Not because it's -good- to take money away from them, but because it's -not good- to have to tax the middle class into living conditions that approach those who are on social assistance.
Perhaps instead of looking at high taxation on the rich as "taking money away" you should look at it as "incentive to use that money to invest in society rather than take it as income".
I suppose that's 'using taxation to close the gap', but not in the typical socialist 'maximum wage!!!' way.
As soon as you implement a progressive taxation scheme you are philosophically on that path. The only variable is the scale. Personally, I see no moral problem with brutally high tax rates on the super-rich. If someone is pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year, in no way is taking 75% of, say, everything over the first few million going to cause them any sort of hardship, nor present any meaningful disincentive for all but the most psychopathic and greedy.
You might have misunderstood me (I suppose I wasn't entirely clear on the subject). By "system", I don't necessarily mean that a law needs to be passed, or money needs to be specifically invested. I just mean that we need some kind of plan of how exactly we're supposed to provide ourselves with culture.
Why ? Is the some major problem with the way "culture" has been "provided" for the several millennia (+/- a few hundred years) before now ?
As for evidence why we need a proven system, I guess I don't have any. It's a pretty fundamental tenet of modern philosophy to require some kind of evidence for assertions. So, if you assert that we are guaranteed to have a rich culture if we scrap copyright, or if we weaken copyright to the point of uselessness, then I would expect, at least, some kind of evidence, if not a working prototype model.
My evidence is the extensive historical culture - of which the vast, vast majority of contemporary culture is derivative - that existed before Copyright did.
If you wish to make an argument that until Copyright existed, there was no meaningful selection of paintings, music, performance, or other arts, then by all means do so - but please back it up with something when you do.
Ha! This from the person who presented us this little strawman gem?
I asked you to elaborate on what you really meant. You didn't. How is my interpretation a straw man ?
And I should point out, you haven't actually pointed out any fallacy I've committed. It's a fairly clear fact that, without any significant number of people willing to provide us with culture, we're simply not going to get culture. It's not going to magically appear because you made some some unfounded accusation of committing a fallacy.
You are begging the question. You are assuming the only way to generate "culture" is with Copyright, while asking how else are we to provide culture without it.
I skimmed it. I could find no explicit or implicit statements that said copyright was never intended to stop non-commercial sharing.
Of course you didn't. You've already made up your mind.
An example: do you seriously think Girl Scouts singing "Happy Birthday" would have been considered a Copyright violation 150 years ago ?
That is another strawman, supported on a false dichotomy.
It's neither. I'm demonstrating more evidence that Copyright was primarily intended to be for the purposes of protecting against commercial infringement, by highlighting all the forms of non-commercial infringement that are accepted or tolerated, sometimes even enshrined in law.
As I said before, there's nobody out there who actually wants to infringe on a copyright with a commercial dealer.
Rubbish. There are zillions of people happy to buy dodgy copies of DVDs from street markets, or similar - and that's before even getting into related things like fake brand label clothing.
Anyone who wants to infringe a copyright can do it from the privacy and convenience of their own internet connection.
Indeed. Yet they frequently choose to go out and spend money on movies, DVDs, music, TV shows and the like. According to you no-one should be doing this.
If we allow non-commercial sharing, then that's not the exception, that's the rule. It completely defeats the purpose of both fair use and copyright to allow such all-encompassing exceptions.
Er, no, it doesn't because that would still be needed for copyright infringement in commercial situations (eg: movie reviewers, soundtracks, preventing commercial pirating).
Oh? You have some evidence that these weren't also functions of copyright?
Why do I need it ? You're the one insisting the technology behind radio transmissions, printing and the Internet wouldn't exist if not for Copyright.
Back then, when artists could only obtain money from the first person they sold their works to, they worked on com
I only have mine for online purchases. It's not like they're good for anything else.
There are numerous reasons to prefer credit cards for (nearly) all purchases - convenience, safety, fraud protection, record keeping, points/rewards schemes, associated services (concierge services, extended warranties, etc) are a few.
Though within the US the overall insanity of the credit rating system there makes credit cards a much different value proposition, so YMMV.
I agree that the income gap is a problem, but I don't think the existence of the gap alone is bad.
Why ? It's a pretty good indicator of an unfair (and getting worse) society.
I couldn't care less that billionaires are swimming in pools of money, it's no concern of mine.
You should, because that's money normal people aren't being paid but could be.
While I do agree with a mildly progressive taxation, I don't think that it's ethical to use (personal) taxation as a tool to close the gap. I'd much rather offer incentives for companies to operate with profit sharing plans or cooperative ownership.
Taxation *is* that incentive. It's essentially the only one available.
But between those previous generations America was a rising star, relatively. For the past twenty or so years, not so much.
And ? That's hardly relevant to a "kids these days don't know how lucky they are" argument.
Consider this (to examine the obligatory "huge TV" example): an average 19" colour TV in 1980 cost about $500. Adjusted for inflation, that's at least $1300 today (and probably quite a bit more). A ~40" flat screen today costs somewhere in the ballpark of $500.
So, in real terms, "entitled middle and working classes" today with their big flat screen TVs are actually being more frugal than your family were in 1980, even if they have a couple of consoles plugged into it.
The real problem is not that the "middle and working classes" are living any more extravagantly - relatively speaking - than they were in the past. The problem is that their incomes have basically been stagnant for three decades while the incomes of the rich have doubled or more. Ie: they have to spend a relatively higher proportion of their income to maintain the same relative living standard.
Except that your definition of "road safety" would have the choice always be car, not bicycle.
False.
Look, I ride a bike to and from work nine months of the year and have been for the better part of a decade now. Heck, until we moved to the US ~12 months ago it had been nearly three years since I'd even _owned_ a car. I have zero reason to try and pretend that driving a car is safer if it's not.
I mean, seriously, the guys doing the research are not idiots, they're going to be looking for weird distributions and things like that.
I'm sure, but they're not going to find something they're not looking for, and they're not looking for anything whatsoever to do with comparing driving vs riding. Thus they're not going to be doing any sort of 'adjusting' to identify and handle factors or bias that might be relevant to that conclusion.
This study simply didn't research, and doesn't provide any evidence for, a hypothesis that a bike is a safer form of transport than driving. You can draw that conclusion if you wish, but I sincerely doubt it's something the original researchers would support based on their analysis.
You are making increasingly unsupported and speculative inferences from this study with every post, and using those to try and construct a supportive framework for - well, I'm not even sure what argument you're trying to make any more, this has drifted so far off topic.
Most people grossly overestimate the overheads of virtualisation, and thus believe they need a lot more CPU than they actually do. Typically, CPU is the _last_ resource you run out of when virtualising.
Many commercial virtualization shops standardize on one VM per core.
Like who ? That seems incredibly low to the point of nearly making it uneconomical. We're averaging about 20 VMs on each of our 8-core/16-thread/48GB UCS blades - not a remotely high consolidation ratio in my experience - and the CPU isn't even close to the limiting factor.
The point is that, if your needs could be reduced to commodity hardware, Sun always lost badly on price.
If your needs could be reduced to commodity hardware, there was probably no point in ever looking at Sun (or any other storage vendor) in the first place. If a DIY box in the corner will suffice, of course any enterprise-grade storage system is going to be groteseque overkill.
For instance 2 years ago we were looking for a new RAID and were considering Sun's ZFS storage appliance but the $10k for 2 tb was just waaaay to much money for the tiny extra bit of redundancy we could get. It was cheaper to just buy a much bigger raid, split it in 2, and do an rsync.
You have described two completely different solutions. One is about redundancy, the other is about backups.
Somehow I don't think you were comparing Apples and Oranges when you made that decision.
No, they don't. Australia, for example, has another 7-10 days worth of public holidays scattered throughout the year, in addition to the 20 days of holiday leave.
Seeing as how they did ask how people commuted to work, at least to the extent of bicycling or not, and given that they were studying mortality rates, and given that I define safety as "reduced risk of death", which is normally synonymous with a reduced mortality rate, I don't see how you reach the conclusions that you do.
Because the study collects no information and makes no attempts at analysis of factors that are actually related to road safety. For all we know, people who do dangerous jobs in Denmark are grossly underrepresented amongst cyclists (eg: because they might tend to be jobs that require carrying tools or travelling long distances).
If you drive a car to work (in their study), you do not ride a bicycle to work.
Another way potentially important data could be ignored or not collected. How are people who ride some days and drive others represented ?
That places you in the group with the much higher mortality rate. Therefore, driving is less safe than bicycling, at least for your daily commute.
No. Correlation != causation.
Consider: You are either Caucasian or not. Non-Caucasians are vastly overrepresented in gaols. Ergo, non-Caucasians commit more crimes than Caucasians because they're not Caucasian.
It might be a bit of a stretch, but I would be willing to bet that most of the increase in mortality is caused by reduced exercise, which certainly describes driving a car, versus riding a bike.
While probably true, it has nothing to with whether bikes are safer than cars and even less to do with your original argument that by making cars more dangerous, driving will become safer. Indeed, you're effectively refuting your own argument by positing a causative factor that isn't at all related to road safety.
Now, you seem to have some definition of "road safety", that is (1) related to tiny changes in overall mortality rate and (2) independent of my actual overall risk of death. Why is your definition useful or interesting?
No, I have a definition of road safety that's relevant to safety on the road, not a stretched inference from a study focused on giving an extremely high level overview of general health and mortality rates. Road safety means that if I want to get from point A to point B, which method of transport is most likely to get me there alive. The study does nothing to answer this because it's completely irrelevant to it.
What I find strange is how the working and middle classes feel entitled to so much more than they did only a few years ago in the 1980s. I had two college-educated parents with jobs, and I still had to share a room with my sister until I was ten. We had a small 19" TV and an antenna, because, according to my dad, it was 'absurd' to spend $20/month for cable. We crammed our family of five into a tiny Mazda when the station wagon was in the shop. The heat never came on until mid-November, and it never went above 62F.
The same argument applies to your parents compared to the "working and middle classes" thirty years earlier because you kids had a room at all, because it was (almost certainly) a colour TV rather than B&W, and because they had two cars rather than one.
Fifty years before that the same argument would have applied because you didn't have to share a house and had a car at all.
Etc.
Wanting to improve your standard of living over previous generations, in line with society, is not "entitlement". To suggest otherwise is the height of intellectual dishonesty.
This is not exactly a credible position you have staked out -- a logical consequence of your position is that it's all correlation, including all the risk factors, and we have no idea what causes heart disease, stroke, or diabetes, and that all that advice to get more exercise, is also bunk.
No, it's not a logical consequence at all, and my position is both simple and eminently credible: that a study doing no direct research into, and collecting no direct evidence about the safety of, riding vs driving, performing no analysis on such a hypothesis, and stating no conclusions about said hypothesis, provides no support for an argument that riding is safer than driving.
Find a study actually investigating the hypothesis, and drawing conclusions in terms of fatalities/passenger-mile, and you'll have something to support your position. Though, even if it *is* safer to ride, it's still not relevant to your original argument, given that it was solely concerned with road safety in vehicles, and it completely ignores the fact that riding is frequently not a viable option.
The problem with driving, and why it is "unsafe", is that it removes this exercise opportunity, and relatively few people have the time for an equivalent amount of exercise.
Which pretty much sums up the whole problem with your reasoning. It says nothing about whether driving is safer or more dangerous that riding, merely that people who ride tend to live longer. There are *many* things completely unrelated to actual riding or driving that could significantly influence the result, from lifestyle to genetics.
Or, to put it another way (and I've been trying to avoid this, but it's time) correlation is not causation.
In order to ensure b), which is of vital importance, we need copyright, or at least some other proven system (of which I have looked and found none yet).
What evidence do you have to support this ?
It's also interesting that you say "copyright holders... [reap] all the benefits", when it's actually us who reap the extra culture. Did you forget about that pivotal detail, or simply turn a blind eye?
No, I'm just not as prone to fallacies as you are.
Again, citation needed.
I suggest you read the history section on Wikipedia's Copyright page. You may also want to consider the number of countries which have things like "Fair Use" allowances, allow downloading and similar non-commercial infringement, or simply turn a blind eye to anything that isn't commercial infringement. Some USA-specific evidence is that until very recently, only commercialised infringement has been a criminal offence, and pursuing perpetrators outside of organised commercial infringement operations practically unheard of.
If Copyright really were about *every* copyright infringement, and not primarily about commercialised infringement, then "Fair Use", "Fair Dealing", time-shifting and "personal" infringement in things like mix tapes would never have been allowed in the first place.
It is my understanding that the people who proposed copyright saw from early on that creating a loophole for non-profit infringement would eventually render copyright completely useless.
And what do you base this understanding on ?
After all, what's the point of copyright if anyone can just download their own copy for free, legally? For that matter, who would ever buy an illegitimate copy, when they could legally get an equally legitimate free copy? Seriously, who?
Lots of people, apparently, since movie theatres are still going strong, DVD sales are massive and new TV shows are being pumped out on free-to-air every year.
I frequently go to the cinema to see movies (which I then generally download as well, once the DVD or BR rip appears). I do this because even though I have a relatively impressive home theatre, it still can't hold a candle to even a semi-decent cinema, to say nothing of the opportunity for a social outing. Similarly with music - I see bands often, and then typically download the same music, for much the same reasons.
There's plenty of money to be made from the creative arts even if "anyone can just download their own copy for free".
(I don't see why everyone jumps immediately to this strawman. It's not like it's ever convincing.)
Because there's not really any other way to interpret a statement that essentially the only reason we have culture at all is because of Copyright. The assertion is ridiculous on its face, not only because culture clearly existed long, long, LONG before Copyright ever did, but also because all of the heavy lifting for "culture" was also done in that time period. Contemporary culture is based nearly entirely on rehashing, repackaging and recreating previous works (and this has been true for thousands of years).
Yes, it explains why there was no culture until a few hundred years ago. It explains why the vast majority of culture, spread extremely thinly to today's standards, was accessible only to the incredibly wealthy. It explains why careers in music were restricted to playing only very locally, and no recording at all. It explains why things like books and movies were not even feasible.
These are all functions of technology, not Copyright.
For the common man, culture sucked until only a few hundred years ago.
For the common man, life sucked until only a few hundred years ago. You are conflating the massive average increase in leisure time over the last hundred-odd years (ie: the ability to actually experience culture), along with huge technological improvemen
Something that reduces my chance of death, is safer.
Only if the relationship is causal.
(Or maybe you'd be interested in my tiger-repelling rock ?)
These guys measured death rates, and one thing they observed is that commuting by car raises your mortality rate, compared to commuting by bicycle.
Doesn't mean it's the commuting by car that's increasing risk. An hour's exercise each day could completely eliminate the difference, and since "the aim of this study was to analyze whether the risk from being physically inactive was consistent across age and sex groups", there's a approximately zero chance they allowed for factors that might impact commuting risk, or did any analysis of that hypothesis.
That's before even getting into more significant variables, like the location of the study subjects (cycling in somewhere like Denmark is going to be _dramatically_ safer than cycling in your average US city) or risk factors like diet (the average European diet is much healthier than the average American diet - any additional safety from cycling, if it even exists, could be rendered statistically irrelevant by that).
It also falls apart when you think about books like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. What if someone writes a great novel and then drops dead? Why shouldn't his/her estate make some money from that?
Because the point of Copyright is supposedly incentive for creating new works. You can't create new works if you're dead.
I do not support the extension of Copyright past the death of the copyright holder. There's no justification for it, any more than there is forcing an employer to pay an employee's salary to their family after they die.
Due to aforemetioned legal ramifications of marriage, being married multiple times is quite arguably a serious form of fraud, that could have serious - and unknown to the individuals themselves - ramifications for all involved. *That* is why bigamy is illegal.
Objective To evaluate the relationship between levels of physical activity during work, leisure time, cycling to work, and sports participation and all-cause mortality.
Somehow I don't think the objective of the study was to determine what the safest way to commute is.
It's straight from the abstract, not clear it would make it past the editors/reviewers if they did not think it was justified, and it appears (to me) to be justified by the paper. And, further, other studies in which large amounts of regular exercise are studied, show similar outcomes (there was one involving old Japanese men, and walking, and the benefits did not plateau -- lots more walking, led to lots more benefit).
Please elaborate on how you can draw meaningful conclusions about road safety from studies about overall health and mortality.
There are lots of laws, from taxation to welfare to inheritance, that assume marriage only consists of two people. Adjusting them to account for the possibility that marriage can consist of an arbitrary number of people is a vastly more complicated and fundamental change than stopping discrimination against gays.
Slashdot Mirror
Do YOU trust Microsoft to stay away from all that shiny information? I don't.
I struggle to see any manager looking at the cost/benefit of illegally accessing such information and coming away thinking "go for it".
Not because it's -good- to take money away from them, but because it's -not good- to have to tax the middle class into living conditions that approach those who are on social assistance.
Perhaps instead of looking at high taxation on the rich as "taking money away" you should look at it as "incentive to use that money to invest in society rather than take it as income".
I suppose that's 'using taxation to close the gap', but not in the typical socialist 'maximum wage!!!' way.
As soon as you implement a progressive taxation scheme you are philosophically on that path. The only variable is the scale. Personally, I see no moral problem with brutally high tax rates on the super-rich. If someone is pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year, in no way is taking 75% of, say, everything over the first few million going to cause them any sort of hardship, nor present any meaningful disincentive for all but the most psychopathic and greedy.
The handling. It seems to be hard to interpret the statement any other way.
You might have misunderstood me (I suppose I wasn't entirely clear on the subject). By "system", I don't necessarily mean that a law needs to be passed, or money needs to be specifically invested. I just mean that we need some kind of plan of how exactly we're supposed to provide ourselves with culture.
Why ? Is the some major problem with the way "culture" has been "provided" for the several millennia (+/- a few hundred years) before now ?
As for evidence why we need a proven system, I guess I don't have any. It's a pretty fundamental tenet of modern philosophy to require some kind of evidence for assertions. So, if you assert that we are guaranteed to have a rich culture if we scrap copyright, or if we weaken copyright to the point of uselessness, then I would expect, at least, some kind of evidence, if not a working prototype model.
My evidence is the extensive historical culture - of which the vast, vast majority of contemporary culture is derivative - that existed before Copyright did.
If you wish to make an argument that until Copyright existed, there was no meaningful selection of paintings, music, performance, or other arts, then by all means do so - but please back it up with something when you do.
Ha! This from the person who presented us this little strawman gem?
I asked you to elaborate on what you really meant. You didn't. How is my interpretation a straw man ?
And I should point out, you haven't actually pointed out any fallacy I've committed. It's a fairly clear fact that, without any significant number of people willing to provide us with culture, we're simply not going to get culture. It's not going to magically appear because you made some some unfounded accusation of committing a fallacy.
You are begging the question. You are assuming the only way to generate "culture" is with Copyright, while asking how else are we to provide culture without it.
I skimmed it. I could find no explicit or implicit statements that said copyright was never intended to stop non-commercial sharing.
Of course you didn't. You've already made up your mind.
An example: do you seriously think Girl Scouts singing "Happy Birthday" would have been considered a Copyright violation 150 years ago ?
That is another strawman, supported on a false dichotomy.
It's neither. I'm demonstrating more evidence that Copyright was primarily intended to be for the purposes of protecting against commercial infringement, by highlighting all the forms of non-commercial infringement that are accepted or tolerated, sometimes even enshrined in law.
As I said before, there's nobody out there who actually wants to infringe on a copyright with a commercial dealer.
Rubbish. There are zillions of people happy to buy dodgy copies of DVDs from street markets, or similar - and that's before even getting into related things like fake brand label clothing.
Anyone who wants to infringe a copyright can do it from the privacy and convenience of their own internet connection.
Indeed. Yet they frequently choose to go out and spend money on movies, DVDs, music, TV shows and the like. According to you no-one should be doing this.
If we allow non-commercial sharing, then that's not the exception, that's the rule. It completely defeats the purpose of both fair use and copyright to allow such all-encompassing exceptions.
Er, no, it doesn't because that would still be needed for copyright infringement in commercial situations (eg: movie reviewers, soundtracks, preventing commercial pirating).
Oh? You have some evidence that these weren't also functions of copyright?
Why do I need it ? You're the one insisting the technology behind radio transmissions, printing and the Internet wouldn't exist if not for Copyright.
Back then, when artists could only obtain money from the first person they sold their works to, they worked on com
Wikileaks founders handling of dubious rape accusations: - Credibility
How so ?
I only have mine for online purchases. It's not like they're good for anything else.
There are numerous reasons to prefer credit cards for (nearly) all purchases - convenience, safety, fraud protection, record keeping, points/rewards schemes, associated services (concierge services, extended warranties, etc) are a few.
Though within the US the overall insanity of the credit rating system there makes credit cards a much different value proposition, so YMMV.
I agree that the income gap is a problem, but I don't think the existence of the gap alone is bad.
Why ? It's a pretty good indicator of an unfair (and getting worse) society.
I couldn't care less that billionaires are swimming in pools of money, it's no concern of mine.
You should, because that's money normal people aren't being paid but could be.
While I do agree with a mildly progressive taxation, I don't think that it's ethical to use (personal) taxation as a tool to close the gap. I'd much rather offer incentives for companies to operate with profit sharing plans or cooperative ownership.
Taxation *is* that incentive. It's essentially the only one available.
But between those previous generations America was a rising star, relatively. For the past twenty or so years, not so much.
And ? That's hardly relevant to a "kids these days don't know how lucky they are" argument.
Consider this (to examine the obligatory "huge TV" example): an average 19" colour TV in 1980 cost about $500. Adjusted for inflation, that's at least $1300 today (and probably quite a bit more). A ~40" flat screen today costs somewhere in the ballpark of $500.
So, in real terms, "entitled middle and working classes" today with their big flat screen TVs are actually being more frugal than your family were in 1980, even if they have a couple of consoles plugged into it.
The real problem is not that the "middle and working classes" are living any more extravagantly - relatively speaking - than they were in the past. The problem is that their incomes have basically been stagnant for three decades while the incomes of the rich have doubled or more. Ie: they have to spend a relatively higher proportion of their income to maintain the same relative living standard.
Except that your definition of "road safety" would have the choice always be car, not bicycle.
False.
Look, I ride a bike to and from work nine months of the year and have been for the better part of a decade now. Heck, until we moved to the US ~12 months ago it had been nearly three years since I'd even _owned_ a car. I have zero reason to try and pretend that driving a car is safer if it's not.
I mean, seriously, the guys doing the research are not idiots, they're going to be looking for weird distributions and things like that.
I'm sure, but they're not going to find something they're not looking for, and they're not looking for anything whatsoever to do with comparing driving vs riding. Thus they're not going to be doing any sort of 'adjusting' to identify and handle factors or bias that might be relevant to that conclusion.
This study simply didn't research, and doesn't provide any evidence for, a hypothesis that a bike is a safer form of transport than driving. You can draw that conclusion if you wish, but I sincerely doubt it's something the original researchers would support based on their analysis.
You are making increasingly unsupported and speculative inferences from this study with every post, and using those to try and construct a supportive framework for - well, I'm not even sure what argument you're trying to make any more, this has drifted so far off topic.
Such as what GP is doing, apparently.
Well he didn't mention doing anything unusual.
Most people grossly overestimate the overheads of virtualisation, and thus believe they need a lot more CPU than they actually do. Typically, CPU is the _last_ resource you run out of when virtualising.
Many commercial virtualization shops standardize on one VM per core.
Like who ? That seems incredibly low to the point of nearly making it uneconomical. We're averaging about 20 VMs on each of our 8-core/16-thread/48GB UCS blades - not a remotely high consolidation ratio in my experience - and the CPU isn't even close to the limiting factor.
The point is that, if your needs could be reduced to commodity hardware, Sun always lost badly on price.
If your needs could be reduced to commodity hardware, there was probably no point in ever looking at Sun (or any other storage vendor) in the first place. If a DIY box in the corner will suffice, of course any enterprise-grade storage system is going to be groteseque overkill.
For instance 2 years ago we were looking for a new RAID and were considering Sun's ZFS storage appliance but the $10k for 2 tb was just waaaay to much money for the tiny extra bit of redundancy we could get. It was cheaper to just buy a much bigger raid, split it in 2, and do an rsync.
You have described two completely different solutions. One is about redundancy, the other is about backups.
Somehow I don't think you were comparing Apples and Oranges when you made that decision.
His numbers don't include holidays I think.
No, they don't. Australia, for example, has another 7-10 days worth of public holidays scattered throughout the year, in addition to the 20 days of holiday leave.
For values of 'power user' that don't include low-end high-volume virtualization where core-count is paramount.
When it comes to virtualisation, RAM is nearly always more important than either core count or speed, unless you're doing something unusual.
Seeing as how they did ask how people commuted to work, at least to the extent of bicycling or not, and given that they were studying mortality rates, and given that I define safety as "reduced risk of death", which is normally synonymous with a reduced mortality rate, I don't see how you reach the conclusions that you do.
Because the study collects no information and makes no attempts at analysis of factors that are actually related to road safety. For all we know, people who do dangerous jobs in Denmark are grossly underrepresented amongst cyclists (eg: because they might tend to be jobs that require carrying tools or travelling long distances).
If you drive a car to work (in their study), you do not ride a bicycle to work.
Another way potentially important data could be ignored or not collected. How are people who ride some days and drive others represented ?
That places you in the group with the much higher mortality rate. Therefore, driving is less safe than bicycling, at least for your daily commute.
No. Correlation != causation.
Consider: You are either Caucasian or not. Non-Caucasians are vastly overrepresented in gaols. Ergo, non-Caucasians commit more crimes than Caucasians because they're not Caucasian.
It might be a bit of a stretch, but I would be willing to bet that most of the increase in mortality is caused by reduced exercise, which certainly describes driving a car, versus riding a bike.
While probably true, it has nothing to with whether bikes are safer than cars and even less to do with your original argument that by making cars more dangerous, driving will become safer. Indeed, you're effectively refuting your own argument by positing a causative factor that isn't at all related to road safety.
Now, you seem to have some definition of "road safety", that is (1) related to tiny changes in overall mortality rate and (2) independent of my actual overall risk of death. Why is your definition useful or interesting?
No, I have a definition of road safety that's relevant to safety on the road, not a stretched inference from a study focused on giving an extremely high level overview of general health and mortality rates. Road safety means that if I want to get from point A to point B, which method of transport is most likely to get me there alive. The study does nothing to answer this because it's completely irrelevant to it.
What I find strange is how the working and middle classes feel entitled to so much more than they did only a few years ago in the 1980s. I had two college-educated parents with jobs, and I still had to share a room with my sister until I was ten. We had a small 19" TV and an antenna, because, according to my dad, it was 'absurd' to spend $20/month for cable. We crammed our family of five into a tiny Mazda when the station wagon was in the shop. The heat never came on until mid-November, and it never went above 62F.
The same argument applies to your parents compared to the "working and middle classes" thirty years earlier because you kids had a room at all, because it was (almost certainly) a colour TV rather than B&W, and because they had two cars rather than one.
Fifty years before that the same argument would have applied because you didn't have to share a house and had a car at all.
Etc.
Wanting to improve your standard of living over previous generations, in line with society, is not "entitlement". To suggest otherwise is the height of intellectual dishonesty.
This is not exactly a credible position you have staked out -- a logical consequence of your position is that it's all correlation, including all the risk factors, and we have no idea what causes heart disease, stroke, or diabetes, and that all that advice to get more exercise, is also bunk.
No, it's not a logical consequence at all, and my position is both simple and eminently credible: that a study doing no direct research into, and collecting no direct evidence about the safety of, riding vs driving, performing no analysis on such a hypothesis, and stating no conclusions about said hypothesis, provides no support for an argument that riding is safer than driving.
Find a study actually investigating the hypothesis, and drawing conclusions in terms of fatalities/passenger-mile, and you'll have something to support your position. Though, even if it *is* safer to ride, it's still not relevant to your original argument, given that it was solely concerned with road safety in vehicles, and it completely ignores the fact that riding is frequently not a viable option.
The problem with driving, and why it is "unsafe", is that it removes this exercise opportunity, and relatively few people have the time for an equivalent amount of exercise.
Which pretty much sums up the whole problem with your reasoning. It says nothing about whether driving is safer or more dangerous that riding, merely that people who ride tend to live longer. There are *many* things completely unrelated to actual riding or driving that could significantly influence the result, from lifestyle to genetics.
Or, to put it another way (and I've been trying to avoid this, but it's time) correlation is not causation .
In order to ensure b), which is of vital importance, we need copyright, or at least some other proven system (of which I have looked and found none yet).
What evidence do you have to support this ?
It's also interesting that you say "copyright holders ... [reap] all the benefits", when it's actually us who reap the extra culture. Did you forget about that pivotal detail, or simply turn a blind eye?
No, I'm just not as prone to fallacies as you are.
Again, citation needed.
I suggest you read the history section on Wikipedia's Copyright page. You may also want to consider the number of countries which have things like "Fair Use" allowances, allow downloading and similar non-commercial infringement, or simply turn a blind eye to anything that isn't commercial infringement. Some USA-specific evidence is that until very recently, only commercialised infringement has been a criminal offence, and pursuing perpetrators outside of organised commercial infringement operations practically unheard of.
If Copyright really were about *every* copyright infringement, and not primarily about commercialised infringement, then "Fair Use", "Fair Dealing", time-shifting and "personal" infringement in things like mix tapes would never have been allowed in the first place.
It is my understanding that the people who proposed copyright saw from early on that creating a loophole for non-profit infringement would eventually render copyright completely useless.
And what do you base this understanding on ?
After all, what's the point of copyright if anyone can just download their own copy for free, legally? For that matter, who would ever buy an illegitimate copy, when they could legally get an equally legitimate free copy? Seriously, who?
Lots of people, apparently, since movie theatres are still going strong, DVD sales are massive and new TV shows are being pumped out on free-to-air every year.
I frequently go to the cinema to see movies (which I then generally download as well, once the DVD or BR rip appears). I do this because even though I have a relatively impressive home theatre, it still can't hold a candle to even a semi-decent cinema, to say nothing of the opportunity for a social outing. Similarly with music - I see bands often, and then typically download the same music, for much the same reasons.
There's plenty of money to be made from the creative arts even if "anyone can just download their own copy for free".
(I don't see why everyone jumps immediately to this strawman. It's not like it's ever convincing.)
Because there's not really any other way to interpret a statement that essentially the only reason we have culture at all is because of Copyright. The assertion is ridiculous on its face, not only because culture clearly existed long, long, LONG before Copyright ever did, but also because all of the heavy lifting for "culture" was also done in that time period. Contemporary culture is based nearly entirely on rehashing, repackaging and recreating previous works (and this has been true for thousands of years).
Yes, it explains why there was no culture until a few hundred years ago. It explains why the vast majority of culture, spread extremely thinly to today's standards, was accessible only to the incredibly wealthy. It explains why careers in music were restricted to playing only very locally, and no recording at all. It explains why things like books and movies were not even feasible.
These are all functions of technology, not Copyright.
For the common man, culture sucked until only a few hundred years ago.
For the common man, life sucked until only a few hundred years ago. You are conflating the massive average increase in leisure time over the last hundred-odd years (ie: the ability to actually experience culture), along with huge technological improvemen
Something that reduces my chance of death, is safer.
Only if the relationship is causal.
(Or maybe you'd be interested in my tiger-repelling rock ?)
These guys measured death rates, and one thing they observed is that commuting by car raises your mortality rate, compared to commuting by bicycle.
Doesn't mean it's the commuting by car that's increasing risk. An hour's exercise each day could completely eliminate the difference, and since "the aim of this study was to analyze whether the risk from being physically inactive was consistent across age and sex groups", there's a approximately zero chance they allowed for factors that might impact commuting risk, or did any analysis of that hypothesis.
That's before even getting into more significant variables, like the location of the study subjects (cycling in somewhere like Denmark is going to be _dramatically_ safer than cycling in your average US city) or risk factors like diet (the average European diet is much healthier than the average American diet - any additional safety from cycling, if it even exists, could be rendered statistically irrelevant by that).
It also falls apart when you think about books like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. What if someone writes a great novel and then drops dead? Why shouldn't his/her estate make some money from that?
Because the point of Copyright is supposedly incentive for creating new works. You can't create new works if you're dead.
I do not support the extension of Copyright past the death of the copyright holder. There's no justification for it, any more than there is forcing an employer to pay an employee's salary to their family after they die.
Due to aforemetioned legal ramifications of marriage, being married multiple times is quite arguably a serious form of fraud, that could have serious - and unknown to the individuals themselves - ramifications for all involved. *That* is why bigamy is illegal.
I'm curious -- why not?
Objective To evaluate the relationship between levels of physical activity during work, leisure time, cycling to work, and sports participation and all-cause mortality.
Somehow I don't think the objective of the study was to determine what the safest way to commute is.
It's straight from the abstract, not clear it would make it past the editors/reviewers if they did not think it was justified, and it appears (to me) to be justified by the paper. And, further, other studies in which large amounts of regular exercise are studied, show similar outcomes (there was one involving old Japanese men, and walking, and the benefits did not plateau -- lots more walking, led to lots more benefit).
Please elaborate on how you can draw meaningful conclusions about road safety from studies about overall health and mortality.
Then why aren't video games released under a delayed-public-domain license such as CC's Founders' Copyright [creativecommons.org]?
Wow, talk about a non-sequitur.
"The point of the lock on luggage isn't to determined thieves, but idle passers-by."
"Then why don't they just use a piece of string ?"
Weird ass laws (and/or weird social stigmas).
There are lots of laws, from taxation to welfare to inheritance, that assume marriage only consists of two people. Adjusting them to account for the possibility that marriage can consist of an arbitrary number of people is a vastly more complicated and fundamental change than stopping discrimination against gays.