Even a seven-foot-tall professional athlete starts looking a little sorry when you poke a bunch of holes in his lungs or brain with supersonic lead pieces.
I notice that the '1% decline' folks haven't responded to you.
The only thing I have to add is that the last time I went shopping for fish, except for the stuff that was farmed, the selection wasn't nearly as good as it used to be a few decades ago.
And although it's before my time, if you read historical accounts of the shellfish harvests in New England, they're nothing like they are today. Lobster used to be so common in Maine that it was considered a poor-person's food; you could basically go and pick them up from the rocks in many bays and inlets. Don't even bother trying that today. Similar with clams, although there you also have toxic contamination to worry about.
Were it not for international treaties, I think it's safe to assume that a whole lot of both whale and large sea-fish species would now be extinct. (We got pretty close with swordfish; it's just getting back to normal now.) The free market is great for a lot of things, but that "tragedy of the commons" is a real bitch. Sometimes the market -- and people in general -- aren't really forward-thinking. They'll slaughter the goose today rather than have the golden eggs later a startlingly large percentage of the time.
Quite possibly. However, I don't share your feelings concerning the "small window" feeling; I think it's misplaced, although everyone is certainly entited to their own opinion on such a personal issue.
Lots of people have children when they are in their late 30s or even later, and I don't think this ends up being a net negative to the child.
Personally, I see raising a child as the most critically important thing that I will ever do, or even concieve of doing. With that said, it seems inappropriate to rush into it. If I'm going to raise a child, they deserve to have the absolute best that I can provide, both in the material sense and in the sense of guidance and knowledge. There is no possible way that I'm there yet.
I think the increased financial security and quality of life I'll be able to provide, not to mention just the greater amount of maturity and experience, as a result of waiting until I'm 35 or 40 to have kids, as opposed to having them in my 20s, is well worth the tradeoff of being comparatively older than the parents of other kids their age. (And of potentially having to use IVF, or try multiple times because of the risk of birth defects, etc.)
Deciding not to have children until later in life isn't always the selfish, materialistic, self-centered whim that it gets made out to be; I, as well as a lot of other people I know who aren't rushing into the kid thing, are quite aware of the tradeoffs. I'm not going to put them at a disadvantage later in life versus what I could have provided or been to them, just because I might want to have the support of a family now.
To be perfectly frank, I guess I feel that kids need financial security and a parent who's been around long enough to have a shot at having most of the answers, more than they need a grouchy old man in their lives when they're approaching middle age themselves. If my decision means that there's a good chance I won't live to see their children, so be it; that's a small cost for knowing I'll have done the absolute best job possible of the most important thing I'll ever do.
My friends and I were lamenting that they don't just offer a low-cost xBox model where they just remove the optical drive and put a copy of Halo in a read-only partition on the hard drive.
As far as I'm concerned, that's the purpose of an xBox. It's not a game machine, it's a "Halo appliance."
Therefore a company working to prevent piracy is spending money on a venture that is not profitable for them in the end
Actually I think that the MPAA and RIAA are very profitable, it's just that you have their ultimate goals wrong. They exist to make money, and to this end they need to appear to try to prevent piracy, and thus take in cash from various record companies in exchange for this "service." Whether or not they actually do anything is immaterial; if they happen to be effective it's just because they think that doing so will make them seem like a better investment to their benefactors. That's why you see the lawsuits and all the advertising. It's all about demonstrating to the people paying the bills where their money is going.
The fact that they're fighting a losing war doesn't really matter, because they're making money in the process. Actually, losing wars are some of the most profitable, because you can convince desperate people to pour the most resources into them.
Well, they'd like everyone to be on wax spools, but they'd like you to buy a new copy every few years when the old one wears out. Actually, what they'd really like is if each recording was a one-shot, somehow destroyed in the playback process. That would be just teriffic.
It's the electronics industry, not the music industry, that has driven new formats. The music industries go along with it because they make a lot of money in the short term, but they're rarely the drivers of new formats. In fact they tend to discourage their adoption more than anything else.
The music industry has been okay with the last few format transitions and hasn't fought the electronics companies too hard, because they've occured more rapidly than the old medium would have worn out. Thus, they made more money off of getting people to "buy up" to CDs than if they had waited around for vinyl records to all wear out and need replacement. Only now, they're starting to realize that they may have eaten the goose that could have laid a lot of golden eggs -- by forcing an 'upgrade' to CDs from vinyl, they made a lot of money in the short term, but they also gave people a format that doesn't wear out and is easily transferable to computers, where it can be replicated losslessly and endlessly, forever.
I think product labeling is important, but I'm not sure whether this particular case is one worth regulating.
There are definitely situations where product labeling is important, and has benefited the consumer greatly by allowing easier comparisons. The basic nutrition information on food, the window stickers on new cars, energy consumption measurements on appliances, for examples.
However, in the case of cloned food, as long as it's actually safe to consume, I don't think there necessarily has to be a labeling requirment mandated by the government just because of people's (irrational, IMO) squeamishness. If people don't want cloned food, then there will be companies marketing "Clone Free" food, and they can buy it.
If people mark their products wrongly -- if you sell something as "Clone Free" that's knowingly made from cloned parts -- then you're committing fraud and should be prosecuted appropriately.
Outside of basic nutrition and safety, I don't really see a place for regulation here. Clone-free, GMO-free, and Organic foods ought to be managed like Kosher foods are -- if people want to buy them, they can look for the symbol of a trusted, indepenent certification organization. As long as the labels aren't applied fradulently, and the food isn't unsafe to eat, then there's no problem.
I don't think most people will really care. The Organic-foods set might look for the Clone-free label, more out of a knee-jerk response than anything else, but most people will continue to buy their favorite brand of beef jerky regardless of whether they're cloned or not. If they don't care, and there's no rational reason why cloned foods are unhealthy versus regular ones, then I don't see why their needs to be labeling requirements handed down by the government. If enough people want un-cloned food, they will be able to buy it by going to Whole Foods or Trader Joe's.
that free flow from producers to consumers DOES NOT MATTER, especially since we have the Net.
Your entire point seems to be that the flow of information from producer to consumer doesn't matter, because the consumers can get that information elsewhere.
Okay, I'll accept that to a certain extent, but it's not really saying that "information doesn't matter," it's just that the source of the information is basically irrelevant, as long as you trust/believe it.
If I want to buy some apples, I can either drive around to all the stores selling apples and look at them, or I can ask my friends where they've gotten good apples. Either way, I'm getting information. In the latter case I'm probably getting better information, and can thus make a better decision, because I'm asking people whose opinions I trust.
Information is critical to the functioning of an efficient marketplace. If the producer doesn't give accurate information about the good they're selling, then a customer is going to have to buy it and then tell others about it (or, more realistically, someone buys one and reverse-engineers it). This isn't a benefit, it's a burden. If the information had been available to begin with, then this reviewing process wouldn't have to happen. As a result of information not being immediately available, the market will manufacture it -- but this process is itself an inefficiency.
More information leads to better purchasing decisions and evaluations of value, which leads to less waste. Less waste means higher efficiency. Efficiency is a Good Thing.
From the producer's side, they benefit from increased information as well -- it's not just consumers that want to know. If you produce a good, and have access to information as to what price it's selling for in various markets, then you can decide whether to sell it locally or transport it (provided you have the transportation costs). Without that knowledge, you might just sell it locally and not make as much profit as you would otherwise.
The biggest benefit of the Internet is that it allows for the fast exchange of information. Markets have traditionally existed only across the same spans that you can transmit information easily. If you're selling apples in one city and I'm selling them in another, and we have no idea what the price of apples is in the other's city, then they're basically disconnected markets. But if there's a telegraph or stock ticker set up between them, and we know the transportation cost, then the markets become integrated because of the flow of information. (If you want a real-world example of this, you can look at the New York and Philadelphia stock markets in the 19th century before and after the introduction of the telegraph. Prior to that, the same stock or commodity might trade on each one, completely independent of the other market. With the telegraph, they became integrated and began following each other almost overnight.) The biggest benefit of the 'net is that it creates one large market out of disparate ones, by facilitating the real-time flow of information from one place to another.
You can only achieve the theoretical peak efficiency of the market, what's known as Pareto efficiency, if everyone has perfect information. Any deviation from that produces inefficiency and waste, and that means that somebody is not making as much profit as they otherwise would have.
While I agree that there always has to be someone at the bottom, I disgree vehemently that somehow economics is always a zero-sum game. It is not. If you have two countries, both with the same basic distribution of wealth (e.g., the top 1% is 10x as wealthy as the bottom 1% in both cases), then in the country with the higher average per capita GDP, everyone -- including the "poor" people -- will have a higher quality of life. (At least in economics terms -- we can argue all day about whether having a dishwasher and a TV really make you "happier" or not.)
So you'll always have 'poor people,' but what it means to be poor changes based on the average quality of life of the society. In some places in Africa, being 'poor' might mean starving to death. In the U.S., being poor might mean not having health insurance, or riding the bus instead of owning a car. I can almost guarantee you that the poverty level in the U.S. would be a king's ransom in Sudan.
Whether immigrants create more in costs than they create in economic output is arguable; it's a tough question to answer because so much of what illegal immigrants do isn't documented or measured. We know pretty solidly that they consume more in public services than they pay in taxes (there are lots of studies, although you don't have to be Adam Smith to look at the budgets of many municipal and state governments in areas with large populations of illegal immigrants to figure that out), at least on the local and state levels.
The net effect of this is that the government is basically subsidizing the labor costs of the industries (principally agriculture) that employ illegal immigrants. And in doing so, we are reducing the demand for replacement technologies.
There was a time when people thought slavery was necessary, because no one could conceive of a way to pick cotton except by hand. Obviously, they were wrong; after slavery was abolished and the cost of labor increased, the demand for a cotton-harvesting machine increased as well. Now, most cotton is harvested mechanically. The same job that might have once been done by slaves, or later by paid sharecroppers, is now done by a very small number of highly skilled workers (those involved in the manufacture of the machines, and a smaller number in their actual operation).
Having a huge -- effectively bottomless -- pool of subsidized, cheap labor stunts both technological and economic development. By keeping the cost of goods artificially low, it prevents labor-saving alternatives from being developed; and labor-saving devices are the hallmark of civilization, because they allow people to move their attention and labor to higher and higher-value activities. As people move to higher-value activities, they can afford to purchase more (or have more leisure time), and their standard of living increases. Simply throwing more people at the problem is no way to develop economically; at best you can achieve a sort of slow development of your upper class, growing the gap between the top and bottom of society ever wider, but the cost is that you create a vast, disenfranchised underclass, and that's bad for business all around.
There is no inherent superiority argument here; I never said that the illegal immigrant was in any way an inferior person to the American worker -- to do so would be racist, and worse than that, factually wrong. However, having a country with a vast surplus of labor is destabilizing, and leads to social stratification. If we want to be a nation of aristocrats and serfs, then we ought to just create an official "second class" citizenship (call it a "permanent worker visa"), open the doors, and stop lying to ourselves. But if we want to actually work towards a goal, however unattainable, of egalitarianism, social mobility, and stability without draconian enforcement, allowing a vast pool of unskilled laborers to remain and stifle growth is not the way to do it.
Let me restate: There's no "immigration debate," at least not in mainstream politics...
Pat Buchanan is to mainstream conservativism what the Ralph Nader or is to mainstream liberalism; actually less so, since I think Nader is taken more seriously as a politician, while Buchanan has essentially retired from that arena to become a professional blowhard and everyone knows it. He's taking an extreme position for a reason: it gets people riled up, which gets him on CNN, which sells more books.
Not that he should be ignored completely -- his popularity ought to be indicative of the widespread disillusionment of a lot of people in the U.S.; the fact that a lot of white English-speaking Christians agree with him and are blaming hispanics (who they associate with being illegal immigrants) for the country's economic problems is too important to be ignored. The real question to ask is why do people feel that way, and why don't they feel that way about other immigrants (say, Asians)? If there weren't so many illegal hispanic immigrants, would white Americans be less likely to feel threatened by them generally? These are the questions that aren't being asked when you just pidgeonhole the entire thing.
Attempting to marginalize the entire question of illegal immigration because someone is using it to further their own agenda (in this case, to hawk a book), would be like writing off the all debate about the environment because of the PETA/radical-animal-rights kooks.
Don't take an extreme position and think that it's representative of the majority opinion; instead take it for what it is -- a barometer of some people's discontent. Important, and definitely worth considering and discussing, but not necessarily the median or the mean.
Granted, this is purely anecdotal, but within my circle of friends (all around 30ish), nobody is having kids or planning on having kids- its just too comfortable to cohabit in sin and live it up.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that your friends are mostly college-educated professionals with salaried jobs?
If so, it's no surprise that they're not having kids. They, to put it bluntly, have better things to do. But if you went into the ghetto somewhere and rounded up an equivalent number of people in the same age group, you would probably find a much greater percentage of people that either already have, or are pregnant with, children. Some in their upper 30s might even have grand-children!
People who have jobs and salaries and who basically have a plan for their future, generally don't have kids until they really want to -- which may mean "never." People who are working paycheck-to-paycheck, and have no idea whether they'll be living on the street in six months, much less what they'll be doing in six years, actually have less desire to keep themselves from getting pregnant.
I don't quite understand the motivation, because I don't share it. For starters, I'm male, and second, I'm closer to the first group of people than the second (professionally educated, salaried job, etc.). I can only assume that to someone with no other future prospects, maybe having a child gives them some sense of security or purpose. Or maybe they just don't care either way, and just get pregnant and then don't have any reason to not have it.
At any rate, if you look at various segments of the U.S. population, you'll see very different trends in terms of child-bearing. At the higher ends of the educational and socio-economic spectrum, highly-educated professionals, you see something that's like Old Europe: very low, sub-replacement-rate birthrates (one or at most two children per couple), very wide use of birth control, and tons and tons of money spent on children when they do occur. At the other end, the archtypical person might have a child or two by their mid-20s, sometimes even before graduating high-school (rendering them basically unemployable if they drop out as a result), and depend on their parents for support for the child -- in many cases making the child's grandparents the primary caregivers. These children basically receive only the bare minimum resources in terms of education (public preschool if available, public schools, no college) and in many cases perpetuate their parents lifestyles.
I used to think that the biggest problem was technological -- that the wide availability of birth control (and abortion) to people who have health insurance and disposable income (to afford the $30-70 a month for it) created the gap. However, I'm no longer sure that's true. Someone who really wants birth control in any major U.S. city can probably get it for free or at negligable cost (compared to having a child). All you have to do is walk into Planned Parenthood and ask; if you can't pay, they don't charge.
There are greater social causes driving the birth rates in the lower socioeconomic sectors which are not being dealt with, and we are just beginning to feel the effects of a widening rift in our social structure: between people who spend their entire lives getting ready to have a child, and pour their resources into providing him or her with every possible advantage; and people who start off with close to nothing, and create children who have even less. It's unfair to punish the former for having the foresight not to have children and to want to give them the best life possible, but our current path seems destined to create a two-tiered society, which is not sustainable in the long term.
Well said. I was going to try and say this but you pretty much nailed it.
The only thing I'd add is that it gets even worse when you consider people that have children at a very young age -- i.e. the phenomenon we politely call "teen pregnancy." When someone has a child before they're even able to support themselves, they essentially create two loads on their family (and/or the tax-supported public welfare system): themselves and the child. Not only do they create a new non-worker, but they take themselves out of the working pool, or at least into a lower wage class than they probably would have been in, effectively making two unproductive individuals. Also, there are fairly convincing statistics showing that the children of very young parents often become young parents themselves, perpetuating the problem.
So in places in the U.S. where, for various social reasons, you have high rates of teen pregnancy, you can quickly have generations of people burdened with supporting large numbers of non-working adults and children; it's a recipe for poverty that's basically unstoppable, unless you can break the cycle of young people continuing to have children.
Unfortunately, certain parts of the U.S. political structure are absolutely unwilling to take this problem on realistically, instead pretending that it can be dealt with indirectly.
Well that's wonderful. More food for thought: if we were all the size of hamsters, but square, with interlocking pegs on top, I could use most of the population of America to insulate my garage. That's an equally useful statement.
Don't be foolish: just because you could concievably live in five square meters doesn't mean that you'd want to, or that you could somehow cram all the infrastructure that it takes to support a person (food production, waste management, power generation, etc.) into that space. Not to mention that unless sedated, most people would probably go batshit crazy and kill each other if forced to live like that.
We will likely never run out of oil, although it will eventually (50 years? 500?) reach the point where it's simply too expensive to get the stuff out of the ground, and we only use biomass-made oil or some other alternative fuel source.
This is a true statement. However, what you're not really discussing -- and what really lies behind the worries of people discussing Peak Oil -- is what the social consequences of that increase in cost will be.
As energy becomes more expensive, the lifestyles that we currently have (particularly in the United States) become untenable. This could be particularly catastrophic if the run-up in prices occurs quickly, rather than gradually. The increase in energy prices could also trigger hyperinflation, lower real purchasing power, and decrease the quality of living of millions of people.
In short, even if the world doesn't run out of energy -- even if the lights don't suddenly go out, without proper planning ahead of time, it might become too expensive for most people to keep them on.
The threat is not that there won't be any energy, the threat is that it'll be so expensive, only a very few people will be able to afford it.
While it's true that they get basically free energy, it comes at the cost of the island that they're living on, tearing itself apart.
In some (geologically) short span of time, Iceland is going to separate into a variety of parts and probably recede underwater. There is a fault line running not far from Reykjavik that grows apart a few inches a year.
Are a few extra immigrants really somethign to get worked up over?
It is when it's a few million, and if the immigrants in question consume more in services than they contribute in GDP; if that's the case, then they are a net economic loss, and decrease per-capita GDP and with it, the overall standard of living. While previous generations of working-class immigrants were basically self-sufficent and used little in the way of public-sector social services, this is not the case today with many people who are immigrating illegally.
Besides which, "eight acres for every person" is a mis-statement. Much of that land you're talking about isn't really habitable, or is already being used for other purposes (such as food production). There's lots of "empty" land in the badlands of Wyoming or up in Alaska, but you're going to have a hard time getting the people wading across the Rio Grande to go there.
There's no "immigration debate," at least not in mainstream politics; the debate is over illegal immigration.
Immigration per se isn't a divisive issue at all. Except for the very far-right fringe, I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that we should stop legitimate immigration of people with skills that are in-demand, here in the United States. The disagreement is in how to deal with the large number of illegal immigrants, doing mostly low-value work, and the consequent social problems that having an effective sub-class of workers entails.
The only debate I can think of that involves legal immigration has to do with the way the U.S. grants refugee status, and the "anchor baby" phenomenon, but those are closely tied to the same issues that make illegal immigration important; they're not really fundamental questions about immigration.
Watching live TV is a distinctly different experience than watching pre-recorded content that's either been time-shifted (using a VCR) or downloaded. It's not just semantics, it's the difference between allowing television to dictate your evening's schedule to you, or fitting it into your own schedule. It's also the difference between having advertising shoveled at you, and being able to skip it or just never see it at all.
It continually amazes me the degree that people will go to, to schedule their lives around live TV -- particularly when practically everyone has a VCR, so it's not as if it's even mandatory.
I've given up on live television viewing for those reasons, and I really think it's a better way to watch. I set my EyeTV to grab the shows I'm interested in, or put them on my Netflix list if they're on DVD, and watch them an episode at a time when it fits my schedule. When I decide I want to watch TV, it's all there waiting for me -- no turning on the tube and aimlessly flipping around for something to watch. Because I know that the content will be there effectively forever (okay, I guess it would run out of space eventually and stop recording), there's no pressure to see it.
You don't need a TiVO or a PVR to do this, you could do it almost as well with a VCR if you were really good at programming it, or you could just unplug it from the cable completely and use Netflix if you weren't interested in seeing programs until a season after they come out.
IMO, what's really unhealthy is just sitting down for hours at a time and watching low-value programming that you're not interested in, because "it's what's on," or building one's life around a television schedule because you just have to see something when it's on live. The lengths that people go to for entertainment is ridiculous, when it ought to be the other way around.
Turning off remote loading of images will not prevent IFRAME bugging, or many other HTML remote-resource bugs.
So that's not the solution you think it is. To prevent bugging, you would need to disable the following HTML elements: [img] [iframe] [style src=""] [script src=""] [input type="image" src=""] [link rel="stylesheet"] [link rel="next"] (In rendering engines that prefetch) [embed] [applet] [object] [frame]
Some CSS elements and JavaScript also need to be disabled. Basically, this is the "neutering" that I was discussing. A smart email system (e.g. a corporate one) could be set to block these only from sources originating outside the company; that would prevent its use by spammers but certainly wouldn't have helped the HP folks any.
If you really need to attach graphics, then attach it to the email; MIME exists for a reason and doesn't have the bugging (or dead link) issues that HTML links do. It would be trivial to allow IMG tags that refer to attached files and not remote ones, if this was really needed.
Actually attaching a Word document should be a much safer and better alternative; it's only because of some grevious security problems in Word (macros, embeddable OLE objects, etc.) that it's not safe. If Word treated documents purely as data, and sandboxed it in such a way as to prevent any executable code from being run, or remote resources fetched as a result of instructions in the document, then they would be less prone to bugging than HTML.
Your ad hominem about me being in college is misplaced; I've been out of college and in business for quite a while now, and I have yet to see any convincing demonstrations of the superiority of HTML email over straight text, or over text plus attachments. If anything, it is the overuse of HTML formatting and graphics (particularly backgrounds) in business communications that has convinced me that rendering should be scaled back to a bare minimum. There are far better ways to share format-intensive documents than trying to cram them into the body of an email.
Should I really need to evaluate the ethics of of every company I purchase from? Isn't that why we have a government?
It is not.
The government exists -- among other reasons -- to encourage/enforce everyone to act legally. So if a company was doing something that was against the law, then you would have a claim for the government to do something.
However, someone can be ethical without being unlawful, because what is "ethical" varies by community. So the government is not in any position to evaluate or regulate that, except where ethics and law overlap.
Having the government regulate behavior generally, based on what is perceived as being "ethical" in the absence of harm to others, would be a tremendous mistake.
No, because all you've done then is leave the real criminals with guns, and eliminated the means with which a whole lot of non-criminals have to defend themselves.
More (legitimately owned) guns are used in self-defense every day than in crime; it's just that the crime gets more publicity so that's what people associate.
If you took away all the legitimately purchased guns, you would eliminate the small amount of crime that's committed with them, but you'd also eliminate the much greater number of self-defense (and general crime deterrence) that they also do.
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Because guns are going to go ... where?
Even a seven-foot-tall professional athlete starts looking a little sorry when you poke a bunch of holes in his lungs or brain with supersonic lead pieces.
You should really get modded up.
I notice that the '1% decline' folks haven't responded to you.
The only thing I have to add is that the last time I went shopping for fish, except for the stuff that was farmed, the selection wasn't nearly as good as it used to be a few decades ago.
And although it's before my time, if you read historical accounts of the shellfish harvests in New England, they're nothing like they are today. Lobster used to be so common in Maine that it was considered a poor-person's food; you could basically go and pick them up from the rocks in many bays and inlets. Don't even bother trying that today. Similar with clams, although there you also have toxic contamination to worry about.
Were it not for international treaties, I think it's safe to assume that a whole lot of both whale and large sea-fish species would now be extinct. (We got pretty close with swordfish; it's just getting back to normal now.) The free market is great for a lot of things, but that "tragedy of the commons" is a real bitch. Sometimes the market -- and people in general -- aren't really forward-thinking. They'll slaughter the goose today rather than have the golden eggs later a startlingly large percentage of the time.
Quite possibly. However, I don't share your feelings concerning the "small window" feeling; I think it's misplaced, although everyone is certainly entited to their own opinion on such a personal issue.
Lots of people have children when they are in their late 30s or even later, and I don't think this ends up being a net negative to the child.
Personally, I see raising a child as the most critically important thing that I will ever do, or even concieve of doing. With that said, it seems inappropriate to rush into it. If I'm going to raise a child, they deserve to have the absolute best that I can provide, both in the material sense and in the sense of guidance and knowledge. There is no possible way that I'm there yet.
I think the increased financial security and quality of life I'll be able to provide, not to mention just the greater amount of maturity and experience, as a result of waiting until I'm 35 or 40 to have kids, as opposed to having them in my 20s, is well worth the tradeoff of being comparatively older than the parents of other kids their age. (And of potentially having to use IVF, or try multiple times because of the risk of birth defects, etc.)
Deciding not to have children until later in life isn't always the selfish, materialistic, self-centered whim that it gets made out to be; I, as well as a lot of other people I know who aren't rushing into the kid thing, are quite aware of the tradeoffs. I'm not going to put them at a disadvantage later in life versus what I could have provided or been to them, just because I might want to have the support of a family now.
To be perfectly frank, I guess I feel that kids need financial security and a parent who's been around long enough to have a shot at having most of the answers, more than they need a grouchy old man in their lives when they're approaching middle age themselves. If my decision means that there's a good chance I won't live to see their children, so be it; that's a small cost for knowing I'll have done the absolute best job possible of the most important thing I'll ever do.
My friends and I were lamenting that they don't just offer a low-cost xBox model where they just remove the optical drive and put a copy of Halo in a read-only partition on the hard drive.
As far as I'm concerned, that's the purpose of an xBox. It's not a game machine, it's a "Halo appliance."
Therefore a company working to prevent piracy is spending money on a venture that is not profitable for them in the end
Actually I think that the MPAA and RIAA are very profitable, it's just that you have their ultimate goals wrong. They exist to make money, and to this end they need to appear to try to prevent piracy, and thus take in cash from various record companies in exchange for this "service." Whether or not they actually do anything is immaterial; if they happen to be effective it's just because they think that doing so will make them seem like a better investment to their benefactors. That's why you see the lawsuits and all the advertising. It's all about demonstrating to the people paying the bills where their money is going.
The fact that they're fighting a losing war doesn't really matter, because they're making money in the process. Actually, losing wars are some of the most profitable, because you can convince desperate people to pour the most resources into them.
So basically, if I'm a major-label corporate band, all I have to do in order to get street cred is to write a song making fun of the music industry?
That's brilliant.
Well, they'd like everyone to be on wax spools, but they'd like you to buy a new copy every few years when the old one wears out. Actually, what they'd really like is if each recording was a one-shot, somehow destroyed in the playback process. That would be just teriffic.
It's the electronics industry, not the music industry, that has driven new formats. The music industries go along with it because they make a lot of money in the short term, but they're rarely the drivers of new formats. In fact they tend to discourage their adoption more than anything else.
The music industry has been okay with the last few format transitions and hasn't fought the electronics companies too hard, because they've occured more rapidly than the old medium would have worn out. Thus, they made more money off of getting people to "buy up" to CDs than if they had waited around for vinyl records to all wear out and need replacement. Only now, they're starting to realize that they may have eaten the goose that could have laid a lot of golden eggs -- by forcing an 'upgrade' to CDs from vinyl, they made a lot of money in the short term, but they also gave people a format that doesn't wear out and is easily transferable to computers, where it can be replicated losslessly and endlessly, forever.
I'm betting they wished they had stuck with wax.
I think product labeling is important, but I'm not sure whether this particular case is one worth regulating.
There are definitely situations where product labeling is important, and has benefited the consumer greatly by allowing easier comparisons. The basic nutrition information on food, the window stickers on new cars, energy consumption measurements on appliances, for examples.
However, in the case of cloned food, as long as it's actually safe to consume, I don't think there necessarily has to be a labeling requirment mandated by the government just because of people's (irrational, IMO) squeamishness. If people don't want cloned food, then there will be companies marketing "Clone Free" food, and they can buy it.
If people mark their products wrongly -- if you sell something as "Clone Free" that's knowingly made from cloned parts -- then you're committing fraud and should be prosecuted appropriately.
Outside of basic nutrition and safety, I don't really see a place for regulation here. Clone-free, GMO-free, and Organic foods ought to be managed like Kosher foods are -- if people want to buy them, they can look for the symbol of a trusted, indepenent certification organization. As long as the labels aren't applied fradulently, and the food isn't unsafe to eat, then there's no problem.
I don't think most people will really care. The Organic-foods set might look for the Clone-free label, more out of a knee-jerk response than anything else, but most people will continue to buy their favorite brand of beef jerky regardless of whether they're cloned or not. If they don't care, and there's no rational reason why cloned foods are unhealthy versus regular ones, then I don't see why their needs to be labeling requirements handed down by the government. If enough people want un-cloned food, they will be able to buy it by going to Whole Foods or Trader Joe's.
that free flow from producers to consumers DOES NOT MATTER, especially since we have the Net.
Your entire point seems to be that the flow of information from producer to consumer doesn't matter, because the consumers can get that information elsewhere.
Okay, I'll accept that to a certain extent, but it's not really saying that "information doesn't matter," it's just that the source of the information is basically irrelevant, as long as you trust/believe it.
If I want to buy some apples, I can either drive around to all the stores selling apples and look at them, or I can ask my friends where they've gotten good apples. Either way, I'm getting information. In the latter case I'm probably getting better information, and can thus make a better decision, because I'm asking people whose opinions I trust.
Information is critical to the functioning of an efficient marketplace. If the producer doesn't give accurate information about the good they're selling, then a customer is going to have to buy it and then tell others about it (or, more realistically, someone buys one and reverse-engineers it). This isn't a benefit, it's a burden. If the information had been available to begin with, then this reviewing process wouldn't have to happen. As a result of information not being immediately available, the market will manufacture it -- but this process is itself an inefficiency.
More information leads to better purchasing decisions and evaluations of value, which leads to less waste. Less waste means higher efficiency. Efficiency is a Good Thing.
From the producer's side, they benefit from increased information as well -- it's not just consumers that want to know. If you produce a good, and have access to information as to what price it's selling for in various markets, then you can decide whether to sell it locally or transport it (provided you have the transportation costs). Without that knowledge, you might just sell it locally and not make as much profit as you would otherwise.
The biggest benefit of the Internet is that it allows for the fast exchange of information. Markets have traditionally existed only across the same spans that you can transmit information easily. If you're selling apples in one city and I'm selling them in another, and we have no idea what the price of apples is in the other's city, then they're basically disconnected markets. But if there's a telegraph or stock ticker set up between them, and we know the transportation cost, then the markets become integrated because of the flow of information. (If you want a real-world example of this, you can look at the New York and Philadelphia stock markets in the 19th century before and after the introduction of the telegraph. Prior to that, the same stock or commodity might trade on each one, completely independent of the other market. With the telegraph, they became integrated and began following each other almost overnight.) The biggest benefit of the 'net is that it creates one large market out of disparate ones, by facilitating the real-time flow of information from one place to another.
You can only achieve the theoretical peak efficiency of the market, what's known as Pareto efficiency, if everyone has perfect information. Any deviation from that produces inefficiency and waste, and that means that somebody is not making as much profit as they otherwise would have.
While I agree that there always has to be someone at the bottom, I disgree vehemently that somehow economics is always a zero-sum game. It is not. If you have two countries, both with the same basic distribution of wealth (e.g., the top 1% is 10x as wealthy as the bottom 1% in both cases), then in the country with the higher average per capita GDP, everyone -- including the "poor" people -- will have a higher quality of life. (At least in economics terms -- we can argue all day about whether having a dishwasher and a TV really make you "happier" or not.)
So you'll always have 'poor people,' but what it means to be poor changes based on the average quality of life of the society. In some places in Africa, being 'poor' might mean starving to death. In the U.S., being poor might mean not having health insurance, or riding the bus instead of owning a car. I can almost guarantee you that the poverty level in the U.S. would be a king's ransom in Sudan.
Whether immigrants create more in costs than they create in economic output is arguable; it's a tough question to answer because so much of what illegal immigrants do isn't documented or measured. We know pretty solidly that they consume more in public services than they pay in taxes (there are lots of studies, although you don't have to be Adam Smith to look at the budgets of many municipal and state governments in areas with large populations of illegal immigrants to figure that out), at least on the local and state levels.
The net effect of this is that the government is basically subsidizing the labor costs of the industries (principally agriculture) that employ illegal immigrants. And in doing so, we are reducing the demand for replacement technologies.
There was a time when people thought slavery was necessary, because no one could conceive of a way to pick cotton except by hand. Obviously, they were wrong; after slavery was abolished and the cost of labor increased, the demand for a cotton-harvesting machine increased as well. Now, most cotton is harvested mechanically. The same job that might have once been done by slaves, or later by paid sharecroppers, is now done by a very small number of highly skilled workers (those involved in the manufacture of the machines, and a smaller number in their actual operation).
Having a huge -- effectively bottomless -- pool of subsidized, cheap labor stunts both technological and economic development. By keeping the cost of goods artificially low, it prevents labor-saving alternatives from being developed; and labor-saving devices are the hallmark of civilization, because they allow people to move their attention and labor to higher and higher-value activities. As people move to higher-value activities, they can afford to purchase more (or have more leisure time), and their standard of living increases. Simply throwing more people at the problem is no way to develop economically; at best you can achieve a sort of slow development of your upper class, growing the gap between the top and bottom of society ever wider, but the cost is that you create a vast, disenfranchised underclass, and that's bad for business all around.
There is no inherent superiority argument here; I never said that the illegal immigrant was in any way an inferior person to the American worker -- to do so would be racist, and worse than that, factually wrong. However, having a country with a vast surplus of labor is destabilizing, and leads to social stratification. If we want to be a nation of aristocrats and serfs, then we ought to just create an official "second class" citizenship (call it a "permanent worker visa"), open the doors, and stop lying to ourselves. But if we want to actually work towards a goal, however unattainable, of egalitarianism, social mobility, and stability without draconian enforcement, allowing a vast pool of unskilled laborers to remain and stifle growth is not the way to do it.
Let me restate: ...
There's no "immigration debate," at least not in mainstream politics
Pat Buchanan is to mainstream conservativism what the Ralph Nader or is to mainstream liberalism; actually less so, since I think Nader is taken more seriously as a politician, while Buchanan has essentially retired from that arena to become a professional blowhard and everyone knows it. He's taking an extreme position for a reason: it gets people riled up, which gets him on CNN, which sells more books.
Not that he should be ignored completely -- his popularity ought to be indicative of the widespread disillusionment of a lot of people in the U.S.; the fact that a lot of white English-speaking Christians agree with him and are blaming hispanics (who they associate with being illegal immigrants) for the country's economic problems is too important to be ignored. The real question to ask is why do people feel that way, and why don't they feel that way about other immigrants (say, Asians)? If there weren't so many illegal hispanic immigrants, would white Americans be less likely to feel threatened by them generally? These are the questions that aren't being asked when you just pidgeonhole the entire thing.
Attempting to marginalize the entire question of illegal immigration because someone is using it to further their own agenda (in this case, to hawk a book), would be like writing off the all debate about the environment because of the PETA/radical-animal-rights kooks.
Don't take an extreme position and think that it's representative of the majority opinion; instead take it for what it is -- a barometer of some people's discontent. Important, and definitely worth considering and discussing, but not necessarily the median or the mean.
Granted, this is purely anecdotal, but within my circle of friends (all around 30ish), nobody is having kids or planning on having kids- its just too comfortable to cohabit in sin and live it up.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that your friends are mostly college-educated professionals with salaried jobs?
If so, it's no surprise that they're not having kids. They, to put it bluntly, have better things to do. But if you went into the ghetto somewhere and rounded up an equivalent number of people in the same age group, you would probably find a much greater percentage of people that either already have, or are pregnant with, children. Some in their upper 30s might even have grand-children!
People who have jobs and salaries and who basically have a plan for their future, generally don't have kids until they really want to -- which may mean "never." People who are working paycheck-to-paycheck, and have no idea whether they'll be living on the street in six months, much less what they'll be doing in six years, actually have less desire to keep themselves from getting pregnant.
I don't quite understand the motivation, because I don't share it. For starters, I'm male, and second, I'm closer to the first group of people than the second (professionally educated, salaried job, etc.). I can only assume that to someone with no other future prospects, maybe having a child gives them some sense of security or purpose. Or maybe they just don't care either way, and just get pregnant and then don't have any reason to not have it.
At any rate, if you look at various segments of the U.S. population, you'll see very different trends in terms of child-bearing. At the higher ends of the educational and socio-economic spectrum, highly-educated professionals, you see something that's like Old Europe: very low, sub-replacement-rate birthrates (one or at most two children per couple), very wide use of birth control, and tons and tons of money spent on children when they do occur. At the other end, the archtypical person might have a child or two by their mid-20s, sometimes even before graduating high-school (rendering them basically unemployable if they drop out as a result), and depend on their parents for support for the child -- in many cases making the child's grandparents the primary caregivers. These children basically receive only the bare minimum resources in terms of education (public preschool if available, public schools, no college) and in many cases perpetuate their parents lifestyles.
I used to think that the biggest problem was technological -- that the wide availability of birth control (and abortion) to people who have health insurance and disposable income (to afford the $30-70 a month for it) created the gap. However, I'm no longer sure that's true. Someone who really wants birth control in any major U.S. city can probably get it for free or at negligable cost (compared to having a child). All you have to do is walk into Planned Parenthood and ask; if you can't pay, they don't charge.
There are greater social causes driving the birth rates in the lower socioeconomic sectors which are not being dealt with, and we are just beginning to feel the effects of a widening rift in our social structure: between people who spend their entire lives getting ready to have a child, and pour their resources into providing him or her with every possible advantage; and people who start off with close to nothing, and create children who have even less. It's unfair to punish the former for having the foresight not to have children and to want to give them the best life possible, but our current path seems destined to create a two-tiered society, which is not sustainable in the long term.
Obviously we just need to start publishing Slashdot in Spanish; that ought to take care of the problem nicely.
Well said. I was going to try and say this but you pretty much nailed it.
The only thing I'd add is that it gets even worse when you consider people that have children at a very young age -- i.e. the phenomenon we politely call "teen pregnancy." When someone has a child before they're even able to support themselves, they essentially create two loads on their family (and/or the tax-supported public welfare system): themselves and the child. Not only do they create a new non-worker, but they take themselves out of the working pool, or at least into a lower wage class than they probably would have been in, effectively making two unproductive individuals. Also, there are fairly convincing statistics showing that the children of very young parents often become young parents themselves, perpetuating the problem.
So in places in the U.S. where, for various social reasons, you have high rates of teen pregnancy, you can quickly have generations of people burdened with supporting large numbers of non-working adults and children; it's a recipe for poverty that's basically unstoppable, unless you can break the cycle of young people continuing to have children.
Unfortunately, certain parts of the U.S. political structure are absolutely unwilling to take this problem on realistically, instead pretending that it can be dealt with indirectly.
Well that's wonderful. More food for thought: if we were all the size of hamsters, but square, with interlocking pegs on top, I could use most of the population of America to insulate my garage. That's an equally useful statement.
Don't be foolish: just because you could concievably live in five square meters doesn't mean that you'd want to, or that you could somehow cram all the infrastructure that it takes to support a person (food production, waste management, power generation, etc.) into that space. Not to mention that unless sedated, most people would probably go batshit crazy and kill each other if forced to live like that.
Nah, they're way too tough and stringy.
We will likely never run out of oil, although it will eventually (50 years? 500?) reach the point where it's simply too expensive to get the stuff out of the ground, and we only use biomass-made oil or some other alternative fuel source.
This is a true statement. However, what you're not really discussing -- and what really lies behind the worries of people discussing Peak Oil -- is what the social consequences of that increase in cost will be.
As energy becomes more expensive, the lifestyles that we currently have (particularly in the United States) become untenable. This could be particularly catastrophic if the run-up in prices occurs quickly, rather than gradually. The increase in energy prices could also trigger hyperinflation, lower real purchasing power, and decrease the quality of living of millions of people.
In short, even if the world doesn't run out of energy -- even if the lights don't suddenly go out, without proper planning ahead of time, it might become too expensive for most people to keep them on.
The threat is not that there won't be any energy, the threat is that it'll be so expensive, only a very few people will be able to afford it.
They are lucky they live where they do.
While it's true that they get basically free energy, it comes at the cost of the island that they're living on, tearing itself apart.
In some (geologically) short span of time, Iceland is going to separate into a variety of parts and probably recede underwater. There is a fault line running not far from Reykjavik that grows apart a few inches a year.
In the short term, though, it's great.
Are a few extra immigrants really somethign to get worked up over?
It is when it's a few million, and if the immigrants in question consume more in services than they contribute in GDP; if that's the case, then they are a net economic loss, and decrease per-capita GDP and with it, the overall standard of living. While previous generations of working-class immigrants were basically self-sufficent and used little in the way of public-sector social services, this is not the case today with many people who are immigrating illegally.
Besides which, "eight acres for every person" is a mis-statement. Much of that land you're talking about isn't really habitable, or is already being used for other purposes (such as food production). There's lots of "empty" land in the badlands of Wyoming or up in Alaska, but you're going to have a hard time getting the people wading across the Rio Grande to go there.
Seriously -- mod parent up.
There's no "immigration debate," at least not in mainstream politics; the debate is over illegal immigration.
Immigration per se isn't a divisive issue at all. Except for the very far-right fringe, I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that we should stop legitimate immigration of people with skills that are in-demand, here in the United States. The disagreement is in how to deal with the large number of illegal immigrants, doing mostly low-value work, and the consequent social problems that having an effective sub-class of workers entails.
The only debate I can think of that involves legal immigration has to do with the way the U.S. grants refugee status, and the "anchor baby" phenomenon, but those are closely tied to the same issues that make illegal immigration important; they're not really fundamental questions about immigration.
I'm not so sure this is true.
Watching live TV is a distinctly different experience than watching pre-recorded content that's either been time-shifted (using a VCR) or downloaded. It's not just semantics, it's the difference between allowing television to dictate your evening's schedule to you, or fitting it into your own schedule. It's also the difference between having advertising shoveled at you, and being able to skip it or just never see it at all.
It continually amazes me the degree that people will go to, to schedule their lives around live TV -- particularly when practically everyone has a VCR, so it's not as if it's even mandatory.
I've given up on live television viewing for those reasons, and I really think it's a better way to watch. I set my EyeTV to grab the shows I'm interested in, or put them on my Netflix list if they're on DVD, and watch them an episode at a time when it fits my schedule. When I decide I want to watch TV, it's all there waiting for me -- no turning on the tube and aimlessly flipping around for something to watch. Because I know that the content will be there effectively forever (okay, I guess it would run out of space eventually and stop recording), there's no pressure to see it.
You don't need a TiVO or a PVR to do this, you could do it almost as well with a VCR if you were really good at programming it, or you could just unplug it from the cable completely and use Netflix if you weren't interested in seeing programs until a season after they come out.
IMO, what's really unhealthy is just sitting down for hours at a time and watching low-value programming that you're not interested in, because "it's what's on," or building one's life around a television schedule because you just have to see something when it's on live. The lengths that people go to for entertainment is ridiculous, when it ought to be the other way around.
Apple and the U.S. government established the anti-boot laws to keep people from booting OS X.
... what?
I'm sorry
Are you posting from the future, where the world has been decimated by killer iPods or something?
Turning off remote loading of images will not prevent IFRAME bugging, or many other HTML remote-resource bugs.
So that's not the solution you think it is. To prevent bugging, you would need to disable the following HTML elements:
[img]
[iframe]
[style src=""]
[script src=""]
[input type="image" src=""]
[link rel="stylesheet"]
[link rel="next"] (In rendering engines that prefetch)
[embed]
[applet]
[object]
[frame]
Some CSS elements and JavaScript also need to be disabled. Basically, this is the "neutering" that I was discussing. A smart email system (e.g. a corporate one) could be set to block these only from sources originating outside the company; that would prevent its use by spammers but certainly wouldn't have helped the HP folks any.
If you really need to attach graphics, then attach it to the email; MIME exists for a reason and doesn't have the bugging (or dead link) issues that HTML links do. It would be trivial to allow IMG tags that refer to attached files and not remote ones, if this was really needed.
Actually attaching a Word document should be a much safer and better alternative; it's only because of some grevious security problems in Word (macros, embeddable OLE objects, etc.) that it's not safe. If Word treated documents purely as data, and sandboxed it in such a way as to prevent any executable code from being run, or remote resources fetched as a result of instructions in the document, then they would be less prone to bugging than HTML.
Your ad hominem about me being in college is misplaced; I've been out of college and in business for quite a while now, and I have yet to see any convincing demonstrations of the superiority of HTML email over straight text, or over text plus attachments. If anything, it is the overuse of HTML formatting and graphics (particularly backgrounds) in business communications that has convinced me that rendering should be scaled back to a bare minimum. There are far better ways to share format-intensive documents than trying to cram them into the body of an email.
Should I really need to evaluate the ethics of of every company I purchase from? Isn't that why we have a government?
It is not.
The government exists -- among other reasons -- to encourage/enforce everyone to act legally. So if a company was doing something that was against the law, then you would have a claim for the government to do something.
However, someone can be ethical without being unlawful, because what is "ethical" varies by community. So the government is not in any position to evaluate or regulate that, except where ethics and law overlap.
Having the government regulate behavior generally, based on what is perceived as being "ethical" in the absence of harm to others, would be a tremendous mistake.
No, because all you've done then is leave the real criminals with guns, and eliminated the means with which a whole lot of non-criminals have to defend themselves.
More (legitimately owned) guns are used in self-defense every day than in crime; it's just that the crime gets more publicity so that's what people associate.
If you took away all the legitimately purchased guns, you would eliminate the small amount of crime that's committed with them, but you'd also eliminate the much greater number of self-defense (and general crime deterrence) that they also do.