Who gets to decide what is "blatant overwhelming streams of commercial speech and propaganda"?
It is arrogance to think that you are smarter and more knowledgeable than the rest of humanity. It falls into the "I could fix all the worlds problems if they would just make me king for a day."
Agreed. Anything that requires the power of eminent domain to implement should remain in the hands of government. If it is so important that government seize property for the common good, then government should remain in control.
BTW, this would also solve the problem of cities using eminent domain to seize poor peoples houses and sell them to developers.
As a dyed in the wool conservative libertarian, I must say that you have no clue what the hell network neutrality is.
Here is a clue: It doesn't have anything to do with bandwidth caps or allocation.
Didn't mean to get you all confused, but you see, cable companies sell cable-TV services as well as internet access. Phone companies sell voice telephone as well as internet access. Both would prefer that I pay them $50/month for a stated amount of bandwidth, and then another $50/month for the other service. But I've found ways of fitting the other service into my alloted bandwidth.
Well, we can't have THAT, now can we? The cable and phone companies have tried to fix their little business plan snafu by blocking my access to these alternate services. They have sold me a connection and now want to tell me what I can do with it. It is tatamount to telling me who I may call, or what television shows I may watch.
Heh, that is all well and good, IFF they put that bullshit in the contract. They don't, because they know people would tell them where to stick it. Instead, they try to slip it in on the backend, or get the service provider to pay them. Plain and simple, this could better be described as fraud or false advertisement.
In any case, I signed a contract for a stated amount of bandwidth for a stated price. It is now my bandwidth. Until contracted otherwise, the provider should be required to be neutral about what I do with MY network bandwith.
I agree with you, Hierarch; unfortunately, the end result is indistinguishable.
One other incentive that you fail to identify is that people do not support limiting laws on themselves. The support limiting laws on their neighbors. You will often hear, "They should not be allowed to do that." McDonald's shouldn't be allowed to offer toys to children, because that will make children want to go to McDonald's just for the toy. No thought is given to the meta-concept that it is a dangerous step to remove the parenting of children from parents and give it to government, because "I know how to raise my children." (Yes, I just had this argument with my wife yesterday.)
I had a situation where a kid was using Skype to make bomb threat phone calls to the middle school my son attended. The kid had a history of the same behavior and could make a reasonable guess that it was the kids voice on the phone. There was also a phone call that reported a gun fight at my house. I was working in the garage when the police showed up with handguns and rifles locked and loaded.
There wasn't enough evidence to support the issuance of a warrant to get the call records from Skype. And that was for an actual bomb threat that shut down a school and a call that had police speeding through town and brandishing loaded weapons.
I'm sure the RIAA can by themselves some search warrants, but they're likely to go broke if they do more than make some example arrests.
The consensus is that "the government" is not a representative cross section of the populace. "The government" is largely comprised of individuals that believe they have an understanding of what is best for the populace and what is best to do about it. Their overriding arrogance blinds them to the fact that their view of the "problem" is not the same as the populace's view of the "problem". Hubris is always the downfall of the epic hero.
That term harkens back to the time when many TVs were built more like furniture. They were wooden cabinets, possibly with legs and all. The "portable" TVs were the ones that were meant to be set on top of another piece of furniture.
Since the "portable" TV was cheaper to build because you didn't have to construct the fancy cabinet around the glass tube, the "portable" TVs with the plastic cabinet sold for less. That did not keep them from growing in size, though, and eventually we end in the absurd situation where the "portable" TV is to large for one person to carry...but still requires another piece of furniture to sit on. 8*)
Aren't making money? You might want to take a look at where the grants for environmental studies go most often.
have data,
Which they've put a lot of effort into shielding from people who question their conclusions.
have their reputation staked on their capability for reasoning and analysis.
Which makes them especially suspect after they have published a conclusion. Their published conclusions are predicated on their reasoning and analysis. Any flaws in that reasoning and analysis is a direct attack on their reputation.
People with principles, also, but they must show ability for cold reasoning, most especially admitting being wrong once in a while, as nobody is perfect.
I don't know these people, so can make no judgement on their principles, but I haven't seen to many admissions of being wrong.
The claim of the warmist is that a few degrees increase in average temperatures (they actually point to one or two degrees in Farenheit), will cause Canada to transform from a frozen tundra to waving wheat fields...Australia's outback and Arabia's deserts from rolling sand hills into tropical forest.
I just can't wrap my mind around how moving from an average winter temperature of -40 to -35 could have such a dramatic effect.
My understanding is that most of the desert regions are due to interaction between surface features and the atmosphere.
Death Valley is the US, for example, is created by the Rocky Mountains shielding the adjacent land from most of rain producing clouds. It seems to be a leap to state that a little more energy in the system will move rain water to where it wasn't before, when the water movement wasn't energy dependent in the first place.
If we were talking about average temperature increases on the order of tens of degrees, I might see it, but the change that is so critical is so small that it would be falling into the noise. If change in temperatures being discussed can have anything near the effect predicted, then the system was hopelessly unstable to begin with.
The data won't impact public policy until some conclusion is made and presented to the public. The rule should be to simply make the data available when the paper is published. We don't expect to use a public road built with public money until the road is complete, do we?
People who would fall for this tripe without a modicum of research deserve to lose all. They are stupid. Hell, I don't take drugs prescribed by my doctor until I have personally done a background check on them. How do they work? What are their side effects?
Let the FDA take an advisory role. "This [device|drug|treatment] has been shown to be effective in the treatment of ". People MAY chose to spend on alternative treatments, but they will know that they are expected to do their own studying.
I don't give a damn if they respect me or my beliefs. Really, I don't. However, I learned early in life that the response to violence is overwhelming violence...right up to the point that the other side is either incapable of responding or decides that a peaceful discussion actually IS the more useful approach.
I used to have many, many more boxes of parts and wires I never used, but now I have a wife, and she is the opposite of a hoarder: she's a compulsive thrower-outer. If you can't justify its existence, it's gone.
My wife used to try that. Then she ended up needing a few cables or such. I told her to go to BestBuy to price them. Then I'd go to my closet and pull out a few, or make one up from others. She learned real quick that my stash is not just a random collection of wires.
If he spent half as much time parenting his kids as he did crafting this response, his kids would disown him.
The problem is that the problem is incredibly organic and constantly changing and moving. You push one corner, and the problem space takes on a completely different shape. As a parent, we are blamed for situations completely out of our control. We're blamed if we don't make enough money to provide the toys that other kids have. We're blamed if we work to much. We're blamed for being invasive if we spend to much time with with our kids. We're blamed for being absent if we try to give them space. It doesn't matter. Until the boy hits 25yrs of age, I'm wrong.
Sometimes, we have to hit/. just to keep our sanity. It reminds us of how ridiculous our children COULD be.
Ask the libertarian if he will house a prisoner, and he will say "NO!"
Of course he will say no. Building prisons is a valid function of the government, necessary to insure individual freedom. Why would the libertarian house the prisoner?
Ask the libertarian if he will repair his road, and he will say "NO!"
Again, building roads is a valid function of government. It requires exercising the power of imminent domain, which should only be given to a duly elected government.
Ask the libertarian if he will give up his medicare, and he will say "NO!"
Bullshit. You can have the medicare, the social security and all of the other nanny state programs. All I ask is that you stop forcefully taking 1/3rd of my working life to pay for them.
Ask the libertarian if he would abolish government, and he will say "YES!"
Not an intelligent one. Government is the grease that allows the machinery of society to operate. A machine will not run long without proper lubrication, but never be confused that the lubrication makes the machine run faster or more precisely. To much oil in the engine will destroy it. Not enough oil in the engine will destroy it. The wrong kind of oil in the engine will destroy it.
Before you go mouthing about libertarians, you might want to learn a little about them. You can't do that by watching Rachel Maddow.
Science is one thing that if done right under socialism works best.
Except that science can't be "done right under socialism".
The problem is that under socialism, you get scientist like Dr. Floyd Ferris from "Atlas Shrugged". It's not a black and white switch, and there are lots of gray areas, but under a capitalist system there is a constant drive to turn a discovery into a usable, marketable invention. IOW, you have to actually solve a problem that people are having. A socialist system removes that drive.
A socialist system replaces the drive to convince other sentient beings that you have a solution to their problems, with the drive to please a bureaucrat. What pleases the bureaucrat changes with whoever happens to be in control. One year, the in thing will be techniques for finding more buried oil. Next, it will be ways to put men on Mars. The next year the emphasis will be innovative ways to treat foot fungus. What often happens is that something interesting is discovered, but there isn't any incentive to turn it into a marketable product. Heh! What were we saying about the state of science under the former Soviet Union? Also consider the almost socialist nature of the former Bell Labs (God rest its soul). How long did the transistor technology lie dormant before it being picked up and put to useful work?
Which one is better? IMO... neither. One sacrifices the long term, the other sacrifices turning the science into useful technology. It's a mix that advances society. The Russians should build the city with a purely scientific center, surrounded by a ring of engineers that are tasked with solving problems. The engineers will be the only ones allowed to make requests of the scientist for scientific investigation.
the reason Obama gets support and approval is because, within the reasonable expectations and limitations of what a president can do, most of us consider him to be doing an overall damn good job under incredibly hard circumstances. Because, for a politician, most of us think he's pretty damn good.
Rasmussen would beg to differ. http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/obama_approval_index_history
Obama drew huge media attention for a number of very legitimate reasons, most particularly because he drew absolutely overwhelming public attention.
And he drew the "overwhelming public attention" because of one speech at the previous DNC national convention, and then the leftist big media crowd continually repeated the line about what a gifted speaker he is. I find his public speaking to be scripted and stuttering, but whatever. He was never asked difficult questions (until a plumber got hold of him), to the point that comedy shows were even making fun of the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Who gets to decide what is "blatant overwhelming streams of commercial speech and propaganda"?
It is arrogance to think that you are smarter and more knowledgeable than the rest of humanity. It falls into the "I could fix all the worlds problems if they would just make me king for a day."
Agreed. Anything that requires the power of eminent domain to implement should remain in the hands of government. If it is so important that government seize property for the common good, then government should remain in control.
BTW, this would also solve the problem of cities using eminent domain to seize poor peoples houses and sell them to developers.
As a dyed in the wool conservative libertarian, I must say that you have no clue what the hell network neutrality is.
Here is a clue: It doesn't have anything to do with bandwidth caps or allocation.
Didn't mean to get you all confused, but you see, cable companies sell cable-TV services as well as internet access. Phone companies sell voice telephone as well as internet access. Both would prefer that I pay them $50/month for a stated amount of bandwidth, and then another $50/month for the other service. But I've found ways of fitting the other service into my alloted bandwidth.
Well, we can't have THAT, now can we? The cable and phone companies have tried to fix their little business plan snafu by blocking my access to these alternate services. They have sold me a connection and now want to tell me what I can do with it. It is tatamount to telling me who I may call, or what television shows I may watch.
Heh, that is all well and good, IFF they put that bullshit in the contract. They don't, because they know people would tell them where to stick it. Instead, they try to slip it in on the backend, or get the service provider to pay them. Plain and simple, this could better be described as fraud or false advertisement.
In any case, I signed a contract for a stated amount of bandwidth for a stated price. It is now my bandwidth. Until contracted otherwise, the provider should be required to be neutral about what I do with MY network bandwith.
I agree with you, Hierarch; unfortunately, the end result is indistinguishable.
One other incentive that you fail to identify is that people do not support limiting laws on themselves. The support limiting laws on their neighbors. You will often hear, "They should not be allowed to do that." McDonald's shouldn't be allowed to offer toys to children, because that will make children want to go to McDonald's just for the toy. No thought is given to the meta-concept that it is a dangerous step to remove the parenting of children from parents and give it to government, because "I know how to raise my children." (Yes, I just had this argument with my wife yesterday.)
And they will have to stay near the wind farms that are now going to be built off the shores of Nantucket.
3. They're actually developing weapons to fight back the aliens after the bees innoculate us against their black, mind-control goo.
I had a situation where a kid was using Skype to make bomb threat phone calls to the middle school my son attended. The kid had a history of the same behavior and could make a reasonable guess that it was the kids voice on the phone. There was also a phone call that reported a gun fight at my house. I was working in the garage when the police showed up with handguns and rifles locked and loaded.
There wasn't enough evidence to support the issuance of a warrant to get the call records from Skype. And that was for an actual bomb threat that shut down a school and a call that had police speeding through town and brandishing loaded weapons.
I'm sure the RIAA can by themselves some search warrants, but they're likely to go broke if they do more than make some example arrests.
Funny, I just use /.
The consensus is that "the government" is not a representative cross section of the populace. "The government" is largely comprised of individuals that believe they have an understanding of what is best for the populace and what is best to do about it. Their overriding arrogance blinds them to the fact that their view of the "problem" is not the same as the populace's view of the "problem". Hubris is always the downfall of the epic hero.
'If we had a deterrent, a bigger stick to fine malefactors, that would be helpful,' says FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz
Translation: "If you would just make me king, I would be able to solve all the problems."
That term harkens back to the time when many TVs were built more like furniture. They were wooden cabinets, possibly with legs and all. The "portable" TVs were the ones that were meant to be set on top of another piece of furniture.
Since the "portable" TV was cheaper to build because you didn't have to construct the fancy cabinet around the glass tube, the "portable" TVs with the plastic cabinet sold for less. That did not keep them from growing in size, though, and eventually we end in the absurd situation where the "portable" TV is to large for one person to carry...but still requires another piece of furniture to sit on. 8*)
I would believe people who aren't making money,
Aren't making money? You might want to take a look at where the grants for environmental studies go most often.
have data,
Which they've put a lot of effort into shielding from people who question their conclusions.
have their reputation staked on their capability for reasoning and analysis.
Which makes them especially suspect after they have published a conclusion. Their published conclusions are predicated on their reasoning and analysis. Any flaws in that reasoning and analysis is a direct attack on their reputation.
People with principles, also, but they must show ability for cold reasoning, most especially admitting being wrong once in a while, as nobody is perfect.
I don't know these people, so can make no judgement on their principles, but I haven't seen to many admissions of being wrong.
The claim of the warmist is that a few degrees increase in average temperatures (they actually point to one or two degrees in Farenheit), will cause Canada to transform from a frozen tundra to waving wheat fields...Australia's outback and Arabia's deserts from rolling sand hills into tropical forest.
I just can't wrap my mind around how moving from an average winter temperature of -40 to -35 could have such a dramatic effect.
My understanding is that most of the desert regions are due to interaction between surface features and the atmosphere.
Death Valley is the US, for example, is created by the Rocky Mountains shielding the adjacent land from most of rain producing clouds. It seems to be a leap to state that a little more energy in the system will move rain water to where it wasn't before, when the water movement wasn't energy dependent in the first place.
If we were talking about average temperature increases on the order of tens of degrees, I might see it, but the change that is so critical is so small that it would be falling into the noise. If change in temperatures being discussed can have anything near the effect predicted, then the system was hopelessly unstable to begin with.
The data won't impact public policy until some conclusion is made and presented to the public. The rule should be to simply make the data available when the paper is published. We don't expect to use a public road built with public money until the road is complete, do we?
People who would fall for this tripe without a modicum of research deserve to lose all. They are stupid. Hell, I don't take drugs prescribed by my doctor until I have personally done a background check on them. How do they work? What are their side effects?
Let the FDA take an advisory role. "This [device|drug|treatment] has been shown to be effective in the treatment of ". People MAY chose to spend on alternative treatments, but they will know that they are expected to do their own studying.
So, he is a dick and an asshole? And he claims his company's phone doesn't support porn?
I don't give a damn if they respect me or my beliefs. Really, I don't. However, I learned early in life that the response to violence is overwhelming violence...right up to the point that the other side is either incapable of responding or decides that a peaceful discussion actually IS the more useful approach.
I used to have many, many more boxes of parts and wires I never used, but now I have a wife, and she is the opposite of a hoarder: she's a compulsive thrower-outer. If you can't justify its existence, it's gone.
My wife used to try that. Then she ended up needing a few cables or such. I told her to go to BestBuy to price them. Then I'd go to my closet and pull out a few, or make one up from others. She learned real quick that my stash is not just a random collection of wires.
Leaner meat is lower quality meat.
But I'll be damned if the local grocery stores don't charge a premium for the lower fat ground beef.
We shouldn't? Oh.
"Heh, honey!! Come back in the house."
If he spent half as much time parenting his kids as he did crafting this response, his kids would disown him.
The problem is that the problem is incredibly organic and constantly changing and moving. You push one corner, and the problem space takes on a completely different shape. As a parent, we are blamed for situations completely out of our control. We're blamed if we don't make enough money to provide the toys that other kids have. We're blamed if we work to much. We're blamed for being invasive if we spend to much time with with our kids. We're blamed for being absent if we try to give them space. It doesn't matter. Until the boy hits 25yrs of age, I'm wrong.
Sometimes, we have to hit /. just to keep our sanity. It reminds us of how ridiculous our children COULD be.
Ask the libertarian if he will house a prisoner, and he will say "NO!"
Of course he will say no. Building prisons is a valid function of the government, necessary to insure individual freedom. Why would the libertarian house the prisoner?
Ask the libertarian if he will repair his road, and he will say "NO!"
Again, building roads is a valid function of government. It requires exercising the power of imminent domain, which should only be given to a duly elected government.
Ask the libertarian if he will give up his medicare, and he will say "NO!"
Bullshit. You can have the medicare, the social security and all of the other nanny state programs. All I ask is that you stop forcefully taking 1/3rd of my working life to pay for them.
Ask the libertarian if he would abolish government, and he will say "YES!"
Not an intelligent one. Government is the grease that allows the machinery of society to operate. A machine will not run long without proper lubrication, but never be confused that the lubrication makes the machine run faster or more precisely. To much oil in the engine will destroy it. Not enough oil in the engine will destroy it. The wrong kind of oil in the engine will destroy it.
Before you go mouthing about libertarians, you might want to learn a little about them. You can't do that by watching Rachel Maddow.
Science is one thing that if done right under socialism works best.
Except that science can't be "done right under socialism".
The problem is that under socialism, you get scientist like Dr. Floyd Ferris from "Atlas Shrugged". It's not a black and white switch, and there are lots of gray areas, but under a capitalist system there is a constant drive to turn a discovery into a usable, marketable invention. IOW, you have to actually solve a problem that people are having. A socialist system removes that drive.
A socialist system replaces the drive to convince other sentient beings that you have a solution to their problems, with the drive to please a bureaucrat. What pleases the bureaucrat changes with whoever happens to be in control. One year, the in thing will be techniques for finding more buried oil. Next, it will be ways to put men on Mars. The next year the emphasis will be innovative ways to treat foot fungus. What often happens is that something interesting is discovered, but there isn't any incentive to turn it into a marketable product. Heh! What were we saying about the state of science under the former Soviet Union? Also consider the almost socialist nature of the former Bell Labs (God rest its soul). How long did the transistor technology lie dormant before it being picked up and put to useful work?
Which one is better? IMO ... neither. One sacrifices the long term, the other sacrifices turning the science into useful technology. It's a mix that advances society. The Russians should build the city with a purely scientific center, surrounded by a ring of engineers that are tasked with solving problems. The engineers will be the only ones allowed to make requests of the scientist for scientific investigation.
the reason Obama gets support and approval is because, within the reasonable expectations and limitations of what a president can do, most of us consider him to be doing an overall damn good job under incredibly hard circumstances. Because, for a politician, most of us think he's pretty damn good.
Rasmussen would beg to differ.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/obama_approval_index_history
Obama drew huge media attention for a number of very legitimate reasons, most particularly because he drew absolutely overwhelming public attention.
And he drew the "overwhelming public attention" because of one speech at the previous DNC national convention, and then the leftist big media crowd continually repeated the line about what a gifted speaker he is. I find his public speaking to be scripted and stuttering, but whatever. He was never asked difficult questions (until a plumber got hold of him), to the point that comedy shows were even making fun of the situation.
No, Obama is big media's lap dog.
All this report means is that RIAA's check hasn't been received by Obama's fundraisers yet.