That's the most frightening thing about it: what in all the nine hells does spying on CITIZENS have to do with protecting us from foreign terrorists? Or for that matter, from domestic terrorists -- how do you pick them out, or do you spy on *everyone* on General Principles?
The voices inside my tinfoil hat are telling me that this all seems like a pretty good way for a foreign power to achieve a covert takeover, in the guise of "protecting" our citizens.
And then there's the Foxworthy game:
If you ever bought fertilizer, you might be a terrorist. If you own a tractor, you might be a terrorist. If you wear a turban, you might be a terrorist.
As I've been saying for years, there is only one true freedom: economic freedom. That is, having enough money, and being allowed to keep enough of it, to be able to fund living free of fear and unreasonable restrictions. ALL non-theoretical freedoms ultimately derive from your economic situation.
"Taxes: a matter of extortion by the biggest thugs that happen to live next to you." -- R.A. Heinlein
So yes, as you say, if the gov't holds your money hostage, you are also held hostage, whether you realise it or not. Well, okay, you can live in a culvert and be free of the gov't, but what sort of freedom is that? Pick one:
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
Or
"The rich and the poor are equally free to sleep under the bridges."
My 11th grade American History teacher was big on digging up dirt on various Famous Americans, among them Lincoln. While Dilorenzo's material is somewhat overblown, my teacher did state that Lincoln was notorious for being unable to make up his mind, and for being easily led by his advisors. She also told us that while the rhetoric behind "freeing the slaves" was great for inspiring public support, Lincoln's real goal was destroying the South's economic base (which depended on slave labour), for the benefit of the Yankee industrialists who were Lincoln's backers and advisors.
Drivers aren't really a problem. I'm the hardware guru for the local user group, and that means I deal with all the donated machines -- which are typically first-generation Pentiums and low-end P2 machines, lately with some P3s for variety. Our standard for machines for the club is a dual boot of Win98SE, and WinXP Pro if the machine is up to it, meaning P2-300 and 128mb RAM or better (we have legal, no-limit, no-activation copies from M$, for club use).
I've found that Win98 has native drivers for most common older components, and XP has drivers for damnear everything. And the rest can be scraped up via DriverGuide or FTP search. Most older video cards will make do with a "close enough" driver; motherboards can do without entirely; sound cards and NICs need an exact match, but there again I've found that the older ones are much easier to find the right driver for, whereas some newer OEM-seconds (like in Gateway machines) don't even like their OWN drivers.
At the moment I have Ubuntu 5.current on a P3-800/768mb (picked out of the trash!); it's slick there, but was only just "okay" on the P3-450/256mb that the P3-800 just replaced. There are some things I don't like (and personally I prefer KDE as my desktop) but it's generally pretty good, and it did find most of the random hardware (except it doesn't seem to have found the USR Courier internal modem).
There's some diff in rendering time, true, as naturally once the data is across, a faster machine makes sense of it faster. But even so, most of the time involved is sheer data transfer, and the processing diff for messy HTML is not nearly in the same league as with, say, applying a complex photoshop filter. (Remember how it might take as long as two weeks for a fractal to process on a 486?! and meanwhile, you HOPE it doesn't crash!!)
But plain HTML isn't a terribly intensive job no matter what. When you get into scripts and image dithering and plugins, of course that tends to expand any performance gap....
But it depends more whether you're using a browser that's slow at the job (Moz/FF are both gawdawful slugs, as becomes evident when used on old hardware -- on my P233, Moz takes several times as long as NS to render the same pages). Back then (and to this day) I used good ol' Netscape 3.04 (sans plugins), and it's pretty quick even on big ugly pages and very old hardware. The main diff I found was that the 32bit version does indeed run just about 2x as fast as the 16bit version, an encouragement to abandon Win3.1:)
But real point being that the performance diff for basic work is not so great that an old machine can't still be useful. Plain browser, simple word processor, other entry-level apps; or as with yours, doing ordinary server work (there are also a lot of very old machines out there still cranking away with Netware 3) -- all are realistic "retirement jobs" for an old machine.
Does croggle me what people pitch out these days; frex, among my "rescue computers" is a dual Xeon 750. Makes you wonder!
Far as I know, there weren't any net viruses for Win3.x; I certainly never suffered any with my old Win3.1 box, which spent thousands of hours connected to the internet, with no firewall. (At the time there were no software firewalls for Win3.x, and hardware firewalls were still prohibitively expensive.) But there just wasn't much for a virus to hook into.
A recent stat I saw re active Win3.1x boxes logged by internet servers was in the 0.2% range, hardly worth even the most desperate virus author's time:)
I have a houseful of other people's discarded computers, for the most part perfectly good and still-useful machines. I only began turning up my nose at 486s as of 3 or 4 years ago... and then mainly because there were getting to be so many homeless newer machines and components, that 486s (and the interoperability issues of the era) were no longer worth the bother. Still, for basic work, a 486 can still be useful (as you obviously know:) And it pains me to see a perfectly healthy system sent to the dump, when someone, somewhere, could be happy with it.
My #2 everyday machine is a lowly P233/128mb RAM; it has Win95 and an assload of large apps (Corel Office 8, CorelDraw 8, Photoshop 5.5, assorted internet apps, etc.) It runs well even with heavy multitasking, works fine for everything expected of it, and *never* crashes. You couldn't pry this machine outta my hands with a crowbar.:) -- At one time it had RH6 on it, and KDE was usable (tho sluggish) but Gnome was like watching paint dry:(
The oldest machine here that still has a Real Job is a P120/64mb/Win95 in a luggable case, mainly used to leech off a friend's cable modem. It's perfectly competent for that simple task.
I've just rehabbed a stack of P150/32mb/Win95 boxen, to give to a teacher who has no funds for PCs in her classrooms. They're good enough for the simple apps she uses there.
There's no reason one HAS to install the latest and greatest on every machine. Let old systems run the stuff that was current in their day (whether Windows, linux, or whatever), and remain both useful and performing adequately to their tasks. Every job doesn't need a P4-3GHz screamer.
Hell, for years I did all my internet stuff on a 486... after all, a dialup machine doesn't need to be any faster than the modem!
I just had a disturbing thought comparing "puppies and ice cream for all" to a stockyard, where you get all you can eat for free... until they haul you away to become hamburger.
Yep. Carter meant well, but politically he was in over his head. I don't think he understood, at least at the level where reality happens, that you can't just "create" money, and you can't sweetly give in to everyone with an axe to grind (frex, hostage takers).
Spoken like someone who believes in "entitlement"...
No, the #1 reason public schools in CA are crap is because 80% of the school budget goes for ADMINISTRATION. Only 20% goes to pay teachers, supply classrooms, and keep facilities in good repair.
Cops here have a starting salary around $45,000. Find me another entry-level position that's paid so well after only 3 months of training?? Nurses make about the same and doctors a whole shitload more; the problem for private practice is the malpractice insurance -- some are paying out 75% of their gross income just for that. Even so, things can't be too bad -- or doctors would be leaving CA in droves, like they've left the Maritime provinces. Try to find an oncologist in Nova Scotia, anywhere but in Halifax.
As to social services for those of us who can't afford insurance or private doctors -- the reason I, a taxpaying citizen, have to wait in line for 8 hours to get five minutes of some Pakistani intern's time, is because 90% of the other people in line are illegal aliens and there are only so many tax dollars to go around, and illegals seldom pay their fair share regardless.
It isn't America's job to support everyone else in the world, just like it's not their job to support us. But somehow America is expected to give and give and give, and that's taught the rest of the world to behave like professional beggars. Mexico has more natural wealth than America, yet is a poor country. Why? Corruption at every level. But instead of staying home and fixing the problem, they come here and bring their attitudes with them.
If your country is so bad, fix it; don't drag your problems here. If you come to my country, live like an American, don't expect ME to change my lifestyle and language for you. And if the old country is so wonderful that you simply MUST bring all its ways here (and inflict them on me) -- STAY IN THE OLD COUNTRY.
As to "people to pump your gas" -- out of all the places I've been, the level of service here is absolutely the worst, and getting worse all the time.
And at least the Terminator doesn't beat up his secretary, like a certain predecessor did.
I was a lot more liberal about immigration before I moved to SoCal. Over the past two decades, thanks to problems like what you cite, I've become a proponent of gun turrets at the border:( If CA wasn't supporting millions of illegals, CA could afford to support its *citizens*.
A good deal of the problem could be halted by doing away with automatic citizenship for the spawn of illegal aliens (it made sense when America was labour-poor, but those days are long gone). In other countries, a baby is a citizen of wherever its *parents* are citizens. Why should they expect different of American?
But oh, no, it's far too politically incorrect for *Americans* to resent being overrun by invaders from another country.
I used to live in Great Falls, MT. Every weekend, swarms of Alberta residents came south to shop. I'm not sure that counts as "somewhere warm":) That general region is a nice stable place to live and raise a family, tho -- if you can take the weather, probably among the best in the world.
And what about browsers where when you type "example" automagically assume "example.com" ?? What about domain squatters and linkfarms who go forth and gather up all the TLD-less domains?
Even with just those two thoughts, IMO the potential for abuse and hijacking is just too much.
The term "idealized feudal system" was made up on the spot:) but the idea being that it omits the abuses of power that have traditionally been associated with a hereditary aristocracy; said abuses deriving largely from the Revised Golden Rule ("He who has the gold makes the rules"). If you don't have a massive skew between rich and poor, there's less ability to abuse power, because no one is so poor that they can't simply pack up and leave an undesirable sphere of influence.
In my space opera ("The Epic" for short:) along with the hereditary feudal gov't, there's also a system of landbound serfdom (it isn't slavery; it's more like "this is MY village, dammit!") In practice, if your serfs don't like how you run your province, they'll gradually leak away to somewhere less obnoxious; indeed, what with widespread labour shortages, the provincial lords try to make their service a safe and desirable place to be, and are neither legally required to nor inclined to return runaways. So there's incentive to treat your people well, or you'll lose 'em. Besides, if you're too much of an idiot, the serfs might go complain to your planetary prince.:)
OTOH, if people want to fight among themselves, chances are no one will stop them unless it begins spilling offplanet, since it's not really anyone else's business. Besides, as with most habitually-independent folk, interference from above tends to exacerbate rather than pacify.
As a further side effect, there is no welfare system. If you can't or won't find a place in life, that's considered your own damned fault, because it's sure not for lack of opportunity, nor for lack of frontiers for misfits to escape to. Don't like how we run this planet? Here's a ship, there's a nav comp, yonder's the rest of the galaxy. Have at it.
But coming back to Earth [g]... there's one of our big problems today: we've run out of practical (read: livable without extreme measures) frontiers for the misfits and overly-independent types to escape to; cyberspace was a short-term substitute, but it's become cramped too. We're beyond the population density we've evolved for, leading to a variety of mostly-covert rats-in-a-cage behaviour (frex, the gimme-everything-for-free mentality). Social efforts to control this lemme-outta-here behaviour leads to draconian laws like the DMCA. And wealth skewed toward the proponents of such laws (frex, the RIAA) gives them an inordinate power to enforce their will (per the aforementioned Revised Golden Rule).
I recall an "anti-flash" campaign from way back when, but it went the way of all the other anti-annoying-shit web campaigns -- nowhere:(
The ol' truck is actually on its 2nd engine, but mainly cuz it once had to haul twice its rated load capacity halfway across the continent, and subsequently lived many years in a very dirty environment. Even so, I can't complain... it still gets from point A to point B, and (except where it got hit-and-runned) looks almost new despite a lifetime of hard work. AND, being it's about the most generic Ford truck ever, I can still get parts anywhere on short notice.
I've got a Chrysler LeBaron that's one year newer (with 1/3rd the miles), and its parts have been special-order-only for years. (Would like to sell that one to a collector.)
Occurs to me that you've just reinvented the idealized feudal system -- where people are largely responsible to and of themselves, and the higher-ups are only for when the locals can't deal with something. In turn, the higher-ups are responsible for protecting the lower levels (against outside forces, or from one another) and can be appealed to directly if the local level isn't doing the job.
And if you don't do the job, someone else will, probably without consulting you.:)
The main problem is this tends to fall apart when population pressures increase to the point where a lot of people's feet are routinely stepped on.
BTW in my fiction (an ongoing space opera) this essentially describes the currently dominant gov't (tho there is a hereditary power structure, who are sometimes, ah, "removed" if unsatisfactory, and no concept of voting); however, they're also in a postwar period of marked population decline. So people have to be responsible to and of themselves, cuz no one else is gonna do it for them!
[Myself, I've ceased to believe in democracy; as someone once described it, "Three wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner."]
IOW, if you sound like a snot-nosed kid, people will respond to you in kind. Which isn't a good way to generate respect for your position. You're more likely to be taken seriously if you make a coherent statement based on the laws in your jurisdiction, rather than going "Nyah Nyah, can't catch me".
The other problem with your system as proposed, is that MOST people want to just be left alone and not get involved. Which means only those who *want* to be in charge wind up doing stuff. And after a while we're back to a skewed system.
However... back in the days when "Trespassers Will Be Shot" was legally and socially acceptable, there was a good deal more personal incentive to do your bit, if only because no one else was going to protect you if you didn't.
"You also have to consider malicious evil, the willingness to do harm to others even when it doesn't benefit you in any way, and in extreme cases, even when it does you harm too."
Or to put it more plainly, there are people who can't "win" unless everybody else *loses*.
If that erodes their own power base, well, they're willing to pay that price, just to avoid letting anyone else "win".
I've known a number of people like that, typically in a big-fish-in-little-pond situation. They'd rather drain their own pond and die with it, rather than admit that the ocean is large and therein lies opportunity for all.
To crawl further off-topic, I don't remember Carter as corrupt, but rather as an essentially good-hearted man who was economically clueless, and happened to be in a position where his cluelessness was harmful (small businesses died in droves).
(Did I just announce my political affiliation? Hint: it ain't the same as yours.:)
Despite that I have flash 6 retail installed on this machine, for some reason Moz insists on using v5, so I get a lot of "you need to upgrade your flash" -- and my response is "no way in hell". Especially since everyone I know who's done so immediately finds their browser all crash-happy, and for all the things I dislike about Moz, at least it very rarely crashes.
And yep, I too am inspired to remember Bad Things about companies (and ad agencies) whose ads cause me annoyance. As you say, negative publicity is sometimes just... negative. "We all know your name SUCKS", rather than "We all know your name."
Just as well in your cited case... Pontiac being GM's bottom-end cars. (Speaking as the driver of a 28-year-old Ford pickup, whose demise is probably another 20 years in the future at the present rate.:)
I have a cat who when he's bad, if I rail at him with sufficient vigour, will eventually put on the most amazing contrite expression. Then later in the day he does this "you wouldn't really put me in the barn, would you??" suckup behaviour, similar to a dog that knows it's been bad and is trying to "apologize" (tho a dog will usually learn from correction, and this cat doesn't, being dumb even as cats go). But agreed, he's an anomaly; most misbehaving cats are concerned only with getting the hell out of reach.
And as to hawks, they're not particularly violent. Doves and sparrows, now there's real violence!!
Slashdot Mirror
That's the most frightening thing about it: what in all the nine hells does spying on CITIZENS have to do with protecting us from foreign terrorists? Or for that matter, from domestic terrorists -- how do you pick them out, or do you spy on *everyone* on General Principles?
The voices inside my tinfoil hat are telling me that this all seems like a pretty good way for a foreign power to achieve a covert takeover, in the guise of "protecting" our citizens.
And then there's the Foxworthy game:
If you ever bought fertilizer, you might be a terrorist.
If you own a tractor, you might be a terrorist.
If you wear a turban, you might be a terrorist.
Add your own! Everyone can play.
As I've been saying for years, there is only one true freedom: economic freedom. That is, having enough money, and being allowed to keep enough of it, to be able to fund living free of fear and unreasonable restrictions. ALL non-theoretical freedoms ultimately derive from your economic situation.
"Taxes: a matter of extortion by the biggest thugs that happen to live next to you." -- R.A. Heinlein
So yes, as you say, if the gov't holds your money hostage, you are also held hostage, whether you realise it or not. Well, okay, you can live in a culvert and be free of the gov't, but what sort of freedom is that? Pick one:
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
Or
"The rich and the poor are equally free to sleep under the bridges."
My 11th grade American History teacher was big on digging up dirt on various Famous Americans, among them Lincoln. While Dilorenzo's material is somewhat overblown, my teacher did state that Lincoln was notorious for being unable to make up his mind, and for being easily led by his advisors. She also told us that while the rhetoric behind "freeing the slaves" was great for inspiring public support, Lincoln's real goal was destroying the South's economic base (which depended on slave labour), for the benefit of the Yankee industrialists who were Lincoln's backers and advisors.
Must be all them drugs being sold via the internet ;)
Drivers aren't really a problem. I'm the hardware guru for the local user group, and that means I deal with all the donated machines -- which are typically first-generation Pentiums and low-end P2 machines, lately with some P3s for variety. Our standard for machines for the club is a dual boot of Win98SE, and WinXP Pro if the machine is up to it, meaning P2-300 and 128mb RAM or better (we have legal, no-limit, no-activation copies from M$, for club use).
I've found that Win98 has native drivers for most common older components, and XP has drivers for damnear everything. And the rest can be scraped up via DriverGuide or FTP search. Most older video cards will make do with a "close enough" driver; motherboards can do without entirely; sound cards and NICs need an exact match, but there again I've found that the older ones are much easier to find the right driver for, whereas some newer OEM-seconds (like in Gateway machines) don't even like their OWN drivers.
At the moment I have Ubuntu 5.current on a P3-800/768mb (picked out of the trash!); it's slick there, but was only just "okay" on the P3-450/256mb that the P3-800 just replaced. There are some things I don't like (and personally I prefer KDE as my desktop) but it's generally pretty good, and it did find most of the random hardware (except it doesn't seem to have found the USR Courier internal modem).
There's some diff in rendering time, true, as naturally once the data is across, a faster machine makes sense of it faster. But even so, most of the time involved is sheer data transfer, and the processing diff for messy HTML is not nearly in the same league as with, say, applying a complex photoshop filter. (Remember how it might take as long as two weeks for a fractal to process on a 486?! and meanwhile, you HOPE it doesn't crash!!)
:)
But plain HTML isn't a terribly intensive job no matter what. When you get into scripts and image dithering and plugins, of course that tends to expand any performance gap....
But it depends more whether you're using a browser that's slow at the job (Moz/FF are both gawdawful slugs, as becomes evident when used on old hardware -- on my P233, Moz takes several times as long as NS to render the same pages). Back then (and to this day) I used good ol' Netscape 3.04 (sans plugins), and it's pretty quick even on big ugly pages and very old hardware. The main diff I found was that the 32bit version does indeed run just about 2x as fast as the 16bit version, an encouragement to abandon Win3.1
But real point being that the performance diff for basic work is not so great that an old machine can't still be useful. Plain browser, simple word processor, other entry-level apps; or as with yours, doing ordinary server work (there are also a lot of very old machines out there still cranking away with Netware 3) -- all are realistic "retirement jobs" for an old machine.
Does croggle me what people pitch out these days; frex, among my "rescue computers" is a dual Xeon 750. Makes you wonder!
Far as I know, there weren't any net viruses for Win3.x; I certainly never suffered any with my old Win3.1 box, which spent thousands of hours connected to the internet, with no firewall. (At the time there were no software firewalls for Win3.x, and hardware firewalls were still prohibitively expensive.) But there just wasn't much for a virus to hook into.
:)
A recent stat I saw re active Win3.1x boxes logged by internet servers was in the 0.2% range, hardly worth even the most desperate virus author's time
I have a houseful of other people's discarded computers, for the most part perfectly good and still-useful machines. I only began turning up my nose at 486s as of 3 or 4 years ago... and then mainly because there were getting to be so many homeless newer machines and components, that 486s (and the interoperability issues of the era) were no longer worth the bother. Still, for basic work, a 486 can still be useful (as you obviously know :) And it pains me to see a perfectly healthy system sent to the dump, when someone, somewhere, could be happy with it.
My #2 everyday machine is a lowly P233/128mb RAM; it has Win95 and an assload of large apps (Corel Office 8, CorelDraw 8, Photoshop 5.5, assorted internet apps, etc.) It runs well even with heavy multitasking, works fine for everything expected of it, and *never* crashes. You couldn't pry this machine outta my hands with a crowbar. :) -- At one time it had RH6 on it, and KDE was usable (tho sluggish) but Gnome was like watching paint dry :(
The oldest machine here that still has a Real Job is a P120/64mb/Win95 in a luggable case, mainly used to leech off a friend's cable modem. It's perfectly competent for that simple task.
I've just rehabbed a stack of P150/32mb/Win95 boxen, to give to a teacher who has no funds for PCs in her classrooms. They're good enough for the simple apps she uses there.
There's no reason one HAS to install the latest and greatest on every machine. Let old systems run the stuff that was current in their day (whether Windows, linux, or whatever), and remain both useful and performing adequately to their tasks. Every job doesn't need a P4-3GHz screamer.
Hell, for years I did all my internet stuff on a 486... after all, a dialup machine doesn't need to be any faster than the modem!
[snork] I think you're probably right :D
I just had a disturbing thought comparing "puppies and ice cream for all" to a stockyard, where you get all you can eat for free... until they haul you away to become hamburger.
Yep. Carter meant well, but politically he was in over his head. I don't think he understood, at least at the level where reality happens, that you can't just "create" money, and you can't sweetly give in to everyone with an axe to grind (frex, hostage takers).
Spoken like someone who believes in "entitlement"...
No, the #1 reason public schools in CA are crap is because 80% of the school budget goes for ADMINISTRATION. Only 20% goes to pay teachers, supply classrooms, and keep facilities in good repair.
Cops here have a starting salary around $45,000. Find me another entry-level position that's paid so well after only 3 months of training?? Nurses make about the same and doctors a whole shitload more; the problem for private practice is the malpractice insurance -- some are paying out 75% of their gross income just for that. Even so, things can't be too bad -- or doctors would be leaving CA in droves, like they've left the Maritime provinces. Try to find an oncologist in Nova Scotia, anywhere but in Halifax.
As to social services for those of us who can't afford insurance or private doctors -- the reason I, a taxpaying citizen, have to wait in line for 8 hours to get five minutes of some Pakistani intern's time, is because 90% of the other people in line are illegal aliens and there are only so many tax dollars to go around, and illegals seldom pay their fair share regardless.
It isn't America's job to support everyone else in the world, just like it's not their job to support us. But somehow America is expected to give and give and give, and that's taught the rest of the world to behave like professional beggars. Mexico has more natural wealth than America, yet is a poor country. Why? Corruption at every level. But instead of staying home and fixing the problem, they come here and bring their attitudes with them.
If your country is so bad, fix it; don't drag your problems here. If you come to my country, live like an American, don't expect ME to change my lifestyle and language for you. And if the old country is so wonderful that you simply MUST bring all its ways here (and inflict them on me) -- STAY IN THE OLD COUNTRY.
As to "people to pump your gas" -- out of all the places I've been, the level of service here is absolutely the worst, and getting worse all the time.
And at least the Terminator doesn't beat up his secretary, like a certain predecessor did.
I was a lot more liberal about immigration before I moved to SoCal. Over the past two decades, thanks to problems like what you cite, I've become a proponent of gun turrets at the border :( If CA wasn't supporting millions of illegals, CA could afford to support its *citizens*.
A good deal of the problem could be halted by doing away with automatic citizenship for the spawn of illegal aliens (it made sense when America was labour-poor, but those days are long gone). In other countries, a baby is a citizen of wherever its *parents* are citizens. Why should they expect different of American?
But oh, no, it's far too politically incorrect for *Americans* to resent being overrun by invaders from another country.
How much skew comes from the horrendous unemployment situation in the Maritimes? that is, how would Canada west of Quebec compare to the US?
I used to live in Great Falls, MT. Every weekend, swarms of Alberta residents came south to shop. I'm not sure that counts as "somewhere warm" :) That general region is a nice stable place to live and raise a family, tho -- if you can take the weather, probably among the best in the world.
And what about browsers where when you type "example" automagically assume "example.com" ??
What about domain squatters and linkfarms who go forth and gather up all the TLD-less domains?
Even with just those two thoughts, IMO the potential for abuse and hijacking is just too much.
The term "idealized feudal system" was made up on the spot :) but the idea being that it omits the abuses of power that have traditionally been associated with a hereditary aristocracy; said abuses deriving largely from the Revised Golden Rule ("He who has the gold makes the rules"). If you don't have a massive skew between rich and poor, there's less ability to abuse power, because no one is so poor that they can't simply pack up and leave an undesirable sphere of influence.
:) along with the hereditary feudal gov't, there's also a system of landbound serfdom (it isn't slavery; it's more like "this is MY village, dammit!") In practice, if your serfs don't like how you run your province, they'll gradually leak away to somewhere less obnoxious; indeed, what with widespread labour shortages, the provincial lords try to make their service a safe and desirable place to be, and are neither legally required to nor inclined to return runaways. So there's incentive to treat your people well, or you'll lose 'em. Besides, if you're too much of an idiot, the serfs might go complain to your planetary prince. :)
... there's one of our big problems today: we've run out of practical (read: livable without extreme measures) frontiers for the misfits and overly-independent types to escape to; cyberspace was a short-term substitute, but it's become cramped too. We're beyond the population density we've evolved for, leading to a variety of mostly-covert rats-in-a-cage behaviour (frex, the gimme-everything-for-free mentality). Social efforts to control this lemme-outta-here behaviour leads to draconian laws like the DMCA. And wealth skewed toward the proponents of such laws (frex, the RIAA) gives them an inordinate power to enforce their will (per the aforementioned Revised Golden Rule).
:D
In my space opera ("The Epic" for short
OTOH, if people want to fight among themselves, chances are no one will stop them unless it begins spilling offplanet, since it's not really anyone else's business. Besides, as with most habitually-independent folk, interference from above tends to exacerbate rather than pacify.
As a further side effect, there is no welfare system. If you can't or won't find a place in life, that's considered your own damned fault, because it's sure not for lack of opportunity, nor for lack of frontiers for misfits to escape to. Don't like how we run this planet? Here's a ship, there's a nav comp, yonder's the rest of the galaxy. Have at it.
But coming back to Earth [g]
And here you thought we'd gotten off topic!
I recall an "anti-flash" campaign from way back when, but it went the way of all the other anti-annoying-shit web campaigns -- nowhere :(
The ol' truck is actually on its 2nd engine, but mainly cuz it once had to haul twice its rated load capacity halfway across the continent, and subsequently lived many years in a very dirty environment. Even so, I can't complain... it still gets from point A to point B, and (except where it got hit-and-runned) looks almost new despite a lifetime of hard work. AND, being it's about the most generic Ford truck ever, I can still get parts anywhere on short notice.
I've got a Chrysler LeBaron that's one year newer (with 1/3rd the miles), and its parts have been special-order-only for years. (Would like to sell that one to a collector.)
Occurs to me that you've just reinvented the idealized feudal system -- where people are largely responsible to and of themselves, and the higher-ups are only for when the locals can't deal with something. In turn, the higher-ups are responsible for protecting the lower levels (against outside forces, or from one another) and can be appealed to directly if the local level isn't doing the job.
:)
And if you don't do the job, someone else will, probably without consulting you.
The main problem is this tends to fall apart when population pressures increase to the point where a lot of people's feet are routinely stepped on.
BTW in my fiction (an ongoing space opera) this essentially describes the currently dominant gov't (tho there is a hereditary power structure, who are sometimes, ah, "removed" if unsatisfactory, and no concept of voting); however, they're also in a postwar period of marked population decline. So people have to be responsible to and of themselves, cuz no one else is gonna do it for them!
[Myself, I've ceased to believe in democracy; as someone once described it, "Three wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner."]
IOW, if you sound like a snot-nosed kid, people will respond to you in kind. Which isn't a good way to generate respect for your position. You're more likely to be taken seriously if you make a coherent statement based on the laws in your jurisdiction, rather than going "Nyah Nyah, can't catch me".
The other problem with your system as proposed, is that MOST people want to just be left alone and not get involved. Which means only those who *want* to be in charge wind up doing stuff. And after a while we're back to a skewed system.
However... back in the days when "Trespassers Will Be Shot" was legally and socially acceptable, there was a good deal more personal incentive to do your bit, if only because no one else was going to protect you if you didn't.
"You also have to consider malicious evil, the willingness to do harm to others even when it doesn't benefit you in any way, and in extreme cases, even when it does you harm too."
Or to put it more plainly, there are people who can't "win" unless everybody else *loses*.
If that erodes their own power base, well, they're willing to pay that price, just to avoid letting anyone else "win".
I've known a number of people like that, typically in a big-fish-in-little-pond situation. They'd rather drain their own pond and die with it, rather than admit that the ocean is large and therein lies opportunity for all.
To crawl further off-topic, I don't remember Carter as corrupt, but rather as an essentially good-hearted man who was economically clueless, and happened to be in a position where his cluelessness was harmful (small businesses died in droves).
:)
(Did I just announce my political affiliation? Hint: it ain't the same as yours.
Despite that I have flash 6 retail installed on this machine, for some reason Moz insists on using v5, so I get a lot of "you need to upgrade your flash" -- and my response is "no way in hell". Especially since everyone I know who's done so immediately finds their browser all crash-happy, and for all the things I dislike about Moz, at least it very rarely crashes.
... negative. "We all know your name SUCKS", rather than "We all know your name."
:)
And yep, I too am inspired to remember Bad Things about companies (and ad agencies) whose ads cause me annoyance. As you say, negative publicity is sometimes just
Just as well in your cited case... Pontiac being GM's bottom-end cars. (Speaking as the driver of a 28-year-old Ford pickup, whose demise is probably another 20 years in the future at the present rate.
I have a cat who when he's bad, if I rail at him with sufficient vigour, will eventually put on the most amazing contrite expression. Then later in the day he does this "you wouldn't really put me in the barn, would you??" suckup behaviour, similar to a dog that knows it's been bad and is trying to "apologize" (tho a dog will usually learn from correction, and this cat doesn't, being dumb even as cats go). But agreed, he's an anomaly; most misbehaving cats are concerned only with getting the hell out of reach.
And as to hawks, they're not particularly violent. Doves and sparrows, now there's real violence!!