There's a lot of parasites in the RIAA, as with any media company. I'm sorry, but the media industry (print, online, motion picture, audio, et al) is the most featherbedded industry on the planet. They make the Teamsters look efficient, fer chrissakes!
Look at any magazine's employee list (it's generally near the front of the magazine). How many of the people listed contribute anything to the content. How many dot-coms went under because they figured "this is like print," we can have people who write two articles a week?
The RIAA labels' net after royalties, marketing, and manufacturing is about $4 per CD. Do the math yourself. In general: $1.00/CD manufacturing, $1/CD in royalties, $3.75 in marketing. On a CD which wholesales for between $8-10. Just because you pay $16 at the store doesn't make $16 going into the RIAA's coffers. In addition, all those albums which only sell 10,000 copies have 20,000+ CDs pressed for the first run. Why? Because the RIAA labels have no idea what'll sell. When it comes to new talent, they throw the music on the wall and see what sticks. This is why established artists (think Metallica, Limp Bizkit, NSync, the Rolling Stones) and catalog artists (Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, the Beatles) can get such huge royalties. The labels are reasonably sure that Metallica can put out an album of utter crap and go platinum on name recognition alone. Of course, such "sure things" sometimes aren't so sure (see Mariah Carey for example).
Consider a CD by the Rolling Stones compared to a CD by Willie Nelson. Both are priced at approximately the same $18 price point. The Rolling Stones are gong to sell more CD's, so there is more demand for their product. You would expect the CD to cost more. Now, consider the price of concert tickets. A Willie Nelson ticket is going to cost about $40. A Rolling Stones ticket is going to cost $150. This is market behavior.
And the thing is, I'll take the Willie Nelson CD/concert over the Stones any day. There are only two country artists I can stand: Willie and Johnny Cash. Don't go messing with them.
For so long, MS and Intel have been sleeping together, both helping eath other out in each other's industries, forcing the other computer manufacturers to use their products in computers.
Microsoft's coziest relationship with Intel was in the 80's (MS helped design the 2, 3, & 486's, iirc). In the '90s though, the relationship has been wary. Each, to some extent, views the other as an obstacle to domination, but neither wants to try and freeze the other out.
But any user who has used Linux in the past will want his favourite CD player. Hence the need to include all five.
Of course, Lycoris is not targeted at experienced Linux users. It's for those migrating from Windows, where the OS includes one "text editor" (if Notepad qualifies...), one "word processor" (if WordPad qualifies), one GUI, one file manager, one shell, etc. I've seen many Linux installs with newbies who get overwhelmed when they see all the packages that are installable. I've seen some turn back right there and go back to Windows saying that Linux is too complex.
The world is going towards automated and computer aided investment (CAI (C)), so at some point, only the smartest rulesets owned by BIG corporations and run on MULTIVAC servers will be able to, on average, earn any short term money.
I remember seeing a study where they asked some mutual fund managers to program a computer with their investment strategy. They then discovered that the computers consistently beat the humans who had programmed them. Why?
To put it plainly: the computers followed the strategy. They didn't second-guess themselves. They didn't think, "the stock is going higher, so I'll sell."
The key to successfully using the hard get-out price strategy is to ignore the stock for at least a couple of years after you sell it. All that matters is that you got out (ideally with the profits). Ignore the people who will say, when they find out that you sold at 30 when the stock went to 40 the next week, "You lost money." No you didn't (assuming you bought at less than 30). Did you make less than you would have had you waited for it to hit 40? Yes, but that's not losing money.
There's an old saying on Wall Street, "Bulls and bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered." Contrary to popular perception, being excessively greedy on Wall Street tends to be a recipe for disaster.
In general one of the smarter investment strategies is to set hard prices where you'll sell. I generally tend to go with a 20% increase or a 10% decrease. As soon as the stock hits that target I drop it. I don't care where the stock goes after that.
With regards to your.sig: [I'd post this in response to his journal, but the discussion has been archived, and you don't have any email listed...], I agree with you. While I do not metamod any down mod as Unfair, I have very high standards for qualifying as a neutral down mod.
At this moment I am working on a Journal post that will propose a simple means by which Over-rated and Under-rated mods can be metamodded.
The other criticism that can be raised about the Kyoto Treaty is that it ignores an approach which would be just about to guaranteed to reduce the global warming problem.
This approach is: punish nations based on net greenhouse gases emitted while rewarding based on net greenhouse gases removed from air (through such things as trees). However, this is not acceptable to the drafters of the Kyoto Treaty. Why? Because of who gets punished and who gets rewarded.
For the most part, Europe has few forests but lots of industry and pollution. North America, has lots of forests (especially in Canada, but also in the US). By this approach, Europe almost certainly accounts for more per capita greenhouse gas emission than anywhere else on the planet (with the possible exceptions of largely desert nations).
The Kyoto Treaty should have been formulated so that if a nation removes n tons of greenhouse gases, it should be able to produce (0
With a huge economic advantage going to those nations that can absorb greenhouse gases, research will be done into technological solutions. And governments would take very seriously forest policy and encourage the creation of replacement forests.
Under current technology, industry (and thus economic activity) implies some level of greenhouse emissions. So by allowing more economic activity (which any believer in a free market considers a good thing) and thus more money to come to those who clean up the air, the air will get cleaner. Why? Because people are whores. A corporation's whore factor is an order of magnitude higher than the sum of its shareholders. A whore wants money. Ergo, corporations and people will work to clean up the air if there is a demonstrable economic advantage to do so.
It's a commonly held idea in psychology, especially in educational psychology, that positive reinforcement is sort of effective, negative reinforcement is slightly more effective, and that combining the two is extremely effective.
For a demonstration of the above, I refer you to the MENACE (Matchbox Educable Naughts and Crosses Engine), an early implementation of reinforcement learning in AI. Consider how good a MENACE is if you only add beads after it wins. Consider how good a MENACE is (relative to the previous example) if you only remove beads (as a useful modification, refuse to allow a given move to lose all of its beads). Consider how effective a MENACE is if addition and subtraction are performed.
2. There is no conspiracy, but most environmental scientists are left-leaning so they all tend to be wrong in the same direction. After all, they generally are supported by the government, advocacy groups, etc. and not private enterprise.
You have hit the nail on the head. To believe that there is a left-wing bias in the major US media does not mean (as some seem to imply) that there is a massive conspiracy, where the editors of publications decide a party line and where deviations from that line will occur. No, it's a function of this: the more educated one is (by conventional standards), the more apt one is to be left-leaning. This does not necessarily mean that left-leaning is the educated position, however. Thus, populations that require higher levels of education will tend to have more left-leaning outlooks. Journalism requires a lot of education, as does science. Therefore, it is not surprising that most journalists are left-leaning.
The environmental movement may be based on misinformation, unfounded fear or outright deception but it is not based on hatred.
While I grant that such groups are far from mainstream in the environmental movement, what about those groups who are convinced that reducing the world population to an "environmentally enlightened" 100,000 is the only way to save the planet?
The World Resources Institute's stated purposes is: WRI is an environmental think tank that goes beyond research to find practical ways to protect the earth and improve people's lives.
Just because an organization says "We are not something" does not mean that they actually are not something, especially if "something" could adversely affect their perception. If Microsoft said on their web page that they are "Dedicated to preserving the ideals and funding the development of the GNU Project," would that be accurate?
The most dangerous person is the true believer, be it a fundamentalist Christian/Jew/Muslim/Buddhist/Hindu/Communist/Anar chist/Libertarian/Fascist/Yankees Fan/Man Utd Fan/Free Software Advocate/etc. Why? Because the true believer has been brainwashed into believing that only their mantras are true. From this, it logically follows that they consider anyone who disagrees with them to be wrong. This has the tendency (at least in my experience) to cause them to automatically disregard any argument from someone who is opposed to them ("Well, you're not a true believer in the Bible, so I will not listen to your arguments that the Bible is not the inerrant word of God").
As it stands, having the government build roads subsidises car makers. If the government spent as much on building railroad tracks as it does on maintaining highways, owning a couple trains would be as profitable as owning a fleet of trucks... A tax like this reverses the subsidies... It would cover for new roads, as the articles suggest, but could also help pay for environmental measures, as well.
I agree. The US Govt botched Amtrak. They should have taken over the infrastructure and improved it (electrifiying, etc), while creating a more open market to do the actual moving. The government does a good job of running infrastructure but not of serving customers (witness Amtrak delays and horrible service). This is analogous to roads: the government builds and maintains the roads, but private concerns run buses and trucks.
While not my favorite governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis proposed essentially the same thing a while back. Unfortunately nothing ever became of it.
Re:US already taxes commercial truckers on mileage
on
Every Road a Toll Road
·
· Score: 2
IIRC, the U.S. DOT has truckers log their mileage in states, and they pay road taxes based on their travel. This is why they don't pay gas taxes.
Close, but not quite. You know what those weigh stations are for? They weigh the truck when it enters and when it leaves. Based on this and the miles it drove in the state, they determine how much gas was consumed. The trucker than has to prove that he paid the gas taxes on that gas in that state.
Disclaimer: I am from Western Massachusetts (west of 495 for over a decade, west of Worcester for about 9 years, and west of the Quabbin for two), where various proposals have been floated that would make the people west of Boston pay for the Big Dig, a massively expensive (and arguably necessary) highway reconstruction project which, at any given moment, is not being used by many people west of Worcester. I'm also somewhat of a road geek. As a young child I would spend hours sketching out designs for highway interchanges. There are few things I find more enjoyable on road trips than studying the design of the roads and watching their construction and rebuilding.
Under the Interstate Highway and Defense Act passed in 1956, the states would receive a sum proportional to the amount of federal gasoline taxes taken from the state. Originally, those funds could only be used for building highways. As a result every state, through about 1970, went on a highway binge. By 1972, save for major portions in Northeastern cities (Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston) most of the system had been built. Why? Because state politicians knew that construction brought good union jobs for free (the Feds were paying 90% of the cost).
In the 1970s, Congress allowed Interstate funds to be used to build public transport systems. With many states having finished their interstates, save for useless spurs that are still built to this day, the party was over. But now that they could build public transport, they started with a vengeance.
Nowadays, very little of the gas tax money goes to construction or maintenance, because the construction has been done and most of the maintenance is cheaper, but the gas tax money has increased dramatically as the number of miles driven increases.
Thus, in many states, the legislatures have gotten addicted to the road money. If their state has lower gas consumption, less money goes to the State House. So it's no surprise that nowadays, public transport gets cut (because the more driving gets done, the more money flows in for political pork projects (stadiums, etc.)). It's also no surprise why the States are perfectly willing to roll back emissions standards, as an Excursion generates some 3 times more gas taxes than a Saturn SL1, and some 5 times more than a Toyota Prius. So few states really encourage their citizens to buy non-SUV's.
If the gas tax were abolished and roads were paid for by who actually used them, things wopuld change for the better, IMHO. If this happens we might actually see states doing sane things like discouraging massive fuel inefficiency (for example, charging extra for registrations of low-efficiency vehicles in urban areas (as a practical matter, restricting trucks in rural areas isn't going to work. The farm lobbies are too powerful). Remember, the problem with monster SUVs are the people in urban/suburban areas who drive them and don't need them). Also, there's this simple fact, which is nice. Those who use the superhighways pay for them. A decent-sized number of Americans drive a lot (thus paying gas taxes), while only utilizing superhighways (which account for the majority of expenditure) rarely. This is a slight inequity.
The reason that more roads, especially in cities, aren't toll roads, is because of the historical overhead of tolls, such as widening the roads and the traffic problems. However, nowadays most toll roads have an electronic option, with EZPass being the most common. By using this option, existing highways can be made toll roads with little overhead.
What few people realize is that before Hitler transformed the Nazis into what they became, they were arguably the first Green party.
To quote from "Virtual Reich", by Michael Reynolds in the February 2002 Playboy, page 147:
The "Jew-Communist" threat of "Red Russia," so long exploited by the American far right on issues ranging from the Roosevelt administration to civil rights, has lost traction. When the Soviet Union finally gave up the ghost..., white nationalists and the anti-communist right lost their common enemy. In its place, the nemesis became the new world order, a juggernaut of international corporate finance, Jewish media, and American military power.
Issues that resonate among swelling ranks of young protesters in opposition to globalism and American domination - the environment, NATO, the IMF, the WTO, ethnic sovereignty, animal rights, genetic engineering, and consumerism - all have been exploited by a new wave of Aryan revolutionaries.
...National Socialism is bedded in... nature worship - it was Patchouli fascism on a grand scale. A solid case can be made the Nazi Party was the first Green Party - a genocidal [Green Party]* -but green nonetheless. The term ecology itself is a purely German concept coined by Ernst Haeckel, a 19th century social Darwinist, German Nationalist, anti-Semite, and mystical racist.
No matter how much the deep ecology believers wish it to be otherwise, their[ideas] flow from a poisoned well dug by Fascists and Nazis.
...Earth First was cranked up 20-years ago by a clutch of white eco-warriors whose backpacks carried some anti-immigrant racism and a genocide-friendly attitude mixed in with their monkey wrenches and love for absolute wilderness. Original Earth First headman and ecoterrorist David Foreman came straight out of the Sixties' right-wing street pack - Young Americans for Freedom - bringing a white-boy anarcho-libertarian stance that would later slip into step with the movement. "An Ice Age is coming and I welcome it as much-needed changing," Foreman said in 1993. "I see no solution to our ruination of Earth except for a drastic reduction in human population."
As AIDS, war, and starvation killed African women and children during the Nineties, the news put Social Darwinist Foreman and his allies in a party mood. "The worst thing we could do in Ethiopia is to give aid - the best thing to do would be just to let nature run its course," said Foreman sounding more like a member of the SS than the Sierra Club.
While Foreman and other ecofanatics regurgitated variations on National Socialist environmental policy and Aryan paganism, some overtly neofascist cross-breeds went into visions of Annihilation.
In March, 1995, the Green-Brown Anarchists took Foreman's suggestion and ratcheted it up several degrees in an internal bulletin:
For circulation among initiates only! The only sane response to mass society is mass murder. In the shadows, ashes and remains of the Green Action death camps, there will be far more than mere liberation from mass society. This is where we shall discover the philosopher's stone, and with it the knowledge to return to a traditional form of society in tune with Mother Earth. This is revolution in the true sense of the word, a homecoming.
Pol Pot had the right idea! Let the parasites drown in a sea of blood. A world population of 100,000 will be enough to build a pure society.
Procalimaing itself as neither left nor right, neither communist nor capitalist, this peculiar political creature is best known as the Third Position. It's history predates the Third Reich. Third Positionists push aside Hitler to identify with Otto and Gregor Strasser, influential early members of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
The Strassers and their Black Front looked east to a pan-Aryan socialist alliance which would oppose American democracy and Jewish finance. This was unacceptable to Hitler and his big-business partners in Germany who were hell-bent on conquest of Russia. The Strassers to ok the Socialism in National Socialism seriously. But for Hitler, it was merely a ploy. Hitler needed the solid support of the aristocracy and industry, so he purged the Strassers from leadership in the party.
[Why has Third Positionism turned to anti-capitalism?] "The most important reason is so obvious it's easy to overlook - the end of the Red Menace," says historian Kevin Coogan, author of Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International. "As long as the commies were pounding shoes at the UN and aiming missiles at Miami, the far-right mantra was that Communism and Capitalism were both Jewish plots, but that Capitalism was slightly better."
"Antiglobalism, anti-WTO protests, anarchists, eco-warriors, animal rights," contiues Coogan, "They see this whole new counterculture as a huge constituency. They push Fascism as a leftist revolution."
The conventional reading of the militia movement is now called into question. Were they really right-wingers? Their ranting about a New World Order, loss of sovereignty, and police-state tactics easily transpose to the words of the anarchists today in Seattle, Prague, Quebec, and Genoa. The new Aryans have torched their white supremacy standard and raised their own separatist flag alongside the other ethnic banners - except, of course, the Mogen David.
*: the actual terminology used was "genocidal pack of ecofreaks," but that terminology is too loaded for my taste.
As an addendum to my post, I'd like to relay a joke I heard a Canadian friend once say:
We Canadians could have been the luckiest people on earth. We could have had American know-how, French cuisine, and British government. We ended up with American cuisine, British know-how, and French government./blockquote.
Being "European", I have always been somewhate disturbed by the strange inferiority complex some Slashdotters seem to have. That "Europe" would be somehow superior is a very strange notion to me. I would also like to know how people would define "Europe." Is it the European Union, the continent (i.e. geographically defined, including countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Albania, Russia which are fairly different from the EU countries socially and economically). Or by a cultrural definition(does this include the European part of Turky, for example, or only the "Christian" countries?).
Well, Americans are suckers for British accents (and I am, too...). It's a fascination with the "mother country", I guess. And we have a complex about the French (cooking and babes like Sophie Marceau...). The Germans, three words: BEER AND CARS! (even at the same time...) The Dutch: WEED! The Swedes: blondes and Saabs (I'm not a Volvo fan, so I will not dignify that...).
What's also funny is that some Europeans feel inferior to "the Americans." Maybe some people are just morons.
I think it's a form of utopianism. People see they're shortcomings and see that others have strengths where they're weaknesses lie. So they think, "If I/we were like them, life would be perfect."
It's like watching your next door neighbor. You've got a good job, but not a hell of a lot of money. He's got a Jaguar and an Audi in the driveway, a 60-inch HDTV, and a hot wife. You want to be him, because what you see of him is an image he projects. Then the credit card debt comes due and he loses it all and starts beating his wife...
Who decides what is hate speech? An argument made by a Palestinian against Jewish occupation, etc. could be easily mis-construed as being anti-semetic.
And it is. To criticize in any way shape or form the State of Israel is to be declared just this side of a Nazi. Once again, America's social conscience (guilt over the Holocaust mainly) does the world a huge disfavor.
What's next? Subversive/anti-government speech will be made illegal?
These laws don't need to be extended. Since every human is guilty of hate (it is an inate emotion), the glut of offenders will make this very selectively enforced. So anti-status quo speech will be branded hateful and banned.
I was going to post anonymously, but I said, fuck it, the most karma i can lose is 2 points. So here goes:
Prevalent on Slashdot is the notion that Europe is somehow superior to the US. I hate to make such a generalization, but it's not true, and things like this lend some creedence to this.
I am a citizen of the United States, so perhaps this post is a manifestation of a major difference between the European point-of-view/thought process and the American, but I cannot see how this is can posibly be a good thing.
The language is going to be broad. Face it. Jus about anything will qualify because as soon as the precedent is set, everybody will be clamoring to have their pet peeve branded as hate speech. Someone makes a joke like: "How do you make a dog go meow? You run it quickly over a circular saw," and it will be branded as hateful to animals and animal lovers.
As a direct consequence, since everyone is guilty of this in one way or another, the law will only be selectively applied. It will only be used against minority viewpoints. Anti-globalization protesters (which I am not a part of and to some extent find some disquieting parallels with Naziis m in their beliefs) will be branded hatemongers and barred from internet use. These laws will turn into icing on the cake and cheap means to punish people when nothing else can be pinned on them.
Has anyone stopped to think what the response of the hatemongers will be? They'll PGP encrypt everything. They'll use steganography. You know what this means? After these laws fail, the governments will blame it on the availability of encryption. So watch it become a crime to possess any encryption technology in Europe, because only terrorists and hatemongers use PGP, SSH, and FreeNet. Watch Linux be branded an accomplice to hate because hate groups use Apache on Linux to run their web sites.
I have one question: how does encouraging suicide qualify as denouncing freedom of speech? Yeah, I suppose that since dead people can't talk, suicide has reduced their freedom of speech, but it's suicide. It's not even Dr. Kevorkian strapping you to his death machine. It's something that's done of your accord, by definition.
Also, is not suicide, in some if not many cases, itself an act of expression equivalent to speech?
Personally, I don't think someone should be allowed to share his opinion when this opinion is that killing people because of some arbitrary criteria is the way to go. Especially scince they tend to act after their opinion.
I dispute that contention. While (p(x) = "x commits hate crimes") implies (q(x) = "x is racist/whatever"), the converse does not hold. Judging by the amount of racist material that gets posted here on Slashdot and Usenet, especially if you browse at -1, I would expect there to be a lot more racist crime in this world than there is.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of parasites in the RIAA, as with any media company. I'm sorry, but the media industry (print, online, motion picture, audio, et al) is the most featherbedded industry on the planet. They make the Teamsters look efficient, fer chrissakes!
Look at any magazine's employee list (it's generally near the front of the magazine). How many of the people listed contribute anything to the content. How many dot-coms went under because they figured "this is like print," we can have people who write two articles a week?
The RIAA labels' net after royalties, marketing, and manufacturing is about $4 per CD. Do the math yourself. In general: $1.00/CD manufacturing, $1/CD in royalties, $3.75 in marketing. On a CD which wholesales for between $8-10. Just because you pay $16 at the store doesn't make $16 going into the RIAA's coffers. In addition, all those albums which only sell 10,000 copies have 20,000+ CDs pressed for the first run. Why? Because the RIAA labels have no idea what'll sell. When it comes to new talent, they throw the music on the wall and see what sticks. This is why established artists (think Metallica, Limp Bizkit, NSync, the Rolling Stones) and catalog artists (Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, the Beatles) can get such huge royalties. The labels are reasonably sure that Metallica can put out an album of utter crap and go platinum on name recognition alone. Of course, such "sure things" sometimes aren't so sure (see Mariah Carey for example).
And the thing is, I'll take the Willie Nelson CD/concert over the Stones any day. There are only two country artists I can stand: Willie and Johnny Cash. Don't go messing with them.
Microsoft's coziest relationship with Intel was in the 80's (MS helped design the 2, 3, & 486's, iirc). In the '90s though, the relationship has been wary. Each, to some extent, views the other as an obstacle to domination, but neither wants to try and freeze the other out.
The article from Yahoo themselves.
Of course, Lycoris is not targeted at experienced Linux users. It's for those migrating from Windows, where the OS includes one "text editor" (if Notepad qualifies...), one "word processor" (if WordPad qualifies), one GUI, one file manager, one shell, etc. I've seen many Linux installs with newbies who get overwhelmed when they see all the packages that are installable. I've seen some turn back right there and go back to Windows saying that Linux is too complex.
No! s/co/ko/ ...
I remember seeing a study where they asked some mutual fund managers to program a computer with their investment strategy. They then discovered that the computers consistently beat the humans who had programmed them. Why?
To put it plainly: the computers followed the strategy. They didn't second-guess themselves. They didn't think, "the stock is going higher, so I'll sell."
The key to successfully using the hard get-out price strategy is to ignore the stock for at least a couple of years after you sell it. All that matters is that you got out (ideally with the profits). Ignore the people who will say, when they find out that you sold at 30 when the stock went to 40 the next week, "You lost money." No you didn't (assuming you bought at less than 30). Did you make less than you would have had you waited for it to hit 40? Yes, but that's not losing money.
There's an old saying on Wall Street, "Bulls and bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered." Contrary to popular perception, being excessively greedy on Wall Street tends to be a recipe for disaster.
In general one of the smarter investment strategies is to set hard prices where you'll sell. I generally tend to go with a 20% increase or a 10% decrease. As soon as the stock hits that target I drop it. I don't care where the stock goes after that.
Did Dell ever have AMD's? I mean, historically, Michael Dell has given head to whoever was in charge at Intel...
With regards to your .sig: [I'd post this in response to his journal, but the discussion has been archived, and you don't have any email listed...], I agree with you. While I do not metamod any down mod as Unfair, I have very high standards for qualifying as a neutral down mod.
At this moment I am working on a Journal post that will propose a simple means by which Over-rated and Under-rated mods can be metamodded.
The other criticism that can be raised about the Kyoto Treaty is that it ignores an approach which would be just about to guaranteed to reduce the global warming problem.
This approach is: punish nations based on net greenhouse gases emitted while rewarding based on net greenhouse gases removed from air (through such things as trees). However, this is not acceptable to the drafters of the Kyoto Treaty. Why? Because of who gets punished and who gets rewarded.
For the most part, Europe has few forests but lots of industry and pollution. North America, has lots of forests (especially in Canada, but also in the US). By this approach, Europe almost certainly accounts for more per capita greenhouse gas emission than anywhere else on the planet (with the possible exceptions of largely desert nations).
The Kyoto Treaty should have been formulated so that if a nation removes n tons of greenhouse gases, it should be able to produce (0
With a huge economic advantage going to those nations that can absorb greenhouse gases, research will be done into technological solutions. And governments would take very seriously forest policy and encourage the creation of replacement forests.
Under current technology, industry (and thus economic activity) implies some level of greenhouse emissions. So by allowing more economic activity (which any believer in a free market considers a good thing) and thus more money to come to those who clean up the air, the air will get cleaner. Why? Because people are whores. A corporation's whore factor is an order of magnitude higher than the sum of its shareholders. A whore wants money. Ergo, corporations and people will work to clean up the air if there is a demonstrable economic advantage to do so.
It's a commonly held idea in psychology, especially in educational psychology, that positive reinforcement is sort of effective, negative reinforcement is slightly more effective, and that combining the two is extremely effective.
For a demonstration of the above, I refer you to the MENACE (Matchbox Educable Naughts and Crosses Engine), an early implementation of reinforcement learning in AI. Consider how good a MENACE is if you only add beads after it wins. Consider how good a MENACE is (relative to the previous example) if you only remove beads (as a useful modification, refuse to allow a given move to lose all of its beads). Consider how effective a MENACE is if addition and subtraction are performed.
Whew! That was a long post...
You have hit the nail on the head. To believe that there is a left-wing bias in the major US media does not mean (as some seem to imply) that there is a massive conspiracy, where the editors of publications decide a party line and where deviations from that line will occur. No, it's a function of this: the more educated one is (by conventional standards), the more apt one is to be left-leaning. This does not necessarily mean that left-leaning is the educated position, however. Thus, populations that require higher levels of education will tend to have more left-leaning outlooks. Journalism requires a lot of education, as does science. Therefore, it is not surprising that most journalists are left-leaning.
While I grant that such groups are far from mainstream in the environmental movement, what about those groups who are convinced that reducing the world population to an "environmentally enlightened" 100,000 is the only way to save the planet?
Just because an organization says "We are not something" does not mean that they actually are not something, especially if "something" could adversely affect their perception. If Microsoft said on their web page that they are "Dedicated to preserving the ideals and funding the development of the GNU Project," would that be accurate?
The most dangerous person is the true believer, be it a fundamentalist Christian/Jew/Muslim/Buddhist/Hindu/Communist/Anar chist/Libertarian/Fascist/Yankees Fan/Man Utd Fan/Free Software Advocate/etc. Why? Because the true believer has been brainwashed into believing that only their mantras are true. From this, it logically follows that they consider anyone who disagrees with them to be wrong. This has the tendency (at least in my experience) to cause them to automatically disregard any argument from someone who is opposed to them ("Well, you're not a true believer in the Bible, so I will not listen to your arguments that the Bible is not the inerrant word of God").
I agree. The US Govt botched Amtrak. They should have taken over the infrastructure and improved it (electrifiying, etc), while creating a more open market to do the actual moving. The government does a good job of running infrastructure but not of serving customers (witness Amtrak delays and horrible service). This is analogous to roads: the government builds and maintains the roads, but private concerns run buses and trucks.
While not my favorite governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis proposed essentially the same thing a while back. Unfortunately nothing ever became of it.
Close, but not quite. You know what those weigh stations are for? They weigh the truck when it enters and when it leaves. Based on this and the miles it drove in the state, they determine how much gas was consumed. The trucker than has to prove that he paid the gas taxes on that gas in that state.
Disclaimer: I am from Western Massachusetts (west of 495 for over a decade, west of Worcester for about 9 years, and west of the Quabbin for two), where various proposals have been floated that would make the people west of Boston pay for the Big Dig, a massively expensive (and arguably necessary) highway reconstruction project which, at any given moment, is not being used by many people west of Worcester. I'm also somewhat of a road geek. As a young child I would spend hours sketching out designs for highway interchanges. There are few things I find more enjoyable on road trips than studying the design of the roads and watching their construction and rebuilding.
Under the Interstate Highway and Defense Act passed in 1956, the states would receive a sum proportional to the amount of federal gasoline taxes taken from the state. Originally, those funds could only be used for building highways. As a result every state, through about 1970, went on a highway binge. By 1972, save for major portions in Northeastern cities (Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston) most of the system had been built. Why? Because state politicians knew that construction brought good union jobs for free (the Feds were paying 90% of the cost).
In the 1970s, Congress allowed Interstate funds to be used to build public transport systems. With many states having finished their interstates, save for useless spurs that are still built to this day, the party was over. But now that they could build public transport, they started with a vengeance.
Nowadays, very little of the gas tax money goes to construction or maintenance, because the construction has been done and most of the maintenance is cheaper, but the gas tax money has increased dramatically as the number of miles driven increases.
Thus, in many states, the legislatures have gotten addicted to the road money. If their state has lower gas consumption, less money goes to the State House. So it's no surprise that nowadays, public transport gets cut (because the more driving gets done, the more money flows in for political pork projects (stadiums, etc.)). It's also no surprise why the States are perfectly willing to roll back emissions standards, as an Excursion generates some 3 times more gas taxes than a Saturn SL1, and some 5 times more than a Toyota Prius. So few states really encourage their citizens to buy non-SUV's.
If the gas tax were abolished and roads were paid for by who actually used them, things wopuld change for the better, IMHO. If this happens we might actually see states doing sane things like discouraging massive fuel inefficiency (for example, charging extra for registrations of low-efficiency vehicles in urban areas (as a practical matter, restricting trucks in rural areas isn't going to work. The farm lobbies are too powerful). Remember, the problem with monster SUVs are the people in urban/suburban areas who drive them and don't need them). Also, there's this simple fact, which is nice. Those who use the superhighways pay for them. A decent-sized number of Americans drive a lot (thus paying gas taxes), while only utilizing superhighways (which account for the majority of expenditure) rarely. This is a slight inequity.
The reason that more roads, especially in cities, aren't toll roads, is because of the historical overhead of tolls, such as widening the roads and the traffic problems. However, nowadays most toll roads have an electronic option, with EZPass being the most common. By using this option, existing highways can be made toll roads with little overhead.
"Once the popstars go up, who care where they come down? That's not my department," says Werner von Braun
For the humor impaired, check some of the links from this Google search.
What few people realize is that before Hitler transformed the Nazis into what they became, they were arguably the first Green party.
To quote from "Virtual Reich", by Michael Reynolds in the February 2002 Playboy, page 147:
As an addendum to my post, I'd like to relay a joke I heard a Canadian friend once say:
Well, Americans are suckers for British accents (and I am, too...). It's a fascination with the "mother country", I guess. And we have a complex about the French (cooking and babes like Sophie Marceau...). The Germans, three words: BEER AND CARS! (even at the same time...) The Dutch: WEED! The Swedes: blondes and Saabs (I'm not a Volvo fan, so I will not dignify that...).
I think it's a form of utopianism. People see they're shortcomings and see that others have strengths where they're weaknesses lie. So they think, "If I/we were like them, life would be perfect."
It's like watching your next door neighbor. You've got a good job, but not a hell of a lot of money. He's got a Jaguar and an Audi in the driveway, a 60-inch HDTV, and a hot wife. You want to be him, because what you see of him is an image he projects. Then the credit card debt comes due and he loses it all and starts beating his wife...
...and ends up in a van down by the river!
And it is. To criticize in any way shape or form the State of Israel is to be declared just this side of a Nazi. Once again, America's social conscience (guilt over the Holocaust mainly) does the world a huge disfavor.
These laws don't need to be extended. Since every human is guilty of hate (it is an inate emotion), the glut of offenders will make this very selectively enforced. So anti-status quo speech will be branded hateful and banned.
Maybe having only 10 hours of sleep in the last 72 hours has something to do with it...
I'm kind of taking a chance posting that at this time of day. At this hour (6:20 ET), most of the /. readers are European.
I was going to post anonymously, but I said, fuck it, the most karma i can lose is 2 points. So here goes:
Prevalent on Slashdot is the notion that Europe is somehow superior to the US. I hate to make such a generalization, but it's not true, and things like this lend some creedence to this.
I am a citizen of the United States, so perhaps this post is a manifestation of a major difference between the European point-of-view/thought process and the American, but I cannot see how this is can posibly be a good thing.
I have one question: how does encouraging suicide qualify as denouncing freedom of speech? Yeah, I suppose that since dead people can't talk, suicide has reduced their freedom of speech, but it's suicide. It's not even Dr. Kevorkian strapping you to his death machine. It's something that's done of your accord, by definition.
Also, is not suicide, in some if not many cases, itself an act of expression equivalent to speech?
I dispute that contention. While (p(x) = "x commits hate crimes") implies (q(x) = "x is racist/whatever"), the converse does not hold. Judging by the amount of racist material that gets posted here on Slashdot and Usenet, especially if you browse at -1, I would expect there to be a lot more racist crime in this world than there is.