Someone else was beaten or killed in the name of religion! *gasp* What's the total up to now? A few billion?
Being that religion has been the social glue to bind humanity's tribal attitudes together for, oh only ten of thousands of years against the last two-three centuries of secularlist thought, methinks you give religion too much of a bad rap.
Atheist viewpoints are not inherently better. Look how many people have been killed in a few years by fascists in worship of the state and racial purity or communists in the rise of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie or in economic "growth" initiatives.
People are people and will attempt to hurt people who are different from them regardless of what supposed values make their kind of people better. Religion gets a bad rap because it's been the most abused concept in history, but making religion go away won't fix that human tendency either. It is not religion's sole provence (to paraphrase Voltaire) to make one believe in absurdities and then commit atrocities.
That to me seems like the most ridiculous state, to be a dogmatic atheist or militant atheist. That's like saying, "I'm a die-hard believer in absolutely nothing!" Or, "I'm going to die for my belief in no greater purpose!"
As a Christian, I'll have to disagree that it's any more ridiculous than any other form dogma. A dogmatic athiest can have passionate beliefs and like any other human looks to any reason they can to justify why their beliefs are superior to those of others. The typical dogmatic athiest believes that people who question their beliefs are irrational (and inherently intellectually inferior) because of their belief in God the same way that many of dogmatic believer in religion treats them as morally inferior and close-minded for not believing in God.
It's just human nature to stroke one's own ego and to find a group to identify with so strongly that one is compelled to attack outsiders to it. It's a primative instinct to do so.
Unfortunately, the fundamentalist christians usually quote the parts of the Old Testament that involve "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
Oddly they miss out on the fact that "An Eye for an Eye" is meant as an alternative to unlimited retaliation not as an alternative to forgiveness. It's a like a speed limit. It's supposed to be a maximum, but everyone treats it like a minimum.
Enough people have jumped all over you (without reading all the other posts doing so) about the fact that 100 yen == 83 cents, but I think the biggest math gaffe is in the title of the article.
3 billion dollars?
THAT DOES NOT COMPUTE.
27 billion yen == 22.4 billion cents == 224 million dollars
...Just like the linked CNN article says. In truth, though, they'll lose much less since most of the shares only lost 9% of their value instead of almost 100%.
So there was no mandate for this "democratic" government to do it. Fascinating.
Straw man arguments are a sign of a lack of intellectual integrity and respect for the point of view of person you are debating with. I will not debate with people who cannot do so in a civil manner.
Here's the problem: I object, you don't. Rather than you and those who agree with you shouldering the full costs of your opinion, you use the coercion of government to reduce your burden by spreading it out upon others.
Here's my problem with the philosophy that all things bought with tax money are bought with blood money and are inherently evil and should be shunned: there's no better way to accomplish some tasks. Like democracy, to paraphrase Churchill, it's the worst system except for all those other systems that have been tried.
Have you ever heard of the concept of "public goods" and "common goods?" Most people of the minarchist bent seem to believe that the whole world consists of nothing but "private goods" and "club goods" that can be easily be enjoyed only by those who pay the costs for it, but this isn't the case.
The national defense is the classic example of a public good. Once produced every user gets it equally, and you can't prevent someone from using it. In other words, if I didn't feel that the national defense was worth my money, I could go hide in Montana and not pay my taxes, but our Army & Navy would still defend me from harm just as much as any other American. They don't really have a way of not doing so.
In your proposed system of paying only for what you like, the national defense would be utterly destroyed. Since everyone would realize that they (individually) roughly the same benefit from the national defense whether they pay or not, the majority of Americans would because of cheapness a desire to spend the money on "bread and circuses" instead. This is known as the "free rider problem" and it leads to market failure, another odd thing (like consumer indifference) that the Austrian school pretends doesn't exist.
We couldn't afford a nuclear deterrent against nations that didn't believe as we did. We couldn't afford the world's strongest army and navy. We wouldn't be safe from large threats to the nation. (I do sincerely hope that you don't believe that unregulated private militias answerable only to investors could do the job or should be trusted with heavy ordinance.)
Similarly, you have common goods like the the water in a lake or the grass in a public commons where one person's consumption does affect other consumers' ability to enjoy the good and exclusion from consumption is difficult or impossible to enforce. Lake Victoria in Africa is a fine example of a common good. It's bordered by Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. It feeds a great number of farms surrounding the lake, but there is no real control over who pulls how much water nor what people dump into it. As a result, the lake is shrinking, fish stocks are being depleted, and it's getting more and more polluted with large regions of water now having months without oxygen due to large algal blooms. What free market solution would allow the lake to continue being used for generation and would be superior to a government solution? Does the Austrian school even consider the maintenance of resources for future generations a valid goal or does the Mises Institute believe as Milton Friedman that, "When actions of individuals have effects on other individuals for which it is not feasible to charge or recompense them."
Free markets hurt people too, even more than government in certain situation mostly thanks to that sort of attitude. Coercion also happens in free markets. When one man owns all of a vital thing like the community's power supply, he can dictate whatever terms he desires so long as he does not provoke violent revolution. When a seller has more information about the quality of a good than a buyer, he can deceive the buyer and get away with it without strong
In the South, it's often cheaper to just switch to 100% cellphone.
You don't have that option if you're a BitTorrent user where I live. Here are the sum and total of my alternatives to BellSouth DSL:
Cox or ComCast cable -- Welcome to the world of bandwidth caps and termination for 24/7 usage! Earthlink DSL -- You still have to pay for phone service (at those same wonderful "competitive" rate, only now your DSL is $10-15 more expensive because BellSouth users get a discount. Satellite -- This is NOT an option for people who actually share their torrents. Dial-up -- This is NOT an option for people who do anything with torrents.
I'm looking right now into the costs of a UMTS cellular modem but it's looking to be too much. If Cingular doesn't do bandwidth capping, it might be the only broadband alternative for BitTorrent users (though a bit more expensive for unlimited access). Of course, I'm just waiting for Cingular to turn evil since it's the joint venture of BellSouth and SBC, the two biggest jackasses among the Baby Bells right now.
If you know something about the Austrian Economic principles, you will be aware that your premise of "perfect competition" is what is impossible. That which depends on an impossible premise is therefore false.
I find the Austrian school of economics fascinating. The emphasis on a subjective rather than objective understanding of the motivations of economic agents(i.e. people) as well as a disbelief in the perfectly rational, informed actor brings some rather interesting and keen insights. However, it also brings some rather odd assertions like the one you just made.
If perfectly competitive markets don't exist, then explain the markets for soybeans and for electricity. Ignoring the different markets of organic vs. non-organic soybeans, customers generally see no differentiation between the goods. Similarly, since it all comes over the same lines, customers see no differentiation between electricity providers. As such, consumer indifference comes into play, and only supply, demand, and price rule the day.
Of course, I also take exception to the free market fundamentalism and general opposition to government of any sort of the Mises Institute on philosophical grounds. I don't trust people to behave well in anarchic situations where the strong are allowed to abuse leverage against the weak. I've seen too many real life examples of people abusing each other when rule of law is weak. That's what a free market IS in a purely economic vein.
Now, turning to space...
I agree that things certainly would not be the same as now, but why must I allow that the present infrastructure is optimal? Why must I allow that the present infrastructure is even preferable to what otherwise might have been built?
I never said that it was optimal, though I will say that it could not have achieved optimal state without a kick-start. In the days of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, what private industries had the resources to go into orbit (about $2-3 billion dollars in today's dollars)? Of that handful of industries, which ones had an interest in putting things in orbit? If those industries existed and where willing to put forth the effort and cash, why didn't the US government supplement them with cash rather than do it themselves?
The truth is that no one existed who was willing to spend the capital to go into space. Without government funding of the aerospace industry, no one would've put forth the money for at least another decade. Imagine if current satellite communications was set back 10 years. Imagine if all the technology invented as a side benefit of manned research in space hadn't been invented. (Who can afford to put a laboratory in space to do fundamental, non-applied research?)
Speaking industries with huge start-up costs...
Nuclear power plants are an excellent counter-example. Something hideously expensive to build, only paying off over decades, yet the only reason they are not being built is because of the government regulatory burden that makes it impossible.
Do you mean the huge government regulatory burden that insists that they put up the costs for cleaning up the plants if they malfunction and decommissioning the plants when they become obsolete? What is your suggestion for a market solution to the nuclear waste disposal problem that doesn't involve nuclear power plant owners just throwing their hands up and walking away from a plant that fails? Who deals with the clean up? Shouldn't the person responsible for the mess clean it up, or is that an unfair regulatory burden?... and for something that would have been accomplished anyway.
*cough* This is a bald assertion with neither logical or factual evidence to back it up.
Tell me again how much I benefit. Tell my granddaughter who will be paying for your conveniences.
They're her conveniences too. It's not like I'm using up all the technological progress that government funding was spent on. You
A private-sector monopoly is a very fragile thing, as Microsoft is discovering. They are temporary abberations, unlike government.
Microsoft is not a utility company. Worse, for Microsoft, everything that Microsoft sells usually gets replaced within ten years. This isn't the case for a water or sewage provider. In fact, the city of Atlanta is right now looking at a hefty bill to start replacing sewage lines that are over a century old. Some monopolies are better at trapping their customers than others.
Operating systems are still a natural monopoly in spite of not being a market dominated by capital investment costs. The greatest efficiency in the market comes when everyone has a common platform to develop on and to use. In computers, this is generally referred to as the network effect. Natural monopolies are not inherently a bad thing -- it's the human nature to abuse a position of power that makes them dangerous.
Once dominant in a market that tends towards natural monopoly, a company has to spend significantly less effort on providing service than its competitors. Other market factors will still tilt things in their favor. A water utility can just extend their own lines to new customers whereas a competitor must start from scratch to reach new people if the incumbent isn't forced to share. Microsoft can leave Internet Explorer unupdated and buggy for years at a time and Mozilla can only get minimal market penetration despite providing a better product for free. (IE's big advantage is that it's already on your system when you get it.)
If I, as a customer, are dissatisfied, I will pay more to some other provider just to spite the monopoly.
The funny thing is that most people won't. Only those with strong feelings attached to the matter will. That's the very principle of how free markets encourage competition. If people were willing to pay more for the same amount or less, then supply and demand curves wouldn't work. I realize that the Austrian School of economics doesn't put too much stock into that sort of analysis, but it works for any perfectly competive markets (not that computer software is a perfect competition).
Also, for as much as you decry government monopolies and their long-term effects on the private sector, you have to realize that we wouldn't have the infrastructure to support industry that we have today without them. There are some industries that will never be established until someone puts forth the capital to create the market, and there are some industries that are far too risky and too expensive to start up. We wouldn't have the power grid, the phone grid, the roads, or the water lines that we have today without massive outlays of public capital investment. We wouldn't have satellites today without massive government investment in launch capacity.
Not really. He's talking about utility companies. Utility companies are the perfect example of an industry that if left to the free market will inevitably contract into a monopoly. The cost of entry into becoming a utility company is enormous, and it's very hard to convert customers from other businesses. In a deregulated water utility market, nothing forces the incumbent to share water pipes with competitors. If I want to switch, then the new company has to build lines to my house (hence the five pipes to a house comment). The cost of this (which I must bear) is too large to the smaller company to be competitive. A monopoly that forms because of natural barriers to competition is called a natural monopoly. The concept is covered well in any introductory economics class.
Without regulation, competition can't survive in a utility market. This is why we have to have the FCC make phone and cable companies share their networks. Otherwise, companies like Earthlink can't offer competitive prices (or service at all in some areas). Sure technology might come along that gives new competition to a service (like cell phones) but nobody's replacing good old pipes for getting people water & gas anytime soon.
Regulation is necessary for some markets to preserve competition. This is his argument. The free market doesn't work for utilities because of the high barriers to competition and the unique hold utility companies hold over their customers' lives.
Hell, you'd probably find people calling George Will liberal because he doesn't like the president, and he's quite possibly the most conservative man on the planet.
Oh, sure. There are two reasons for this. The first is that there are legitimate issues on which some conservatives define themselves as conservatives whether most other people would consider them conservative at all. Some examples are, fiscal discipline against running up debts, border controls against immigration, protectionist trade policies, support for a national prescription drug benefit, other forms of corporate welfare, racial diverisity in his cabinet, etc. It all depends on what each person think a "true conservative" philosophy is. One not uncommon split would be over his links to the neocons. Neoconservativism was a perjorative invented in the time of the doves & hawks split in the Democratic Party during Vietnam to insult liberal hawks would had previously dominated party policy. Neocons didn't actually become conservative until the Reagan years. Some traditional conservatives still think of the neocons as "liberals."
The second reason is that a lot of conservatives define a liberal as anyone who disagrees with them. If they come to disagree with the President, it's cause he's too "liberal" for them. I remember a primary election in my state where two Republicans ran largely on platforms that the each other was a liberal even though both were arch-conservatives.
FYI, the way most of these attacks work is by utter and complete surprise. It's kind of a thuggish candid camera. By the time you recover from the hit and recognize what's going on, you've just got a bunch of stupid kids laughing at and taunting you. If you then drew your gun and shot, you'd be convicted of first- or second-degree murder in practically any jurisdiction -- yes, even Florida and Texas.
Being armed does nothing to prevent this sort of nonsense unless you want to send a powerful message at the expense of your freedom and some stupid kid's life.
What's the difference between members of government expressing their religion through law and a state-sponsored religion?
Mostly in the sectarian nonsense. The early history of the US was filled with Christians discriminating agasint Christians. State sponsored religion meant that the restrictions came down to very ticky and irrelevant matters such was what could be said in prayers and how music should be handled. It also led to sensless hate and division. The First Amendment puts freedom of religion into the Constitution to avoid a regression to that sort of behavior (as well as to ease inter-state tensions since many states were Catholic states, Puritan states, etc.)
I'm going to go off on a little tangent for a bit before returning to the difference between state-sponsored religion and democracy that follow religious values.
Most religions share the same values -- don't do to other people what you wouldn't want done to you, help out the less fortunate, and avoid selfish behavior. Most of these agree on certain specific ways of expressing these core values -- don't sleep around, don't kill or hurt people, don't steal, don't go around trying to offend people, do give to charity, do spend time with your family, do spend time helping other members of the community.
Religion also often have a bad side due to their function as a binder of communities. Most religions treat those who don't follow their precepts as flawed people to encourage shame/guilt reinforcement of the morals they espouse. Most religions have some sort of code of behavior, dress, or food preparation that help distinguish believers from non-believers. Many religions actually proscribe punishments to be meted out against those who break their codes of behavior -- Judaism and Islam are well noted for this. Some religions promote certain unequal hierarchies such as a caste system or wives being always subservient to their husbands.
The real problem with religions (especially state-sponsored religions) is their abuse by people following mankind's tribal instincts. We have evolved with powerful mechanisms to support the livelihood of our communities. We naturally group people into either "us" or "them." We then ignore flaws to bind "us" together and accentuate flaws to encourage competition with "them." The power-hungry have always used religion as an excuse to feed atrocities that the religions themselves abhor. "We" are culturally & morally superior than "they" are. "We" should bring our englightened ways to "them." "They" are Evil and should be crushed.
This is in no way limited to religious entities. Marxism used hatred of the poor and sneering at religion as a tool. In the Spanish-American War, our president promised that we'd spread the values of Christendom while our current president promises that we'll spread the values of Democracy. It's all still about one group telling another how to live because they believe that their way is best. We proudly beat our chests about the good things about our way of life and obsess over the bad things about their way of life. Whether we're right or not is irrelevant; we're still following instinctual behaviors.
Even though, this tribal attitude isn't limited to religiously-linked communities, state-sponsored religion has always resulted in persecution at home and conquering abroad because it very strongly enforces "us" vs. "them" divides. However, the modern system of democratically voting in shared beliefs (while protecting against restriction of religion) has been far more successful at promoting the community-building nature of religion over the abuse of it by encouraging tolerance and consensus. If the majority feel that something is bad, then the laws will reflect that and will preserve community harmony which is the purpose of Law. If the majority overrides and seriously disaffects a minority, then unrest will arrise, and the Law will eventually be corrected to reflect what will restore harmony. This is the democratic process.
Your bit about commercials reminded me of another time when I was made ill by watching TV I didn't have control over. Last year, I was at a pizza place, and I was watching the TV 'cause I was there alone. There's this show I'd heard of before but never seen on the TV called "Fear Factor." Those of you with cable probably have an idea of where this is going. I didn't.
They started with an innocuous fear of heights based contest that was dumb but mildly amusing. Then, they turn to the next event. The next event takes place in a slaughterhouse. (You can just skip to the next paragraph right now if you're squeamish. I recommend it.) The contestants must lay in a tub and have cattle intestines dumped on them. They must then bite into the raw intestines, suck out the greenish undigested food/poop/slime and spit it into a glass until it gets to a line and then drink it all down.
I don't really eat at that place anymore. The food was good, but.... there was something wrong with the... ambiance. To be honest, I really wish that I'd filed an FCC complaint about the show, but it's too late now. I've got a strong stomach and all, but that was just freaking nasty. I still get creeped out and lose my appetite whenver I think about that show.
Right now there's a TON of crap on TV, and I don't mean 'offensive' I just mean crap (every reality show ever created comes to mind). And if a la carte means that some of the crap will go away for lack of interest, that's fine by me.
I think you need to get out there and find out what the mainstream actually likes instead of projecting what you like onto them. Yes, reality television is utter and complete crap, but it's immensely popular crap. You see while geeks obsess over interesting objects and ideas, most people out there obsess over people and relationships. Reality TV is all about that -- alliances, double-crossings, pettiness, ego, short-lived romance, and broken hearts. Extroverts eat it up. It's the car accident of human relationships. It engages that same parts of the brain that make people rubberneck as they drive by. I've even gotten caught up a time or two before slapping myself and asking, "Why am I watching a bunch of attention-starved narcissists compete to see who's the biggest, most manipulative choad?"
No, reality TV won't be hurt in the slightest by a la carte programming. It's the fine art, esoteric documentaries, and fantastic fiction that will be hurt. If you already think that the History channel is the War Channel and that the Discovery channel is the Sharks & Aliens channel, prepare for it all to get worse as informational and cultural stations fight to survive by pandering as much as possible. The Sundance Channel? Gone! BBC America? Gone! G4-TechTV? Gone! (Well, good riddance anyway...) ADV's Anime channel? Gone! Sci-Fi channel? Well, it better keep churning out Battlestar Galactica like hits instead of recycling crap the other networks dumped.
TV will condense itself down to a handful of channels -- network television (with all its reality TV), news channels, sports channels, the major movie channels, ethnic channels, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, Food Network, and the Weather Channel. Pretty much anything else is doomed to struggle unless they're free (like C-SPAN or probably the shopping networks). New channels will have to face shelling out tons of money to get cable/sat providers to show them as freebies for a few months to try to build up enough of a potential subscriber base to survive. This will kill anything fringe -- especially when the market model comes down that refuses to let channels be sold for less than a dollar.
Malloc a huge chunk of memory. Custom cut one or more items out of the huge chunk, manually managing byte alignment of the objects to ensure portability between different chipset architectures. This is what most people refer to as a "custom allocator" (possibly also a pool or slab allocator) and its performance is vastly higher than an equal number of new's in a GC language.
What about that scheme can't be done in a GC language when needed in critical sections and abandoned when not? Sure it's ugly to do in those languages, but so's writing your own GC in a non-GC language (e.g. SmartPointers).
Incidentally, this is the sort of thing that your OS should be doing for you. No one pratically needs this level of control unless they're flying without a well-featured OS (i.e. working in an embedded context). People pulling this sort of nonsense in a normal application are just setting themselves up for a fall.
Just don't complain when you're shopping around for a product and find one that is 5x the speed of its GD'd competitors. Then you the customer are forced to pay the price for programmer laziness and/or convenience.
Just don't complain when you're shopping around for a product and find one that has 5x the number of crashes and exploits of its GD'd competitors. Then you the customer are forced to pay the price for programmer obession with trying to optimize non-critical sections.
If Opera works anything like Safari in that respect, I really, really hate that feature. The most frequent thing that I use multiple tabs for is to open multiple links from a single page (e.g. a news site or my list of webcomics) and then read each page, closing them as I go.
When your close widget is on each tab, and your tabs change in size, this means that you can't just leave your mouse in one place and hit the button over and over as you go through the opened pages. Instead, you have to look over and pay attention to the tabs once you get down to the number where they start widening. That drives me nuts.
Also, Mozilla used to return to the previous tab when you closed a tab back sometime in the pre-1.0 days. This led to the annoying practice of having to start opening links at the bottom of a page if you wanted to read them from the top-down. On the other hand, I became so used reading opened pages in reverse order that I just start on the last tab and close off from there. If I recall correctly, you can set the order of tab closing in about:config, but I could be wrong (am I'm forced to use IE at work, so I can't confirm).
It's just two syllables... the first, "go", is pronounced like the "go" in gordon, not like the English word "go". The second, "to", is not like the English word "to", it is pronounced like the "to" in "tornado". Try saying "gohr-tohr". *
* Note: Pronunciation instruction may only apply if you live in the city of Boston. People living in other localities may need to contact the appropriate authorities for further instruction.
It would be pretty cool if Linux worked on a 360 but please remind me again why people are trying to make it so? Aren't there enough projects crying out for some decent developer input already? Maybe I am just getting old and grumpy but this seems like a terrible waste of time that could be used to great benefit.
I consider this the logical equivalent of the question, "Couldn't they be working on a cure for cancer instead?" I cannot abide this sort of arrogant stupidity.
1) All programmers/scientists/etc. are not equivalent. Life is not some computer strategy game. You can't just wave your mouse around, pull a person off one project, put them on another, and expect the same level of productivity. Maybe the Xbox 360 project will attract people with good hardware hacking skills that aren't really applicable on anything you care about.
2) What interests you may or may not interest people of technical aptitude. Sure, a cure for cancer would be really great, but not everyone is interested in whatever field of research will finally result in it. Some people might be more interested in entomology than oncology, and some people might be more interested in getting a cheap, powerful Linux home entertainment computer than whatever makes you happy. Your desires are not everyone else's desires.
3) What doesn't interest you isn't necessarily useless. An Xbox is a very powerful multi-processor system perfect for hooking up to a home entertainment system and well suited for light distributed processing tasks. It's also fantastically cheap for what it's capable of. There are numerous potential uses for it.
4) Not everything has to be useful to be worth doing. Surprise, surprise -- the people working on this might be doing it for fun! Even if it didn't have a lot of utility, that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing if it brings someone enjoyment to do it.
In short, stuff it. You're not the dictator of the world, so quit discouraging people from pursuing interests that you don't share.
Total rubbish from an economic simpleton. Poverty kills. The more money that is deflected towards unobtainable social-engineering goals or speculative global-warming alleviation schemes, the less is spent on food aid and pharmaceutical research and education.
So, causing extinctions that deprive us of a rich source of pharmaceutical research and bringing drought to Africa mean we spend less on food aid and pharmaceutical research? Also, I do believe that the political factions (world-wide, not just in the US) that oppose global warming alleviation are those parties most interesed in ending food aid, healthcare, and education spending. The rest of your post is just blanket assertions without any concrete reasoning behind why they might be true.
Spending on global warming alleviation will not cause poverty. It will create jobs and lead to more efficient use of resources as it has in Japan, one of the world's most resource stingy economic powerhouses (by necessity). Spending on biofuels will bring money out of the hands of oil rich areas (like the Middle East and Russia) and put it in the hands of agriculturally rich areas (like the USA and South America). Spending on solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal power, will put money into power generation that needs no external fuels which I believe will inevitably become cheaper than fuel-consuming methods. Raising fuel efficiency standards on cars will eventually bring down the TCO for cars, elevating the poor in the long-term as well as reducing the harmful emissions that put a burden on the health of city dwellers (and thus on the taxpayer's wallets). Encouraging and facilitating mass transit (such as via PRT systems) may eventually eliminate the need for cars for much of the nation's poor and lead to more efficient use of resources with accompanying drops in price for energy due to decreased demand. Carbon sequestration technologies also assist in making coal a much cleaner technology that spews less mercury and radioactives than it currently does. If fusion technology finally pans out, we will be capable of feats relying on energy densities much greater than we have previously imagined. Carbon-neutral energy generation gives us a leg up on working in places where the atmosphere is at a premium such as in space or deep under the ocean.
The net benefit of attention on global warming and pollution is that our economic system may in fact become more efficient by no longer ignoring the economic effects of externalities. By no longer looking at each industry as an unconnected system whose waste outputs are not considered to have any effect on anything else, we may be able to optimize the world economy by preventing harm by one industry to another, allowing all industries to operate at a greater efficiency than they could in pretending to be completely independent agents. This is something to be embraced as much as the computerized logistics revolution of the last half of the 20th century which has increased global economic efficiency by slashing waste in supply chains.
The point of guilty until proven innocent is to default to the least injurious assumption. In crime, that means that we default to the one that doesn't ruin a man's life and that keeps the investigation of a crime going. In global warming, we should default to avoiding disaster.
Remember, if global warming people are right and we don't listen to them, the worst that can happen is a disaster that will take centuries to reverse and will lead to widespread famine from desertification in Africa and Central Asia and the loss of temperate topsoils, the irrecoverable loss of the world's biodiversity and the medicines that could come from it, the freezing of Europe due to the loss of the North Atlantic current, the flooding of most of the world's current shorelines, increased hurricanes due to longer seasonal warming of waters, increased spread of malaria due to greater tropical insect populations, vicious resource wars that will tear apart the Middle East and fray relations between all neighbors who share rivers & other water resources, diminished international trade, and diminished political capital for the USA -- the nation that consistently blocked action against fixing the problem.
If the global warming people are wrong and we listen to them, then the worst that happens is we have poured a bunch of money into more efficient use of resources & alternative energy (technologies needed for space colonization anyway) instead of all the products we could've had with our previous expenditure of energy.
Of course, a snarky soundbite just sounds so much better than actual reason.
He has been one of the strongest and biggest name Mac proponents in the industry for the last 15 years. He also has incredible amounts of disdain for Microsoft.
Are you talking about the same John "Apple is Dying" Dvorak who has been predicting the death of Apple since the 90s at the very least? Does this or this really sound like the words of a Mac lover ? No one who is even vaguely familiar with the name Dvorak in the Mac community is of the opinion that the guy has had any affection for Apple for over a decade.
Now it is fair to say that he's fallen out of love with Microsoft since the heady romantic days of Windows 95, but a Mac proponent for the past 15 years? Pfft...
If that's the video I'm thinking of -- I can't view it here at work -- then you have to feel so sorry for the guy. He had such bad stage fright that he destroyed a priceless historical artifact that he spent his part of his life caring for. You know that he's never getting up in front of a crowd again unless he's reclining in a casket.
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Let's call them what they are: recent creationists.
FYI, the most commonly accepted term is Young Earth Creationists.
Someone else was beaten or killed in the name of religion! *gasp*
What's the total up to now? A few billion?
Being that religion has been the social glue to bind humanity's tribal attitudes together for, oh only ten of thousands of years against the last two-three centuries of secularlist thought, methinks you give religion too much of a bad rap.
Atheist viewpoints are not inherently better. Look how many people have been killed in a few years by fascists in worship of the state and racial purity or communists in the rise of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie or in economic "growth" initiatives.
People are people and will attempt to hurt people who are different from them regardless of what supposed values make their kind of people better. Religion gets a bad rap because it's been the most abused concept in history, but making religion go away won't fix that human tendency either. It is not religion's sole provence (to paraphrase Voltaire) to make one believe in absurdities and then commit atrocities.
That to me seems like the most ridiculous state, to be a dogmatic atheist or militant atheist. That's like saying, "I'm a die-hard believer in absolutely nothing!" Or, "I'm going to die for my belief in no greater purpose!"
As a Christian, I'll have to disagree that it's any more ridiculous than any other form dogma. A dogmatic athiest can have passionate beliefs and like any other human looks to any reason they can to justify why their beliefs are superior to those of others. The typical dogmatic athiest believes that people who question their beliefs are irrational (and inherently intellectually inferior) because of their belief in God the same way that many of dogmatic believer in religion treats them as morally inferior and close-minded for not believing in God.
It's just human nature to stroke one's own ego and to find a group to identify with so strongly that one is compelled to attack outsiders to it. It's a primative instinct to do so.
Unfortunately, the fundamentalist christians usually quote the parts of the Old Testament that involve "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
Oddly they miss out on the fact that "An Eye for an Eye" is meant as an alternative to unlimited retaliation not as an alternative to forgiveness. It's a like a speed limit. It's supposed to be a maximum, but everyone treats it like a minimum.
3 billion dollars? 27 billion yen == 22.4 billion cents == 224 million dollars
...Just like the linked CNN article says. In truth, though, they'll lose much less since most of the shares only lost 9% of their value instead of almost 100%.
So there was no mandate for this "democratic" government to do it. Fascinating.
Straw man arguments are a sign of a lack of intellectual integrity and respect for the point of view of person you are debating with. I will not debate with people who cannot do so in a civil manner.
Here's the problem: I object, you don't. Rather than you and those who agree with you shouldering the full costs of your opinion, you use the coercion of government to reduce your burden by spreading it out upon others.
Here's my problem with the philosophy that all things bought with tax money are bought with blood money and are inherently evil and should be shunned: there's no better way to accomplish some tasks. Like democracy, to paraphrase Churchill, it's the worst system except for all those other systems that have been tried.
Have you ever heard of the concept of "public goods" and "common goods?" Most people of the minarchist bent seem to believe that the whole world consists of nothing but "private goods" and "club goods" that can be easily be enjoyed only by those who pay the costs for it, but this isn't the case.
The national defense is the classic example of a public good. Once produced every user gets it equally, and you can't prevent someone from using it. In other words, if I didn't feel that the national defense was worth my money, I could go hide in Montana and not pay my taxes, but our Army & Navy would still defend me from harm just as much as any other American. They don't really have a way of not doing so.
In your proposed system of paying only for what you like, the national defense would be utterly destroyed. Since everyone would realize that they (individually) roughly the same benefit from the national defense whether they pay or not, the majority of Americans would because of cheapness a desire to spend the money on "bread and circuses" instead. This is known as the "free rider problem" and it leads to market failure, another odd thing (like consumer indifference) that the Austrian school pretends doesn't exist.
We couldn't afford a nuclear deterrent against nations that didn't believe as we did. We couldn't afford the world's strongest army and navy. We wouldn't be safe from large threats to the nation. (I do sincerely hope that you don't believe that unregulated private militias answerable only to investors could do the job or should be trusted with heavy ordinance.)
Similarly, you have common goods like the the water in a lake or the grass in a public commons where one person's consumption does affect other consumers' ability to enjoy the good and exclusion from consumption is difficult or impossible to enforce. Lake Victoria in Africa is a fine example of a common good. It's bordered by Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. It feeds a great number of farms surrounding the lake, but there is no real control over who pulls how much water nor what people dump into it. As a result, the lake is shrinking, fish stocks are being depleted, and it's getting more and more polluted with large regions of water now having months without oxygen due to large algal blooms. What free market solution would allow the lake to continue being used for generation and would be superior to a government solution? Does the Austrian school even consider the maintenance of resources for future generations a valid goal or does the Mises Institute believe as Milton Friedman that, "When actions of individuals have effects on other individuals for which it is not feasible to charge or recompense them."
Free markets hurt people too, even more than government in certain situation mostly thanks to that sort of attitude. Coercion also happens in free markets. When one man owns all of a vital thing like the community's power supply, he can dictate whatever terms he desires so long as he does not provoke violent revolution. When a seller has more information about the quality of a good than a buyer, he can deceive the buyer and get away with it without strong
In the South, it's often cheaper to just switch to 100% cellphone.
You don't have that option if you're a BitTorrent user where I live. Here are the sum and total of my alternatives to BellSouth DSL:
Cox or ComCast cable -- Welcome to the world of bandwidth caps and termination for 24/7 usage!
Earthlink DSL -- You still have to pay for phone service (at those same wonderful "competitive" rate, only now your DSL is $10-15 more expensive because BellSouth users get a discount.
Satellite -- This is NOT an option for people who actually share their torrents.
Dial-up -- This is NOT an option for people who do anything with torrents.
I'm looking right now into the costs of a UMTS cellular modem but it's looking to be too much. If Cingular doesn't do bandwidth capping, it might be the only broadband alternative for BitTorrent users (though a bit more expensive for unlimited access). Of course, I'm just waiting for Cingular to turn evil since it's the joint venture of BellSouth and SBC, the two biggest jackasses among the Baby Bells right now.
If you know something about the Austrian Economic principles, you will be aware that your premise of "perfect competition" is what is impossible. That which depends on an impossible premise is therefore false.
... and for something that would have been accomplished anyway.
I find the Austrian school of economics fascinating. The emphasis on a subjective rather than objective understanding of the motivations of economic agents(i.e. people) as well as a disbelief in the perfectly rational, informed actor brings some rather interesting and keen insights. However, it also brings some rather odd assertions like the one you just made.
If perfectly competitive markets don't exist, then explain the markets for soybeans and for electricity. Ignoring the different markets of organic vs. non-organic soybeans, customers generally see no differentiation between the goods. Similarly, since it all comes over the same lines, customers see no differentiation between electricity providers. As such, consumer indifference comes into play, and only supply, demand, and price rule the day.
Of course, I also take exception to the free market fundamentalism and general opposition to government of any sort of the Mises Institute on philosophical grounds. I don't trust people to behave well in anarchic situations where the strong are allowed to abuse leverage against the weak. I've seen too many real life examples of people abusing each other when rule of law is weak. That's what a free market IS in a purely economic vein.
Now, turning to space...
I agree that things certainly would not be the same as now, but why must I allow that the present infrastructure is optimal? Why must I allow that the present infrastructure is even preferable to what otherwise might have been built?
I never said that it was optimal, though I will say that it could not have achieved optimal state without a kick-start. In the days of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, what private industries had the resources to go into orbit (about $2-3 billion dollars in today's dollars)? Of that handful of industries, which ones had an interest in putting things in orbit? If those industries existed and where willing to put forth the effort and cash, why didn't the US government supplement them with cash rather than do it themselves?
The truth is that no one existed who was willing to spend the capital to go into space. Without government funding of the aerospace industry, no one would've put forth the money for at least another decade. Imagine if current satellite communications was set back 10 years. Imagine if all the technology invented as a side benefit of manned research in space hadn't been invented. (Who can afford to put a laboratory in space to do fundamental, non-applied research?)
Speaking industries with huge start-up costs...
Nuclear power plants are an excellent counter-example. Something hideously expensive to build, only paying off over decades, yet the only reason they are not being built is because of the government regulatory burden that makes it impossible.
Do you mean the huge government regulatory burden that insists that they put up the costs for cleaning up the plants if they malfunction and decommissioning the plants when they become obsolete? What is your suggestion for a market solution to the nuclear waste disposal problem that doesn't involve nuclear power plant owners just throwing their hands up and walking away from a plant that fails? Who deals with the clean up? Shouldn't the person responsible for the mess clean it up, or is that an unfair regulatory burden?
*cough*
This is a bald assertion with neither logical or factual evidence to back it up.
Tell me again how much I benefit. Tell my granddaughter who will be paying for your conveniences.
They're her conveniences too. It's not like I'm using up all the technological progress that government funding was spent on. You
A private-sector monopoly is a very fragile thing, as Microsoft is discovering. They are temporary abberations, unlike government.
Microsoft is not a utility company. Worse, for Microsoft, everything that Microsoft sells usually gets replaced within ten years. This isn't the case for a water or sewage provider. In fact, the city of Atlanta is right now looking at a hefty bill to start replacing sewage lines that are over a century old. Some monopolies are better at trapping their customers than others.
Operating systems are still a natural monopoly in spite of not being a market dominated by capital investment costs. The greatest efficiency in the market comes when everyone has a common platform to develop on and to use. In computers, this is generally referred to as the network effect. Natural monopolies are not inherently a bad thing -- it's the human nature to abuse a position of power that makes them dangerous.
Once dominant in a market that tends towards natural monopoly, a company has to spend significantly less effort on providing service than its competitors. Other market factors will still tilt things in their favor. A water utility can just extend their own lines to new customers whereas a competitor must start from scratch to reach new people if the incumbent isn't forced to share. Microsoft can leave Internet Explorer unupdated and buggy for years at a time and Mozilla can only get minimal market penetration despite providing a better product for free. (IE's big advantage is that it's already on your system when you get it.)
If I, as a customer, are dissatisfied, I will pay more to some other provider just to spite the monopoly.
The funny thing is that most people won't. Only those with strong feelings attached to the matter will. That's the very principle of how free markets encourage competition. If people were willing to pay more for the same amount or less, then supply and demand curves wouldn't work. I realize that the Austrian School of economics doesn't put too much stock into that sort of analysis, but it works for any perfectly competive markets (not that computer software is a perfect competition).
Also, for as much as you decry government monopolies and their long-term effects on the private sector, you have to realize that we wouldn't have the infrastructure to support industry that we have today without them. There are some industries that will never be established until someone puts forth the capital to create the market, and there are some industries that are far too risky and too expensive to start up. We wouldn't have the power grid, the phone grid, the roads, or the water lines that we have today without massive outlays of public capital investment. We wouldn't have satellites today without massive government investment in launch capacity.
You're making an argument for monopoly.
Not really. He's talking about utility companies. Utility companies are the perfect example of an industry that if left to the free market will inevitably contract into a monopoly. The cost of entry into becoming a utility company is enormous, and it's very hard to convert customers from other businesses. In a deregulated water utility market, nothing forces the incumbent to share water pipes with competitors. If I want to switch, then the new company has to build lines to my house (hence the five pipes to a house comment). The cost of this (which I must bear) is too large to the smaller company to be competitive. A monopoly that forms because of natural barriers to competition is called a natural monopoly. The concept is covered well in any introductory economics class.
Without regulation, competition can't survive in a utility market. This is why we have to have the FCC make phone and cable companies share their networks. Otherwise, companies like Earthlink can't offer competitive prices (or service at all in some areas). Sure technology might come along that gives new competition to a service (like cell phones) but nobody's replacing good old pipes for getting people water & gas anytime soon.
Regulation is necessary for some markets to preserve competition. This is his argument. The free market doesn't work for utilities because of the high barriers to competition and the unique hold utility companies hold over their customers' lives.
Whoops. George Will, not George Bush. Strike the "his cabinet" and the whole comment still works.
Hell, you'd probably find people calling George Will liberal because he doesn't like the president, and he's quite possibly the most conservative man on the planet.
Oh, sure. There are two reasons for this. The first is that there are legitimate issues on which some conservatives define themselves as conservatives whether most other people would consider them conservative at all. Some examples are, fiscal discipline against running up debts, border controls against immigration, protectionist trade policies, support for a national prescription drug benefit, other forms of corporate welfare, racial diverisity in his cabinet, etc. It all depends on what each person think a "true conservative" philosophy is. One not uncommon split would be over his links to the neocons. Neoconservativism was a perjorative invented in the time of the doves & hawks split in the Democratic Party during Vietnam to insult liberal hawks would had previously dominated party policy. Neocons didn't actually become conservative until the Reagan years. Some traditional conservatives still think of the neocons as "liberals."
The second reason is that a lot of conservatives define a liberal as anyone who disagrees with them. If they come to disagree with the President, it's cause he's too "liberal" for them. I remember a primary election in my state where two Republicans ran largely on platforms that the each other was a liberal even though both were arch-conservatives.
Wait. This thing consumes 92W at rest and 108W at ful usage and it's a laptop chip? Geez, what's the expected battery life for users of this chip?
FYI, the way most of these attacks work is by utter and complete surprise. It's kind of a thuggish candid camera. By the time you recover from the hit and recognize what's going on, you've just got a bunch of stupid kids laughing at and taunting you. If you then drew your gun and shot, you'd be convicted of first- or second-degree murder in practically any jurisdiction -- yes, even Florida and Texas.
Being armed does nothing to prevent this sort of nonsense unless you want to send a powerful message at the expense of your freedom and some stupid kid's life.
What's the difference between members of government expressing their religion through law and a state-sponsored religion?
Mostly in the sectarian nonsense. The early history of the US was filled with Christians discriminating agasint Christians. State sponsored religion meant that the restrictions came down to very ticky and irrelevant matters such was what could be said in prayers and how music should be handled. It also led to sensless hate and division. The First Amendment puts freedom of religion into the Constitution to avoid a regression to that sort of behavior (as well as to ease inter-state tensions since many states were Catholic states, Puritan states, etc.)
I'm going to go off on a little tangent for a bit before returning to the difference between state-sponsored religion and democracy that follow religious values.
Most religions share the same values -- don't do to other people what you wouldn't want done to you, help out the less fortunate, and avoid selfish behavior. Most of these agree on certain specific ways of expressing these core values -- don't sleep around, don't kill or hurt people, don't steal, don't go around trying to offend people, do give to charity, do spend time with your family, do spend time helping other members of the community.
Religion also often have a bad side due to their function as a binder of communities. Most religions treat those who don't follow their precepts as flawed people to encourage shame/guilt reinforcement of the morals they espouse. Most religions have some sort of code of behavior, dress, or food preparation that help distinguish believers from non-believers. Many religions actually proscribe punishments to be meted out against those who break their codes of behavior -- Judaism and Islam are well noted for this. Some religions promote certain unequal hierarchies such as a caste system or wives being always subservient to their husbands.
The real problem with religions (especially state-sponsored religions) is their abuse by people following mankind's tribal instincts. We have evolved with powerful mechanisms to support the livelihood of our communities. We naturally group people into either "us" or "them." We then ignore flaws to bind "us" together and accentuate flaws to encourage competition with "them." The power-hungry have always used religion as an excuse to feed atrocities that the religions themselves abhor. "We" are culturally & morally superior than "they" are. "We" should bring our englightened ways to "them." "They" are Evil and should be crushed.
This is in no way limited to religious entities. Marxism used hatred of the poor and sneering at religion as a tool. In the Spanish-American War, our president promised that we'd spread the values of Christendom while our current president promises that we'll spread the values of Democracy. It's all still about one group telling another how to live because they believe that their way is best. We proudly beat our chests about the good things about our way of life and obsess over the bad things about their way of life. Whether we're right or not is irrelevant; we're still following instinctual behaviors.
Even though, this tribal attitude isn't limited to religiously-linked communities, state-sponsored religion has always resulted in persecution at home and conquering abroad because it very strongly enforces "us" vs. "them" divides. However, the modern system of democratically voting in shared beliefs (while protecting against restriction of religion) has been far more successful at promoting the community-building nature of religion over the abuse of it by encouraging tolerance and consensus. If the majority feel that something is bad, then the laws will reflect that and will preserve community harmony which is the purpose of Law. If the majority overrides and seriously disaffects a minority, then unrest will arrise, and the Law will eventually be corrected to reflect what will restore harmony. This is the democratic process.
Offtopic:
Your bit about commercials reminded me of another time when I was made ill by watching TV I didn't have control over. Last year, I was at a pizza place, and I was watching the TV 'cause I was there alone. There's this show I'd heard of before but never seen on the TV called "Fear Factor." Those of you with cable probably have an idea of where this is going. I didn't.
They started with an innocuous fear of heights based contest that was dumb but mildly amusing. Then, they turn to the next event. The next event takes place in a slaughterhouse. (You can just skip to the next paragraph right now if you're squeamish. I recommend it.) The contestants must lay in a tub and have cattle intestines dumped on them. They must then bite into the raw intestines, suck out the greenish undigested food/poop/slime and spit it into a glass until it gets to a line and then drink it all down.
I don't really eat at that place anymore. The food was good, but.... there was something wrong with the... ambiance. To be honest, I really wish that I'd filed an FCC complaint about the show, but it's too late now. I've got a strong stomach and all, but that was just freaking nasty. I still get creeped out and lose my appetite whenver I think about that show.
Right now there's a TON of crap on TV, and I don't mean 'offensive' I just mean crap (every reality show ever created comes to mind). And if a la carte means that some of the crap will go away for lack of interest, that's fine by me.
I think you need to get out there and find out what the mainstream actually likes instead of projecting what you like onto them. Yes, reality television is utter and complete crap, but it's immensely popular crap. You see while geeks obsess over interesting objects and ideas, most people out there obsess over people and relationships. Reality TV is all about that -- alliances, double-crossings, pettiness, ego, short-lived romance, and broken hearts. Extroverts eat it up. It's the car accident of human relationships. It engages that same parts of the brain that make people rubberneck as they drive by. I've even gotten caught up a time or two before slapping myself and asking, "Why am I watching a bunch of attention-starved narcissists compete to see who's the biggest, most manipulative choad?"
No, reality TV won't be hurt in the slightest by a la carte programming. It's the fine art, esoteric documentaries, and fantastic fiction that will be hurt. If you already think that the History channel is the War Channel and that the Discovery channel is the Sharks & Aliens channel, prepare for it all to get worse as informational and cultural stations fight to survive by pandering as much as possible. The Sundance Channel? Gone! BBC America? Gone! G4-TechTV? Gone! (Well, good riddance anyway...) ADV's Anime channel? Gone! Sci-Fi channel? Well, it better keep churning out Battlestar Galactica like hits instead of recycling crap the other networks dumped.
TV will condense itself down to a handful of channels -- network television (with all its reality TV), news channels, sports channels, the major movie channels, ethnic channels, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, Food Network, and the Weather Channel. Pretty much anything else is doomed to struggle unless they're free (like C-SPAN or probably the shopping networks). New channels will have to face shelling out tons of money to get cable/sat providers to show them as freebies for a few months to try to build up enough of a potential subscriber base to survive. This will kill anything fringe -- especially when the market model comes down that refuses to let channels be sold for less than a dollar.
Malloc a huge chunk of memory. Custom cut one or more items out of the huge chunk, manually managing byte alignment of the objects to ensure portability between different chipset architectures. This is what most people refer to as a "custom allocator" (possibly also a pool or slab allocator) and its performance is vastly higher than an equal number of new's in a GC language.
What about that scheme can't be done in a GC language when needed in critical sections and abandoned when not? Sure it's ugly to do in those languages, but so's writing your own GC in a non-GC language (e.g. SmartPointers).
Incidentally, this is the sort of thing that your OS should be doing for you. No one pratically needs this level of control unless they're flying without a well-featured OS (i.e. working in an embedded context). People pulling this sort of nonsense in a normal application are just setting themselves up for a fall.
Just don't complain when you're shopping around for a product and find one that is 5x the speed of its GD'd competitors. Then you the customer are forced to pay the price for programmer laziness and/or convenience.
Just don't complain when you're shopping around for a product and find one that has 5x the number of crashes and exploits of its GD'd competitors. Then you the customer are forced to pay the price for programmer obession with trying to optimize non-critical sections.
close box on each tab
If Opera works anything like Safari in that respect, I really, really hate that feature. The most frequent thing that I use multiple tabs for is to open multiple links from a single page (e.g. a news site or my list of webcomics) and then read each page, closing them as I go.
When your close widget is on each tab, and your tabs change in size, this means that you can't just leave your mouse in one place and hit the button over and over as you go through the opened pages. Instead, you have to look over and pay attention to the tabs once you get down to the number where they start widening. That drives me nuts.
Also, Mozilla used to return to the previous tab when you closed a tab back sometime in the pre-1.0 days. This led to the annoying practice of having to start opening links at the bottom of a page if you wanted to read them from the top-down. On the other hand, I became so used reading opened pages in reverse order that I just start on the last tab and close off from there. If I recall correctly, you can set the order of tab closing in about:config, but I could be wrong (am I'm forced to use IE at work, so I can't confirm).
It's just two syllables... the first, "go", is pronounced like the "go" in gordon, not like the English word "go". The second, "to", is not like the English word "to", it is pronounced like the "to" in "tornado". Try saying "gohr-tohr". *
* Note: Pronunciation instruction may only apply if you live in the city of Boston. People living in other localities may need to contact the appropriate authorities for further instruction.
It would be pretty cool if Linux worked on a 360 but please remind me again why people are trying to make it so? Aren't there enough projects crying out for some decent developer input already? Maybe I am just getting old and grumpy but this seems like a terrible waste of time that could be used to great benefit.
I consider this the logical equivalent of the question, "Couldn't they be working on a cure for cancer instead?" I cannot abide this sort of arrogant stupidity.
1) All programmers/scientists/etc. are not equivalent. Life is not some computer strategy game. You can't just wave your mouse around, pull a person off one project, put them on another, and expect the same level of productivity. Maybe the Xbox 360 project will attract people with good hardware hacking skills that aren't really applicable on anything you care about.
2) What interests you may or may not interest people of technical aptitude. Sure, a cure for cancer would be really great, but not everyone is interested in whatever field of research will finally result in it. Some people might be more interested in entomology than oncology, and some people might be more interested in getting a cheap, powerful Linux home entertainment computer than whatever makes you happy. Your desires are not everyone else's desires.
3) What doesn't interest you isn't necessarily useless. An Xbox is a very powerful multi-processor system perfect for hooking up to a home entertainment system and well suited for light distributed processing tasks. It's also fantastically cheap for what it's capable of. There are numerous potential uses for it.
4) Not everything has to be useful to be worth doing. Surprise, surprise -- the people working on this might be doing it for fun! Even if it didn't have a lot of utility, that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing if it brings someone enjoyment to do it.
In short, stuff it. You're not the dictator of the world, so quit discouraging people from pursuing interests that you don't share.
</frothing at the mouth>
Total rubbish from an economic simpleton. Poverty kills. The more money that is deflected towards unobtainable social-engineering goals or speculative global-warming alleviation schemes, the less is spent on food aid and pharmaceutical research and education.
So, causing extinctions that deprive us of a rich source of pharmaceutical research and bringing drought to Africa mean we spend less on food aid and pharmaceutical research? Also, I do believe that the political factions (world-wide, not just in the US) that oppose global warming alleviation are those parties most interesed in ending food aid, healthcare, and education spending. The rest of your post is just blanket assertions without any concrete reasoning behind why they might be true.
Spending on global warming alleviation will not cause poverty. It will create jobs and lead to more efficient use of resources as it has in Japan, one of the world's most resource stingy economic powerhouses (by necessity). Spending on biofuels will bring money out of the hands of oil rich areas (like the Middle East and Russia) and put it in the hands of agriculturally rich areas (like the USA and South America). Spending on solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal power, will put money into power generation that needs no external fuels which I believe will inevitably become cheaper than fuel-consuming methods. Raising fuel efficiency standards on cars will eventually bring down the TCO for cars, elevating the poor in the long-term as well as reducing the harmful emissions that put a burden on the health of city dwellers (and thus on the taxpayer's wallets). Encouraging and facilitating mass transit (such as via PRT systems) may eventually eliminate the need for cars for much of the nation's poor and lead to more efficient use of resources with accompanying drops in price for energy due to decreased demand. Carbon sequestration technologies also assist in making coal a much cleaner technology that spews less mercury and radioactives than it currently does. If fusion technology finally pans out, we will be capable of feats relying on energy densities much greater than we have previously imagined. Carbon-neutral energy generation gives us a leg up on working in places where the atmosphere is at a premium such as in space or deep under the ocean.
The net benefit of attention on global warming and pollution is that our economic system may in fact become more efficient by no longer ignoring the economic effects of externalities. By no longer looking at each industry as an unconnected system whose waste outputs are not considered to have any effect on anything else, we may be able to optimize the world economy by preventing harm by one industry to another, allowing all industries to operate at a greater efficiency than they could in pretending to be completely independent agents. This is something to be embraced as much as the computerized logistics revolution of the last half of the 20th century which has increased global economic efficiency by slashing waste in supply chains.
So ... guilty till proven innocent?
The point of guilty until proven innocent is to default to the least injurious assumption. In crime, that means that we default to the one that doesn't ruin a man's life and that keeps the investigation of a crime going. In global warming, we should default to avoiding disaster.
Remember, if global warming people are right and we don't listen to them, the worst that can happen is a disaster that will take centuries to reverse and will lead to widespread famine from desertification in Africa and Central Asia and the loss of temperate topsoils, the irrecoverable loss of the world's biodiversity and the medicines that could come from it, the freezing of Europe due to the loss of the North Atlantic current, the flooding of most of the world's current shorelines, increased hurricanes due to longer seasonal warming of waters, increased spread of malaria due to greater tropical insect populations, vicious resource wars that will tear apart the Middle East and fray relations between all neighbors who share rivers & other water resources, diminished international trade, and diminished political capital for the USA -- the nation that consistently blocked action against fixing the problem.
If the global warming people are wrong and we listen to them, then the worst that happens is we have poured a bunch of money into more efficient use of resources & alternative energy (technologies needed for space colonization anyway) instead of all the products we could've had with our previous expenditure of energy.
Of course, a snarky soundbite just sounds so much better than actual reason.
He has been one of the strongest and biggest name Mac proponents in the industry for the last 15 years. He also has incredible amounts of disdain for Microsoft.
Are you talking about the same John "Apple is Dying" Dvorak who has been predicting the death of Apple since the 90s at the very least? Does this or this really sound like the words of a Mac lover ? No one who is even vaguely familiar with the name Dvorak in the Mac community is of the opinion that the guy has had any affection for Apple for over a decade.
Now it is fair to say that he's fallen out of love with Microsoft since the heady romantic days of Windows 95, but a Mac proponent for the past 15 years? Pfft...
If that's the video I'm thinking of -- I can't view it here at work -- then you have to feel so sorry for the guy. He had such bad stage fright that he destroyed a priceless historical artifact that he spent his part of his life caring for. You know that he's never getting up in front of a crowd again unless he's reclining in a casket.