That's why this perplexes me so much; why on Earth would you want to offend one half of the spectrum and jeapordize a chunk of your readership?
Why would posting a factual article about something that one of our elected officials stated to be his desired policy be seen as alienating to one half of the "spectrum?"
You know, as I was posting that I was going crazy trying to remember what they actually used. I looked up metal pipes & plastic pipes, but I knew I was still missing something.
The idea is not to remove all environmental pollution from the water but to simply destroy cholera, hepatitis A, E. coli, cryptosporidia, salmonella, typhoid fever, and many other waterborne diseases. This is not all about cleaning up dioxin, benzene, or other industrial disasters.
This will solve a lot disease problems in the third world.
All jokes aside, pipes from central plants are a LOT more expensive than locally created potable water. A 2" diameter PVC pipe costs a little over $2/foot. That's over $10K per mile. Now add the cost of burying the pipe or otherwise securing it from harm.
Oddly enough, I find myself for the first time in my entire life positively reminded of an Ayn Rand novel I read. Damnit, I hated that book. It was nothing but one continuous straw man argument from start to finish.
Mugabe gets all of his support from uneducated rural people, while city people consistently vote for the opposition. As long as Mugabe can promise farms for landless people and keep his majority base from trusting anyone else, he will stay in power.
If those rural people had electricity and water, they might have the ability to hear dissenting views over the radio that they can't hear right now. People living in abject poverty are a lot more willing to surrender power than the middle class and the wealthy. Look at the collapse of every democracy since the beginning of the 20th century -- they all had to do with selling the poor on promises of a stronger nation if they only surrendered themselves to the state. The impoverishment of a people is one of the first steps towards totalitarianism, whether it be communism or fascism.
I'm not worried about a population explosion in Africa. It will last at most a century before Africa becomes subject to the lowered birth rates of every other industrialized nation. Just look at the United States 100 years ago. I'll bet your grandparents had a LOT more siblings than you do.
Corruption and tribalism are the worst problems facing Africa, but they cannot disappear until they are connected with the rest of the world, and that requires technology. Barriers to trade and contact with the outside world foment extremism and allow gatekeepers to wealth. Until we get Africa "on the grid," we can't expect the people to take steps to stop the sort of behavior our own nations were guilty of only 100 years ago.
The big problem with the Segway was the hype, not the merits of device itself. When Jeff Bezos said that he could see cities being redesigned around the thing, we all thought that it had to be something revolutionary and amazing that would lead us all to change.
What he really seems to have meant was that for the device to sell, cities would have to be redesigned first. It's too heavy, fast, and unmaneuverable to ue on sidewalks, and it's too slow, unprotected, and unmaneuverable to use on streets. In essence, for the Segway to work, there'd have to be a completely new set of lanes for it. Additionally, it has all the problems of not protecting against the elements or having cargo space that prevent it from truly replacing cars. It's also far too expensive for the average person to justify the limited utility.
To sum up, it costs too much and can't be used in a majority of outdoor situations. It was overhyped when it had commercial flop written all over it. The Segway was brilliant example of promising the world and delivering nothing.
Snowmobiles and trail bikes at least have thrill-seeking element that the 12.5 MPH, no off-roading Segway did not.
I was not aware that they did not operate the same. It seems a much more attractive option for hedging and speculating now that I know that all you can lose is your initial investment.
Of course, finding someone to sell you a call on oil might be a little tough right now with the whole Iran situation.
He also seems to imply that violation of other countries laws just because the US goverment doesn't agree with them is morally correct. That's a morally questionable point in itself.
In and of itself -- yes. When the law in question is one of basic human freedoms -- no.
This 'Congressman' also part of a system which has incarcerated a number of people indefinately without due process of law (Guantanamo Bay of course) because they say they're guilty. Somewhat hypocritical...
This Congressman has been one of the strongest objectors to this kind of willful violation of the 6th Amendment. He's a Democrat however and has been consistently denied the power to do anything about it. You should read more about what the people in your government are doing before lazily tarring them all with the same brush.
Also, by your own logic, you're a part of this system too as a voter and are just as guilty of hypocrisy as he is.
If they wanted to do business there they had to comply.
No kidding. One might say that that's the entire point of contention. When does doing business matter more than freedom and human rights?
Personally, I think our policies in China are in fact leading it slowly towards democracy. They have a growing middle class, education is growing, people have a taste of freedom in their decisions, and we're slowly breaking through the censorship barriers every time the government tries to cover up something over there. It's not inevitable, but it's probable at this point. I'm not as worried about China in 50 years as I am about Russia with its evaporating middle class, its increasing state control of business, and the mainstreaming of racist attitudes.
Even so, for you to say that it was permissable to cooperate with the Nazis even to the point of assisting in rounding up Jews for the Holocaust like IBM's German business units did just to continue to be able to do business there is utterly amoral and insane.
I hate Godwin's Law. I wouldn't hate it so much if people realized that it was a tongue-in-cheek limit on the increasing hyperbole that an internet discussion will get into instead of treating it as "Hah! You said Hitler! That means you've lost!"
There are times that parallels with the Nazis are extremely useful. Comparisons to authoritarian states, the self-destruction of democracies, racist state policies, genocide, and merging of industry and state power without the loss of private profit all apply.
In this case, another rare correlation comes up; WWII was the last well-remembered times that the U.S. has a string of prosecutions for the crime of businesses colluding with the enemy. There were similar cases for breaking the law against dealing with apatheid South Africa. Also, there was a law against doing business with the Arab world and not Israel at a time when the much larger Arab market was boycotting businesses that dealt with Israel, but few people remember that. Personally, I would've gone with the apartheid example, but since state censorship was the issue, an authoritarian regime seems a little more appropriate.
I find extremely dangerous that one of the darkest moment in history and most especially one of the darkest moments in the history of democratic nations is forever walled off from discussion because of the extreme nature of its behavior. Fascism is the dark shadow of right wing politics in democracies just as Communism is the dark shadow of the left. It is unbalancing to the public dialogue that we are only allowed to talk about one of the two without a large section of the public putting their hands over their ears and shouting, "La la la! I can't hear you!"
The better choice is futures options. For a few thousand dollars you can buy an option whose value will be 1000 times (oil price - $100). If oil got to $200 your few thousand dollars would turn into $100,000. And you don't get wiped out by any fluctuations along the way; you pay up front, then sit tight and wait to get lucky. The down side is that you lose your entire investment if oil is less than $100 at the end, but it was only a few thousand dollars, which you should be able to afford if you're thinking about this.
Woah, woah, woah! Slow down there. Let me explain commodity futures a little better before you go thinking that it's a low risk investment with a high pay-off.
When you buy an option, you are entering a contract with another person to buy a large amount of a commodity at a certain price. The brokerage fee is what costs a fractional chunk of change. Let's say you buy an option to buy a minimal contract for an offset on 5000 bushels of corn for $2.50 per bushel. A contract like this would cost around The contract has a time limit at the end of which you must make the trade.
If corn goes up to $2.70 per bushel, you just made $1000. If corn goes down to $2.30 per bushel, you just lost $1000. People who sell commodity contracts are making a bet that the value will go down while people who buy them are hoping that it will go up. Futures are extremely dangerous because they're one of the few types of investments where you can lose more money than you put in -- far more money than you put in. This is not the kind of investment that small-time amateurs should even think about, and many lose their shirts trying to gamble with the exchange instead of buying and selling wisely.
I've had good success with the roll on and pump spray deodorants that are basically nothing but the same salt with water, but I never could get the rock itself to work well. Maybe I was using it wrong; I had high hopes since it was cheaper, but it didn't pan out.
I just like poking fun at vegans for absolutely no good reason.
Nice try, that wont work either, most food cannot be grown or survive without the very extensive use of, you guessed it, petroleum based pesticides.
Really? Not where I shop. This is a large part of why the organic food movement talks about sustainable practices as part of its rhetoric. Sure, I pay about 20-30% more for my food, but it's still much cheaper than eating out, and I get the peace of mind of reducing my pesticide exposure other unnatural things in my food like trans fats and high fructose corn syrup.
I down with that, but we need to also stop artificially propping up the price of cane sugar too, and it'll all even out. As a bonus we'll stop using high-fructose corn syrup in our food and drink and probably have better health as a result.
Anyway, if we ever find a way to make ethanol from cellulose, it won't matter how much money the government gives to Big Corn for ethanol or sweetener purposes since converting cellulose into sugar is the first step. A large chunk of the demand for corn will simply vanish, and subsidies will become economically unviable.
If you actually made sustainable biodiesel from algae, you'd have to grow them on carbon from the atmosphere. This means leaving the ponds open, evaporative losses, and considerable water use.
I take it you've never owned an aquarium. We could bubble air into the pipes and extract it at the other end while conserving most of humidity to feed back into the system.
No, the question is funny. The cycling question was a joke because it took the ridiculous argument seriously, and the tires question was a joke because it took the joke cycling question seriously.
Some people just have no appreciation for dry humor.
You're not alone. I did the EverQuest thing for about 4-6 months back in 2000 and then gave it up. MMOGs are like a second job. To get anywhere you have to find groups. That means building relationships with other players and a reputation in addition to getting equipment to make you competitive with other potential players.
The main problem is that if you don't keep up levelling at the same pace as your friends, you fall behind and have to start all over on building up relationships and reputation with a new wave of players, hoping that they play at your pace. Since most people that I met in EQ played a lot, I fell behind several times. Eventually, I gave up on the game when classwork started to pile up.
I don't even have time to play all the offline RPGs I have, so MMOGs aren't very attractive to me. Plus, there's a whole lot of irritating people out there that I'd just rather not deal with (much like FPS & RTS games).
You used the word "ideally" to start off your argument. That means, "in anywhere but real life". Because we do not live in an idyllic world, ideals are worth nothing unless they are practical.
I used ideally to contrast elected officials versus a totalitarian goverment, but since you've just dissed the concept of representative democracy being given any authority, I'm curious to know what system you would prefer.
Let me explain. There is an ideal that everyone should be nice to one another. But this is an ideal. Real life is not like this.
This is exactly why neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism work. Socialism only works if the people will still work to maximum efficiency when the government provides everything, and that the government will be filled with people only working for society's benefit instead of themselves. Capitalism only works when people live by the golden rule and do not leverage superior economic strength to hurt other for maximum self gain like the economic equivalent of petty warlords.
Communists make all private and club goods into common and public goods and ignore the reality of the free rider problem. Liberatarians pretend that common and public goods don't exist and ignore the reality of the free rider problem. Only moderates see the problem for what it is.
Now, you have a problem. How do we efficiently distribute goods and services to maximize the happiness of everyone? That is, we want everyone to be as happy as possible, and leave no one unhappy. This is the real-world problem.
Much like every other real world problem, there is no "one size fits all" solution that works for every situation.
The capitalist solution is, "Within a set of parameters (law & morality), you secure your own happiness." This has proven by experience and history to be a far better system than anything where you have smart people make decisions for others. Even though Aunt May is below average intelligence, even though she hasn't been to school but for three days in her life, and even though she is misinformed on a number of subjects, if she is able to make her own decisions, she will be happier. Experience shows us this.
The problem here is what happens when your happiness is in direct conflict with someone else's happiness, and only law (not morality) can be relied on to prevail. You just admitted that we don't live in an ideal world where everyone is nice to each other, but you positted a system that requires that people be nice to each other to avoid causing suffering.
If the rule of the land is to only look after yourself, then the rule of the land is that it is permissable to screw over others to get what you want. For example, what happens if Aunt May goes to a car dealer? Without lemon laws and limitations on contract law, the car she buys may be a piece of junk thanks to her relative lack of information about the good compared to the dealer. It is the dealer's imperative to sell low cost goods for as high as possible and that may include selling junky cars.
But wait! The usual objection is that the market will provide an ethical dealer because there is a demand for it. However, it's not really that hard to find markets in reality where all the players have historically seemed do their best to screw the customers wherever possible -- American cell phone providers on price plans, auto manufacturers on defects, oil companies on gas prices, etc. In many cases, rent-seeking behavior leads to corrupt business practices across the board because "that's just standard practice."
The major problem with the principle of putting the self first is the prisoners' dilemma. There are a number of real world situations where everyone would be better off if they cooperated towards a goal instead of doing what seems best for just them. The environment is a classic example. Lake Victoria in Africa is bordered by three countries. If each country tries to use the lake for their own benefit, t
You have made a classic mistake, claiming that wealth is measured in dollars.
You say this, but then you go to use a cooked example based on dollars to try to prove your point. Given what you do in the second example is in contrast with the first example, the real message of your examples is that people who do nothing don't create value and people who work do. Big revelation there.
I cannot pinpoint the effects of another's poverty on my own situation. In fact, what you are and what you do do not affect me (unless you do something amoral or illegal.) I cannot pinpoint how my actions in creating wealth negatively affected anyone.
Aye, there's the rub.
People in poverty who cannot get by may be forced to do something amoral or illegal for survival. People in poverty who can barely get by but aren't properly education and don't have healthcare are less efficient workers and raise children that contribute less efficiently to the economy that supports you. Envy of people's "betters" and malaise lead to violent crime, drug use, social instability, and revolution.
A problem with pure capitalism is that it sets up a dynamic where one of the goals of all investors is to get as much work out of workers for as little pay as possible. This does not create a just and free society if class mobility becomes impossible and if workers cannot afford the downtime to switch jobs if their current job is unbearable. This is why we have minimum wage laws and laws about overtime. The alternative was that people were worked nearly to death (and to death before better safety regulations) for a pittance that was just enough to live a much shortened life on. We've seen what unfettered capitalism does to a society; it was the so-called "Gilded Age."
(Now before you go screaming "Communism!" I'd live to point out that I have almost as dim view of Marxism as I do of Social Darwinism, but I'll get to that in my response to your other post.)
In fact, when I engage in free trade, I notice that both parties are getting more than what they put in (otherwise, I or the other party wouldn't have done it.)
Immediately after I point a gun at you and say, "Your money or your life," we are now in a situation where the trade benefits both parties. However, many free market fundamentalists refuse to acknowledge that life frequently puts you in situations where you must make less that maximally beneficial trades by saying that you wouldn't have made the trade if it didn't benefit you.
Take a utility monopoly. A utility monopoly combines two very dangerous things -- they hold a good needed for life, and they hold exclusive access to that good. If such a company decides to charge 20% over their total costs (including investment in infrastructure improvement, R&D, marketing, etc.), then the customer is forced to pay because they have no alternative including going without. In this case, both parties "benefit" from the trade, but market efficiency is not obtained. If a competitor tries to sprout up, the established monopoly can just refuse them access to their pipes, grid, etc. making them have to invest huge amounts of money in parallel infrastructure that they cannot afford.
There are all sort of other less forceful domains in which a trade benefits both parties, but does not benefit the customer maximally. Markets where access to information is asymmetrical is one (used cars, investments, real estate, etc.). Goods that are unsafe but provide utility (the Pinto, asbestos insulation, etc.) are another.
The idea that just because a trade happened that the customer should always be happy is ridiculous.
But now it's more on the side of getting the output from continuous things, like top, watch and more specifically from comand line encoders.
Ouch. That's actually a little more advanced than what I've done and would really depend on your ability to interpret terminal-type specific special characters. I'd actually be interested to know how you do this in Perl too. I'm guessing that there's a CPAN module for this sort of thing?
I'll have to give this one some thought. Unfortunately, I don't have access to Python at work, and the python.org website seems to be timing out for me, so I'll have to think about this at home.
I have found python to be very weak and under-documented in the department of dealing with linux command line utilities.
Out of curiosity, what problems have you run into? I'd be glad to give some pointers since I've done a decent amount of work with Python in places where shell scripts would normally be used.
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That's why this perplexes me so much; why on Earth would you want to offend one half of the spectrum and jeapordize a chunk of your readership?
Why would posting a factual article about something that one of our elected officials stated to be his desired policy be seen as alienating to one half of the "spectrum?"
You're telling us you've never heard of George Clinton and the P.Funk?
You need to get out more!
You know, as I was posting that I was going crazy trying to remember what they actually used. I looked up metal pipes & plastic pipes, but I knew I was still missing something.
The idea is not to remove all environmental pollution from the water but to simply destroy cholera, hepatitis A, E. coli, cryptosporidia, salmonella, typhoid fever, and many other waterborne diseases. This is not all about cleaning up dioxin, benzene, or other industrial disasters.
This will solve a lot disease problems in the third world.
All jokes aside, pipes from central plants are a LOT more expensive than locally created potable water. A 2" diameter PVC pipe costs a little over $2/foot. That's over $10K per mile. Now add the cost of burying the pipe or otherwise securing it from harm.
Kamen's idea is better.
Candle manufacturers express skepticism.
Oddly enough, I find myself for the first time in my entire life positively reminded of an Ayn Rand novel I read.
Damnit, I hated that book. It was nothing but one continuous straw man argument from start to finish.
Mugabe gets all of his support from uneducated rural people, while city people consistently vote for the opposition. As long as Mugabe can promise farms for landless people and keep his majority base from trusting anyone else, he will stay in power.
If those rural people had electricity and water, they might have the ability to hear dissenting views over the radio that they can't hear right now. People living in abject poverty are a lot more willing to surrender power than the middle class and the wealthy. Look at the collapse of every democracy since the beginning of the 20th century -- they all had to do with selling the poor on promises of a stronger nation if they only surrendered themselves to the state. The impoverishment of a people is one of the first steps towards totalitarianism, whether it be communism or fascism.
I'm not worried about a population explosion in Africa. It will last at most a century before Africa becomes subject to the lowered birth rates of every other industrialized nation. Just look at the United States 100 years ago. I'll bet your grandparents had a LOT more siblings than you do.
Corruption and tribalism are the worst problems facing Africa, but they cannot disappear until they are connected with the rest of the world, and that requires technology. Barriers to trade and contact with the outside world foment extremism and allow gatekeepers to wealth. Until we get Africa "on the grid," we can't expect the people to take steps to stop the sort of behavior our own nations were guilty of only 100 years ago.
The big problem with the Segway was the hype, not the merits of device itself. When Jeff Bezos said that he could see cities being redesigned around the thing, we all thought that it had to be something revolutionary and amazing that would lead us all to change.
What he really seems to have meant was that for the device to sell, cities would have to be redesigned first. It's too heavy, fast, and unmaneuverable to ue on sidewalks, and it's too slow, unprotected, and unmaneuverable to use on streets. In essence, for the Segway to work, there'd have to be a completely new set of lanes for it. Additionally, it has all the problems of not protecting against the elements or having cargo space that prevent it from truly replacing cars. It's also far too expensive for the average person to justify the limited utility.
To sum up, it costs too much and can't be used in a majority of outdoor situations. It was overhyped when it had commercial flop written all over it. The Segway was brilliant example of promising the world and delivering nothing.
Snowmobiles and trail bikes at least have thrill-seeking element that the 12.5 MPH, no off-roading Segway did not.
I was not aware that they did not operate the same. It seems a much more attractive option for hedging and speculating now that I know that all you can lose is your initial investment.
Of course, finding someone to sell you a call on oil might be a little tough right now with the whole Iran situation.
He also seems to imply that violation of other countries laws just because the US goverment doesn't agree with them is morally correct. That's a morally questionable point in itself.
In and of itself -- yes.
When the law in question is one of basic human freedoms -- no.
This 'Congressman' also part of a system which has incarcerated a number of people indefinately without due process of law (Guantanamo Bay of course) because they say they're guilty. Somewhat hypocritical...
This Congressman has been one of the strongest objectors to this kind of willful violation of the 6th Amendment. He's a Democrat however and has been consistently denied the power to do anything about it. You should read more about what the people in your government are doing before lazily tarring them all with the same brush.
Also, by your own logic, you're a part of this system too as a voter and are just as guilty of hypocrisy as he is.
If they wanted to do business there they had to comply.
No kidding. One might say that that's the entire point of contention. When does doing business matter more than freedom and human rights?
Personally, I think our policies in China are in fact leading it slowly towards democracy. They have a growing middle class, education is growing, people have a taste of freedom in their decisions, and we're slowly breaking through the censorship barriers every time the government tries to cover up something over there. It's not inevitable, but it's probable at this point. I'm not as worried about China in 50 years as I am about Russia with its evaporating middle class, its increasing state control of business, and the mainstreaming of racist attitudes.
Even so, for you to say that it was permissable to cooperate with the Nazis even to the point of assisting in rounding up Jews for the Holocaust like IBM's German business units did just to continue to be able to do business there is utterly amoral and insane.
Our bad. We didn't realize until your "5, Insightful" post that dissenting opinions in Congress are Another Liberal Myth.
I hate Godwin's Law. I wouldn't hate it so much if people realized that it was a tongue-in-cheek limit on the increasing hyperbole that an internet discussion will get into instead of treating it as "Hah! You said Hitler! That means you've lost!"
There are times that parallels with the Nazis are extremely useful. Comparisons to authoritarian states, the self-destruction of democracies, racist state policies, genocide, and merging of industry and state power without the loss of private profit all apply.
In this case, another rare correlation comes up; WWII was the last well-remembered times that the U.S. has a string of prosecutions for the crime of businesses colluding with the enemy. There were similar cases for breaking the law against dealing with apatheid South Africa. Also, there was a law against doing business with the Arab world and not Israel at a time when the much larger Arab market was boycotting businesses that dealt with Israel, but few people remember that. Personally, I would've gone with the apartheid example, but since state censorship was the issue, an authoritarian regime seems a little more appropriate.
I find extremely dangerous that one of the darkest moment in history and most especially one of the darkest moments in the history of democratic nations is forever walled off from discussion because of the extreme nature of its behavior. Fascism is the dark shadow of right wing politics in democracies just as Communism is the dark shadow of the left. It is unbalancing to the public dialogue that we are only allowed to talk about one of the two without a large section of the public putting their hands over their ears and shouting, "La la la! I can't hear you!"
The better choice is futures options. For a few thousand dollars you can buy an option whose value will be 1000 times (oil price - $100). If oil got to $200 your few thousand dollars would turn into $100,000. And you don't get wiped out by any fluctuations along the way; you pay up front, then sit tight and wait to get lucky. The down side is that you lose your entire investment if oil is less than $100 at the end, but it was only a few thousand dollars, which you should be able to afford if you're thinking about this.
Woah, woah, woah! Slow down there. Let me explain commodity futures a little better before you go thinking that it's a low risk investment with a high pay-off.
When you buy an option, you are entering a contract with another person to buy a large amount of a commodity at a certain price. The brokerage fee is what costs a fractional chunk of change. Let's say you buy an option to buy a minimal contract for an offset on 5000 bushels of corn for $2.50 per bushel. A contract like this would cost around The contract has a time limit at the end of which you must make the trade.
If corn goes up to $2.70 per bushel, you just made $1000. If corn goes down to $2.30 per bushel, you just lost $1000. People who sell commodity contracts are making a bet that the value will go down while people who buy them are hoping that it will go up. Futures are extremely dangerous because they're one of the few types of investments where you can lose more money than you put in -- far more money than you put in. This is not the kind of investment that small-time amateurs should even think about, and many lose their shirts trying to gamble with the exchange instead of buying and selling wisely.
I've had good success with the roll on and pump spray deodorants that are basically nothing but the same salt with water, but I never could get the rock itself to work well. Maybe I was using it wrong; I had high hopes since it was cheaper, but it didn't pan out.
I just like poking fun at vegans for absolutely no good reason.
Nice try, that wont work either, most food cannot be grown or survive without the very extensive use of, you guessed it, petroleum based pesticides.
Really? Not where I shop. This is a large part of why the organic food movement talks about sustainable practices as part of its rhetoric. Sure, I pay about 20-30% more for my food, but it's still much cheaper than eating out, and I get the peace of mind of reducing my pesticide exposure other unnatural things in my food like trans fats and high fructose corn syrup.
I down with that, but we need to also stop artificially propping up the price of cane sugar too, and it'll all even out. As a bonus we'll stop using high-fructose corn syrup in our food and drink and probably have better health as a result.
Anyway, if we ever find a way to make ethanol from cellulose, it won't matter how much money the government gives to Big Corn for ethanol or sweetener purposes since converting cellulose into sugar is the first step. A large chunk of the demand for corn will simply vanish, and subsidies will become economically unviable.
If you actually made sustainable biodiesel from algae, you'd have to grow them on carbon from the atmosphere. This means leaving the ponds open, evaporative losses, and considerable water use.
I take it you've never owned an aquarium. We could bubble air into the pipes and extract it at the other end while conserving most of humidity to feed back into the system.
No, the question is funny. The cycling question was a joke because it took the ridiculous argument seriously, and the tires question was a joke because it took the joke cycling question seriously.
Some people just have no appreciation for dry humor.
"Electric shaver?! Ha! What are you, a chick? You're not hardcore unless you shave with a rock."
...ehh, not so much.
Oddly enough though, people who use rocks for deodorant
You're not alone. I did the EverQuest thing for about 4-6 months back in 2000 and then gave it up. MMOGs are like a second job. To get anywhere you have to find groups. That means building relationships with other players and a reputation in addition to getting equipment to make you competitive with other potential players.
The main problem is that if you don't keep up levelling at the same pace as your friends, you fall behind and have to start all over on building up relationships and reputation with a new wave of players, hoping that they play at your pace. Since most people that I met in EQ played a lot, I fell behind several times. Eventually, I gave up on the game when classwork started to pile up.
I don't even have time to play all the offline RPGs I have, so MMOGs aren't very attractive to me. Plus, there's a whole lot of irritating people out there that I'd just rather not deal with (much like FPS & RTS games).
You used the word "ideally" to start off your argument. That means, "in anywhere but real life". Because we do not live in an idyllic world, ideals are worth nothing unless they are practical.
I used ideally to contrast elected officials versus a totalitarian goverment, but since you've just dissed the concept of representative democracy being given any authority, I'm curious to know what system you would prefer.
Let me explain. There is an ideal that everyone should be nice to one another. But this is an ideal. Real life is not like this.
This is exactly why neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism work. Socialism only works if the people will still work to maximum efficiency when the government provides everything, and that the government will be filled with people only working for society's benefit instead of themselves. Capitalism only works when people live by the golden rule and do not leverage superior economic strength to hurt other for maximum self gain like the economic equivalent of petty warlords.
Communists make all private and club goods into common and public goods and ignore the reality of the free rider problem. Liberatarians pretend that common and public goods don't exist and ignore the reality of the free rider problem. Only moderates see the problem for what it is.
Now, you have a problem. How do we efficiently distribute goods and services to maximize the happiness of everyone? That is, we want everyone to be as happy as possible, and leave no one unhappy. This is the real-world problem.
Much like every other real world problem, there is no "one size fits all" solution that works for every situation.
The capitalist solution is, "Within a set of parameters (law & morality), you secure your own happiness." This has proven by experience and history to be a far better system than anything where you have smart people make decisions for others. Even though Aunt May is below average intelligence, even though she hasn't been to school but for three days in her life, and even though she is misinformed on a number of subjects, if she is able to make her own decisions, she will be happier. Experience shows us this.
The problem here is what happens when your happiness is in direct conflict with someone else's happiness, and only law (not morality) can be relied on to prevail. You just admitted that we don't live in an ideal world where everyone is nice to each other, but you positted a system that requires that people be nice to each other to avoid causing suffering.
If the rule of the land is to only look after yourself, then the rule of the land is that it is permissable to screw over others to get what you want. For example, what happens if Aunt May goes to a car dealer? Without lemon laws and limitations on contract law, the car she buys may be a piece of junk thanks to her relative lack of information about the good compared to the dealer. It is the dealer's imperative to sell low cost goods for as high as possible and that may include selling junky cars.
But wait! The usual objection is that the market will provide an ethical dealer because there is a demand for it. However, it's not really that hard to find markets in reality where all the players have historically seemed do their best to screw the customers wherever possible -- American cell phone providers on price plans, auto manufacturers on defects, oil companies on gas prices, etc. In many cases, rent-seeking behavior leads to corrupt business practices across the board because "that's just standard practice."
The major problem with the principle of putting the self first is the prisoners' dilemma. There are a number of real world situations where everyone would be better off if they cooperated towards a goal instead of doing what seems best for just them. The environment is a classic example. Lake Victoria in Africa is bordered by three countries. If each country tries to use the lake for their own benefit, t
You have made a classic mistake, claiming that wealth is measured in dollars.
You say this, but then you go to use a cooked example based on dollars to try to prove your point. Given what you do in the second example is in contrast with the first example, the real message of your examples is that people who do nothing don't create value and people who work do. Big revelation there.
I cannot pinpoint the effects of another's poverty on my own situation. In fact, what you are and what you do do not affect me (unless you do something amoral or illegal.) I cannot pinpoint how my actions in creating wealth negatively affected anyone.
Aye, there's the rub.
People in poverty who cannot get by may be forced to do something amoral or illegal for survival. People in poverty who can barely get by but aren't properly education and don't have healthcare are less efficient workers and raise children that contribute less efficiently to the economy that supports you. Envy of people's "betters" and malaise lead to violent crime, drug use, social instability, and revolution.
A problem with pure capitalism is that it sets up a dynamic where one of the goals of all investors is to get as much work out of workers for as little pay as possible. This does not create a just and free society if class mobility becomes impossible and if workers cannot afford the downtime to switch jobs if their current job is unbearable. This is why we have minimum wage laws and laws about overtime. The alternative was that people were worked nearly to death (and to death before better safety regulations) for a pittance that was just enough to live a much shortened life on. We've seen what unfettered capitalism does to a society; it was the so-called "Gilded Age."
(Now before you go screaming "Communism!" I'd live to point out that I have almost as dim view of Marxism as I do of Social Darwinism, but I'll get to that in my response to your other post.)
In fact, when I engage in free trade, I notice that both parties are getting more than what they put in (otherwise, I or the other party wouldn't have done it.)
Immediately after I point a gun at you and say, "Your money or your life," we are now in a situation where the trade benefits both parties. However, many free market fundamentalists refuse to acknowledge that life frequently puts you in situations where you must make less that maximally beneficial trades by saying that you wouldn't have made the trade if it didn't benefit you.
Take a utility monopoly. A utility monopoly combines two very dangerous things -- they hold a good needed for life, and they hold exclusive access to that good. If such a company decides to charge 20% over their total costs (including investment in infrastructure improvement, R&D, marketing, etc.), then the customer is forced to pay because they have no alternative including going without. In this case, both parties "benefit" from the trade, but market efficiency is not obtained. If a competitor tries to sprout up, the established monopoly can just refuse them access to their pipes, grid, etc. making them have to invest huge amounts of money in parallel infrastructure that they cannot afford.
There are all sort of other less forceful domains in which a trade benefits both parties, but does not benefit the customer maximally. Markets where access to information is asymmetrical is one (used cars, investments, real estate, etc.). Goods that are unsafe but provide utility (the Pinto, asbestos insulation, etc.) are another.
The idea that just because a trade happened that the customer should always be happy is ridiculous.
But now it's more on the side of getting the output from continuous things, like top, watch and more specifically from comand line encoders.
Ouch. That's actually a little more advanced than what I've done and would really depend on your ability to interpret terminal-type specific special characters. I'd actually be interested to know how you do this in Perl too. I'm guessing that there's a CPAN module for this sort of thing?
I'll have to give this one some thought. Unfortunately, I don't have access to Python at work, and the python.org website seems to be timing out for me, so I'll have to think about this at home.
I have found python to be very weak and under-documented in the department of dealing with linux command line utilities.
Out of curiosity, what problems have you run into? I'd be glad to give some pointers since I've done a decent amount of work with Python in places where shell scripts would normally be used.