Tornado warnings are extremely vague. Anyone who has spent significant time living in tornado alley can tell you they are routinely ignored. And the new technologies that attempt to pinpoint tornadoes exactly (TVS, VIPIR) aren't as accurate as they're made out to be. False positives are nothing new.
Economizing drinking water by Coca-Cola and others... caused 10 of thousands of people to die of starvation last year.
I'm sure that had more to do with unwarranted force and with monopolizing resources than with economizing them, which I addressed in the other 90% of my post that you did not quote. Furthermore, the water table would eventually have lowered anyways due to population stress, another form of unwarranted force that doesn't fit into the stock leftist anti-corporate worldview.
But feel free to look up the meanings of the terms "economizing" and "ceteris paribus".
You fail basic logic. You can't read what you respond to or answer simple questions. You instead want to accuse others of not comprehending things. You don't understand the profit motive and the fact that it exists regardless of laws. You still fail to recognize the existence of environmental laws and regulations and professional licensing even after it has been pointed out. You are ignorant of the fact that the Federal Reserve is a corporation legally obligated to ensure full employment. And you are somehow convinced that US corporations might be able to completely automate their workforces in contravention to the mandate of the US central bank. You are a complete, blithering idiot who should have given up on whatever point it is you're trying to make several posts ago.
Send them home. Give them a basic income, or five acres and a mule. And if they can't behave themselves, throw them in jail.
I don't know where you people got the idea that the employment system is some kind of giant babysitting apparatus. Is it a result of public schooling? I don't enjoy working with unproductive children. I don't enjoy driving to work in order to punch a clock, sit in a cubicle, and become an unhealthy lardass for absolutely no reason.
This is a major problem in America. You people have absolutely no idea what the word "work" even means. I don't know how the US can credibly claim to be the most productive nation on earth given the amount of make-work bullshit that goes on here.
Which country does Bob flee to? Any countries closer to laissez-faire purity than the US? I know that you consider the US to be headed towards fatally distorting the Market, but where actually distorts it less than America?
Sorry, I meant to address this. Bob has fled to Asia.
it seems that the last few centuries have been anomalous in their broad improvement of people's living conditions?
The last few centuries have been driven by unprecedented scientific/technological improvement, which was in turn driven mainly by the previous few centuries of European expansion into the Americas. Nearly doubling the amount of occupied land and resources would by necessity encourage improvement in living conditions, even without the industrial revolution. If society completely collapsed tomorrow and modern technologies disappeared, my family would still have a better standard of living than the average European because we have twice their amount of arable land.
Living conditions in the rest of the world have been mainly driven by the same factor, improvements in agriculture and industrial production developed almost solely in the Americas and in colonial Europe.
Unfortunately, however, our political/economic systems have not kept up. That technological progress has slowed. We have fallen back into oppressive, corrupt and pseudo-scientific old-European systems of banking, wage-slavery and command-economy primarily due to government's inability to fairly and equitably facilitate inter-generational wealth transfer. We have adopted their same fractious methods: standing armies and needless warfare, pseudo-marxist wealth re-distribution, state-subsidized-corporatism, social welfare, and feudalism. None of which provide guarantees of economic stability or motivation for innovation and individual improvement anywhere near equivalent to the simple availability of productive land into which to expand.
anti immigration/isolationist
Anti-immigration is not the same as isolationist. People are a unique economic input, as they are both suppliers of labor and beneficiaries of production. They are exponentially self-replicating and legally indestructible. Immigration policy does not account for this. Indeed, political theory itself barely does an adequate job of accounting for this. The fact that governments benefit from increased immigration while their constituents suffer (at least in the long term) constitutes a major market failure. And it is one in which the US government is firmly entrenched, given it's history.
To say that corporations seek profit because they are greedy bastards is one thing. It's probably even correct.
But to pretend that corporations seek profit because it's the law is clearly just bullshit since there are tons of laws that provide other, conflicting goals which corporations also abide by. Besides profit, any corporation operating in a licensed industry would probably view it's legal goal of maintaining licensure to actually supercede it's legal goal of earning profit. For that matter, corporations don't always even follow the laws.
So, yes, it is the explicit legal goal of one of the largest corporations in the US, the Federal Reserve, to provide full employment. It is the explicit legal goal of Microsoft and others not to stifle competition. It is the explicit legal goal of Dow Chemical and others to abide by environmental regulations. It is the goal of all of these corporations to pay taxes (to the Federal Reserve) so that they can continue getting loans and operating in a country conducive to their earning a profit.
Let's not delude ourselves into thinking that all corporations have a single goal. They have multiple goals. The main one is to earn a profit. A secondary goal is to obey the laws. And that's the reason they are more than happy to pack up and leave when the laws conflict with their primary goal.
Now, if you'd like to talk about these specific companies, IBM, Accenture, and HP, we can do that. What do they all have in common? They all make shit-tons of money automating entire workforces and putting people out of work. Since the US government is currently taxing them at probably around 50%, and paying that money to the Federal Reserve as interest on the national debt, and the Federal Reserve is giving that money away at 0% interest to IBM, HP and Accenture's clients and competitors in order to thwart their business model of automating people out of work and instead provide "full employment" for US workers so they can afford to pay the mortgages (to the Federal Reserve) on their giant wasteful houses, it's understandable that innovative, productive businesses like IBM, HP and Accenture that have zero reason to be physically located in the US would decide to up and leave.
And it has nothing to do with them being greedy or following their "legal" goal of earning a profit. It has to do with them being completely screwed out of the product of their labor by a horrible, broken government system of unconstitutionally-chartered quasi-government corporations, debt, handouts and stupidity.
I imagine that many of acts of unwarranted force you list in your second paragraph would be considered by many to be the valid government interventions you describe in your first paragraph.
I "imagine" you're correct, but that doesn't make it true.
If Bob is deprived of capital because Tim has monopolized some resource, and Joe can't work because he's sick from the pollution caused by Bill, having the government draft Sue into providing free healthcare to Joe and letting Raul into the country in order to do Bob's job for lower wages doesn't actually fix anything. It just wards off complete collapse for a little while longer.
That's pretty much what our "economy" has become. It should be no surprise that the entire system collapses the minute Sue empties all of her bank accounts and Bob decides to flee the country.
I agree with all of this, and it's sad that someone has to point it out. In a globalized economy, the US is not able to compete on price. We don't have the natural resources. We don't have the cheap labor.
We can only compete on quality. We have many advantages. Low population density, decent schools, lots of infrastructure. But with free trade, even that probably isn't enough to keep us on top. Developing countries will eventually catch up.
If we import immigrants to compete with third world countries, we will become a third world country. If we export capital in order to "raise up" third world countries, same result.
Let's face it. We aren't particularly productive. Our government is not particularly great. We aren't particularly "free".
But we have a head start. So we don't have to bend over backwards in order to prevent companies like IBM from leaving. They don't do anything that other companies can't do. Western countries are still their primary market. Their employees are still educated in Western schools.
So let's just shut the door behind them. Raise tariffs on so-called "multinationals" that produce elsewhere and sell here. And rid ourselves of the delusion that Americans owning stock in these companies is worth the loss of jobs and revenue that goes with them when they decide to flee the country.
Ceteris paribus, economizing resources is intrinsically good for everyone.
Obviously there are some implementation details that get in the way of that always working out. Recognizing and correcting market failure, force and fraud should be the primary function of government regulations meant to ensure we all benefit from the "economy". The US government has clearly demonstrated it is not up to that task.
Worse, there are entire swaths of activities that much of American society considers "beneficial" which actually constitute unwarranted force: foreign warfare, welfare, retirement entitlements, unchecked immigration, employment policies, monopolization of natural resources. Few states, let alone the US, even philosophically recognize most of these as such. As far as I am aware, none recognize them all.
Businesses will naturally move to states with the most beneficial regulatory environment for them. Those with high labor costs will move to states with high populations or unchecked immigration. Those with high materials costs will move to states where they can easily monopolize natural resources or where an imperialistic military will ensure resource availability. Those that perform dangerous work will move to states with socialized healthcare and little ability for legal recourse by injured parties. Polluting industries will move to states with few environmental regulations. Et cetera, et cetera...
But the US economy will never function for the benefit of all Americans until all unwarranted force is regulated and eliminated and economic activity proceeds on a voluntary basis for all involved.
A corporation has one goal, by law: make money for the shareholders.
This is hardly the only law affecting business. By law, corporations pay taxes. By law, corporations abide by environmental regulations. By law, corporations may not completely stifle competition. By law, corporations provide for "full employment". (Yes it's a law.)
Taken together with market competition, the laws provide very little room for profit on the part of the average, productive business. So it is unsurprising that businesses most able to produce the highest profits through their own efforts (and not through corruption and exploiting government force) are the first to jump ship to locations with fewer laws preventing it.
I mean, you do know that it's all been little figures stored somewhere for well over a century if not longer, right?
Clearly my history classes were deficient. They didn't teach me about the use of credit cards during the great depression. Thanks for bringing me up to speed, smart-ass.
I wonder if you're the same type of person who complains about government inefficiency and waste of money.
You're right, I'm sure there's no chance of any kind of mis-allocation of capital when the government agency that prints money is completely fucking automated in the middle of a recession.
Oh you're absolutely right. I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But obviously there is some ulterior motive for automating this workforce to such an extent. Hauling around money isn't particularly difficult, dangerous or precision work.
But it is frightening to think about how much financial engineering has gone on in recent years. Printing money is literally no longer necessary in order to inflate the currency. Credit limits can be increased electronically. Paychecks are direct-deposited. It's just bank balances, like you say.
It sounds like you don't live in the US. State governments and the courts already do a good job of rounding up the children of poor parents and putting them in the homes of people in higher income tax brackets. Have you not been paying attention to the debates over so-called "faith-based initiatives" and gay marriage? That ship has sailed.
Personally, I think it is a complete mistake. The US standard of living is falling across the board. Taking children away from their parents in order to give them a standard of living that is unrealistically high in relation to the standard of living they will likely have as adults is a disservice, in my opinion.
You probably won't become rich, but you can work 2 jobs and build your child a better foundation from which THEY can climb, ultimately improving the lives of your grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.
50% of the US population doesn't even work one job, let alone two. What possible motivation would I have to work two jobs in order to pay for a bunch of worthless moochers and "not become rich"?
Yeah, right. I'd like to go to the gym more often and lose some weight but I seem to be busy working two jobs to pay for other people's health problems and taxes for a whole bunch of other stupid failures of the craptacular government we have had for the last ten years.
The connection between Rayleigh scattering and refraction is very fundamental. Both are due (from the point of view of electromagnetic theory) to the electrical polarization of the scatterers by the incident electromagnetic wave. The waves re-radiated by the dipoles induced in the scatterers by the incident field are incoherent, as seen by an observer located to the side of the incident beam of light. But, in the forward direction, the re-radiated waves are completely coherent with the incident waves, but retarded in phase. These retarded waves make the incident wave train propagate more slowly in the scattering medium than in a vacuum; the ratio of the speed of propagation in vacuo to the speed in the medium is just the refractive index of the medium. Thus refraction and Rayleigh scattering are two aspects of a single phenomenon.
Slashdot Mirror
Tornado warnings are extremely vague. Anyone who has spent significant time living in tornado alley can tell you they are routinely ignored. And the new technologies that attempt to pinpoint tornadoes exactly (TVS, VIPIR) aren't as accurate as they're made out to be. False positives are nothing new.
Odds are this guy is a 110'er.
What's a 110'er ?
Economizing drinking water by Coca-Cola and others... caused 10 of thousands of people to die of starvation last year.
I'm sure that had more to do with unwarranted force and with monopolizing resources than with economizing them, which I addressed in the other 90% of my post that you did not quote. Furthermore, the water table would eventually have lowered anyways due to population stress, another form of unwarranted force that doesn't fit into the stock leftist anti-corporate worldview.
But feel free to look up the meanings of the terms "economizing" and "ceteris paribus".
And the IT Dept is competent enough to monitor usage of the CD burner, but not to disable it?
Issuing speeding tickets is not a "service".
You fail basic logic. You can't read what you respond to or answer simple questions. You instead want to accuse others of not comprehending things. You don't understand the profit motive and the fact that it exists regardless of laws. You still fail to recognize the existence of environmental laws and regulations and professional licensing even after it has been pointed out. You are ignorant of the fact that the Federal Reserve is a corporation legally obligated to ensure full employment. And you are somehow convinced that US corporations might be able to completely automate their workforces in contravention to the mandate of the US central bank. You are a complete, blithering idiot who should have given up on whatever point it is you're trying to make several posts ago.
I'd say pretty damned well that this makes making money for shareholders a legally enforced goal of a corporation.
Did I even once contradict this? Did you even read the original post you responded to?
Send them home. Give them a basic income, or five acres and a mule. And if they can't behave themselves, throw them in jail.
I don't know where you people got the idea that the employment system is some kind of giant babysitting apparatus. Is it a result of public schooling? I don't enjoy working with unproductive children. I don't enjoy driving to work in order to punch a clock, sit in a cubicle, and become an unhealthy lardass for absolutely no reason.
This is a major problem in America. You people have absolutely no idea what the word "work" even means. I don't know how the US can credibly claim to be the most productive nation on earth given the amount of make-work bullshit that goes on here.
Which country does Bob flee to? Any countries closer to laissez-faire purity than the US? I know that you consider the US to be headed towards fatally distorting the Market, but where actually distorts it less than America?
Sorry, I meant to address this. Bob has fled to Asia.
it seems that the last few centuries have been anomalous in their broad improvement of people's living conditions?
The last few centuries have been driven by unprecedented scientific/technological improvement, which was in turn driven mainly by the previous few centuries of European expansion into the Americas. Nearly doubling the amount of occupied land and resources would by necessity encourage improvement in living conditions, even without the industrial revolution. If society completely collapsed tomorrow and modern technologies disappeared, my family would still have a better standard of living than the average European because we have twice their amount of arable land.
Living conditions in the rest of the world have been mainly driven by the same factor, improvements in agriculture and industrial production developed almost solely in the Americas and in colonial Europe.
Unfortunately, however, our political/economic systems have not kept up. That technological progress has slowed. We have fallen back into oppressive, corrupt and pseudo-scientific old-European systems of banking, wage-slavery and command-economy primarily due to government's inability to fairly and equitably facilitate inter-generational wealth transfer. We have adopted their same fractious methods: standing armies and needless warfare, pseudo-marxist wealth re-distribution, state-subsidized-corporatism, social welfare, and feudalism. None of which provide guarantees of economic stability or motivation for innovation and individual improvement anywhere near equivalent to the simple availability of productive land into which to expand.
anti immigration/isolationist
Anti-immigration is not the same as isolationist. People are a unique economic input, as they are both suppliers of labor and beneficiaries of production. They are exponentially self-replicating and legally indestructible. Immigration policy does not account for this. Indeed, political theory itself barely does an adequate job of accounting for this. The fact that governments benefit from increased immigration while their constituents suffer (at least in the long term) constitutes a major market failure. And it is one in which the US government is firmly entrenched, given it's history.
All of the laws I listed "provide goals".
To say that corporations seek profit because they are greedy bastards is one thing. It's probably even correct.
But to pretend that corporations seek profit because it's the law is clearly just bullshit since there are tons of laws that provide other, conflicting goals which corporations also abide by. Besides profit, any corporation operating in a licensed industry would probably view it's legal goal of maintaining licensure to actually supercede it's legal goal of earning profit. For that matter, corporations don't always even follow the laws.
So, yes, it is the explicit legal goal of one of the largest corporations in the US, the Federal Reserve, to provide full employment. It is the explicit legal goal of Microsoft and others not to stifle competition. It is the explicit legal goal of Dow Chemical and others to abide by environmental regulations. It is the goal of all of these corporations to pay taxes (to the Federal Reserve) so that they can continue getting loans and operating in a country conducive to their earning a profit.
Let's not delude ourselves into thinking that all corporations have a single goal. They have multiple goals. The main one is to earn a profit. A secondary goal is to obey the laws. And that's the reason they are more than happy to pack up and leave when the laws conflict with their primary goal.
Now, if you'd like to talk about these specific companies, IBM, Accenture, and HP, we can do that. What do they all have in common? They all make shit-tons of money automating entire workforces and putting people out of work. Since the US government is currently taxing them at probably around 50%, and paying that money to the Federal Reserve as interest on the national debt, and the Federal Reserve is giving that money away at 0% interest to IBM, HP and Accenture's clients and competitors in order to thwart their business model of automating people out of work and instead provide "full employment" for US workers so they can afford to pay the mortgages (to the Federal Reserve) on their giant wasteful houses, it's understandable that innovative, productive businesses like IBM, HP and Accenture that have zero reason to be physically located in the US would decide to up and leave.
And it has nothing to do with them being greedy or following their "legal" goal of earning a profit. It has to do with them being completely screwed out of the product of their labor by a horrible, broken government system of unconstitutionally-chartered quasi-government corporations, debt, handouts and stupidity.
Comprehension indeed...
I imagine that many of acts of unwarranted force you list in your second paragraph would be considered by many to be the valid government interventions you describe in your first paragraph.
I "imagine" you're correct, but that doesn't make it true.
If Bob is deprived of capital because Tim has monopolized some resource, and Joe can't work because he's sick from the pollution caused by Bill, having the government draft Sue into providing free healthcare to Joe and letting Raul into the country in order to do Bob's job for lower wages doesn't actually fix anything. It just wards off complete collapse for a little while longer.
That's pretty much what our "economy" has become. It should be no surprise that the entire system collapses the minute Sue empties all of her bank accounts and Bob decides to flee the country.
I agree with all of this, and it's sad that someone has to point it out. In a globalized economy, the US is not able to compete on price. We don't have the natural resources. We don't have the cheap labor.
We can only compete on quality. We have many advantages. Low population density, decent schools, lots of infrastructure. But with free trade, even that probably isn't enough to keep us on top. Developing countries will eventually catch up.
If we import immigrants to compete with third world countries, we will become a third world country. If we export capital in order to "raise up" third world countries, same result.
Let's face it. We aren't particularly productive. Our government is not particularly great. We aren't particularly "free".
But we have a head start. So we don't have to bend over backwards in order to prevent companies like IBM from leaving. They don't do anything that other companies can't do. Western countries are still their primary market. Their employees are still educated in Western schools.
So let's just shut the door behind them. Raise tariffs on so-called "multinationals" that produce elsewhere and sell here. And rid ourselves of the delusion that Americans owning stock in these companies is worth the loss of jobs and revenue that goes with them when they decide to flee the country.
Ceteris paribus, economizing resources is intrinsically good for everyone.
Obviously there are some implementation details that get in the way of that always working out. Recognizing and correcting market failure, force and fraud should be the primary function of government regulations meant to ensure we all benefit from the "economy". The US government has clearly demonstrated it is not up to that task.
Worse, there are entire swaths of activities that much of American society considers "beneficial" which actually constitute unwarranted force: foreign warfare, welfare, retirement entitlements, unchecked immigration, employment policies, monopolization of natural resources. Few states, let alone the US, even philosophically recognize most of these as such. As far as I am aware, none recognize them all.
Businesses will naturally move to states with the most beneficial regulatory environment for them. Those with high labor costs will move to states with high populations or unchecked immigration. Those with high materials costs will move to states where they can easily monopolize natural resources or where an imperialistic military will ensure resource availability. Those that perform dangerous work will move to states with socialized healthcare and little ability for legal recourse by injured parties. Polluting industries will move to states with few environmental regulations. Et cetera, et cetera...
But the US economy will never function for the benefit of all Americans until all unwarranted force is regulated and eliminated and economic activity proceeds on a voluntary basis for all involved.
A corporation has one goal, by law: make money for the shareholders.
This is hardly the only law affecting business. By law, corporations pay taxes. By law, corporations abide by environmental regulations. By law, corporations may not completely stifle competition. By law, corporations provide for "full employment". (Yes it's a law.)
Taken together with market competition, the laws provide very little room for profit on the part of the average, productive business. So it is unsurprising that businesses most able to produce the highest profits through their own efforts (and not through corruption and exploiting government force) are the first to jump ship to locations with fewer laws preventing it.
Nothing requires US citizens to use federal reserve notes.
I mean, you do know that it's all been little figures stored somewhere for well over a century if not longer, right?
Clearly my history classes were deficient. They didn't teach me about the use of credit cards during the great depression. Thanks for bringing me up to speed, smart-ass.
I wonder if you're the same type of person who complains about government inefficiency and waste of money.
You're right, I'm sure there's no chance of any kind of mis-allocation of capital when the government agency that prints money is completely fucking automated in the middle of a recession.
Oh you're absolutely right. I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But obviously there is some ulterior motive for automating this workforce to such an extent. Hauling around money isn't particularly difficult, dangerous or precision work.
But it is frightening to think about how much financial engineering has gone on in recent years. Printing money is literally no longer necessary in order to inflate the currency. Credit limits can be increased electronically. Paychecks are direct-deposited. It's just bank balances, like you say.
Robots also can't tell their neighbors about how much more money the government is printing.
What's the name of that country where they don't make watches at all?
It sounds like you don't live in the US. State governments and the courts already do a good job of rounding up the children of poor parents and putting them in the homes of people in higher income tax brackets. Have you not been paying attention to the debates over so-called "faith-based initiatives" and gay marriage? That ship has sailed.
Personally, I think it is a complete mistake. The US standard of living is falling across the board. Taking children away from their parents in order to give them a standard of living that is unrealistically high in relation to the standard of living they will likely have as adults is a disservice, in my opinion.
You probably won't become rich, but you can work 2 jobs and build your child a better foundation from which THEY can climb, ultimately improving the lives of your grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.
50% of the US population doesn't even work one job, let alone two. What possible motivation would I have to work two jobs in order to pay for a bunch of worthless moochers and "not become rich"?
Yeah, right. I'd like to go to the gym more often and lose some weight but I seem to be busy working two jobs to pay for other people's health problems and taxes for a whole bunch of other stupid failures of the craptacular government we have had for the last ten years.
Have you ever known people who work in manufacturing? They aren't especially healthy.
The connection between Rayleigh scattering and refraction is very fundamental. Both are due (from the point of view of electromagnetic theory) to the electrical polarization of the scatterers by the incident electromagnetic wave. The waves re-radiated by the dipoles induced in the scatterers by the incident field are incoherent, as seen by an observer located to the side of the incident beam of light. But, in the forward direction, the re-radiated waves are completely coherent with the incident waves, but retarded in phase. These retarded waves make the incident wave train propagate more slowly in the scattering medium than in a vacuum; the ratio of the speed of propagation in vacuo to the speed in the medium is just the refractive index of the medium. Thus refraction and Rayleigh scattering are two aspects of a single phenomenon.
http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/explain/extinction/extintro.html