Well, that's not to say that there aren't fewer trees than there are now. I honestly don't know, but I suspect it is true that there are fewer now.
Where I think that mostly comes from is people clearing land for farming in tropical regions (so the Blame America crowd need not apply here.)
IMO the best cure for this? GMO foods. The whole purpose of GMO food in most cases is purely to increase crop yield. Most anti-GMO people are against it because they view it as a quick way to save a buck, but that's the advantage: Saving a buck usually translates into consuming fewer resources, and in the case of GMO food, it means needing to use less land for farming.
And no, contrary to popular belief, GMO food never harmed anybody.
Last I checked, trees earmarked for that purpose were specifically grown for that purpose, and aren't wild trees (thus when they're harvested, they don't count as a lost tree anymore than eating a potato counts as a lost potato.)
To be honest (and my employer probably wouldn't like to hear this) I'm not a big fan of HPs enterprise solutions. It mainly comes down to them typically eschewing standards that everybody else uses (such as IPMI) and then slaps a fee on top of it (their ILO feature.) And then to make things worse, you have to have an active service contract in order to get firmware updates, even if they're only security related.
This might be fine for a big IT shop, but if you're a small to medium sized business (which most IT purchasers are) then HP is a terrible choice, because your shiny new servers may very well be doomed to the trash heap after 3 years unless you're willing to spend more than you can afford.
As far as consumers are concerned, that's what HP is. However as far as enterprise is concerned, HP is a best known as a major vendor of network, server, cloud, and storage appliances.
In fact, HP is actually in the process of splitting the company into two separate entities with two different stock tickers. One company will do the printers and other consumer grade crap, and the other will focus on enterprise grade technologies.
But yeah, other than that, they basically only bet on sure things these days, and are much more iterative than innovative.
Honestly I don't even know how the hell she got elected. I never met a single person who actually liked her, and I've lived in Arizona my entire life, including Tempe. She's got a big reputation for telling bald faced lies.
I really do think hell would freeze over before a republican would take office in any office that governs Seattle.
Besides, if that was the case, then I wouldn't have gig service right now where I live in Arizona, which is about as much of a red state as you can get. In fact, come to think of it, a lot of red states have gig service somewhere within the state, such as Utah, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Louisiana.
In other places where I have lived, the electrical utilities are "owned" and operated by a "public utility district". That operation is beholden to the rate payers, who are also the voters who elect the commissioners to it's board. The difference is, in a word, stark. I can count on one hand the number of times I saw the power go out for more than a split second in 20-some years before moving to this model of free enterprise. The power went out more than that last week alone. The two (one a monopoly and one as close to socialism as it gets) could not be more different when it comes to the things that count.
I think that's more of a symptom of you're just beholden to whoever operates it, government or not. Take Arizona and California's relationship for example. California is mostly public run utility, and even then, they can only provide about 75% of the total power demand of the state. The rest of that they obtain from Arizona, and Arizona has so much ample power that it actually sells most of it to neighboring states. Arizona's power grid is also owned by two major companies: SRP and APS, both of which are privately held, for profit companies, generating electricity from hydro power and nuclear power respectively. They both only really answer to the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates them.
Here's another fun fact about Arizona: Our power grid is so reliable here, that a lot of the world's biggest tech firms have built major datacenters here, even though it's so hot that air conditioning is a real cost concern. In fact, Intel built the world's most advanced semiconductor fabrication plant just a few miles from me. Why? Two reasons: No earthquakes, and a very reliable power grid.
The difference is with socialism or marxism the government tries to make the service affordable to the people, whereas with a monopoly, a corporation tries to make as much profit as possible.
That's almost never the case. For example, in the USSR, cars were so expensive that buying one was a really big undertaking, and even after you paid all of those rubles for it, it took a long time to actually receive it, and even then it wasn't necessarily your car. And it wasn't just cars that were like this, most capital goods were.
At least in a socialist economy, assuming a democratic political structure, the people could vote in new managers. That's much more difficult when trying to do the same to a privately held monopolistic corporation.
Theoretically yes, but so far in every socialist country that has ever existed, the political elite end up granting themselves favors that the average person cannot obtain. Take for example Venezuela has free elections, but the common people live in the gutter, where the political elite and only the political elite have it made.
Granted, in the US the political elite have a status of their own, but being a politician isn't the only way to obtain that here, nor it is even the most common way. The most common way is exploiting an underserved market (also called disruption,) and/or creating a new market entirely. Which by the way, when you do that, you're making your customers happy in the process, as people only pay money for something if they value it more than they value their money.
I've seen a lot of people lament the fact that among the 20 most powerful/influential people in the US, only one is a government official, which is the US president. That's not something to lament at all however, in fact that's exactly what the founding fathers intended. They knew that democracies fail when any one entity gains too much power, so they were very adamant that there needs to be a balance between all types of power, such as balance between public and private, and balance between haves and have nots. So long as none of them become too powerful, then they all keep one another in check. So if somebody asks me if I am happy with having various CEOs being roughly as influential as the president, I'll answer that yes, I am happy with that.
So where do you draw the line between abuse of power and Google being in the end a dominant for-profit corporation? Do we really think there's a simple one word or one sentence answer?
Well here's a question: Who is Google abusing? And before you answer end user privacy, note that there are some very good alternatives to everything Google offers.
Not according to what our local tax-is-theft basement dwellers say. They assert that any sort of restriction in trading is "interfering with the market." In other words, according to them, the Free Market includes interference with supply-and-demand by restricting the market. And that includes prohibiting a market althogether.
Well a trade restriction certainly can hamper a free market, though usually it has a less noticeable impact than the four I mentioned above. For example, a tariff typically raises the price of a particular good by artificially increasing scarcity. But tariffs are bad for a different reason. Namely, they end up costing more than they supposedly save.
For example, the steel tariffs that George W Bush implemented were designed to save jobs by raising the price of foreign steel. The problem is, it ended up costing our economy something like $300,000 per job that was saved, meaning that while a few steelworker jobs were saved, many more people in adjacent industries probably lost their job. How does that happen? Well for example, steel is used to make cars, and if domestically produced cars now cost more because we are forced to pay a higher price for steel, then foreign cars are more attractive.
So slap a tariff on foreign cars then you say, right? Well, problem with that is sticking tariffs on foreign cars doesn't make our domestically produced cars anymore attractive to say Australia or Canada than Japanese cars. So, the end result is you're going to sell less cars, which means people might lose jobs. Remember, we're operating on a global economy now, so you can't just assume that forcing domestic purchasers to pay more means you're going to make more. In fact, it very rarely ever works out that way and usually results in a big loss, which is why even the most left leaning economists are overwhelmingly against tariffs (this even includes the New Keynesian economists, who are now in opposition to John Maynard Keynes who strongly believed in tariffs.)
For better or for worse though, politicians left and right typically ignore economists.
What you're getting at are the limitations to free speech, which yes there are some. Often cited is shouting fire in a crowded theater, which goes against the clear and present danger litmus test established by SCOTUS. What you're alluding to is speech intended to defraud, which yes, there are limits on as well. However in the case of Google, I don't really see any intent to defraud anybody. To promote their own services? Perhaps, but I'm not sure what legal theory that would run afoul of.
It's kind of like saying if you own a store, and a customer walks in, while they're there you offer them a free cup of tea in hopes that they might buy another, because you don't want them to go down the street to buy from a competitor instead. There is a careful balancing act there however as it may run afoul of a few antitrust (aka anticompete) laws, but in order to do that, you there are four criteria you need to meet, among them is an unavoidable necessity, which Google doesn't have (their customers come there completely by choice, it isn't like say Microsoft's Windows where customers HAD to have the platform in order to run their apps that they needed for their livelihood.)
In the US, banks had been prohibited from selling securities ever since the Great Depression.
But that was against the principles of the Free Market.
Hmm...no, it's not. A Free Market just means that prices are determined by the forces of supply and demand. That's it, pretty simple.
There are typically only four situations where prices are either not influenced by or are lightly influenced by supply and demand:
1) Price floors and price ceilings 2) Socialism (Socialism, contrary to popular belief, simply means that the government owns the means of production and just sets the price to whatever they want) 3) Monopolies (there's only one producer and thus only one entity owns the means of production, so they can create artificial scarcity.) 4) Highly inelastic markets (such as oil) where people will basically pay whatever is asked because they want it so badly.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but your rants about the evils of the Free Market and/or libertarians are highly uneducated.
Commercial speech is not supposed to be free speech.
That's a strange claim. What law is it based on?
Some countries may have decided they are the same thing, but the general consensus is that a government can regulate a business including their advertising, practices and stock announcements.
Well you aren't allowed to speak in a manner meant to defraud somebody, which is a well established limit to the free speech clause of the first amendment. There are other limitations as well, such as shouting fire in a crowded theater. However none of these discriminate over whether the speech is for commercial purposes or not.
You mean like how that show Under the Dome always has product placement integrated into the script? In fact, I have a working theory about the show's plot that hasn't been revealed yet:
If you notice, basically every character in that show goes around carrying a windows phone and/or a surface tablet. One of the aliens told the town that the dome was sent down to protect. My guess is that since so many Microsoft products were under the dome, somehow that billion dollars worth of surface tablets ended up there and not in customer's hands, the dome was sent to protect the world from surface tablets and windows phones by trapping them all inside. The people inside are screwed of course, but at least the rest of the world is safe.
So there, you don't need to watch that show anymore because you already know how it ends (besides, the directing and writing sucks anyways. They scored some good acting talent, but even good actors can't make that show look believable.)
To add to that, when most people buy a computer, their default search engine is Bing, and if they download firefox, it's yahoo. Yet still, Google manages to hold some 65% (or so) of the market anyways. Probably helped by the fact that the verb "to google" is now basically an actual word in the English language. At any rate, you can't do that while running a bad search engine that nobody likes.
Now some might argue that Google holds a monopoly as far as advertising goes, but that's just not true. Google does have quite an advertising presence, but there are quite a few good alternatives. Google is just very attractive because of the sheer number of ad impressions that they can bring.
Yes, really. He's one of those libertarian morons who thinks companies should be allowed to grow into absolute monopolies unimpeded, and then should be able to do whatever they want at that point, free from any kind of consequences because with a monopoly position it's nearly impossible to unseat them or compete against them. He'll probably say something about you wanting to "punish success".
Well first of all, that's a really shitty assumption as he may not be a libertarian at all, second of all, few libertarians favor a monopoly situation.
As a libertarian myself, I view a monopoly as basically the same thing as socialism. And when I say socialism, I'm not talking about welfare, I'm talking about a form of economy where the government owns the means of production and at the end of the day doesn't give a shit about its customers because it has no competitors...which is no different at all from a monopoly.
At the end of the day, a search engine is just a website that offers it's opinion of what URLs closest match what you typed. Last I checked opinions are free speech, though I suppose not every country respects free speech.
Then again, even in the US, investment advice firms have been sued for expressing opinions that cause other company's stock to tumble. Though generally the companies that sue these firms are doing so because said firm looked at their books and smelled a rat, and the suing company doesn't want the public to know about that rat's existence. Sometimes those lawsuits are successful anyways though.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's not to say that there aren't fewer trees than there are now. I honestly don't know, but I suspect it is true that there are fewer now.
Where I think that mostly comes from is people clearing land for farming in tropical regions (so the Blame America crowd need not apply here.)
IMO the best cure for this? GMO foods. The whole purpose of GMO food in most cases is purely to increase crop yield. Most anti-GMO people are against it because they view it as a quick way to save a buck, but that's the advantage: Saving a buck usually translates into consuming fewer resources, and in the case of GMO food, it means needing to use less land for farming.
And no, contrary to popular belief, GMO food never harmed anybody.
Last I checked, trees earmarked for that purpose were specifically grown for that purpose, and aren't wild trees (thus when they're harvested, they don't count as a lost tree anymore than eating a potato counts as a lost potato.)
Namely, these kinds of farm raised trees:
https://photos.travelblog.org/...
Those kind of trees are even preferred over wild trees because their growth pattern is much better suited to their end purpose.
To be honest (and my employer probably wouldn't like to hear this) I'm not a big fan of HPs enterprise solutions. It mainly comes down to them typically eschewing standards that everybody else uses (such as IPMI) and then slaps a fee on top of it (their ILO feature.) And then to make things worse, you have to have an active service contract in order to get firmware updates, even if they're only security related.
This might be fine for a big IT shop, but if you're a small to medium sized business (which most IT purchasers are) then HP is a terrible choice, because your shiny new servers may very well be doomed to the trash heap after 3 years unless you're willing to spend more than you can afford.
As far as consumers are concerned, that's what HP is. However as far as enterprise is concerned, HP is a best known as a major vendor of network, server, cloud, and storage appliances.
In fact, HP is actually in the process of splitting the company into two separate entities with two different stock tickers. One company will do the printers and other consumer grade crap, and the other will focus on enterprise grade technologies.
But yeah, other than that, they basically only bet on sure things these days, and are much more iterative than innovative.
Oh and I forgot to mention that they took the picture off of that site a long time ago, it's no longer to be found there.
Slashdot fixed that vulnerability a long time ago. And boy did it leave workers vulnerable.
Honestly I don't even know how the hell she got elected. I never met a single person who actually liked her, and I've lived in Arizona my entire life, including Tempe. She's got a big reputation for telling bald faced lies.
I don't think democrat means what you think it means. Obama himself is bought and paid for by hollywood.
Except when they use neural networks they usually call it just that, whereas when they use heuristics they call it AI.
I'm still confused as to why they call it "artificial intelligence" instead of heuristics.
I really do think hell would freeze over before a republican would take office in any office that governs Seattle.
Besides, if that was the case, then I wouldn't have gig service right now where I live in Arizona, which is about as much of a red state as you can get. In fact, come to think of it, a lot of red states have gig service somewhere within the state, such as Utah, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Louisiana.
In other places where I have lived, the electrical utilities are "owned" and operated by a "public utility district". That operation is beholden to the rate payers, who are also the voters who elect the commissioners to it's board. The difference is, in a word, stark. I can count on one hand the number of times I saw the power go out for more than a split second in 20-some years before moving to this model of free enterprise. The power went out more than that last week alone. The two (one a monopoly and one as close to socialism as it gets) could not be more different when it comes to the things that count.
I think that's more of a symptom of you're just beholden to whoever operates it, government or not. Take Arizona and California's relationship for example. California is mostly public run utility, and even then, they can only provide about 75% of the total power demand of the state. The rest of that they obtain from Arizona, and Arizona has so much ample power that it actually sells most of it to neighboring states. Arizona's power grid is also owned by two major companies: SRP and APS, both of which are privately held, for profit companies, generating electricity from hydro power and nuclear power respectively. They both only really answer to the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates them.
Here's another fun fact about Arizona: Our power grid is so reliable here, that a lot of the world's biggest tech firms have built major datacenters here, even though it's so hot that air conditioning is a real cost concern. In fact, Intel built the world's most advanced semiconductor fabrication plant just a few miles from me. Why? Two reasons: No earthquakes, and a very reliable power grid.
The difference is with socialism or marxism the government tries to make the service affordable to the people, whereas with a monopoly, a corporation tries to make as much profit as possible.
That's almost never the case. For example, in the USSR, cars were so expensive that buying one was a really big undertaking, and even after you paid all of those rubles for it, it took a long time to actually receive it, and even then it wasn't necessarily your car. And it wasn't just cars that were like this, most capital goods were.
At least in a socialist economy, assuming a democratic political structure, the people could vote in new managers. That's much more difficult when trying to do the same to a privately held monopolistic corporation.
Theoretically yes, but so far in every socialist country that has ever existed, the political elite end up granting themselves favors that the average person cannot obtain. Take for example Venezuela has free elections, but the common people live in the gutter, where the political elite and only the political elite have it made.
Granted, in the US the political elite have a status of their own, but being a politician isn't the only way to obtain that here, nor it is even the most common way. The most common way is exploiting an underserved market (also called disruption,) and/or creating a new market entirely. Which by the way, when you do that, you're making your customers happy in the process, as people only pay money for something if they value it more than they value their money.
I've seen a lot of people lament the fact that among the 20 most powerful/influential people in the US, only one is a government official, which is the US president. That's not something to lament at all however, in fact that's exactly what the founding fathers intended. They knew that democracies fail when any one entity gains too much power, so they were very adamant that there needs to be a balance between all types of power, such as balance between public and private, and balance between haves and have nots. So long as none of them become too powerful, then they all keep one another in check. So if somebody asks me if I am happy with having various CEOs being roughly as influential as the president, I'll answer that yes, I am happy with that.
So where do you draw the line between abuse of power and Google being in the end a dominant for-profit corporation? Do we really think there's a simple one word or one sentence answer?
Well here's a question: Who is Google abusing? And before you answer end user privacy, note that there are some very good alternatives to everything Google offers.
Well when I use the term, I need to distinguish government owned means of production from welfare, which are two very different things.
Not according to what our local tax-is-theft basement dwellers say. They assert that any sort of restriction in trading is "interfering with the market." In other words, according to them, the Free Market includes interference with supply-and-demand by restricting the market. And that includes prohibiting a market althogether.
Well a trade restriction certainly can hamper a free market, though usually it has a less noticeable impact than the four I mentioned above. For example, a tariff typically raises the price of a particular good by artificially increasing scarcity. But tariffs are bad for a different reason. Namely, they end up costing more than they supposedly save.
For example, the steel tariffs that George W Bush implemented were designed to save jobs by raising the price of foreign steel. The problem is, it ended up costing our economy something like $300,000 per job that was saved, meaning that while a few steelworker jobs were saved, many more people in adjacent industries probably lost their job. How does that happen? Well for example, steel is used to make cars, and if domestically produced cars now cost more because we are forced to pay a higher price for steel, then foreign cars are more attractive.
So slap a tariff on foreign cars then you say, right? Well, problem with that is sticking tariffs on foreign cars doesn't make our domestically produced cars anymore attractive to say Australia or Canada than Japanese cars. So, the end result is you're going to sell less cars, which means people might lose jobs. Remember, we're operating on a global economy now, so you can't just assume that forcing domestic purchasers to pay more means you're going to make more. In fact, it very rarely ever works out that way and usually results in a big loss, which is why even the most left leaning economists are overwhelmingly against tariffs (this even includes the New Keynesian economists, who are now in opposition to John Maynard Keynes who strongly believed in tariffs.)
For better or for worse though, politicians left and right typically ignore economists.
Nononono....buy an island, and let thepiratebay colo there. Watching the Chris Dodd Hollywood response would be classic comedy.
What you're getting at are the limitations to free speech, which yes there are some. Often cited is shouting fire in a crowded theater, which goes against the clear and present danger litmus test established by SCOTUS. What you're alluding to is speech intended to defraud, which yes, there are limits on as well. However in the case of Google, I don't really see any intent to defraud anybody. To promote their own services? Perhaps, but I'm not sure what legal theory that would run afoul of.
It's kind of like saying if you own a store, and a customer walks in, while they're there you offer them a free cup of tea in hopes that they might buy another, because you don't want them to go down the street to buy from a competitor instead. There is a careful balancing act there however as it may run afoul of a few antitrust (aka anticompete) laws, but in order to do that, you there are four criteria you need to meet, among them is an unavoidable necessity, which Google doesn't have (their customers come there completely by choice, it isn't like say Microsoft's Windows where customers HAD to have the platform in order to run their apps that they needed for their livelihood.)
In the US, banks had been prohibited from selling securities ever since the Great Depression.
But that was against the principles of the Free Market.
Hmm...no, it's not. A Free Market just means that prices are determined by the forces of supply and demand. That's it, pretty simple.
There are typically only four situations where prices are either not influenced by or are lightly influenced by supply and demand:
1) Price floors and price ceilings
2) Socialism (Socialism, contrary to popular belief, simply means that the government owns the means of production and just sets the price to whatever they want)
3) Monopolies (there's only one producer and thus only one entity owns the means of production, so they can create artificial scarcity.)
4) Highly inelastic markets (such as oil) where people will basically pay whatever is asked because they want it so badly.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but your rants about the evils of the Free Market and/or libertarians are highly uneducated.
Commercial speech is not supposed to be free speech.
That's a strange claim. What law is it based on?
Some countries may have decided they are the same thing, but the general consensus is that a government can regulate a business including their advertising, practices and stock announcements.
Well you aren't allowed to speak in a manner meant to defraud somebody, which is a well established limit to the free speech clause of the first amendment. There are other limitations as well, such as shouting fire in a crowded theater. However none of these discriminate over whether the speech is for commercial purposes or not.
You mean like how that show Under the Dome always has product placement integrated into the script? In fact, I have a working theory about the show's plot that hasn't been revealed yet:
If you notice, basically every character in that show goes around carrying a windows phone and/or a surface tablet. One of the aliens told the town that the dome was sent down to protect. My guess is that since so many Microsoft products were under the dome, somehow that billion dollars worth of surface tablets ended up there and not in customer's hands, the dome was sent to protect the world from surface tablets and windows phones by trapping them all inside. The people inside are screwed of course, but at least the rest of the world is safe.
So there, you don't need to watch that show anymore because you already know how it ends (besides, the directing and writing sucks anyways. They scored some good acting talent, but even good actors can't make that show look believable.)
To add to that, when most people buy a computer, their default search engine is Bing, and if they download firefox, it's yahoo. Yet still, Google manages to hold some 65% (or so) of the market anyways. Probably helped by the fact that the verb "to google" is now basically an actual word in the English language. At any rate, you can't do that while running a bad search engine that nobody likes.
Now some might argue that Google holds a monopoly as far as advertising goes, but that's just not true. Google does have quite an advertising presence, but there are quite a few good alternatives. Google is just very attractive because of the sheer number of ad impressions that they can bring.
Yes, really. He's one of those libertarian morons who thinks companies should be allowed to grow into absolute monopolies unimpeded, and then should be able to do whatever they want at that point, free from any kind of consequences because with a monopoly position it's nearly impossible to unseat them or compete against them. He'll probably say something about you wanting to "punish success".
Well first of all, that's a really shitty assumption as he may not be a libertarian at all, second of all, few libertarians favor a monopoly situation.
As a libertarian myself, I view a monopoly as basically the same thing as socialism. And when I say socialism, I'm not talking about welfare, I'm talking about a form of economy where the government owns the means of production and at the end of the day doesn't give a shit about its customers because it has no competitors...which is no different at all from a monopoly.
At the end of the day, a search engine is just a website that offers it's opinion of what URLs closest match what you typed. Last I checked opinions are free speech, though I suppose not every country respects free speech.
Then again, even in the US, investment advice firms have been sued for expressing opinions that cause other company's stock to tumble. Though generally the companies that sue these firms are doing so because said firm looked at their books and smelled a rat, and the suing company doesn't want the public to know about that rat's existence. Sometimes those lawsuits are successful anyways though.