That legal theory won't work. Nothing is being taken by the government. Unless my understanding is wrong, what's established is that if if ISPs don't block this, then they open themselves up to civil liability on the basis of this case law (unless it is appealed.) We already have many examples of laws that do this, like the DMCA for example. If the penalty for not complying with this order is adverse action by the government (i.e. a fine) then it still wouldn't work...they're not giving private property to the public, and this isn't eminent domain. If it was a government penalty, then I think you'd have better luck fighting this on first amendment grounds.
Personally, I'd like to see some kind of law or case law in a high court that prevents breaking the internet. And I mean that literally; you're causing what should be one big cohesive network of networks to become segmented into smaller networks of networks, and making the term "internets" (yes, plural) apply. (Depending on how they implement it, of course. If it's at the IP layer, which is the only way that this could reasonably work, and the injunction seems to call for it, then this is exactly what they'd be doing. Of course, it probably won't defeat VPN tunneling, which could never realistically be banned without making major changes to the constitution.)
We may be able to get a good case law in a higher court (maybe even SCOTUS) for that if all of these internet companies decide to hop in the ring to fight this, which based on their history, seems probable.
No...We shouldn't allow vigilantism any more than we should allow companies to retaliate. However when they made this statement:
Instead, Keith argued that the U.S. government should be able to not only hit back at hackers -- as it already does -- but should also have more powers and responsibilities when it comes to stopping hackers before they even get in. Private companies should share more data with the U.S. government to prevent breaches, ha said.
I agree with all of this, but only under the condition that is done with a large dose of oversight and policies and protocols that are open to the public. None of this FISA/national security letter crap.
Why don't we just get rid of corporate income taxes instead? They only bring in about 9% of all federal tax revenue, and they burden local businesses far more than others. We could shift that tax burden into other forms of taxes to make up for this.
For example, because we try to avoid double-taxing capital gains, we have a low capital gains tax rate. So, let's go ahead and bump it up a bit to compensate for the fact that we're no longer double-taxing. That should make the Bernies happy because it would mostly shift the tax burden to those with higher incomes. (I'm not a Bernie fan at all, by the way.)
It would be more complex than what I'm making it out to be for sure, but I would like to see it gain wider consideration. We would probably want to do some other things as well to encourage foreign businesses to actually move here rather than just use us as a tax haven (probably not too much, as there are already many other good reasons to move here, such as a stronger STEM talent pool than you'll usually find abroad.)
No, no, and no. This kind of thinking is why video games are highly censored in Germany and Australia, and why England now has a mandatory porn filter, among many, many other solutions to problems that don't actually exist. All it does is make life harder for those who know better.
To be honest, this smells of old media attacking new media after new media took a big bite out of old media's advertising revenue. The author happens to be a writer and at least part-time journalist. Worst of all, we've already seen this fictional horror film before:
How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted. In an editorial titled “Terror by Radio,” the New York Times reproached “radio officials” for approving the interweaving of “blood-curdling fiction” with news flashes “offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given.” Warned Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade journal, “The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove... that it is competent to perform the news job.”
Could this be a real threat to kids? Maybe, but I'd much rather hear this from somebody skilled in separating the damn lies from the statistics and somebody else skilled in pediatric psychology, rather than some C list writer trying to win a Pulitzer, before drawing any conclusions.
Kirk: Someone or....some....thing....or some.....combination of people....and....things...is using YouTube to... Bones: Dammit Jim! Well what the hell are we going to do about it?
Even if this does work as Amazon intends, then I see a giant antitrust lawsuit in the future. We're seeing Amazon vertically integrate everything, including shipping, which previously was exclusively outsourced to one of UPS, USPS, or FedEx. If this lock did gain mass market penetration, then you're going to see a situation arise where Amazon can literally lock the competition out.
That said, you design it so that a signal cannot be used to cause a crash and combine it with other features too.
I've heard this argument before...many times.
Car A sends "I'm breaking" signal to Car B. Car B breaks. This isn't a bad thing. If someone spoofs the "I'm breaking" signal, worst case scenario cars slow down.
Worsening traffic congestion, which could potentially be very useful in a cyber-attack intended to disrupt the economy.
Car A sends "I'm accelerating" signal to Car B. Car B doesn't do anything. You don't accelerate until your sensors detect the car ahead is far enough away from you. Spoofing the "accelerating" signal doesn't cause an accident.
What if car B was traveling at a lower rate of speed than car A, and only changed to a higher speed because somebody spoofed a signal saying that car A is going faster? And what if they're moving around a blind curve or hill, meaning visual or radar sensors won't help?
What if car A was traveling at high speed in an intersection, and somebody spoofs a message telling car B that car A was breaking while car B is intending to take a right turn?
As you can see, there are many ways that this can be broken.
A modern liberal or a postmodern liberal? My beliefs tend to align really well with the former (also called classical liberals,) but far less so the later, and I would really like to see a general shift in political ideologies back in that direction. Interestingly, postmodern conservatives and liberals seem to think they're more like them than the other side is, when in reality they're both very far from it.
This is a long post that I typed in somewhat of a rush, so I've probably made a few grammatical and factual errors, and missed a few things that didn't support my argument enough, but the overall message should hold up well. If you read nothing else in this, at least read the last few paragraphs.
You obviously haven't looked at that site beyond the colors you see when you land on the home page have you? If you drill down the specific figures you'll see that there are actually large differences between the US and Scandinavian countries; Scandinavian countries have higher tax, higher government spending, better fiscal health and lower "labor freedom".
Take another look at those figures. The tax burden in three of those countries is similar to the US, with Finland scoring higher. But that's a moot point. Remember, you're trying to argue that the US is more laissez-faire than them, so I need you to try thinking from a more nuanced perspective: Property rights, and everything from business freedom to everything to the right of that are what matter in this regard, and if you pay attention, they're all on par with the US.
Or better yet, select all four Nordic countries to see their averages, and then compare them to the US. Not a massive difference. Anyways, this is splitting hairs at this point, your original assertion that these problems are caused by laissez-faire capitalism is incredibly stupid given we have no such thing here.
Not in the US no, but given what large companies over there are able to get away with compared to most other western countries there's clearly a lack of oversight.
Actually this is rapidly changing. In fact, China just started a big crackdown:
So in terms of *buying*, using a certain methodology shows house affordability has been stable since the 90s (well after the policies I'm criticizing had been enacted). On the other hand rent has increased dramatically, especially for those in the lower 3rd of incomes [pewtrusts.org]. And no, wages haven't grown [pewtrusts.org] to fill that gap [pewtrusts.org].
Rents are an interesting case right now because we've seen a culture shift recently where people prefer to rent so that they can move easier if they find a new job somewhere else. But this is a good effect to have, because it shows that people are more easily able to find higher paying jobs: Since the people who do this tend to have higher incomes, we've been seeing a lot of people pay higher rents than they do for mortgages. This may or may not be a long-term trend (it only happened recently, and most probably will die down during the next recession, but nobody has a magic ball, least of all me) but it has nothing to do with the problems associated with low income neighborhoods where rents mostly aren't impacted by this.
Speak of which, these policies you mentioned, just how laissez-faire are they?
With regard to that last chart you linked, it doesn't support your claim that well. Food has gone up 2 points since 96, and housing has gone up 4 points, but the rest don't appear to be significantly significant. 2 points is barely worth mention, 4 points is worth mention, but it's not exactly having a big impact.
Lol, there's no magic money tree, that money is coming from somewhere.
No...We're talking about cultural problems in these low income areas. Health care costs and health care spending make quite a difference here from the perspective of the consumer. For example, somebody on medicaid (which is common for this demographic) most likely isn't going to notice any difference if health care costs go up, especially for medicaid plans that don't ask for premiums, copays, or deductibles (my state, Arizona, does this.) The same is tr
I'm a former Sprint user that moved to T-Mobile, and I say HELL NO! Sprint is by a mile the worst carrier of the big four, and I really don't want their crappy influence screwing me over yet again.
If you really want better service, why not just switch?
The cells in your body don't know what time it is.
I'm just going to be blunt here: You're an idiot. There's this thing called the circadian rhythm, and yes, bothering your circadian rhythm does real harm to your body.
I've lived in Arizona most of my life, and personally, I fucking hate dealing with daylight savings any time I am somewhere else during those switch periods.
For a little background, that site favors less regulation when it comes to the economy, and if they didn't like a particular country's state of regulation, you'd see it show up. Having said that, they do a pretty thorough job in their measurements, and you can poke through their data if you'd like. As you can plainly see, it places the Nordic countries as being roughly the same as the US.
You've obviously never tried to run a business before if you think the US is AT ALL laissez-faire.
What's that? Just throwing money at a problem without actually changing the underlying socioeconomic model that caused the issue in the first place doesn't fix the problem? Who could have predicted??
And what about the socioeconomic model is different in their case? It's really all the same thing.
I can pick 5 things straight off the bat that haven't been improving:
1. Cost of housing [inflationdata.com].
This doesn't tell you much. The cost of housing has always varied depending on what incomes look like in any given region. What matters, depending on how you look at it, is either the housing opportunity index or the housing affordability index. The HOI, which roughly measures what your mortgage rate would be vs your income, currently sits roughly where it was between 1990 and 2003 at about 60. It went down to about 40 during the 2006 bubble, and went up to around 75 when the market bottomed out, and then has returned back to 60. The HAI measures how affordable the median house price is for the average household, with 100 normalized to mean that the average household has exactly enough income to afford the median priced house. Right now, that index sits at 150ish, which means that the average household makes 50% more than enough to afford the median priced house in their region, though around 2011 it was much higher, but again, this was after the housing crash.
So to put it another way, while housing prices are in fact up, they're no less affordable.
/facepalm That's not health care costs, that's health care spending.
And if you bother to pay attention, you'll notice that it's increasing globally, practically in lock-step. And the cause of this isn't what you no doubt think it is based on your comment about housing (increased pricing) rather it's because people are adopting bad habits, i.e. being more sedentary, consuming more alcohol, sugar, etc. And this has nothing at all to do with lower incomes or anything like that, rather it's because of the opposite: They can afford be more sedentary, afford more booze, and afford more twinkies. This is one of those things that could be fixed by behavioral/cultural changes, not socioeconomic ones.
3. Income inequality [forbesimg.com]. The majority of wages have stagnated while only those at the top have seen their wages increase. Stagnant wages combined with increasing the living costs above is leaving far more lower and middle income families in a precarious position.
I found the Bernie fan! But actually this is highly misleading, and in many ways its an outright farce. I'll show you some hard numbers later, but first, I'm going to give you a lesson in economics:
I mean seriously, the author explicitly states we shouldn't judge people on their individual merits.. how can you really take that as a serious rebuttal?
This is actually the premise behind social justice. Really, it is. I've been told by at least 6 people here on slashdot that if you have any success at all in life when there are other people who don't, then that is an injustice no different than if you had stolen from somebody else. So in other words, social justice says to throw out the Martin Luther King message that people should be judged by the content of their character, and unfortunately, postmodern liberalism has done precisely this.
It really is still one internet, in spite of the filtering that the first three you mentioned engage in. A lot of people are confused as to what the internet actually is, which means that defining the internet is something that most people fail to do. Rather, all they know is what they see in their web browser or mobile apps.
The internet is simple to define: Networks communicating with other networks in order to form one larger internetwork. In fact, the word internet is just a short form of internetwork.
Because different media types have different costs and availability for bandwidth. This has always been true.
The bigger question is...what kind of an idiot thinks the mobile internet is AT ALL somehow distinct from the internet? They are and always have been the same fucking thing. Anybody who disagrees, please tell us all at what time it was impossible to route an internet protocol (IP) packet from a mobile device to a non-mobile web server? And before answering, know that the days before mobile phones could send IP packets, they by definition had no internet at all.
But what if those problems are actually caused by the economic problems associated with laissez-faire capitalism?
First off, we don't have laissez-faire capitalism. Second off, these problems have little to do with economics, in fact we've already tried throwing lots of money at these kinds of people, and it didn't work. We've even tried building lower income homes in affluent areas where it's considerably easier to find better paying work, and all it does is move the problem from one place to another.
Certainly these problems seem to have been growing since the 80s after America moved to a much more unrestrained economic model.
It's interesting that you say this, because things have only been improving. Pick any metric you want:
- Birth rates are lower - Life expectancies are higher - Wealth is higher across the board, poor and rich - Violent crime rates are going down (Fun fact: Fewer people die of public mass shootings in the US than in many prominent welfare-friendly European countries, even though when they happen in Europe, nobody seems to debate much about increased gun control: https://www.thejacknews.com/la...) - Suicide rates are decreasing overall (with the exception being middle aged white people, but the overall suicide rates are still going down in spite of that.)
So if we follow your assertion, then a more unrestricted economic model is improving life for Americans. The reality is much more nuanced than that, but you're the idiot who made this statement.
While you were coming up with that, did you stop at all to think about how many very non-capitalist countries are the worst offenders here? Iran, whose economy is 60% centrally planned (which is a wet-dream-come-true in your case) holds the #1 most polluted city in the world, with many other either pure socialist or mostly socialist countries not far behind them. For comparison, the US, which is arguably the most capitalist country in the world, doesn't even have a single city that falls within the top 1,000 polluting cities in the world.
What an epic fail on your part. You aren't very good at thinking, you know. It's best to leave that to the competent people.
As war profiteering, you realize much of this has nothing to do with weapons, right? Even your own link says so. But let's stay on this subject, now that you've brought it up: Which country focused the most effort on building high powered nuclear weapons? (Hint: It wasn't a capitalist one.) And speak of weapons:
Oh man, did you ever prove my point! You ignored all of my other examples of "Government Entrepreneurship" to trot out the V2 Rocket... which was developed by a Government, and further developed by two more Governments. Godard's experiments were pretty much ignored by Private Industry until decades after his early work... largely funded by the Smithsonian, which is hardly private.
Yes, they further developed it; I never denied this. But the invention really, truly, started with an entrepreneur.
ICs... bozo, research first, blather away second. Initial research was conducted for the British Government, and was further developed and funded by the US Government, especially the work of Kilby at TI:
Try reading my post again.
No Army and Air Force, no Funding, no IC. At least not at that time. The IC was developed initially for the Governments, something that you can't dispute, because the weight of evidence crushes your delusions.
Perhaps try reading your own link: The government did not fund it, rather they were the first customer. I think your bad reading comprehension is probably why you're uneducated, which explains why you're a commie bastard.
Now as for Cannibalism... do spend some time looking into the history of the Telegraph, and especially the history of the Transatlantic Cables. Every single "Entrepreneur" failed, often in a period of just a year or two, only to be gobbled up by successors, who also failed, only to be gobbled up again.
Hate to break it to you, but this isn't cannibalism. If the management fails at one company, and another company effectively takes over and then succeeds, that's just progress. Your socialist governments do the same thing, by the way, only they execute the former management in many cases. Cannibalism would be more akin to outright stealing somebody else's ideas, which your vaunted socialist governments did all the time.
And by the way, have you ever asked yourself why people are always wanting to leave socialist states, and why socialist states always have to build fences and shoot their own people who try to escape?
And they did it all by their itty-bitty-wittle selves, taking a Clean Room approach, and ignoring the decades of Research conducted by... Ta Dum!... Governments!
Actually, yes, they came up with the recyclable rocket engine concept themselves.
Wrong yet _again_
That isn't a valid comparison...at all. Those rockets first of all didn't even go half way to the Karman line, which is why they were able to be landed with a parachute, and why they didn't put up with anywhere near the amount of atmospheric abuse that the Falcon 9 does, because the Falcon 9 goes ALL THE WAY up to the Karman line, with a bonus in that it does it with liquid fuel as opposed to the shuttle booster's solid fuel. But in spite of that, the shuttle booster rockets weren't really all that reusable as thousands of the parts had to be refurbished, and some of the more expensive parts were outright destroyed. In fact, the whole reason the Shuttle program was abandoned to begin with was because it wasn't anywhere near as reusable as it was planned to be, and each flight costed in the 1.5 billion dollar range per launch in most cases. For comparison, NASA's SLS rockets have an estimated cost of about 500 million per launch even though none of them will be reusable.
Here's some factoids about SpaceX's current rockets: - Their components are so reusable that they can have them ready to launch again in under 24 hours with very little in the way of refurbishment, and their current goal is to be able to reduce that to less than half of a day. In fact, the re-usability is so good that almost all of the cost to re-use the rocket is spent on fuel alone. - The retail cost of a Falcon 9 rocket launch is roughly $62 million, and with a reused rocket that has been lower
Oh, no . . . ? Tell that to the folks in Iraq and Afghanistan . . . when the US military invades a country . . . US law becomes the norm there . . . even if the natives would prefer Sharia Law.
No, actually Afghanistan didn't, or at least not in the way the taliban interprets it. The taliban, among other things, forbade things like music, dancing, artwork, and any viewpoints that even slightly strayed from Wahhabism. The majority certainly didn't want this, and furthermore, the US didn't impose its own laws on them. The US deposed the taliban because they were providing safe harbor for terrorists. You're being butthurt over Afghanistan because you think the taliban rule was better means you're just a total fucking asshole.
Iraq was similar; the law that was present prior to the US invasion was imposed by force by the British, and was in fact less Islamic than the people there wanted it. Saddam was actually not popular at all. I'm sure you believe in the farce election that gave him a 99% approval rating, because as mentioned above, you're a total fucking asshole, but really the only people who wanted him there were the ones who's pockets he was lining. The law of the land there was actually written and spoken for by many religious figures, and the people there voted for it in a free election.
If you want an example of a modern day country that still has a (mostly) US written constitution to this day, that would be Japan. Douglas MacArthur was installed as a de-facto governor of that country just after Japan surrendered (in fact, they informally refer to him as Gaijin Shogun, or Foreign Military Ruler.) The majority of the country still wanted imperialistic rule and militarism to remain intact, because that was at the heart of their culture (and in some ways, it still is.) MacArthur, and a very small number of Japanese people that were considered radicals in their country at the time, formed a constitution similar to our own in many ways, with the exception that the royal family maintained symbolic power, and Japan was to have no military. Of course, I'm sure you hate this as well, because as was mentioned twice already, you're a total fucking asshole.
Because the US doesn't ask any other countries to do this. Google is based out of the US, so it is beholden to US laws, which for better or for worse (worse in this case, IMO) Google has to comply with the DMCA. Notice other search engines not based in the US don't do this (Yandex, for example.)
However, any tech company with a presence in another country can be asked by that country to apply rules in other countries, which is what Canada is doing (France and a number of its fellow neo-fascist states in Europe are doing the same, mainly over right to be forgotten and other forms of speech that are banned.) They can do this by holding liable the subsidiary company operating there for violating any local laws.
Unfortunately, it may turn out that they must remove themselves from having a presence in these countries and just operate in nearby ones while serving content for the neighboring country's local language. This ultimately hinges on whether these countries drop these demands based on their own internal legal and political decisions, which may or may not be influenced by international laws and treaties.
The US can't force laws on any other country by any meaning of the word. It's up to other countries what laws they enact. If they don't like the terms of any trade deals, they can just walk away.
Slashdot Mirror
That legal theory won't work. Nothing is being taken by the government. Unless my understanding is wrong, what's established is that if if ISPs don't block this, then they open themselves up to civil liability on the basis of this case law (unless it is appealed.) We already have many examples of laws that do this, like the DMCA for example. If the penalty for not complying with this order is adverse action by the government (i.e. a fine) then it still wouldn't work...they're not giving private property to the public, and this isn't eminent domain. If it was a government penalty, then I think you'd have better luck fighting this on first amendment grounds.
Personally, I'd like to see some kind of law or case law in a high court that prevents breaking the internet. And I mean that literally; you're causing what should be one big cohesive network of networks to become segmented into smaller networks of networks, and making the term "internets" (yes, plural) apply. (Depending on how they implement it, of course. If it's at the IP layer, which is the only way that this could reasonably work, and the injunction seems to call for it, then this is exactly what they'd be doing. Of course, it probably won't defeat VPN tunneling, which could never realistically be banned without making major changes to the constitution.)
We may be able to get a good case law in a higher court (maybe even SCOTUS) for that if all of these internet companies decide to hop in the ring to fight this, which based on their history, seems probable.
No...We shouldn't allow vigilantism any more than we should allow companies to retaliate. However when they made this statement:
Instead, Keith argued that the U.S. government should be able to not only hit back at hackers -- as it already does -- but should also have more powers and responsibilities when it comes to stopping hackers before they even get in. Private companies should share more data with the U.S. government to prevent breaches, ha said.
I agree with all of this, but only under the condition that is done with a large dose of oversight and policies and protocols that are open to the public. None of this FISA/national security letter crap.
Why don't we just get rid of corporate income taxes instead? They only bring in about 9% of all federal tax revenue, and they burden local businesses far more than others. We could shift that tax burden into other forms of taxes to make up for this.
For example, because we try to avoid double-taxing capital gains, we have a low capital gains tax rate. So, let's go ahead and bump it up a bit to compensate for the fact that we're no longer double-taxing. That should make the Bernies happy because it would mostly shift the tax burden to those with higher incomes. (I'm not a Bernie fan at all, by the way.)
It would be more complex than what I'm making it out to be for sure, but I would like to see it gain wider consideration. We would probably want to do some other things as well to encourage foreign businesses to actually move here rather than just use us as a tax haven (probably not too much, as there are already many other good reasons to move here, such as a stronger STEM talent pool than you'll usually find abroad.)
No, no, and no. This kind of thinking is why video games are highly censored in Germany and Australia, and why England now has a mandatory porn filter, among many, many other solutions to problems that don't actually exist. All it does is make life harder for those who know better.
To be honest, this smells of old media attacking new media after new media took a big bite out of old media's advertising revenue. The author happens to be a writer and at least part-time journalist. Worst of all, we've already seen this fictional horror film before:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
TL;DR in paragraph 4:
How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted. In an editorial titled “Terror by Radio,” the New York Times reproached “radio officials” for approving the interweaving of “blood-curdling fiction” with news flashes “offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given.” Warned Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade journal, “The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove ... that it is competent to perform the news job.”
Could this be a real threat to kids? Maybe, but I'd much rather hear this from somebody skilled in separating the damn lies from the statistics and somebody else skilled in pediatric psychology, rather than some C list writer trying to win a Pulitzer, before drawing any conclusions.
This is how I read that sentence:
Kirk: Someone or....some....thing....or some.....combination of people....and....things...is using YouTube to...
Bones: Dammit Jim! Well what the hell are we going to do about it?
Even if this does work as Amazon intends, then I see a giant antitrust lawsuit in the future. We're seeing Amazon vertically integrate everything, including shipping, which previously was exclusively outsourced to one of UPS, USPS, or FedEx. If this lock did gain mass market penetration, then you're going to see a situation arise where Amazon can literally lock the competition out.
That said, you design it so that a signal cannot be used to cause a crash and combine it with other features too.
I've heard this argument before...many times.
Car A sends "I'm breaking" signal to Car B. Car B breaks. This isn't a bad thing. If someone spoofs the "I'm breaking" signal, worst case scenario cars slow down.
Worsening traffic congestion, which could potentially be very useful in a cyber-attack intended to disrupt the economy.
Car A sends "I'm accelerating" signal to Car B. Car B doesn't do anything. You don't accelerate until your sensors detect the car ahead is far enough away from you. Spoofing the "accelerating" signal doesn't cause an accident.
What if car B was traveling at a lower rate of speed than car A, and only changed to a higher speed because somebody spoofed a signal saying that car A is going faster? And what if they're moving around a blind curve or hill, meaning visual or radar sensors won't help?
What if car A was traveling at high speed in an intersection, and somebody spoofs a message telling car B that car A was breaking while car B is intending to take a right turn?
As you can see, there are many ways that this can be broken.
It certainly does.
I'm a liberal.
A modern liberal or a postmodern liberal? My beliefs tend to align really well with the former (also called classical liberals,) but far less so the later, and I would really like to see a general shift in political ideologies back in that direction. Interestingly, postmodern conservatives and liberals seem to think they're more like them than the other side is, when in reality they're both very far from it.
This is a long post that I typed in somewhat of a rush, so I've probably made a few grammatical and factual errors, and missed a few things that didn't support my argument enough, but the overall message should hold up well. If you read nothing else in this, at least read the last few paragraphs.
You obviously haven't looked at that site beyond the colors you see when you land on the home page have you? If you drill down the specific figures you'll see that there are actually large differences between the US and Scandinavian countries; Scandinavian countries have higher tax, higher government spending, better fiscal health and lower "labor freedom".
Take another look at those figures. The tax burden in three of those countries is similar to the US, with Finland scoring higher. But that's a moot point. Remember, you're trying to argue that the US is more laissez-faire than them, so I need you to try thinking from a more nuanced perspective: Property rights, and everything from business freedom to everything to the right of that are what matter in this regard, and if you pay attention, they're all on par with the US.
Or better yet, select all four Nordic countries to see their averages, and then compare them to the US. Not a massive difference. Anyways, this is splitting hairs at this point, your original assertion that these problems are caused by laissez-faire capitalism is incredibly stupid given we have no such thing here.
Not in the US no, but given what large companies over there are able to get away with compared to most other western countries there's clearly a lack of oversight.
Actually this is rapidly changing. In fact, China just started a big crackdown:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...
So in terms of *buying*, using a certain methodology shows house affordability has been stable since the 90s (well after the policies I'm criticizing had been enacted). On the other hand rent has increased dramatically, especially for those in the lower 3rd of incomes [pewtrusts.org]. And no, wages haven't grown [pewtrusts.org] to fill that gap [pewtrusts.org].
Rents are an interesting case right now because we've seen a culture shift recently where people prefer to rent so that they can move easier if they find a new job somewhere else. But this is a good effect to have, because it shows that people are more easily able to find higher paying jobs: Since the people who do this tend to have higher incomes, we've been seeing a lot of people pay higher rents than they do for mortgages. This may or may not be a long-term trend (it only happened recently, and most probably will die down during the next recession, but nobody has a magic ball, least of all me) but it has nothing to do with the problems associated with low income neighborhoods where rents mostly aren't impacted by this.
Speak of which, these policies you mentioned, just how laissez-faire are they?
With regard to that last chart you linked, it doesn't support your claim that well. Food has gone up 2 points since 96, and housing has gone up 4 points, but the rest don't appear to be significantly significant. 2 points is barely worth mention, 4 points is worth mention, but it's not exactly having a big impact.
Lol, there's no magic money tree, that money is coming from somewhere.
No...We're talking about cultural problems in these low income areas. Health care costs and health care spending make quite a difference here from the perspective of the consumer. For example, somebody on medicaid (which is common for this demographic) most likely isn't going to notice any difference if health care costs go up, especially for medicaid plans that don't ask for premiums, copays, or deductibles (my state, Arizona, does this.) The same is tr
I'm a former Sprint user that moved to T-Mobile, and I say HELL NO! Sprint is by a mile the worst carrier of the big four, and I really don't want their crappy influence screwing me over yet again.
If you really want better service, why not just switch?
The cells in your body don't know what time it is.
I'm just going to be blunt here: You're an idiot. There's this thing called the circadian rhythm, and yes, bothering your circadian rhythm does real harm to your body.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/11/...
I've lived in Arizona most of my life, and personally, I fucking hate dealing with daylight savings any time I am somewhere else during those switch periods.
But you can't deny it's a lot more laissez-faire than the Nordic model.
How little you know.... http://www.heritage.org/index/...
For a little background, that site favors less regulation when it comes to the economy, and if they didn't like a particular country's state of regulation, you'd see it show up. Having said that, they do a pretty thorough job in their measurements, and you can poke through their data if you'd like. As you can plainly see, it places the Nordic countries as being roughly the same as the US.
You've obviously never tried to run a business before if you think the US is AT ALL laissez-faire.
What's that? Just throwing money at a problem without actually changing the underlying socioeconomic model that caused the issue in the first place doesn't fix the problem? Who could have predicted??
And what about the socioeconomic model is different in their case? It's really all the same thing.
I can pick 5 things straight off the bat that haven't been improving:
1. Cost of housing [inflationdata.com].
This doesn't tell you much. The cost of housing has always varied depending on what incomes look like in any given region. What matters, depending on how you look at it, is either the housing opportunity index or the housing affordability index. The HOI, which roughly measures what your mortgage rate would be vs your income, currently sits roughly where it was between 1990 and 2003 at about 60. It went down to about 40 during the 2006 bubble, and went up to around 75 when the market bottomed out, and then has returned back to 60. The HAI measures how affordable the median house price is for the average household, with 100 normalized to mean that the average household has exactly enough income to afford the median priced house. Right now, that index sits at 150ish, which means that the average household makes 50% more than enough to afford the median priced house in their region, though around 2011 it was much higher, but again, this was after the housing crash.
So to put it another way, while housing prices are in fact up, they're no less affordable.
https://www.nahb.org/en/resear...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se...
In other words, it's very much a moot point.
2. Healthcare costs [killingthebreeze.com].
/facepalm That's not health care costs, that's health care spending.
And if you bother to pay attention, you'll notice that it's increasing globally, practically in lock-step. And the cause of this isn't what you no doubt think it is based on your comment about housing (increased pricing) rather it's because people are adopting bad habits, i.e. being more sedentary, consuming more alcohol, sugar, etc. And this has nothing at all to do with lower incomes or anything like that, rather it's because of the opposite: They can afford be more sedentary, afford more booze, and afford more twinkies. This is one of those things that could be fixed by behavioral/cultural changes, not socioeconomic ones.
Oh, and there's this:
http://www.washington.edu/news...
3. Income inequality [forbesimg.com]. The majority of wages have stagnated while only those at the top have seen their wages increase. Stagnant wages combined with increasing the living costs above is leaving far more lower and middle income families in a precarious position.
I found the Bernie fan! But actually this is highly misleading, and in many ways its an outright farce. I'll show you some hard numbers later, but first, I'm going to give you a lesson in economics:
I mean seriously, the author explicitly states we shouldn't judge people on their individual merits.. how can you really take that as a serious rebuttal?
This is actually the premise behind social justice. Really, it is. I've been told by at least 6 people here on slashdot that if you have any success at all in life when there are other people who don't, then that is an injustice no different than if you had stolen from somebody else. So in other words, social justice says to throw out the Martin Luther King message that people should be judged by the content of their character, and unfortunately, postmodern liberalism has done precisely this.
It really is still one internet, in spite of the filtering that the first three you mentioned engage in. A lot of people are confused as to what the internet actually is, which means that defining the internet is something that most people fail to do. Rather, all they know is what they see in their web browser or mobile apps.
The internet is simple to define: Networks communicating with other networks in order to form one larger internetwork. In fact, the word internet is just a short form of internetwork.
Because different media types have different costs and availability for bandwidth. This has always been true.
The bigger question is...what kind of an idiot thinks the mobile internet is AT ALL somehow distinct from the internet? They are and always have been the same fucking thing. Anybody who disagrees, please tell us all at what time it was impossible to route an internet protocol (IP) packet from a mobile device to a non-mobile web server? And before answering, know that the days before mobile phones could send IP packets, they by definition had no internet at all.
Interesting, so in your mind, South Koreans would be better off if only we had allowed the DPRK to conquer it?
But what if those problems are actually caused by the economic problems associated with laissez-faire capitalism?
First off, we don't have laissez-faire capitalism. Second off, these problems have little to do with economics, in fact we've already tried throwing lots of money at these kinds of people, and it didn't work. We've even tried building lower income homes in affluent areas where it's considerably easier to find better paying work, and all it does is move the problem from one place to another.
Certainly these problems seem to have been growing since the 80s after America moved to a much more unrestrained economic model.
It's interesting that you say this, because things have only been improving. Pick any metric you want:
- Birth rates are lower
- Life expectancies are higher
- Wealth is higher across the board, poor and rich
- Violent crime rates are going down (Fun fact: Fewer people die of public mass shootings in the US than in many prominent welfare-friendly European countries, even though when they happen in Europe, nobody seems to debate much about increased gun control: https://www.thejacknews.com/la...)
- Suicide rates are decreasing overall (with the exception being middle aged white people, but the overall suicide rates are still going down in spite of that.)
So if we follow your assertion, then a more unrestricted economic model is improving life for Americans. The reality is much more nuanced than that, but you're the idiot who made this statement.
While you were coming up with that, did you stop at all to think about how many very non-capitalist countries are the worst offenders here? Iran, whose economy is 60% centrally planned (which is a wet-dream-come-true in your case) holds the #1 most polluted city in the world, with many other either pure socialist or mostly socialist countries not far behind them. For comparison, the US, which is arguably the most capitalist country in the world, doesn't even have a single city that falls within the top 1,000 polluting cities in the world.
What an epic fail on your part. You aren't very good at thinking, you know. It's best to leave that to the competent people.
As war profiteering, you realize much of this has nothing to do with weapons, right? Even your own link says so. But let's stay on this subject, now that you've brought it up: Which country focused the most effort on building high powered nuclear weapons? (Hint: It wasn't a capitalist one.) And speak of weapons:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/30/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Though I could go on forever; in fact Russia alone does many of these in tandem for different military branches.
But what's the first Google result on this for America?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHi...
I pity those with weak minds like yours...they always end up being somebody's useful idiot.
Oh man, did you ever prove my point! You ignored all of my other examples of "Government Entrepreneurship" to trot out the V2 Rocket... which was developed by a Government, and further developed by two more Governments. Godard's experiments were pretty much ignored by Private Industry until decades after his early work... largely funded by the Smithsonian, which is hardly private.
Yes, they further developed it; I never denied this. But the invention really, truly, started with an entrepreneur.
ICs... bozo, research first, blather away second. Initial research was conducted for the British Government, and was further developed and funded by the US Government, especially the work of Kilby at TI:
Try reading my post again.
No Army and Air Force, no Funding, no IC. At least not at that time. The IC was developed initially for the Governments, something that you can't dispute, because the weight of evidence crushes your delusions.
Perhaps try reading your own link: The government did not fund it, rather they were the first customer. I think your bad reading comprehension is probably why you're uneducated, which explains why you're a commie bastard.
Now as for Cannibalism... do spend some time looking into the history of the Telegraph, and especially the history of the Transatlantic Cables. Every single "Entrepreneur" failed, often in a period of just a year or two, only to be gobbled up by successors, who also failed, only to be gobbled up again.
Hate to break it to you, but this isn't cannibalism. If the management fails at one company, and another company effectively takes over and then succeeds, that's just progress. Your socialist governments do the same thing, by the way, only they execute the former management in many cases. Cannibalism would be more akin to outright stealing somebody else's ideas, which your vaunted socialist governments did all the time.
And by the way, have you ever asked yourself why people are always wanting to leave socialist states, and why socialist states always have to build fences and shoot their own people who try to escape?
And they did it all by their itty-bitty-wittle selves, taking a Clean Room approach, and ignoring the decades of Research conducted by... Ta Dum!... Governments!
Actually, yes, they came up with the recyclable rocket engine concept themselves.
Wrong yet _again_
That isn't a valid comparison...at all. Those rockets first of all didn't even go half way to the Karman line, which is why they were able to be landed with a parachute, and why they didn't put up with anywhere near the amount of atmospheric abuse that the Falcon 9 does, because the Falcon 9 goes ALL THE WAY up to the Karman line, with a bonus in that it does it with liquid fuel as opposed to the shuttle booster's solid fuel. But in spite of that, the shuttle booster rockets weren't really all that reusable as thousands of the parts had to be refurbished, and some of the more expensive parts were outright destroyed. In fact, the whole reason the Shuttle program was abandoned to begin with was because it wasn't anywhere near as reusable as it was planned to be, and each flight costed in the 1.5 billion dollar range per launch in most cases. For comparison, NASA's SLS rockets have an estimated cost of about 500 million per launch even though none of them will be reusable.
Here's some factoids about SpaceX's current rockets:
- Their components are so reusable that they can have them ready to launch again in under 24 hours with very little in the way of refurbishment, and their current goal is to be able to reduce that to less than half of a day. In fact, the re-usability is so good that almost all of the cost to re-use the rocket is spent on fuel alone.
- The retail cost of a Falcon 9 rocket launch is roughly $62 million, and with a reused rocket that has been lower
Oh, no . . . ? Tell that to the folks in Iraq and Afghanistan . . . when the US military invades a country . . . US law becomes the norm there . . . even if the natives would prefer Sharia Law.
No, actually Afghanistan didn't, or at least not in the way the taliban interprets it. The taliban, among other things, forbade things like music, dancing, artwork, and any viewpoints that even slightly strayed from Wahhabism. The majority certainly didn't want this, and furthermore, the US didn't impose its own laws on them. The US deposed the taliban because they were providing safe harbor for terrorists. You're being butthurt over Afghanistan because you think the taliban rule was better means you're just a total fucking asshole.
Iraq was similar; the law that was present prior to the US invasion was imposed by force by the British, and was in fact less Islamic than the people there wanted it. Saddam was actually not popular at all. I'm sure you believe in the farce election that gave him a 99% approval rating, because as mentioned above, you're a total fucking asshole, but really the only people who wanted him there were the ones who's pockets he was lining. The law of the land there was actually written and spoken for by many religious figures, and the people there voted for it in a free election.
If you want an example of a modern day country that still has a (mostly) US written constitution to this day, that would be Japan. Douglas MacArthur was installed as a de-facto governor of that country just after Japan surrendered (in fact, they informally refer to him as Gaijin Shogun, or Foreign Military Ruler.) The majority of the country still wanted imperialistic rule and militarism to remain intact, because that was at the heart of their culture (and in some ways, it still is.) MacArthur, and a very small number of Japanese people that were considered radicals in their country at the time, formed a constitution similar to our own in many ways, with the exception that the royal family maintained symbolic power, and Japan was to have no military. Of course, I'm sure you hate this as well, because as was mentioned twice already, you're a total fucking asshole.
Because the US doesn't ask any other countries to do this. Google is based out of the US, so it is beholden to US laws, which for better or for worse (worse in this case, IMO) Google has to comply with the DMCA. Notice other search engines not based in the US don't do this (Yandex, for example.)
However, any tech company with a presence in another country can be asked by that country to apply rules in other countries, which is what Canada is doing (France and a number of its fellow neo-fascist states in Europe are doing the same, mainly over right to be forgotten and other forms of speech that are banned.) They can do this by holding liable the subsidiary company operating there for violating any local laws.
Unfortunately, it may turn out that they must remove themselves from having a presence in these countries and just operate in nearby ones while serving content for the neighboring country's local language. This ultimately hinges on whether these countries drop these demands based on their own internal legal and political decisions, which may or may not be influenced by international laws and treaties.
The US can't force laws on any other country by any meaning of the word. It's up to other countries what laws they enact. If they don't like the terms of any trade deals, they can just walk away.
You can view it here:
https://youtu.be/w57JLmY5dmw?t...
Osama didn't have the hardcore stuff though, because he found the parts where they show their whole face to be too distasteful.
The Apple Newton from the 80's also flopped.
Wrong decade.