You'd expect the Iranian state to have more sense, after all, the Natanz malware did not move around via internet, it moved around on foot.
Let's hope the efficiency loss for the Iranian government hastens the departure of allah out of that country (or at the very least out of it's government).
About time that the Ukraine accepted what most governments of the world have already accepted--that the U.S. is your master and you had goddamn well better do whatever the fuck we tell you to!
Now sit, rollover, and say "We're your bitch!"....No, SAY IT LOUDER!!
Because there are so few countries with copyright laws you mean ? At least where I live, the local copyright people + a whole lot of small companies are pushing the government like mad to do stuff like this, saying tens of thousands of jobs depend on it.
Also I've recently visited a very large software company (in America), and the developers were nearly universally in favor of copyright laws and destroying things like demonoid and thepiratebay. I'm not sure if that's typical, and yes, the youngest guy there (~25) did not share this opinion, but I'm pretty sure he was much outnumbered.
I think slashdot is providing us with a somewhat limited selection of people declaring their opinions on this matter.
I think you misunderstand the "buy American" position. I'm not a tea party member, but their position as I see it is that, FIRST everyone should have a choice on what to buy, including the chance to buy the products from exploitative businesses, SECOND you should, in the way that some say you should go to church on sunday, buy American. It is extremely important to them that it is not an obligation. The tea party's buy American position is most definitely not about forcing people to buy products they wouldn't otherwise want to buy.
The propensity of leftwingers to change their tune in an instant and bury the previous view is well-known. George Orwell wrote about it in 1984, based on his experience with lefties in the UK and the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Well yeah, but my point is more general. Ikea's exploitative labor and Nike's sweatshops work on the same principle as mechanical turk and other "paid" crowdsourcing alternatives. Every adult working for Nike's production line has a choice (and the kids are their kids, and in most different cultures, like islamic, kids are slaves of their parents until they marry with whomever the parents want them to marry or the father dies. Islam even goes so far as saying that parents can enforce this abomination by murdering their own kids, a position consistently accepted by sharia judgements, and started by the prophet. So this is very well established (besides, except for the killing, Jewish laws say the same thing : the whole town must agree to kill an unemployed kid before they get executed. So really the paedophile prophet just copied Halakha law and made it even less humane). So for muslim indians culture parents forcing children to work, then kill them, is perfectly acceptable in their religion/in the law they believe in, whatever you want to call it. And those parents do have a choice. Anyway this is not the discussion here).
And the choice offered to those parents : exploitative employment relationship or no business at all, is exactly the same deal these sites are starting to "offer" to Americans. And surprise : programmer democrats find this perfectly acceptable. As a comparison, the democrat party has long taken the position that it is utterly unacceptable for any employee to not have health insurance, and can't be trusted to pick their own health insurance... so I find it puzzling that these "no rights at all" employment contracts suddenly find sympathy in democrat circles. Is this hypocrisy ? Do they simply not care about what they don't see on tv ? Am I wrong ?
My hypothesis is : mechanical turk and these other crowd-labor sites provide an easy advantage to pseudo-lefties in their work/business and don't show them the suffering on the other end (like the above mentioned no health insurance,...). So my assumption is that their position is simply "cheap goodies !" and nothing more.
Tea party are laissez-faire rightwing people. They are in favor of outsourcing because lowering corporate costs is good for everybody. Some of them even go so far to say they are in favor of exploitation, for the exact same reasons you're in favor of this software tool : because "it offers poor people a chance".
What I see you do is a very worrying trend. You have relatively leftwing people (or nominally leftwing, certainly democrat voters) and they become rightwing extremists when they are the beneficiaries of exploitative contracts, like in this case. Everybody finds it obvious that that is pure exploitation and should not be allowed, but it allows online programmer democrats to do a few things they couldn't otherwise do. So, no matter how bad it is for the society as a whole, and especially for the more vulnerable part of our society, it is okayed and even described as if it's somehow an "advance in work".
What I don't get is how one can be against apple's exploitation of Chinese workers, or Nike's children sweatshop exploitation, then be in favor of doing the same things yourself.
he saw as the lie that "The interests of the capitalist and those of the worker are... one and the same"
That attitude is extremely common in the US. People mostly bring it on themselves. You won't find many Europeans coupling their self-worth to the stock value of the firm they work for. In fact, you'll find very few that even know. Even if they work for an international firm (ie. American in attitude, based on some tax haven) that provides them with stock options, they generally don't care.
Why do Americans do this ? It seems so illogical and dangerous.
"the fastest possible growth of productive capital" was best not only for the wealthy capitalists but also for the workers because it provided them with employment.
Maybe, and I mean maybe, this was true before automation. After automation it's simply flawed reasoning at best, a lie at worst.
You are essentially locking Americans out of large sectors of the economy, obviously giving them zero opportunities to replace the ones you've taken away.
You know, no matter how many times I see this jingoist, nationalistic bullshit, it never gets any less putrid. Fuck Americans, fuck you, and fuck your Tea Party fuckwit asshole nativist friends. Let the rest of the world taste prosperity for a change. It's not all about you.
Let the world taste prosperity ? I think you need to look at those pay figures again. This isn't bringing the third world up to first world standards, it's pulling most of the first world down to third world standard (yes, people without extensive education or massive amounts of money are by the large majority).
Obviously you've also got the political affiliations wrong. The tea party is in favor of things like outsourcing. If you want to insult me on this point, your best bet is probably communist. You know, remind people that soviets killed a few hundred million people and how that makes helping people bad or some such.
This company offers poor people a chance to earn money, at a rate that the poor voluntarily accept.
You mean out of all their many options ? Wow... that must be so great.
Meanwhile you forget the other side of the equation : you are forcing others to also accept the lowest rate. You are essentially locking Americans (and Europeans, and South Americans, hell, at these rates, even Middle Easterners and and and...) out of large sectors of the economy, obviously giving them zero opportunities to replace the ones you've taken away.
There are these people, you may have met them, that do not have degrees, that do not have an Ivy League education... and you are removing their options, reducing them to zero. After that, no doubt, you'll be telling me they're lazy and it's their own fault... and hopefully at some point they'll show you that they're 98% of the population.
How is any of this "exploitation?"
Given the fact that that money will barely pay for living expenses in all but the most miserable locales their "choices" are reduced to nothing in practice. You get situations of workers building iphones who can't afford a single iphone after 12 months wages. You think that's somehow fair ?
Furthermore, that money will never pay, anywhere in the world, for decent medical care, for a decent car, for... and so on and so forth. You're locking people out of the "western lifestyle" (you know the one you consider yourself entitled to).
And in places where this "standard of living" thing applies are hellholes like afghanistan or bad rural parts of China. If it applies in other places, that's temporary at best.
How about... because it can't possibly evolve higher organisms ? This is a question more and more often posed in biological papers (and I don't mean by creationists, loony or otherwise).
How the hell do organisms that have a generation switch of more than 100.000 times longer than simple lifeforms retain fitness ? A generation length is what determines the "learning rate" of an organism. The human "species" leans once every 20 years, with ~2 billion individuals alive. Most bacteria once every 2 minutes, for most species with more individuals than there are stars in the universe. So why in the name of Darwin aren't humans extinct, all killed by diseases with evolotionary knowledge that our organism couldn't possibly hope to match ?
The answer seems simple : because evolution isn't built on mutation and selection at all. Now of course anyone making this argument is immediately branded a heretic, because, well we all know why. Are we any better than with burners though ?
The simple answer is : evolution isn't built on mutation and selection, it is built on transgenic copying and on per-species selection, with mutation relegated to a "once in a thousand years maybe" status. Mutation on one hand is the source of all genes, but it's not involved in spreading them at all, and mutation hardly ever happens and the chance of a phenotype characteristic getting into the human race by mutation is so absurdly remote it's not even funny.
You should read a bit of history, not even that far back, about how international relations worked in the 19th century. Or, in general, at any time between the start of the dark ages in the 8-9th century to into the 20th century.
Why do people feel the need to invade other countries ? Simple, historically the first and foremost reason has been because the invader believes they can win and do whatever they want, from annexing a tiny stroke of land to "this is what we do, this is how we live" mongol armies, to muslims massacring entire populations. More often than not, they were right that they could attack without consequences. Tactically speaking, wars are most often over before they even begin, since one thing is for absolutely sure : when it comes to war, nobody's interested in a fair fight.
But that's not why the west wages wars, at least not in the last 50-60 years. The west makes war to protect trade relations. Those wars are comparatively tiny, and the invader retreats without replacing the current population as most historical wars did.
Oh and by far the scariest weapon is not an atom bomb, which is really kind of pathetic, barely matching the death toll of a single bombing run, but the simple and humble knife. Several muslim empires have killed more then 200 million people each using only the simple and humble knife, and a quite dull badly made brittle knife at that. No other state or weapon has come anywhere close to those piles of corpses.
The real problem politicians have with an atom bomb is that it's near unstoppable : your hopes of protecting any location from an atomic bomb are small at best, and so you cannot protect your own ass. If you have a nuke, which is the size of a large woman's purse and the weight of 5 bricks of orange juice, it is trivial to kill, say Obama or whoever follows him, or Kim Il Sung for that matter. Just bring it near any public appearance of the guy and...
They will have the same problems with automated sniper robots, for example.
Why ? Are guys that "stick it to the man" above the law these days ?
Every country and everyone has embarassing things to hide. Furthermore there are many other reasons to hide information. If you disagree with this, please post your credit card number, social security number and internet passwords in a reply message.
While you can maybe make the point that Assange can't legally be arrested in the Ecuadorian embassy, which is true, but he is a fugitive under 3 law systems, all of which are western free democracies with fair justice systems, all of which provide all the protections for a fair trial. He refuses to face his accusers or the justice system for crimes including rape, fraud, spying, conspiracy to commit treason and others. He lies about wikileak's internal structure, as it pertains to money, and has refused payment on contracts he had signed. And of course, hiding from justice is an offence by itself, and a very serious one at that. As to whether he is guilty, frankly given his behaviour, my money's on "yes", including the rape and fraud charges. As to whether those Swedish rape laws are just, that's not a discussion we should be having just because one popular guy has managed to run afoul of it.
Why would any guy currently popular get protection from the law ? I wonder what the reaction would be if a wall street banker stole some money and tried this crap...
Furthermore, I am not a fool, and as such I find it very hard to believe wikileaks is anything but a broker for industrial espionage data that has decided to try to do that publicly. I find it very, very hard to believe they are anything but a front for something else. If they succeed, the world will be a much worse place.
Your Native American tribes would fail that test in so far as the woodlands and buffalo herds were not privately owned.
I don't think that would be true. You could easily defend the position that the leader of the tribe that has won the last war over the buffalo herd/woodland privately owns it. It was certainly true that they didn't share (unless the woodland was so big they didn't detect eachother). And I'm sure at least a few tribes had traded "hunting rights", especially when the tribes were very small, which often happened. I remember that buffalo herds were often part of "peace treaties", although I don't quite remember what exactly the conditions were. The treaties could be thought of as transactions, although they never lasted as tribes grew.
And it strikes me as true that on a small scale the differences between systems is not very large. Totalitarianism, communism, maybe even very limited forms of capitalism would look very similar if not the same within a tribe.
So at what point are you capitalist ? What does it require ? Native Americans did trade goods for "money", even if it was not paper money like we have.
Communism is what existed within a tribe : a central organ (the guy with the biggest axe) "decides what happens" (through what we'd call murder). A capitalism"-lite" existed between neighbouring tribes when not at war.
Inter-tribe relations in native American tribes were capitalistic. They traded and even had various things that took the function of money, and this was partially used within a tribe as well (and if capitalism failed they "raided" each other. Which means kill all the men, kill all the women they didn't want to rape and kidnap, kidnap the rest of the women and steal the surviving children - gotta love these non-capitalistic systems of negotiation). Both the Mayan and the Inca empires were capitalistic states (doesn't mean it necessarily controlled them, but they had a money system). Mayans appear to have had a central bank (even if it was religious in nature, which the west never did, but it can probably work just as well or maybe even better (Europe was long plagued by the effects of state control of central banks - if being religious in nature allowed the central bank to be independent that would probably have been an advantage))
Besides, if you want to see how a tribe functions for yourself, visit one in Central Africa. I think you'll agree that it's a much worse system than capitalism. And yes, inter-tribe relations in central africa are also mostly based on money exchange.
You're advocating not activating needed generation capacity. How exactly do you consider yourself not advocating lowering supply ? How do you expect throwing away this infrastructure not to drive up prices ?
I know, but I don't buy it. It flies in the face of well-known economics. If you lower the supply of anything, prices will rise. There's no way around that.
It's quite possible to build insulated skyscrapers. Insulation materials essentially prevent air movement. The more effective ones just lock a lot of air in plastic bubbles near the outer wall. The next thing is to prevent metals or other materials from touching both the outside air and the internal air, which again is not much of a technical challenge (ie. main thing would be to use plastic windows instead of metal ones), but it is expensive.
Of course, upgrading every building to the most recent technical advances remains prohibitively expensive, no matter how well-understood a problem it is. Nothing really changes.
My point is that something like this might be the best thing for higher ed, because it would attract all the people thinking education is a passive activity--something they consume rather than produce themselves. Then that would leave the motivated students to actually come to university and participate.
An alternative interpretation is that it would leave the rich students to come to university because of the increased prestige only. And they're unlikely to be the most motivated students.
A university education isn't about being lectured at, it's about having you asking questions and being enabled in answering them. The reason to go get a university degree is to go hang out with other students (undergrad or grad) and professors, and do things with them. It's not to sit in a lecture hall.
It wasn't in the roman empire, or in the middle ages, no, where the commitment a student made to the university was akin to becoming a monk for 10+ years. But since it became mass education it has been about just that.
The usual "renewable" nutters' answer to this is that it is possible to rebuild all those buildings to have stable internal temperatures. And, like any insane argument, it's technically true.
Let's just evict, oh, about 100 million americans and rebuild their houses and apartment blocks from scratch, because that'll save us about 20% or-so electricity usage.
Energy generation is what allows humans to live north of, say, New York. Anything north of that, you're effectively killing people if you raise electricity prices.
Supplying coal is one problem, dumping the toxic remains is another. Coal power plants are a disaster as bad as fukushima even when nothing goes wrong.
You don't get the advantage here. You always have "a few assholes" that think they deserve the world and have the physical power to make that happen. Do you really think that Obama is any better than Kim Yong Il (junior these days I hear) ?
One big difference between Amerika and North Korea is not that the assholes at the top own 90% plus of the nation's production. That's true in both cases. One difference is that America has 10x more money than it should (at least, probably more). In other words the cumulative value of the dollar represents over 10x the value of America. Except in America 10% of that money buys you a comfortable lifestyle, because really you're buying 90%+ of the actual value with it. The 90% of money collecting interest and "working" in stocks and buildings does not DO anything, so it doesn't represent any value at all.
The big problem with this approach is... that regularly investments become worthless due to bubble effects attracting big investors and turning out to be ponzi schemes, and big investors... loose big. Wait... "big investors"... who is that again ? The 10% or the 90% ?
In the end the whole financial system is built to play the rich out against one another, making sure the end result of any face-off is random, which results in no-one really amassing power like they did just before the American independance happened. The founding fathers were smart enough to make sure that the way they rose to power (which was with big -for the time- bank accounts) would be extremely difficult to use against the government they created.
Which is exactly what you'd want. You see most money in existence (> 90%) is such "hoarded" money. You can pretend that money doesn't exist (and in fact you have to) if you are a government. So what did we do ? Ah simple, governments (through banks) printed 10x more money than is needed to run the economy.
The problem is, of course, given that banks and governments can (at best) back 10% of the money they claim to have... is what happens if something happens that makes banks and or governments lose 10.00000000001% of their assets. Given the fact that governments "roll-over" loans, and increase their own debt burden to pay back interest "in the short term" (riiight), they are extremely sensitive to interest rate changes, and those rates are a function of human feelings...
Slashdot Mirror
When you say "look at" ... well, this is the internet, right ?
How about a few links ?
You'd expect the Iranian state to have more sense, after all, the Natanz malware did not move around via internet, it moved around on foot.
Let's hope the efficiency loss for the Iranian government hastens the departure of allah out of that country (or at the very least out of it's government).
About time that the Ukraine accepted what most governments of the world have already accepted--that the U.S. is your master and you had goddamn well better do whatever the fuck we tell you to!
Now sit, rollover, and say "We're your bitch!" ....No, SAY IT LOUDER!!
Because there are so few countries with copyright laws you mean ? At least where I live, the local copyright people + a whole lot of small companies are pushing the government like mad to do stuff like this, saying tens of thousands of jobs depend on it.
Also I've recently visited a very large software company (in America), and the developers were nearly universally in favor of copyright laws and destroying things like demonoid and thepiratebay. I'm not sure if that's typical, and yes, the youngest guy there (~25) did not share this opinion, but I'm pretty sure he was much outnumbered.
I think slashdot is providing us with a somewhat limited selection of people declaring their opinions on this matter.
I think you misunderstand the "buy American" position. I'm not a tea party member, but their position as I see it is that, FIRST everyone should have a choice on what to buy, including the chance to buy the products from exploitative businesses, SECOND you should, in the way that some say you should go to church on sunday, buy American. It is extremely important to them that it is not an obligation. The tea party's buy American position is most definitely not about forcing people to buy products they wouldn't otherwise want to buy.
The propensity of leftwingers to change their tune in an instant and bury the previous view is well-known. George Orwell wrote about it in 1984, based on his experience with lefties in the UK and the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Well yeah, but my point is more general. Ikea's exploitative labor and Nike's sweatshops work on the same principle as mechanical turk and other "paid" crowdsourcing alternatives. Every adult working for Nike's production line has a choice (and the kids are their kids, and in most different cultures, like islamic, kids are slaves of their parents until they marry with whomever the parents want them to marry or the father dies. Islam even goes so far as saying that parents can enforce this abomination by murdering their own kids, a position consistently accepted by sharia judgements, and started by the prophet. So this is very well established (besides, except for the killing, Jewish laws say the same thing : the whole town must agree to kill an unemployed kid before they get executed. So really the paedophile prophet just copied Halakha law and made it even less humane). So for muslim indians culture parents forcing children to work, then kill them, is perfectly acceptable in their religion/in the law they believe in, whatever you want to call it. And those parents do have a choice. Anyway this is not the discussion here).
And the choice offered to those parents : exploitative employment relationship or no business at all, is exactly the same deal these sites are starting to "offer" to Americans. And surprise : programmer democrats find this perfectly acceptable. As a comparison, the democrat party has long taken the position that it is utterly unacceptable for any employee to not have health insurance, and can't be trusted to pick their own health insurance ... so I find it puzzling that these "no rights at all" employment contracts suddenly find sympathy in democrat circles. Is this hypocrisy ? Do they simply not care about what they don't see on tv ? Am I wrong ?
My hypothesis is : mechanical turk and these other crowd-labor sites provide an easy advantage to pseudo-lefties in their work/business and don't show them the suffering on the other end (like the above mentioned no health insurance, ...). So my assumption is that their position is simply "cheap goodies !" and nothing more.
Tea party are laissez-faire rightwing people. They are in favor of outsourcing because lowering corporate costs is good for everybody. Some of them even go so far to say they are in favor of exploitation, for the exact same reasons you're in favor of this software tool : because "it offers poor people a chance".
What I see you do is a very worrying trend. You have relatively leftwing people (or nominally leftwing, certainly democrat voters) and they become rightwing extremists when they are the beneficiaries of exploitative contracts, like in this case. Everybody finds it obvious that that is pure exploitation and should not be allowed, but it allows online programmer democrats to do a few things they couldn't otherwise do. So, no matter how bad it is for the society as a whole, and especially for the more vulnerable part of our society, it is okayed and even described as if it's somehow an "advance in work".
What I don't get is how one can be against apple's exploitation of Chinese workers, or Nike's children sweatshop exploitation, then be in favor of doing the same things yourself.
he saw as the lie that "The interests of the capitalist and those of the worker are... one and the same"
That attitude is extremely common in the US. People mostly bring it on themselves. You won't find many Europeans coupling their self-worth to the stock value of the firm they work for. In fact, you'll find very few that even know. Even if they work for an international firm (ie. American in attitude, based on some tax haven) that provides them with stock options, they generally don't care.
Why do Americans do this ? It seems so illogical and dangerous.
"the fastest possible growth of productive capital" was best not only for the wealthy capitalists but also for the workers because it provided them with employment.
Maybe, and I mean maybe, this was true before automation. After automation it's simply flawed reasoning at best, a lie at worst.
You are essentially locking Americans out of large sectors of the economy, obviously giving them zero opportunities to replace the ones you've taken away.
You know, no matter how many times I see this jingoist, nationalistic bullshit, it never gets any less putrid. Fuck Americans, fuck you, and fuck your Tea Party fuckwit asshole nativist friends. Let the rest of the world taste prosperity for a change. It's not all about you.
Let the world taste prosperity ? I think you need to look at those pay figures again. This isn't bringing the third world up to first world standards, it's pulling most of the first world down to third world standard (yes, people without extensive education or massive amounts of money are by the large majority).
Obviously you've also got the political affiliations wrong. The tea party is in favor of things like outsourcing. If you want to insult me on this point, your best bet is probably communist. You know, remind people that soviets killed a few hundred million people and how that makes helping people bad or some such.
This company offers poor people a chance to earn money, at a rate that the poor voluntarily accept.
You mean out of all their many options ? Wow ... that must be so great.
Meanwhile you forget the other side of the equation : you are forcing others to also accept the lowest rate. You are essentially locking Americans (and Europeans, and South Americans, hell, at these rates, even Middle Easterners and and and ...) out of large sectors of the economy, obviously giving them zero opportunities to replace the ones you've taken away.
There are these people, you may have met them, that do not have degrees, that do not have an Ivy League education ... and you are removing their options, reducing them to zero. After that, no doubt, you'll be telling me they're lazy and it's their own fault ... and hopefully at some point they'll show you that they're 98% of the population.
How is any of this "exploitation?"
Given the fact that that money will barely pay for living expenses in all but the most miserable locales their "choices" are reduced to nothing in practice. You get situations of workers building iphones who can't afford a single iphone after 12 months wages. You think that's somehow fair ?
Furthermore, that money will never pay, anywhere in the world, for decent medical care, for a decent car, for ... and so on and so forth. You're locking people out of the "western lifestyle" (you know the one you consider yourself entitled to).
And in places where this "standard of living" thing applies are hellholes like afghanistan or bad rural parts of China. If it applies in other places, that's temporary at best.
In short what is wrong with this : Manna
How about ... because it can't possibly evolve higher organisms ? This is a question more and more often posed in biological papers (and I don't mean by creationists, loony or otherwise).
How the hell do organisms that have a generation switch of more than 100.000 times longer than simple lifeforms retain fitness ? A generation length is what determines the "learning rate" of an organism. The human "species" leans once every 20 years, with ~2 billion individuals alive. Most bacteria once every 2 minutes, for most species with more individuals than there are stars in the universe. So why in the name of Darwin aren't humans extinct, all killed by diseases with evolotionary knowledge that our organism couldn't possibly hope to match ?
The answer seems simple : because evolution isn't built on mutation and selection at all. Now of course anyone making this argument is immediately branded a heretic, because, well we all know why. Are we any better than with burners though ?
The simple answer is : evolution isn't built on mutation and selection, it is built on transgenic copying and on per-species selection, with mutation relegated to a "once in a thousand years maybe" status. Mutation on one hand is the source of all genes, but it's not involved in spreading them at all, and mutation hardly ever happens and the chance of a phenotype characteristic getting into the human race by mutation is so absurdly remote it's not even funny.
You should read a bit of history, not even that far back, about how international relations worked in the 19th century. Or, in general, at any time between the start of the dark ages in the 8-9th century to into the 20th century.
Why do people feel the need to invade other countries ? Simple, historically the first and foremost reason has been because the invader believes they can win and do whatever they want, from annexing a tiny stroke of land to "this is what we do, this is how we live" mongol armies, to muslims massacring entire populations. More often than not, they were right that they could attack without consequences. Tactically speaking, wars are most often over before they even begin, since one thing is for absolutely sure : when it comes to war, nobody's interested in a fair fight.
But that's not why the west wages wars, at least not in the last 50-60 years. The west makes war to protect trade relations. Those wars are comparatively tiny, and the invader retreats without replacing the current population as most historical wars did.
Oh and by far the scariest weapon is not an atom bomb, which is really kind of pathetic, barely matching the death toll of a single bombing run, but the simple and humble knife. Several muslim empires have killed more then 200 million people each using only the simple and humble knife, and a quite dull badly made brittle knife at that. No other state or weapon has come anywhere close to those piles of corpses.
The real problem politicians have with an atom bomb is that it's near unstoppable : your hopes of protecting any location from an atomic bomb are small at best, and so you cannot protect your own ass. If you have a nuke, which is the size of a large woman's purse and the weight of 5 bricks of orange juice, it is trivial to kill, say Obama or whoever follows him, or Kim Il Sung for that matter. Just bring it near any public appearance of the guy and ...
They will have the same problems with automated sniper robots, for example.
Why ? Are guys that "stick it to the man" above the law these days ?
Every country and everyone has embarassing things to hide. Furthermore there are many other reasons to hide information. If you disagree with this, please post your credit card number, social security number and internet passwords in a reply message.
While you can maybe make the point that Assange can't legally be arrested in the Ecuadorian embassy, which is true, but he is a fugitive under 3 law systems, all of which are western free democracies with fair justice systems, all of which provide all the protections for a fair trial. He refuses to face his accusers or the justice system for crimes including rape, fraud, spying, conspiracy to commit treason and others. He lies about wikileak's internal structure, as it pertains to money, and has refused payment on contracts he had signed. And of course, hiding from justice is an offence by itself, and a very serious one at that. As to whether he is guilty, frankly given his behaviour, my money's on "yes", including the rape and fraud charges. As to whether those Swedish rape laws are just, that's not a discussion we should be having just because one popular guy has managed to run afoul of it.
Why would any guy currently popular get protection from the law ? I wonder what the reaction would be if a wall street banker stole some money and tried this crap ...
Furthermore, I am not a fool, and as such I find it very hard to believe wikileaks is anything but a broker for industrial espionage data that has decided to try to do that publicly. I find it very, very hard to believe they are anything but a front for something else. If they succeed, the world will be a much worse place.
Your Native American tribes would fail that test in so far as the woodlands and buffalo herds were not privately owned.
I don't think that would be true. You could easily defend the position that the leader of the tribe that has won the last war over the buffalo herd/woodland privately owns it. It was certainly true that they didn't share (unless the woodland was so big they didn't detect eachother). And I'm sure at least a few tribes had traded "hunting rights", especially when the tribes were very small, which often happened. I remember that buffalo herds were often part of "peace treaties", although I don't quite remember what exactly the conditions were. The treaties could be thought of as transactions, although they never lasted as tribes grew.
And it strikes me as true that on a small scale the differences between systems is not very large. Totalitarianism, communism, maybe even very limited forms of capitalism would look very similar if not the same within a tribe.
So at what point are you capitalist ? What does it require ? Native Americans did trade goods for "money", even if it was not paper money like we have.
Communism is what existed within a tribe : a central organ (the guy with the biggest axe) "decides what happens" (through what we'd call murder). A capitalism"-lite" existed between neighbouring tribes when not at war.
Inter-tribe relations in native American tribes were capitalistic. They traded and even had various things that took the function of money, and this was partially used within a tribe as well (and if capitalism failed they "raided" each other. Which means kill all the men, kill all the women they didn't want to rape and kidnap, kidnap the rest of the women and steal the surviving children - gotta love these non-capitalistic systems of negotiation). Both the Mayan and the Inca empires were capitalistic states (doesn't mean it necessarily controlled them, but they had a money system). Mayans appear to have had a central bank (even if it was religious in nature, which the west never did, but it can probably work just as well or maybe even better (Europe was long plagued by the effects of state control of central banks - if being religious in nature allowed the central bank to be independent that would probably have been an advantage))
Besides, if you want to see how a tribe functions for yourself, visit one in Central Africa. I think you'll agree that it's a much worse system than capitalism. And yes, inter-tribe relations in central africa are also mostly based on money exchange.
You've been repeating that, but how does that change the fact that a resource is being artificially limited ? Prices *will* go up ...
You're advocating not activating needed generation capacity. How exactly do you consider yourself not advocating lowering supply ? How do you expect throwing away this infrastructure not to drive up prices ?
I know, but I don't buy it. It flies in the face of well-known economics. If you lower the supply of anything, prices will rise. There's no way around that.
It's quite possible to build insulated skyscrapers. Insulation materials essentially prevent air movement. The more effective ones just lock a lot of air in plastic bubbles near the outer wall. The next thing is to prevent metals or other materials from touching both the outside air and the internal air, which again is not much of a technical challenge (ie. main thing would be to use plastic windows instead of metal ones), but it is expensive.
Of course, upgrading every building to the most recent technical advances remains prohibitively expensive, no matter how well-understood a problem it is. Nothing really changes.
My point is that something like this might be the best thing for higher ed, because it would attract all the people thinking education is a passive activity--something they consume rather than produce themselves. Then that would leave the motivated students to actually come to university and participate.
An alternative interpretation is that it would leave the rich students to come to university because of the increased prestige only. And they're unlikely to be the most motivated students.
A university education isn't about being lectured at, it's about having you asking questions and being enabled in answering them. The reason to go get a university degree is to go hang out with other students (undergrad or grad) and professors, and do things with them. It's not to sit in a lecture hall.
It wasn't in the roman empire, or in the middle ages, no, where the commitment a student made to the university was akin to becoming a monk for 10+ years. But since it became mass education it has been about just that.
The usual "renewable" nutters' answer to this is that it is possible to rebuild all those buildings to have stable internal temperatures. And, like any insane argument, it's technically true.
Let's just evict, oh, about 100 million americans and rebuild their houses and apartment blocks from scratch, because that'll save us about 20% or-so electricity usage.
You want to make the problem worse ? How would that help ?
Yes, worse.
... and kills people who cannot afford it.
Energy generation is what allows humans to live north of, say, New York. Anything north of that, you're effectively killing people if you raise electricity prices.
Supplying coal is one problem, dumping the toxic remains is another. Coal power plants are a disaster as bad as fukushima even when nothing goes wrong.
You don't get the advantage here. You always have "a few assholes" that think they deserve the world and have the physical power to make that happen. Do you really think that Obama is any better than Kim Yong Il (junior these days I hear) ?
One big difference between Amerika and North Korea is not that the assholes at the top own 90% plus of the nation's production. That's true in both cases. One difference is that America has 10x more money than it should (at least, probably more). In other words the cumulative value of the dollar represents over 10x the value of America. Except in America 10% of that money buys you a comfortable lifestyle, because really you're buying 90%+ of the actual value with it. The 90% of money collecting interest and "working" in stocks and buildings does not DO anything, so it doesn't represent any value at all.
The big problem with this approach is ... that regularly investments become worthless due to bubble effects attracting big investors and turning out to be ponzi schemes, and big investors ... loose big. Wait ... "big investors" ... who is that again ? The 10% or the 90% ?
In the end the whole financial system is built to play the rich out against one another, making sure the end result of any face-off is random, which results in no-one really amassing power like they did just before the American independance happened. The founding fathers were smart enough to make sure that the way they rose to power (which was with big -for the time- bank accounts) would be extremely difficult to use against the government they created.
Which is exactly what you'd want. You see most money in existence (> 90%) is such "hoarded" money. You can pretend that money doesn't exist (and in fact you have to) if you are a government. So what did we do ? Ah simple, governments (through banks) printed 10x more money than is needed to run the economy.
The problem is, of course, given that banks and governments can (at best) back 10% of the money they claim to have ... is what happens if something happens that makes banks and or governments lose 10.00000000001% of their assets. Given the fact that governments "roll-over" loans, and increase their own debt burden to pay back interest "in the short term" (riiight), they are extremely sensitive to interest rate changes, and those rates are a function of human feelings ...