The "hyperinflation" or more properly 'race condition inflation', you speak of would only occur if the lives of minimum wage workers depended 100% on other minimum wage workers
This seems a little unconvincing. If the 'living wage' value is dependent 100% on people making minimum wage, then fixing the minimum wage to the 'living wage' value will produce (fast) infinite runaway/race-condition inflation. Agree you there. And if the two values are totally independent, such that the cost of basic living isn't affected by what the minimum wage is, then there's no feedback at all.
But as long as that value (the dependence of the input value, the living wage, on the output value, the minimum wage) is non-zero, you're going to have a positive-feedback condition. You seem to be saying that as long as the input value isn't 100% dependent on the output, that there won't be any positive feedback, and that doesn't make sense. The less dependent it is, the slower the increase in the output will be, but it'll still happen.
The remaining question is 'how much positive feedback would there be,' and consequently, how much faster would it cause inflation to increase. But I've never seen any good analysis of that, and in fact it never seems to get discussed at all by the people I know who are deeply in favor of living wage programs/legislation.
I don't think this is propaganda; it's caution. What the people promoting the 'living wage' are after is not a bad thing, but it seems like it could also be pretty dangerous, because it doesn't to me look like it's self-stabilizing. We've done a pretty good job, in the last few decades anyway, of keeping inflation low while also keeping unemployment under control; anything that has even the slightest chance of messing with that equilibrium needs to have a pretty convincing case behind it.
I'm not saying that case doesn't exist, I just haven't seen it yet, and and my default reaction is to be somewhat skeptical; despite that, though, I'm really trying to keep an open mind on this.
Virtual goods should be treated just like stock, or any other valuable non-currency good that you might invest in.
When you're just holding on to it, and not doing anything with it, there's no tax. But when you go to sell it, then you are responsible for paying tax on that income. (In order to avoid paying tax on the entire amount raised by the sale, you can go back and establish the original price you paid for the good, and only pay tax on the money you made -- this is simple capital gains.)
This avoids having to try and determine the value of things when you aren't ready to sell them, when they're just sitting around and being held as an investment. The IRS doesn't give a shit what the price of the stock you own fluctuated to while you were holding onto it -- they only care about two things: what it cost to buy it originally, and what you got when you turned around and sold it. The delta between those two is what you're responsible for paying tax on.
There's no reason to do anything different with 'virtual property.' Treat it just like any other kind of non-physical investment.
I think birthright citizenship is a good thing overall though. Stateless people are not a good thing to have floating around in the world.
Eliminating automatic place-of-birth citizenship wouldn't necessarily lead to 'stateless people.' Lots of countries -- the majority of the First World, actually -- doesn't automatically make you a citizen just by being born there, and they're not overrun by stateless people. A child's citizenship ought to follow from the citizenship of its parents. A child born to American citizen/s abroad is eligible to become a citizen; most other countries allow the same thing.
If a country doesn't allow children born to its citizens outside its geographic borders to become a citizen, then the statelessness problem is being caused there, not by the country that doesn't automatically grant status to the child simply by virtue of where the mother was when they popped out. (Mexico definitely does allow this -- I've met a number of children-of-illegals that are dual U.S./Mexican citizens.)
Eliminating place-of-birth automatic citizenship would remove much of the incentive for pregnant women to travel to the U.S., and it wouldn't necessarily result in a huge number of stateless persons.
The GP didn't say anything that would warrant that. He said that at one point, farm workers made enough money so that they could be considered "middle class." Overall, illegal immigration didn't, therefore, seem to be a big problem.
However, since then, the amount of illegal immigration has increased (or continued) to the point where there's now such a surplus of cheap labor, that we've created what's effectively a slave class. (Actually, I've seen some analyses around that say the cost of hiring illegal immigrants today is less than the cost of maintaining a similar number of slaves on a cotton plantation in the 1840s; I suspect you can manipulate the numbers to go either way because of the difficulty in comparing relative costs, but the fact that it's even close says something.) It's become pretty clear that illegal immigration is harmful, and as a result, people aren't falling over themselves to protect it anymore.
Those Employers would now be responsible for maintenance, rather than passing it on to society at large. The problem is that a decent social welfare system combined with a free market economy is a minimum wage set well below a person's ability to economically care for themselves. Illegal or not a man (or woman) who works 40 hours (or more) a week should be able to care for their family without government or private assistance. The only alternative to fixing the minimum wage and the removing illegally paid employees, is to allow some people to starve in the streets. However that would have the nasty side effect of increasing street crime exponentially, as hungry people would kill for a loaf of bread.
What evidence do you have that you can just jack up the minimum wage to the levels you're talking about, and not drive inflation and the cost of basic goods up proportionately?
I'm really honestly interested. I've talked to a lot of "living wage" proponents and the schemes always seem to have some gaps in them. Okay, if we decide that it costs $20k in order to "live," and we divide that into 50 weeks per year at 40 hours per week, we get about $10 an hour take-home pay. Add 30% in taxes, and you're at $13/hr minimum wage. Okay so far. But if these are the people who are producing the cheap goods, how do you keep that from just driving up the $20k figure?
And if you set the minimum wage to a dynamic value, rather than a static one -- a "basket" of goods, or some formula that's supposed to represent what's necessary to "live" -- and it causes that value itself to increase, then you've just created a positive feedback loop. The result, as far as I can tell, would be runaway inflation.
The idea of a living wage seems pretty nice (and I'm no stranger to minimum wage jobs myself, before I realized that a college diploma is probably the best thing you can ever spend money on, in terms of ROI), but if it has to be purchased at the cost of hyperinflation, I'm not sure it's a great idea. And I'm pretty skeptical of the whole concept, unless there's some way to conclusively demonstrate that it's not going to drive inflation.
You're probably going to get modbombed for saying that, but FWIW I agree with you almost completely. (To further your proposal, I think that employers who hire illegal workers either knowingly, or by looking the other way when they should have known it, should be severely penalized. I think the forged-paperwork angle is a little overstated sometimes; there are a lot of businesses around who just don't give a shit about who they're hiring, and that needs to stop.)
The United States does not have, and has never had, any responsibility to be an employment agency for the poor of the rest of the world. The government of the United States has one mandate, and that is to act in the best interest of its citizens. In some cases, historically, it was in the best interest of the existing citizens to let lots of people immigrate and become new citizens. This is fine, and it contributed immensely towards making our country the place it is today.
However, I don't think this is true today; or at least, I've seen scant evidence that this is the case. Legalizing the currently-illegal workers in this country would be in the best interests of a few big agricultural and business concerns, and perhaps some of the unions; I don't think it would benefit the majority of U.S. citizens. Whether it's good for the illegal workers themselves, or for Mexico, or for Sweden, or for anyone else but bona fide U.S. Citizens who the U.S. government represents, is irrelevant.
I don't know who wrote the "give us your poor, your hungry..." etc. line, but it's not true and never has been. The U.S. doesn't want the huddled masses, the poor, sick, and tired (and we routinely turned them away); we need the best and brightest, the most driven, the smartest, and the most ambitious. I have no problem with immigration per se. I too, like virtually everyone in this country, am descended from immigrants. But the amount of, and type, and criteria for immigration, should be decided with one goal in mind, and that is what is good for America as a nation and its people, at any given time.
This is true. Although as I think about it more, I'm not sure there's any anonymous/repudiable voting system that isn't subject to tampering if you assume that the poll workers are all compromised. You can make it more difficult, by placing the ballots into locked boxes, but that doesn't stop them from pulling other shenanigans. At some point you have to either trust them, and create a framework so that interested parties can observe and ensure that things aren't being manipulated. Aside from transparency, there's no real magic bullet around it.
By that line of reasoning, nobody would do business in France, much of Eastern Europe, most of the Middle East, and much of Asia, because the governments meddle and scheme in the private sector. (And that's without even mentioning most of Africa.)
Guess what? People still do. They'll do business in places that are incredibly corrupt, at least by U.S./Western European standards. Sure, the corruption raises the cost of doing business somewhat, but it just gets factored in to overhead.
Before the FCPA got passed in the U.S., and right now in other countries, it wasn't unheard of to just line-item bribe money when constructing the budget for a project in a place where that was how business got done. (Generally termed "Gratuity Payments" or some slightly more-polite term.) Actually I know guys who will talk your ear off about how nice it was to do business pre-FCPA, because you could guarantee all sorts of cooperation from the local governments. Keep the cash flowing and you're everybody's best friend.
Business exists. It will work just as happily with a corrupt government as it will with a clean one; the reason you want a government that's not corrupt isn't because a lack of corruption is "good for business" per se, it's because it's good for the kind of business that most people want to live around. It's generally the people who get screwed when their government is corrupt, it's not the companies that do business there.
I think the key point here is that it's not worth listening to what either government says about the other; really the only thing that's worth analyzing is their respective goals and priorities. Where they have conflicting priorities, they're going to try to screw one another. (You could say this just as easily about individuals or corporations as you could about nation-states; the main difference is that while individuals and most corporations operate in an arena where there are "higher powers" enforcing rules that they have to play by, nation-states have no real limitations on what they can do -- all the 'rules' are self-enforced. So they play dirtier.)
I have no idea what the real truth behind it is, but a whole lot of people still believe in the Air France industrial-espionage business.
A while ago, I started working for a new company (which shall remain nameless, but it's one of your basic U.S. military-industrial-complex stalwarts) and had to go to their security briefing. Most of it was the usual, but they also emphasized not conducting any business discussions at all while traveling (except in secure locations), particularly on foreign aircraft and in businessman's hotels abroad. Air France was mentioned specifically by name.
I don't know whether someone in their security apparatus had just read the same news articles that everyone else did back in 1991 and really believed it, or if maybe they got burned, or suspected they'd been burned, via a bug or other listening device / "friendly stranger," but I was amazed at how seriously they took it.
This is actually the first I'd heard of it since that lecture. Seems like there might have been something to it after all.
An individual subscription to the OED Online costs $295USD annually.
While that might be a justifiable expense for someone in an English department somewhere, it's a rather large chunk of change to expect an average person to pay, for something that will probably be used only very occasionally -- effectively an entertainment resource (albeit a geeky one). I have an interest in it, but three hundred bucks a year is more than a year's worth of Netflix, more than half of what I pay for broadband. Pick your own metric; at any rate, it's a lot of money.
I'm not against paying money for things, but the value proposition is just not there -- not even close to being there. And I think that's unfortunate, because if they changed their pricing model at the low end, I think they could pick up some additional users; a pay-per-use model wouldn't be bad at all, maybe a buck or so a pop. That would discourage anyone who uses it frequently from downgrading but make it available to a lot of people that aren't going to shell out three C-notes just to settle an obscure etymological argument on an internet forum once in a while.
(I've decided just to ignore the various personal attacks in your and the sibling post as not really being worth responding to. Believe what you want to believe; I'm not going to get in some dick-length contest with some troll over who I am or what I do in real life.)
About CEOs, based on rumors and wild speculation, I've heard that Michael Dell does indeed use email, and does it pretty much directly. This is why he has to change email addresses pretty frequently, whenever it becomes known to the wider world and they start sending him hatemail / penis enlargement ads / technical support questions.
In contrast, some other CEOs have catchy, widely-published email addresses, and I can only assume whole staffs of people to read their Inbox and sort the wheat from the chaff. Sam Palmisano (CEO of IBM) used to have an address that was like "sam@ibm.com" or something like that. I thought it was kinda cool, but then realized that anyone sending an email there, thinking a CEO is actually going to read it, is on as much crack as someone who writes to their Senator and doesn't realize that it's going to be read and filed by some unpaid summer intern.
Anyway, although I've never gotten to use them, most of the big corporate email suites (Exchange, Notes, etc.) have features that allow for 'delegation' of people's email boxes to secretaries and assistants. So an executive can have their own address but route all the mail coming into it to an assistant, who can sort through and pass stuff along appropriately. And that's for executives that do any of their own email.
Doubtless, at the very high end of the power ladder, there are people whose time is just so valuable that it's wasteful to ever have them sitting and typing at a keyboard -- it's cheaper to have a well-paid executive assistant actually read, summarize, note the desired response to, draft, and present for approval the responses to, all incoming messages. Whether most CEOs do that I don't know (I suspect not too many, anymore), but I bet that a lot of high-ranking government officials do it that way.
I'd love to have access to the OED, but at least last time I went looking, it's not freely available.
I'm pretty sure that at least the first half of the alphabet or so, from the early editions published back in the teens and early 20s, are now out of copyright and could be put online if someone wanted to OCR them, but I've never seen any evidence of anyone working on it.
It's unfortunate because the OED is a great resource, but I'm not sure how they can let average people (that is, people who aren't working at universities while still getting funding for its professional development.
I don't think Wired really creates much of anything. They seem to basically troll around to various blogs and dig up anything that seems to be coming into use, and then blast it all over a few pages.
I guess that might make them responsible for promulgating some memes that otherwise would have died a blissful and natural death, but I've never seen them actually create something from whole cloth. (Whether that's a good or bad thing, I'm not sure.)
That's a good point about the airlines. At least in some sense, they do a bit of long-term planning. However, I think it might be more the exception than the rule. (And I think the planners and investors also realize that should their plans not work out, the planes are an asset that can be liquidated fairly easily to someone else; it's not a complete and total commitment.)
As for cathedrals, they're historically a very good example of the sorts of multi-generational projects that I'd like to see more of, but when's the last time you've seen anyone build a cathedral like that? (I don't just mean a cathedral as a literal building, I'm sure there's some of those that have gone up around the world -- with today's construction methods you can put up something the size of Stephansdom in a few months or years, I mean something on that scale, relative to what's possible at the time.)
Oddly enough, regarding corporations in my earlier post, I was informed that Disney actually issues 100 year corporate bonds. I'm not sure if that's the sign of a long outlook, or just arrogance on their part. Somehow, a blind belief that you'll be around in a century, doesn't in my mind necessarily imply that you're actually planning for the next century.
Seems like the solution to that is obvious -- don't allow repeaters.
I think it could be a boon for colleges and small organizations that might be interested in having a radio station, but that can't afford one currently because it's so expensive to get spectrum.
So duct tape and Velcro and thousands of other things which became part of all of our lives don't count for anything in the trip to the moon?
Sure, those are all great inventions. But sending a person to the moon is a pretty freaking expensive way of developing Velcro. It was a nice side-effect, a NASA equivalent to what the military terms a "peace dividend," but if the goal is to move technology forward, there are more efficient ways to do it.
I just think that sending someone to Mars is premature. At some point, certainly, we'll need to develop a delivery system to take materials, and later people, to other planets. At some point. But that point is a long way off. We're so far behind in terms of establishing a self-supporting long-term habitat (or, viewed differently, we're so far ahead at taking stuff, shooting it a long way away, and bringing it back) that there's no point in pouring a lot more money into the delivery system before we have something significant to deliver. And a taxpayer-funded 'Mars tourist' isn't a significant payload.
We tried this with the Moon. We rushed and rushed to get someone there, and a lot of people believed that once we did, a permanent base, and perhaps then a colony, was sure to follow. But the technological gap between "sending someone there for a day" and "sending a bunch of people there to live" is so vast, we still haven't put much of a dent in the latter.
The money and resources for a manned Mars mission in the immediate future could be better spent improving our lift capacity -- everything from designing an economical Shuttle replacement, to basic materials-science research that might some day lead to a space elevator. There's not going to be any significant off-planet colonization while the launch cost per kg is high, and sending someone to Mars and back isn't going to help that. That needs to be our first priority.
[As a sidenote: about the only reason I would agree with a manned Mars mission is if, politically, it came down to that-or-nothing. I.e., I'd rather see a trillion dollars spent on basic materials research than on a manned mission, but if that option is out, I'd rather see it spent on a manned mission, than on pissant domestic pork-barrel projects that have no redeeming benefits to the nation as a whole whatsoever. (Actually, I'd rather spend it on new military technology than on pissant pet projects, because there's usually at least some technological dividends and trickledown from those.) Hopefully it won't come to that.]
but any paper system is fundamentally inaccurate above a certain size election.
I disagree. Paper systems make a certain amount of human error (feel free to call it 'stupidity,' I won't stop you) visible. Electronic systems hide it. They're not inherently superior.
The problem with the Florida ballots was a fundamental design flaw, combined with human error, combined with procedural mistakes.
You could fix many of the problems experienced in Florida, keeping paper ballots, by redesigning them and fixing the procedure. For example, the "dangling chad" problem of incompletely punched holes could be fixed by replacing the perforated-card ballots with optical ones, and giving the voter a big "dauber" type pen that they simply have to touch to the circle they want to fill in. Thousands of old people do this every day -- it's called Bingo Night. Do it with a UV-reflective marker and you can probably read them quickly using a machine. To prevent double-marks, just mandate that if you accidentally touch the marker to anyplace on the paper outside of a bubble you meant to fill in, you need to get a new ballot and start over. You could even have a 'test scanner' at the voting site that quickly scans a voter's ballot and checks for gross stupidity (double marks, marks outside the lines, etc.). If someone does manage to submit a ballot with two marks, it doesn't get counted, since the only person who can legally determine the intent of a voter is a judge. (I suppose you could put them all to the side and wait to see if the election is close enough to warrant bothering to look at them, but frankly I'd prefer that they just get thrown out. It's too easy to politicize the process of 'determining intent;' better to avoid it completely and only count well-formed ballots.)
Electronic voting covers up some of the inaccuracies of paper ballots and gives a false sense of perfection. They're not. You only think that the total you're getting is free of errors; there's just no way to look at a particular ballot and see if anything went amiss when someone was casting it. Last year when I went to the polls, there was a huge amount of confusion over one old codger who thought he was de-selecting candidates, when he was actually selecting them. I'm sure other people do similarly dumb things when voting -- but an electronic system just sweeps them under the rug behind a facade of digital faultlessness. It's camouflaging stupidity, not eliminating it. Just because the system gives you an output that's 1 or 0 doesn't mean that only ones and zeros went in; it's just being quantized down that way. You have no idea what's really going into it. All sorts of stupidity could be happening and you'd have no idea, just by looking at the output of an electronic voting system.
Hybrid electronic/paper systems are certainly better than paperless systems (which are anathema to democracy, frankly), but there's no reason, aside from a typical American obsession with instant gratification, to have the electronic side at all. There's no reason why we should be compromising our elections, introducing any unnecessary mysteriousness or opacity into the process, just to get the returns a few hours sooner. If it takes a few days to count all the ballots and make sure we do it right before we know the final results, fine! It's not worth the cost, or the risk, of e-voting, just to try to have the "final score" by 8PM on Election Day.
I totally agree. However, we should be setting our sights a little closer to home as regards the future of humanity. Terraforming Mars (if possible) and transplanting people (and our problems) there won't fix anything. If we can't solve the problems of disease, war, overcrowding, famine, racial/religious intolerance, etc. right here on Earth, maybe we don't deserve to survive as a species.
That's silly. We're never going to solve those problems -- they're fundamental to our nature as individuals with different goals and desires, coupled with limited resources. What we can do, is try to spread out enough to keep a single major incident from ending us as a species.
In contrast to some other people in the thread, although I don't think that permanent, self-sustaining (or at least economically self-sustaining, e.g. "oil platform") settlements are right around the corner, that doesn't mean that it's a bad goal, or one we shouldn't be working towards. One of the most disappointing things about our society, to me anyway, is that even though we have organizations and entities that are capable of preserving themselves and executing very long-term projects, we seldom think of more than a few years out. (You would think that large corporations and governments, which by their nature don't grow old and die, would have long planning horizons -- instead they have even shorter ones than individuals.)
I'm not saying that working for peace, justice, harmony, etc. on Earth aren't noble endeavors or worthy of support. They certainly are. I'm just saying that if you make them a precondition for exploration, then you're dooming us just as effectively as if we don't try at all.
Based on what I've heard -- and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here -- the initial version of the iPhone isn't going to include 3G capability, so its internet-access speed will be pretty limited. I have a GSM phone that doesn't have 3G, and using the internet on it, even with the Mobile version of Opera, is pretty painful. I can't imagine using YouTube or some other videoconferencing app over EDGE.
I could see YouTube being a 'killer app' if the phone did real high-speed data, enough so that you could stream video over it from anywhere, but barring that it seems a bit limited.
Although, I suppose if there's one thing that I should have learned over the past few years, it's to never doubt the ability of consumers to watch really crummy video of people making fools of themselves. And of cats.
Or rather, it only makes sense if Mars is "next" in the "places we haven't stuck American flags on and then left, never to return to" list.
We're not accomplishing anything by going there. Yes, it looks neat, and maybe it'll make space exploration 'cool' again for a while, but it hasn't brought us any closer to the goal of having a sustainable settlement off of Earth. The astronauts would go out there, stand around for a while, and then come back. And it would cost a lot of money and mean a lot of other things wouldn't get done. And at the end of it, what would we have? People would be able to bitch by saying "we can put a man on Mars, but we can't do x" instead of the Moon, but that would be about it. Maybe we'd know a little more about how people exist when in a small, closed environment for a long time, but we can learn that here on Earth for a lot less money. (And there was a Slashdot article yesterday or the day before about how they're doing it.)
Keep going down that path, and once we've put a flag on Mars, then maybe we'll put one on a few asteroids or even a comet or two, and maybe a few trillion dollars and a few generations after that, maybe we'll put a flag somewhere further out, on one of the gas-giant moons. All very nice. But it hasn't gotten anyone permanently off the planet. One good nuclear war, asteroid strike, or widespread pandemic, and there goes civilization, maybe the species. They'll be a lot of flags out there, showing how far we made it, but a fat lot of good it'll do.
Sucks that short-term politics and pet pork takes precedence over the future of humanity itself. (disclosure: I don't give a frig WHICH party is at fault - this simply sucks):/
I feel the same way, at least about the importance of the ultimate goal -- but I'm not sure that the Human Mars Initiative (or whatever they were calling it) is really the right way to go, and that canceling it is in any way bad or wrong.
Right now, we're so far away from having a self-sustaining (both physically and economically) off-Earth settlement, sending one guy or a few guys out to Mars and back really isn't going to get us that much closer. We have too much basic research yet to be done, in order to make it permanent. And really, non-permanent human exploration doesn't get us that much that we haven't already gotten.
Look at it this way. Imagine that we're some European nation in the 15th or 16th century, and we want to plant a colony on the New World. The Mars project that's on the drawing board now is like sponsoring a long-distance swimming contest. It seems like it's going in the right direction, but really it's not that helpful. It's the wrong set of skills to be developing. Instead, you need to be doing boring crap on shore, building shipyards and learning how to make ships that don't sink.
In terms of progressing towards the eventual goal of a permanent, sustainable, off-Earth human settlement, the money that we're spending pushing a few people to Mars, so they can dig around in the dirt and pose for a photo op, would be much better spent improving our materials science, producing a good reusable launch vehicle, or researching advanced robotics systems. None of those are as sexy as actually putting a person on the surface of Mars, but all of them will bring us closer to actually putting people in space, permanently, than a quick sightseeing trip would.
About the only reason to send a person to Mars and back without a sustainable presence there, is because it would be good PR for NASA and possibly result in a lot more funding for long-term projects. But I'm not sure it would be worth the cost and diverted resources, particularly since it would mean basically setting aside all other projects and priorities in order to work on it.
It seems like they're trying to create something that's more like an uncensored Photobucket.
The fact that it's internally disorganized doesn't really matter, as long as you can get a static link to the hosted photo.
I think the (idealistic) use case is something like this: I take a photo of some Authority Figure abusing their authority. I know that they'll dislike this, and will try to suppress its publication -- therefore ruling out sites like Flickr and Photobucket that will respond to a DMCA Takedown Notice. But I want to get the word out. So I upload it to TPB's site, and then start passing the link around. People can now access the photo, blog it, whatever, and hopefully it's safe from censorship. (Doesn't do anything to prevent retribution against locals who link to it, but at least they're not hosting it.)
Of course, I think the more realistic use case is that it'll just get used by trolls posting goatse, jailbait, tubgirl, animal cruelty, etc. to message-boards. (Not that it's tough to find a goatse or tubgirl to link to currently, but doubtless there are more disgusting things out there that get taken down faster that the trolls will find.)
Did I miss the memo where child porn became legal in Sweden?
I know nothing about Swedish law, but it's entirely possible that they define both "child" and "pornography" differently than in the U.S., creating a space where something is legal if it's on a Swedish webserver, but not if it's in one in the U.S. (Actually, I think there are a number of respected, non-pornographic films that contain nudity that fall into this area.)
Anyway, if they want to avoid getting constantly raided by the local gendarmes, they should probably create some sort of "Foreigner's Guide to Swedish Obscenity Law" so that people can at least have a shot at knowing what's illegal before they upload it.
In particular, aside from pornography which is the obvious one, I wonder about extreme animal cruelty (there is some downright disgusting stuff out there, and to be honest I find it more offensive than most of the run-of-the-mill CP). I kinda hope the Swedes make that illegal, since I think its presence does encourage its creation -- some dickhead sees another dickhead gain some sort of minor notoriety online by setting a kitten on fire and decides to emulate them. Since animals are more easily available and even more vulnerable than children, and the disincentives against hurting them are less, it doesn't take much.
As far as I can tell, 7chan seems to be made up of people who got banned from 4chan, which in itself is remarkable, since 4chan's moderation is...minimal...at best.
Slashdot Mirror
The "hyperinflation" or more properly 'race condition inflation', you speak of would only occur if the lives of minimum wage workers depended 100% on other minimum wage workers
This seems a little unconvincing. If the 'living wage' value is dependent 100% on people making minimum wage, then fixing the minimum wage to the 'living wage' value will produce (fast) infinite runaway/race-condition inflation. Agree you there. And if the two values are totally independent, such that the cost of basic living isn't affected by what the minimum wage is, then there's no feedback at all.
But as long as that value (the dependence of the input value, the living wage, on the output value, the minimum wage) is non-zero, you're going to have a positive-feedback condition. You seem to be saying that as long as the input value isn't 100% dependent on the output, that there won't be any positive feedback, and that doesn't make sense. The less dependent it is, the slower the increase in the output will be, but it'll still happen.
The remaining question is 'how much positive feedback would there be,' and consequently, how much faster would it cause inflation to increase. But I've never seen any good analysis of that, and in fact it never seems to get discussed at all by the people I know who are deeply in favor of living wage programs/legislation.
I don't think this is propaganda; it's caution. What the people promoting the 'living wage' are after is not a bad thing, but it seems like it could also be pretty dangerous, because it doesn't to me look like it's self-stabilizing. We've done a pretty good job, in the last few decades anyway, of keeping inflation low while also keeping unemployment under control; anything that has even the slightest chance of messing with that equilibrium needs to have a pretty convincing case behind it.
I'm not saying that case doesn't exist, I just haven't seen it yet, and and my default reaction is to be somewhat skeptical; despite that, though, I'm really trying to keep an open mind on this.
Taxing virtual goods is stupid.
Virtual goods should be treated just like stock, or any other valuable non-currency good that you might invest in.
When you're just holding on to it, and not doing anything with it, there's no tax. But when you go to sell it, then you are responsible for paying tax on that income. (In order to avoid paying tax on the entire amount raised by the sale, you can go back and establish the original price you paid for the good, and only pay tax on the money you made -- this is simple capital gains.)
This avoids having to try and determine the value of things when you aren't ready to sell them, when they're just sitting around and being held as an investment. The IRS doesn't give a shit what the price of the stock you own fluctuated to while you were holding onto it -- they only care about two things: what it cost to buy it originally, and what you got when you turned around and sold it. The delta between those two is what you're responsible for paying tax on.
There's no reason to do anything different with 'virtual property.' Treat it just like any other kind of non-physical investment.
I think birthright citizenship is a good thing overall though. Stateless people are not a good thing to have floating around in the world.
Eliminating automatic place-of-birth citizenship wouldn't necessarily lead to 'stateless people.' Lots of countries -- the majority of the First World, actually -- doesn't automatically make you a citizen just by being born there, and they're not overrun by stateless people. A child's citizenship ought to follow from the citizenship of its parents. A child born to American citizen/s abroad is eligible to become a citizen; most other countries allow the same thing.
If a country doesn't allow children born to its citizens outside its geographic borders to become a citizen, then the statelessness problem is being caused there, not by the country that doesn't automatically grant status to the child simply by virtue of where the mother was when they popped out. (Mexico definitely does allow this -- I've met a number of children-of-illegals that are dual U.S./Mexican citizens.)
Eliminating place-of-birth automatic citizenship would remove much of the incentive for pregnant women to travel to the U.S., and it wouldn't necessarily result in a huge number of stateless persons.
Way to jump to a ridiculous conclusion there.
The GP didn't say anything that would warrant that. He said that at one point, farm workers made enough money so that they could be considered "middle class." Overall, illegal immigration didn't, therefore, seem to be a big problem.
However, since then, the amount of illegal immigration has increased (or continued) to the point where there's now such a surplus of cheap labor, that we've created what's effectively a slave class. (Actually, I've seen some analyses around that say the cost of hiring illegal immigrants today is less than the cost of maintaining a similar number of slaves on a cotton plantation in the 1840s; I suspect you can manipulate the numbers to go either way because of the difficulty in comparing relative costs, but the fact that it's even close says something.) It's become pretty clear that illegal immigration is harmful, and as a result, people aren't falling over themselves to protect it anymore.
Those Employers would now be responsible for maintenance, rather than passing it on to society at large. The problem is that a decent social welfare system combined with a free market economy is a minimum wage set well below a person's ability to economically care for themselves. Illegal or not a man (or woman) who works 40 hours (or more) a week should be able to care for their family without government or private assistance. The only alternative to fixing the minimum wage and the removing illegally paid employees, is to allow some people to starve in the streets. However that would have the nasty side effect of increasing street crime exponentially, as hungry people would kill for a loaf of bread.
What evidence do you have that you can just jack up the minimum wage to the levels you're talking about, and not drive inflation and the cost of basic goods up proportionately?
I'm really honestly interested. I've talked to a lot of "living wage" proponents and the schemes always seem to have some gaps in them. Okay, if we decide that it costs $20k in order to "live," and we divide that into 50 weeks per year at 40 hours per week, we get about $10 an hour take-home pay. Add 30% in taxes, and you're at $13/hr minimum wage. Okay so far. But if these are the people who are producing the cheap goods, how do you keep that from just driving up the $20k figure?
And if you set the minimum wage to a dynamic value, rather than a static one -- a "basket" of goods, or some formula that's supposed to represent what's necessary to "live" -- and it causes that value itself to increase, then you've just created a positive feedback loop. The result, as far as I can tell, would be runaway inflation.
The idea of a living wage seems pretty nice (and I'm no stranger to minimum wage jobs myself, before I realized that a college diploma is probably the best thing you can ever spend money on, in terms of ROI), but if it has to be purchased at the cost of hyperinflation, I'm not sure it's a great idea. And I'm pretty skeptical of the whole concept, unless there's some way to conclusively demonstrate that it's not going to drive inflation.
You're probably going to get modbombed for saying that, but FWIW I agree with you almost completely. (To further your proposal, I think that employers who hire illegal workers either knowingly, or by looking the other way when they should have known it, should be severely penalized. I think the forged-paperwork angle is a little overstated sometimes; there are a lot of businesses around who just don't give a shit about who they're hiring, and that needs to stop.)
The United States does not have, and has never had, any responsibility to be an employment agency for the poor of the rest of the world. The government of the United States has one mandate, and that is to act in the best interest of its citizens. In some cases, historically, it was in the best interest of the existing citizens to let lots of people immigrate and become new citizens. This is fine, and it contributed immensely towards making our country the place it is today.
However, I don't think this is true today; or at least, I've seen scant evidence that this is the case. Legalizing the currently-illegal workers in this country would be in the best interests of a few big agricultural and business concerns, and perhaps some of the unions; I don't think it would benefit the majority of U.S. citizens. Whether it's good for the illegal workers themselves, or for Mexico, or for Sweden, or for anyone else but bona fide U.S. Citizens who the U.S. government represents, is irrelevant.
I don't know who wrote the "give us your poor, your hungry..." etc. line, but it's not true and never has been. The U.S. doesn't want the huddled masses, the poor, sick, and tired (and we routinely turned them away); we need the best and brightest, the most driven, the smartest, and the most ambitious. I have no problem with immigration per se. I too, like virtually everyone in this country, am descended from immigrants. But the amount of, and type, and criteria for immigration, should be decided with one goal in mind, and that is what is good for America as a nation and its people, at any given time.
This is true. Although as I think about it more, I'm not sure there's any anonymous/repudiable voting system that isn't subject to tampering if you assume that the poll workers are all compromised. You can make it more difficult, by placing the ballots into locked boxes, but that doesn't stop them from pulling other shenanigans. At some point you have to either trust them, and create a framework so that interested parties can observe and ensure that things aren't being manipulated. Aside from transparency, there's no real magic bullet around it.
By that line of reasoning, nobody would do business in France, much of Eastern Europe, most of the Middle East, and much of Asia, because the governments meddle and scheme in the private sector. (And that's without even mentioning most of Africa.)
Guess what? People still do. They'll do business in places that are incredibly corrupt, at least by U.S./Western European standards. Sure, the corruption raises the cost of doing business somewhat, but it just gets factored in to overhead.
Before the FCPA got passed in the U.S., and right now in other countries, it wasn't unheard of to just line-item bribe money when constructing the budget for a project in a place where that was how business got done. (Generally termed "Gratuity Payments" or some slightly more-polite term.) Actually I know guys who will talk your ear off about how nice it was to do business pre-FCPA, because you could guarantee all sorts of cooperation from the local governments. Keep the cash flowing and you're everybody's best friend.
Business exists. It will work just as happily with a corrupt government as it will with a clean one; the reason you want a government that's not corrupt isn't because a lack of corruption is "good for business" per se, it's because it's good for the kind of business that most people want to live around. It's generally the people who get screwed when their government is corrupt, it's not the companies that do business there.
Well said, CTS, well said.
I think the key point here is that it's not worth listening to what either government says about the other; really the only thing that's worth analyzing is their respective goals and priorities. Where they have conflicting priorities, they're going to try to screw one another. (You could say this just as easily about individuals or corporations as you could about nation-states; the main difference is that while individuals and most corporations operate in an arena where there are "higher powers" enforcing rules that they have to play by, nation-states have no real limitations on what they can do -- all the 'rules' are self-enforced. So they play dirtier.)
I have no idea what the real truth behind it is, but a whole lot of people still believe in the Air France industrial-espionage business.
A while ago, I started working for a new company (which shall remain nameless, but it's one of your basic U.S. military-industrial-complex stalwarts) and had to go to their security briefing. Most of it was the usual, but they also emphasized not conducting any business discussions at all while traveling (except in secure locations), particularly on foreign aircraft and in businessman's hotels abroad. Air France was mentioned specifically by name.
I don't know whether someone in their security apparatus had just read the same news articles that everyone else did back in 1991 and really believed it, or if maybe they got burned, or suspected they'd been burned, via a bug or other listening device / "friendly stranger," but I was amazed at how seriously they took it.
This is actually the first I'd heard of it since that lecture. Seems like there might have been something to it after all.
An individual subscription to the OED Online costs $295USD annually.
While that might be a justifiable expense for someone in an English department somewhere, it's a rather large chunk of change to expect an average person to pay, for something that will probably be used only very occasionally -- effectively an entertainment resource (albeit a geeky one). I have an interest in it, but three hundred bucks a year is more than a year's worth of Netflix, more than half of what I pay for broadband. Pick your own metric; at any rate, it's a lot of money.
I'm not against paying money for things, but the value proposition is just not there -- not even close to being there. And I think that's unfortunate, because if they changed their pricing model at the low end, I think they could pick up some additional users; a pay-per-use model wouldn't be bad at all, maybe a buck or so a pop. That would discourage anyone who uses it frequently from downgrading but make it available to a lot of people that aren't going to shell out three C-notes just to settle an obscure etymological argument on an internet forum once in a while.
(I've decided just to ignore the various personal attacks in your and the sibling post as not really being worth responding to. Believe what you want to believe; I'm not going to get in some dick-length contest with some troll over who I am or what I do in real life.)
About CEOs, based on rumors and wild speculation, I've heard that Michael Dell does indeed use email, and does it pretty much directly. This is why he has to change email addresses pretty frequently, whenever it becomes known to the wider world and they start sending him hatemail / penis enlargement ads / technical support questions.
In contrast, some other CEOs have catchy, widely-published email addresses, and I can only assume whole staffs of people to read their Inbox and sort the wheat from the chaff. Sam Palmisano (CEO of IBM) used to have an address that was like "sam@ibm.com" or something like that. I thought it was kinda cool, but then realized that anyone sending an email there, thinking a CEO is actually going to read it, is on as much crack as someone who writes to their Senator and doesn't realize that it's going to be read and filed by some unpaid summer intern.
Anyway, although I've never gotten to use them, most of the big corporate email suites (Exchange, Notes, etc.) have features that allow for 'delegation' of people's email boxes to secretaries and assistants. So an executive can have their own address but route all the mail coming into it to an assistant, who can sort through and pass stuff along appropriately. And that's for executives that do any of their own email.
Doubtless, at the very high end of the power ladder, there are people whose time is just so valuable that it's wasteful to ever have them sitting and typing at a keyboard -- it's cheaper to have a well-paid executive assistant actually read, summarize, note the desired response to, draft, and present for approval the responses to, all incoming messages. Whether most CEOs do that I don't know (I suspect not too many, anymore), but I bet that a lot of high-ranking government officials do it that way.
I'd love to have access to the OED, but at least last time I went looking, it's not freely available.
I'm pretty sure that at least the first half of the alphabet or so, from the early editions published back in the teens and early 20s, are now out of copyright and could be put online if someone wanted to OCR them, but I've never seen any evidence of anyone working on it.
It's unfortunate because the OED is a great resource, but I'm not sure how they can let average people (that is, people who aren't working at universities while still getting funding for its professional development.
I don't think Wired really creates much of anything. They seem to basically troll around to various blogs and dig up anything that seems to be coming into use, and then blast it all over a few pages.
I guess that might make them responsible for promulgating some memes that otherwise would have died a blissful and natural death, but I've never seen them actually create something from whole cloth. (Whether that's a good or bad thing, I'm not sure.)
That's a good point about the airlines. At least in some sense, they do a bit of long-term planning. However, I think it might be more the exception than the rule. (And I think the planners and investors also realize that should their plans not work out, the planes are an asset that can be liquidated fairly easily to someone else; it's not a complete and total commitment.)
As for cathedrals, they're historically a very good example of the sorts of multi-generational projects that I'd like to see more of, but when's the last time you've seen anyone build a cathedral like that? (I don't just mean a cathedral as a literal building, I'm sure there's some of those that have gone up around the world -- with today's construction methods you can put up something the size of Stephansdom in a few months or years, I mean something on that scale, relative to what's possible at the time.)
Oddly enough, regarding corporations in my earlier post, I was informed that Disney actually issues 100 year corporate bonds. I'm not sure if that's the sign of a long outlook, or just arrogance on their part. Somehow, a blind belief that you'll be around in a century, doesn't in my mind necessarily imply that you're actually planning for the next century.
Seems like the solution to that is obvious -- don't allow repeaters.
I think it could be a boon for colleges and small organizations that might be interested in having a radio station, but that can't afford one currently because it's so expensive to get spectrum.
So duct tape and Velcro and thousands of other things which became part of all of our lives don't count for anything in the trip to the moon?
Sure, those are all great inventions. But sending a person to the moon is a pretty freaking expensive way of developing Velcro. It was a nice side-effect, a NASA equivalent to what the military terms a "peace dividend," but if the goal is to move technology forward, there are more efficient ways to do it.
I just think that sending someone to Mars is premature. At some point, certainly, we'll need to develop a delivery system to take materials, and later people, to other planets. At some point. But that point is a long way off. We're so far behind in terms of establishing a self-supporting long-term habitat (or, viewed differently, we're so far ahead at taking stuff, shooting it a long way away, and bringing it back) that there's no point in pouring a lot more money into the delivery system before we have something significant to deliver. And a taxpayer-funded 'Mars tourist' isn't a significant payload.
We tried this with the Moon. We rushed and rushed to get someone there, and a lot of people believed that once we did, a permanent base, and perhaps then a colony, was sure to follow. But the technological gap between "sending someone there for a day" and "sending a bunch of people there to live" is so vast, we still haven't put much of a dent in the latter.
The money and resources for a manned Mars mission in the immediate future could be better spent improving our lift capacity -- everything from designing an economical Shuttle replacement, to basic materials-science research that might some day lead to a space elevator. There's not going to be any significant off-planet colonization while the launch cost per kg is high, and sending someone to Mars and back isn't going to help that. That needs to be our first priority.
[As a sidenote: about the only reason I would agree with a manned Mars mission is if, politically, it came down to that-or-nothing. I.e., I'd rather see a trillion dollars spent on basic materials research than on a manned mission, but if that option is out, I'd rather see it spent on a manned mission, than on pissant domestic pork-barrel projects that have no redeeming benefits to the nation as a whole whatsoever. (Actually, I'd rather spend it on new military technology than on pissant pet projects, because there's usually at least some technological dividends and trickledown from those.) Hopefully it won't come to that.]
but any paper system is fundamentally inaccurate above a certain size election.
I disagree. Paper systems make a certain amount of human error (feel free to call it 'stupidity,' I won't stop you) visible. Electronic systems hide it. They're not inherently superior.
The problem with the Florida ballots was a fundamental design flaw, combined with human error, combined with procedural mistakes.
You could fix many of the problems experienced in Florida, keeping paper ballots, by redesigning them and fixing the procedure. For example, the "dangling chad" problem of incompletely punched holes could be fixed by replacing the perforated-card ballots with optical ones, and giving the voter a big "dauber" type pen that they simply have to touch to the circle they want to fill in. Thousands of old people do this every day -- it's called Bingo Night. Do it with a UV-reflective marker and you can probably read them quickly using a machine. To prevent double-marks, just mandate that if you accidentally touch the marker to anyplace on the paper outside of a bubble you meant to fill in, you need to get a new ballot and start over. You could even have a 'test scanner' at the voting site that quickly scans a voter's ballot and checks for gross stupidity (double marks, marks outside the lines, etc.). If someone does manage to submit a ballot with two marks, it doesn't get counted, since the only person who can legally determine the intent of a voter is a judge. (I suppose you could put them all to the side and wait to see if the election is close enough to warrant bothering to look at them, but frankly I'd prefer that they just get thrown out. It's too easy to politicize the process of 'determining intent;' better to avoid it completely and only count well-formed ballots.)
Electronic voting covers up some of the inaccuracies of paper ballots and gives a false sense of perfection. They're not. You only think that the total you're getting is free of errors; there's just no way to look at a particular ballot and see if anything went amiss when someone was casting it. Last year when I went to the polls, there was a huge amount of confusion over one old codger who thought he was de-selecting candidates, when he was actually selecting them. I'm sure other people do similarly dumb things when voting -- but an electronic system just sweeps them under the rug behind a facade of digital faultlessness. It's camouflaging stupidity, not eliminating it. Just because the system gives you an output that's 1 or 0 doesn't mean that only ones and zeros went in; it's just being quantized down that way. You have no idea what's really going into it. All sorts of stupidity could be happening and you'd have no idea, just by looking at the output of an electronic voting system.
Hybrid electronic/paper systems are certainly better than paperless systems (which are anathema to democracy, frankly), but there's no reason, aside from a typical American obsession with instant gratification, to have the electronic side at all. There's no reason why we should be compromising our elections, introducing any unnecessary mysteriousness or opacity into the process, just to get the returns a few hours sooner. If it takes a few days to count all the ballots and make sure we do it right before we know the final results, fine! It's not worth the cost, or the risk, of e-voting, just to try to have the "final score" by 8PM on Election Day.
I totally agree. However, we should be setting our sights a little closer to home as regards the future of humanity. Terraforming Mars (if possible) and transplanting people (and our problems) there won't fix anything. If we can't solve the problems of disease, war, overcrowding, famine, racial/religious intolerance, etc. right here on Earth, maybe we don't deserve to survive as a species.
That's silly. We're never going to solve those problems -- they're fundamental to our nature as individuals with different goals and desires, coupled with limited resources. What we can do, is try to spread out enough to keep a single major incident from ending us as a species.
In contrast to some other people in the thread, although I don't think that permanent, self-sustaining (or at least economically self-sustaining, e.g. "oil platform") settlements are right around the corner, that doesn't mean that it's a bad goal, or one we shouldn't be working towards. One of the most disappointing things about our society, to me anyway, is that even though we have organizations and entities that are capable of preserving themselves and executing very long-term projects, we seldom think of more than a few years out. (You would think that large corporations and governments, which by their nature don't grow old and die, would have long planning horizons -- instead they have even shorter ones than individuals.)
I'm not saying that working for peace, justice, harmony, etc. on Earth aren't noble endeavors or worthy of support. They certainly are. I'm just saying that if you make them a precondition for exploration, then you're dooming us just as effectively as if we don't try at all.
Based on what I've heard -- and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here -- the initial version of the iPhone isn't going to include 3G capability, so its internet-access speed will be pretty limited. I have a GSM phone that doesn't have 3G, and using the internet on it, even with the Mobile version of Opera, is pretty painful. I can't imagine using YouTube or some other videoconferencing app over EDGE.
I could see YouTube being a 'killer app' if the phone did real high-speed data, enough so that you could stream video over it from anywhere, but barring that it seems a bit limited.
Although, I suppose if there's one thing that I should have learned over the past few years, it's to never doubt the ability of consumers to watch really crummy video of people making fools of themselves. And of cats.
That doesn't make sense.
Or rather, it only makes sense if Mars is "next" in the "places we haven't stuck American flags on and then left, never to return to" list.
We're not accomplishing anything by going there. Yes, it looks neat, and maybe it'll make space exploration 'cool' again for a while, but it hasn't brought us any closer to the goal of having a sustainable settlement off of Earth. The astronauts would go out there, stand around for a while, and then come back. And it would cost a lot of money and mean a lot of other things wouldn't get done. And at the end of it, what would we have? People would be able to bitch by saying "we can put a man on Mars, but we can't do x" instead of the Moon, but that would be about it. Maybe we'd know a little more about how people exist when in a small, closed environment for a long time, but we can learn that here on Earth for a lot less money. (And there was a Slashdot article yesterday or the day before about how they're doing it.)
Keep going down that path, and once we've put a flag on Mars, then maybe we'll put one on a few asteroids or even a comet or two, and maybe a few trillion dollars and a few generations after that, maybe we'll put a flag somewhere further out, on one of the gas-giant moons. All very nice. But it hasn't gotten anyone permanently off the planet. One good nuclear war, asteroid strike, or widespread pandemic, and there goes civilization, maybe the species. They'll be a lot of flags out there, showing how far we made it, but a fat lot of good it'll do.
Sucks that short-term politics and pet pork takes precedence over the future of humanity itself. (disclosure: I don't give a frig WHICH party is at fault - this simply sucks) :/
I feel the same way, at least about the importance of the ultimate goal -- but I'm not sure that the Human Mars Initiative (or whatever they were calling it) is really the right way to go, and that canceling it is in any way bad or wrong.
Right now, we're so far away from having a self-sustaining (both physically and economically) off-Earth settlement, sending one guy or a few guys out to Mars and back really isn't going to get us that much closer. We have too much basic research yet to be done, in order to make it permanent. And really, non-permanent human exploration doesn't get us that much that we haven't already gotten.
Look at it this way. Imagine that we're some European nation in the 15th or 16th century, and we want to plant a colony on the New World. The Mars project that's on the drawing board now is like sponsoring a long-distance swimming contest. It seems like it's going in the right direction, but really it's not that helpful. It's the wrong set of skills to be developing. Instead, you need to be doing boring crap on shore, building shipyards and learning how to make ships that don't sink.
In terms of progressing towards the eventual goal of a permanent, sustainable, off-Earth human settlement, the money that we're spending pushing a few people to Mars, so they can dig around in the dirt and pose for a photo op, would be much better spent improving our materials science, producing a good reusable launch vehicle, or researching advanced robotics systems. None of those are as sexy as actually putting a person on the surface of Mars, but all of them will bring us closer to actually putting people in space, permanently, than a quick sightseeing trip would.
About the only reason to send a person to Mars and back without a sustainable presence there, is because it would be good PR for NASA and possibly result in a lot more funding for long-term projects. But I'm not sure it would be worth the cost and diverted resources, particularly since it would mean basically setting aside all other projects and priorities in order to work on it.
It seems like they're trying to create something that's more like an uncensored Photobucket.
The fact that it's internally disorganized doesn't really matter, as long as you can get a static link to the hosted photo.
I think the (idealistic) use case is something like this: I take a photo of some Authority Figure abusing their authority. I know that they'll dislike this, and will try to suppress its publication -- therefore ruling out sites like Flickr and Photobucket that will respond to a DMCA Takedown Notice. But I want to get the word out. So I upload it to TPB's site, and then start passing the link around. People can now access the photo, blog it, whatever, and hopefully it's safe from censorship. (Doesn't do anything to prevent retribution against locals who link to it, but at least they're not hosting it.)
Of course, I think the more realistic use case is that it'll just get used by trolls posting goatse, jailbait, tubgirl, animal cruelty, etc. to message-boards. (Not that it's tough to find a goatse or tubgirl to link to currently, but doubtless there are more disgusting things out there that get taken down faster that the trolls will find.)
Did I miss the memo where child porn became legal in Sweden?
I know nothing about Swedish law, but it's entirely possible that they define both "child" and "pornography" differently than in the U.S., creating a space where something is legal if it's on a Swedish webserver, but not if it's in one in the U.S. (Actually, I think there are a number of respected, non-pornographic films that contain nudity that fall into this area.)
Anyway, if they want to avoid getting constantly raided by the local gendarmes, they should probably create some sort of "Foreigner's Guide to Swedish Obscenity Law" so that people can at least have a shot at knowing what's illegal before they upload it.
In particular, aside from pornography which is the obvious one, I wonder about extreme animal cruelty (there is some downright disgusting stuff out there, and to be honest I find it more offensive than most of the run-of-the-mill CP). I kinda hope the Swedes make that illegal, since I think its presence does encourage its creation -- some dickhead sees another dickhead gain some sort of minor notoriety online by setting a kitten on fire and decides to emulate them. Since animals are more easily available and even more vulnerable than children, and the disincentives against hurting them are less, it doesn't take much.
I would rather be able to see the filth of society clearly
Take a nice, hard look. (You'll want the "Random" board. Totally NSFW.)
As far as I can tell, 7chan seems to be made up of people who got banned from 4chan, which in itself is remarkable, since 4chan's moderation is...minimal...at best.