CWT has one working plant, nine years after opening their first research facility. That's an important splash of cold water in the face of any unwarranted optimism here, I think.
Well, it did happen before--we couldn't be in this mess if the nation hadn't turned their back on the hard lessons learned in the oil shocks of the 1970s--but I don't think it could happen again; the limits on oil production have nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with the rate at which the stuff can be hauled out of the ground. I doubt petroleum will ever be really cheap again. (Though in a few years, we'll be looking back at the halcyon days of '08 as the days of inexpensive oil, when one could actually afford to run a car on gasoline--it's all relative.)
You're essentially repeating what the grandparent post said. GM follows the dictates of the market; the market was distorted on purpose to cause GM to make electric cars, but when that distortion was removed, GM stopped making electric cars, as it would not have been profitable. The blame for this change appears to rest with the government, whose policy change led to the junking of the EV-1. Are you arguing otherwise?
The version on SourceForge is developed from Frankel's original sources. It's also pretty moribund; mainly it's waiting for someone to come pick it up and continue development. (It has a few rough edges, and hasn't been worked on in about two years.) If you know anyone who'd like everlasting fame and glory, they'd be much appreciated--some of us are still happily using WASTE.
You're expecting the vast majority of teenagers to make a good decision when faced with peer pressure, vague and unlikely-seeming negative consequences, and raging adolescent hormones. Mere words cannot describe your unfounded optimism.
There is NO guarantee of ANYTHING (read the 20 page TOS/disclaimer).
That TOS/disclaimer is there for precisely one reason, and it's not to prevent MySpace from hosting a ton of illegal content, nor to prevent kids from making stupid decisions (first, making stupid decisions is what kids do best, and second, if you think the subliterate nitwits on MySpace can read that TOS/disclaimer in the first place, you're even dumber than they are); the purpose of that TOS/disclaimer is to cover Rupert Murdoch's well-fed ass. Don't pretend it does anything else.
It's little known that parents are explicitly allowed to have nude photos of their kids as long as they are obviously not being abused and the pictures are not distributed.
"Explicitly"? Could you point out where the naked-kids-in-the-bathtub exception under U.S. law? I have a faint memory of parents actually being prosecuted in precisely the situation you mention, but hey, I could be wrong.
As Mark Pilgrim said, "Praising companies for providing APIs to get your own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with gravel." It's depressing that this isn't all a given.
Please do explain to me your understanding of history as it relates to any amount of governance being a bad thing, especially with regards to the examples of government-free areas such as Somalia in the mid-1990s and modern-day Iraq outside the Green Zone.
It appears you think the word "government" carries with it certain magical powers. Have you considered that things not calling themselves your government can "F [things] up"? And that perhaps governmental interference can ameliorate these F'ings? And that, furthermore, this is exactly what's happened in the past?
All the things you mention are simply a softer brand of facism than what they had over in europe.
Sure, in the same sense that giving someone a hug is simply a softer brand of mashing them into a moist pulp with a car crusher.
What else can you call a central authority that forces urban populations to support rural ones and monopolizes first class mail
I suppose I'd call it a representative democracy empowered by the consent of the governed, but that's just me.
(when any number of private alternatives would do just fine).
Please provide evidence for your assertion that "any number of private alternatives would do just fine". Part of what the Postal Service's monopoly on first-class mail accomplishes is preventing rural areas from being isolated because it costs more to deliver mail there than it does to densely-packed urban environments. Unless you define "do[ing] just fine" as leaving rural America out in the cold, please explain how this could be accomplished with a private postal service. Historical examples would be much appreciated.
And don't get me started on the terrible, unnecessary FDA.
No, please, do get started. You link to a set of criticisms of the FDA--that it regulates too much (e.g., it takes too long to approve safe drugs), that it doesn't regulate enough (e.g., it approves unsafe drugs with insufficient testing), or that its regulation is biased (e.g., it makes wacky claims about pot). You take this to mean that the FDA is unnecessary--that is, it should be abolished. But what you fail to remember is that we have plenty of information about what things were like before the regulatory apparatus was created; unsafe patent medicines were rampant, consumers were unable to make informed decisions because nothing was truthfully labeled, and food production was grossly unsanitary. (Recent outbreaks of food poisoning are rather directly attributable to the reduction of the USDA's oversight; there are some figures in Fast Food Nation about this.) Please explain why abolishing the FDA rather than reforming it--and, for instance, regulating the influence of the pharma industry on its representatives--is the obvious course of action. Again, I stress that we know what happens without a regulatory apparatus--why do you think returning to that state would be any different than it was a century ago?
And the GI Bill? There shouldn't even be a standing army, let alone a need for that. I would hardly say the case for a standing army was "won a long time ago."
The GI Bill was established for the returning veterans of World War II. Veterans who had fought in a war, and were not part of a standing, peacetime army. Now tell me how the GI Bill caused "facism".
And I haven't hand-waved any sort of "paradise" into existence. Now you're just creating straw-men.
I'll break it down a little further. You claim that any sort of government whatsoever is "facism", apparently blaming any and all problems on government. This implies that if we got rid of government, these problems would go away. Where did I misstep?
Well, it's sad that people call for authoritarian government, given all that. But what you're conveniently leaving out is that people call for government intervention is based on a long history of government intervention working. Rural electrification didn't end in "facism", as you put it; neither did a government monopoly on first-class mail delivery (though it did bring the cities and the countryside together); neither did the establishment of the FDA to limit the number of rats per vat of ketchup, or the establishment of the various grants and loans delineated by the GI Bill. These things were only disasters if you were an oligarch who hoped to stay on top of a pyramidal-shaped society.
As is traditional for the standard internet libertarian, you're counting the worst possible effects of the worst possible government against an airy-fairy concept of a libertarian paradise which you've just hand-waved into existence. While I don't think this makes you evil, it at the very least dishonest.
And, oh hell, I can't believe you're writing this on the internet.
There's an excellent article I read about it; I think it's a combination of factors. By nature, a lot of geeks are raised in comparative isolation; the internet has made it even easier to surround oneself only with people who agree with you; there's a disdain for "lesser" people that comes from years of wedgies. It's part of the standard high-school rant that those damned bullies are going to be pumping your gas one day, and why on earth would a geek who's Gotten His try to better that bully's position in life?
(I should disclaim that the above is just cultural criticism, and it's very far from empirical. You'd have to be David Brooks or someone like him to think that that constitutes an actual explanation for the streak of libertarianism that runs through geek culture.)
On a less hand-wavey level, I think there's something very appealing (especially to geeks) about the idea that one can deduce the entirety of politics from first principles. (I speak here of the Non-Aggression Principle.) The problem with this, as Seth Finkelstein points out, is that it just moves the complexity to the definitions of your terms, which are beyond debatability in your edge of the libertarian tent, in much the same way as fundamentalist churches claiming that their sole authority is the bible sweep their assumptions under the rug by pretending that they're not making any. (Fred the Slacktivist has some good discussion on the topic; also here.)
Heck, I went through a libertarian phase when I was profoundly ignorant of how history actually worked. I grew out of it by the time I got to college; it looks like a lot of people never got that far.
I guarentee that 90% of all CFL bulbs that have been disposed of over the past 5 years by consumers went into the trash bin and NOT a special bulb recycle bin. This is a trend that will not change as people are lazy.
Did you even read the original post? Even if every CFL gets thrown in a landfill, it still releases less mercury into the environment than the amount of coal required to support the equivalent incandescent lamps would have. If you recycle them, it's better. You can read about recycling programs if you'd like to.
Most bulbs bought by americans are in the local stores and home improvement stores, they dont order high quality, they grab what is cheapest on the display. Most cheap crap CFL's die early and overall suck with long warm up times and nasty coloration.
Care to back this up? The seventy-nine cent bulbs I got at my local cheap-stuff store (I got some wacky Russian dog food there, for example) are Energy Star-compliant, and have a two-year warranty. They've been in use for between one and two years, and I haven't noticed long warm-up times, nasty coloration or any early death. I was really expecting that last--it's why I still have the packaging for the lamps.
When you get rid of "government", you don't actually get rid of government. Something shows up in its place, and whether or not you call it government, it's de facto the same thing. In Russia it's the Mafia; in Somalia it's warlords. In the United States, it'd probably be something corporate. The only faintly plausible idea for living without governance of which I'm aware was outlined in Vernor Vinge's "Conquest by Default", and even that relied on a big honking deus ex machina at the end. (Note that I didn't say that it was a good idea--it'd be a fairly miserable outcome--only that it was plausible.)
I can vote with my wallet only if the products are offered.
I don't think that's the biggest problem with the "just vote with your wallet!" response to any hint of regulation. The suggestion that it's in any way a democratic process is ridiculous--it's an oligarch's wet dream, a caricature of democracy in which rich people get to vote more.
I think the idea of outlawing incandescent lightbulbs is disgusting. Disgusting. Why? Because I like them more than CFL bulbs, and after all I AM PAYING FOR THEIR ENERGY USE.
Awesome. I think the idea of outlawing my habit of pointing the sewer outflow from my house onto the town green is disgusting. Disgusting. Why? Because I like pointing the shitpipe from my house onto the town green.
Not to mention that energy usage wouldn't be as much of a problem if we would just produce it from more efficent and cleaner sources. That CFL what is powered by a coal fired plant is more damaging than an incandescent bulb powered by solar (or wind or tidal or geothermal or nuclear ad nasuem).
Do you get your energy from renewable sources? Wait, scratch that; it doesn't matter. the entire grid is interconnected, which means that if you use less energy, then less coal is burned, period.
And isn't mercury a component of current CFLs? While it may not be a global warming danger, I centainly don't want any more mercury in my house than neccessary (anyone with a link to a site that compares the *production and disposal* of CFLs to incandescents?)
Here you go. In short, less mercury is released into the environment from a broken CFL than from the amount of coal burned by the equivalent incandescent. There are charts.
Most fluorescent bulbs aren't recycled; lamprecycle.org has information about where you can get them recycled. My municipality, for example, has a pickup program for burned-out lamps. (They also hand out free CFLs, six per household.) So: even if they're thrown in the trash, they release less mercury into the environment than the equivalent coal usage from incandescent bulbs do. However, the net release can be dropped to zero by recycling them.
There's no constitutional provision for secession (go look if you don't believe me), and in practice, the last time states did that, they were reconquered and placed under military governance. You may have heard about a certain "War of Northern Aggression".
From Article VI of the Constitution: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
This also holds true in practice. I think you may have just left off a "not" in your last sentence.
Sure, it's implausible for this system to actually work like msauve pretends it will, preventing coal plants from making the air an unbreathable mess--which one might suppose was msauve's real goal in proposing it. But this magical system is freedomlicious, which makes up for it being wallbangingly stupid.
The foreclosures are mostly in the "subprime" market of weak credit. A decade ago, the US government passed laws basically making it illegal to deny someone a loan just because they didn't have enough income. Seems lots of people were unable to "own" their home due to lack of means. So US Congress tried to "fix" this by forcing lenders to give them loans anyway. Lo and behold, they didn't have enough income to sustain the loan.
I'm certainly interested in what this law was, and what exactly it stipulated. How did we manage to avoid a housing crisis until recently, if loans have been going out to people who can't afford them for the last ten years?
Slashdot Mirror
CWT has one working plant, nine years after opening their first research facility. That's an important splash of cold water in the face of any unwarranted optimism here, I think.
Well, it did happen before--we couldn't be in this mess if the nation hadn't turned their back on the hard lessons learned in the oil shocks of the 1970s--but I don't think it could happen again; the limits on oil production have nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with the rate at which the stuff can be hauled out of the ground. I doubt petroleum will ever be really cheap again. (Though in a few years, we'll be looking back at the halcyon days of '08 as the days of inexpensive oil, when one could actually afford to run a car on gasoline--it's all relative.)
You're essentially repeating what the grandparent post said. GM follows the dictates of the market; the market was distorted on purpose to cause GM to make electric cars, but when that distortion was removed, GM stopped making electric cars, as it would not have been profitable. The blame for this change appears to rest with the government, whose policy change led to the junking of the EV-1. Are you arguing otherwise?
The version on SourceForge is developed from Frankel's original sources. It's also pretty moribund; mainly it's waiting for someone to come pick it up and continue development. (It has a few rough edges, and hasn't been worked on in about two years.) If you know anyone who'd like everlasting fame and glory, they'd be much appreciated--some of us are still happily using WASTE.
As Mark Pilgrim said, "Praising companies for providing APIs to get your own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with gravel." It's depressing that this isn't all a given.
Please do explain to me your understanding of history as it relates to any amount of governance being a bad thing, especially with regards to the examples of government-free areas such as Somalia in the mid-1990s and modern-day Iraq outside the Green Zone.
It appears you think the word "government" carries with it certain magical powers. Have you considered that things not calling themselves your government can "F [things] up"? And that perhaps governmental interference can ameliorate these F'ings? And that, furthermore, this is exactly what's happened in the past?
Well, it's sad that people call for authoritarian government, given all that. But what you're conveniently leaving out is that people call for government intervention is based on a long history of government intervention working. Rural electrification didn't end in "facism", as you put it; neither did a government monopoly on first-class mail delivery (though it did bring the cities and the countryside together); neither did the establishment of the FDA to limit the number of rats per vat of ketchup, or the establishment of the various grants and loans delineated by the GI Bill. These things were only disasters if you were an oligarch who hoped to stay on top of a pyramidal-shaped society.
As is traditional for the standard internet libertarian, you're counting the worst possible effects of the worst possible government against an airy-fairy concept of a libertarian paradise which you've just hand-waved into existence. While I don't think this makes you evil, it at the very least dishonest.
And, oh hell, I can't believe you're writing this on the internet .
There's an excellent article I read about it; I think it's a combination of factors. By nature, a lot of geeks are raised in comparative isolation; the internet has made it even easier to surround oneself only with people who agree with you; there's a disdain for "lesser" people that comes from years of wedgies. It's part of the standard high-school rant that those damned bullies are going to be pumping your gas one day, and why on earth would a geek who's Gotten His try to better that bully's position in life?
(I should disclaim that the above is just cultural criticism, and it's very far from empirical. You'd have to be David Brooks or someone like him to think that that constitutes an actual explanation for the streak of libertarianism that runs through geek culture.)
On a less hand-wavey level, I think there's something very appealing (especially to geeks) about the idea that one can deduce the entirety of politics from first principles. (I speak here of the Non-Aggression Principle.) The problem with this, as Seth Finkelstein points out, is that it just moves the complexity to the definitions of your terms, which are beyond debatability in your edge of the libertarian tent, in much the same way as fundamentalist churches claiming that their sole authority is the bible sweep their assumptions under the rug by pretending that they're not making any. (Fred the Slacktivist has some good discussion on the topic; also here.)
Heck, I went through a libertarian phase when I was profoundly ignorant of how history actually worked. I grew out of it by the time I got to college; it looks like a lot of people never got that far.
Six words speak more eloquently than the paragraph of verbiage I used. Well played, sir--well played.
When you get rid of "government", you don't actually get rid of government. Something shows up in its place, and whether or not you call it government, it's de facto the same thing. In Russia it's the Mafia; in Somalia it's warlords. In the United States, it'd probably be something corporate. The only faintly plausible idea for living without governance of which I'm aware was outlined in Vernor Vinge's "Conquest by Default", and even that relied on a big honking deus ex machina at the end. (Note that I didn't say that it was a good idea--it'd be a fairly miserable outcome--only that it was plausible.)
Most fluorescent bulbs aren't recycled; lamprecycle.org has information about where you can get them recycled. My municipality, for example, has a pickup program for burned-out lamps. (They also hand out free CFLs, six per household.) So: even if they're thrown in the trash, they release less mercury into the environment than the equivalent coal usage from incandescent bulbs do. However, the net release can be dropped to zero by recycling them.
There's no constitutional provision for secession (go look if you don't believe me), and in practice, the last time states did that, they were reconquered and placed under military governance. You may have heard about a certain "War of Northern Aggression".
This also holds true in practice. I think you may have just left off a "not" in your last sentence.
Sure, it's implausible for this system to actually work like msauve pretends it will, preventing coal plants from making the air an unbreathable mess--which one might suppose was msauve's real goal in proposing it. But this magical system is freedomlicious, which makes up for it being wallbangingly stupid.