What does Assange's personnality, and your opinion of it, matter ? That's Ad Hominem put to the extreme. What about his work ?
It's the man, not his work, who is seeking asylum.
the work is more important than who's doing it
Actually, even as far as the work itself is concerned, since Assange selects what information he presents, there is a degree of judgment and choice involved. If Assange is prone to making choices based on personal interests rather than objective truth, then even the value of his work is questionable. That is why considerations about the person ("ad hominem") are relevant not just to his asylum request, but also to his work.
The real answer is to make the original records easily viewable on an official government web site, but mandate that "CHARGES DROPPED" or "NOT GUILTY" or some other exculpatory language clearly appear whenever they are viewed.
Tort law should be able to handle that. That is, I have no problem with people being able to recover damages from Google or newspapers if the text they present doesn't make it crystal clear that the person in question was exonerated.
Also helpful: fewer laws and fewer police. Every action and inaction doesn't need to be regulated and policed by petty government officials. Save the policing for theft and violence and let us otherwise live our lives as we choose.
Yes, this. Sadly, as these discussions demonstrate, the knee jerk reaction of many people to the negative consequences of bad laws is to pass even more bad laws.
Mr "Sorry but my religion won't let me hire a gay" has a problem. Mr "Sorry but you were once arrested, I can't give you a job." should also have a problem.
As a gay man, I'd rather hear "sorry but my religion won't let me hire a gay[sic]" instead of some weird excuse or, worse yet, working for a homophobic employer.
Still want arrest records to be a matter of public record? Better also have laws prohibiting people from refusing a former arrestee a job, just like they do for gays and racial minorities.
Those laws are bullshit, as is the suggestion that arrest records should be secret.
A much better solution is to get rid of the laws that make it matter what corporate HR departments think in the first place, and that induce corporate HR departments to be overly cautious. That is, let's get rid of laws that make it hard to start your private business, namely a ton of licensing and certification requirements, and a ton of tax laws and rules. And for the latter, let's make it much easier for corporations to hire and fire people without having to fear bogus lawsuits. I.e., let's do the exact opposite of what you suggest.
No, they are not. They are going after Google, which isn't putting these reports online, instead of going after the people who actually do put them online.
Why do arrest records have to be public?
Because we don't want police to be able to operate without public scrutiny.
These show not just convictions, but -arrests-, and if someone is -arrested- for anything, even if it is a case of a night in the drunk tank, no job.
Well, why are corporations ("HR department") so reluctant to hire? Because hiring and firing have become so enormously costly that you can't just hire someone on a whim. And because corporations face tons of liability when one of their employees does something bad or stupid. And why does getting hired by a corporation matter anyway? Because working for yourself has become a nightmare of regulations, taxation, liabilities, and paperwork.
So, after screwing up hiring, firing, and small business, you are saying: why not screw things up a little more? You're saying that we might as well get rid of free speech and government transparency as well to make up for the problems caused by previous government interference.
Google provides search results, not reports. If this report is truly of no public interest anymore, the court should order the people who put the report online to take it offline. The court knows full well that if they ordered the original reports in newspapers and in public records offline, there would be a storm of protest, so they go after Google.
Like all such arrangements, you're paying to transfer the risk. What's the risk? That the lights don't work as advertised and that a new, better technology is around five years from now.
I addition, the reason municipalities can get money so cheaply is because their interest rates don't reflect actual risk. Given that, their ability to take on debt should be (and has been) limited.
The prudent and right thing to do for government projects is to treat every project as if it borrowed money at commercial rates over its entire lifetime.
(1) Arbitrarily describe some weird experimental conditions by some grand sounding, general, important term (e.g., "moral judgment")
(2) Vary experimental conditions randomly.
(3) After about 100 experiments, you will find one that gives an effect with statistical significance at the 1% level. Chances are better if you pick experimental conditions involving psychoactive drugs and/or pain.
(4) Publish your results and bask in the accolades of your peers and the press coverage.
I suggest we program all robots with some type of rules that prevent this from happening. Some 'laws', if you will that prevent them from hurting people.
Yeah, and that's going to be just about as effective as laws are in real life in preventing murder.
You seem to have this unwarranted trust in human nature. 1 Where will they go? to some unknown upstart? That goes counter the fact that people in general hate change
Seems to me human nature is doing just fine: people minimize risk, and that includes not switching haphazardly.
The problem seems to be with your dislike of rational behavior.
My comment was a sarcastic reply to Joffrin and his ilk. In any case, don't kid yourself, this isn't just a "current of thought". Intellectuals wield vast powers in France, even more so than in other European countries. Furthermore, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, cultural chauvinism, and leftist attitudes are widespread and powerful currents in French politics.
Sir Tim Hurt ultimately doesn't care; he doesn't have to prove anything to anyone anymore, and I'm sure he's financially secure enough not to worry about it.
The whole thing mostly hurts University College London, who are losing a skilled and accomplished scientist.
Given that Joffrin is actually a French leftist displaying the typical traits of that class of people, including knee-jerk anti-Americanism, it's not a lazy stereotype. Of course, you'd actually have to understand something about European intellectual life to recognize that. Given that I'm not obese and European by birth, your comment is just nonsensical.
If you knew a bit more about France, you'd recognize Joffrin's diatribe as the typical contempt the French (and European) intellectual left holds for the US; it doesn't matter what we do, we can never satisfy them. Historically, cheese and the Statue of Liberty is less important to me than the fact that the French killed a lot of my ancestors over religion. Despite all the talk of "liberty", the French have a decidedly violent and totalitarian streak, and Joffrin is very much part of that tradition. Contempt and ridicule what buffoons like Joffrin deserve.
As for spying, of course our spy agencies should attempt to spy on foreign leaders; that's what we pay them for. And I it doesn't bother me if the French try the same thing.
Oh, but surely, Obama, our fearless defender of all that is good and just, Constitutional scholar and gentleman, would never, ever resort to such methods!
Contempt. There is no other word to define the attitude of the US government towards its allies,
Oh, you poor dears! Of course, we the American people, hold French culture and the French people in the highest regard, you cute little cheese eating surrender monkeys!
Incidentally, the example of feudal lords destroys your argument. If your view of feudalism was right, then feudalism should have arisen out of increasing wealth concentration in a free market, and then been destroyed through government action.
In fact, the opposite happened. Feudalism started out as a military defense pact, an oppressive arrangement entered into out of necessity by people whose lives were threatened by external invaders. Feudalism ended when the threat was gone and it was too inefficient a system to compete with the emerging free markets.
You know, tautologies doesn't make for good definitions.
A tautology is "saying of the same thing twice in different words". So, yes, all definitions are tautologies.
It can well make sense to you but it is, nevertheless, tautological
Actually, I defined the value to society as "the aggregate of the value to individuals" and the value to individuals as "how much they are willing to pay for it relative to other things". Note how neither of those definitions talks about "capital" or "wealth" or "interest"? Connecting my definitions of "value" with "capital" and "interest" is not at all a tautology.
Furthermore, if you don't like my definition, you are welcome to state your own and show that it is logically consistent.
Which is why things like rent that cause wealth-concentration are not part of a free market, they break the market and make it unfree.
No, what breaks the free market is coercion. You are proposing destroying the free market because you say that it will eventually break anyway due to wealth concentration. Even if your assumptions about wealth concentration were true (they are not), that would be an absurd argument.
You're assuming everyone starts off with an equal distribution of assets and inequalities only arise due to differences in behavior thereafter. The point is that rent exacerbates such differences, so that two people who work and consume exactly the same amount will gain or lose different amounts based only on who had more or less to start with.
No, I'm assuming no such thing. Obviously, if you're born rich, you start out with more money. But contrary to what you believe, those differences don't get amplified over time, they diminish over time, both in theory and in practice.
There is exactly enough land in this market to support two people. The only currency in question is food, grown on that land. One of them owns 3/4 of it, while another only owns 1/4 of it. The one who only owns 1/4 of it thus doesn't have enough land to survive, and has to borrow land from the other one.
In that situation, no trade can ever take place, and the extra 1/4 land that one person holds is worthless. Your example is the economic equivalent of dividing by zero. Nor would the situation change if you said the two people lived under socialism, communism, theocracy, or third position economics.
I think what you are trying to get at is that markets can misallocate resources such that people starve in the absence of charity. Yes, they can. So can any other realistic economic system. Free markets do it a lot less.
Any way you slice it, it becomes impossible for the two people to work the same, consume the same, and profit the same from that identical behavior, just because one of them owned more than the other at the outset.
Yes, people who have identical behavior can have unequal outcomes, depending on inheritance, gifts, investments, and sheer luck. So what?
You seem to want an economic system that allocates resources optimally and also guarantees that equal work is rewarded equally. Such a system would be intrinsically totalitarian, because the only way to accomplish those goals is to have total state control over the economy, and hence over the people. And even if you are willing to accept totalitarianism, nobody knows how to create such a system, and all attempts at doing so at a large scale have been dismal failures.
A minimum wage job isn't a job that's only worth minimum wage to the employer, it's a job that the employer can restaff easily. Raise the minimum wage, and a few jobs will go away, but other minimum wage employees will make more money.
Let's say you raise the minimum wage from $8 to $12. There are workers that are worth $8/h and there are workers that are worth $12/h. So what's going to happen? Exactly what you say: the employer is going to restaff; he doesn't even have to fire anybody, because minimum wage workers have a nearly 100% turnover year over year. So, he lets the $8/h workers go and hires $12/h workers for the same jobs.
Congratulations, the category "minimum wage employees" now makes more money, the statistics look shiny, but the original workers, the ones that minimum wage was supposed to help, are still screwed.
Far from presenting an argument for minimum wage, you just presented one against minimum wage.
They didn't care about the price of housing - they already owned their home so would not be affected outside of taxes.... So one pushes these "life style" ordinances (no lot can be less than 1/2 acre, etc) and the prices sky rocket
Many of them don't realize that they don't care about the price of housing, but that's effectively what they are doing when they are "preserving the character of the neighborhood" and "making sure infrastructure is sufficient to serve all residents" etc.
Obviously, the arguments in Loundon County are going to be different from SF or NYC. But the arguments against micro apartments in SF and NYC has been that they are such lousy places to live that we need to protect the poor from such places being built by evil landlords.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the man, not his work, who is seeking asylum.
Actually, even as far as the work itself is concerned, since Assange selects what information he presents, there is a degree of judgment and choice involved. If Assange is prone to making choices based on personal interests rather than objective truth, then even the value of his work is questionable. That is why considerations about the person ("ad hominem") are relevant not just to his asylum request, but also to his work.
Tort law should be able to handle that. That is, I have no problem with people being able to recover damages from Google or newspapers if the text they present doesn't make it crystal clear that the person in question was exonerated.
Yes, this. Sadly, as these discussions demonstrate, the knee jerk reaction of many people to the negative consequences of bad laws is to pass even more bad laws.
As a gay man, I'd rather hear "sorry but my religion won't let me hire a gay[sic]" instead of some weird excuse or, worse yet, working for a homophobic employer.
Those laws are bullshit, as is the suggestion that arrest records should be secret.
A much better solution is to get rid of the laws that make it matter what corporate HR departments think in the first place, and that induce corporate HR departments to be overly cautious. That is, let's get rid of laws that make it hard to start your private business, namely a ton of licensing and certification requirements, and a ton of tax laws and rules. And for the latter, let's make it much easier for corporations to hire and fire people without having to fear bogus lawsuits. I.e., let's do the exact opposite of what you suggest.
No, they are not. They are going after Google, which isn't putting these reports online, instead of going after the people who actually do put them online.
Because we don't want police to be able to operate without public scrutiny.
Well, why are corporations ("HR department") so reluctant to hire? Because hiring and firing have become so enormously costly that you can't just hire someone on a whim. And because corporations face tons of liability when one of their employees does something bad or stupid. And why does getting hired by a corporation matter anyway? Because working for yourself has become a nightmare of regulations, taxation, liabilities, and paperwork.
So, after screwing up hiring, firing, and small business, you are saying: why not screw things up a little more? You're saying that we might as well get rid of free speech and government transparency as well to make up for the problems caused by previous government interference.
Google provides search results, not reports. If this report is truly of no public interest anymore, the court should order the people who put the report online to take it offline. The court knows full well that if they ordered the original reports in newspapers and in public records offline, there would be a storm of protest, so they go after Google.
Like all such arrangements, you're paying to transfer the risk. What's the risk? That the lights don't work as advertised and that a new, better technology is around five years from now.
I addition, the reason municipalities can get money so cheaply is because their interest rates don't reflect actual risk. Given that, their ability to take on debt should be (and has been) limited.
The prudent and right thing to do for government projects is to treat every project as if it borrowed money at commercial rates over its entire lifetime.
(1) Arbitrarily describe some weird experimental conditions by some grand sounding, general, important term (e.g., "moral judgment")
(2) Vary experimental conditions randomly.
(3) After about 100 experiments, you will find one that gives an effect with statistical significance at the 1% level. Chances are better if you pick experimental conditions involving psychoactive drugs and/or pain.
(4) Publish your results and bask in the accolades of your peers and the press coverage.
Yeah, and that's going to be just about as effective as laws are in real life in preventing murder.
Seems to me human nature is doing just fine: people minimize risk, and that includes not switching haphazardly.
The problem seems to be with your dislike of rational behavior.
The fact that you starve unless you work doesn't mean that you are anybody's slave.
Coercion is the threat of force by one person against another.
Nobody has any responsibility to protect you from undesirable situations.
My comment was a sarcastic reply to Joffrin and his ilk. In any case, don't kid yourself, this isn't just a "current of thought". Intellectuals wield vast powers in France, even more so than in other European countries. Furthermore, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, cultural chauvinism, and leftist attitudes are widespread and powerful currents in French politics.
Typo... Hunt...
Sir Tim Hurt ultimately doesn't care; he doesn't have to prove anything to anyone anymore, and I'm sure he's financially secure enough not to worry about it.
The whole thing mostly hurts University College London, who are losing a skilled and accomplished scientist.
Irrational fear?
Police-style self-righteous indignation and privilege?
Given that Joffrin is actually a French leftist displaying the typical traits of that class of people, including knee-jerk anti-Americanism, it's not a lazy stereotype. Of course, you'd actually have to understand something about European intellectual life to recognize that. Given that I'm not obese and European by birth, your comment is just nonsensical.
If you knew a bit more about France, you'd recognize Joffrin's diatribe as the typical contempt the French (and European) intellectual left holds for the US; it doesn't matter what we do, we can never satisfy them. Historically, cheese and the Statue of Liberty is less important to me than the fact that the French killed a lot of my ancestors over religion. Despite all the talk of "liberty", the French have a decidedly violent and totalitarian streak, and Joffrin is very much part of that tradition. Contempt and ridicule what buffoons like Joffrin deserve.
As for spying, of course our spy agencies should attempt to spy on foreign leaders; that's what we pay them for. And I it doesn't bother me if the French try the same thing.
Oh, but surely, Obama, our fearless defender of all that is good and just, Constitutional scholar and gentleman, would never, ever resort to such methods!
Oh, you poor dears! Of course, we the American people, hold French culture and the French people in the highest regard, you cute little cheese eating surrender monkeys!
Incidentally, the example of feudal lords destroys your argument. If your view of feudalism was right, then feudalism should have arisen out of increasing wealth concentration in a free market, and then been destroyed through government action.
In fact, the opposite happened. Feudalism started out as a military defense pact, an oppressive arrangement entered into out of necessity by people whose lives were threatened by external invaders. Feudalism ended when the threat was gone and it was too inefficient a system to compete with the emerging free markets.
A tautology is "saying of the same thing twice in different words". So, yes, all definitions are tautologies.
Actually, I defined the value to society as "the aggregate of the value to individuals" and the value to individuals as "how much they are willing to pay for it relative to other things". Note how neither of those definitions talks about "capital" or "wealth" or "interest"? Connecting my definitions of "value" with "capital" and "interest" is not at all a tautology.
Furthermore, if you don't like my definition, you are welcome to state your own and show that it is logically consistent.
No, what breaks the free market is coercion. You are proposing destroying the free market because you say that it will eventually break anyway due to wealth concentration. Even if your assumptions about wealth concentration were true (they are not), that would be an absurd argument.
No, I'm assuming no such thing. Obviously, if you're born rich, you start out with more money. But contrary to what you believe, those differences don't get amplified over time, they diminish over time, both in theory and in practice.
In that situation, no trade can ever take place, and the extra 1/4 land that one person holds is worthless. Your example is the economic equivalent of dividing by zero. Nor would the situation change if you said the two people lived under socialism, communism, theocracy, or third position economics.
I think what you are trying to get at is that markets can misallocate resources such that people starve in the absence of charity. Yes, they can. So can any other realistic economic system. Free markets do it a lot less.
Yes, people who have identical behavior can have unequal outcomes, depending on inheritance, gifts, investments, and sheer luck. So what?
You seem to want an economic system that allocates resources optimally and also guarantees that equal work is rewarded equally. Such a system would be intrinsically totalitarian, because the only way to accomplish those goals is to have total state control over the economy, and hence over the people. And even if you are willing to accept totalitarianism, nobody knows how to create such a system, and all attempts at doing so at a large scale have been dismal failures.
Let's say you raise the minimum wage from $8 to $12. There are workers that are worth $8/h and there are workers that are worth $12/h. So what's going to happen? Exactly what you say: the employer is going to restaff; he doesn't even have to fire anybody, because minimum wage workers have a nearly 100% turnover year over year. So, he lets the $8/h workers go and hires $12/h workers for the same jobs.
Congratulations, the category "minimum wage employees" now makes more money, the statistics look shiny, but the original workers, the ones that minimum wage was supposed to help, are still screwed.
Far from presenting an argument for minimum wage, you just presented one against minimum wage.
Well, if that is how you define "coercion", then the term has nothing to do with slavery, forced labor, or injustice anymore.
So, if that's how you define "coercion", I have no problem with you "coercing" me that way, and I have no problem with people "coercing" you that way.
Many of them don't realize that they don't care about the price of housing, but that's effectively what they are doing when they are "preserving the character of the neighborhood" and "making sure infrastructure is sufficient to serve all residents" etc.
Obviously, the arguments in Loundon County are going to be different from SF or NYC. But the arguments against micro apartments in SF and NYC has been that they are such lousy places to live that we need to protect the poor from such places being built by evil landlords.