Neither of the two papers you refer to show that there is any metabolic difference between HFCS and cane sugar. One paper compares 100% fructose to 100% glucose, the other measures behavioral differences.
Despite what the powerful corn lobby in the US would have you believe
"The powerful corn lobby"? It's the US government that is keeping sugar prices artificially high, subsidizing corn production, and promoting corn. Farm subsidies began with the New Deal in 1933, direct farm subsidies were created under Clinton in 1996, and corn ethanol subsidies under Carter in 1978. Progressives justify this crap with economic, social, and environmental "research". That is "the research" you should be concerned about.
And with the amount that goes into HFCS, drinking soda pop is getting corn in large amounts.
If you drink enough sweetened sodas that any differences between HFCS and sucrose matter to you, you are drinking too much soda.
I mean, forget about the fact that High Fructose Corn Syrup tastes like ass compared to actual cane sugar.
High fructose corn syrup is about half fructose, half glucose... which makes it pretty much the same as cane sugar. Cane sugar needs to be hydrolyzed to fructose and glucose, but that's a fast process. Whatever differences there are between HFCS and can sugar are academic; both are bad for your health.
However, in Australia there is a push to ban bottled water too, because it's just tap water and the bottles are harmful.
Nowhere near as "harmful" as ingesting bacteria growing in your private Britta water filter and your reusable water bottle.
The alternative is paying more for an empty bottle (which you reuse) and basically nothing for water refills.
That's an "alternative" only if your usage of water consists of filling up your water bottle and consuming the water within a day or two. In fact, even tap water is only safe if your plumbing is in good condition and regularly used.
Bottling up water so you can safely store it for months is a lot of work, and you are never going to do as well as a commercial bottling company.
Some municipalities have already banned the sale of bottled water.
Not to mention it's bottled by the same companies like Pepsico and Coke that make soda. So if people keep drinking water these companies have nothing to worry about.
Why would I want those companies to "worry"? They are in the business of safely bottling and efficiently distributing stuff, and they are good at it.
Not only are you flushing your money down the toilet
Well, you are not. While you can get the product (water) itself much more cheaply, the value is in the packaging.
but getting all those empty bottles out of our waste stream would be a great benefit for all of us.
Water bottles previously existed as oil underground, and they return underground in a less toxic form as plastics. Where exactly do you see the "great benefit" eliminating plastic bottles?
At $1 plus a bottle (plus the almost always not recycled plastic bottle), why don't people just get a Britta filter for home or office?
Because bottled water is a standard quantity of packaged, sealed, and tested water. Unlike water you package up yourself with your Britta filter, you can safely store bottled water for a long time (until the "Use By" date). Water you bottle yourself, you can at most keep for six months, and even that only if you do everything right.
It's disturbing no-one blew the whistle on this. So many people, no-one spoke up. Not even anonymously. That's our fault as a society, for not creating an environment where people feel safe to speak their minds.
Volkswagen, like all big German companies, has a substantial participation of workers in management decisions. Volkswagen employees realized that they would hurt their company and their own financial interests and the interests of their friends and coworkers if they caused their US sales to tank by revealing the fraud.
We, as a society, get what we deserve.
You do realize that Volkswagen is a German company and run rather differently from US companies?
Keep in mind that both German state governments and Volkswagen workers have substantial representation on the board, and a lot of input and responsibility for Volkswagen's business decisions. They either knew, or ought to have known, about the emissions fraud.
The fraud should also have been obvious from the fact that these cars are tested in Germany and other countries as well, and that other manufacturers were unable to match VW's emissions even though VW didn't have any known technology to reduce emissions.
Well, that was exactly the point I was trying to make - that's exactly what we have now - when there is a collision in flight the pilot most likely is going to die.
That's a lousy analogy. Whether you fly and take on the risk of collisions with wires, birds, and drones is entirely up to you. If you don't want to take those risks, don't fly where those risks are possible.
This, and the low cost of entry to having a drone, mean it's possible (likely?) for people to operate drones in a reckless manner endangering airborne people.
The only "airborne people" that are being endangered are those that fly in the same airspace as drones.
I think that whatever solution we arrive at needs to take into account that the average person who buys a drone probably can't be relied upon to understand and respect the risk they can be placing upon the other users of the airspace.
I think the average person who buys a drone shouldn't be burdened with having to worry about "airborne people" or all the other nonsense that goes along with manned flight. That's what makes drones so attractive, after all.
Drone rules that make sense to me are:
(1) Over private property, private drone use by the owners has precedence over general aviation. That is, general aviation must stay above a reasonable flight altitude for drones, and drones must stay below it. I don't know what that is, but it may easily be several thousand feet. In effect, we extend the current rule for fixed structures to drones.
(2) Over private property, drone use by others is subject to the same limits as general aviation. That is, drones that fly over someone else's private property should not interfere with the property owner's drones or structures.
(3) In the few cases where public or private entities get exceptional use of low airspace over private property (e.g., for rescue, police, etc.), the aircraft that intrude into the private airspace are responsible for taking the appropriate safety precautions; the property owner has no responsibility.
In fact, in effect, that's roughly what the FAA is tending towards anyway, but they have their altitudes screwed up. Instead of substantially raising the lower altitude limit for general aviation, they try to squeeze in drone traffic below; that needs to change.
With a consistent test, the auto manufacturer can come within, say, 5% of the emission limits. With random tests, the manufacturer has to come in way low to beat the odds on the test.
Well, and that can be taken into account when setting emissions limits. Besides, the effect can be reduced by averaging multiple tests and allowing limited retesting.
If individual unit expenses go up, the price will go up, but that means fewer units will be sold, and the price will almost certainly stabilize at a point where there's less per-unit profit.
Yes, an increase in price will decrease demand, but decreased demand by itself has no effect on per-unit profit. Given that demand for cars appears to be fairly inelastic, the decrease in demand is also likely to be fairly small. Usually, a decrease in demand actually leads to increase in per unit profits; the reason is that people who invest their time and money in a factory to produce something will want a certain return on their investment no matter what, and a large chunk of their investment is independent of the number of units sold, so in order to maintain their desired return when unit sales decrease, they need to increase their profit margin. If they can't sell at that increased per unit profit, they will get out of the business altogether and do something else with their money.
Therefore, imposing costs due to environmental regulation, or anything else, cuts into corporate profits.
As we have just seen, that is wrong. In fact, many companies favor environmental regulations because they increase the cost of entry for competitors.
Further, some things have significant externalities that are not accounted for in the price.
Environmental regulations also have significant costs to society. When you tighten clean air standards or declare a species endangered, that costs someone money, and that money translates into a lower standard of living and lives lost. Right now, the tradeoffs are driven by politics and lobbying: that is, the executive branch optimizes benefits to politically powerful lobbying groups while imposing costs on people without powerful lobbying groups (often, the rest of society). The reason is that the environment is managed by the government as a political resource, not an economic resource. (In fact, governmental environmental regulations often set up perverse incentives, where property owners rather quietly kill endangered species and destroy habitats instead of conserving them.)
The contractual obligations are going to be between the manufacturer and suppliers or manufacturers and customers, and it's to the immediate financial interest of all three of those to disregard externalities. Who's going to sign a contract with whom limiting pollution?
The contracts ought to be between polluters and the owners of the resources being polluted. Organizations like the Nature Conservancy are an example of such an approach. Such private approaches force polluters and environmentalists to sit down at the same table and actually negotiate over costs and benefits, instead of engaging in political lobbying.
If you want a totalitarian economy, mandate that all disputes be settled through binding arbitration.
I didn't say anything about "mandating binding arbitration". And don't get hung up on my mention of arbitration and mediation, it's unrelated to the core issue we are discussing, namely that governmental regulation is inferior to environmental protection through private contracts; I happen to think arbitration is better and more efficient, but if you don't understand why, just substitute your favorite form of dispute resolution between two private parties (civil litigation?).
But whatever you may think of arbitration, by definition, it isn't "totalitarian", because totalitarianism refers to st
Yes, I think we need to integrate drones into the airspace.
"Integrating" already presumes that current users and uses are accommodated largely unchanged. What we need to do instead is rethink the use of airspace from the ground up, taking no existing rights or privileges for granted.
I can think of several ways this can work out: [...] It's not a question of the people in the aircraft being more important than the drone operator. It's that their lives are at risk and his is not.
You leave out the most important and simplest solution: generally giving drones precedence over general aviation. That is, we'd severely restrict where news helicopters, traffic helicopters, air taxis, sight seeing planes, etc. can fly relative to what they could do in the past. Some of these uses of public airspace might simply be eliminated altogether because they are unsafe and unnecessary.
The few remaining cases where conflicts remain between drones and manned flights (e.g., rescue, police work) after eliminating all the current irrational uses of airspace are easily handled by upgrading those aircraft to be drone-strike proof, something they probably have to be anyway.
7. Mandatory death penalty for drone operators who cause a fatal crash due to the presence of their drone in the airspace
Sure, as soon as we institute a mandatory death penalty for any general aviation pilot who causes any fatalities.
You seem to be starting from the assumption that all existing general aviation privileges remain untouched and drones somehow need to be fit into that existing scheme. But if we are going to have central decision making for a rational use of airspace, then the past privileges of general aviation need to be on the table. A rational policy for airspace use may well mean that drones don't have to accommodate all current forms of general aviation, but that general aviation instead become much more restrictive so that drones can be operated without hassles or risk.
In particular, many current uses of general aviation are probably more effectively handled by drones, including observation, mapping, crop dusting, news reporting, etc. Pilots like you, of course, will scream bloody murder, but face it, many of you will lose your jobs anyway because you simply aren't needed anymore.
The Supreme Court agreed with the nationwide "easement" that established regulated air space. [...] I.e., the body explicitly granted the power to interpret the Constitution decided that the FAA was legally granted the authority to regulate national air space. That is the end of the discussion unless you wish to amend the Constitution further.
So? I said nothing that contradicted what you said.
It's pretty clear that with the invention of aircraft, we needed to revise the way we handle real estate.
Yes, and with the invention of drones and the fact that general aviation has become little more than a playground for rich folks, it may well be worth revisiting the question again. For example, we might tighten requirements so that only licensed and insured commercial airlines are permitted overflight, in particular in light of the fact that general aviation is the primary source of conflict with drones, as well as the overwhelming cause of air travel related fatalities.
Go be an armchair lawyer somewhere else.
Learn to read and put up your straw men somewhere else.
If they can be 95% sure that a properly designed vehicle will pass the tests, which seems like high probability, we'd have car designs getting unlucky and being banned for no good reason every year.
Whether it's 95% or 99% or 99.9% is entirely under their control, even when the testing is randomized.
It isn't a matter of government is bad because the market economy works better than central planning. Shall I argue that corporations should be abolished because of the British East India Company?
The British East India Company isn't an example of market economies; the British East India Company was a government-established monopoly.
What's the proper payout for somebody who's dead or dying of inoperable cancer? What monetary amount will remove their pain and suffering and return them to life?
About $9 million right now, according to EPA regulators.
The corporation will presumably pay whatever weregild is set to people who did get cancer, which may or may not be more than what they saved from not preventing the carcinogens from polluting the neighborhood.
You talk as if the two opposing forces here were a clean environment vs corporate profits, but that's nonsense. Corporate profits ultimately depend little on environmental regulations; the costs of such regulations are simply passed on to people who buy these products, who then have fewer resources to spend on their health and well being. Overall, erring on the side of mandating too much safety is just as deadly as mandating too little.
It makes sense to take action against the corporation for releasing the carcinogens in the first place, without demonstrating actual harm to anyone, because that avoids the need for people to start dying before any legal remedies are possible.
Oh, indeed it does. That is what private contractual agreements accomplish. It is not what government regulation accomplishes.
Given that, it makes sense for some central body to establish some sort of standards for how much is emitted, so that corporations know what they can and cannot do, and to protect them from frivolous lawsuits.
The body doesn't have to be "central", any more than economic planning decisions have to be "central". Furthermore, the body doesn't have to be governmental, i.e., subject to politics and lobbying. The problem with making this central and governmental is that politics and lobbying ends up corrupting the process in both directions, for the simple reason that the people who do the lobbying don't have to bear the costs. That is, the EPA both needlessly outlaws things that are harmless and permits things that are harmful due to political lobbying.
At that point, the central body may as well do its own prosecution.
Sure, if you want to live in a totalitarian world, you can centralize all decision making and then you "might as well" just add police and judicial powers to that decision making body too. It creates a miserable, impoverished country, but you "may as well" do it, right?
A much better system is to replace environmental regulations with a system of private interests and private contracts, primarily enforced through mediation and arbitration.
Planes already do the same thing, and have been for a long time.
Planes got limited overflight rights, under the assumption that 500-1000ft above the tallest structure is something that wouldn't impact property owners. Low flying drones certainly do impact property owners, so the same reasoning doesn't apply.
What you want is irrelevant.
Well, fortunately, it isn't, since we live in a democracy.
Public airspace is for all to enjoy. It is not yours.
Yes, "public airspace" over my property is actually mine. Congress established a public easement that allows people to cross that airspace 500 ft above the tallest structure on my property, but that's it. As soon as start using that airspace myself, your easement vanishes and you can't use it anymore.
Operators need to not fly over property that they have not sought and received explicit permission to fly over. Operators need to not fly in heavily populated areas.
Why don't we apply the same rules to private airplanes?
I don't understand what you want. Unlicensed use of drones above 400 ft and close to airports is already prohibited. What benefit is there to imposing additional restrictions?
Furthermore, we may need to rethink priorities. Threats from drones to large commercial airliners and airports are small and fairly easy to deal with. So, the conflict mainly arises between drones and small private aircraft, and between those two, I think it's clear that drones are far more valuable to society than small private planes. So, instead of imposing draconian restrictions on drones, maybe we should strongly restrict the use of small private planes.
When the Constitution was signed, the legal principle was that you owned everything above and below your land ad caelum et ad inferos. I think it's pretty clear that they would have disapproved of the federal government intruding into state and individual property rights the way the FAA is doing.
Furthermore, the airspace described by "the tallest flagpole or the yardarm of the tallest ship in the harbor" is pretty much what we are talking about when talking about drones.
We aren't talking about which party is preferable from a libertarian point of view. We are talking about why the libertarian party appears to be "leaning right". And the reason is simple: a substantial minority of Republicans today pay lip service to some of the principles libertarians favor, namely free markets and individual liberties, while few Democrats do. But in neither party are libertarians in the majority. The actual Republican and Democratic presidents we have had since Reagan (and including Reagan) have been about equally bad: corrupt, war mongering statist.
From a libertarian point of view, both Democrats and Republicans have sunk more towards the bottom of the diamond over the last few decades: http://www.theadvocates.org/qu...
Still, unrelated to libertarianism, I'd like to point out:
The democratic party has been the party of civil liberties since the Dixiecrats ran into the open arms of the GOP.
No, the Democratic party has been the party of civil rights; there's a big difference: civil liberties are negative rights, while civil rights are positive rights. Furthermore, the "civil rights" policies of the Democratic party are just a variation on its previous racist policies, repackaged to appeal more to minority voters. The underlying belief didn't change, namely the belief that blacks are generally incapable of succeeding on their own and need some form of (physical or legal) segregation and special support from the state.
A hearty chunk of the debt incurred during the Obama administration is due to the actions of Bush and his lapdog congresses. (Wars, Medicare Part D, tax cuts when there is a deficit, etc.)
And instead of fixing these issues when he had a chance to and his own lapdog congress, Obama just piled massively on top of them. I used to think that Bush would be one of the worst presidents of my lifetime, but Obama really has turned out to be a credible rival for that position.
Oh, my. I'm uncertain at this point whether I'm being trolled, or whether you're actually convinced that "moral reasoning" can actually generate a complete set of morals _without_ social involvement by other people.
We are discussing this statement:
What Uber is doing is wrong not because it's against the law, but because the laws it breaks are laws that the population in general see as being at least acceptable.
And I'm simply saying: what "the population in general" believes to be right or wrong is irrelevant to my moral judgments. In particular, as an American traveling to the UK, I may decide to respect UK law for practical reasons, but otherwise the majority beliefs of UK voters are completely irrelevant to me.
The fact that the society I grew up in influenced my moral judgments doesn't change that. And, in fact, the way the society I grew up in influenced my moral views wasn't by having me adopt the majority opinion either, but by rejecting that majority opinion in many areas.
The legal, moral, and utilitarian reason for consistent tests is to let manufacturers know what they have to do to pass the test. Inconsistent tests would mean that a manufacturer might get lucky or unlucky
You have a fundamentally wrong understanding of how these tests function. It's not that manufacturers design cars and then some pass and some don't. Instead, manufacturers make rational decisions about risk and benefits. If you randomize the tests (and that's what we are talking about), they are going to design their cars so that they pass with high probability. Most government licensing and regulatory enforcement has a significant component of randomness. It is bizarre to argue that somehow EPA clean air standards must function differently.
And, no, the corporate death penalty should not be a tool of the executive branch. It should be a tool of the judiciary branch.
Since environmental regulations are made by the executive branch and prosecutions happen at the discretion of the executive branch, the corporate death penalty would be primarily a tool of the executive branch to use as a threat; whether the judicial branch gets involved in the final decision is irrelevant.
There has to be some way to aggregate this, and class action lawsuits don't seem to do it effectively.
Seems pretty effective to me. The main problem with civil lawsuits is that government and government regulations protect companies against many such lawsuits.
Direct government regulation and enforcement is much more efficient
Yes, in the same way that central planning is theoretically much more efficient than a market economy; unfortunately, in the real world, it is a lot worse.
and if the charges have to be proven in court there's no more prosecutorial abuse than civil attorney abuse.
Civil attorneys can't abuse their power because they don't have any; all they can do is stand up in court and talk. And they have to demonstrate actual harm, not merely failure to comply with arbitrary regulations.
Regulators and prosecutors, on the other hand, do have power: they can go to companies and say "play ball with the president on policy X or we are going to charge you with violations of regulation Y".
The evidence of history (and present day developing countries) is that an absence of building regulations (or enforcement of them) results in "politically well connected group of businesses" building sub-standard housing on the cheap
In the absence of building codes, you don't need to be politically connected in order to build "sub standard housing"; anybody can build "substandard" housing. So, that part of your statement is bullshit.
which are then crammed with "poorer people"
Yes, of course, poorer people will have houses built to poorer standards. But they will have places to live, which is a lot better than being homeless or being forced to spend an excessive percentage of their income on housing. Most of the "substandard" housing that poor people would be getting without the draconian building codes we have would simply be housing that would have been state of the art a few decades ago anyway.
In fact, the vast majority of people live in "substandard" housing anyway, since old housing is usually grandfathered in. Building codes mostly affect new construction and drive up the cost of new construction. I spent most of my life living in "substandard housing", and chances are you did as well.
who are the ones who suffer the slum conditions and disasters that befall them
You're confusing cause and effect. People live in slums because they can't afford regular, high-cost housing that complies with government regulations. If you go in and try to enforce code in "slums", you don't help the slum dwellers, you simply end up driving them out of their homes again.
So the exact opposite of what you suggest. It's the poorest who benefit most from these regulations.
No, the poorest don't benefit at all. The poorest are simply driven to violating building codes and living in slums. That is, in addition to not getting what the building codes promise, they now also have to deal with the risk and cost of code enforcement, having their homes taken away or condemned by government, and having no legal recourse against builders at all because the only builders they can choose are black market builders.
What the headline isn't telling you is that what they tore down wasn't a retail unit, it was a developer unit. And Apple didn't specifically pull the iFixit app, they canceled the developer account for violations of the developer agreement.
I don't like Apple or their secretiveness, but in this case, it seems to me they are in the right: if you get a developer unit under a special development agreement, you should abide by your agreement.
I don't see any legal, moral, or logical principle that says that these tests have to be exactly reproducible. I mean, heck, the driver's license test itself takes place on real streets and isn't exactly reproducible either.
I disagree, but since we haven't even tried, there is no evidence to support either your or my claim.
No, that's simply a fact: once billions of dollars are involved, you're into the territory where pretty much any kind of criminal conduct becomes worthwhile.
There is no such thing as a cheat-proof test. You can make it more difficult, that's all. Going this way means entering an arms race.
Nonsense. The EPA can buy production automobiles at random and test them by driving them on the street. There is no "arms race".
So let's revoke a few corporate charters and see what happens. We certainly have enough corporations on the list for death penalty crimes.
That is not a power we should hand to the executive branch because it's going to be massively abused by government to bully and blackmail companies. I'm not talking about forcing companies to do things that are for the benefit of society, I'm talking about forcing companies to do things that are in the interests of politicians and administrations.
I argue that we should apply at least the same if not tougher standards to corporations as we already apply to humans. I argue we should jail (temporary shutdown) or execute (revoke corporate charter) them if their crimes justify it.
Quite to the contrary: we should abolish most criminal penalties and prosecutions, in particular at the federal level. They should be replaced by far tougher civil liability standards. Sufficiently stiff civil penalties are just as effective as "corporate death penalties", but much less prone to political or prosecutorial abuse.
I wonder where you get that strange conclusion from that is nowhere in anything I wrote. [...] By all means, set a million non-violent drug-users free and take that military equipment back from the police. All that is not the point here.
You keep arguing for an expansion of governmental powers and penalties as the solution to problems. You happen to have certain preferences about how those massive executive powers are wielded, but guess what, your preferences (or mine) about the details of those powers don't count for shit in the real world. In the real world, if you give government more power to take property or penalize groups, that power will invariably be abused for political and personal purposes. Regulations that you think of being regulations of big corporations end up infringing on everyday liberties of individuals: their ability to bank, to get mortgages, to buy hookahs, to watch pornography, to voice their political opinions. The distinction you're trying to make between regulating corporations and limiting individual liberties doesn't exist in the real world.
Because we need some government, some level of that kind of abuse and corruption is inevitable, but it needs to be kept to a minimum, and the only way of doing that is to keep governmental power to an absolute minimum.
I'm afraid that moral conduct has _always_ been a matter largely of local opinion. Can you find any society or culture, or even people, where it is not?
My moral judgments don't change just because I move from place A to place B. If I don't have any moral objections to Uber in the US, that view doesn't change when I travel to the UK just because a majority of UK voters may disagree with me.
You're saying that certain moral judgments statistically prevail in certain regions. That's true, but it isn't defining of morality, it's merely an sociological phenomenon.
Morals can't be completely derived from axiomatic beliefs.
The axiomatic beliefs of morality are called "values"; that's what people differ on. Moral reasoning connects values with moral judgments in more complex situations, just like mathematical reasoning connects axioms with theorems.
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Neither of the two papers you refer to show that there is any metabolic difference between HFCS and cane sugar. One paper compares 100% fructose to 100% glucose, the other measures behavioral differences.
"The powerful corn lobby"? It's the US government that is keeping sugar prices artificially high, subsidizing corn production, and promoting corn. Farm subsidies began with the New Deal in 1933, direct farm subsidies were created under Clinton in 1996, and corn ethanol subsidies under Carter in 1978. Progressives justify this crap with economic, social, and environmental "research". That is "the research" you should be concerned about.
If you drink enough sweetened sodas that any differences between HFCS and sucrose matter to you, you are drinking too much soda.
High fructose corn syrup is about half fructose, half glucose... which makes it pretty much the same as cane sugar. Cane sugar needs to be hydrolyzed to fructose and glucose, but that's a fast process. Whatever differences there are between HFCS and can sugar are academic; both are bad for your health.
Nowhere near as "harmful" as ingesting bacteria growing in your private Britta water filter and your reusable water bottle.
That's an "alternative" only if your usage of water consists of filling up your water bottle and consuming the water within a day or two. In fact, even tap water is only safe if your plumbing is in good condition and regularly used.
Bottling up water so you can safely store it for months is a lot of work, and you are never going to do as well as a commercial bottling company.
Some municipalities are run by idiots.
Why would I want those companies to "worry"? They are in the business of safely bottling and efficiently distributing stuff, and they are good at it.
Well, you are not. While you can get the product (water) itself much more cheaply, the value is in the packaging.
Water bottles previously existed as oil underground, and they return underground in a less toxic form as plastics. Where exactly do you see the "great benefit" eliminating plastic bottles?
Because bottled water is a standard quantity of packaged, sealed, and tested water. Unlike water you package up yourself with your Britta filter, you can safely store bottled water for a long time (until the "Use By" date). Water you bottle yourself, you can at most keep for six months, and even that only if you do everything right.
Yes, even the US government recommends bottled water for that reason: http://www.ready.gov/water
Volkswagen, like all big German companies, has a substantial participation of workers in management decisions. Volkswagen employees realized that they would hurt their company and their own financial interests and the interests of their friends and coworkers if they caused their US sales to tank by revealing the fraud.
You do realize that Volkswagen is a German company and run rather differently from US companies?
Keep in mind that both German state governments and Volkswagen workers have substantial representation on the board, and a lot of input and responsibility for Volkswagen's business decisions. They either knew, or ought to have known, about the emissions fraud.
The fraud should also have been obvious from the fact that these cars are tested in Germany and other countries as well, and that other manufacturers were unable to match VW's emissions even though VW didn't have any known technology to reduce emissions.
That's a lousy analogy. Whether you fly and take on the risk of collisions with wires, birds, and drones is entirely up to you. If you don't want to take those risks, don't fly where those risks are possible.
The only "airborne people" that are being endangered are those that fly in the same airspace as drones.
I think the average person who buys a drone shouldn't be burdened with having to worry about "airborne people" or all the other nonsense that goes along with manned flight. That's what makes drones so attractive, after all.
Drone rules that make sense to me are:
(1) Over private property, private drone use by the owners has precedence over general aviation. That is, general aviation must stay above a reasonable flight altitude for drones, and drones must stay below it. I don't know what that is, but it may easily be several thousand feet. In effect, we extend the current rule for fixed structures to drones.
(2) Over private property, drone use by others is subject to the same limits as general aviation. That is, drones that fly over someone else's private property should not interfere with the property owner's drones or structures.
(3) In the few cases where public or private entities get exceptional use of low airspace over private property (e.g., for rescue, police, etc.), the aircraft that intrude into the private airspace are responsible for taking the appropriate safety precautions; the property owner has no responsibility.
In fact, in effect, that's roughly what the FAA is tending towards anyway, but they have their altitudes screwed up. Instead of substantially raising the lower altitude limit for general aviation, they try to squeeze in drone traffic below; that needs to change.
Well, and that can be taken into account when setting emissions limits. Besides, the effect can be reduced by averaging multiple tests and allowing limited retesting.
Yes, an increase in price will decrease demand, but decreased demand by itself has no effect on per-unit profit. Given that demand for cars appears to be fairly inelastic, the decrease in demand is also likely to be fairly small. Usually, a decrease in demand actually leads to increase in per unit profits; the reason is that people who invest their time and money in a factory to produce something will want a certain return on their investment no matter what, and a large chunk of their investment is independent of the number of units sold, so in order to maintain their desired return when unit sales decrease, they need to increase their profit margin. If they can't sell at that increased per unit profit, they will get out of the business altogether and do something else with their money.
As we have just seen, that is wrong. In fact, many companies favor environmental regulations because they increase the cost of entry for competitors.
Environmental regulations also have significant costs to society. When you tighten clean air standards or declare a species endangered, that costs someone money, and that money translates into a lower standard of living and lives lost. Right now, the tradeoffs are driven by politics and lobbying: that is, the executive branch optimizes benefits to politically powerful lobbying groups while imposing costs on people without powerful lobbying groups (often, the rest of society). The reason is that the environment is managed by the government as a political resource, not an economic resource. (In fact, governmental environmental regulations often set up perverse incentives, where property owners rather quietly kill endangered species and destroy habitats instead of conserving them.)
The contracts ought to be between polluters and the owners of the resources being polluted. Organizations like the Nature Conservancy are an example of such an approach. Such private approaches force polluters and environmentalists to sit down at the same table and actually negotiate over costs and benefits, instead of engaging in political lobbying.
I didn't say anything about "mandating binding arbitration". And don't get hung up on my mention of arbitration and mediation, it's unrelated to the core issue we are discussing, namely that governmental regulation is inferior to environmental protection through private contracts; I happen to think arbitration is better and more efficient, but if you don't understand why, just substitute your favorite form of dispute resolution between two private parties (civil litigation?).
But whatever you may think of arbitration, by definition, it isn't "totalitarian", because totalitarianism refers to st
"Integrating" already presumes that current users and uses are accommodated largely unchanged. What we need to do instead is rethink the use of airspace from the ground up, taking no existing rights or privileges for granted.
You leave out the most important and simplest solution: generally giving drones precedence over general aviation. That is, we'd severely restrict where news helicopters, traffic helicopters, air taxis, sight seeing planes, etc. can fly relative to what they could do in the past. Some of these uses of public airspace might simply be eliminated altogether because they are unsafe and unnecessary.
The few remaining cases where conflicts remain between drones and manned flights (e.g., rescue, police work) after eliminating all the current irrational uses of airspace are easily handled by upgrading those aircraft to be drone-strike proof, something they probably have to be anyway.
Sure, as soon as we institute a mandatory death penalty for any general aviation pilot who causes any fatalities.
You seem to be starting from the assumption that all existing general aviation privileges remain untouched and drones somehow need to be fit into that existing scheme. But if we are going to have central decision making for a rational use of airspace, then the past privileges of general aviation need to be on the table. A rational policy for airspace use may well mean that drones don't have to accommodate all current forms of general aviation, but that general aviation instead become much more restrictive so that drones can be operated without hassles or risk.
In particular, many current uses of general aviation are probably more effectively handled by drones, including observation, mapping, crop dusting, news reporting, etc. Pilots like you, of course, will scream bloody murder, but face it, many of you will lose your jobs anyway because you simply aren't needed anymore.
So? I said nothing that contradicted what you said.
Yes, and with the invention of drones and the fact that general aviation has become little more than a playground for rich folks, it may well be worth revisiting the question again. For example, we might tighten requirements so that only licensed and insured commercial airlines are permitted overflight, in particular in light of the fact that general aviation is the primary source of conflict with drones, as well as the overwhelming cause of air travel related fatalities.
Learn to read and put up your straw men somewhere else.
Whether it's 95% or 99% or 99.9% is entirely under their control, even when the testing is randomized.
The British East India Company isn't an example of market economies; the British East India Company was a government-established monopoly.
About $9 million right now, according to EPA regulators.
You talk as if the two opposing forces here were a clean environment vs corporate profits, but that's nonsense. Corporate profits ultimately depend little on environmental regulations; the costs of such regulations are simply passed on to people who buy these products, who then have fewer resources to spend on their health and well being. Overall, erring on the side of mandating too much safety is just as deadly as mandating too little.
Oh, indeed it does. That is what private contractual agreements accomplish. It is not what government regulation accomplishes.
The body doesn't have to be "central", any more than economic planning decisions have to be "central". Furthermore, the body doesn't have to be governmental, i.e., subject to politics and lobbying. The problem with making this central and governmental is that politics and lobbying ends up corrupting the process in both directions, for the simple reason that the people who do the lobbying don't have to bear the costs. That is, the EPA both needlessly outlaws things that are harmless and permits things that are harmful due to political lobbying.
Sure, if you want to live in a totalitarian world, you can centralize all decision making and then you "might as well" just add police and judicial powers to that decision making body too. It creates a miserable, impoverished country, but you "may as well" do it, right?
A much better system is to replace environmental regulations with a system of private interests and private contracts, primarily enforced through mediation and arbitration.
Planes got limited overflight rights, under the assumption that 500-1000ft above the tallest structure is something that wouldn't impact property owners. Low flying drones certainly do impact property owners, so the same reasoning doesn't apply.
Well, fortunately, it isn't, since we live in a democracy.
Yes, "public airspace" over my property is actually mine. Congress established a public easement that allows people to cross that airspace 500 ft above the tallest structure on my property, but that's it. As soon as start using that airspace myself, your easement vanishes and you can't use it anymore.
Why don't we apply the same rules to private airplanes?
I don't understand what you want. Unlicensed use of drones above 400 ft and close to airports is already prohibited. What benefit is there to imposing additional restrictions?
Furthermore, we may need to rethink priorities. Threats from drones to large commercial airliners and airports are small and fairly easy to deal with. So, the conflict mainly arises between drones and small private aircraft, and between those two, I think it's clear that drones are far more valuable to society than small private planes. So, instead of imposing draconian restrictions on drones, maybe we should strongly restrict the use of small private planes.
When the Constitution was signed, the legal principle was that you owned everything above and below your land ad caelum et ad inferos. I think it's pretty clear that they would have disapproved of the federal government intruding into state and individual property rights the way the FAA is doing.
Furthermore, the airspace described by "the tallest flagpole or the yardarm of the tallest ship in the harbor" is pretty much what we are talking about when talking about drones.
We aren't talking about which party is preferable from a libertarian point of view. We are talking about why the libertarian party appears to be "leaning right". And the reason is simple: a substantial minority of Republicans today pay lip service to some of the principles libertarians favor, namely free markets and individual liberties, while few Democrats do. But in neither party are libertarians in the majority. The actual Republican and Democratic presidents we have had since Reagan (and including Reagan) have been about equally bad: corrupt, war mongering statist.
From a libertarian point of view, both Democrats and Republicans have sunk more towards the bottom of the diamond over the last few decades: http://www.theadvocates.org/qu...
Still, unrelated to libertarianism, I'd like to point out:
No, the Democratic party has been the party of civil rights; there's a big difference: civil liberties are negative rights, while civil rights are positive rights. Furthermore, the "civil rights" policies of the Democratic party are just a variation on its previous racist policies, repackaged to appeal more to minority voters. The underlying belief didn't change, namely the belief that blacks are generally incapable of succeeding on their own and need some form of (physical or legal) segregation and special support from the state.
And instead of fixing these issues when he had a chance to and his own lapdog congress, Obama just piled massively on top of them. I used to think that Bush would be one of the worst presidents of my lifetime, but Obama really has turned out to be a credible rival for that position.
We are discussing this statement:
And I'm simply saying: what "the population in general" believes to be right or wrong is irrelevant to my moral judgments. In particular, as an American traveling to the UK, I may decide to respect UK law for practical reasons, but otherwise the majority beliefs of UK voters are completely irrelevant to me.
The fact that the society I grew up in influenced my moral judgments doesn't change that. And, in fact, the way the society I grew up in influenced my moral views wasn't by having me adopt the majority opinion either, but by rejecting that majority opinion in many areas.
You have a fundamentally wrong understanding of how these tests function. It's not that manufacturers design cars and then some pass and some don't. Instead, manufacturers make rational decisions about risk and benefits. If you randomize the tests (and that's what we are talking about), they are going to design their cars so that they pass with high probability. Most government licensing and regulatory enforcement has a significant component of randomness. It is bizarre to argue that somehow EPA clean air standards must function differently.
Since environmental regulations are made by the executive branch and prosecutions happen at the discretion of the executive branch, the corporate death penalty would be primarily a tool of the executive branch to use as a threat; whether the judicial branch gets involved in the final decision is irrelevant.
Seems pretty effective to me. The main problem with civil lawsuits is that government and government regulations protect companies against many such lawsuits.
Yes, in the same way that central planning is theoretically much more efficient than a market economy; unfortunately, in the real world, it is a lot worse.
Civil attorneys can't abuse their power because they don't have any; all they can do is stand up in court and talk. And they have to demonstrate actual harm, not merely failure to comply with arbitrary regulations.
Regulators and prosecutors, on the other hand, do have power: they can go to companies and say "play ball with the president on policy X or we are going to charge you with violations of regulation Y".
In the absence of building codes, you don't need to be politically connected in order to build "sub standard housing"; anybody can build "substandard" housing. So, that part of your statement is bullshit.
Yes, of course, poorer people will have houses built to poorer standards. But they will have places to live, which is a lot better than being homeless or being forced to spend an excessive percentage of their income on housing. Most of the "substandard" housing that poor people would be getting without the draconian building codes we have would simply be housing that would have been state of the art a few decades ago anyway.
In fact, the vast majority of people live in "substandard" housing anyway, since old housing is usually grandfathered in. Building codes mostly affect new construction and drive up the cost of new construction. I spent most of my life living in "substandard housing", and chances are you did as well.
You're confusing cause and effect. People live in slums because they can't afford regular, high-cost housing that complies with government regulations. If you go in and try to enforce code in "slums", you don't help the slum dwellers, you simply end up driving them out of their homes again.
No, the poorest don't benefit at all. The poorest are simply driven to violating building codes and living in slums. That is, in addition to not getting what the building codes promise, they now also have to deal with the risk and cost of code enforcement, having their homes taken away or condemned by government, and having no legal recourse against builders at all because the only builders they can choose are black market builders.
What the headline isn't telling you is that what they tore down wasn't a retail unit, it was a developer unit. And Apple didn't specifically pull the iFixit app, they canceled the developer account for violations of the developer agreement.
I don't like Apple or their secretiveness, but in this case, it seems to me they are in the right: if you get a developer unit under a special development agreement, you should abide by your agreement.
I don't see any legal, moral, or logical principle that says that these tests have to be exactly reproducible. I mean, heck, the driver's license test itself takes place on real streets and isn't exactly reproducible either.
No, that's simply a fact: once billions of dollars are involved, you're into the territory where pretty much any kind of criminal conduct becomes worthwhile.
Nonsense. The EPA can buy production automobiles at random and test them by driving them on the street. There is no "arms race".
That is not a power we should hand to the executive branch because it's going to be massively abused by government to bully and blackmail companies. I'm not talking about forcing companies to do things that are for the benefit of society, I'm talking about forcing companies to do things that are in the interests of politicians and administrations.
Quite to the contrary: we should abolish most criminal penalties and prosecutions, in particular at the federal level. They should be replaced by far tougher civil liability standards. Sufficiently stiff civil penalties are just as effective as "corporate death penalties", but much less prone to political or prosecutorial abuse.
You keep arguing for an expansion of governmental powers and penalties as the solution to problems. You happen to have certain preferences about how those massive executive powers are wielded, but guess what, your preferences (or mine) about the details of those powers don't count for shit in the real world. In the real world, if you give government more power to take property or penalize groups, that power will invariably be abused for political and personal purposes. Regulations that you think of being regulations of big corporations end up infringing on everyday liberties of individuals: their ability to bank, to get mortgages, to buy hookahs, to watch pornography, to voice their political opinions. The distinction you're trying to make between regulating corporations and limiting individual liberties doesn't exist in the real world.
Because we need some government, some level of that kind of abuse and corruption is inevitable, but it needs to be kept to a minimum, and the only way of doing that is to keep governmental power to an absolute minimum.
My moral judgments don't change just because I move from place A to place B. If I don't have any moral objections to Uber in the US, that view doesn't change when I travel to the UK just because a majority of UK voters may disagree with me.
You're saying that certain moral judgments statistically prevail in certain regions. That's true, but it isn't defining of morality, it's merely an sociological phenomenon.
The axiomatic beliefs of morality are called "values"; that's what people differ on. Moral reasoning connects values with moral judgments in more complex situations, just like mathematical reasoning connects axioms with theorems.