Apart from the references that you provided as part of your argument you mean?
You mean the references that show that there is no consistent difference between the US and those other countries that you claim are socialist?
Tell you what, why don't you actually define what you mean by "socialist country"?
Why don't you then demonstrate that the US doesn't meet those criteria while all of the countries you claim are "socialist" (Norway, Australia, Switzerland, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, Ireland) meet those criteria.
There wasn't any old rules. They NEVER EXISTED. All you have been told about the "old rules" are lies. They never existed!!!!
I didn't talk about "old rules", I talked about a "putative 'right to be forgotten'". Go look up what the word "putative" means if you are having trouble with it.
What did exist was national laws, and a human right court decision that said national laws that put time limits on certain information also applied on the internet. Being on the internet does not raise you about existing laws, no matter how silly they may seem.
The information itself isn't "limited", what is limited is the ability of search engines to provide it to people. Archives, banks, doctors, lenders, politicians, police, newspapers, and governments can hold your past misdeeds over you in perpetuity; the "right to be forgotten" simply limits the ability of ordinary citizens to obtain information for themselves via search engines.
And being neither North American nor European I have no attachment to the cultural dogma attached to either of them. They both have strengths and weaknesses. Socialism has been proven to work in quite a few places, so saying it can't work is deliberately deceptive or ignorant.
The reality is that there is little difference between the economic systems of the US, Canada, Australia, Norway, Germany, and all the other countries you list. All of them are modern welfare states, none of them are socialist. If anything, the US spends more on social welfare, social safety nets, and other social expenses than those other countries, and the US regulates corporations and bankers more strongly.
What is "deceptive and ignorant" is that you try to make a distinction between the US and "socialist states" that simply doesn't exist. Your reasoning is rooted in complete ignorance of the social and economic realities in Europe and the US.
Here's is the problem with the "lower taxes" and "smaller government" arguments. At what point do you deem them small enough?
Do you find a statement like "the US should cut back our corporate tax rates and our social welfare spending to the lower levels found in those other countries" too difficult to comprehend?
placing some people in a perpetual pillory. This makes rehabilitation difficult as the convicted criminal who has paid his or her debt to society will find it increasingly difficult to start a fresh life
Again, you are confusing "rehabilitation" with "fresh start". If you murdered someone, "rehabilitation" means that you convince society that you aren't going to do it again and therefore can be let free; it doesn't mean that society owes you anything, let alone a "fresh start".
In any case, European governments were concerned with giving a "fresh start", they could simply make it easy for people to change their name and identity. So, that argument doesn't work.
In some cases, I think it is reasonable to view this as an unjust and unreasonable punishment.
People talking and writing about someone's crime isn't a "punishment", it's a right that everybody in a free society has. The fact that this inconveniences former murderers is no justification for restricting the freedom of speech of others.
Correction. Murders have tried to use it, but details of their serious crimes aren't covered by this right so they failed.
Murderers have failed to enforce the "right to be forgotten" against German Wikipedia and media outlets, but they seem to have succeeded in enforcing it against search engines. The latter didn't even require a court case, because it is the intended function of the "right to be forgotten" laws.
Furthermore, given the steep penalties for corporations, this law has a chilling effect that will cause any big company to censor speech in order to avoid the risk of massive losses.
Except all you're able to point at is a single case of one guy's lawyers trying to make Wikipedia and Deutschlandradio internet archives to remove his name - and failing at that.
As for Wikipedia, European courts have no jurisdiction over it anyway.
Except they specifically list exemptions for legal, archival, scientific research, public interest, freedom of expression etc.
Yes precisely. What isn't exempt is foreign corporations, search engines, and other such entities. And low information voters like you think that's a good thing.
Not if the city is running out of money due to tax cuts.
When "cities are running out of money due to tax cuts", they use that as a justification to raise taxes again. Cities (and governments in general) have no incentives to save money and operate cost efficiently because they are not rewarded for that.
Which is quite understandable in some forms since people generally have a right to be rehabilitated.
"Rehabilitation" means that we attempt to change the minds and behavior of criminals, not that criminals have any new rights, least of all to have their crimes erased from the public record. The latter is an absurd perversion of the concept of rehabilitation.
Purpose of this is to ensure that Facebook, Google and various government and other agencies can't use or sell your private data if you don't want them to.
Yeah, "stick it to big US companies" is very popular, with European corporations and press, who then go out to lobby European politicians and bamboozle European voters. Also, government agencies are usually exempt from this.
Not for convicted murderers to be able to erase their past from the internet.
Unless the city planned ahead and buried extra conduits in advance, the cost of 'just adding another wire' is the cost of tearing up and rebuilding the roads and/or sidewalks
Why do you imagine the city cares? One year a few years ago, the city tore up the street in front of my house three times, to put in new lines for public utilities. If anything, tearing up the same street again and again means more work for city employees and more money handed out to contractors, both of which the city likes. A city that doesn't plan ahead to minimize disruption also don't care about actually disrupting people.
One would presume that en Engineering Degree would require more than a little exposure to the scientific method.
I have no idea what kind of "exposure" it requires, but in practice, engineers think and reason very different from scientists. There are few people who manage to be both good engineers and good scientists. (Bill Nye, IMO, is neither.)
Give me a budget for a small town (mine would work) where I could build out a COLO facility, and put in conduit and fiber to every home, and I'll show you how well it would work. I'll bet that I could have most houses wanting High Speed Internet at a fraction of the cost of Cable
You could. But you don't have such a budget and you don't run a small town, and that's no accident. If you did, you'd have donors, lobbyists, unions, and corporations breathing down your neck, and you would end up making the choices that let you keep your job, not the choices that are objectively best for the public. That's how the political process works.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with how much you pay for the pipe into your home, or who sells it to you. That means that an ISP that is also a content provider does not artificially limit your access to content from other providers in preference to its own.
The only reason a content provider can artificially limit access to content from other providers is because access to the "last mile" is limited. If access to the last mile weren't limited, then if one provider attempts to limit access to the content from other providers, people would simply get their Internet access elsewhere. Therefore, Archangel Michael is right and you are wrong: net neutrality very much has to do with the last mile.
It still amazes me that people continue to point wildly at climate funding as if it were some huge incentive to betray everything science stands for
If you're an academic, you must get government research grants or you're out of a job and your career is in the toilet. Pressure is even stronger for scientists actually employed by the government.
But no, it must be the climatologists who are all baldly lying to us to protect their incomes.
Climatologists aren't "baldly lying", they simply have strong publication and research biases; many of them are likely not even aware of their biases. What biases oil and gas company sponsored scientists have (the few there are) is irrelevant, since the case for action on climate change isn't based on their results.
You attempted to explain volumes of work in one paragraph. If you can't accept the error of that vast oversimplification there is no point continuing.
I made a simple, factual historical statement about the NSDAP party program and the role scientific statements played in it. I suggest you verify it yourself.
Good one. So you conveniently pretend Norway, Australia, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany and Ireland aren't there? Or are you man enough to admit that yes, there are a few socialist countries with higher standard of living than the US?
The US spends about the same percentage of GDP on social welfare as Switzerland and Australia, and significantly more than Canada. In absolute terms, the US spends more on social welfare per capita than any other major country. Canada, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the UK all rank higher on economic liberty than the US. And the US has the highest corporate tax rates among OECD countries. So, the idea that those other countries are "socialist", even in the sense of being a welfare state, while the US is supposedly not is untenable.
In terms of economic factors (housing, jobs, income), the US outranks all other OECD members. If you ranked countries like Sweden and Germany among US states, they would be among the poorest US states. Having lived in several of the countries you list, that agrees with my experience. In particular, I rejected emigrating both to Canada and Australia because I consider the economic opportunities and standard of living to be too low in those countries.
And if we take the wealth inequality of the US into account, then for 99% of Americans, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Liechtenstein, Sweden, UK, Iceland etc etc have higher standards of living too?
Most comparisons of living standards already look at median incomes or exclude the top 1%, so arguments about "if you take wealth inequality into account" are rooted in a misunderstanding of what that data shows. Furthermore, the levels of inequality in the US are not much higher than other countries; pretax, they are the same or lower than the UK, Spain, Poland, Germany, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Post tax, they are similar to the UK, Canada, Spain, and Australia (0.42 vs. 0.41 and 0.38).
Overall, I agree: the US should be more like Canada, Australia, and Ireland: we should cut back our corporate tax rates to lower levels, and cut back our social welfare spending to the lower levels found in those other countries.
It's the same thing, you just choose different word to make you sound like it's different. Example: Arms Control. Right wing nut jobs scream freedom to own guns, but are the first to complain when Iran wants nukes. Why can't Iran be free to own Nukes, North Korea?
It's a simple statement of fact: under the US Constitution, the US government has the power to use force against Iran and North Korea for any reason whatsoever, but it does not have the power to restrict gun ownership by US citizens.
True Freedom is either all-in or not, otherwise you're somewhere in the middle, which we all are, but only some of us are aware of this fact.
I don't believe I ever claimed that the US Constitution was a perfect blueprint for a free society. Furthermore, freedoms need to be reciprocal, and since Iran and North Korea are not free societies, we don't have to treat them as such.
"It's too complicated forme to explain" is the cop-out of someone who is trying to cover his ignorance.
In fact, I did "Google it", and read a lot of books about it, which is why I know this stuff and you don't. Look up the NSDAP party program, read the speeches Hitler and other politicians gave to the public, and read the speeches Hitler and other parliamentarians gave justifying their key votes in parliament, foremost the Enabling Act. Read the books I recommended.
A little bit of regulation to define long term goals helps offset that.
You mean like when government forces companies and people to invest in expensive ISDN and fiber infrastructure for the long term? You know, when ISDN is replaced rapidly by DSL, never recouping the investment, and the fiber technologies that were deployed "for the long term" turned out to be obsolete by the time fiber actually was commercially feasible? That happened where I used to live.
Corporations frequently think and plan long term. That's how all the new telecoms standards come about. Microsoft's, Apple's, and Google's software is planned years ahead. And many corporations plan a decade or two ahead. That's because today's stock price reflects that long term planning.
It is governments that are guilty of short term planning. Politicians don't care about spending too much because they don't have to; it's not their money. All they really care is getting reelected, and that means a short time horizon and a focus on fluff.
Net Neutrality is a problem of the "last mile", the inability of the customer to SHOP for the service / price / quality of the products and services we wish to purchase
I agree.
Fix the last mile, make it COMMON for all (like roads) and bring all those connections back to a COLO where Businesses compete for the last mile customer.
That may be a reasonable practical solution, given the way our roads are owned and managed today.
However, I think it's worth pointing out that the reason we have this economic "last mile problem" isn't a consequence of "natural monopolies" or "big corporations", it exists because the inability of services to compete for last mile access customers right now. That is, last mile access is managed politically by city hall, not economically by the people who actually want service.
They are probably both true: the FBI knows how to unlock some phones themselves, and for others, they need outside help.
And because the FBI lied, why should I have confidence in law enforcement at all?
It should be obvious to anybody that civilization requires jackbooted thugs carrying guns and protected by (un)qualified immunity reading your E-mail. For the children. And so that you don't cheat on your taxes. Seriously, do you want to live in SOMALIA?
Slashdot Mirror
You mean the references that show that there is no consistent difference between the US and those other countries that you claim are socialist?
Tell you what, why don't you actually define what you mean by "socialist country"?
Why don't you then demonstrate that the US doesn't meet those criteria while all of the countries you claim are "socialist" (Norway, Australia, Switzerland, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, Ireland) meet those criteria.
I didn't talk about "old rules", I talked about a "putative 'right to be forgotten'". Go look up what the word "putative" means if you are having trouble with it.
The information itself isn't "limited", what is limited is the ability of search engines to provide it to people. Archives, banks, doctors, lenders, politicians, police, newspapers, and governments can hold your past misdeeds over you in perpetuity; the "right to be forgotten" simply limits the ability of ordinary citizens to obtain information for themselves via search engines.
The reality is that there is little difference between the economic systems of the US, Canada, Australia, Norway, Germany, and all the other countries you list. All of them are modern welfare states, none of them are socialist. If anything, the US spends more on social welfare, social safety nets, and other social expenses than those other countries, and the US regulates corporations and bankers more strongly.
What is "deceptive and ignorant" is that you try to make a distinction between the US and "socialist states" that simply doesn't exist. Your reasoning is rooted in complete ignorance of the social and economic realities in Europe and the US.
Do you find a statement like "the US should cut back our corporate tax rates and our social welfare spending to the lower levels found in those other countries" too difficult to comprehend?
Again, you are confusing "rehabilitation" with "fresh start". If you murdered someone, "rehabilitation" means that you convince society that you aren't going to do it again and therefore can be let free; it doesn't mean that society owes you anything, let alone a "fresh start".
In any case, European governments were concerned with giving a "fresh start", they could simply make it easy for people to change their name and identity. So, that argument doesn't work.
People talking and writing about someone's crime isn't a "punishment", it's a right that everybody in a free society has. The fact that this inconveniences former murderers is no justification for restricting the freedom of speech of others.
Murderers have failed to enforce the "right to be forgotten" against German Wikipedia and media outlets, but they seem to have succeeded in enforcing it against search engines. The latter didn't even require a court case, because it is the intended function of the "right to be forgotten" laws.
Furthermore, given the steep penalties for corporations, this law has a chilling effect that will cause any big company to censor speech in order to avoid the risk of massive losses.
Google has already received 280000 "right to be forgotten" requests.
As for Wikipedia, European courts have no jurisdiction over it anyway.
Yes precisely. What isn't exempt is foreign corporations, search engines, and other such entities. And low information voters like you think that's a good thing.
When "cities are running out of money due to tax cuts", they use that as a justification to raise taxes again. Cities (and governments in general) have no incentives to save money and operate cost efficiently because they are not rewarded for that.
"Rehabilitation" means that we attempt to change the minds and behavior of criminals, not that criminals have any new rights, least of all to have their crimes erased from the public record. The latter is an absurd perversion of the concept of rehabilitation.
Not under "these rules", but under a putative "right to be forgotten". The new rules appear to strengthen the old ones.
The "right to be forgotten" never applied to German news organizations. It was always intended to limit foreign search engines.
You keep demonstrating your own ignorance and bigotry.
Yeah, "stick it to big US companies" is very popular, with European corporations and press, who then go out to lobby European politicians and bamboozle European voters. Also, government agencies are usually exempt from this.
Except, of course, that this is what it has been used for in the past.
True. Just look in the mirror.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. I had fixed point wireless for several years; it worked fine and was cheap.
The obvious choices are 2.4GHz, 5GHz and laser. For directional communications, whether the "bands are full" doesn't matter.
Why do you imagine the city cares? One year a few years ago, the city tore up the street in front of my house three times, to put in new lines for public utilities. If anything, tearing up the same street again and again means more work for city employees and more money handed out to contractors, both of which the city likes. A city that doesn't plan ahead to minimize disruption also don't care about actually disrupting people.
If you don't know Bill Nye, here is more info https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
I answered your question of why people believe this, not what I think should be done.
I have no idea what kind of "exposure" it requires, but in practice, engineers think and reason very different from scientists. There are few people who manage to be both good engineers and good scientists. (Bill Nye, IMO, is neither.)
You could. But you don't have such a budget and you don't run a small town, and that's no accident. If you did, you'd have donors, lobbyists, unions, and corporations breathing down your neck, and you would end up making the choices that let you keep your job, not the choices that are objectively best for the public. That's how the political process works.
The only reason a content provider can artificially limit access to content from other providers is because access to the "last mile" is limited. If access to the last mile weren't limited, then if one provider attempts to limit access to the content from other providers, people would simply get their Internet access elsewhere. Therefore, Archangel Michael is right and you are wrong: net neutrality very much has to do with the last mile.
If you're an academic, you must get government research grants or you're out of a job and your career is in the toilet. Pressure is even stronger for scientists actually employed by the government.
Climatologists aren't "baldly lying", they simply have strong publication and research biases; many of them are likely not even aware of their biases. What biases oil and gas company sponsored scientists have (the few there are) is irrelevant, since the case for action on climate change isn't based on their results.
I made a simple, factual historical statement about the NSDAP party program and the role scientific statements played in it. I suggest you verify it yourself.
The US spends about the same percentage of GDP on social welfare as Switzerland and Australia, and significantly more than Canada. In absolute terms, the US spends more on social welfare per capita than any other major country. Canada, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the UK all rank higher on economic liberty than the US. And the US has the highest corporate tax rates among OECD countries. So, the idea that those other countries are "socialist", even in the sense of being a welfare state, while the US is supposedly not is untenable.
In terms of economic factors (housing, jobs, income), the US outranks all other OECD members. If you ranked countries like Sweden and Germany among US states, they would be among the poorest US states. Having lived in several of the countries you list, that agrees with my experience. In particular, I rejected emigrating both to Canada and Australia because I consider the economic opportunities and standard of living to be too low in those countries.
Most comparisons of living standards already look at median incomes or exclude the top 1%, so arguments about "if you take wealth inequality into account" are rooted in a misunderstanding of what that data shows. Furthermore, the levels of inequality in the US are not much higher than other countries; pretax, they are the same or lower than the UK, Spain, Poland, Germany, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Post tax, they are similar to the UK, Canada, Spain, and Australia (0.42 vs. 0.41 and 0.38).
Overall, I agree: the US should be more like Canada, Australia, and Ireland: we should cut back our corporate tax rates to lower levels, and cut back our social welfare spending to the lower levels found in those other countries.
It's a simple statement of fact: under the US Constitution, the US government has the power to use force against Iran and North Korea for any reason whatsoever, but it does not have the power to restrict gun ownership by US citizens.
I don't believe I ever claimed that the US Constitution was a perfect blueprint for a free society. Furthermore, freedoms need to be reciprocal, and since Iran and North Korea are not free societies, we don't have to treat them as such.
"It's too complicated forme to explain" is the cop-out of someone who is trying to cover his ignorance.
In fact, I did "Google it", and read a lot of books about it, which is why I know this stuff and you don't. Look up the NSDAP party program, read the speeches Hitler and other politicians gave to the public, and read the speeches Hitler and other parliamentarians gave justifying their key votes in parliament, foremost the Enabling Act. Read the books I recommended.
You mean like when government forces companies and people to invest in expensive ISDN and fiber infrastructure for the long term? You know, when ISDN is replaced rapidly by DSL, never recouping the investment, and the fiber technologies that were deployed "for the long term" turned out to be obsolete by the time fiber actually was commercially feasible? That happened where I used to live.
Corporations frequently think and plan long term. That's how all the new telecoms standards come about. Microsoft's, Apple's, and Google's software is planned years ahead. And many corporations plan a decade or two ahead. That's because today's stock price reflects that long term planning.
It is governments that are guilty of short term planning. Politicians don't care about spending too much because they don't have to; it's not their money. All they really care is getting reelected, and that means a short time horizon and a focus on fluff.
I agree.
That may be a reasonable practical solution, given the way our roads are owned and managed today.
However, I think it's worth pointing out that the reason we have this economic "last mile problem" isn't a consequence of "natural monopolies" or "big corporations", it exists because the inability of services to compete for last mile access customers right now. That is, last mile access is managed politically by city hall, not economically by the people who actually want service.
They are probably both true: the FBI knows how to unlock some phones themselves, and for others, they need outside help.
It should be obvious to anybody that civilization requires jackbooted thugs carrying guns and protected by (un)qualified immunity reading your E-mail. For the children. And so that you don't cheat on your taxes. Seriously, do you want to live in SOMALIA?