You yourself put a price on it every time you decide to order a caramel latte at Starbucks instead of donating that money to some vaccination program for the third world. The fact that you are ignorant of the price you put on other people's lives doesn't change that.
There's MAny (many many) quotes about the slow erosion of freedoms but the following [wikipedia.org] is one of my favorites.
And your freedom is being eroded by having the choice of carrying a cell phone... how? This must be the same sense in which you get poorer when Zuckerberg makes an extra million.
Seems to me you're driven more by FUD than actual civil liberties concerns.
No, "enhanced 911" (i.e., the ability of authorities to determine your location) needs to meet these requirements:
95% of a network operator's in-service phones must be E911 compliant ("location capable") by December 31, 2005. (Several carriers missed this deadline, and were fined by the FCC.)
Wireless network operators must provide the latitude and longitude of callers within 300 meters, within six minutes of a request by a PSAP. Accuracy rates must meet FCC standards on average within any given participating PSAP service area by September 11, 2012 (deferred from September 11, 2008).
If someone proposed HTTP today, it wouldn't pass muster by these experts either. And I doubt that any of these new protocols really would make much of a difference anyway. The infrastructure has been built around HTTP, everybody knows how to compress it and everybody knows how to deal with the kind of multiple connections that it requires. If anything additional is really needed, it could be expressed as hints to the server and the intermediate infrastructure without starting from scratch.
Well, as I was saying: "If you want pharmaceuticals to be developed by private industry, then patents are essential."
But the question is whether it's working overall: do markets incentivize the development of the drugs we need, and do pharmaceutical companies operate in a free market. The answer to both questions is "no". And that means that we need to rethink how we reward and how we pay for drug development.
So pharmaceuticals are the poster child for the patent system.
If you want pharmaceuticals to be developed by private industry, then patents are essential.
However, pharmaceuticals are also a poster child for bad patents because we don't really have a free market in drugs; drugs have a few large buyers, and the largest is the government. This means that drug prices are subject to rent seeking and price manipulation. In addition, drug companies have little incentive to explore finding cheap and effective cures, they want expensive long term maintenance drugs for lifestyle-related illnesses of the rich; in different words, for pharmaceuticals, market incentives and desirable outcomes don't necessarily coincide.
So, although patents are quite effective at financing drug development in the narrow sense, they tend to encourage the development of the wrong kind of drugs for the wrong kind of people. It might be cheaper for everybody to drop patent protection for drugs altogether and have the government and researchers choose what drugs to develop and then place them in the public domains after development.
No, different countries in Europe want different laws. They have different economies from each other, so that's perfectly fine. A nation is just fine to set it's own laws, that's what makes them a sovereign nation.
And the US is just fine to set its own laws. That includes choosing not to trade with India or canceling loan guarantees or whatever if other countries choose not to respect US intellectual property.
That's how the US whooped the rest of the world's ass in the music and movie industries. We told the Berne Convention off for a century, and during that century, we left the rest of the industrialized world behind due in large part to our much more permissive copyright laws.
Yes, we did, and we accepted the consequences. And every other nation has the same choice. The US is, if anything, much more restrained in its responses than the truly offensive and belligerent behavior of Europeans back when they had power.
You act like trade is a privilege,
Trade is something that happens by mutual agreement, no more and no less. And the US can choose to engage in trade with India only if India meets certain conditions.
For reasons of predictability, the US and many other nations have agreed to free trade rules that allow nations not to stop trade capriciously. But those are still voluntary agreements, not moral or immutable legal obligations. And what the US is demanding from other countries falls within those agreements anyway.
I just don't use that fact to excuse all exploitation.
I'm not excusing "all" exploitation, I just think moral judgments like that are pointless. I do not believe that Bill Gates, Donald Trump, or your average wall street type "deserve" their riches as human beings. I don't believe that I "deserve" to make so much more money than someone in a third world country. I just think that all attempts to redistribute the wealth differently by fiat or force leads to even more injustice than already exists, and that both your and my best choice of improving our situation is to take responsibility for our own lives instead about complaining about inequality and exploitation.
Here's the plan – for step one, Terraspan would like to build a backbone network of underground vacuum tube train tunnels linking eastern Canada to western Mexico through the United States. Embedded in the train tunnel network would be a series of thick, superconducting energy cables that would form the heart of the first true continental power grid.
Here is Step 0: request massive subsidies from the government, because even if you can't build the thing, you'll still profit.
Look at the financial black hole that even proven and mature technology, like California's high speed rail, is turning into. And even for that kind of much simpler and cheaper train system, there isn't much of an economic argument.
IIRC, the bill Spain was blackmailed into went beyond US laws in a couple of regards, as did the law Canada was pressured into.
Blackmailed? Did the US say "we are going to drop some nukes on you if you don't sign"? Did the US say "we are going to reveal the extramarital escapades of your prime minister if you don't sign"? I doubt that. What the US may have said is "if you want to trade with us/loans from us, you sign this". That's not "blackmail", that's a business deal, and Spain can take it or leave it. What the US can negotiate is already strongly constrained by WTO rules anyway.
The EU as a whole is, but individual countries can be pressured,
So the US is at fault because Europe can't get its political act together and different countries in Europe are acting against each other's interest?
and you may not know this, but there are countries other than Europe. Like, for example, India, who objects to these treaties because they don't want to have to have their people die because they can't get cheap drugs.
Let's say for the sake of argument you hold typical progressive views. You want good, well-paying jobs in the US; you want cheap goods imported from India and China, and you want those countries to develop; you want affordable medical care; you want safe and effective drugs and get upset when a few people die from their anti-diabetes drug; and you don't want the poor people of India to die because they can't get cheap drugs. If you don't want one or more of these things, just say it.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but you can't have all of those together. If you want India to be able to develop, it has to trade freely with the US and Europe. If you don't want to wreck the US and European economy in the process, you have to make sure that India plays by the same rules as everybody else. And drug development is very expensive, in part because of extremely strict "consumer protection" laws. Also, India isn't being coerced, they have a choice: trade with the rest of the world on equal terms or don't. But they can't pick and choose which rules to obey and which ones to ignore.
We can argue about whether drug patents are a good idea or not, but as long as we have them, India needs to comply with them just like everybody else. US and European drug companies already go out of their way to try to sell their drugs in developing markets at prices people can afford.
(Incidentally, just as with other IP, European companies are pressing just as strongly for drug-related IP enforcement as American companies.)
These agreements are in practice not equally binding on all. In many cases, foreign governments are pressured into having laws that are not part of US law.
"In many cases"... like what?
Are you aware that many European publishers and artists are screaming bloody murder because European Internet parties managed to stop ACTA? They wanted tougher IP laws. It seems whatever special interest group in Europe isn't getting its way, they are always blaming the US instead of fixing their problems at home.
More importantly, not all countries are on even terms of negotiation
Europe is every bit as big and powerful as the US.
So instead of relying on numbers which could be more scientifically rigorous, we're going to go with...your hunch?
Your basic premise is wrong; it doesn't matter what numbers we use. "Living from paycheck to paycheck" is just not a sign of economic privation. Donald Trump was "living from paycheck to paycheck" for a while, but that paycheck just happened to be $300000/month.
The rest of your post indicates that you are simply happy to be an exploited serf. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that.
If you don't want to save, fine, then don't. I really don't care how you choose to wreck your own life, it's a free country. But if you want to tax me because you live a financially irresponsible life, that's where I draw the line.
And don't pretend that you represent the exploited peoples of this world. If you live in the first world, you are the exploiter, not the exploited, no matter what your income is.
So how is this supposed to work? Is everything every company, not-for-profit, newspaper, or church publishes going to go through a government panel or court who determine whether it is allowable non-political speech? Or what?
It's still about bullying other countries into passing laws they don't want. It undermines national sovereignty
These are global trade agreements: everybody wants to trade with each other, that's why we all negotiate and agree to common rules, equally binding on all. Some of these rules may be bad, but nobody is being "bullied".
No "decision" and no "jumping" happened. US manufacturing keeps growing and is bigger than it has ever been. It's just that other sectors have grown as well, and that manufacturing requires fewer workers per output and doesn't have much use for unskilled labor anymore.
First, your numbers are bogus. Self-reported subjective impressions from biased samples do not constitute facts about the state of the economy.
Second, unless you are at the very bottom of the income distribution, living paycheck-to-paycheck depends on your choice of spending and savings patterns, not on your income. With much less (equivalent) income, people in Germany, France, Spain, or Switzerland have savings rates of 10-15%. You have the option of adopting the spending patterns of people in the decile below you and saving 10% of your income, or the spending patterns of Europeans in the same decile as you and saving two to three times that.
And your idea that "a tiny number of people hoarding most of mankind's wealth" is true, but not in the way you present it. If you are American or European, you are part of the "tiny number of people" hoarding the wealth of this world, so spare the world your self-righteous indignation about the fact that there are some people even richer than you. Furthermore, the people who are wealthy within the US keep changing over the years; being in the top 1% has about a half-life of 10 years in the US.
so now we see another uptick in anarchism, in a new gilded age, as worker's rights sink lower and lower and the predatory make off with vast sums of money. it's a pendulum in history, swinging back and forth
Yes, those poor American workers are richer than at any time in history, but the pendulum just keeps swinging back and forth... in your imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
You yourself put a price on it every time you decide to order a caramel latte at Starbucks instead of donating that money to some vaccination program for the third world. The fact that you are ignorant of the price you put on other people's lives doesn't change that.
You can already get a number of Android apps that watch the road and alert you if you pull up too close or leave your lane.
And, of course, some cars have these kinds of assistance systems as well.
HTTP has persistent connections for that. How do you propose to reduce latency even further?
And your freedom is being eroded by having the choice of carrying a cell phone... how? This must be the same sense in which you get poorer when Zuckerberg makes an extra million.
Seems to me you're driven more by FUD than actual civil liberties concerns.
No, "enhanced 911" (i.e., the ability of authorities to determine your location) needs to meet these requirements:
95% of a network operator's in-service phones must be E911 compliant ("location capable") by December 31, 2005. (Several carriers missed this deadline, and were fined by the FCC.)
Wireless network operators must provide the latitude and longitude of callers within 300 meters, within six minutes of a request by a PSAP. Accuracy rates must meet FCC standards on average within any given participating PSAP service area by September 11, 2012 (deferred from September 11, 2008).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1
If someone proposed HTTP today, it wouldn't pass muster by these experts either. And I doubt that any of these new protocols really would make much of a difference anyway. The infrastructure has been built around HTTP, everybody knows how to compress it and everybody knows how to deal with the kind of multiple connections that it requires. If anything additional is really needed, it could be expressed as hints to the server and the intermediate infrastructure without starting from scratch.
That looks like it might be excited hydrogen.
This isn't "multiple simultaneous viewers".
Well, as I was saying: "If you want pharmaceuticals to be developed by private industry, then patents are essential."
But the question is whether it's working overall: do markets incentivize the development of the drugs we need, and do pharmaceutical companies operate in a free market. The answer to both questions is "no". And that means that we need to rethink how we reward and how we pay for drug development.
If you want pharmaceuticals to be developed by private industry, then patents are essential.
However, pharmaceuticals are also a poster child for bad patents because we don't really have a free market in drugs; drugs have a few large buyers, and the largest is the government. This means that drug prices are subject to rent seeking and price manipulation. In addition, drug companies have little incentive to explore finding cheap and effective cures, they want expensive long term maintenance drugs for lifestyle-related illnesses of the rich; in different words, for pharmaceuticals, market incentives and desirable outcomes don't necessarily coincide.
So, although patents are quite effective at financing drug development in the narrow sense, they tend to encourage the development of the wrong kind of drugs for the wrong kind of people. It might be cheaper for everybody to drop patent protection for drugs altogether and have the government and researchers choose what drugs to develop and then place them in the public domains after development.
And the US is just fine to set its own laws. That includes choosing not to trade with India or canceling loan guarantees or whatever if other countries choose not to respect US intellectual property.
Yes, we did, and we accepted the consequences. And every other nation has the same choice. The US is, if anything, much more restrained in its responses than the truly offensive and belligerent behavior of Europeans back when they had power.
Trade is something that happens by mutual agreement, no more and no less. And the US can choose to engage in trade with India only if India meets certain conditions.
For reasons of predictability, the US and many other nations have agreed to free trade rules that allow nations not to stop trade capriciously. But those are still voluntary agreements, not moral or immutable legal obligations. And what the US is demanding from other countries falls within those agreements anyway.
I'm not excusing "all" exploitation, I just think moral judgments like that are pointless. I do not believe that Bill Gates, Donald Trump, or your average wall street type "deserve" their riches as human beings. I don't believe that I "deserve" to make so much more money than someone in a third world country. I just think that all attempts to redistribute the wealth differently by fiat or force leads to even more injustice than already exists, and that both your and my best choice of improving our situation is to take responsibility for our own lives instead about complaining about inequality and exploitation.
Here is Step 0: request massive subsidies from the government, because even if you can't build the thing, you'll still profit.
Look at the financial black hole that even proven and mature technology, like California's high speed rail, is turning into. And even for that kind of much simpler and cheaper train system, there isn't much of an economic argument.
Blackmailed? Did the US say "we are going to drop some nukes on you if you don't sign"? Did the US say "we are going to reveal the extramarital escapades of your prime minister if you don't sign"? I doubt that. What the US may have said is "if you want to trade with us/loans from us, you sign this". That's not "blackmail", that's a business deal, and Spain can take it or leave it. What the US can negotiate is already strongly constrained by WTO rules anyway.
So the US is at fault because Europe can't get its political act together and different countries in Europe are acting against each other's interest?
Let's say for the sake of argument you hold typical progressive views. You want good, well-paying jobs in the US; you want cheap goods imported from India and China, and you want those countries to develop; you want affordable medical care; you want safe and effective drugs and get upset when a few people die from their anti-diabetes drug; and you don't want the poor people of India to die because they can't get cheap drugs. If you don't want one or more of these things, just say it.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but you can't have all of those together. If you want India to be able to develop, it has to trade freely with the US and Europe. If you don't want to wreck the US and European economy in the process, you have to make sure that India plays by the same rules as everybody else. And drug development is very expensive, in part because of extremely strict "consumer protection" laws. Also, India isn't being coerced, they have a choice: trade with the rest of the world on equal terms or don't. But they can't pick and choose which rules to obey and which ones to ignore.
We can argue about whether drug patents are a good idea or not, but as long as we have them, India needs to comply with them just like everybody else. US and European drug companies already go out of their way to try to sell their drugs in developing markets at prices people can afford.
(Incidentally, just as with other IP, European companies are pressing just as strongly for drug-related IP enforcement as American companies.)
"In many cases"... like what?
Are you aware that many European publishers and artists are screaming bloody murder because European Internet parties managed to stop ACTA? They wanted tougher IP laws. It seems whatever special interest group in Europe isn't getting its way, they are always blaming the US instead of fixing their problems at home.
Europe is every bit as big and powerful as the US.
Your basic premise is wrong; it doesn't matter what numbers we use. "Living from paycheck to paycheck" is just not a sign of economic privation. Donald Trump was "living from paycheck to paycheck" for a while, but that paycheck just happened to be $300000/month.
If you don't want to save, fine, then don't. I really don't care how you choose to wreck your own life, it's a free country. But if you want to tax me because you live a financially irresponsible life, that's where I draw the line.
And don't pretend that you represent the exploited peoples of this world. If you live in the first world, you are the exploiter, not the exploited, no matter what your income is.
So how is this supposed to work? Is everything every company, not-for-profit, newspaper, or church publishes going to go through a government panel or court who determine whether it is allowable non-political speech? Or what?
These are global trade agreements: everybody wants to trade with each other, that's why we all negotiate and agree to common rules, equally binding on all. Some of these rules may be bad, but nobody is being "bullied".
No "decision" and no "jumping" happened. US manufacturing keeps growing and is bigger than it has ever been. It's just that other sectors have grown as well, and that manufacturing requires fewer workers per output and doesn't have much use for unskilled labor anymore.
First, your numbers are bogus. Self-reported subjective impressions from biased samples do not constitute facts about the state of the economy.
Second, unless you are at the very bottom of the income distribution, living paycheck-to-paycheck depends on your choice of spending and savings patterns, not on your income. With much less (equivalent) income, people in Germany, France, Spain, or Switzerland have savings rates of 10-15%. You have the option of adopting the spending patterns of people in the decile below you and saving 10% of your income, or the spending patterns of Europeans in the same decile as you and saving two to three times that.
And your idea that "a tiny number of people hoarding most of mankind's wealth" is true, but not in the way you present it. If you are American or European, you are part of the "tiny number of people" hoarding the wealth of this world, so spare the world your self-righteous indignation about the fact that there are some people even richer than you. Furthermore, the people who are wealthy within the US keep changing over the years; being in the top 1% has about a half-life of 10 years in the US.
I see: you still can't read beyond elementary school level.
Microsoft is finally getting out of the computer business then.
Do you actually believe this bullshit, or do you get paid to spread it?
Ah, yes, because it's so much better if everybody is dirt poor, but at least they are equal!
Yes, those poor American workers are richer than at any time in history, but the pendulum just keeps swinging back and forth... in your imagination.