"But I should have the right to choose between school systems."
Feel free to do so. If you'd like to choose the one subsidized by the rest of us, you may need to put up with graduation requirements that reflect our priorities.
Coordinating and supervising teenagers who are each doing a small bit of labor is about as efficient as getting calculations done by putting them on a high school math test.
You may not think community service is a valid part of an education, but the people who support such requirements do. That's why they support them, not as some tricky child labor scam. These are fruity liberal commies we're talking about, not cackling capitalists. They actually believe in teaching kids to help others, and all that kumbaya-singing claptrap.
Back when I was in school, the principal was a notorious mumbler, so this was a continuing problem.
As for the principle in question: Some people believe doing some sort of community service work is a useful part of ones education. They believe it is important to helping the young learn to be well rounded and integrated members of society. You're welcome to disagree, and think it's a stupid waste of time.
But if you think it's a scam to get cheap labor, you're crazy. For what it costs to coordinate and supervise 40 teenagers each doing an hours work, you can hire a couple adults as full time employees and get five times as much done.
You don't care about downtowns. Downtown is the start point or destination; you take the street that goes to your office. For traffic data, all you care about is major arteries.
I do data analysis that needs good (average, not real-time) speed data for all the roads. It's very frustrating - nobody has it because almost nobody else cares.
Still not quite getting it. Attending Math class is supposed to be a choice...
If a school system thinks some time spent on community service is an important part of educating students, they make it a graduation requirement.
Forced labor? You want to try coordinating high school students doing a few hours of work at a time and see if you can wind up getting more done than if you sent them home and did it yourself? I'm thinking the motivation isn't the chance to exploit the fabulous labor pool provided by a few hours from untrained 16 year olds.
"if your developers don't have any motivation to write excellent code, they won't."
Excellent developers write excellent code partly because they understand lousy code is more work to write.
Such developers are, of course, hard to find and expensive. If you're not going to find and pay someone really good, you probably want to do it yourself. It will probably cost more (counting your time) and won't be as good, but that will be true for hiring mediocre developers too. In the future, it will be better to have bad code you wrote then bad code someone no longer available wrote.
You still seem to be assuming I want the player to "manage" anything. It just has to play the file I point it at. If it wants to get fancy, it could read a plain-text list of files I point it at, and play those, optionally in shuffled order. If it thinks it is doing anything "fancier" than that, I probably don't want it.
"Unfortunately, this can slow down search "
I don't want search. I know where my files are, and have better ways to search for them if I didn't.
"and shuffle functions"
after I've given it a list of files to shuffle between, I expect a machine up to playing audio can generate some pseudo-random numbers quickly enough.
"if the directory structure is corrupted in anyway (yes yes, that's mostly a Windows issue)"
Not an issue I've ever seen, and I'm mostly a windows user. Not sure how locking me into a bad UI for managing music files helps in any case, since it rests on the file system in the background anyway.
Why have to "import" at all? Why does every music player have to manage a "library"? I've got a file system. I've learned to use it to manage files in ways I like. Just let me do that.
Farmland doesn't get the solar energy hitting the outer atmosphere - there's all that pesky atmosphere in the way. So lose another order of magnitude to maybe balance not driving the cars all the time. But other than that, OK, you've assumed you can take half the land currently used for food production (!), and maybe be in the ballpark of powering our cars by "this one solution alone". But this one one solution alone is assuming it gets to harness all the energy arriving on earth from the sun.
"Nawh. You're right. This is a pointless endeavor."
I never said it was pointless. (I see no indication this fungus is anywhere near as good as solar panels, so it probably is pointless, but that's beside my main point.) I said "solar energy is not going to renewably power a society where the only thing that looks different is under the hood of the cars." Covering half of the land in solar panels "looks different" if you ask me. I also think it's improbable, and still insufficient.
If our transportation needs are going to be powered by means that get back (via solar panels, fungus, windmills, whatever) to sunlight striking the earth recently, we're going to be using transportation that looks more like bicycles and trains, not cars and planes.
And my argument is that all the energy absorbed by the fungus over an entire growing season is not a heck of a lot. Even if you could convert it very efficiently, it can't compare with a gallon of gas that contains energy absorbed by plants over hundreds of thousands of growing seasons.
Convert all the solar energy hitting earths outer atmosphere over an area of 600 square feet with perfect efficiency, and you've got about 100 horsepower - enough for a crappy sub-compact car.
No matter what you put in between, solar energy is not going to renewably power a society where the only thing that looks different is under the hood of the cars.
This fungus may be really neat, but the best it can do is get closer to that perfect conversion of solar energy to car movement, and it's still nowhere close to perfect, which isn't good enough anyway.
"please, someone, go win your nobel prize for chemistry, biology, AND peace, and isolate those genes."
Blah. May as well collect the Physics prize too for getting around conservation of energy.
No matter how many wacky new discoveries you use and what genetic engineering on mushrooms you do, you cannot get out energy that was not put in. To produce the petroleum we use today, plants spent millions of years, slowly binding solar energy a tiny bit at a time.
You can't invent a magic petroleum tree to solve our energy needs, because it can't excrete energy as petroleum any faster than the sun puts energy into it. Which is not very fast.
Why is healthcare different from: Education, roads, police and fire protection, courts...?
You can argue what things you think society ought to collectively provide to it's members; intelligent people might reasonably have a different opinions about what should be on that list.
What I suggest is unreasonable about our current health care system is that we do provide health care to people; we just do it in a really inefficient, financially stupid way. Unless you want to turn the indigent away from emergency rooms and just letting them die, we should pay for keeping them alive more efficiently than we do.
"Should we give everybody the same food too?" Same deal. We should (and do) feed the hungry. If you don't want to do it out of the goodness of your bleeding liberal heart, do it out of self interest: A bunch of people starving to death in the streets is a real downer; bad for property values. Most arguments against welfare revolve around how undeserving the (imagined) lazy recipients are, but in my view, that's entirely irrelevant. None of the socialist programs I support (food stamps, health care, public schools, interstates, bank bailouts) are particularly "fair"; they're just "better".
"Why is it fair to compare the way that the rest of the world does health care in a vacuum"
I'm not. We, as a society, pay much more for health care than other places that get better health care for less money. Whether I pay taxes or premiums makes little difference to me.
People going to the doctors office on Medicaid cost much less than people going to the Emergency Room with non-emergencies for "free". Our government has proved really bad at handling health care: we mostly fund emergency rooms, which is a crappy way to provide health care.
It comes back to what seems to be the basic Republican position lately: Government does a crappy job, elect us and we'll prove it.
I say: Government is us; We are doing a crappy job; We should do better. Take some fraking responsibility already.
Of course, pretty much all Americans support and enjoy socialized education. It's only health care where we think everyone should ahave it but inexplicable refuse to pay for it efficiently.
"I just don't think it's as easy in less homogeneous countries"
"Would you like the population numbers by racial breakdown or the welfare recipient numbers or what?"
Yes, that would be great.
"Let me know which statistics you would like and I'll dig them up for you."
Whatever ones you think support your bullshit. Maybe you could start with the percent of the population deriving the majority of their income from government support in the US vs the Nordic countries? Hint: If you're not going to change your mind in the face of evidence, don't bother looking that one up.
"It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."
Got it.
The rest is details, but contrary to your assertion, he specifically he argues against sales taxes because they are regressive: They hit the poor harder, who must spend a large proportion on necessities. He likes property taxes, which is not a terrible idea, though I think it's out of date (too easy to move offshore these days). Note that accurately assesing an income tax would have been impossible in Smiths day, so we can't know his opinion there. But he's still right on with his larger point, that taxing the rich by a greater proportion of their iuncome than the poor makes sense. And also with the detail you've inexplicably turned around: that sales taxes are a bad idea because they tax the poor more.
"I think the overwhelming idea is that given the way our government runs *anything*, it's impossible to imagine how they would provide health care for all citizens in any efficient manor."
Citation required.
"They can't even pave the roads properly "
Since this is the federal government, you must mean the interstate highway system? Having recently driven all the way across the country at 60 mph without hitting a single pothole, what are you smoking?
"it's not like you can't walk into any hospital in the united states and get treated with no money."
Yes, you can walk into the emergency room, where treating you will cost me (a taxpayer) ten times as much as if I just paid for your health insurance so you could make an appointment at a primary care office.
"That's, of course, discounting all the other valid theories"
Well, I'm going to go ahead and discount your theories as long as you keep discounting the rest of the industrialized worlds actual experience, okay?
So you're offended that people think you believe one particular wacky thing, then quickly dismiss roughly half of people who call themselves Christians as "not really" because they belong to denominations without bishops? Somehow I'd have thought following the teachings of Christ might have been more the telling point, but whatever; I'm not sure you have much standing to get all offended at that point.
Anyway, as an atheist (who no doubt slipped from my Christian upbringing due to a lack of bishops) let me assure you that I don't believe all christians are creationists. It is however, fine to assume creationism of all who bring up their Christianity in order to claim oppression from internet posts that don't actually make any mention of it. People that eager to force their religion into things either are creationsts, or are, as you apparently claim, so eager to be offended it would be cruel not to give them the chance.
Right. And they don't want money from GenCon why? GenCon isn't a PAC; there's no legal reason they can't take the money. Which leaves that they don't "wish to be associated with" people giving money in memory of Gary Gygax. Who, we might note, they happily took money from directly when he was alive.
"this particular donation appeared to imply an endorsement."
Why? It's a check. You cash it. I've cashed checks plenty, and never felt I was endorsing anything. So has CCF. Why does this check appear to imply anything?
Please post the deed history on YOUR land that traces back to a direct grant from God.
Your ownership of your land derives from the laws of the society you are part of. I don't know where you live, but where I do, ownership of land most definitely does not include the water or minerals under it, water that falls on it, or cattle that graze on it.
"The question is: if such protections didn't exist, and every piece of 'intellectual property' would thus be created either because someone wanted to or someone wanted it to exist enough to pay someone else to make it, would the world be better or worse off ?"
I'd guess much worse. Patronage worked sorta OK back when copying creative works was more or less impossible. When the printing press arrived and people who owned one could, with some effort, make a whole ton of copies of a creative work, problems developed, and we came up with copyright. In various forms, this has worked sorta OK until recently. In a relatively short, recent time, it's become the case that most creative works are trivially easy for anyone to copy perfectly. Clearly, the systems that worked for the age where copying was possible but hard are not going to cut it; we'll need to adapt. But simply going back to the systems that worked when copying was impossible doesn't sound like a likely solution either.
Ideally we want to get the benefits of easy copying of things, without having to think too much about the rules or let big owners of lots of stuff push little guys around inappropriately. But we'd like to also keep it easy for me to create something because I think a lot of people will pay a small amount for it.
That would support his point. You're able to pay $5 because the website doesn't need to pay for insurance in case you post a pop song, because they are protected from liability. Now thank the DMCA.
Slashdot Mirror
"But I should have the right to choose between school systems."
Feel free to do so. If you'd like to choose the one subsidized by the rest of us, you may need to put up with graduation requirements that reflect our priorities.
Coordinating and supervising teenagers who are each doing a small bit of labor is about as efficient as getting calculations done by putting them on a high school math test.
You may not think community service is a valid part of an education, but the people who support such requirements do. That's why they support them, not as some tricky child labor scam. These are fruity liberal commies we're talking about, not cackling capitalists. They actually believe in teaching kids to help others, and all that kumbaya-singing claptrap.
"You're failing to understand the principal"
Back when I was in school, the principal was a notorious mumbler, so this was a continuing problem.
As for the principle in question: Some people believe doing some sort of community service work is a useful part of ones education. They believe it is important to helping the young learn to be well rounded and integrated members of society. You're welcome to disagree, and think it's a stupid waste of time.
But if you think it's a scam to get cheap labor, you're crazy. For what it costs to coordinate and supervise 40 teenagers each doing an hours work, you can hire a couple adults as full time employees and get five times as much done.
You don't care about downtowns. Downtown is the start point or destination; you take the street that goes to your office. For traffic data, all you care about is major arteries.
I do data analysis that needs good (average, not real-time) speed data for all the roads. It's very frustrating - nobody has it because almost nobody else cares.
Still not quite getting it. Attending Math class is supposed to be a choice...
If a school system thinks some time spent on community service is an important part of educating students, they make it a graduation requirement.
Forced labor? You want to try coordinating high school students doing a few hours of work at a time and see if you can wind up getting more done than if you sent them home and did it yourself? I'm thinking the motivation isn't the chance to exploit the fabulous labor pool provided by a few hours from untrained 16 year olds.
"if your developers don't have any motivation to write excellent code, they won't."
Excellent developers write excellent code partly because they understand lousy code is more work to write.
Such developers are, of course, hard to find and expensive. If you're not going to find and pay someone really good, you probably want to do it yourself. It will probably cost more (counting your time) and won't be as good, but that will be true for hiring mediocre developers too. In the future, it will be better to have bad code you wrote then bad code someone no longer available wrote.
You still seem to be assuming I want the player to "manage" anything. It just has to play the file I point it at. If it wants to get fancy, it could read a plain-text list of files I point it at, and play those, optionally in shuffled order. If it thinks it is doing anything "fancier" than that, I probably don't want it.
"Unfortunately, this can slow down search "
I don't want search. I know where my files are, and have better ways to search for them if I didn't.
"and shuffle functions"
after I've given it a list of files to shuffle between, I expect a machine up to playing audio can generate some pseudo-random numbers quickly enough.
"if the directory structure is corrupted in anyway (yes yes, that's mostly a Windows issue)"
Not an issue I've ever seen, and I'm mostly a windows user. Not sure how locking me into a bad UI for managing music files helps in any case, since it rests on the file system in the background anyway.
Why have to "import" at all? Why does every music player have to manage a "library"? I've got a file system. I've learned to use it to manage files in ways I like. Just let me do that.
Farmland doesn't get the solar energy hitting the outer atmosphere - there's all that pesky atmosphere in the way. So lose another order of magnitude to maybe balance not driving the cars all the time. But other than that, OK, you've assumed you can take half the land currently used for food production (!), and maybe be in the ballpark of powering our cars by "this one solution alone". But this one one solution alone is assuming it gets to harness all the energy arriving on earth from the sun.
"Nawh. You're right. This is a pointless endeavor."
I never said it was pointless. (I see no indication this fungus is anywhere near as good as solar panels, so it probably is pointless, but that's beside my main point.) I said "solar energy is not going to renewably power a society where the only thing that looks different is under the hood of the cars." Covering half of the land in solar panels "looks different" if you ask me. I also think it's improbable, and still insufficient.
If our transportation needs are going to be powered by means that get back (via solar panels, fungus, windmills, whatever) to sunlight striking the earth recently, we're going to be using transportation that looks more like bicycles and trains, not cars and planes.
And my argument is that all the energy absorbed by the fungus over an entire growing season is not a heck of a lot. Even if you could convert it very efficiently, it can't compare with a gallon of gas that contains energy absorbed by plants over hundreds of thousands of growing seasons.
Convert all the solar energy hitting earths outer atmosphere over an area of 600 square feet with perfect efficiency, and you've got about 100 horsepower - enough for a crappy sub-compact car.
No matter what you put in between, solar energy is not going to renewably power a society where the only thing that looks different is under the hood of the cars.
This fungus may be really neat, but the best it can do is get closer to that perfect conversion of solar energy to car movement, and it's still nowhere close to perfect, which isn't good enough anyway.
"please, someone, go win your nobel prize for chemistry, biology, AND peace, and isolate those genes."
Blah. May as well collect the Physics prize too for getting around conservation of energy.
No matter how many wacky new discoveries you use and what genetic engineering on mushrooms you do, you cannot get out energy that was not put in. To produce the petroleum we use today, plants spent millions of years, slowly binding solar energy a tiny bit at a time.
You can't invent a magic petroleum tree to solve our energy needs, because it can't excrete energy as petroleum any faster than the sun puts energy into it. Which is not very fast.
Why is healthcare different from: Education, roads, police and fire protection, courts...?
You can argue what things you think society ought to collectively provide to it's members; intelligent people might reasonably have a different opinions about what should be on that list.
What I suggest is unreasonable about our current health care system is that we do provide health care to people; we just do it in a really inefficient, financially stupid way. Unless you want to turn the indigent away from emergency rooms and just letting them die, we should pay for keeping them alive more efficiently than we do.
"Should we give everybody the same food too?"
Same deal. We should (and do) feed the hungry. If you don't want to do it out of the goodness of your bleeding liberal heart, do it out of self interest: A bunch of people starving to death in the streets is a real downer; bad for property values. Most arguments against welfare revolve around how undeserving the (imagined) lazy recipients are, but in my view, that's entirely irrelevant. None of the socialist programs I support (food stamps, health care, public schools, interstates, bank bailouts) are particularly "fair"; they're just "better".
"Why is it fair to compare the way that the rest of the world does health care in a vacuum"
I'm not. We, as a society, pay much more for health care than other places that get better health care for less money. Whether I pay taxes or premiums makes little difference to me.
People going to the doctors office on Medicaid cost much less than people going to the Emergency Room with non-emergencies for "free". Our government has proved really bad at handling health care: we mostly fund emergency rooms, which is a crappy way to provide health care.
It comes back to what seems to be the basic Republican position lately: Government does a crappy job, elect us and we'll prove it.
I say: Government is us; We are doing a crappy job; We should do better. Take some fraking responsibility already.
"Does anyone else miss small-gov't, pro-personal-liberties republicans?"
Miss them? How could I miss them? I've never seen one on the ballot in my lifetime. And I'm old.
Of course, pretty much all Americans support and enjoy socialized education. It's only health care where we think everyone should ahave it but inexplicable refuse to pay for it efficiently.
"I just don't think it's as easy in less homogeneous countries"
Why?
"Would you like the population numbers by racial breakdown or the welfare recipient numbers or what?"
Yes, that would be great.
"Let me know which statistics you would like and I'll dig them up for you."
Whatever ones you think support your bullshit. Maybe you could start with the percent of the population deriving the majority of their income from government support in the US vs the Nordic countries? Hint: If you're not going to change your mind in the face of evidence, don't bother looking that one up.
"It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."
Got it.
The rest is details, but contrary to your assertion, he specifically he argues against sales taxes because they are regressive: They hit the poor harder, who must spend a large proportion on necessities. He likes property taxes, which is not a terrible idea, though I think it's out of date (too easy to move offshore these days). Note that accurately assesing an income tax would have been impossible in Smiths day, so we can't know his opinion there. But he's still right on with his larger point, that taxing the rich by a greater proportion of their iuncome than the poor makes sense. And also with the detail you've inexplicably turned around: that sales taxes are a bad idea because they tax the poor more.
"I think the overwhelming idea is that given the way our government runs *anything*, it's impossible to imagine how they would provide health care for all citizens in any efficient manor."
Citation required.
"They can't even pave the roads properly "
Since this is the federal government, you must mean the interstate highway system? Having recently driven all the way across the country at 60 mph without hitting a single pothole, what are you smoking?
"it's not like you can't walk into any hospital in the united states and get treated with no money."
Yes, you can walk into the emergency room, where treating you will cost me (a taxpayer) ten times as much as if I just paid for your health insurance so you could make an appointment at a primary care office.
"That's, of course, discounting all the other valid theories"
Well, I'm going to go ahead and discount your theories as long as you keep discounting the rest of the industrialized worlds actual experience, okay?
So you're offended that people think you believe one particular wacky thing, then quickly dismiss roughly half of people who call themselves Christians as "not really" because they belong to denominations without bishops? Somehow I'd have thought following the teachings of Christ might have been more the telling point, but whatever; I'm not sure you have much standing to get all offended at that point.
Anyway, as an atheist (who no doubt slipped from my Christian upbringing due to a lack of bishops) let me assure you that I don't believe all christians are creationists. It is however, fine to assume creationism of all who bring up their Christianity in order to claim oppression from internet posts that don't actually make any mention of it. People that eager to force their religion into things either are creationsts, or are, as you apparently claim, so eager to be offended it would be cruel not to give them the chance.
Right. And they don't want money from GenCon why? GenCon isn't a PAC; there's no legal reason they can't take the money. Which leaves that they don't "wish to be associated with" people giving money in memory of Gary Gygax. Who, we might note, they happily took money from directly when he was alive.
"this particular donation appeared to imply an endorsement."
Why? It's a check. You cash it. I've cashed checks plenty, and never felt I was endorsing anything. So has CCF. Why does this check appear to imply anything?
Please post the deed history on YOUR land that traces back to a direct grant from God.
Your ownership of your land derives from the laws of the society you are part of. I don't know where you live, but where I do, ownership of land most definitely does not include the water or minerals under it, water that falls on it, or cattle that graze on it.
"The question is: if such protections didn't exist, and every piece of 'intellectual property' would thus be created either because someone wanted to or someone wanted it to exist enough to pay someone else to make it, would the world be better or worse off ?"
I'd guess much worse. Patronage worked sorta OK back when copying creative works was more or less impossible. When the printing press arrived and people who owned one could, with some effort, make a whole ton of copies of a creative work, problems developed, and we came up with copyright. In various forms, this has worked sorta OK until recently. In a relatively short, recent time, it's become the case that most creative works are trivially easy for anyone to copy perfectly. Clearly, the systems that worked for the age where copying was possible but hard are not going to cut it; we'll need to adapt. But simply going back to the systems that worked when copying was impossible doesn't sound like a likely solution either.
Ideally we want to get the benefits of easy copying of things, without having to think too much about the rules or let big owners of lots of stuff push little guys around inappropriately. But we'd like to also keep it easy for me to create something because I think a lot of people will pay a small amount for it.
Sounds like what they are saying doesn't make any sense to you, and you assume the fault lies with them. There my be another explanation.
That would support his point. You're able to pay $5 because the website doesn't need to pay for insurance in case you post a pop song, because they are protected from liability. Now thank the DMCA.