Uhrm, sort of, but nope, not at all. What you are trying to get at, although it's clear your knowledge of this is extremely shallow, is referred to as "Purchasing Power Parity" in economics. There is some degree to which some goods are indeed cheaper to buy in poorer countries. This makes sense, as if e.g. a local climate lends itself to cheap wheat production, as a simple example, then bread may be cheaper there; also many poorer countries aren't tied down by heavy regulation and minimum wage laws, all of which raise production costs. However, this ALREADY gets factored in by economists, they're not total idiots: When people talk about GDP per capita, they refer to two different figures: "Nominal" and "Adjusted for PPP (Purchasing Power Parity)". The latter takes the local 'effective purchasing power' into consideration:
The creative damage from the Comics Code persists to this day. If you look at the whole history of comics, it immediately split what was a thriving, creative market producing interesting and creative comics, into two, and drove and dictated the entire creative approach in each of the two: (1) An 'above-ground' over-sappy, over-cleaned-up, over-family-friendly market segment - which (2) then spawned an underground of "alternative" comics, which because they were in essence a reaction to this, polarized in the opposite direction and tried to be about as dark and modernist/nihilist and non-family-friendly as you can get.
If you read that from start to finish, you can actually see these trends unfold. You'll be amazed at some of the comics of the 30's and 40's, which have really creative and interesting and amazing and neither-too-childish-nor-too-adult work - even the highly creative Mickey Mouse stories from Floyd Gottfredson. After the Comics Code changed the industry, only then did Mickey Mouse become such a watered-down piece of crappy over-cleansed family sap, to the point that "Mickey Mouse" even became an idiom for something watered-down and weak.
Of course, there were other trends driving the above too.. e.g. overall modernism/nihilism, and the rise of other forms of entertainment... but the Comics Code definitely left a seriously ugly mark on comics as a field of art and expression for decades. Basically only the advent of webcomics in the 1990s saw the beginning of the rise of more interesting and positive creativity again, and only now is it coming into its own again.
"resulted in a ban on all laser pointers in the state of New South Wales."
Sigh... can we please ban 'knee-jerk banning' based on statistically highly unlikely incidents that don't even actually cause safety problems because 'this is why we have co-pilots' (an incident that was probably already illegal in this case)?
Why don't we just ban EVERYTHING, in advance, just in case anyone uses it in a bad way? Woman throws an ashtray at husband's head? Ban ashtrays! Man throws coffee mug back? Ban mugs! A child trips over a LAN cable? Ban LAN cables!
But why wait? Let's introduce a new bill called the "Ban Everything Bill".
"No, not at all, in spite of such laws" => "in spite of the complete lack of such laws" (sorry, didn't use preview)
And incidentally, before anyone goes into over-hysterics over some of the recent performance problems encountered, first read up on, and understand Jim Getty's analysis of that, that was recently covered by slashdot.
Pause, and think about it for a minute. Does anyone REALLY think an ISP can afford to make 99% of the Web intolerable for its users, without immediately dying a horrible death in the market? No. It won't happen.
This is just more irrational fear-mongering from those interests pushing for government control over the Internet under the guise of so-called 'Net neutrality', claiming power in order to solve a problem that doesn't exist under the guise of 'helping you'.
The reasoning fallacy behind the promotion of 'net neutrality' is something like this: The market might be perfectly capable of providing everyone decent-speed, usable Internet (it's done a reasonably good job so far), but because it doesn't apparently recognize a legal 'right' to decent service, then "oh noes, panic, it means we won't get decent service". Wrong. The market will provide decent service because that is the very service they offer.
Here's a car analogy. There are no laws dictating a car has to be able to go at least 50 miles per hour. But is there a crisis of car manufacturers trying to get away with selling very slow cars? No, not at all, in spite of such laws. How could this possibly be? Because if a car company started selling cars that could only go 30 MPH, nobody would buy them. "But, but, we need laws just in case they do! Government must regulate and control the whole thing!"... nope. Calm down, relax, don't be taken in by such blatant hysteria-creating propaganda.
Wrong, if you check their 'what's that site running' history you'll see that they only switched to Apache yesterday. Before that, they were on IIS 5 on, FFS, Windows 2000, which is a sign that they were probably running on outdated poorly managed systems. The fact that the attack attempts "continue" is probably meaningless as whatever they were, they are almost certainly failing now, but the attempts will still show up in the logs which will make any naive IT administrator nervous.
A multi-billion dollar company is a bunch of buildings and infrastructure, a building can't enjoy a car or yacht. In order for the human owners of the company to be able to do so much as buy a car with the profits they have to pay themselves out of the company first, and at that point they get taxed far more "2.4%", in fact they get taxed much higher than your 30%. Business owners pay massive amounts of taxes, disproportionately, so this lie that business owners are all somehow evading taxes at the expense of everyone is just blind anti-rich bullshit and propaganda.
Also why is the implication that merely having money in a Swiss bank account automatically makes you a tax evader?
Finally the only reason anybody pays taxes is that they're forced to. NOBODY on slashdot complaining about how evil the rich people are for trying to minimize their taxes, would pay their taxes either if they could get away with not doing so. Nobody. Not one person here would voluntarily pay taxes if they didn't have to. So let's all cut the hypocrisy.
If providing the services is not affordable, they have to be cut. Which part of "we don't have money to pay for all this" is hard to understand for a bright slashdot user.
That's not what objective truth means. Objective truth relates to agreement between observers, undistorted by individual feelings, prejudices or subjective interpretations. Your computer simulation of the universe would never be objective truth, as it lies outside of the perception of scientific observers, and there could never be agreement free of subjective beliefs between them.
Lol... so if I *wrote* a computer simulation with two virtual AI agents who could only 'see' and 'observe' the virtual world I created, you would say that if they thought "objective truth" was their tiny virtual world then they would be correct? I'm not sure you've thought this through very well.
It's sad, but the thing to do about it is to make philosophy relevant again.
Philosophy 'as a discipline' will always be relevant. 99% of what gets called philosophy is a waste of time. Once in a while, a great philosopher comes along and adds something new, interesting or useful. Maybe 1 or 2 per century. The best philosophy adds relevance to peoples lives, and is actually useful. That most certainly does exist. And there is definitely still ground to cover. E.g. in fields such as philosophy of ethics / morality. Philosophy should be the application of reason to figure out 'how we should best live our lives'.
The conception of "objective truth" is implicit in the conception of "usefully predictive models".
No, it's not, because the reality is we can't know if everything in our observable universe is, just (silly example, but well-known) a big computer simulation or something. The best scientists understand this already, it's not something new or insightful. It's also completely pointless, because once you get past the "gee whiz, theoretically that's true" phase, you realize that there is no practical use in our everyday lives. The only way such inquiry would have practical use were if it could generate testable theories and we could turn it into some new technology, which might be useful but still could not be a claim to objective truth because it's like infinite recursion or 'turtles all the way down'.
To claim usefulness is "meaningless" if we aren't locating objective truth is NOT true, that is a reasoning error. Our scientific models have use FOR US, in OUR observable universe --- whatever the true nature of that universe. What matters to humans, matters to humans. It doesn't mean that reality is subjective to each human either; all evidence so far is to the contrary. It just means we can never "truly" prove that. Wow. Interesting, but not useful.
So would it make Feyerabend happy if every scientific article's titled added "[* Not necessarily a claim to objective truth]"? That would be silly. Science doesn't claim to be finding the greatest objective truth, but it would be stupid and inconvenient and pointless to mention this in every scientific effort; science just does what it does within what appears to us to be our observable universe, and it does it well and it works, and that's all it claims to do. To point out that it's not necessarily a claim to absolute truth is not adding anything new or interesting to the discussion, doesn't make you more 'intelligent' than all the 'scientists', this has been known since science began, it's about as insightful and new as the ideas in the Matrix (which is to say, not). To equate science with religion is just silly, not 'subtle'. Some scientists - usually the better ones - even already understand the philosophical framework within which science rests.
Many people don't realize this because we're taught to almost blindly revere philosophy as an exalted intellectual activity, but Sturgeon's law applies equally to philosophy as anything else: 90% of philosophy is crap. Most philosophy "academics" are morons, as with any field (and how big someone's name is isn't necessarily an indicator).
It doesn't mean all philosophy is crap, which seems to be the implication in the summary; there is philosophy that is good and valuable and helps us lead better lives. The trick is learning to find the good amongst the bad.
It was also philosophers who laid the foundation of modern science and reason in the first place.
"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water." - John William Gardner
Germany *was* a democratic state when Hitler was elected to power, as were numerous other of the mentioned governments that committed atrocities, and more.
Post nothing but a list of pure undeniable facts and get modded down - wow - I guess that proves irrefutably just how strong the moderator bias is around here.
Thanks, but I'll take corporations any day of the week. The following were all government-based and didn't have that apparently uber-evil "profit motive" that terrifies you: Hitler, Mao, Lenin, Idi Amin, Mugabe, Pot Pol, Lothar von Trotha, the Akazu.
The people in government are just that - people. They're not a different species that is somehow more noble and somehow lack the same genes for greed and harm. They're the exact same species that run corporations, and the same species as you or I. They're equally fallible. They equally lust for power and money. They're equally greedy. They equally have bigotry and hate. They equally want higher salaries. They equally want to grow and expand their departments and have more people under them. The difference between the state, and anyone else, is that modern states have a monopoly on force.
If this will remain private and no centralized database will emerge, it's not clear to me that there is a rationale for getting the government involved, in fact if I look at industry trends this problem appears to be solving itself. (Also I don't see the justification for spending still more taxpayer-backed borrowed-money-we-don't-have on yet another government program. No it won't break the camel's back, but it will be one more straw.)
"Paranoia"? Need I remind you what happened in World War II, or would you have called the Jews paranoid if Hitler was calling for this? Governments have proven over and over that they can't be trusted, you only have to open a history book and count the millions upon millions of dead, same story over and over, all over the world, and throughout history. Or do you think that in "modern times" we've magically evolved past that sort of thing?
Probably part of the reason we've 'all made this mistake together' is that most people wouldn't intuitively expect that adding larger buffers could be harmful; it sounds like something that can 'surely only make things better', or so you would think. It's not that adding large buffers inherently will create more problems though, it's that adding large buffers in combination with a protocol that wasn't well-designed for this particular scenario, causes problems. Our infrastructure and hardware have run ahead of the protocol design, which was built on yesterday's Internet, so it needs some new tweaks/extensions to more elegantly handle the infrastructure setup.
You are right, on every level, I am probably just wasting my time. I thought maybe I could get through to at least a few people by talking a bit of straight sense, but if slashdot consists of many of America's most intelligent, and they are impervious to reason, it's a bit worrying, I don't know how this will all play itself out. No wonder the people at the very top in the US have no clue how to manage money.
p>How is receiving emergency care in a hospital equivalent to "stealing"?
How is forcing someone else to PAY for that visit, NOT stealing?
I'm not "letting" anyone die.
But you said in your post that anybody who is uninsured should be turned away from hospitals. This necessarily results in people dying. Or did you not mean what you wrote?
No, I'm saying that they should look after themselves. The uninsured could get a job, work hard, save some money, and get insurance. The poor could live more resourcefully by pooling their resources in more community-based living, and stop tolerating the wasting of their own money on things they don't need, like smoking / drinking / drugs.
Corps have poisoned waterways and land with industrial pollutants, destroyed lives and killed people through abusive business practice. And this is before we look back at times when they were unregulated and workers were expected to work unreasonable hours in dangerous conditions for very little pay, often getting maimed or killed by the machinery they were supposed to work with, with no recompense for themselves or their families. Or getting cancer, emphysema or a million and one other 'occupational hazards'
Firstly, governments have also poisoned waterways and land with industrial pollutants. Secondly, what's the death toll for on-the-job safety issues in the whole of history, do you truly, HONESTLY think it even remotely approaches the death toll from the government death and destruction? Just my short list above is probably 50 million odd murdered. Third, much government destruction is just deliberate murder for the sake of murder, while on the job deaths were always attempted to be minimized, they were by accident not on purpose. Fourth, in most cases that dangerous work was voluntary (and where it wasn't, government was usually involved). Fifth, corporations were at least improving lives in other ways, such as mining new resources, while ethnic or political slaughtering of millions of people doesn't. Maybe I'm "retarded" but I suggest you re-evaluate whether the facts truly fit your worldview.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhrm, sort of, but nope, not at all. What you are trying to get at, although it's clear your knowledge of this is extremely shallow, is referred to as "Purchasing Power Parity" in economics. There is some degree to which some goods are indeed cheaper to buy in poorer countries. This makes sense, as if e.g. a local climate lends itself to cheap wheat production, as a simple example, then bread may be cheaper there; also many poorer countries aren't tied down by heavy regulation and minimum wage laws, all of which raise production costs. However, this ALREADY gets factored in by economists, they're not total idiots: When people talk about GDP per capita, they refer to two different figures: "Nominal" and "Adjusted for PPP (Purchasing Power Parity)". The latter takes the local 'effective purchasing power' into consideration:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita
You'll see that most poor countries remain poor even after adjusting for PPP.
Finally, capitalism may indeed help keep things cheap, but most countries don't practice true capitalism.
The creative damage from the Comics Code persists to this day. If you look at the whole history of comics, it immediately split what was a thriving, creative market producing interesting and creative comics, into two, and drove and dictated the entire creative approach in each of the two: (1) An 'above-ground' over-sappy, over-cleaned-up, over-family-friendly market segment - which (2) then spawned an underground of "alternative" comics, which because they were in essence a reaction to this, polarized in the opposite direction and tried to be about as dark and modernist/nihilist and non-family-friendly as you can get.
Neither were all that appealing, frankly.
If you're interested in comics, this is one of the most awesome books ever: http://www.amazon.com/Smithsonian-Collection-Newspaper-Comics-Blackbeard/dp/0874741726
If you read that from start to finish, you can actually see these trends unfold. You'll be amazed at some of the comics of the 30's and 40's, which have really creative and interesting and amazing and neither-too-childish-nor-too-adult work - even the highly creative Mickey Mouse stories from Floyd Gottfredson. After the Comics Code changed the industry, only then did Mickey Mouse become such a watered-down piece of crappy over-cleansed family sap, to the point that "Mickey Mouse" even became an idiom for something watered-down and weak.
Of course, there were other trends driving the above too .. e.g. overall modernism/nihilism, and the rise of other forms of entertainment ... but the Comics Code definitely left a seriously ugly mark on comics as a field of art and expression for decades. Basically only the advent of webcomics in the 1990s saw the beginning of the rise of more interesting and positive creativity again, and only now is it coming into its own again.
"resulted in a ban on all laser pointers in the state of New South Wales."
Sigh ... can we please ban 'knee-jerk banning' based on statistically highly unlikely incidents that don't even actually cause safety problems because 'this is why we have co-pilots' (an incident that was probably already illegal in this case)?
Why don't we just ban EVERYTHING, in advance, just in case anyone uses it in a bad way? Woman throws an ashtray at husband's head? Ban ashtrays! Man throws coffee mug back? Ban mugs! A child trips over a LAN cable? Ban LAN cables!
But why wait? Let's introduce a new bill called the "Ban Everything Bill".
"No, not at all, in spite of such laws" => "in spite of the complete lack of such laws" (sorry, didn't use preview)
And incidentally, before anyone goes into over-hysterics over some of the recent performance problems encountered, first read up on, and understand Jim Getty's analysis of that, that was recently covered by slashdot.
Pause, and think about it for a minute. Does anyone REALLY think an ISP can afford to make 99% of the Web intolerable for its users, without immediately dying a horrible death in the market? No. It won't happen.
This is just more irrational fear-mongering from those interests pushing for government control over the Internet under the guise of so-called 'Net neutrality', claiming power in order to solve a problem that doesn't exist under the guise of 'helping you'.
The reasoning fallacy behind the promotion of 'net neutrality' is something like this: The market might be perfectly capable of providing everyone decent-speed, usable Internet (it's done a reasonably good job so far), but because it doesn't apparently recognize a legal 'right' to decent service, then "oh noes, panic, it means we won't get decent service". Wrong. The market will provide decent service because that is the very service they offer.
Here's a car analogy. There are no laws dictating a car has to be able to go at least 50 miles per hour. But is there a crisis of car manufacturers trying to get away with selling very slow cars? No, not at all, in spite of such laws. How could this possibly be? Because if a car company started selling cars that could only go 30 MPH, nobody would buy them. "But, but, we need laws just in case they do! Government must regulate and control the whole thing!" ... nope. Calm down, relax, don't be taken in by such blatant hysteria-creating propaganda.
All the more reason it's time to simplify the 8000+ page tax code.
Wrong, if you check their 'what's that site running' history you'll see that they only switched to Apache yesterday. Before that, they were on IIS 5 on, FFS, Windows 2000, which is a sign that they were probably running on outdated poorly managed systems. The fact that the attack attempts "continue" is probably meaningless as whatever they were, they are almost certainly failing now, but the attempts will still show up in the logs which will make any naive IT administrator nervous.
A multi-billion dollar company is a bunch of buildings and infrastructure, a building can't enjoy a car or yacht. In order for the human owners of the company to be able to do so much as buy a car with the profits they have to pay themselves out of the company first, and at that point they get taxed far more "2.4%", in fact they get taxed much higher than your 30%. Business owners pay massive amounts of taxes, disproportionately, so this lie that business owners are all somehow evading taxes at the expense of everyone is just blind anti-rich bullshit and propaganda.
Also why is the implication that merely having money in a Swiss bank account automatically makes you a tax evader?
Finally the only reason anybody pays taxes is that they're forced to. NOBODY on slashdot complaining about how evil the rich people are for trying to minimize their taxes, would pay their taxes either if they could get away with not doing so. Nobody. Not one person here would voluntarily pay taxes if they didn't have to. So let's all cut the hypocrisy.
If providing the services is not affordable, they have to be cut. Which part of "we don't have money to pay for all this" is hard to understand for a bright slashdot user.
Lol ... so if I *wrote* a computer simulation with two virtual AI agents who could only 'see' and 'observe' the virtual world I created, you would say that if they thought "objective truth" was their tiny virtual world then they would be correct? I'm not sure you've thought this through very well.
It's sad, but the thing to do about it is to make philosophy relevant again.
Philosophy 'as a discipline' will always be relevant. 99% of what gets called philosophy is a waste of time. Once in a while, a great philosopher comes along and adds something new, interesting or useful. Maybe 1 or 2 per century. The best philosophy adds relevance to peoples lives, and is actually useful. That most certainly does exist. And there is definitely still ground to cover. E.g. in fields such as philosophy of ethics / morality. Philosophy should be the application of reason to figure out 'how we should best live our lives'.
The conception of "objective truth" is implicit in the conception of "usefully predictive models".
No, it's not, because the reality is we can't know if everything in our observable universe is, just (silly example, but well-known) a big computer simulation or something. The best scientists understand this already, it's not something new or insightful. It's also completely pointless, because once you get past the "gee whiz, theoretically that's true" phase, you realize that there is no practical use in our everyday lives. The only way such inquiry would have practical use were if it could generate testable theories and we could turn it into some new technology, which might be useful but still could not be a claim to objective truth because it's like infinite recursion or 'turtles all the way down'.
To claim usefulness is "meaningless" if we aren't locating objective truth is NOT true, that is a reasoning error. Our scientific models have use FOR US, in OUR observable universe --- whatever the true nature of that universe. What matters to humans, matters to humans. It doesn't mean that reality is subjective to each human either; all evidence so far is to the contrary. It just means we can never "truly" prove that. Wow. Interesting, but not useful.
So would it make Feyerabend happy if every scientific article's titled added "[* Not necessarily a claim to objective truth]"? That would be silly. Science doesn't claim to be finding the greatest objective truth, but it would be stupid and inconvenient and pointless to mention this in every scientific effort; science just does what it does within what appears to us to be our observable universe, and it does it well and it works, and that's all it claims to do. To point out that it's not necessarily a claim to absolute truth is not adding anything new or interesting to the discussion, doesn't make you more 'intelligent' than all the 'scientists', this has been known since science began, it's about as insightful and new as the ideas in the Matrix (which is to say, not). To equate science with religion is just silly, not 'subtle'. Some scientists - usually the better ones - even already understand the philosophical framework within which science rests.
Many people don't realize this because we're taught to almost blindly revere philosophy as an exalted intellectual activity, but Sturgeon's law applies equally to philosophy as anything else: 90% of philosophy is crap. Most philosophy "academics" are morons, as with any field (and how big someone's name is isn't necessarily an indicator).
It doesn't mean all philosophy is crap, which seems to be the implication in the summary; there is philosophy that is good and valuable and helps us lead better lives. The trick is learning to find the good amongst the bad.
It was also philosophers who laid the foundation of modern science and reason in the first place.
"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water." - John William Gardner
Check out this video supposedly made by the shooter ... if real, he definitely seems mentally ill, it's almost time-cube-ish.
http://www.thecypresstimes.com/article/News/National_News/JARED_LOUGHNER_IDENTIFIED_AS_GUNMAN_IN_AZ_SHOOTING/38520
Germany *was* a democratic state when Hitler was elected to power, as were numerous other of the mentioned governments that committed atrocities, and more.
Post nothing but a list of pure undeniable facts and get modded down - wow - I guess that proves irrefutably just how strong the moderator bias is around here.
Thanks, but I'll take corporations any day of the week. The following were all government-based and didn't have that apparently uber-evil "profit motive" that terrifies you: Hitler, Mao, Lenin, Idi Amin, Mugabe, Pot Pol, Lothar von Trotha, the Akazu.
The people in government are just that - people. They're not a different species that is somehow more noble and somehow lack the same genes for greed and harm. They're the exact same species that run corporations, and the same species as you or I. They're equally fallible. They equally lust for power and money. They're equally greedy. They equally have bigotry and hate. They equally want higher salaries. They equally want to grow and expand their departments and have more people under them. The difference between the state, and anyone else, is that modern states have a monopoly on force.
If this will remain private and no centralized database will emerge, it's not clear to me that there is a rationale for getting the government involved, in fact if I look at industry trends this problem appears to be solving itself. (Also I don't see the justification for spending still more taxpayer-backed borrowed-money-we-don't-have on yet another government program. No it won't break the camel's back, but it will be one more straw.)
"Paranoia"? Need I remind you what happened in World War II, or would you have called the Jews paranoid if Hitler was calling for this? Governments have proven over and over that they can't be trusted, you only have to open a history book and count the millions upon millions of dead, same story over and over, all over the world, and throughout history. Or do you think that in "modern times" we've magically evolved past that sort of thing?
Probably part of the reason we've 'all made this mistake together' is that most people wouldn't intuitively expect that adding larger buffers could be harmful; it sounds like something that can 'surely only make things better', or so you would think. It's not that adding large buffers inherently will create more problems though, it's that adding large buffers in combination with a protocol that wasn't well-designed for this particular scenario, causes problems. Our infrastructure and hardware have run ahead of the protocol design, which was built on yesterday's Internet, so it needs some new tweaks/extensions to more elegantly handle the infrastructure setup.
I'd rather be heartless than brainless.
You are right, on every level, I am probably just wasting my time. I thought maybe I could get through to at least a few people by talking a bit of straight sense, but if slashdot consists of many of America's most intelligent, and they are impervious to reason, it's a bit worrying, I don't know how this will all play itself out. No wonder the people at the very top in the US have no clue how to manage money.
p>How is receiving emergency care in a hospital equivalent to "stealing"?
How is forcing someone else to PAY for that visit, NOT stealing?
I'm not "letting" anyone die.
But you said in your post that anybody who is uninsured should be turned away from hospitals. This necessarily results in people dying. Or did you not mean what you wrote?
No, I'm saying that they should look after themselves. The uninsured could get a job, work hard, save some money, and get insurance. The poor could live more resourcefully by pooling their resources in more community-based living, and stop tolerating the wasting of their own money on things they don't need, like smoking / drinking / drugs.
Umm, are you retarded?
Corps have poisoned waterways and land with industrial pollutants, destroyed lives and killed people through abusive business practice. And this is before we look back at times when they were unregulated and workers were expected to work unreasonable hours in dangerous conditions for very little pay, often getting maimed or killed by the machinery they were supposed to work with, with no recompense for themselves or their families. Or getting cancer, emphysema or a million and one other 'occupational hazards'
Firstly, governments have also poisoned waterways and land with industrial pollutants. Secondly, what's the death toll for on-the-job safety issues in the whole of history, do you truly, HONESTLY think it even remotely approaches the death toll from the government death and destruction? Just my short list above is probably 50 million odd murdered. Third, much government destruction is just deliberate murder for the sake of murder, while on the job deaths were always attempted to be minimized, they were by accident not on purpose. Fourth, in most cases that dangerous work was voluntary (and where it wasn't, government was usually involved). Fifth, corporations were at least improving lives in other ways, such as mining new resources, while ethnic or political slaughtering of millions of people doesn't. Maybe I'm "retarded" but I suggest you re-evaluate whether the facts truly fit your worldview.