All of those countries have better education system than any state in the US, because all of them have free, or essentially free higher education!
Since I grew up in one of those European countries with free education, I can tell you from first hand experience that you are wrong.
Notice my command of the English language? Thanks to the education system of a couple of the abovementioned countries. I speak three more languages, again thanks to those education systems that you think are poorer than the one in Arkansas
Your command of the English language evidently isn't very good, since you seem to be unable to distinguish between "per capita GDP" and "quality of the education system". Your command of economics is non-existent. And your manners, well, I won't comment on those since they are self-evident.
The only problem with this is that the costs for checking the validity of patents would then be put on the companies sued for patent infringement.
You got it backwards, because that's the current situation: if you get sued for patent infringement, it is your legal and financial responsibility to challenge the validity of the patent. That's why we have patent trolls. What I suggest, namely dropping the presumption of validity, means that the burden of proof shifts to the company that is suing for patent infringement.
If patent examiners actually examined patents, the courts would only need to deal with the edge cases and the patent lawsuit costs on businesses would drop. Yes, this might mean more government expenses to hire patent examiners who actually do their jobs, but these costs would spread out across everyone - not just a few companies being sued.
Obviously, patent examiners can't keep up. Few people with any skills would want such a boring job to begin with, and patent examiners have no incentive to get it right, since they aren't liable for the consequences of their decisions. So, patent examinations aren't going to improve. And, frankly, I don't see why the public should subsidize multi-decade monopolies to begin with.
The sacrifice required now to right the ship is minimal compared to what it will become in a decade
Science doesn't support the notion that spending money on preventing climate change is worth it, and no serious policy proposal attempts to achieve that.
I welcome Pacific Islanders. There is about 3 million people in Micronesia, Polynesia, and Melanesia, and maybe half of them are living on these kinds of marginal atolls. The US has one million legal immigrants per year; this is a drop in the bucket. We should welcome these people with open arms, for their benefit and for ours.
Better than what? I was under the impression that we'd put schools and infrastructure in place post WWII.
Per capita GDP in the Marshall Islands is $2900, compared to Arkansas's $31000. Arkansas, while near the bottom among US states, is better off even compared to EU members like the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Portugal, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, and Croatia.
No matter how much "schools and infrastructure" we put in place, a pacific atoll simply doesn't have much to support a thriving economy: it is poorly located for physical or data traffic, has few natural resources, and has always been at high risk of natural disasters. The reason much of Micronesia and Polynesia were settled so late in human migration (many places just a few thousand years ago) is because these islands really are not good places to live and people only move there if they don't have a choice.
The per-capita GDP of the Marshall Islands is $2900, very low by world standards, and it has never been a lot better. Arkansas's per capita GDP, by comparison, is $31000. That alone is ample incentive for moving. That is, even a backwater, poor state like Arkansas is still a lot better that the Marshall Islands. While Westerners have some idyllic notions of island paradise, atolls have always been risky and marginal places to live; people moved there because they didn't have any other options, and these nations have always experienced large net emigration as soon as people actually had opportunities to emigrate. In addition, many of these atolls simply are not permanent, but they are temporary features that appear and disappear over thousands of years, quite naturally, regardless of human activity.
Also, to put this issue into perspective, all island nations of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia together make up less than 3 million people, who have always lived under impoverished conditions and always been at high risk from natural disasters. Even if global warming were to displace all of them, that would be comparable to the number displaced by a single major hydroelectric plant, like China's Three River Gorges dam.
At this point, the discussion is also academic because sea levels are going to continue to rise, no matter what policies we adopt, so we better find places to accommodate these people. Given that places like Europe have big demographic problems, Europeans should welcome these populations with open arms. Of course, America would also benefit from their presence and I'm glad they are settling here.
First, a corporation must act reasonably in the best interest of the general public. Second, a corporation must act reasonably in the best interest of their employees where it doesn't conflict with the first rule. Third, a corporation must act reasonably in the best interest of their shareholders where that doesn't conflict with the first or second rule.
A corporation jacks up the price of a generic drug by 7,000,000%? Sued by the general public.
The only reason a corporation can do that is because of monopolistic laws created by government.
A corporation informs employees that they will have to train their H1B replacements? Sued by their employees.
For what? Lowering their costs?
A corporation pays its CEO an unreasonably large salary with no evidence that that results in better executive performance? Sued by their shareholders.
Paying CEOs unreasonably large salaries usually correlates with poor performance; that's because you have to pay a CEO a lot of money to run a poorly performing company.
I like it better than a corporate death penalty, because many corporations do have value and importance to the general public that would be at risk of being destroyed because of a single bad acting CEO. With this scheme, the courts would have a framework for redressing these issues.
there should be a corporate death penalty, where a company is completely disbanded: its assets (yeah, the investor's and bank's too!) are confiscated and put towards public good
This is a patent troll; they don't have any assets. And it's easy to disband a company, namely by getting a legal judgment against it that is larger than its assets. Lawyers like the "owner" of this company can also be held in contempt of court and disbarred.
but lobbyism, nepotism and too much corporate power is obstructing the few good things it *could* reasonably do.
What do you think is going to happen if you allow government to dissolve companies for "moral reasons"? Corporations are going to use "lobbyism, nepotism, and corporate power" to dissolve their competitors.
In different words, what this company is doing is taking advantage of a badly run patent system with bad legal foundations, both governmental problems, and instead of fixing those problems, you want to give government even more and bigger guns to fuck up people's lives even more. The reason we have "lobbyism, nepotism, and corporate power" is because idiots like you keep advocating that we should have more of it.
The USPTO can (and does) award patents for almost anything. The patent examiners aren't experts in every field and if they receive advice that an item, method, or process is unique and non-obvious, they will award a patent. But a patent is just a pretty piece of paper until you try to enforce it. Only then will the courts actually look at the merit of the patent and declare it enforceable or invalid.
That's a nice fiction, but legal reality is different. Legally, if a patent examine grants a patent, it is presumed to be valid, because the assumption is that the patent examiners are experts in the field and that they are doing their job. The presumption of validity means that overturning a patent is quite difficult.
We should change the patent system so that it works more like how you imagine it works, namely that patent examiners only do some simple sanity checks, and that validity only gets established through court challenges. But that's not the patent system we have right now.
EAST BERLIN — East Germany finally admits it is choking in pollution. But it is too poor to clean up. This is the dilemma facing the (East) German Democratic Republic as it celebrates the gala 35th anniversary of its founding this week. A UN report six months ago identified East Germany as the most polluted country in Europe
In the case of Czechoslovakia, the state was told to concentrate on heavy industry. This concentration on heavy industry depleted the country's natural resources at an extraordinarily fast rate and produced an excessive amount of pollution. [...] While pollution was increasing, records and information relating to pollution became increasingly inaccessible to the public. Students who tried to make the public aware of the problems were arrested and detained by the police.[2] Often no records were even kept on the industrial effects on the environment.
There are numerous environmental issues in Russia. Many of the issues have been attributed to policies during the Soviet Union, a time when officials felt that pollution control was an unnecessary hindrance to economic development and industrialization. As a result, 40% of Russia's territory began demonstrating symptoms of significant ecological stress by the 1990s, largely due to a diverse number of environmental issues, including deforestation, energy irresponsibility, pollution, and nuclear waste.[1]
You seriously didn't know this? Socialism and communism have been environmental disasters, while capitalist and free market countries, foremost the US, have done extremely well at protecting the environment and focusing on clean industrial processes.
If you were running VW and all you cared about was money (see the quote above about viewpoint if you've drifted off) wouldn't you do the same?
And VW did do the same. My point is that the VW is run in large part by government representatives and workers, which shows that government representatives and workers are just as greedy and amoral as private investors.
These online auctions are designed to generate proceeds from ill-gotten gains to give back to victims, he stated.
Assets seized under asset forfeiture generally don't go "back to victims", they mostly go back to police departments. It is a corrupt system that is urgently in need of reform.
Police should never benefit from asset forfeiture because it creates a perverse set of incentives; either it should go into the state or federal general fund, or proceeds should go to a pool of charities. The burden of proof for asset forfeiture should be on the government, and the standard should be "beyond a reasonable doubt", just like any other criminal conviction.
What it would take is for all the companies to be more strongly vetted/regulated.
Which part of It can't be fully state owned facilities, because they had an even worse environmental record when they were tried in Europe. did you not understand? Half of Europe was run entirely without capitalism, and the environmental record of that half was abysmal.
However, just because a single player is "partially owned by a government" doesn't make it any more likely to be moral;
No, but what it does tell you is that the government employees involved in VW management didn't care about health, safety, legality, or morality; they simply did what was good for their own careers, namely lying to the public and killing thousands of Americans. And your prescription for better behaved companies is to put more of those selfish greedy fucks in charge?
The entire market is amoral-capitalist
Who do you think becomes a politician or a government regulator? The same kind of greedy, selfish, amoral people that currently run corporations. The difference is, when these people operate in a free market, you have a choice whether to do business with them; when they work in government, they can simply order you to obey them at gunpoint. Neither markets nor governments are themselves "moral" (in fact, morality is subjective); but markets allow you to make your own choices, while governments will impose the greedy and selfish policies of others on you, by force if necessary.
Self destructive actions of an individual negatively affect society. In a simplistic nutshell, your freedom ends when it negatively affects others.
was exactly the principle used to justify restricting emigration from East Germany. And by "restrict emigration", I mean "build the Berlin wall and shoot people trying to leave".
People have a widely recognized right to remove themselves from a society, by external or internal emigration. Once you accept that, you can't make a principled argument based on "harm to society" when people choose to remove themselves by other means, like suicide or drug use.
They have to deal with a Palestinian Government which has IN ITS CHARTER the goal of the total destruction of Israel.
Calling for the "total destruction" of a state isn't the same as calling for the mass murder of its citizens. Nazi Germany was "totally destroyed" by the WWII allies, but Germans went on to live in a better, less violent, more democratic state.
The issue here is whether or not a nation like Israel should be allowed to censor "their enemy" on YouTube and other sites.
Allowed by who? They are a sovereign nation. And as a sovereign nation, they can give Google an alternative: either comply with our censorship or stop doing business in Israel. And Google's options are to negotiate a compromise, comply, or leave.
Instead fight to have them both dissolved and if the US and UN are going to pay for "peace keeping" in the region, then treat it like post-was Germany and just take the damn thing over and treat it as a haven instead and bring peace there.
Why the hell should the US pay for peace keeping in the region? Israel and the mess in the Middle East are the result of screwed up European politics and history.
Yes it is, otherwise you would have no laws at all, and everybody would be free to steal and kill with perfect freedom.
Not at all. Lots of people reject this principle:
In a simplistic nutshell, your freedom ends when it negatively affects others.
but they accept some variant of this principle:
In a simplistic nutshell, your freedom ends when it involves physical violence against others or taking their property against their will.
Just because people accept governmental limits on some actions that "negatively affect others" doesn't mean that they accept limits on any and all actions that "negatively affect others".
VW is highly successful, not just in turning a profit
Their stock price basically just follows the DOW; not exactly a stellar performer. And that's with strong political support, subsidies, and protectionism.
but in managing a company that benefits its workers and the general area where they manufacture
Yes, auto workers in Germany are a special interest group with lots of political clout. Unfortunately, other Germans are paying the price for that. And, of course, all those people who spend day in and day out screwing back seats into cars aren't doing anything more interesting, like building the Internet. I can't figure out why people think that we should have more car manufacturing in the US.
Apparently, the ideal progressive vision of the future of the US is a nation of Ph.D.'s (free education!) working on factory assembly lines (in their defense, I suppose, that's really all a social science or journalism degree is good for).
I am aware that VW do manufacturing outside of Germany but this is additional manufacturing, not instead of.
GM is the second largest employer of factory workers in the US (after Ford), and that's despite their US sales numbers having dropped in half over the last decade. Apparently, a lot of GM's cars are for export. So, I'm not sure in what sense your statement of "additional" vs "instead of" would be true.
I tried to move things from specific to general to help explain the problem
If you persist in calling VW "unfettered entirely amoral capitalism", why don't you tell us what kind of company and management you think would be better.
It can't be fully state owned facilities, because they had an even worse environmental record when they were tried in Europe.
If you look at things in terms of unfettered entirely amoral capitalism Volkswagen had a duty to their shareholders
VW is a partly state owned German company, with strong state and worker involvement in its management, subject to strong government regulation and supervision. So, this is anything but "unfettered entirely amoral capitalism".
In fact, making VW workers happy probably has at least as high priority as making their shareholders happy. But it turns out that workers are just as greedy and selfish as shareholders, and politicians are even more beholden to them than to shareholders.
News flash: companies are trying to sell you things, and most companies will lie as much as they can without losing face or legal reprisal to get you to buy their things. I'm still glad the story is posted, but it's not even remotely surprising.
Except that this is a German company, partly state owned, with German government representatives and workers participating in its management.
It's the kind of model that Democrats and Sanders advocate as a better way of running the economy. Reflect on that.
The fact is that other countries do it, and we should be able to as well.
We are doing it. US government per-student spending on education is already substantially higher in PPP$ than countries like Germany, France, and the UK, and it's comparable in terms of percentage of GDP (around 5%). Because we are spending so much money, 65% of Americans go on to university after high school (compared to 45% in, say, Germany). You're fabricating a crisis or problem that simply doesn't exist.
Just like providing K-through-12 education was dismissed as nutty and "too expensive" when the idea was proposed.
We are discussing university education, not K-12. In addition, you are making this up, since "providing K-12 education" was never "proposed" as an idea (public primary and public secondary education developed separately and over many years).
That's kind of a simplistic take on a complex subject. [...] Personally I think education should be free, period
What is simplistic is your view that education is "too expensive" or that "it should be free, period." or your assumptions about the cost of medical education. The numbers are clear: there is no student loan crisis; almost all graduates have either no debt or no problem paying back their loans. And in the US, 65% of high school graduates go on to college, compared to 45% in places like Germany where education is essentially free. In both places, only about half of those who enter actually graduate, which tells you that many people who enter university shouldn't have gone in the first place.
There is not a shred of evidence that there is any need for more government support of education in the US. If anything, far too many Americans waste their time in college and government spending on college and university education should be cut, along with federal student loan programs.
(In case you're wondering, I worked my way through college and grad school, since my parents couldn't pay for it.)
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Since I grew up in one of those European countries with free education, I can tell you from first hand experience that you are wrong.
Your command of the English language evidently isn't very good, since you seem to be unable to distinguish between "per capita GDP" and "quality of the education system". Your command of economics is non-existent. And your manners, well, I won't comment on those since they are self-evident.
You got it backwards, because that's the current situation: if you get sued for patent infringement, it is your legal and financial responsibility to challenge the validity of the patent. That's why we have patent trolls. What I suggest, namely dropping the presumption of validity, means that the burden of proof shifts to the company that is suing for patent infringement.
Obviously, patent examiners can't keep up. Few people with any skills would want such a boring job to begin with, and patent examiners have no incentive to get it right, since they aren't liable for the consequences of their decisions. So, patent examinations aren't going to improve. And, frankly, I don't see why the public should subsidize multi-decade monopolies to begin with.
Science doesn't support the notion that spending money on preventing climate change is worth it, and no serious policy proposal attempts to achieve that.
China certainly thinks that it is worth displacing more than 1.5 million people for a single hydroelectric dam.
I welcome Pacific Islanders. There is about 3 million people in Micronesia, Polynesia, and Melanesia, and maybe half of them are living on these kinds of marginal atolls. The US has one million legal immigrants per year; this is a drop in the bucket. We should welcome these people with open arms, for their benefit and for ours.
Per capita GDP in the Marshall Islands is $2900, compared to Arkansas's $31000. Arkansas, while near the bottom among US states, is better off even compared to EU members like the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Portugal, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, and Croatia.
No matter how much "schools and infrastructure" we put in place, a pacific atoll simply doesn't have much to support a thriving economy: it is poorly located for physical or data traffic, has few natural resources, and has always been at high risk of natural disasters. The reason much of Micronesia and Polynesia were settled so late in human migration (many places just a few thousand years ago) is because these islands really are not good places to live and people only move there if they don't have a choice.
The per-capita GDP of the Marshall Islands is $2900, very low by world standards, and it has never been a lot better. Arkansas's per capita GDP, by comparison, is $31000. That alone is ample incentive for moving. That is, even a backwater, poor state like Arkansas is still a lot better that the Marshall Islands. While Westerners have some idyllic notions of island paradise, atolls have always been risky and marginal places to live; people moved there because they didn't have any other options, and these nations have always experienced large net emigration as soon as people actually had opportunities to emigrate. In addition, many of these atolls simply are not permanent, but they are temporary features that appear and disappear over thousands of years, quite naturally, regardless of human activity.
Also, to put this issue into perspective, all island nations of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia together make up less than 3 million people, who have always lived under impoverished conditions and always been at high risk from natural disasters. Even if global warming were to displace all of them, that would be comparable to the number displaced by a single major hydroelectric plant, like China's Three River Gorges dam.
At this point, the discussion is also academic because sea levels are going to continue to rise, no matter what policies we adopt, so we better find places to accommodate these people. Given that places like Europe have big demographic problems, Europeans should welcome these populations with open arms. Of course, America would also benefit from their presence and I'm glad they are settling here.
The only reason a corporation can do that is because of monopolistic laws created by government.
For what? Lowering their costs?
Paying CEOs unreasonably large salaries usually correlates with poor performance; that's because you have to pay a CEO a lot of money to run a poorly performing company.
Your scheme is imbecilic.
This is a patent troll; they don't have any assets. And it's easy to disband a company, namely by getting a legal judgment against it that is larger than its assets. Lawyers like the "owner" of this company can also be held in contempt of court and disbarred.
What do you think is going to happen if you allow government to dissolve companies for "moral reasons"? Corporations are going to use "lobbyism, nepotism, and corporate power" to dissolve their competitors.
In different words, what this company is doing is taking advantage of a badly run patent system with bad legal foundations, both governmental problems, and instead of fixing those problems, you want to give government even more and bigger guns to fuck up people's lives even more. The reason we have "lobbyism, nepotism, and corporate power" is because idiots like you keep advocating that we should have more of it.
That's a nice fiction, but legal reality is different. Legally, if a patent examine grants a patent, it is presumed to be valid, because the assumption is that the patent examiners are experts in the field and that they are doing their job. The presumption of validity means that overturning a patent is quite difficult.
We should change the patent system so that it works more like how you imagine it works, namely that patent examiners only do some simple sanity checks, and that validity only gets established through court challenges. But that's not the patent system we have right now.
http://www.csmonitor.com/1984/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You seriously didn't know this? Socialism and communism have been environmental disasters, while capitalist and free market countries, foremost the US, have done extremely well at protecting the environment and focusing on clean industrial processes.
And VW did do the same. My point is that the VW is run in large part by government representatives and workers, which shows that government representatives and workers are just as greedy and amoral as private investors.
Assets seized under asset forfeiture generally don't go "back to victims", they mostly go back to police departments. It is a corrupt system that is urgently in need of reform.
http://www.forfeiturereform.co...
https://www.aclu.org/issues/cr...
Police should never benefit from asset forfeiture because it creates a perverse set of incentives; either it should go into the state or federal general fund, or proceeds should go to a pool of charities. The burden of proof for asset forfeiture should be on the government, and the standard should be "beyond a reasonable doubt", just like any other criminal conviction.
Which part of It can't be fully state owned facilities, because they had an even worse environmental record when they were tried in Europe. did you not understand? Half of Europe was run entirely without capitalism, and the environmental record of that half was abysmal.
No, but what it does tell you is that the government employees involved in VW management didn't care about health, safety, legality, or morality; they simply did what was good for their own careers, namely lying to the public and killing thousands of Americans. And your prescription for better behaved companies is to put more of those selfish greedy fucks in charge?
Who do you think becomes a politician or a government regulator? The same kind of greedy, selfish, amoral people that currently run corporations. The difference is, when these people operate in a free market, you have a choice whether to do business with them; when they work in government, they can simply order you to obey them at gunpoint. Neither markets nor governments are themselves "moral" (in fact, morality is subjective); but markets allow you to make your own choices, while governments will impose the greedy and selfish policies of others on you, by force if necessary.
Incidentally, this principle:
was exactly the principle used to justify restricting emigration from East Germany. And by "restrict emigration", I mean "build the Berlin wall and shoot people trying to leave".
People have a widely recognized right to remove themselves from a society, by external or internal emigration. Once you accept that, you can't make a principled argument based on "harm to society" when people choose to remove themselves by other means, like suicide or drug use.
Calling for the "total destruction" of a state isn't the same as calling for the mass murder of its citizens. Nazi Germany was "totally destroyed" by the WWII allies, but Germans went on to live in a better, less violent, more democratic state.
Allowed by who? They are a sovereign nation. And as a sovereign nation, they can give Google an alternative: either comply with our censorship or stop doing business in Israel. And Google's options are to negotiate a compromise, comply, or leave.
Why the hell should the US pay for peace keeping in the region? Israel and the mess in the Middle East are the result of screwed up European politics and history.
Not at all. Lots of people reject this principle:
but they accept some variant of this principle:
Just because people accept governmental limits on some actions that "negatively affect others" doesn't mean that they accept limits on any and all actions that "negatively affect others".
Their stock price basically just follows the DOW; not exactly a stellar performer. And that's with strong political support, subsidies, and protectionism.
Yes, auto workers in Germany are a special interest group with lots of political clout. Unfortunately, other Germans are paying the price for that. And, of course, all those people who spend day in and day out screwing back seats into cars aren't doing anything more interesting, like building the Internet. I can't figure out why people think that we should have more car manufacturing in the US.
Apparently, the ideal progressive vision of the future of the US is a nation of Ph.D.'s (free education!) working on factory assembly lines (in their defense, I suppose, that's really all a social science or journalism degree is good for).
GM is the second largest employer of factory workers in the US (after Ford), and that's despite their US sales numbers having dropped in half over the last decade. Apparently, a lot of GM's cars are for export. So, I'm not sure in what sense your statement of "additional" vs "instead of" would be true.
If you persist in calling VW "unfettered entirely amoral capitalism", why don't you tell us what kind of company and management you think would be better.
It can't be fully state owned facilities, because they had an even worse environmental record when they were tried in Europe.
VW is a partly state owned German company, with strong state and worker involvement in its management, subject to strong government regulation and supervision. So, this is anything but "unfettered entirely amoral capitalism".
In fact, making VW workers happy probably has at least as high priority as making their shareholders happy. But it turns out that workers are just as greedy and selfish as shareholders, and politicians are even more beholden to them than to shareholders.
Except that this is a German company, partly state owned, with German government representatives and workers participating in its management.
It's the kind of model that Democrats and Sanders advocate as a better way of running the economy. Reflect on that.
We are doing it. US government per-student spending on education is already substantially higher in PPP$ than countries like Germany, France, and the UK, and it's comparable in terms of percentage of GDP (around 5%). Because we are spending so much money, 65% of Americans go on to university after high school (compared to 45% in, say, Germany). You're fabricating a crisis or problem that simply doesn't exist.
We are discussing university education, not K-12. In addition, you are making this up, since "providing K-12 education" was never "proposed" as an idea (public primary and public secondary education developed separately and over many years).
No, I don't. What I do know is that if people pay for stuff with their own money, they make more careful and prudent choices.
I'm quite sure that even many of the people who don't drop out don't benefit from their degree. So, yeah.
What is simplistic is your view that education is "too expensive" or that "it should be free, period." or your assumptions about the cost of medical education. The numbers are clear: there is no student loan crisis; almost all graduates have either no debt or no problem paying back their loans. And in the US, 65% of high school graduates go on to college, compared to 45% in places like Germany where education is essentially free. In both places, only about half of those who enter actually graduate, which tells you that many people who enter university shouldn't have gone in the first place.
There is not a shred of evidence that there is any need for more government support of education in the US. If anything, far too many Americans waste their time in college and government spending on college and university education should be cut, along with federal student loan programs.
(In case you're wondering, I worked my way through college and grad school, since my parents couldn't pay for it.)