As an engineer, I make more money than my father ever did as a factory worker, yet have less than he did when he was my age.
That is because the government has been lying to you for years about the REAL inflation rate, thanks to little tricks they play like hedonics and substitution to fiddle the numbers to make a particular administration look good (and I won't blame Bush for once, since Clinton started it). Your father probably was the only one who worked, and supported your mother and your family. Today both parents MUST work just to make ends meet.
An SUV is not a luxury item anymore.
Yes it is. Only your perception of standard of living, and the fact that your neighbors all have one, makes you think that it isn't. A CAR is a luxury item. At the beginning of last century only the very rich had cars. Now they are taken for granted. Most people in the world do not own cars, yet the American "standard of living" DEMANDS at least a car, and you DEMAND "at least an SUV". However you will not die if you don't have one, believe it or not. However you're faced with a different problem- American cities are DESIGNED for cars, and are very hard to live in without one. Uh oh.
A house is practically a necessity for anyone with more than two children.
I agree. However everyone wants to own their house, instead of renting - like most poor people around the world do. Shelter is a human necessity, but there are varying degrees of quality. You obviously want the very best, or at least as good as you are "comfortable" with. But your definition of "comfortable" is far greater than what the rest of the world would call "comfortable", and that is no longer economically sustainable. Indians and Chinese who also want to be "comfortable" and are increasing their expectations for housing are driving up the costs for building materials worldwide - why? Because limits in supply are being reached and resources are running out. Increased demand leads to increased prices as suppliers auction off their remaining goods to the highest bidders. That's basic micro-economics.
People need to have more children to grow the number of consumers in the economy
That is exactly wrong, because the natural resources of the world are LIMITED. This is the point we are fast approaching. When everyone in the world owns a car, how many years do you think the remaining oil will last? How many acres will be available for the production of "biodiesel", versus say - FOOD? Until we can learn to survive by living, breathing and eating human excrement, the population increase will only hurt us from now on. Our growth is NO LONGER SUSTAINABLE. $150/bbl oil will be coming back eventually. How much will the last barrel of oil be worth, and how many people will have to die to own it?
The reason we need a stimulus package now is because people stopped having large families in the 70's and 80's and there's a shortfall of consumers in the economy now.
Absolute rubbish. The lack of consumer spending is because of the economic crisis which started with cheating by investment banks and credit rating agencies, not the other way around. People spend less if they think they will soon be fired. People spend less when they have to pay $4.00+ for a gallon of gasoline. People simply couldn't afford to buy houses anymore at the hugely inflated prices - house sellers priced themselves right out of the market. So much so that the only people who were buying houses were considered sub-prime buyers - because they probably couldn't afford the mortgages they were taking. Since the banks didn't care anyway because they passed those mortgages on to someone else, they still wrote them and collected their fee. And consumers who were betting on the equity in their homes for their retirement suddenly found themselves wiped out when the prices began to fall. You seem to have no idea what kind of mess we're in, or why it happened.
Fair enough, I will retract "all economists" and change it to "many economists".
However, I take objection with: "Furthermore, private spending is generally more efficient than the government spending that would replace it because people act more carefully when they spend their own money than when they spend other people's money."
There is no way you can get a group of private citizens together and get them to build an insterstate or a bridge - the arguments about where and how and why will be endless. Some things require a powerful central authority to dictate where and how, with a strong enough club to oblige people to sell their land, and impose penalties on the contractor(s) if they fail to deliver a pre agreed quality at a pre determined time. Sometimes only government spending can do that.
Now I am not for the stimulus - I think the US government is trying to prop up the housing bubble and it makes no sense at all. WHO CARES how much your house is worth, if you live there? If the price goes down, the price of every other house goes down too, so if you want to move you'll be able to afford a new home. The only ones who care are the greedy, who expected to make a living by perpetually flipping houses, and the foolish - who bought bigger houses than they can afford. No amount of government "stimulus" will prevent the collapse of the housing market. It was long overdue, and "we ain't seen nothing yet".
Please don't think I am "pro" stimulus. But right now the consumer is insolvent - who ELSE is going to spend money?
All economists agree that government spending is important during times of contraction, as it helps to make up the shortfall in the economy from the side of the consumer, and helps "stimulate" the economy. Another advantage of government spending is that it's usually an investment in infrastructure that will last many decades and provide a platform for future growth in the economy.
However, the United States has not taken advantage of the good times. They have failed to reduce their debt during those times- and in fact have increased it to record proportions. Not only that, but they have not even managed to maintain their infrastructure. This is at both the state and federal level. So we went INTO this mess already up to our ears in debt.
People fail to understand that every dollar the US prints reduces the real value of all the other dollars that currently exist by a tiny fraction - because after all, fiat currency is only hard to forge pieces of paper. Once the shared belief in the value of that worthless piece of paper is destroyed, it will quickly return to its intrinsic value - ZERO. Ask Mugabe.
Printing trillions of dollars at a time when you are already close to 60 trillion (when you count social security) in debt, and the WORLD GDP is only 150 trillion, will destroy the currency in short order. The US can't afford to bail ANYONE out - they are too deep in debt already. Yet the political temptation to appear to "do something" is too strong - despite the fact that it's already too late. The "stimulus" is currently designed to put almost $300BN back into the pockets of the consumer in the form of tax relief - consumers that are already deep in debt. That 300BN will disappear in a couple months, as people pay their overdue credit cards, mortgage payments and utility bills, or buy houses thinking that this is "the bottom" (HAH! The "bottom" will be in 2015 or so, because all bubbles are V shaped and this one started in 1998) - and THEN WHAT?
Well, $126BN will be spent on infrastructure - great, let's do what FDR did and build, or re-build, interstates. Surely a plan that worked 70 years ago is still valid today, right? So after giving jobs to all the immigrants again (because who ELSE works with a shovel nowadays?), what's left? A few hundred billion to be spent giving cheap drugs to the elderly and other programs to win political points. Oh and NASA is going to get $2BN, so that should cover the fuel for 2 shuttle launches...
Frankly by the time enough "infrastructure" is built that the government begins to require turbines from GE for their wind farms, or technological equipment for the new "smart grid", we will all be out of a job already, burning money by the bucketful in winter in order to keep warm.
Oh and don't forget Chrysler and GM's "recovery plan" is to apparently ask the government for more money every quarter.
America still hasn't woken up and realized that this is not just another "recession". This is the breaking of the previous consumer model, and a complete dissolution of the "American way of life". We can't ALL have SUV's, we can't ALL have big screen TV's, and we can't ALL live in dream houses. Especially not when it's bought on "credit". Well America, the credit has run out.
My bad, I forgot to figure out the volume of the oceans - around 1,444M cubic km... the relative increase would be more like 1.5% or 58m, not 234m. Serves me right for doing something else at the same time.
The fun thing about science is you don't have to "believe" anything. Science is all about facts that you can reproduce for yourself. Therefore take a glass of water and put an ice cube in it. Mark the water level on the glass with a felt pen. Then wait for the ice cube to melt. Notice that the water level has not changed...
Melting ice from the north pole will not alter the sea level at all. Now the south pole is a different matter because there is actual land underneath the ice, so that ice - if it melted, would run off into the sea. However Antarctica contains around 22 million cubic kilometers of water stored in its ice (13.7 M sq km area x 1.6 km avg ice depth). Now considering that the area of the earth's oceans is around 361 M km, this ice is around 22/361 x 100 = 6% of the current volume of water in the oceans. Considering that the average depth of the oceans is around 3800 meters, increasing the water by 6% would add around 234 meters to sea level - assuming the oceans stuck to exactly same shorelines, which they wouldn't - so the sea level increase would actually be much less than 234m.
Fortunately, the average annual temperature in Antactica is still around -50C, with steamy summers being around -30C. Therefore THAT polar ice is in no danger of melting soon, even if the average temperature on Earth increases by a couple degrees (which is, after all, what the big fuss is about).
So don't expect to cash in on that "beachfront" desert property in Arizona just yet. Although it's smart and it makes sense for us to pollute as little as possible, the "global warming" preachers are absolutely full of shit - just like anyone else that tells you the world is about to end.
But isn't there some provision in patent law excluding things that are so obvious that if an "average person" can come up with it without specialized knowledge, it's not covered? Specifically Sect 103: "if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art"
Why isn't that clause being used more to get rid of all these frivolous patents? Wow, I have a computer, and a device that outputs something on a screen. I put them together and use a computer to output something on a screen - give me my patent. Yeah. Or one click shopping - I have a mouse, which is used to point and click and LO AND BEHOLD if you use your mouse to point at something and click, I have a patent on it. Sigh, the waste of court time far outweighs the fees paid to the government for the patent. Perhaps the patent office should be fined every time one of their patents is thrown out.
WHAT other torrent sites? Sheesh you make it sound like there ARE other torrent sites. Didn't you read the summary? The Pirate Bay goes down, and bit torrent goes down. There ARE no "other" sites.
And the desperate search for a sustainable business model continues. Too bad they have destroyed their reputation in the process. Will I be charged to breathe in this store? Will there be a "dirty shoe" fee? Does my hearing the chime on entering the store constitute agreeing to pay $50 every time I look at one of their products on the shelf? And finally, how many windows will this store have (at the same time)?
f you had content (a song for example) that was a method for you to put food on the table, you would be thinking differently about copyright laws.
Please explain to me exactly which actors and singers are starving? I thought the whole anorexia thing was entirely voluntary, but now I'm concerned that they are too thin not from drug use but because they don't have enough money to pay for food!
1. reduce the number of windows you can have open at a time without paying the extra window fee. 2. Convince everyone to switch to linux/Mac 3. The world profits.
Funny, our cats at the farm catch and kill all sorts of things: mice, iguanas, snakes, birds. But then again we don't feed them all that much, just dry food - so they're always hungry enough to go hunting for "fresh meat".
You are free to believe what you will. But if you convince others with your sophistry, don't get upset when we scientists who deal in FACTS ignore you and/or call you a liar.
I like the way the summary tries to equate torrent with illicit. Interesting, on a site full of linux people who have probably torrented more than one distro in their lives.
Slashdot Mirror
As an engineer, I make more money than my father ever did as a factory worker, yet have less than he did when he was my age.
That is because the government has been lying to you for years about the REAL inflation rate, thanks to little tricks they play like hedonics and substitution to fiddle the numbers to make a particular administration look good (and I won't blame Bush for once, since Clinton started it). Your father probably was the only one who worked, and supported your mother and your family. Today both parents MUST work just to make ends meet.
An SUV is not a luxury item anymore.
Yes it is. Only your perception of standard of living, and the fact that your neighbors all have one, makes you think that it isn't. A CAR is a luxury item. At the beginning of last century only the very rich had cars. Now they are taken for granted. Most people in the world do not own cars, yet the American "standard of living" DEMANDS at least a car, and you DEMAND "at least an SUV". However you will not die if you don't have one, believe it or not. However you're faced with a different problem- American cities are DESIGNED for cars, and are very hard to live in without one. Uh oh.
A house is practically a necessity for anyone with more than two children.
I agree. However everyone wants to own their house, instead of renting - like most poor people around the world do. Shelter is a human necessity, but there are varying degrees of quality. You obviously want the very best, or at least as good as you are "comfortable" with. But your definition of "comfortable" is far greater than what the rest of the world would call "comfortable", and that is no longer economically sustainable. Indians and Chinese who also want to be "comfortable" and are increasing their expectations for housing are driving up the costs for building materials worldwide - why? Because limits in supply are being reached and resources are running out. Increased demand leads to increased prices as suppliers auction off their remaining goods to the highest bidders. That's basic micro-economics.
People need to have more children to grow the number of consumers in the economy
That is exactly wrong, because the natural resources of the world are LIMITED. This is the point we are fast approaching. When everyone in the world owns a car, how many years do you think the remaining oil will last? How many acres will be available for the production of "biodiesel", versus say - FOOD? Until we can learn to survive by living, breathing and eating human excrement, the population increase will only hurt us from now on. Our growth is NO LONGER SUSTAINABLE. $150/bbl oil will be coming back eventually. How much will the last barrel of oil be worth, and how many people will have to die to own it?
The reason we need a stimulus package now is because people stopped having large families in the 70's and 80's and there's a shortfall of consumers in the economy now.
Absolute rubbish. The lack of consumer spending is because of the economic crisis which started with cheating by investment banks and credit rating agencies, not the other way around. People spend less if they think they will soon be fired. People spend less when they have to pay $4.00+ for a gallon of gasoline. People simply couldn't afford to buy houses anymore at the hugely inflated prices - house sellers priced themselves right out of the market. So much so that the only people who were buying houses were considered sub-prime buyers - because they probably couldn't afford the mortgages they were taking. Since the banks didn't care anyway because they passed those mortgages on to someone else, they still wrote them and collected their fee. And consumers who were betting on the equity in their homes for their retirement suddenly found themselves wiped out when the prices began to fall. You seem to have no idea what kind of mess we're in, or why it happened.
Fair enough, I will retract "all economists" and change it to "many economists".
However, I take objection with: "Furthermore, private spending is generally more efficient than the government spending that would replace it because people act more carefully when they spend their own money than when they spend other people's money."
There is no way you can get a group of private citizens together and get them to build an insterstate or a bridge - the arguments about where and how and why will be endless. Some things require a powerful central authority to dictate where and how, with a strong enough club to oblige people to sell their land, and impose penalties on the contractor(s) if they fail to deliver a pre agreed quality at a pre determined time. Sometimes only government spending can do that.
Now I am not for the stimulus - I think the US government is trying to prop up the housing bubble and it makes no sense at all. WHO CARES how much your house is worth, if you live there? If the price goes down, the price of every other house goes down too, so if you want to move you'll be able to afford a new home. The only ones who care are the greedy, who expected to make a living by perpetually flipping houses, and the foolish - who bought bigger houses than they can afford. No amount of government "stimulus" will prevent the collapse of the housing market. It was long overdue, and "we ain't seen nothing yet".
Please don't think I am "pro" stimulus. But right now the consumer is insolvent - who ELSE is going to spend money?
All economists agree that government spending is important during times of contraction, as it helps to make up the shortfall in the economy from the side of the consumer, and helps "stimulate" the economy. Another advantage of government spending is that it's usually an investment in infrastructure that will last many decades and provide a platform for future growth in the economy.
However, the United States has not taken advantage of the good times. They have failed to reduce their debt during those times- and in fact have increased it to record proportions. Not only that, but they have not even managed to maintain their infrastructure. This is at both the state and federal level. So we went INTO this mess already up to our ears in debt.
People fail to understand that every dollar the US prints reduces the real value of all the other dollars that currently exist by a tiny fraction - because after all, fiat currency is only hard to forge pieces of paper. Once the shared belief in the value of that worthless piece of paper is destroyed, it will quickly return to its intrinsic value - ZERO. Ask Mugabe.
Printing trillions of dollars at a time when you are already close to 60 trillion (when you count social security) in debt, and the WORLD GDP is only 150 trillion, will destroy the currency in short order. The US can't afford to bail ANYONE out - they are too deep in debt already. Yet the political temptation to appear to "do something" is too strong - despite the fact that it's already too late. The "stimulus" is currently designed to put almost $300BN back into the pockets of the consumer in the form of tax relief - consumers that are already deep in debt. That 300BN will disappear in a couple months, as people pay their overdue credit cards, mortgage payments and utility bills, or buy houses thinking that this is "the bottom" (HAH! The "bottom" will be in 2015 or so, because all bubbles are V shaped and this one started in 1998) - and THEN WHAT?
Well, $126BN will be spent on infrastructure - great, let's do what FDR did and build, or re-build, interstates. Surely a plan that worked 70 years ago is still valid today, right? So after giving jobs to all the immigrants again (because who ELSE works with a shovel nowadays?), what's left? A few hundred billion to be spent giving cheap drugs to the elderly and other programs to win political points. Oh and NASA is going to get $2BN, so that should cover the fuel for 2 shuttle launches...
Frankly by the time enough "infrastructure" is built that the government begins to require turbines from GE for their wind farms, or technological equipment for the new "smart grid", we will all be out of a job already, burning money by the bucketful in winter in order to keep warm.
Oh and don't forget Chrysler and GM's "recovery plan" is to apparently ask the government for more money every quarter.
America still hasn't woken up and realized that this is not just another "recession". This is the breaking of the previous consumer model, and a complete dissolution of the "American way of life". We can't ALL have SUV's, we can't ALL have big screen TV's, and we can't ALL live in dream houses. Especially not when it's bought on "credit". Well America, the credit has run out.
Another post about Boxee - I am fed up with reading about that stupid camwhore bitch!
My bad, I forgot to figure out the volume of the oceans - around 1,444M cubic km... the relative increase would be more like 1.5% or 58m, not 234m. Serves me right for doing something else at the same time.
Not sure what to believe anymore...
The fun thing about science is you don't have to "believe" anything. Science is all about facts that you can reproduce for yourself. Therefore take a glass of water and put an ice cube in it. Mark the water level on the glass with a felt pen. Then wait for the ice cube to melt. Notice that the water level has not changed...
Melting ice from the north pole will not alter the sea level at all. Now the south pole is a different matter because there is actual land underneath the ice, so that ice - if it melted, would run off into the sea. However Antarctica contains around 22 million cubic kilometers of water stored in its ice (13.7 M sq km area x 1.6 km avg ice depth). Now considering that the area of the earth's oceans is around 361 M km, this ice is around 22/361 x 100 = 6% of the current volume of water in the oceans. Considering that the average depth of the oceans is around 3800 meters, increasing the water by 6% would add around 234 meters to sea level - assuming the oceans stuck to exactly same shorelines, which they wouldn't - so the sea level increase would actually be much less than 234m.
Fortunately, the average annual temperature in Antactica is still around -50C, with steamy summers being around -30C. Therefore THAT polar ice is in no danger of melting soon, even if the average temperature on Earth increases by a couple degrees (which is, after all, what the big fuss is about).
So don't expect to cash in on that "beachfront" desert property in Arizona just yet. Although it's smart and it makes sense for us to pollute as little as possible, the "global warming" preachers are absolutely full of shit - just like anyone else that tells you the world is about to end.
Police and Courts cost money to maintain. Money that does not need to be spent on childrens idioc obsessions with phones.
No, it's much better spent dealing with the MPAA/RIAA's random lawsuits...
he's going to keep fighting to prove he's innocent of computer crime charges.
Well, good luck with that...
Both a Microsoft ad, AND a dupe? Heavens no - on slashdot of all places!
and a range of 300 kilometers based on four hours of flying time.
But based on the actual length of the hose, the range is more like 100 feet.
The problem with quantum bits is that they can be either alive or dead, until someone opens the box and lets the damned cat out again.
I'd love to jump out of bed at 3 am wondering where the iceberg is.
Thanks to global warming, there are no icebergs anymore. Oh, wait-
But isn't there some provision in patent law excluding things that are so obvious that if an "average person" can come up with it without specialized knowledge, it's not covered? Specifically Sect 103: "if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art"
Why isn't that clause being used more to get rid of all these frivolous patents? Wow, I have a computer, and a device that outputs something on a screen. I put them together and use a computer to output something on a screen - give me my patent. Yeah. Or one click shopping - I have a mouse, which is used to point and click and LO AND BEHOLD if you use your mouse to point at something and click, I have a patent on it. Sigh, the waste of court time far outweighs the fees paid to the government for the patent. Perhaps the patent office should be fined every time one of their patents is thrown out.
Ontario is a country called Canada.
Virginia is in a country called The United States of America.
Comparisons between the laws of two separate countries are useless, because they have their own separate laws, governments and courts.
WHAT other torrent sites? Sheesh you make it sound like there ARE other torrent sites. Didn't you read the summary? The Pirate Bay goes down, and bit torrent goes down. There ARE no "other" sites.
Did I sound convincing?
And the desperate search for a sustainable business model continues. Too bad they have destroyed their reputation in the process. Will I be charged to breathe in this store? Will there be a "dirty shoe" fee? Does my hearing the chime on entering the store constitute agreeing to pay $50 every time I look at one of their products on the shelf? And finally, how many windows will this store have (at the same time)?
Cause then maybe Sweden will be raped by WTO.
The United States doesn't listen to the WTO, why should Sweden?
f you had content (a song for example) that was a method for you to put food on the table, you would be thinking differently about copyright laws.
Please explain to me exactly which actors and singers are starving? I thought the whole anorexia thing was entirely voluntary, but now I'm concerned that they are too thin not from drug use but because they don't have enough money to pay for food!
Microsoft has a plan:
1. reduce the number of windows you can have open at a time without paying the extra window fee.
2. Convince everyone to switch to linux/Mac
3. The world profits.
I dunno, I have seen some very creepy girls...
Clowder. Rhymes with chowder. Coincidence?
I would only have thought it was significant if it rhymed with "Chow Mein"
Funny, our cats at the farm catch and kill all sorts of things: mice, iguanas, snakes, birds. But then again we don't feed them all that much, just dry food - so they're always hungry enough to go hunting for "fresh meat".
There HAS to be a reason why cables are usually put in conduits and/or PVC pipes. If you have bare cables lying around, you're asking for trouble.
My personal belief
This is exactly where science stops.
You are free to believe what you will. But if you convince others with your sophistry, don't get upset when we scientists who deal in FACTS ignore you and/or call you a liar.
I like the way the summary tries to equate torrent with illicit. Interesting, on a site full of linux people who have probably torrented more than one distro in their lives.
Anyway - good luck with that.