Of all the reasons I stated for why it was bad to send humans to Europa, the humans dying on Europa was not one of them. I don't even care if we send healthy people to Europa to die, if that's what they want to do.
What I am against, is pretending that this is necessary for scientific discovery or exploration. We can actually fit more and better scientific instruments on the spacecraft if we don't need to take any meat sacks and all the stuff required to have the survive the journey.
"Objective Europa aims to send human beings to Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, on a one way mission in search of extraterrestrial life while expanding the borders of exploration and knowledge for all mankind.
If you think it would be fun to go to Europa even if it means you will die there, that's totally something you should try to do. As for science and exploration, there is really nothing that a human being is going to be able to see or do, beyond what can be done by a robot.
Adding humans to a space mission just makes everything harder, because now you need to bring a whole bunch of shit like water, food, waste treatment machines, CO2 scrubbers, radiation protection, space suits, and extra rocket fuel to propel all this extra mass and even more rocket fuel to propel the extra rocket fuel. The only time when sending humans on a space trip would be beneficial to the human race at this point would be if the earth became full, and we needed to lower the population without killing people or sterilizing them.
The volt is a pretty trendy car in the circles that would actually consider buying it. I haven't seen a single volt commercial. I don't see many car commercials in general. I don't watch non-internet based TV. When a car commercial slips into my internet surfing, I completely ignore it out of habbit.
A unbiased positive article or review of a car has about a million times more weight in my mind than marketing. It is my personal opinion that Chevy should spend every dime of money it has allocated to electric cars on making the cars better rather than trying to sell them. Good cars sell themselves. Ok well maybe they should at least have a website with statistics and some pictures.
Whenever I see a car commercial it makes me less likely to buy that car because I think of all the money diverted from R&D into marketing for that car.
I basically dumped almost all my money into a house because I don't trust banks, but the money I have left over is in a bank.
I did. I bought a house. In fact I borrowed money to buy a house. Which is extra smart if inflation is going to happen.
What I am saying is that the path of least resistance is to be a risky investor. The other paths that are safer require a good amount of effort. I has enough money that it made sense for me to expend this effort to try to protect it (only time will tell if it worked), but for most other people I don't think it makes sense for them to spend lots of time and money to figure out what to invest in. A lot of those people just put their money in the biggest most responsible looking bank they can find. Maybe that was a good idea at one point in history. Maybe it's still a good idea considering banks can be too big to fail.
An investor in a bank, or a purchaser of A-rated securities offered by that bank, may not be aware that there are unregulated, undocumented liabilities held by that bank, which, were they to go sour (see "Credit Default Swap"), could cause the bank to collapse.
I thought everyone knew these ratings were bullshit.
If you knew that your bank was involved in large, unregulated transactions worth more than the bank's holdings, would you continue to do business with them?
Well, this presumes that I am doing business with them in the first place, but I would say that this information wouldn't change my mind, because I just assumed nearly everything the banks did was not actually regulated anyway. Yes there are bank regulators, but they don't really understand how anything works, nor do the banks for that matter. This might be pretty scary for the banks if they weren't able to get taxpayers to pay their losses. It also might cause regulators to start shutting all these banks down if their bosses weren't completely in the pockets of the banks.
Hell even I have my money in a bank. I basically dumped almost all my money into a house because I don't trust banks, but the money I have left over is in a bank. The Federal reserve has made it so that the only thing dumber than putting your money in a bank is not putting your money in a bank. They basically force everyone to become irresponsible investors or they confiscate your money through inflation. It's really quite an ingenious system, but it sucks for people who want to play it safe. Then again life sucks for people who want to play it safe.
I was asking for things that would actually qualify. I believe these would be done anyway. Their R&D costs aren't big enough, especially once you get away from the developed world and its ridiculous regulatory burden.
I think these would qualify, and in fact it is these sorts of expensive innovations that patent proponents will typically cite as emblematic innovations that would not happen without patent law.
If however it can be demonstrated that these industries do not need patents to drive innovation, then I would support removing them or shortening their expiration dates.
What is the purpose of patent law for you, if it is not to get people to invent things that otherwise would not have been (or at least not for a long time)?
Visual studio is not required at all. That's like saying Linux needs IIS to be successful (no apache doesn't count). Linux has a few shortcomings, development tools ain't one of them.
A big chunk of people on welfare in the US are completely dependent on it. Which means that without welfare, there would be no reason for them not to be as poor as the poorest people in Africa.
How would you explain the fact that the quality of life for people on welfare in the US is so much higher than people in Africa. People on welfare in the US have access to safe food, clean water, healthcare, mobile phones, television, etc, if not for the welfare system we have in place?
The quality of life in the US is also better now for the average poor person than it was a hundred years ago. We still have poor people but these people are poor relative to other Americans. As long as people have unequal wealth regardless of how much or how little everyone has, there will be poor people relative to rich people.
We will never reach a state were 100% of people are off welfare. If anything, as our society gets more wealthy, we will probably continue to raise the threshold for what we consider poor. The fact that the same number of people are on welfare is not an indicator that it is not working.
Somehow, I think that if you have to cook your food in your single pan over an open fire, long term concerns aren't really high on the list.
No they aren't, which is why it is important to reduce the cost as much as possible. People barely scraping by don't have the luxury of making long term investments like education. They need to spend their time on what they know works and will keep them alive. Unfortunately what they know works is really inefficient. But if costs can be brought down low enough, then they don't need to make a long term investment. They can make a low or medium term investment with the same benefit potential.
And it may be hard with air pollution, but once they see the benefits of higher fuel efficiency, they may be willing to take a risk now that it seems more likely to be a good investment.
So you would support the crowbar can opener patent?
What invention actually would qualify under that excessive standard?
New drugs, new designs for computer chips, new aircraft designs.
The whole point of patents was to drive innovation. If we are rewarding people for inventions that they or someone else would have made anyway without the patent, then we are not driving innovation. We are taking a thing that 50 people would have independently thought of, and rewarded the first to actually file at the patent office at the expense of any potential competitors and society.
What you're saying is an attractive excuse because it puts the blame on poverty rather than the people themselves, but does it make sense?
What I said was that poverty is the cause of poverty. Being poor in the first place is the cause of staying poor. I wasn't blaming anybody for anything. I was suggesting that this cycle of poverty can be easily broken by people not stuck within the cycle.
Not only that, but it doesn't even do what it claims to do. Yes you can buy stuff with one click, right after you click a bunch of other things first.
My dad is always asking me "Which button do I push" when it comes to computers. You'd think amazon 1 click purchasing would be the one thing, for which, that my dad's question would actually have an answer.
It turns out that every online retailer has the same kind of one click purchasing as well. Once you've verified that you picked all the stuff you want to buy correctly, almost without fail there is eventually a "submit order" button to be clicked. If we start counting right before this step is performed, then that is a one click purchase as well.
Actually, I don't see why that is relevant since a pencil with a built in eraser did do something new - it erased out of the box which apparently was new for pencils at the time.
Yes but it was pretty standard for erasers to erase right out of the box.
This is about the most straight forward example of just combining 2 existing inventions. We all know that pencils can do things that erasers can't, and that erasers can do things that pencils can't, and that a pencil with an eraser attached can do both things.
This same property holds for any 2 inventions glued together. TO use Jane Q Public's example of a can opener welded to a crowbar, I can say the same thing. Before this new invention, crow bars could not open cans out of the box. So what? Can openers could open cans out of the box.
I think a more important question to ask is the following: What does society gain by allowing these types of "inventions" to receive a government sanctioned monopoly? The normal deal is that the monopoly provides an incentive to the inventor that he wouldn't otherwise have. I am 100% sure that someone else would have been willing to dedicate the time and effort into research and development to put an eraser on a pencil even without the prospect of a monopoly.
We should only be offering the monopoly when it is unlikely that an inventor would be willing to spend the time an effort to create the invention without it, as in the case with inventions that have very high research and development costs. All other patents actual stifle innovation rather than spur it.
So, if you can abuse someone we both think is in our mutual "outgroup" I quietly know that you have the capability to do it to anyone, even those in your "ingroup" which includes me.
This is probably true of shareholders in a company who find themselves with common interests for the moment. I think there is probably a deeper bond between other sorts of ingroups. I wouldn't assume that a man would be willing to murder his own son, because he was able to murder a stranger for money. I wouldn't assume that a soldier would be willing to kill his fellow soldiers because he was willing to kill an enemy soldier.
They're doing it because their kids – Trey, 5, and Denton, 2 – wouldn't look up from their parents' iPhones and iPads long enough to kick a ball around the backyard. 'That's kind of when it hit me because I'm like, wow, when I was a kid, I lived outside,' says Blair adding that now 'we're parenting our kids the same way we were parented for a year just to see what it's like.' The McMillans do their banking in person instead of online.
I had an NES in 1986. My parents had the exact same concerns about my siblings and me playing video games instead of playing outside.
If anything, with mobile devices, now, people *can* go outside and still be connected to whatever they want.
Going to the bank takes away time that could be used to kick the ball around the back yard as well.
If these parents were having trouble getting their kids to go play outside, surely it would have been easier to force the kids to simply go play outside without their ipads than it was to transport their whole family back in time 30 years.
If you are nostalgic for 1986, then just say so. You don't need an incoherent justification to be different. "I thought it would be interesting", is a perfectly legitimate reason to do something.
It depends on how you view your ingroups and outgroups. If your ingroup is the whole world, then the most profitable thing to do is to be a socialist/philanthropist. If your ingroup is your family and your fellow shareholders, then ethics may not play such a big part in your ability to be profitable.
By vowing not to be evil, Google is effectively claiming a larger ingroup than is typically expected of a corporation.
Many people are perfectly content with their flourishing coming at the expense of the misery of other less fortunate people.
Human effort is not free. The time spent gathering firewood is an opportunity cost. Much of the reason why people in the 3rd world remain poor, is because their poverty does not allow for the initial investment to do basic tasks efficiently. They basically spend all their time doing chores inefficiently.
I did read the article and I saw the picture. "Cost" means more than just cost in money to build a stove. There is the cost in human time and effort in making your own rudimentary stove and operating it.
According to TFA "3.5 million people die each year as a result of indoor air pollution from open fires or rudimentary stoves in their homes. More than 900,000 people die from pneumonia alone, which has been linked to indoor air pollution."
Surely a person could be far more productive if they don't contract pneumonia and die as a result of their rudimentary stove (i.e. the opportunity cost of a rudimentary stove). A rudimentary stove actually has a very high cost, and you are paying this cost with your health and future productivity.
Even if the stove costs like $10 (which is a lot for people in 3rd world countries), this is a smaller long term cost than being sick and dying earlier.
The problem is that they can't afford any stove in the first place
Apparently they can afford rudimentary stoves, which, according to the English language, are types of stoves.
So if this money can be used to create the infrastructure necessary to produce better stoves at a cost comparable to a rudimentary stove, then the lives of many people can be improved for relatively little cost. I am not saying that this is definitely going to work. The devil is in the details. But I don't think it's a bad idea per se.
It could be that the incentive to do evil is stronger in competitive markets. It would seem the incentive to to whatever it takes to be profitable in competitive markets would be even stronger.
Whether a company decides it's a better strategy to be more competitive by trying to attract more customers by offering superior products (including ideologies like green, ethical, etc) or finding legal or illegal ways of exploiting society for higher revenue seems incidental.
I am not saying google is good or evil. I am only saying that I don;t see the rationale to necessarily be good in competitive markets and bad in noncompetitive markets. If anything being bad in any sphere would seem to nullify Google's image as an ethical company and ruin any advantages such a reputation would have in markets where ethics were it's primary selling point.
I think all companies try to be profitable and ethical. Where these 2 ideals are in conflict some companies have a higher willingness to overlook ethics in favor of profit. I don't think market competition is as relevant a factor as this article implies.
I see the temptation to abandon a label once it has become tainted, but I feel like this would leave me constantly needing to change labels.
Look at the way the republicans successfully made "liberal" into a dirty word, forcing democrats to call themselves "progressives" instead. I think the battle to prevent a label you care about from being subverted is a battle worth fighting.
Speaking of which, "liberal" was the first label for the libertarian ideology, that was then assumed by neo-liberals, before they allowed neo-conservatives to turn it into a pejorative, and abandoned it for "progressive". I'd be happy to reclaim the "liberal" label for libertarianism. I would proudly call myself a liberal. I don;t think neo-liberals are bad people or anything, but I think the term liberal suits libertarians better, considering it's root is from the latin word form freedom.
If we would simply provide the TSA information of who are the terrorists, then they would only need to body scan the terrorists instead of everybody. And if we scan only terrorists, logically, everyone the TSA doesn't scan is not a terrorist, and therefore safe to let on the plane. I don;t see any problems with this at all.
Either you believe taxation is wrong or you don't.
I don't believe taxation is wrong. Charity is part of the social safety net right now, alongside taxes. I pay taxes and I donate to charitable organizations like doctors without borders.
I don;t think it's a good idea to depend solely on either government or charitable programs. I think we should have sensible government welfare programs and encourage donations to worthy charities.
I think excessive taxes are bad. I think government waste is bad. I think excessive government control which hinders the economy for the benefit of certain corporations and special interests is bad. But no I don't think taxes are wrong per se.
We may have too much government; what I firmly believe is that it is too centralized.
So you want more power in the hands of the states?
Slashdot Mirror
Of all the reasons I stated for why it was bad to send humans to Europa, the humans dying on Europa was not one of them. I don't even care if we send healthy people to Europa to die, if that's what they want to do.
What I am against, is pretending that this is necessary for scientific discovery or exploration. We can actually fit more and better scientific instruments on the spacecraft if we don't need to take any meat sacks and all the stuff required to have the survive the journey.
"Objective Europa aims to send human beings to Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, on a one way mission in search of extraterrestrial life while expanding the borders of exploration and knowledge for all mankind.
If you think it would be fun to go to Europa even if it means you will die there, that's totally something you should try to do. As for science and exploration, there is really nothing that a human being is going to be able to see or do, beyond what can be done by a robot.
Adding humans to a space mission just makes everything harder, because now you need to bring a whole bunch of shit like water, food, waste treatment machines, CO2 scrubbers, radiation protection, space suits, and extra rocket fuel to propel all this extra mass and even more rocket fuel to propel the extra rocket fuel. The only time when sending humans on a space trip would be beneficial to the human race at this point would be if the earth became full, and we needed to lower the population without killing people or sterilizing them.
The volt is a pretty trendy car in the circles that would actually consider buying it. I haven't seen a single volt commercial. I don't see many car commercials in general. I don't watch non-internet based TV. When a car commercial slips into my internet surfing, I completely ignore it out of habbit.
A unbiased positive article or review of a car has about a million times more weight in my mind than marketing. It is my personal opinion that Chevy should spend every dime of money it has allocated to electric cars on making the cars better rather than trying to sell them. Good cars sell themselves. Ok well maybe they should at least have a website with statistics and some pictures.
Whenever I see a car commercial it makes me less likely to buy that car because I think of all the money diverted from R&D into marketing for that car.
So buy something.
I basically dumped almost all my money into a house because I don't trust banks, but the money I have left over is in a bank.
I did. I bought a house. In fact I borrowed money to buy a house. Which is extra smart if inflation is going to happen.
What I am saying is that the path of least resistance is to be a risky investor. The other paths that are safer require a good amount of effort. I has enough money that it made sense for me to expend this effort to try to protect it (only time will tell if it worked), but for most other people I don't think it makes sense for them to spend lots of time and money to figure out what to invest in. A lot of those people just put their money in the biggest most responsible looking bank they can find. Maybe that was a good idea at one point in history. Maybe it's still a good idea considering banks can be too big to fail.
An investor in a bank, or a purchaser of A-rated securities offered by that bank, may not be aware that there are unregulated, undocumented liabilities held by that bank, which, were they to go sour (see "Credit Default Swap"), could cause the bank to collapse.
I thought everyone knew these ratings were bullshit.
If you knew that your bank was involved in large, unregulated transactions worth more than the bank's holdings, would you continue to do business with them?
Well, this presumes that I am doing business with them in the first place, but I would say that this information wouldn't change my mind, because I just assumed nearly everything the banks did was not actually regulated anyway. Yes there are bank regulators, but they don't really understand how anything works, nor do the banks for that matter. This might be pretty scary for the banks if they weren't able to get taxpayers to pay their losses. It also might cause regulators to start shutting all these banks down if their bosses weren't completely in the pockets of the banks.
Hell even I have my money in a bank. I basically dumped almost all my money into a house because I don't trust banks, but the money I have left over is in a bank. The Federal reserve has made it so that the only thing dumber than putting your money in a bank is not putting your money in a bank. They basically force everyone to become irresponsible investors or they confiscate your money through inflation. It's really quite an ingenious system, but it sucks for people who want to play it safe. Then again life sucks for people who want to play it safe.
I was asking for things that would actually qualify. I believe these would be done anyway. Their R&D costs aren't big enough, especially once you get away from the developed world and its ridiculous regulatory burden.
I think these would qualify, and in fact it is these sorts of expensive innovations that patent proponents will typically cite as emblematic innovations that would not happen without patent law.
If however it can be demonstrated that these industries do not need patents to drive innovation, then I would support removing them or shortening their expiration dates.
What is the purpose of patent law for you, if it is not to get people to invent things that otherwise would not have been (or at least not for a long time)?
Visual studio is not required at all. That's like saying Linux needs IIS to be successful (no apache doesn't count). Linux has a few shortcomings, development tools ain't one of them.
Sadly, I don't see Linux Gaming replacing Windows anytime soon
I don't see any system being dominant int the near future, not even windows. I expect period of many competing game systems for a while.
With no dominant system, I think there will be a higher tolerance for change, and a big push for interoperability, which Linux is really good at.
And part C won't happen because you're probably "gross".
A big chunk of people on welfare in the US are completely dependent on it. Which means that without welfare, there would be no reason for them not to be as poor as the poorest people in Africa.
How would you explain the fact that the quality of life for people on welfare in the US is so much higher than people in Africa. People on welfare in the US have access to safe food, clean water, healthcare, mobile phones, television, etc, if not for the welfare system we have in place?
The quality of life in the US is also better now for the average poor person than it was a hundred years ago. We still have poor people but these people are poor relative to other Americans. As long as people have unequal wealth regardless of how much or how little everyone has, there will be poor people relative to rich people.
We will never reach a state were 100% of people are off welfare. If anything, as our society gets more wealthy, we will probably continue to raise the threshold for what we consider poor. The fact that the same number of people are on welfare is not an indicator that it is not working.
Somehow, I think that if you have to cook your food in your single pan over an open fire, long term concerns aren't really high on the list.
No they aren't, which is why it is important to reduce the cost as much as possible. People barely scraping by don't have the luxury of making long term investments like education. They need to spend their time on what they know works and will keep them alive. Unfortunately what they know works is really inefficient. But if costs can be brought down low enough, then they don't need to make a long term investment. They can make a low or medium term investment with the same benefit potential.
And it may be hard with air pollution, but once they see the benefits of higher fuel efficiency, they may be willing to take a risk now that it seems more likely to be a good investment.
It makes it novel, that's the "so what".
So you would support the crowbar can opener patent?
What invention actually would qualify under that excessive standard?
New drugs, new designs for computer chips, new aircraft designs.
The whole point of patents was to drive innovation. If we are rewarding people for inventions that they or someone else would have made anyway without the patent, then we are not driving innovation. We are taking a thing that 50 people would have independently thought of, and rewarded the first to actually file at the patent office at the expense of any potential competitors and society.
What you're saying is an attractive excuse because it puts the blame on poverty rather than the people themselves, but does it make sense?
What I said was that poverty is the cause of poverty. Being poor in the first place is the cause of staying poor. I wasn't blaming anybody for anything. I was suggesting that this cycle of poverty can be easily broken by people not stuck within the cycle.
Not only that, but it doesn't even do what it claims to do. Yes you can buy stuff with one click, right after you click a bunch of other things first.
My dad is always asking me "Which button do I push" when it comes to computers. You'd think amazon 1 click purchasing would be the one thing, for which, that my dad's question would actually have an answer.
It turns out that every online retailer has the same kind of one click purchasing as well. Once you've verified that you picked all the stuff you want to buy correctly, almost without fail there is eventually a "submit order" button to be clicked. If we start counting right before this step is performed, then that is a one click purchase as well.
Actually, I don't see why that is relevant since a pencil with a built in eraser did do something new - it erased out of the box which apparently was new for pencils at the time.
Yes but it was pretty standard for erasers to erase right out of the box.
This is about the most straight forward example of just combining 2 existing inventions. We all know that pencils can do things that erasers can't, and that erasers can do things that pencils can't, and that a pencil with an eraser attached can do both things.
This same property holds for any 2 inventions glued together. TO use Jane Q Public's example of a can opener welded to a crowbar, I can say the same thing. Before this new invention, crow bars could not open cans out of the box. So what? Can openers could open cans out of the box.
I think a more important question to ask is the following: What does society gain by allowing these types of "inventions" to receive a government sanctioned monopoly? The normal deal is that the monopoly provides an incentive to the inventor that he wouldn't otherwise have. I am 100% sure that someone else would have been willing to dedicate the time and effort into research and development to put an eraser on a pencil even without the prospect of a monopoly.
We should only be offering the monopoly when it is unlikely that an inventor would be willing to spend the time an effort to create the invention without it, as in the case with inventions that have very high research and development costs. All other patents actual stifle innovation rather than spur it.
So, if you can abuse someone we both think is in our mutual "outgroup" I quietly know that you have the capability to do it to anyone, even those in your "ingroup" which includes me.
This is probably true of shareholders in a company who find themselves with common interests for the moment. I think there is probably a deeper bond between other sorts of ingroups. I wouldn't assume that a man would be willing to murder his own son, because he was able to murder a stranger for money. I wouldn't assume that a soldier would be willing to kill his fellow soldiers because he was willing to kill an enemy soldier.
They're doing it because their kids – Trey, 5, and Denton, 2 – wouldn't look up from their parents' iPhones and iPads long enough to kick a ball around the backyard. 'That's kind of when it hit me because I'm like, wow, when I was a kid, I lived outside,' says Blair adding that now 'we're parenting our kids the same way we were parented for a year just to see what it's like.' The McMillans do their banking in person instead of online.
I had an NES in 1986. My parents had the exact same concerns about my siblings and me playing video games instead of playing outside.
If anything, with mobile devices, now, people *can* go outside and still be connected to whatever they want.
Going to the bank takes away time that could be used to kick the ball around the back yard as well.
If these parents were having trouble getting their kids to go play outside, surely it would have been easier to force the kids to simply go play outside without their ipads than it was to transport their whole family back in time 30 years.
If you are nostalgic for 1986, then just say so. You don't need an incoherent justification to be different. "I thought it would be interesting", is a perfectly legitimate reason to do something.
It depends on how you view your ingroups and outgroups. If your ingroup is the whole world, then the most profitable thing to do is to be a socialist/philanthropist. If your ingroup is your family and your fellow shareholders, then ethics may not play such a big part in your ability to be profitable.
By vowing not to be evil, Google is effectively claiming a larger ingroup than is typically expected of a corporation.
Many people are perfectly content with their flourishing coming at the expense of the misery of other less fortunate people.
Human effort is not free. The time spent gathering firewood is an opportunity cost. Much of the reason why people in the 3rd world remain poor, is because their poverty does not allow for the initial investment to do basic tasks efficiently. They basically spend all their time doing chores inefficiently.
I did read the article and I saw the picture. "Cost" means more than just cost in money to build a stove. There is the cost in human time and effort in making your own rudimentary stove and operating it.
According to TFA "3.5 million people die each year as a result of indoor air pollution from open fires or rudimentary stoves in their homes. More than 900,000 people die from pneumonia alone, which has been linked to indoor air pollution."
Surely a person could be far more productive if they don't contract pneumonia and die as a result of their rudimentary stove (i.e. the opportunity cost of a rudimentary stove). A rudimentary stove actually has a very high cost, and you are paying this cost with your health and future productivity.
Even if the stove costs like $10 (which is a lot for people in 3rd world countries), this is a smaller long term cost than being sick and dying earlier.
The problem is that they can't afford any stove in the first place
Apparently they can afford rudimentary stoves, which, according to the English language, are types of stoves.
So if this money can be used to create the infrastructure necessary to produce better stoves at a cost comparable to a rudimentary stove, then the lives of many people can be improved for relatively little cost. I am not saying that this is definitely going to work. The devil is in the details. But I don't think it's a bad idea per se.
It could be that the incentive to do evil is stronger in competitive markets. It would seem the incentive to to whatever it takes to be profitable in competitive markets would be even stronger.
Whether a company decides it's a better strategy to be more competitive by trying to attract more customers by offering superior products (including ideologies like green, ethical, etc) or finding legal or illegal ways of exploiting society for higher revenue seems incidental.
I am not saying google is good or evil. I am only saying that I don;t see the rationale to necessarily be good in competitive markets and bad in noncompetitive markets. If anything being bad in any sphere would seem to nullify Google's image as an ethical company and ruin any advantages such a reputation would have in markets where ethics were it's primary selling point.
I think all companies try to be profitable and ethical. Where these 2 ideals are in conflict some companies have a higher willingness to overlook ethics in favor of profit. I don't think market competition is as relevant a factor as this article implies.
I see the temptation to abandon a label once it has become tainted, but I feel like this would leave me constantly needing to change labels.
Look at the way the republicans successfully made "liberal" into a dirty word, forcing democrats to call themselves "progressives" instead. I think the battle to prevent a label you care about from being subverted is a battle worth fighting.
Speaking of which, "liberal" was the first label for the libertarian ideology, that was then assumed by neo-liberals, before they allowed neo-conservatives to turn it into a pejorative, and abandoned it for "progressive". I'd be happy to reclaim the "liberal" label for libertarianism. I would proudly call myself a liberal. I don;t think neo-liberals are bad people or anything, but I think the term liberal suits libertarians better, considering it's root is from the latin word form freedom.
If we would simply provide the TSA information of who are the terrorists, then they would only need to body scan the terrorists instead of everybody. And if we scan only terrorists, logically, everyone the TSA doesn't scan is not a terrorist, and therefore safe to let on the plane. I don;t see any problems with this at all.
Either you believe taxation is wrong or you don't.
I don't believe taxation is wrong. Charity is part of the social safety net right now, alongside taxes. I pay taxes and I donate to charitable organizations like doctors without borders.
I don;t think it's a good idea to depend solely on either government or charitable programs. I think we should have sensible government welfare programs and encourage donations to worthy charities.
I think excessive taxes are bad. I think government waste is bad. I think excessive government control which hinders the economy for the benefit of certain corporations and special interests is bad. But no I don't think taxes are wrong per se.
We may have too much government; what I firmly believe is that it is too centralized.
So you want more power in the hands of the states?