:
www.ndma.us
(National Digital Medical Archive)
NDMA never did get all the bugs out. It was a little slow and lacked some key xml protocol sharing features. Security and never losing a file are a legitimately difficult task, in itself, and that was addressed. Maybe Microsoft will come up with better ideas than NDMA did. The protocol for the application there was terribly slow, but the website to access the information eventually came through.
Selling anonymous data is, unfortunately, a necessary evil. It's already happening, all Hospitals require you to sign things on joining that will give them rights to sell your data, with your name and ID numbers removed. Doctors do truly need that information, especially for disease outbreaks and drug treatment information. This system by Microsoft just makes it more practical.
With Microsoft entering, it probably means Oracle, IBM, and maybe Sun will as well. There's tens of billions of dollars to be made.
-Ben
How can we kill the terminators now?
Thanks a lot, Nasa. You've just doomed us all.
Nice post, but your words contradict themselves here: "Personally, I stick to category 1 and am a devout atheist."
:) That's consistent with having only faith in assumptions in the "1" category.
You can't possibly prove or observe the non-existence of all possible deities. That's a category 3 assumption! Unless you can show we are all there is, which can't physically be done, as we could always be part of a bigger deity's plan in some form, or even co-existing with entities that fit the definition of deities.
This is atheism's great logical problem. You say its up to believers to prove each of their individual deities. Since they can't, you go off and claim none exists. Uh... But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The positive assumption that "no gods exist" is itself exactly as unprovable as the assumption that any one or any set of deities does.
You could be a wishy-washy agnostic
Until then, you have to at least assume one thing - that it matters what you believe! Or, put another way, you have to assume that there is truth or meaning in anything, or how could you have even made your post?
That's the real reason why faith in G-d won't die, and its the reason why birth rates in majority atheist countries typically fall through the floor. Atheism's core assumption is just as much of an assumption as anything in Scientology, to be blunt. And atheism, unlike most other ways of looking at the world, offers no compelling reason to exist at all!
-Ben
Hard to say if the vietnamese war promoted freedom or saved lives. But it was not a vacuum. Communists were trying to commit mass murder of millions, like the 60 million or so they had already killed by that point. So we tried to stop them - but failed to do so. Mostly because (despite what you heard), the Vietnamese people couldn't defend themselves, and the murders continued.
Those who say its all America's fault - look what happened when America left. Is America responsible for everything that ever happens after they withdraw? Certainly not legally, not morally either.
North Vietnam "reunited" with South Vietnam, killing hundreds of thousands. But the Khmer Rouge committed genocide against their own people, with some Chinese aid. China invaded Vietnam, and lost. The Hmong were massacred, and became refugees scattered through the world. I don't remember democracies and free people committing such atrocities against their own people. Communists had no problem doing it, though.
Your argument may be that we treated a worldwide cancer. But it was so bloody and so awful in the end, that no one comes out clean. In the end, America was neither terribly good or evil. Just trying to continue to exist and help a friend, and thwart an enemy. But who can exonerate the evil that communism did in the region? Sure, American bombs killed civilians. But the Americans (under Democratic administrations, btw) weren't trying to do so - the communists clearly were.
You'd wish the Vietnamese people would have realized the hell they put on themselves, and that they would have stood united against communism, even supported a right-wing dictator against them. It would have cost far less lives. But if people were rational, communism would have never existed in the first place - or would have been a non-violent experiment in a single country that others would have watched for accurate reports of success or failure.
But, sadly, the real failure in Vietnam, and in Iraq, is the clear, unadulterated stupidity and ignorance of the people of those countries. You want communism? Screw you. America will wait 50 years and a million lives until you crawl out of that hole. You want terrorism? Screw you. We'll stand back, bomb you when you bomb us, and wait until you wake up and realize your G-d doesn't love your more when you blow yourself up with innocents.
We gave you a chance for a better way. We tried. You failed. Blame us all you want. But when you're tired of lies and propaganda, starvation and economic stagnation, military burdens and dictators... we'll come by and help you if you ask.
-Ben
Wait a sec... I've heard this story in variances a hundred times now. Hold on.
I have no love for unions.
But this "A friend had X happen to him... and the union guy didn't do anything..." This sounds way too pat.
My B.S. meter went off here. Did anyone else get that feeling?
Can you back up what you said? Or will your "friend" get in trouble?
-Ben
Jim, isn't Christianity based on logic and reason?
Either a person who is reasonable will try to reconcile what is seen and what is believed, or he will not. The Pope reconciled the two by accepting evolution, and that it was divinely inspired, and by reconsidering the creation stories to be allegorical or apocryphal. Many Jews (myself included) do likewise.
Another way to reconcile it is to say science has mis-interpreted the evidence and the only logical truth is what the bible literally says. That's what these folks in the museum are doing.
Are you saying that we shouldn't try to reconcile reason and religion? That may work - actually, and it makes a little more sense then some of the "creation science" arguments. But it seems a little difficult to swallow completely. After all, if you do say that they shouldn't be reconciled, then isn't either science or religion extraneous?
I suppose there's another way - to say that the world is made of illusion, and that a deeper reality exists which we can find by communing with the deity. Thus, since science can only see the illusion, there is no real contradiction that it doesn't see the real truth. Is this what you subscribe to? Just a question.
-Ben
No, a quantum scientist would say that he KNOWS Quantum entanglement exists. After all, that's what he studies and if he doesn't know it, noone else would.
If Jim says he knows something, then let's at least give him the courtesy of taking him at his word. He says that he knows of G-d's existence - don't assign him a different set of words, just because you want him to be politically correct, and somehow accept the possiblity of it not being so. Jim is simply stating that, as far as he is concerned, G-d exists and he cannot be wrong on that point.
-Ben
In this house, we obey the second law of thermodynamics!
Seriously, if we had a system that "created energy", you could have it power itself. Let's say you powered a flywheel with this "free energy". Every second, it would generate a calorie of heat, then double that the next second (because friction increases exponentially as power on the wheel increases lineraly.) The flywheel burns down the entire Earth in a matter of minutes (a billion calories in just 30 seconds, roughly 2^30th).
"Free energy", if it actually did exist, would destroy the universe - end of story. No matter how small the amount, a free energy system would end up powering an ever-increasing exponential system.
Or, if you prefer - you just attach your free energy motor to a rocket. And look, it goes faster and faster. But its mass approaches infity as it approaches the speed of light. And when your free energy rocket gets to be the mass of the universe, so much for the universe.
Be glad these wackos are wrong.
-Ben
Actually, their goal is world domination under their hardline view of Islam.
Like many other totalitarians, they think little of inconveniencing or killing human life, as long as their goals are getting met. Terror is a tool. Inconvenience just another tool.
And destroying the US and Israel is their initial goal, to be followed shortly by world domination. They target the US and Israel because, in theory, we oppose their horrifying goals and have the balls to stop them. Of course, if we give in and put on our burqas and shut up and praise Allah, they might just settle for forcing us to convert.
-Ben
If you took all the crazy twentieth century mistakes, and laid them next to communism, you would see that communism not only tops the list of crazy mistakes, it surpasses all it's brother ideas put together in terms of bad ideas.
It's not that communism itself is stupid, which it is. It is that it sounds intelligent and intellectual. It can make even a half-hearted student into a great communist philosopher with a couple of easy to digest papers. In other words, it was alluring as an idea, easy to understand, quick to learn, and popular to research. It was easy to grasp, yet seemed intellectually satisfying. That it was incorrect was discoverable immediately, but that it still seemed worthy of study was undeniable.
Even today backyard communist theorists demand "further research." As if the clinical trials leaving behind millions dead were so close to being successful for perfecting mankind that we need to do that again. Throw your brothers on the hot stove again, it didn't hurt US. It just killed the subsistance farmers.
Imagine if communism was a drug that claimed to cure cancer. Or a model prison designed to cure criminals. Would we still be sending people to a communist establishment with a track record of a hundred million deaths for treatment?
-Ben
Using AI -controlled extra metal arms seems like a much cooler way to fix this problem of controlling the reaction to prevent outbursts. Plus you can beat up superheroes.
-Ben
You are absolutely right with this comment:
"Capitalism should be a tool, not a god."
Surely, I couldn't agree more - it is not a perfect system, and G-d didn't hand it to us. It is our responsibility as humans to help those who cannot help themselves, and we shouldn't look to capitalism to fix all that is wrong in the world. We need charities and minimal gov't social safety nets as well. But remember that those aren't perfect either, and nothing is perfect in this world.
"Well, no, because the extremists on both ends go too far. This doesn't invalidate the concern that the pro-Wal-Mart extremists (i.e. the people Wal-Mart is paying) are winning."
I guess I'm a pro Wal-Mart extremist, by your definition. Where's my check? Somehow I didn't receive it!
"Big red flag here: first, you're pretending that the only options are for Wal-Mart to exist in its current form, or not at all."
Correct. If Wal-mart didn't have the business model, slogan, and attitude "always low prices, always," then they might as well not exist at all. They'd just be another slightly lower priced chain store. I like the fact that we aren't forcing them to be the "sometimes low prices" store! Why should we force them to be something they don't want to be? Why should we force them to give better benifits than they can afford in their current business model?
What makes walmart unique and valuable to our economy is exactly the fact that they viciously and mercilessly cut prices and costs everywhere. It's what makes them a place worth shopping at. Many goods and services would be priced out of potential customer's reach if they didn't do exactly what they are doing.
-Ben
What have we learned?
8 86274-2659010?v=glance&n=283155
Walmart is nothing but a free company in a capitalist society. Those complaining about Walmart are really complaining about capitalism itself.
Yes, walmart prices some American manufacturers out of business. But that is allowing a switch from manufacturing to service based economy. And, thanks to low prices at places like Walmart, more Americans than ever are able to own a house, and stock that house with Tvs, DVDs, Mp3 players and Cell Phones - even at the salary paid by Walmart!
Yes, Walmart buys Chinese. In fact, it is China's leading trading partner and is giving China a real capitalist change from within - a growing middle class in China is coming up. Millions have benefitted there, and I fail to see how this is a bad thing for anyone.
Yes, Walmart doesn't give the very best health benefits. But it beats having unemployment and medicaid. And if Walmart wasn't providing "low paying" jobs, we'd be paying for them in taxes, instead of collecting tax revenue from them.
I checked the Walmart page and Walmart was called "The great satan" in the first line. Why? Because they decided to sell inexpensive, yet usable goods to a mass market?
I rarely shop there, don't work there, don't own stock - but I'm glad they exist. Because they show, better than anything, the hypocracy of anti-capitalist whiners. You know the type - those who complain that they are entitled to everything the world has to offer, for free from the government.
Walmart has shown that the goverment need not provide every citizen with a DVD player. Instead, Walmart has shown the real way for every American who wants a DVD player to get one - is to make it cheaply and sell it cheap enough.
And that's really why people hate Walmart - it shows that capitalism does what utopian socialism never could.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0451191145/103-4
-Ben
The vehicle seems like it could like a small rocket. With long cables, you'd simply hold the rocket vertically upwards, at a slight angle. During launch, the rocket could get around the blimp, and the rocket wouldn't need to carry nearly as much fuel at a higher altitude.
-Ben
In the history of mankind, there have been some aweful regimes. But which regime has murderred the most of its own people?
It's the current Chinese one. 40 million. In fact, it has killed more people than any other regime in history. And it continues to kill people for "treason" or "talking against the regime". It sponsorred Pol Pot and the Korean despots who killed further millions. And it has nuclear weapons.
Google has a promise to "not be evil". What evil is China not guilty of? Forced abortions, environmental massacres, aggression towards neighbors, genocide of Tibettans, and so forth.
What does the Chinese regime have to do to be considderred evil? Google has a responsiblity to look at its relation with China in respect to its promisses.
-Ben
Solar/ Motion powerred jackets. Charge the devices from your incoming light and motion. The only problems with this are the expense of the jackets and the need for a universal power jack that the jacket would have to output.
-Ben
Our hero, Milton Feng, has discoverred a plot by the evil Terahertz gang to break the Universe's barier.
Pseudomorphic, the evil gang leader, has invented a new device to break through the barrier. "I will cause the failure of all the communication devices and computers." He cries. His sidekick, Heterojunction, says "I will collect the indium the we need to finish our ultimate machine!"
Pseudo's girlfriend, Bipolar Transistor, has a bag full of arsenide and is on the lookout to kill anyone foolish enough to interfere.
Milton stealthily invades the enemy base, where he overhears that the Terahertz gang will strike the bandgap in selected areas. After he finds this out, he speeds his electron flow to warn the others.
But what he doesn't know is that while his group of heroes is made of dissimilar and equally spunky men, the Pseudomorphic has his gang thoroughly doped.
Can our hero improve the compositional grading of the transistor components enough?
Or will the PseudoMoprh defeat them with his awesome signal charging time?
Find out on the next episode of "Moore's Law"!
-Ben