Small companies pay whatever they can in order to get the employees they can get. If they can't pay as much as Apple or Google, then the price fixing arrangement (for salaries) between those companies isn't going to affect them at all. And if they can pay more than Apple or Google, then it benefits them.
Seems to me, overall, price fixing between Apple and Google can only be beneficial for everybody else.
Show me where Jesus told people to kill and rape and wage war.
Jesus was a confused end-time preacher who thought the world was going to end within his lifetime. And whatever he preached, he preached to Jews about relationships within the Jewish community. Turning that into a universal message was a fiction created by Christian churches.
Also, he did say: "Do not think that I have come to send peace on Earth. I did not come to send peace, but a sword. I am sent to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law." But of course, Christians try to weasel out of that.
Since none of the gospels are actual records of what he said, we also don't know how much bad stuff has been edited out of them by the people who wrote them down.
Personally, I think it is the height of hubris to believe that the universe is obligated to exist and behave in a form that humans can observe and measure, let alone that intelligence is capable of understanding. There is no way a dog would understand even basic chemistry. Why do we assume humanity is not so limited?
Your understanding of science seems to be that of the 19th century. In the 20th century, scientists learned to accept that there are many aspects of the world that are intrinsically unknowable and/or unpredictable. However, the important thing is: if they are unknowable and/or unpredictable to science, then they are unknowable/unpredictable to all other disciplines.
In different words, science is our only method for discovering truths about the universe. The fact that it is incomplete and error prone does not change that.
There are a few other things we might call "truths": mathematical truths and religious truths. Such "truths" can be complete and free of errors, but they are not truths about the universe we live in; they are truths about hypothetical realities people construct in their heads.
How about we characterize each political movement by its most effective members?
And who is a "member"? Movements don't have memberships. Movements are characterized by what they stand for, in the case of the Tea Party, lower government spending and lower taxes. Some Republican politician calling himself a "Tea Party conservative" doesn't mean that that's what he stands for. Politicians constantly say that they are one thing and do another.
When things like food-stamp programs get cut while subsidies to ADM and the like are renewed, then you have to wonder what part of the tea party is in control.
The Tea Party movement is opposed to agricultural subsidies. But the Tea Party has no control over it; there aren't enough Tea Party members in Congress to overcome the overwhelming support from both Republicans and Democrats. Districts and states from Tea Party leaning politicians, of course, receive agricultural subsidies. But they have no control over that. And they should receive those subsidies until they are abolished for everybody, since they paid for them.
The food stamp program should get cut, not because of any kind of small government impulse, but because it gives money to people who have enough money to buy their own food. And the food stamp program itself is also a kind of agricultural subsidies.
Perhaps you should try to learn something about history instead of collecting Google snippets to support your partisan views. Go read up on the history of both parties and their positions on interventionism.
As for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, they were not examples of interventionism; they were stupid, knee-jerk responses to 9/11. And they were approved by Congress, including a large number of Democrats.
You think government is a monolithic entity defined by a single parameter -- incompetence.
Not at all. I think government is composed of a large number of human beings, each primarily pursuing their rational self interest, with the good of the country at best secondary. That's the system of government we have. It's not a great system, but it's better than any of the ones we had before. But what you can achieve with such a system is limited. In particular, it cannot achieve what progressives want it to achieve.
When you abdicate your role in a participatory democracy, of course you are going to get worst possible version of governance.
I take my role in a participatory democracy very seriously, which is why I strongly advocate smaller government, less government spending, and more liberties, and I will vote for and support candidates that take our country in that direction.
Our democracy needs to be protected from fools like you who think that if we just get the right people into power, we will flourish. That's the same mistake communists and monarchists were making, except you add to it the additional folly of believing that you can get the right people into government through elections.
Honestly saying that very little of the money the federal government spends benefits most people (presumably citizens of the US) is utterly ludicrous.
What is utterly ludicrous is that you use functions that cost very little money, and functions that can be handled well by the state, and entitlement programs that are accounted for separately, to justify DOD, DHS, agricultural subsidies, bailouts, and crony capitalism, which make up most of the federal government's spending.
And in your analysis, as usual, you leave out opportunity costs. The fact that the federal government did something doesn't mean we didn't lose a whole lot more as a result. The US rail system was a gigantic government handout to a bunch of politically powerful figures that built an inefficient mess. The Apollo program was a huge cold-war publicity stunt and, together with the "space shuttle", pretty much killed off any reasonable attempt at space exploration in the 20th century.
And to top it all off, you add a good dose of race baiting.
While that's technically true, one of the problems is that in practice they are conflated by the people who call themselves libertarians. Especially in the tea party movement
The Tea Party itself advocates for reducing the national debt, spending, and taxes, nothing more. The fact that that attracts unsavory elements like Christian conservatives doesn't change the goals, nor the fact that even people who hate each other's guts can cooperate politically on a common goal.
The reason you hate the Tea Party so much is because both Democratic and Republican politicians have seen a threat their ability to hand out vast sums to their cronies in industry and special interest groups, and so they figured that destroying the reputation of the Tea Party would be the best defense. And they were right.
I've come to the conclusion that the norquist "starve the beast" approach is a bad idea. It is too simplistic - it is the stick without the carrot. It needs a complementary "good governance" movement too.
Then you have missed the point. Governance is never "good"; it is sometimes necessary, but when it is, it is a grudging compromise.
You think of government as an animal that you can reward and punish and that will learn and improve over time, but that's ridiculously naive.
The problem is that most of the people who claim to want small government really mean: spend less on everything except the things that benefit me.
When people talk about "smaller government", they mean "smaller federal government". And you're right: there is very little the federal government spends money on that benefits me or most other people, therefore we want the entire federal government to be smaller.
Unless it involves cutting our absurdly bloated defense department and DHS. Anything to keep us safe.
Huge DOD spending is largely a consequence of having so many troops overseas, and Democrats and "progressives" favor that, because they think they can fix the world. In fact, people who suggest that we may not want to bomb others into democracy are frequently denounced as "isolationists" by Democrats.
There was a recent study done that says any generation that's grown up during a serious recession or depression tends to vote left.
That was when the US could afford to paper over deep problems with government spending. It used to work, albeit at a high cost. It didn't work for Obama: his spending programs were a gigantic waste of money.
The baby boomers, many of whom are conservative, are an anomaly and they are starting to die off now.
The Baby Boomers are retiring, not dying off. That means they are at their politically most powerful.
And libertarians aren't "conservative", libertarians are liberals. In fact, libertarians should be called "liberals", but unfortunately the term "liberal" has been hijacked in the US by a party that in Europe would be called "social democratic" (i.e. progressive and socialist).
When everything the president does ends up either a handout of tax dollars to big business, or an erosion of civil liberties, or a useless publicity stunt, then one should oppose everything the president does.
The paper has nothing to do with "the origin of life". We know that life exists, so proving that it can arise tells us nothing that we don't already know.
What we need to know is how fast it can arise and how likely it is.
I'm not astounded by your ignorance. In fact, it's a reflection of the crap you read that you erroneously think describes "the basics of our financial system".
The only thing the Greek government debt crisis has to do with "our" financial system is that banks and other financial institutions are being pressured and subsidized by European governments to waste even more money on Greece because everybody wants to pretend that Greece isn't actually a basked case.
But the causes of the Greek government debt crisis are quite simply that the Greek government borrowed too much and lied about their economic performance, nothing else. It's no different from when you get in trouble if you max out your credit cards and then fraudulently apply for more and max those out too. Of course, people like you manage to blame the banks for that too.
If you seriously think that economic disasters in Greece and Spain were caused by their governments and banks have no parts in it, I only have one question for you.
That means the Greek government borrowed more than it could afford, in large part because they bet on continued growth that didn't materialize. Then they lied about their financial situation, so people kept giving them money long past where it was reasonable. And because they had foolishly joined the Euro they couldn't get out of this the way they used to. In what way are banks responsible for any of this?
And make no mistake: the economic meltdown in Greece can happen in any European country: France, Germany, you name it. It could also happen in the US, although for various reasons, the US can get away with a bit more.
2. That is called "technological progress". Issue is, that in spite of it massively pushing forward even today, quality of life is actually going down.
I've lived through it as an adult for several decades, I assure you: quality of life has improved immensely in the US and even much of Europe.
That suggests we have hit the saturation point where parasitic corporatism is so powerful, that even technological progress can no longer hide its inefficiency.
If by "parasitic corporatism" you mean the fact that governments increasingly shove vast amounts of public funds in the direction of well connected big corporations, you're absolutely right: it's a huge problem. But the guilty parties there are the politicians that waste our money in that way, because they are supposed to spend our taxes wisely. The corporations just take whatever governments are willing to hand out, no different from you or I.
The solution to these corrupt government is not to get rid of the corporations and handing even more power to governments, it is the exact opposite: take away power from governments. And that's not theory, you simply have to look at how well or poorly different countries in North America and Europe have been doing and what policies they adopted. The economic disasters in Greece and Spain were caused by their governments, not corporations or banks or any other of the groups the left likes to blame.
Considering that about the only problem I did see was the discrimination against certain people
Certain people, like everybody who wasn't a straight white male working a corporate job. Which meant that life wasn't so good for a huge number of Americans.
But hey, if you want to think that if you're talented, you're somehow better off today than you were a few decades ago, keep on living that dream.
Everybody is a lot better off today than they would have been in the 1960's.
Slashdot Mirror
Small companies pay whatever they can in order to get the employees they can get. If they can't pay as much as Apple or Google, then the price fixing arrangement (for salaries) between those companies isn't going to affect them at all. And if they can pay more than Apple or Google, then it benefits them.
Seems to me, overall, price fixing between Apple and Google can only be beneficial for everybody else.
You bet. Good engineers know they can do better than average, and average is what they would get from collective bargaining.
Why would other salary be suppressed? If these companies underpay, companies not part of this price fixing arrangement are still competing for talent.
Jesus was a confused end-time preacher who thought the world was going to end within his lifetime. And whatever he preached, he preached to Jews about relationships within the Jewish community. Turning that into a universal message was a fiction created by Christian churches.
Also, he did say: "Do not think that I have come to send peace on Earth. I did not come to send peace, but a sword. I am sent to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law." But of course, Christians try to weasel out of that.
Since none of the gospels are actual records of what he said, we also don't know how much bad stuff has been edited out of them by the people who wrote them down.
Your understanding of science seems to be that of the 19th century. In the 20th century, scientists learned to accept that there are many aspects of the world that are intrinsically unknowable and/or unpredictable. However, the important thing is: if they are unknowable and/or unpredictable to science, then they are unknowable/unpredictable to all other disciplines.
In different words, science is our only method for discovering truths about the universe. The fact that it is incomplete and error prone does not change that.
There are a few other things we might call "truths": mathematical truths and religious truths. Such "truths" can be complete and free of errors, but they are not truths about the universe we live in; they are truths about hypothetical realities people construct in their heads.
And who is a "member"? Movements don't have memberships. Movements are characterized by what they stand for, in the case of the Tea Party, lower government spending and lower taxes. Some Republican politician calling himself a "Tea Party conservative" doesn't mean that that's what he stands for. Politicians constantly say that they are one thing and do another.
The Tea Party movement is opposed to agricultural subsidies. But the Tea Party has no control over it; there aren't enough Tea Party members in Congress to overcome the overwhelming support from both Republicans and Democrats. Districts and states from Tea Party leaning politicians, of course, receive agricultural subsidies. But they have no control over that. And they should receive those subsidies until they are abolished for everybody, since they paid for them.
The food stamp program should get cut, not because of any kind of small government impulse, but because it gives money to people who have enough money to buy their own food. And the food stamp program itself is also a kind of agricultural subsidies.
Perhaps you should try to learn something about history instead of collecting Google snippets to support your partisan views. Go read up on the history of both parties and their positions on interventionism.
As for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, they were not examples of interventionism; they were stupid, knee-jerk responses to 9/11. And they were approved by Congress, including a large number of Democrats.
Not at all. I think government is composed of a large number of human beings, each primarily pursuing their rational self interest, with the good of the country at best secondary. That's the system of government we have. It's not a great system, but it's better than any of the ones we had before. But what you can achieve with such a system is limited. In particular, it cannot achieve what progressives want it to achieve.
I take my role in a participatory democracy very seriously, which is why I strongly advocate smaller government, less government spending, and more liberties, and I will vote for and support candidates that take our country in that direction.
Our democracy needs to be protected from fools like you who think that if we just get the right people into power, we will flourish. That's the same mistake communists and monarchists were making, except you add to it the additional folly of believing that you can get the right people into government through elections.
What is utterly ludicrous is that you use functions that cost very little money, and functions that can be handled well by the state, and entitlement programs that are accounted for separately, to justify DOD, DHS, agricultural subsidies, bailouts, and crony capitalism, which make up most of the federal government's spending.
And in your analysis, as usual, you leave out opportunity costs. The fact that the federal government did something doesn't mean we didn't lose a whole lot more as a result. The US rail system was a gigantic government handout to a bunch of politically powerful figures that built an inefficient mess. The Apollo program was a huge cold-war publicity stunt and, together with the "space shuttle", pretty much killed off any reasonable attempt at space exploration in the 20th century.
And to top it all off, you add a good dose of race baiting.
For the usual reasons: he's lazy, poorly informed, and not very smart. None of those are problems industry can fix for him.
They are common problems in all areas of society.
The Tea Party itself advocates for reducing the national debt, spending, and taxes, nothing more. The fact that that attracts unsavory elements like Christian conservatives doesn't change the goals, nor the fact that even people who hate each other's guts can cooperate politically on a common goal.
The reason you hate the Tea Party so much is because both Democratic and Republican politicians have seen a threat their ability to hand out vast sums to their cronies in industry and special interest groups, and so they figured that destroying the reputation of the Tea Party would be the best defense. And they were right.
Then you have missed the point. Governance is never "good"; it is sometimes necessary, but when it is, it is a grudging compromise.
You think of government as an animal that you can reward and punish and that will learn and improve over time, but that's ridiculously naive.
When people talk about "smaller government", they mean "smaller federal government". And you're right: there is very little the federal government spends money on that benefits me or most other people, therefore we want the entire federal government to be smaller.
Huge DOD spending is largely a consequence of having so many troops overseas, and Democrats and "progressives" favor that, because they think they can fix the world. In fact, people who suggest that we may not want to bomb others into democracy are frequently denounced as "isolationists" by Democrats.
That was when the US could afford to paper over deep problems with government spending. It used to work, albeit at a high cost. It didn't work for Obama: his spending programs were a gigantic waste of money.
The Baby Boomers are retiring, not dying off. That means they are at their politically most powerful.
And libertarians aren't "conservative", libertarians are liberals. In fact, libertarians should be called "liberals", but unfortunately the term "liberal" has been hijacked in the US by a party that in Europe would be called "social democratic" (i.e. progressive and socialist).
When everything the president does ends up either a handout of tax dollars to big business, or an erosion of civil liberties, or a useless publicity stunt, then one should oppose everything the president does.
The industry has nothing to do with it; it has done its job, at least when it comes to calendaring.
I dunno. Given that there are plenty of excellent multi-user calendar solutions, I don't know what industry you're actually describing.
The paper has nothing to do with "the origin of life". We know that life exists, so proving that it can arise tells us nothing that we don't already know.
What we need to know is how fast it can arise and how likely it is.
Scientists determine that the sun will still rise tomorrow, the moon is still orbiting the earth, and water is still wet.
That's useless for many kinds of compressed files, like images and audio.
Why don't you tell us how the Greek government borrowing too much money is the fault of banks.
But, of course, you exhaust yourself in this nonsense because you don't know. You don't know because you're full of sh*t.
I'm not astounded by your ignorance. In fact, it's a reflection of the crap you read that you erroneously think describes "the basics of our financial system".
The only thing the Greek government debt crisis has to do with "our" financial system is that banks and other financial institutions are being pressured and subsidized by European governments to waste even more money on Greece because everybody wants to pretend that Greece isn't actually a basked case.
But the causes of the Greek government debt crisis are quite simply that the Greek government borrowed too much and lied about their economic performance, nothing else. It's no different from when you get in trouble if you max out your credit cards and then fraudulently apply for more and max those out too. Of course, people like you manage to blame the banks for that too.
Greece had a government debt crisis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
That means the Greek government borrowed more than it could afford, in large part because they bet on continued growth that didn't materialize. Then they lied about their financial situation, so people kept giving them money long past where it was reasonable. And because they had foolishly joined the Euro they couldn't get out of this the way they used to. In what way are banks responsible for any of this?
And make no mistake: the economic meltdown in Greece can happen in any European country: France, Germany, you name it. It could also happen in the US, although for various reasons, the US can get away with a bit more.
I've lived through it as an adult for several decades, I assure you: quality of life has improved immensely in the US and even much of Europe.
If by "parasitic corporatism" you mean the fact that governments increasingly shove vast amounts of public funds in the direction of well connected big corporations, you're absolutely right: it's a huge problem. But the guilty parties there are the politicians that waste our money in that way, because they are supposed to spend our taxes wisely. The corporations just take whatever governments are willing to hand out, no different from you or I.
The solution to these corrupt government is not to get rid of the corporations and handing even more power to governments, it is the exact opposite: take away power from governments. And that's not theory, you simply have to look at how well or poorly different countries in North America and Europe have been doing and what policies they adopted. The economic disasters in Greece and Spain were caused by their governments, not corporations or banks or any other of the groups the left likes to blame.
Certain people, like everybody who wasn't a straight white male working a corporate job. Which meant that life wasn't so good for a huge number of Americans.
Everybody is a lot better off today than they would have been in the 1960's.