Right. And the expense of the caller in Germany is less than the summed expense of the caller and receiver in the US and Canada. That's what they're saying, and that's why they doubled the US and Canadian rates. To make for a fair comparison.
Ummm... you really need to think that through because that thinking is complete b.s.
Dude, I was being facetious because I've grown weary of Saint Reagan's apostles on slashdot
Dude, I recognized that you were confused, which is why I pointed this out again. And that has nothing to do with Reagan or Republicans; Reagan talked a lot about free markets, just like Obama talked a lot about civil liberties, and they both turned out to be big fat liars.
And now you're saying that the two biggest failures of the free market (lack of complete information and formation of monopolies) are why it wins over government regulations?
Governments have even less information than markets, which is why they are piss poor at regulating. Furthermore, markets almost never lead to monopolies; almost every monopoly in human history was artificially created by governments in response to rent seeking.
I guess life would be different with John McCain instead of Obama?
Sure, it would be a lot worse; McCain was a senile war mongering idiot. The country would also be different if we had elected Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney or Gary Johnson. There were half a dozen other contenders in each primary too.
But, you know, you should reflect on your cult of the presidency and presidential elections. Many important decisions are made at the local and state level, many in Congress. A bad president, like Bush or Obama, can screw things up in a big way, but he can't actually fix much.
(And be careful with your/trollface/; your face may get stuck permanently that way.)
In places like "Germany", indeed, the calls are paid for by one party, while in the US and Canada, calls are paid for by both parties. Setting aside any difference in calling rates, this results in calls that are quite literally "half price" in "Germany" as compared against calls in the US and Canada. Two people paying $X for something is precisely twice the cost of one person paying $X.
Well, no, in Germany, the caller pays their own rate, plus a surcharge for calling a mobile phone; it just shifts the expense to the caller.
(The reason we don't have that system in the US is probably because flatrate landline service already was widespread at the time.)
First of all, by "Germany", you mean "everywhere outside of the US and Canada", right? Okay.
I don't know the details of the Canadian, French, or British cell phone market, only using them occasionally and on prepaid. I do know exactly how the German and US cell phone markets work, and I do know that my German cell phone bill has been considerably higher than my US cell phone bill.
All problems are largely due to government regulations.
Not all, but many.
well, except for those inconvenient parts about universal availability of complete information...and the whole issue of monopolies...
Those are some the reasons the free market wins over government regulations when it comes to business and competition.
to include more acceptance of a post-consumer capitalism that no longer expands inexorably
If you're happy with a "post-consumer capitalism that no longer expands inexorably", why are you concerned about stagnating wages for everybody but "the one percent"? Seems to me the latter automatically leads to the former, and you can save yourself all that moral outrage and be happy that you got what you wanted.
Health insurance would have such competitors if it weren't for government regulation; ACA has been one of the most effective ways of eliminating competition in health insurance.
You should read the fine print: "Since receiving phone calls is free of charge in the countries studied, except for the U.S. and Canada (where customers are charged for calls placed and received); the rate per minute is doubled for these two countries, as shown in the figure". The fact that people in places like Germany don't pay for incoming calls doesn't mean those calls are free or half price; it means the caller pays. There are other things wrong with that comparison; it's b.s. Nevertheless, even within the US market, competition has been driving down prices for cellular service significantly.
There are problems with US cell phone service, but they are largely due to government regulations. If we had more open spectrum and allowed WiFi-like services with larger range, cellular phones and carriers would be out of business within a few years, driven away by new, very low-cost startups. Lobbying by the big carriers prevents that. That's not a market failure, it's a government failure.
They aren't sheep, they're wolflings voting to ensure their nation gets to be the Big Bad Wolf of nations.
If people wanted a hawk, Obama would have been the last person to vote for, given both what he said he stood for and his utter incompetence when it comes to foreign or military policy.
How could they possibly be otherwise, when the entire system they live in is set up as one giant game of "winner takes it all, loser has to fall"?
See, that's the beauty of the Western system, as compared to for example Russia. There, if private companies dump dissidents, it's "oh noes government's fault". But in the land of the free? That's just private corporations exercising their freedom!
Private companies didn't "dump" these people. Private companies have nothing to do with these people, their choices, their legal troubles. Individual businesses simply decide individually that hiring these people isn't worth their trouble.
And a big part of that calculation is likely that if they hired a government whistleblower, they would likely face repercussions from the government. The whistleblowers are likely on various government watchlists, listed in government databases as criminals or arrestees, and have government investigations and legal proceedings pending against them.
Russia is exactly what that is like, and attitudes like yours are what is responsible for that. Take it from someone who has heard it first hand: you could have been a propagandist for one of the East Bloc regimes, twisting even entirely government-created problems into the fault of businesses and individual liberty.
Corporations want infrastructure, rule of the law, and educated workforce that comes with doing business in US while paying third-world wages and hiding income in tax shelters. You can't have it both ways.
And they don't get all of that in Ireland, the UK, Germany, Japan, or Canada, where many are trying to move? Those places are often less corrupt, have better infrastructure, generally have lower corporate taxes and lower operating costs. And corporations don't want to have it "both ways", that's why they trying to leave the US and incorporate elsewhere.
The real reason these companies are in the US is not because the US is such a nice environment to do business anymore, it's because it's a big market. It's the same reason they put up with all the crap they have to deal with in places like China.
The US isn't a horrible place to do business yet. But things are deteriorating, and thinking like yours is responsible. Inertia and the hope that the trend can be reversed is why a lot of companies are still staying, but that's not going to last.
It's a very effective method at discouraging effective and functional resistance against status quo.
Relying on whistleblowers to "resist the status quo" is a stupid political strategy. The power of the NSA and CIA need to be limited, civil liberties and constitutionality need to be restored, by the people we vote for. But as long as sheep keep reelecting politicians who blatantly violate their campaign promises of transparency, accountability, constitutionality, and restoration of civil liberties, nothing is going to change.
Similar procedures were used against key people behind Occupy movement according to similar reports.
You make it sound like a conspiracy. But there are millions of private employers; they just individually look at these people and decide that hiring them isn't worth the risk and hassle.
Leaving government for the private sector usually involves a great deal of soft corruption: employers who want inside connections, inside knowledge, and lobbying power; obviously, these people can't bring that to the table. Beyond that, they may not have that many skills employers want.
FYI, the debate is about turning "vast majority" to "all" and removing the "nearly".
So you want women to always "get equal or preferential treatment"? Since women do get preferential treatment in many areas, that isn't a campaign for equalitiy, it's a campaign for treating men worse than women.
Right to self-determination on most cases. Right to liberty, usually. Right to due process of law, for the vast majority. Right to freedom of movement, in almost all circumstances. Right to freedom of thought, except when it's inconvenient....
Most of the feminist agenda these days isn't about government discrimination, it is about private conduct. So, the positions you mock are actually pretty much the positions feminists take: right to self-determination in most cases (except when it interferes with feminist notions of equality), right to liberty usually (except when we need to restrict it in order to achieve feminist goals), right to due process (except when rape, harassment, or other crimes feminists care about are involved), freedom of though except if it is inconvenient (because people don't believe what feminists believe).
People made the same arguments about Stalin and Hitler. For some reason, communism and totalitarianism tend to have a large following among a Western intellectual elites.
And because you live in Hong Kong and experience China's lousy environmental record, not to mention rapid population growth... the US with its stagnant natural growth and strong environmental protection is at fault for global pollution and global warming. Sure, that makes total sense!
First of all, historically, much of the carbon in the atmosphere was emitted by EU countries. The US still hasn't caught up.
Europe has also chopped down most of its forests, depriving the world of a big carbon sink.
And a lot of the nominally lower carbon emissions in the EU are fake: they amount to little more than exporting the carbon emissions to other countries.
Finally, Europeans are economically considerably worse off than Americans, so all of that comes at a price.
The dirty three (US, Canada and Australia) all produce more than 16 tonnes CO2 per person. The EU about 6.8 China produces 7.2
Yes, and what does China do with it? A Chinese is about 1/4 as productive as the US.
None of the figures above actually account for outsourcing manufacturing to China from the US and EU. In that light the Western country's CO2 production is much and China's lower.
Yet, we would be better off if that production actually happened in the US and EU, because we would be emitting less CO2 overall to produce the same amount of stuff. But because of strong environmental and carbon emission rules, people shift that production to China, leading to more global carbon emissions.
Lowering US and EU carbon emissions has one of two inevitable consequences: either, the production shifts to less efficient countries like China and results in more emissions, or the production ceases altogether, increasing prices and making everybody worse off.
An average US person consumes 4x more power than a Chinese person.
An average US person is also more than 4x as productive than a Chinese person.
The US ought to cut its fuel and power consumption before snubbing other nations.
That will have a combination of three consequences: (1) more of the stuff we make will be made by the Chinese with less efficient methods, leading to more carbon emissions, (2) stuff will get more expensive overall, making everybody worse off, and (3) China will become more powerful relative to the US.
Of course, (2) and (3) is what people like you actually desire: people should live in poverty and China should rule the world, right?
The point is that Canada is being put to a very awkward choice: Allow our culture to be overwhelmed and abosorbed into the United States, or limit the free speech rights of corporations that throw scads of US content at Canadians for profit.
Your premise is false: there is no choice. You cannot create a culture or maintain it through these kinds of government programs, you actually kill it that way. People are going to watch what they like no matter what you do, and crony capitalism for culture has the same effect as crony capitalism for anything else: it makes the "product" (culture) worse.
The term "free enterprise" is not something I think I've heard *once* in my life from a politician here. We frankly don't make a big deal about the "sacred invisible hand of the market".
I suppose the Heritage Foundation is then simply trying to smear you by rating your little socialist utopia as more free-market than the US?
The fact that the Canadian effective corporate tax rate is much lower than the US effective corporate tax rate is an expression of your aversion to free market principles? Canadian politicians are succeeding at luring US corporations to Canada through... more heavy-handed regulations and higher tax rates?
Get real. All you're demonstrating is that you don't really know much about what's going on in your own country. Sadly, by-and-large, Canada is more free market and corporate-friendly than the US these days.
Many Canadians *support* this idea and we're not too fond of an American company trying to wreck the system of local content production.
Canada is free to insulate itself from the US market, in media and otherwise, any time you choose. Otherwise, if you want to do business with us, you do it on our terms, because you don't have much leverage.
Why do you consider this particular question to be subjective? Surely, any specific question can best be addressed scientifically.
I didn't say it was "subjective", I said nobody knows. There are a lot of things that science simply does not have an answer to. In some cases, we may find an answer, in others, we may never know.
There are many environmental impacts of our industrial activities.... Before about 50-100 years ago, the bulk of habitat destruction occurred in temperate zones. Now, it is occurring in tropical zones, which have far higher biodiversity.
These are reasonable beliefs, but not actually facts.
Global warming is only just getting going.
Good, so we can take some time to think about it before we do anything, which is what I have been saying.
It can be expected to do very major damage
Again, belief, not fact.
especially to the "most-beloved" species - the large land animals. In part this is because these animals will be trapped in the wrong place.
Well, impacting "beloved species" isn't the same as a mass extinction. All large land mammals could disappear, for example, and that would be tragic, but it wouldn't amount to a "mass extinction". And that's the problem with all the fear mongering: people keep switching their claims and the supposed threats.
What makes AGW especially pernicious is that we've yet to really feel the effects of what we've already done. The warming will continue to increase over the coming decades, no matter what we do now. We have no idea what demons we may unleash.
We have a pretty good idea, because it already was warmer than this 100000 years ago.
This is a total non-sequitur. How do you figure...? You're saying that incentives won't work because as people cash in on the incentive to create green energy technology, the success of that technology will make the incentive less important?! That is illogical.
No, it's economics. Until I have developed green technologies, I can't cash in on them. As soon as I have developed the technologies, the subsidies will stop.
Surely, harvesting all the free energy raining down on us, right where we want it, makes much more economic sense - in the long term - than digging stuff out from deep under the earth and shipping it around.
There really is not much difference: solar cells and wind turbines don't give you perpetual free energy; they are devices that have considerable operating expenses and finite lifetimes.
If everyone was as reckless as you are, we would (might) not get there until we had exhausted every ounce of available fossil fuel. Why? Because we've already sunk the costs for the fossil fuel infrastructure, and nobody has to pay for the damage it causes.
That's not true either. The only reason we keep getting fossil fuels is because people constantly figure out new ways of recovering them, constantly invest in exploration, and constantly develop new equipment. We're just better at developing new fossil fuel technologies than new solar cell technologies.
Renewables are preferable to fossil fuel in the long term, but the obstacles are technological; the idea that there is some grand conspiracy by oil companies or "sunk costs" or any of that other stuff irrationally preventing us from going to renewables simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
American courts had no problem getting a US court order
Imagine that! American courts issuing US court orders! What is the world coming to!
that basically ended the service
Well, they were a Canadian company and could have ignored the US court order. If found guilty by a US court, they might not have been able to enter the US, transact business in the US, or move money through US banks or their affiliates; that's the way things work. They also realized that they were likely also violating Canadian law and were accruing large liabilities. That's why they chose to stop operating. What do you think is wrong with any of that?
Slashdot Mirror
I have no words. Truly, if I were listening to a Soviet citizen in the 50s, he'd be less ignorant of political reality in his country
Having experienced communism first hand, I have to tell you: you are a despicable and utterly ignorant human being.
Ummm... you really need to think that through because that thinking is complete b.s.
Dude, I recognized that you were confused, which is why I pointed this out again. And that has nothing to do with Reagan or Republicans; Reagan talked a lot about free markets, just like Obama talked a lot about civil liberties, and they both turned out to be big fat liars.
Governments have even less information than markets, which is why they are piss poor at regulating. Furthermore, markets almost never lead to monopolies; almost every monopoly in human history was artificially created by governments in response to rent seeking.
Sure, it would be a lot worse; McCain was a senile war mongering idiot. The country would also be different if we had elected Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney or Gary Johnson. There were half a dozen other contenders in each primary too.
But, you know, you should reflect on your cult of the presidency and presidential elections. Many important decisions are made at the local and state level, many in Congress. A bad president, like Bush or Obama, can screw things up in a big way, but he can't actually fix much.
(And be careful with your /trollface/; your face may get stuck permanently that way.)
Yup, and gladly so. I still believe in liberty, free markets, and democracy.
Well, unlike the USSR, we do have real choices, and in the US small changes in voting preferences can lead to significant improvements.
Well, no, in Germany, the caller pays their own rate, plus a surcharge for calling a mobile phone; it just shifts the expense to the caller.
(The reason we don't have that system in the US is probably because flatrate landline service already was widespread at the time.)
I don't know the details of the Canadian, French, or British cell phone market, only using them occasionally and on prepaid. I do know exactly how the German and US cell phone markets work, and I do know that my German cell phone bill has been considerably higher than my US cell phone bill.
Not all, but many.
Those are some the reasons the free market wins over government regulations when it comes to business and competition.
If you're happy with a "post-consumer capitalism that no longer expands inexorably", why are you concerned about stagnating wages for everybody but "the one percent"? Seems to me the latter automatically leads to the former, and you can save yourself all that moral outrage and be happy that you got what you wanted.
Auto and home insurance have such competitors.
Health insurance would have such competitors if it weren't for government regulation; ACA has been one of the most effective ways of eliminating competition in health insurance.
You should read the fine print: "Since receiving phone calls is free of charge in the countries studied, except for the U.S. and Canada (where customers are charged for calls placed and received); the rate per minute is doubled for these two countries, as shown in the figure". The fact that people in places like Germany don't pay for incoming calls doesn't mean those calls are free or half price; it means the caller pays. There are other things wrong with that comparison; it's b.s. Nevertheless, even within the US market, competition has been driving down prices for cellular service significantly.
There are problems with US cell phone service, but they are largely due to government regulations. If we had more open spectrum and allowed WiFi-like services with larger range, cellular phones and carriers would be out of business within a few years, driven away by new, very low-cost startups. Lobbying by the big carriers prevents that. That's not a market failure, it's a government failure.
Collusion like that only works briefly; it's too profitable to defect.
The only way to make the collusion work is through government regulation, forcing every competitor to comply with excessively high prices by law.
If people wanted a hawk, Obama would have been the last person to vote for, given both what he said he stood for and his utter incompetence when it comes to foreign or military policy.
You make no sense.
Private companies didn't "dump" these people. Private companies have nothing to do with these people, their choices, their legal troubles. Individual businesses simply decide individually that hiring these people isn't worth their trouble.
And a big part of that calculation is likely that if they hired a government whistleblower, they would likely face repercussions from the government. The whistleblowers are likely on various government watchlists, listed in government databases as criminals or arrestees, and have government investigations and legal proceedings pending against them.
Russia is exactly what that is like, and attitudes like yours are what is responsible for that. Take it from someone who has heard it first hand: you could have been a propagandist for one of the East Bloc regimes, twisting even entirely government-created problems into the fault of businesses and individual liberty.
And they don't get all of that in Ireland, the UK, Germany, Japan, or Canada, where many are trying to move? Those places are often less corrupt, have better infrastructure, generally have lower corporate taxes and lower operating costs. And corporations don't want to have it "both ways", that's why they trying to leave the US and incorporate elsewhere.
The real reason these companies are in the US is not because the US is such a nice environment to do business anymore, it's because it's a big market. It's the same reason they put up with all the crap they have to deal with in places like China.
The US isn't a horrible place to do business yet. But things are deteriorating, and thinking like yours is responsible. Inertia and the hope that the trend can be reversed is why a lot of companies are still staying, but that's not going to last.
Relying on whistleblowers to "resist the status quo" is a stupid political strategy. The power of the NSA and CIA need to be limited, civil liberties and constitutionality need to be restored, by the people we vote for. But as long as sheep keep reelecting politicians who blatantly violate their campaign promises of transparency, accountability, constitutionality, and restoration of civil liberties, nothing is going to change.
You make it sound like a conspiracy. But there are millions of private employers; they just individually look at these people and decide that hiring them isn't worth the risk and hassle.
Leaving government for the private sector usually involves a great deal of soft corruption: employers who want inside connections, inside knowledge, and lobbying power; obviously, these people can't bring that to the table. Beyond that, they may not have that many skills employers want.
You generalized your experience from Hong Kong to the rest of the world. The rest of the world includes the US, and TFA is about Obama and the US.
Generalizing from an Asian metropolis to the rest of the world is just stupid, and that's what you were doing.
Reading comprehension, you lack it.
So you want women to always "get equal or preferential treatment"? Since women do get preferential treatment in many areas, that isn't a campaign for equalitiy, it's a campaign for treating men worse than women.
Most of the feminist agenda these days isn't about government discrimination, it is about private conduct. So, the positions you mock are actually pretty much the positions feminists take: right to self-determination in most cases (except when it interferes with feminist notions of equality), right to liberty usually (except when we need to restrict it in order to achieve feminist goals), right to due process (except when rape, harassment, or other crimes feminists care about are involved), freedom of though except if it is inconvenient (because people don't believe what feminists believe).
People made the same arguments about Stalin and Hitler. For some reason, communism and totalitarianism tend to have a large following among a Western intellectual elites.
And because you live in Hong Kong and experience China's lousy environmental record, not to mention rapid population growth... the US with its stagnant natural growth and strong environmental protection is at fault for global pollution and global warming. Sure, that makes total sense!
First of all, historically, much of the carbon in the atmosphere was emitted by EU countries. The US still hasn't caught up.
Europe has also chopped down most of its forests, depriving the world of a big carbon sink.
And a lot of the nominally lower carbon emissions in the EU are fake: they amount to little more than exporting the carbon emissions to other countries.
Finally, Europeans are economically considerably worse off than Americans, so all of that comes at a price.
Yes, and what does China do with it? A Chinese is about 1/4 as productive as the US.
Yet, we would be better off if that production actually happened in the US and EU, because we would be emitting less CO2 overall to produce the same amount of stuff. But because of strong environmental and carbon emission rules, people shift that production to China, leading to more global carbon emissions.
Lowering US and EU carbon emissions has one of two inevitable consequences: either, the production shifts to less efficient countries like China and results in more emissions, or the production ceases altogether, increasing prices and making everybody worse off.
An average US person is also more than 4x as productive than a Chinese person.
That will have a combination of three consequences: (1) more of the stuff we make will be made by the Chinese with less efficient methods, leading to more carbon emissions, (2) stuff will get more expensive overall, making everybody worse off, and (3) China will become more powerful relative to the US.
Of course, (2) and (3) is what people like you actually desire: people should live in poverty and China should rule the world, right?
Your premise is false: there is no choice. You cannot create a culture or maintain it through these kinds of government programs, you actually kill it that way. People are going to watch what they like no matter what you do, and crony capitalism for culture has the same effect as crony capitalism for anything else: it makes the "product" (culture) worse.
I suppose the Heritage Foundation is then simply trying to smear you by rating your little socialist utopia as more free-market than the US?
http://www.heritage.org/index/...
The fact that the Canadian effective corporate tax rate is much lower than the US effective corporate tax rate is an expression of your aversion to free market principles? Canadian politicians are succeeding at luring US corporations to Canada through... more heavy-handed regulations and higher tax rates?
Get real. All you're demonstrating is that you don't really know much about what's going on in your own country. Sadly, by-and-large, Canada is more free market and corporate-friendly than the US these days.
Canada is free to insulate itself from the US market, in media and otherwise, any time you choose. Otherwise, if you want to do business with us, you do it on our terms, because you don't have much leverage.
You read the literature. A good paper to look at is doi:10.1038/nature09678
I didn't say it was "subjective", I said nobody knows. There are a lot of things that science simply does not have an answer to. In some cases, we may find an answer, in others, we may never know.
These are reasonable beliefs, but not actually facts.
Good, so we can take some time to think about it before we do anything, which is what I have been saying.
Again, belief, not fact.
Well, impacting "beloved species" isn't the same as a mass extinction. All large land mammals could disappear, for example, and that would be tragic, but it wouldn't amount to a "mass extinction". And that's the problem with all the fear mongering: people keep switching their claims and the supposed threats.
We have a pretty good idea, because it already was warmer than this 100000 years ago.
No, it's economics. Until I have developed green technologies, I can't cash in on them. As soon as I have developed the technologies, the subsidies will stop.
There really is not much difference: solar cells and wind turbines don't give you perpetual free energy; they are devices that have considerable operating expenses and finite lifetimes.
That's not true either. The only reason we keep getting fossil fuels is because people constantly figure out new ways of recovering them, constantly invest in exploration, and constantly develop new equipment. We're just better at developing new fossil fuel technologies than new solar cell technologies.
Renewables are preferable to fossil fuel in the long term, but the obstacles are technological; the idea that there is some grand conspiracy by oil companies or "sunk costs" or any of that other stuff irrationally preventing us from going to renewables simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Imagine that! American courts issuing US court orders! What is the world coming to!
Well, they were a Canadian company and could have ignored the US court order. If found guilty by a US court, they might not have been able to enter the US, transact business in the US, or move money through US banks or their affiliates; that's the way things work. They also realized that they were likely also violating Canadian law and were accruing large liabilities. That's why they chose to stop operating. What do you think is wrong with any of that?