While I don't mean to demean your service, or the service of anyone. We owe them more than the paltry benefits that they already receive. (While the New GI Bill does help, we can and should do more.) That said, there is little demand for being able to drive a submarine in civilian life. This isn't a secret. Even, Air Force recruiters use that line. Life experience, while valuable to an individual's growth, isn't the point of the military. It isn't a vision quest, or a coming of age story. (Though it does tend to be that due to the predominance of 18 year olds joining.) Life experience can be gained anywhere, include going straight from high school to college, or even into a trade.
In other words, the taxpayers aren't shelling out billions of dollars on weapons instead of roads and schools, for an elaborate rite of passage. It's train people, to kill people, for the off chance, we need to. It's a resource sink, but one we unfortunately have to pay, just as Eisenhower said.
The play areas are there to make McD's attractive to children, just like the Happy Meal toys. The children then say "I want to go to McDonald's!" because they want the toy and the playground. The parents take them.
Join an armed Christian militia after the Rapture (Wait. Weren't all the Christians called up in the rapture? What's the point of faith, if after it becomes super-obvious that one religion was true, you get a mulligan? Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of faith?) who go through the streets of New York shooting UN soldiers that are now part of the Anti-Christ's One World Government(tm), shooting down Black Helicopters, and either converting or shooting the unsaved. (Nothing like spreading the message of the Prince of Peace with the barrel of a gun.)
Yes, This game was a parody of itself.
Needless to say, this game caused quite a bit controversy when released.
And what's in it for the newspapers that provide ALL the content on news.google.com ? Many people never move off that page. Where's their ads? Where's their revenue?
I agree the Clone Wars series and Genndy Tartakovsky ("Dexter's Lab, "Powerpuff Girls," "Samurai Jack") 's Clone War's "microseries" are great. They're nice stories, with people getting shot and killed, and lines like, "It's alright sir. We're clones. We're meant to be expendable."
Honestly, I think what makes them good, is that Lucas's involvement is limited to cashing the checks.
The "saving" at the end of Return of the Jedi was already bad enough (in the books and expanded universe it is made clear that he can't cross over nearly as easy, hence the reason to burn the corpse where Yoda and Obi-wan just faded away) but it still doesn't sit well with the hero ending of the bad guy being blown away, but is excused because it is different enough to be seen as original.
Really? I just always assumed that it was because he was "more machine than man now." Ben and Yoda's clothes didn't disappear. Why would Vader's helmet and armor? I just figured that if you took off the helmet before lighting the pyre, there would be nothing there.
But he AIN'T a hero character. And in the first three movies you are supposed to care about this guy who really is not going to end up saving the day. It would be like making a movie about Adolf Hitler's youth and expecting people to root for him. Sorry, no. And there was a remote possibility that we could have cared, if we had seen him fighting the dark side only to be tricked fatally in the end in a way nobody could forsee.
EXACTLY! The new trilogy should have been about Obi-Wan. How he tried to rush things, go for the brass ring, and screwed up royally. Thus setting up not just Vader's death-bed conversion, but Obi-Wan's redemption by finally correcting his mistake through Luke. ("I thought I could train him as well as Yoda. I was wrong.")
And why does Qui-Gon Jin even exist? Yoda was supposed to train Obi-Wan. ("There you will meet Yoda, the Jedi Master who instructed me.") Yeah, sure you can have multiple teachers, but it's a master-apprentice relationship. You may have other teachers besides your main advisor, but you're never considered those other teachers' "student."
Don't even get me started on how Akosha figures in as Anakin's student in the Clone Wars cartoon. Does she turn evil? Does Ani kill her too? Why does he have a student at 20, when Obi-Wan was still a padawan at age 30? (Still, the Clone Wars cartoon is actually good. In all honesty, I think it's because Lucas has nothing to do with it.)
Hanzel and Grettle are taken out into the woods and left to die of exposure by their parents. They meet a cannibal that they burn to death in an oven, before returning to the very parents that just tried to murder them. What's your point?
If you look at it with fresh eyes, the original three had a weaker plot line, worse acting, worse special effects, and significantly worse choreography.
Let me refute each of these points.
Weaker plot? What was the plot of Episode 1? Seriously. I can't figure it out. It's just a bunch of stuff. No one is motivated to do anything. So the whole thing is just to make Palpatine chancelor? Wouldn't it be simpler to just to have Palpatine already a corrupt chancelor? What was Episode 2 about? I honestly don't know. It didn't even have a big six movie plot point. It's just stuff blowing up for two hours. Episode 3 just built up to an overly long sword fight, that honestly got boring, and an annoyingly huge inconsistency with Padame dying in childbirth of a broken heart (I'm sorry, she died because "she lost the will to live." As Stewie said in Family Guy parody, "Oh come on!") even though Leia is supposed to know her as a child.
Episodes 4-6 are a traditional story. ANH is a complete story. It has a start, a middle and end. ESB and ROTJ on contrast are the middle and third acts of the 3 act story. ROTJ is just a a big battle (which probably makes it your favorite), but ESB is about losing. It's all about failure. The good guys lose. As the review linked above asks, "Who is the main character of the Phantom Menace?" It's not Anakin. He's not seen until 40 minutes into the film. It's not Obi-Wan. He's a sidekick. How about the New Trilogy? Anakin? Why do we care about him? The Original Trilogy? Luke. It's all about Luke. He's a nobody we identify with, rises to the occasion in ANH, gets kicked down in ESB, and overcomes and ultimately defeats the bad guys in ROTJ. Where's the plot arc? It's all so rushed. Anakin turns evil because he thinks Padame is going to die, but doesn't make sense. He kills Sand People in E2, but it's just a snap. He's whiney in E3 for some reason. There's no character growth. There's nothing.
Worse acting? Hayden Christensen is bad. He's just very very bad. There's a reason why he doesn't really work, even though Natalie Portman and Ewan McGreggor have since E1-3. It's not all their fault. There's only so much you can do with the script you're given. The writing is just very bad. Not only are there glaring plot holes, but the dialog is atrocious. The reason why the dialog is better in the original trilogy is simple. Lucas didn't write nor direct them. He only wrote and directed ANH, the one with the weakest dialog and weakest direction.
Worse Special Effects? Yes. Let's compare movies on special effects that are 28 years apart. Let me repeat that. TWENTY EIGHT YEARS. My god, if the effects weren't better, then there'd be something wrong. It's not how the effects are executed. It's about how they're used. There's just too much shit going on in the new trilogy. It's distracting. Even Lucas himself said during the production of the ESB back in 1980 that special effects that don't serve the story are pointless, but now we get stuff crammed into every frame. It's like watching one of the damn "punch the monkey for a free iPod" ads, or a chinese website. ("Renao" or "hot and noisy" is the Chinese term for that design. And yes, they consider crowded flashing colors a feature.) Just because you can make a dinosaur walk in front of the camera, or have a construction robot punch a tiny robot, doesn't mean you should.
Worse choreography? I assume you're talking about the lightsaber battles. Let's examine those. There are three in the original triliogy, and all three are better. Why? They mean something. Especially Luke vs Vader 1. Vader vs Kenobi is about letting go. It's the rematch of the old teacher and fallen student. It's the old teacher giving one last instruction to both his old student and his new one. It's about sacrifice. It's about saying that you w
You're right that most business law is state, but many states have very similar laws. Thanks in part to interstate efforts like the Uniform Commercial Code and other uniform acts. Each state, and I believe it's all of them, that ratified these essentially interstate compacts, have identical laws and thus identical forms. So you see, the situation isn't nearly as bad you might believe. As seen by the existence of things like nolo.com .
The carcinogen is acrylamide, and thanks to California's Prop 65, you can find labels on potato chips, and in fast food joints that read: "WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer."
I always liked the "known to the State of California" part, like Maine isn't aware of carcinogens.
Actually, I just assumed that it was an exclusive deal since, that's how these things work. You want to limit the number of people rummaging through your library and the rare books collection in order to protect them, and still be able to function as a library while the books are being scanned you know?
I can't find a link. Just talk about "virtually exclusive" due to GOOG's deep pockets to ward off the numerous lawsuits that have and will come out. Keep in mind, every publisher lawsuit was settled. Nothing was resolved in court, so the publishers can just sue the next person that try to repeat GOOG's scan effort.
So without a link, I guess they weren't legally exclusive deals after all.
There's no reason to believe that this is going to change. Motorola's 68k never went anywhere, and PowerPC is dead. IBM's Cell went nowhere. AMD? Well they make a clone, and have 15% versus 83% marketshare, and one-fifth the revenue. Cyrix? Well they went belly up and got bought by NS, then Via. We're talking scraps. less than 2% of the market here.
Oh yeah, and AMD is teetering into bankruptcy. Primo competitive environment eh?
but if people actually thought competition would help, there would already be a competitor.
What type of logic is this? Competition isn't about helping! It's about running the other guy of business and taking all of the money yourself. (Or as TMBG put it, "I don't want the world. I only want your half." Or perhaps better, Conan's description of the best in life, "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women") Do you think Pepsi exists to help Coke? If so, you clearly are more confused than most Ayn Rand reading parent's basement dwelling "capitalists".
So why hasn't this happened? Well let me introduce you to the ideas of "barriers to entry" and "limited returns." Keep in mind GOOG got $21,128,514 revenues from their advertising business last year. They can afford to lose money for literally decades (Google Books started in 2002) before beginning to recoop their investment. Google is the only group that can. Especially given that the exclusivity deals Google signed to begin this project.
And don't for once think that GOOG is doing this out of the goodness of their heart. Companies are heartless and amoral. Like the cylons, they have a plan.
I'm not talking about money spent in elections. The vast majority of high office candidates are preselected by the parties, so it doesn't matter who is elected
You do understand that we have primary elections right? That means the people vote.
The only successful exception one can point to is Ron Paul, and there, "success" is defined by not getting his way except once in a blue moon... he just manages to hang on in an environment where his outlook is steadfastly ignored.
Well Ron Paul wasn't a success at all. He failed to win any state, or even finish in the top three. Outside of Digg, he simply didn't have any traction.
That isn't going to work for stealth spacecraft which are a trivial engineering problem next to propulsion. Space is huge, you're going to need very very powerful sensors to find anything the size of a ship.
The best comment I've ever heard about stealth spaceships was in the faq for the board game Full Thrust. I wish I could find the link, but there was a big write up that calculated how much heat would be radiated away from a manned space craft simply to keep it heated, and thus the crew alive. Then given a telescope sweeping through space you could easily detect the ship against the background of the cold deep black.
We're talking about business practices. You haven't named one. Also, you have to be at least 5 mph over the speed limit before it's considered illegal, to account for calibration error in both the detector and the vehicle's speedometer.
FYI: It's "accepted" not "excepted" Also you'd sound like you'd sound like you knew what you knew what you were talking about if you didn't use phrases such as "cunt hair."
I didn't say that loud ads were a market inefficiency. I assumed we were talking about regulation to prevent and correct monopolies, since the grandparent was said that regulation was good in monopolistic situations, and you said that regulation was axiomatically bad.
I believe solutions to such problems should not involve the state as they have too much power already. We don't need yet more laws in the law books. We don't need to justify them taking even more taxes off us.
Taxes are low in the United States, even in a historical context. And given the deficit and the exponential growth since 1980 of the National Debt since Reaganomics. (" "Reagan proved deficits don't matter" -- Dick Cheney) we need increased taxes to pay as we go. (Cutting spending is a non-starter as government programs are already underfunded and popular. Witness California's perpetual budget crisis with Tax Rates held at 1970's levels due to a 2/3s vote to pass any budget or tax increase, an budgetary obstruction GOP holding a whopping 35% in the legislature, and a majority of the budget being mandatory spending due to popular (and popularly abused) initiative process.
Futhermore, given that the current economic crisis was spawned by deregulation of the banking and investment industries. (Just like how the California Power Crisis was was spawned by the industry written deregulation of the power industry, less regulation is demonstrably not a good thing in all cases.
That's a loser's lament. Votes are still cast by people, and people still make decisions. Yes, money definitely helps, but there are multiple examples of where the candidate that spent the most money lost. Even today, the major party candidates have lost. Witness Joe Lieberman losing the Democratic primary, and then going on to winning statewide. Witness the rise of Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman in the NY-23 race. Witness Reform Party, turned independent, governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura.
You've begged the question. It's not accepted practice because the law forbids it. There are no accepted illegal practices.
A better attack would have been to point to an legal but unethical business behavior, but given the number of business that promote "If it's not illegal, it's ethical," positions, and the assertion that business is fundamentally amoral, and the lamentations about the lack of business ethics, that attack appears quite weak.
I had one of those TVs. It was an RCA something or other. I got it back in 2000. Advertised "sound logic audio leveler"right on the box. It made everything sound a bit softer (meaning I had to turn the volume up a bit more than usual), but perceived volume remained constant.
The fact that a fair government may allow the customer to get screwed, but the power in the end will rest with the consumer to avoid being screwed.
Since the government in a democracy is us -- the people -- and represents what we want, then how is it in our interest to allow unfair exchanges? By your logic, fraud should be legalized. Why?
Slashdot Mirror
I think you do not realize how much inovation comes from the military.
Not any more.
While I don't mean to demean your service, or the service of anyone. We owe them more than the paltry benefits that they already receive. (While the New GI Bill does help, we can and should do more.) That said, there is little demand for being able to drive a submarine in civilian life. This isn't a secret. Even, Air Force recruiters use that line. Life experience, while valuable to an individual's growth, isn't the point of the military. It isn't a vision quest, or a coming of age story. (Though it does tend to be that due to the predominance of 18 year olds joining.) Life experience can be gained anywhere, include going straight from high school to college, or even into a trade.
In other words, the taxpayers aren't shelling out billions of dollars on weapons instead of roads and schools, for an elaborate rite of passage. It's train people, to kill people, for the off chance, we need to. It's a resource sink, but one we unfortunately have to pay, just as Eisenhower said.
+1 insightful
The play areas are there to make McD's attractive to children, just like the Happy Meal toys. The children then say "I want to go to McDonald's!" because they want the toy and the playground. The parents take them.
It's not a service for low turn over. It's lure.
Lest we forget Left Behind: Eternal Forces, the video game based on the evangelical born-again Christian Tom Clancy / Stephen King-esque, "Left Behind" series.
Join an armed Christian militia after the Rapture (Wait. Weren't all the Christians called up in the rapture? What's the point of faith, if after it becomes super-obvious that one religion was true, you get a mulligan? Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of faith?) who go through the streets of New York shooting UN soldiers that are now part of the Anti-Christ's One World Government(tm), shooting down Black Helicopters, and either converting or shooting the unsaved. (Nothing like spreading the message of the Prince of Peace with the barrel of a gun.)
Yes, This game was a parody of itself.
Needless to say, this game caused quite a bit controversy when released.
Sarah Silverman? Is that you? You're all I want for Hanukkah!
The Wallstreet Journal, Slashdot, Google, Youtube, Facebook, and the smaller (and much smaller) websites should be free to view AND advertising free.
Um...
And what's in it for the newspapers that provide ALL the content on news.google.com ? Many people never move off that page. Where's their ads? Where's their revenue?
I agree the Clone Wars series and Genndy Tartakovsky ("Dexter's Lab, "Powerpuff Girls," "Samurai Jack") 's Clone War's "microseries" are great. They're nice stories, with people getting shot and killed, and lines like, "It's alright sir. We're clones. We're meant to be expendable."
Honestly, I think what makes them good, is that Lucas's involvement is limited to cashing the checks.
The "saving" at the end of Return of the Jedi was already bad enough (in the books and expanded universe it is made clear that he can't cross over nearly as easy, hence the reason to burn the corpse where Yoda and Obi-wan just faded away) but it still doesn't sit well with the hero ending of the bad guy being blown away, but is excused because it is different enough to be seen as original.
Really? I just always assumed that it was because he was "more machine than man now." Ben and Yoda's clothes didn't disappear. Why would Vader's helmet and armor? I just figured that if you took off the helmet before lighting the pyre, there would be nothing there.
But he AIN'T a hero character. And in the first three movies you are supposed to care about this guy who really is not going to end up saving the day. It would be like making a movie about Adolf Hitler's youth and expecting people to root for him. Sorry, no. And there was a remote possibility that we could have cared, if we had seen him fighting the dark side only to be tricked fatally in the end in a way nobody could forsee.
EXACTLY! The new trilogy should have been about Obi-Wan. How he tried to rush things, go for the brass ring, and screwed up royally. Thus setting up not just Vader's death-bed conversion, but Obi-Wan's redemption by finally correcting his mistake through Luke. ("I thought I could train him as well as Yoda. I was wrong.")
And why does Qui-Gon Jin even exist? Yoda was supposed to train Obi-Wan. ("There you will meet Yoda, the Jedi Master who instructed me.") Yeah, sure you can have multiple teachers, but it's a master-apprentice relationship. You may have other teachers besides your main advisor, but you're never considered those other teachers' "student."
Don't even get me started on how Akosha figures in as Anakin's student in the Clone Wars cartoon. Does she turn evil? Does Ani kill her too? Why does he have a student at 20, when Obi-Wan was still a padawan at age 30? (Still, the Clone Wars cartoon is actually good. In all honesty, I think it's because Lucas has nothing to do with it.)
Hanzel and Grettle are taken out into the woods and left to die of exposure by their parents. They meet a cannibal that they burn to death in an oven, before returning to the very parents that just tried to murder them. What's your point?
If you look at it with fresh eyes, the original three had a weaker plot line, worse acting, worse special effects, and significantly worse choreography.
Let me refute each of these points.
Weaker plot? What was the plot of Episode 1? Seriously. I can't figure it out. It's just a bunch of stuff. No one is motivated to do anything. So the whole thing is just to make Palpatine chancelor? Wouldn't it be simpler to just to have Palpatine already a corrupt chancelor? What was Episode 2 about? I honestly don't know. It didn't even have a big six movie plot point. It's just stuff blowing up for two hours. Episode 3 just built up to an overly long sword fight, that honestly got boring, and an annoyingly huge inconsistency with Padame dying in childbirth of a broken heart (I'm sorry, she died because "she lost the will to live." As Stewie said in Family Guy parody, "Oh come on!") even though Leia is supposed to know her as a child.
Episodes 4-6 are a traditional story. ANH is a complete story. It has a start, a middle and end. ESB and ROTJ on contrast are the middle and third acts of the 3 act story. ROTJ is just a a big battle (which probably makes it your favorite), but ESB is about losing. It's all about failure. The good guys lose. As the review linked above asks, "Who is the main character of the Phantom Menace?" It's not Anakin. He's not seen until 40 minutes into the film. It's not Obi-Wan. He's a sidekick. How about the New Trilogy? Anakin? Why do we care about him? The Original Trilogy? Luke. It's all about Luke. He's a nobody we identify with, rises to the occasion in ANH, gets kicked down in ESB, and overcomes and ultimately defeats the bad guys in ROTJ. Where's the plot arc? It's all so rushed. Anakin turns evil because he thinks Padame is going to die, but doesn't make sense. He kills Sand People in E2, but it's just a snap. He's whiney in E3 for some reason. There's no character growth. There's nothing.
Worse acting? Hayden Christensen is bad. He's just very very bad. There's a reason why he doesn't really work, even though Natalie Portman and Ewan McGreggor have since E1-3. It's not all their fault. There's only so much you can do with the script you're given. The writing is just very bad. Not only are there glaring plot holes, but the dialog is atrocious. The reason why the dialog is better in the original trilogy is simple. Lucas didn't write nor direct them. He only wrote and directed ANH, the one with the weakest dialog and weakest direction.
Worse Special Effects? Yes. Let's compare movies on special effects that are 28 years apart. Let me repeat that. TWENTY EIGHT YEARS. My god, if the effects weren't better, then there'd be something wrong. It's not how the effects are executed. It's about how they're used. There's just too much shit going on in the new trilogy. It's distracting. Even Lucas himself said during the production of the ESB back in 1980 that special effects that don't serve the story are pointless, but now we get stuff crammed into every frame. It's like watching one of the damn "punch the monkey for a free iPod" ads, or a chinese website. ("Renao" or "hot and noisy" is the Chinese term for that design. And yes, they consider crowded flashing colors a feature.) Just because you can make a dinosaur walk in front of the camera, or have a construction robot punch a tiny robot, doesn't mean you should.
Worse choreography? I assume you're talking about the lightsaber battles. Let's examine those. There are three in the original triliogy, and all three are better. Why? They mean something. Especially Luke vs Vader 1. Vader vs Kenobi is about letting go. It's the rematch of the old teacher and fallen student. It's the old teacher giving one last instruction to both his old student and his new one. It's about sacrifice. It's about saying that you w
You're right that most business law is state, but many states have very similar laws. Thanks in part to interstate efforts like the Uniform Commercial Code and other uniform acts. Each state, and I believe it's all of them, that ratified these essentially interstate compacts, have identical laws and thus identical forms. So you see, the situation isn't nearly as bad you might believe. As seen by the existence of things like nolo.com .
The carcinogen is acrylamide, and thanks to California's Prop 65, you can find labels on potato chips, and in fast food joints that read: "WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer."
I always liked the "known to the State of California" part, like Maine isn't aware of carcinogens.
Actually, I just assumed that it was an exclusive deal since, that's how these things work. You want to limit the number of people rummaging through your library and the rare books collection in order to protect them, and still be able to function as a library while the books are being scanned you know?
I can't find a link. Just talk about "virtually exclusive" due to GOOG's deep pockets to ward off the numerous lawsuits that have and will come out. Keep in mind, every publisher lawsuit was settled. Nothing was resolved in court, so the publishers can just sue the next person that try to repeat GOOG's scan effort.
So without a link, I guess they weren't legally exclusive deals after all.
Intel x86. Serving all of us since 1978.
There's no reason to believe that this is going to change. Motorola's 68k never went anywhere, and PowerPC is dead. IBM's Cell went nowhere. AMD? Well they make a clone, and have 15% versus 83% marketshare, and one-fifth the revenue. Cyrix? Well they went belly up and got bought by NS, then Via. We're talking scraps. less than 2% of the market here.
Oh yeah, and AMD is teetering into bankruptcy. Primo competitive environment eh?
but if people actually thought competition would help, there would already be a competitor.
What type of logic is this? Competition isn't about helping! It's about running the other guy of business and taking all of the money yourself. (Or as TMBG put it, "I don't want the world. I only want your half." Or perhaps better, Conan's description of the best in life, "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women") Do you think Pepsi exists to help Coke? If so, you clearly are more confused than most Ayn Rand reading parent's basement dwelling "capitalists".
So why hasn't this happened? Well let me introduce you to the ideas of "barriers to entry" and "limited returns." Keep in mind GOOG got $21,128,514 revenues from their advertising business last year. They can afford to lose money for literally decades (Google Books started in 2002) before beginning to recoop their investment. Google is the only group that can. Especially given that the exclusivity deals Google signed to begin this project.
And don't for once think that GOOG is doing this out of the goodness of their heart. Companies are heartless and amoral. Like the cylons, they have a plan.
I'm not talking about money spent in elections. The vast majority of high office candidates are preselected by the parties, so it doesn't matter who is elected
You do understand that we have primary elections right? That means the people vote.
The only successful exception one can point to is Ron Paul, and there, "success" is defined by not getting his way except once in a blue moon... he just manages to hang on in an environment where his outlook is steadfastly ignored.
Well Ron Paul wasn't a success at all. He failed to win any state, or even finish in the top three. Outside of Digg, he simply didn't have any traction.
That isn't going to work for stealth spacecraft which are a trivial engineering problem next to propulsion. Space is huge, you're going to need very very powerful sensors to find anything the size of a ship.
The best comment I've ever heard about stealth spaceships was in the faq for the board game Full Thrust. I wish I could find the link, but there was a big write up that calculated how much heat would be radiated away from a manned space craft simply to keep it heated, and thus the crew alive. Then given a telescope sweeping through space you could easily detect the ship against the background of the cold deep black.
We're talking about business practices. You haven't named one. Also, you have to be at least 5 mph over the speed limit before it's considered illegal, to account for calibration error in both the detector and the vehicle's speedometer.
FYI: It's "accepted" not "excepted" Also you'd sound like you'd sound like you knew what you knew what you were talking about if you didn't use phrases such as "cunt hair."
I didn't say that loud ads were a market inefficiency. I assumed we were talking about regulation to prevent and correct monopolies, since the grandparent was said that regulation was good in monopolistic situations, and you said that regulation was axiomatically bad.
I believe solutions to such problems should not involve the state as they have too much power already. We don't need yet more laws in the law books. We don't need to justify them taking even more taxes off us.
Taxes are low in the United States, even in a historical context. And given the deficit and the exponential growth since 1980 of the National Debt since Reaganomics. (" "Reagan proved deficits don't matter" -- Dick Cheney) we need increased taxes to pay as we go. (Cutting spending is a non-starter as government programs are already underfunded and popular. Witness California's perpetual budget crisis with Tax Rates held at 1970's levels due to a 2/3s vote to pass any budget or tax increase, an budgetary obstruction GOP holding a whopping 35% in the legislature, and a majority of the budget being mandatory spending due to popular (and popularly abused) initiative process.
Futhermore, given that the current economic crisis was spawned by deregulation of the banking and investment industries. (Just like how the California Power Crisis was was spawned by the industry written deregulation of the power industry, less regulation is demonstrably not a good thing in all cases.
That's a loser's lament. Votes are still cast by people, and people still make decisions. Yes, money definitely helps, but there are multiple examples of where the candidate that spent the most money lost. Even today, the major party candidates have lost. Witness Joe Lieberman losing the Democratic primary, and then going on to winning statewide. Witness the rise of Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman in the NY-23 race. Witness Reform Party, turned independent, governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura.
Yes, it is hard, but it is not impossible.
You've begged the question. It's not accepted practice because the law forbids it. There are no accepted illegal practices.
A better attack would have been to point to an legal but unethical business behavior, but given the number of business that promote "If it's not illegal, it's ethical," positions, and the assertion that business is fundamentally amoral, and the lamentations about the lack of business ethics, that attack appears quite weak.
I had one of those TVs. It was an RCA something or other. I got it back in 2000. Advertised "sound logic audio leveler"right on the box. It made everything sound a bit softer (meaning I had to turn the volume up a bit more than usual), but perceived volume remained constant.
This wasn't the model, but it has the feature http://www.amazon.com/RCA-F36450-36-Inch-Diagonal-Television/dp/B00006F2JP
The fact that a fair government may allow the customer to get screwed, but the power in the end will rest with the consumer to avoid being screwed.
Since the government in a democracy is us -- the people -- and represents what we want, then how is it in our interest to allow unfair exchanges? By your logic, fraud should be legalized. Why?