The secret-software-business is quite different that the shared discoveries of the scientific method that works well in education and science.
Although you're right about closed software, computer science as a whole is actually much more open in many respects than some other scientific fields. In particular, the medical and biological science fields are quite closed-off. Even physics is somewhat closed-off, not by design, but because the equipment required to perform experiments is so expensive.
Few computer science experiments take more than a couple thousand in capital investment. Also, if you have questions, you can often discuss your experiments, ideas, data, findings, etc. with an expert (or even industry leader) simply by signing up to a mailing list or going on IRC.
This is true, but it's understandable also. Rails uses databases as persistent object storage, and nothing more.
The benefits of relational databases are that they can enforce constraints with simple declarations, and abstract the logical from the physical storage. You can try to do some basic checking before you put something into a database, but it's very hard to do constraints on the application side.
I understand why developers at smaller companies don't like using relational databases as relational databases. For a long time relational databases weren't really meeting the needs of smaller shops, and they have their own learning curve. But now with good databases like PostgreSQL that have proper constraints and can do powerful relational manipulations, it's a great time to get involved in relational databases. I encourage you to try them out, they can be a godsend when it comes to application development speed.
It's a wonderful thing when you get an error from your database, and you know exactly which part of the application tried to do something wrong. The alternative is waiting until the bad data gets in, and finding out a week later when you try to do a report (try to find the bug now that you have no idea how the data got that way).
Well, where's the city going to get the money if not by forcing people to pay up?
I meant I wouldn't mind if such programs were paid for by money wrested from the city's taxpayers. You can move out of your city or relocate your business outside of the city if you really disagree with the city's policies. It's a lot harder to do that when it's state-wide or nation-wide. I think, in general, the local government has a larger scope than the state government, which has a larger scope than the federal government.
And we probably agree that government isn't the most efficient solution imaginable.
I would add to that that the scope of government (especially federal) should be very limited.
I don't like the prison system at all and would just do away with it.
I don't know if anyone likes it, but I haven't seen anything better come along. It has two functions: deter criminals and keep them away from law-abiding citizens. I'm not against the idea that you try to prevent a person from becoming a criminal, but once they are, the best thing to do (especially with violent criminals) is to lock 'em up.
Go back over my posts and find one single law I suggested as a solution to any problem.
What are your solutions if not laws? If you pay want society to pay for rehab, doesn't that have to be a law? After all, it involves confiscating money from one person to pay for the rehab of another. But feel free to list out a few solutions if there has been some confusion.
has a heart attack, and crashes into your car.
Yup, that would suck. Life isn't fair. If he was alive or his estate had value, all I could do is sue. That's pretty much it. Forcing people to carry car insurance when driving doesn't entirely contradict my policies (forces the driver to pay the costs of their recklessness, and encourages responsibility), so if he had insurance I could collect on that.
The cost to society for the cold-hearted don't-give-a-fuck-about-anyone-but-yourself is too high.
I didn't say that. I just said nobody should be legally obliged to care about other people. That doesn't mean they won't, but it means they don't have to.
Reconcile it with your own choice and tell me what government should do for both of us.
Protect us by the rule of law from extortion, violence, theft, invasion, fraud, etc.
I think I do start to see your point, that you want to reduce the cost to society somehow through rehabilitation and education that offers people an opportunity to stop some types of bad behavior, without banning the behavior outright. I think to a degree we do that now though, and I don't think it's really the place of the federal or state government. I wouldn't really have a problem if it was a local service at all. Have the city pay for the social services.
I'm saying there are hidden costs society has to pay, and you can't change that
We absolutely can change it. We could eliminate social security, and that would mean that society would no longer be burdened by people who don't save for their retirement. Now we have no need to force people to pay that extra 15.5% taxes because, if someone doesn't save, it's not coming out of the taxpayers' pockets.
My point was that it was in society's best interests to absorb these hidden costs by trying to prevent known bad behavior
You're trying to reduce the costs by using laws to discourage choices that are a cost to society. If you hide costs away from individuals, as socialism does, there are more actions that have a greater cost to society (and less cost to the person making the choice), and the natural reaction is to try to discourage those costly actions with laws. That's the direction your point seems to be going.
However, if you try to keep the costs away from society, by eliminating things like "Universal Health Care" and Social Security, society doesn't need to reduce the costs, because society isn't paying them. That means you can offer more freedom: you can smoke as much pot as you want, because nobody else is held responsible if you can't pay your bills. This also reduces the total cost (to the individual plus the cost to society) by acting as a deterrent: if you do something irresponsible, nobody is legally required to bail you out.
comparing the damage done by terrorists to the damage done by drunk drivers is a strawman
I didn't say "terrorist" I said "suicide bomber". I was trying to think of an example where the individual making the choice pays a small fraction of the cost that society pays. It's what came to mind.
If I were to sum up my point as succinctly as possible, it would be that "with freedom comes responsibility". A free market is about freedom to do what you want and responsibility for the costs of your choices. Socialism is incompatible with freedom because socialism removes responsibility and obscures costs.
So let's say about half the cost of reckless driving is paid by non-reckless people. And for suicide bombers, it's even worse, maybe society pays 10 times the cost as the bomber.
But those are exceptions, not the rule. And you want to shift the costs more toward the person making the choice, not less. Why do you want society to hide the costs (and pay the costs) of people's choices from the people making the choices? People make choices based on cost-benefit analysis, even if the choice is made quickly. If you hide the cost, the person loses the cost information in their cost-benefit analysis, and is no longer able to make a good choice. Even worse, since they don't pay the cost, they don't get any negative feedback from their choice.
Having more information when making choices and a more effective feedback cycle is why a free market works, and why large-scale central planning doesn't work. I'm not only talking about socialism in large countries, large corporations can suffer from similar problems internally. However, externally, large corporations have to compete with the rest of the free market, which provides enough feedback to keep reasonably-size corporations in business. Very large corporations would usually only survive with government help, which is why big corporations like big government (as long as they have enough lobbyists to make the government work for them, and not against).
A weather presenter has every right to an opposing view but whilst a member of that organisation s/he should be clear their view is personal and unpublished.
No, you don't have to explicitly state all your organizational memberships every time you make a statement, that's ridiculous. "I have questions about global warming, and by the way, my views do not represent those of the Safeway Club Card, of which I am a member."
If they do their job, there's no reason to kick them out of that professional organization. To remove them would discredit the professional organization, and discredit it's members.
Perhaps a surgeon who refuses to wash thier hands but is still allowed to practice is a better analogy.
No. A surgeon who ignores standard procedures and guidelines is recklessly endangering the patient. I really don't see how expressing doubt over global warming risks giving a bad weather forecast. First of all, one thing is an action, another an expression of an idea. Unless someone expresses inaccurate weather information, I see no reason they should be kicked out of the organization for an expression.
(I'll ignore the other list items because I don't think they're relevant)
Doctors and lawyers are very different from engineers. If you are a doctor or lawyer, you are an expert, and everything you say is correct. Of course, during training you will be corrected a lot, but you will be corrected by someone usually much older than you who has a wealth of experience and many years of education.
Engineering is completely different. Even if you're a great engineer, not all of your ideas are winners. Some of your ideas will be outright bad. And some ideas might be corrected by someone half your age, with almost no experience at all. And everyone will listen patiently to the young guy who just corrected you, as though he had as much experience as you do. Every idea you have must stand on it's own, and if it doesn't, will simply be dismissed, discredited, or challenged in a very public way. Especially in Computer Science, where you might (and probably will) be corrected on a mailing list that will be dug up any time someone types the topic into Google. Engineers have to face constant criticism from other engineers, and being a good engineer doesn't reduce that at all.
I don't know whether that matters for the gap between sexes in engineering. But as far as anecdotal evidence goes, I can't think of many women who take that kind of constant criticism in stride. There might be some innate difference in the response to that kind of feedback, or maybe I'm just being sexist, I don't know. But I think it's a valid question, and if we do want an answer, we should start thinking along these lines.
Don't hold back, by the way, be brutally honest with your feedback;)
And when he finds out he needs his triple by-pass at 60mph right behind you, who are stopped in rush hour traffic?
I'm not saying that society does not face some burden when someone else has a medical problem. I am just saying that the person with the medical problem is burdened with most of the cost. That encourages good health.
But let's not pretend we can see all the costs associated with any behavior. Ok?
We can't. But the important point is who is paying the costs that do exist. Sure, some of those costs are paid by society even in a free market. But a much larger share of those costs are paid by the person who makes the choice than paid by society. Under socialism, it's the opposite, with a much larger share of the costs being paid by society and almost no cost being paid by the person making the choice.
Those simple incentives show why someone making a choice might be more likely to make a bad choice under socialism: they don't see the costs of their choice (because they don't pay the costs), they only see the benefit.
In many cases, splitting the difference IS the best policy.
Sure, but it's also an easy out for people who haven't taken the time to think about what is the best policy. Just take candidate A and candidate B, whatever they say, choose the exact middle stance. Magically you're a moderate. The problem I have is when people do that often it doesn't matter who the candidates are, it could be Hitler running against Stalin, and you could still just say "split the difference".
There is room for compromise, and sometimes the best policies are splitting the difference. For instance, I happen to think a good policy might be to allow abortions only in the first 3-4 months. But I wouldn't go around calling myself a moderate, because I don't want to be associated with the other moderates.
It IS possible to have socialistic views but not be socialist in economics.
Dennis Kucinich has Socialistic economic stances, which is the opposite of a libertarian.
Your points seem to go along the lines that just because something is legal everyone is going to be doing it
No, my point is that under a free market, the costs of a choice rest almost entirely on the person who makes the choice. However, under socialism, the costs of a choice rest on society as a whole.
In a free market, I can drink all the time and sleep 'til noon, and the costs of that behavior rest on me. I might lose my job, and might not be able to enjoy a comfortable life.
However, in a socialistic economy, the costs of me drinking rest mostly on society, because I am entitled to medical care. Even if someone is not really a drunk, lots of people enjoy a night out. So why not make it 4 nights out per week? Society is picking up the tab anyway.
Being locked up solves nothing for the person.
I don't think we should lock up drug users/sellers. I think we should allow them to do what they want. I also think I shouldn't have a responsibility to pay for their treatment, should they need it. Same with people who eat too much fast food: go ahead, but don't ask me to pay for your triple-bypass.
How about a Fairness Doctrine that says that if you're reporting on a story you have a financial stake in, you have to disclose the fact. Is that fair enough?
No. What if you're old, about to retire, and you are reporting on Social Security? My point is that just about everything affects the economy, and affects individuals financially. If you open up fines and lawsuits for not disclosing the many ways a story might impact you financially, everyone will be scared to speak. It will be a free-for-all of punitive lawsuits and fines against all of your opponents.
Did you ever see the South Park "Everybody vs. Everybody" lawsuit episode? It really would be that bad.
And I just said that's what I think because that's what I do think when someone says "moderate". Many people do use the term moderate as a cop-out because they haven't thought about the issues.
I'd hate to label myself a part of the moderate group.
The point still remains that drug use != drug abuse.
Never said it was. But it's easy to make drugs legal if the only person who suffers is you. If society has to pay for your 18th rehab from heroine, because of Universal Health Care, they now have a vested interest in keeping you away from heroine (whether you abuse it or not).
This is for the company to decide as it is mostly now. It isn't illegal to go to work drunk now, but I guarantee that 99% of jobs will fire you for coming to work drunk
And that's my point. When you get drunk, it's mostly you that pays, because we live in a mostly free market. If you take the opposite extreme, in socialism, it's society that pays every time you get drunk, so there is an incentive on the part of society to limit drunkenness, heroine consumption, and LSD.
The closer we get to socialism the more government will have to control what you do personally. Socialism and freedom don't mix, because what you do with your freedom affects how much you produce for society. The closer we get to capitalism the more freedom we can have, because if we can afford to get drunk, nobody else will care.
Many people are brilliant at taking a simple issue, and persuading people to adopt strange convoluted positions on it.
Brainwashing happens when "facts" are repeated constantly without refutation. I am suggesting you avoid that by listening to many sources which will most likely prevent the brainwash from taking place. Then, you're left with facts that you can weigh for yourself.
I know. But my point stands that you failed to show that the media is in the hands of few people. If my "false dilemma" didn't illustrate that point for you, hopefully I have by now.
Surely you're not denying that the media that would be covered by the Fairness Doctrine
So now you qualify it. Before it was the media in general, now it's just the forms of media that you've selected, which are a slice of the overall media picture. The stated purpose of the fairness doctrine is to provide people with viewpoints they otherwise can't find, but if those viewpoints exist in widely available non-broadcast media it weakens that argument.
So the original statement that you made: "the media is now in the hands of so few people" has yet to be shown. And your new statement: "the media that would be covered by the Fairness Doctrine is controlled by fewer people/corporations than in the past" does not back up your original post, so isn't a part of the argument.
Fair enough. But keep in mind that a lot of people use the term "moderate" as a cop-out. You might want to consider something like "independent" instead.
Granted, wikipedia is not bulletproof, but there is no real source other than the original documents, which I don't have. Based on what I see there, it seems like those documents would be obviously forged to any expert in the field. After all, it was just a bunch of bloggers that initially raised the questions.
Fact-checking is most important right before an election, and it was grossly negligent for him to not be careful. Even if the documents were authentic, in such an important situation he should have a team of experts ready to say exactly why they think it is an authentic document.
This is no different than a pilot drinking before a flight
But where does the medical care come from? Mr. Kucinich is not a doctor, so to ensure that someone gets treatment he needs to either: (a) Force a doctor to go to work that day, meaning that he denies the doctor the ability to use recreational drugs (b) Force enough other people to go to work that day to produce enough stuff to offer the doctor so that the doctor wants to go to work that day
If he chooses B, that means those people better do a good enough job to convince the doctor to go to work, so maybe we shouldn't let them use drugs that day either?
If you just pick one industry, you can diffuse (or should I say obfuscate?) the cost over enough people that maybe everyone can be high and still convince at least one doctor to help at least one person. I guess the rest of the people can just wait in line, but they shouldn't worry because they have a life-long right to health care. So, if you just start granting entitlements in one industry, you can have a quasi-socialism that results in some of those people being able to do drugs and some people getting medical care by a sober doctor.
However, if you apply the same principles to other industries, you run out of places to hide the costs and you end up needing to tell people they can't use LSD, because the government promised someone that they'd get something, and they need you to deliver it.
BTW the ONLY known negative effects of marijuana are incurred when smoking it, if one bakes or vaporizes the pot, there are no known detrimental side effects.
Yeah, I know. I just didn't want 50 links to someone who breathes more pot smoke than they do air getting lung cancer when they're 50. I've always thought that pot really stands out from other drugs in that regard. Can you name a drug with a lower risk of, well, anything? I haven't even heard of an overdose, or even a bad drug interaction. I mean, seriously, if people didn't enjoy it, there would be no way to even know that there is a drug in there somewhere!
And you missed the point. The point was, your post begged the questions: "is the media controlled by few people, or many?" and "compared to what?".
That's a big question, with no easy answer. Radio might be more centrally controlled than it once was, but that is merely one aspect of the overall media picture. The internet is a very powerful media tool, never available before, and it has the opposite tendency: very decentralized content creation.
My attitudes toward moderates: if I say 2 + 2 = 4, and you say it's 6, does the truth "lie in the middle?"
Hah. When I hear people say "moderate", all I can think is that they don't want to make the effort to determine the better policy, and just default to splitting the difference.
But if I say that the First Amendment protects my right to say whatever I want on my website, no matter how unpopular, is that radical? By world standards, it is. In other countries, like France and Canada, you are not free to express whatever idea you want. Does a moderate in the United States "split the difference" on the First Amendment?
Slashdot Mirror
Latency is not a bottleneck.
You could turn it around and say that, since the disks are not using their full bandwidth, the disks spend most of their time waiting for requests.
That being said, disk latency is one of the major causes of poor performance. But "bottlenecks" only have to do with throughput.
The secret-software-business is quite different that the shared discoveries of the scientific method that works well in education and science.
Although you're right about closed software, computer science as a whole is actually much more open in many respects than some other scientific fields. In particular, the medical and biological science fields are quite closed-off. Even physics is somewhat closed-off, not by design, but because the equipment required to perform experiments is so expensive.
Few computer science experiments take more than a couple thousand in capital investment. Also, if you have questions, you can often discuss your experiments, ideas, data, findings, etc. with an expert (or even industry leader) simply by signing up to a mailing list or going on IRC.
So long as greed and materialism exist, socialism can't work.
More like: ever since economies were too complicated and dynamic for a small group to understand and solve, socialism couldn't work.
DBA's may hate the way Rails uses databases.
This is true, but it's understandable also. Rails uses databases as persistent object storage, and nothing more.
The benefits of relational databases are that they can enforce constraints with simple declarations, and abstract the logical from the physical storage. You can try to do some basic checking before you put something into a database, but it's very hard to do constraints on the application side.
I understand why developers at smaller companies don't like using relational databases as relational databases. For a long time relational databases weren't really meeting the needs of smaller shops, and they have their own learning curve. But now with good databases like PostgreSQL that have proper constraints and can do powerful relational manipulations, it's a great time to get involved in relational databases. I encourage you to try them out, they can be a godsend when it comes to application development speed.
It's a wonderful thing when you get an error from your database, and you know exactly which part of the application tried to do something wrong. The alternative is waiting until the bad data gets in, and finding out a week later when you try to do a report (try to find the bug now that you have no idea how the data got that way).
Well, where's the city going to get the money if not by forcing people to pay up?
I meant I wouldn't mind if such programs were paid for by money wrested from the city's taxpayers. You can move out of your city or relocate your business outside of the city if you really disagree with the city's policies. It's a lot harder to do that when it's state-wide or nation-wide. I think, in general, the local government has a larger scope than the state government, which has a larger scope than the federal government.
And we probably agree that government isn't the most efficient solution imaginable.
I would add to that that the scope of government (especially federal) should be very limited.
I don't like the prison system at all and would just do away with it.
I don't know if anyone likes it, but I haven't seen anything better come along. It has two functions: deter criminals and keep them away from law-abiding citizens. I'm not against the idea that you try to prevent a person from becoming a criminal, but once they are, the best thing to do (especially with violent criminals) is to lock 'em up.
Go back over my posts and find one single law I suggested as a solution to any problem.
What are your solutions if not laws? If you pay want society to pay for rehab, doesn't that have to be a law? After all, it involves confiscating money from one person to pay for the rehab of another. But feel free to list out a few solutions if there has been some confusion.
has a heart attack, and crashes into your car.
Yup, that would suck. Life isn't fair. If he was alive or his estate had value, all I could do is sue. That's pretty much it. Forcing people to carry car insurance when driving doesn't entirely contradict my policies (forces the driver to pay the costs of their recklessness, and encourages responsibility), so if he had insurance I could collect on that.
The cost to society for the cold-hearted don't-give-a-fuck-about-anyone-but-yourself is too high.
I didn't say that. I just said nobody should be legally obliged to care about other people. That doesn't mean they won't, but it means they don't have to.
Reconcile it with your own choice and tell me what government should do for both of us.
Protect us by the rule of law from extortion, violence, theft, invasion, fraud, etc.
I think I do start to see your point, that you want to reduce the cost to society somehow through rehabilitation and education that offers people an opportunity to stop some types of bad behavior, without banning the behavior outright. I think to a degree we do that now though, and I don't think it's really the place of the federal or state government. I wouldn't really have a problem if it was a local service at all. Have the city pay for the social services.
I'm saying there are hidden costs society has to pay, and you can't change that
We absolutely can change it. We could eliminate social security, and that would mean that society would no longer be burdened by people who don't save for their retirement. Now we have no need to force people to pay that extra 15.5% taxes because, if someone doesn't save, it's not coming out of the taxpayers' pockets.
My point was that it was in society's best interests to absorb these hidden costs by trying to prevent known bad behavior
You're trying to reduce the costs by using laws to discourage choices that are a cost to society. If you hide costs away from individuals, as socialism does, there are more actions that have a greater cost to society (and less cost to the person making the choice), and the natural reaction is to try to discourage those costly actions with laws. That's the direction your point seems to be going.
However, if you try to keep the costs away from society, by eliminating things like "Universal Health Care" and Social Security, society doesn't need to reduce the costs, because society isn't paying them. That means you can offer more freedom: you can smoke as much pot as you want, because nobody else is held responsible if you can't pay your bills. This also reduces the total cost (to the individual plus the cost to society) by acting as a deterrent: if you do something irresponsible, nobody is legally required to bail you out.
comparing the damage done by terrorists to the damage done by drunk drivers is a strawman
I didn't say "terrorist" I said "suicide bomber". I was trying to think of an example where the individual making the choice pays a small fraction of the cost that society pays. It's what came to mind.
If I were to sum up my point as succinctly as possible, it would be that "with freedom comes responsibility". A free market is about freedom to do what you want and responsibility for the costs of your choices. Socialism is incompatible with freedom because socialism removes responsibility and obscures costs.
How many drunks kill someone,
So let's say about half the cost of reckless driving is paid by non-reckless people. And for suicide bombers, it's even worse, maybe society pays 10 times the cost as the bomber.
But those are exceptions, not the rule. And you want to shift the costs more toward the person making the choice, not less. Why do you want society to hide the costs (and pay the costs) of people's choices from the people making the choices? People make choices based on cost-benefit analysis, even if the choice is made quickly. If you hide the cost, the person loses the cost information in their cost-benefit analysis, and is no longer able to make a good choice. Even worse, since they don't pay the cost, they don't get any negative feedback from their choice.
Having more information when making choices and a more effective feedback cycle is why a free market works, and why large-scale central planning doesn't work. I'm not only talking about socialism in large countries, large corporations can suffer from similar problems internally. However, externally, large corporations have to compete with the rest of the free market, which provides enough feedback to keep reasonably-size corporations in business. Very large corporations would usually only survive with government help, which is why big corporations like big government (as long as they have enough lobbyists to make the government work for them, and not against).
A weather presenter has every right to an opposing view but whilst a member of that organisation s/he should be clear their view is personal and unpublished.
No, you don't have to explicitly state all your organizational memberships every time you make a statement, that's ridiculous. "I have questions about global warming, and by the way, my views do not represent those of the Safeway Club Card, of which I am a member."
If they do their job, there's no reason to kick them out of that professional organization. To remove them would discredit the professional organization, and discredit it's members.
Perhaps a surgeon who refuses to wash thier hands but is still allowed to practice is a better analogy.
No. A surgeon who ignores standard procedures and guidelines is recklessly endangering the patient. I really don't see how expressing doubt over global warming risks giving a bad weather forecast. First of all, one thing is an action, another an expression of an idea. Unless someone expresses inaccurate weather information, I see no reason they should be kicked out of the organization for an expression.
1: Doctors
;)
2: Lawyers
(I'll ignore the other list items because I don't think they're relevant)
Doctors and lawyers are very different from engineers. If you are a doctor or lawyer, you are an expert, and everything you say is correct. Of course, during training you will be corrected a lot, but you will be corrected by someone usually much older than you who has a wealth of experience and many years of education.
Engineering is completely different. Even if you're a great engineer, not all of your ideas are winners. Some of your ideas will be outright bad. And some ideas might be corrected by someone half your age, with almost no experience at all. And everyone will listen patiently to the young guy who just corrected you, as though he had as much experience as you do. Every idea you have must stand on it's own, and if it doesn't, will simply be dismissed, discredited, or challenged in a very public way. Especially in Computer Science, where you might (and probably will) be corrected on a mailing list that will be dug up any time someone types the topic into Google. Engineers have to face constant criticism from other engineers, and being a good engineer doesn't reduce that at all.
I don't know whether that matters for the gap between sexes in engineering. But as far as anecdotal evidence goes, I can't think of many women who take that kind of constant criticism in stride. There might be some innate difference in the response to that kind of feedback, or maybe I'm just being sexist, I don't know. But I think it's a valid question, and if we do want an answer, we should start thinking along these lines.
Don't hold back, by the way, be brutally honest with your feedback
And when he finds out he needs his triple by-pass at 60mph right behind you, who are stopped in rush hour traffic?
I'm not saying that society does not face some burden when someone else has a medical problem. I am just saying that the person with the medical problem is burdened with most of the cost. That encourages good health.
But let's not pretend we can see all the costs associated with any behavior. Ok?
We can't. But the important point is who is paying the costs that do exist. Sure, some of those costs are paid by society even in a free market. But a much larger share of those costs are paid by the person who makes the choice than paid by society. Under socialism, it's the opposite, with a much larger share of the costs being paid by society and almost no cost being paid by the person making the choice.
Those simple incentives show why someone making a choice might be more likely to make a bad choice under socialism: they don't see the costs of their choice (because they don't pay the costs), they only see the benefit.
In many cases, splitting the difference IS the best policy.
Sure, but it's also an easy out for people who haven't taken the time to think about what is the best policy. Just take candidate A and candidate B, whatever they say, choose the exact middle stance. Magically you're a moderate. The problem I have is when people do that often it doesn't matter who the candidates are, it could be Hitler running against Stalin, and you could still just say "split the difference".
There is room for compromise, and sometimes the best policies are splitting the difference. For instance, I happen to think a good policy might be to allow abortions only in the first 3-4 months. But I wouldn't go around calling myself a moderate, because I don't want to be associated with the other moderates.
It IS possible to have socialistic views but not be socialist in economics.
Dennis Kucinich has Socialistic economic stances, which is the opposite of a libertarian.
Your points seem to go along the lines that just because something is legal everyone is going to be doing it
No, my point is that under a free market, the costs of a choice rest almost entirely on the person who makes the choice. However, under socialism, the costs of a choice rest on society as a whole.
In a free market, I can drink all the time and sleep 'til noon, and the costs of that behavior rest on me. I might lose my job, and might not be able to enjoy a comfortable life.
However, in a socialistic economy, the costs of me drinking rest mostly on society, because I am entitled to medical care. Even if someone is not really a drunk, lots of people enjoy a night out. So why not make it 4 nights out per week? Society is picking up the tab anyway.
Being locked up solves nothing for the person.
I don't think we should lock up drug users/sellers. I think we should allow them to do what they want. I also think I shouldn't have a responsibility to pay for their treatment, should they need it. Same with people who eat too much fast food: go ahead, but don't ask me to pay for your triple-bypass.
How about a Fairness Doctrine that says that if you're reporting on a story you have a financial stake in, you have to disclose the fact. Is that fair enough?
No. What if you're old, about to retire, and you are reporting on Social Security? My point is that just about everything affects the economy, and affects individuals financially. If you open up fines and lawsuits for not disclosing the many ways a story might impact you financially, everyone will be scared to speak. It will be a free-for-all of punitive lawsuits and fines against all of your opponents.
Did you ever see the South Park "Everybody vs. Everybody" lawsuit episode? It really would be that bad.
I think the Libertarian Party would disagree with you.
http://www.lp.org/
The supreme court says a lot of things, and not all of them are valid. Who in their right mind agrees with the Kelo decision?
Sounds kind of "independent" to me.
And I just said that's what I think because that's what I do think when someone says "moderate". Many people do use the term moderate as a cop-out because they haven't thought about the issues.
I'd hate to label myself a part of the moderate group.
The point still remains that drug use != drug abuse.
Never said it was. But it's easy to make drugs legal if the only person who suffers is you. If society has to pay for your 18th rehab from heroine, because of Universal Health Care, they now have a vested interest in keeping you away from heroine (whether you abuse it or not).
This is for the company to decide as it is mostly now. It isn't illegal to go to work drunk now, but I guarantee that 99% of jobs will fire you for coming to work drunk
And that's my point. When you get drunk, it's mostly you that pays, because we live in a mostly free market. If you take the opposite extreme, in socialism, it's society that pays every time you get drunk, so there is an incentive on the part of society to limit drunkenness, heroine consumption, and LSD.
The closer we get to socialism the more government will have to control what you do personally. Socialism and freedom don't mix, because what you do with your freedom affects how much you produce for society. The closer we get to capitalism the more freedom we can have, because if we can afford to get drunk, nobody else will care.
Many people are brilliant at taking a simple issue, and persuading people to adopt strange convoluted positions on it.
Brainwashing happens when "facts" are repeated constantly without refutation. I am suggesting you avoid that by listening to many sources which will most likely prevent the brainwash from taking place. Then, you're left with facts that you can weigh for yourself.
But, there is no necessity that I am either
I know. But my point stands that you failed to show that the media is in the hands of few people. If my "false dilemma" didn't illustrate that point for you, hopefully I have by now.
Surely you're not denying that the media that would be covered by the Fairness Doctrine
So now you qualify it. Before it was the media in general, now it's just the forms of media that you've selected, which are a slice of the overall media picture. The stated purpose of the fairness doctrine is to provide people with viewpoints they otherwise can't find, but if those viewpoints exist in widely available non-broadcast media it weakens that argument.
So the original statement that you made: "the media is now in the hands of so few people" has yet to be shown. And your new statement: "the media that would be covered by the Fairness Doctrine is controlled by fewer people/corporations than in the past" does not back up your original post, so isn't a part of the argument.
Fair enough. But keep in mind that a lot of people use the term "moderate" as a cop-out. You might want to consider something like "independent" instead.
the documents presented by rather were not 'obviously forged', to this day the best you can get is that their authenticity is questionable
I didn't say he forged them, but I am convinced that the documents were forged and that no proper fact-checking was done.
I suggest you read here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rathergate
Granted, wikipedia is not bulletproof, but there is no real source other than the original documents, which I don't have. Based on what I see there, it seems like those documents would be obviously forged to any expert in the field. After all, it was just a bunch of bloggers that initially raised the questions.
Fact-checking is most important right before an election, and it was grossly negligent for him to not be careful. Even if the documents were authentic, in such an important situation he should have a team of experts ready to say exactly why they think it is an authentic document.
This is no different than a pilot drinking before a flight
But where does the medical care come from? Mr. Kucinich is not a doctor, so to ensure that someone gets treatment he needs to either:
(a) Force a doctor to go to work that day, meaning that he denies the doctor the ability to use recreational drugs
(b) Force enough other people to go to work that day to produce enough stuff to offer the doctor so that the doctor wants to go to work that day
If he chooses B, that means those people better do a good enough job to convince the doctor to go to work, so maybe we shouldn't let them use drugs that day either?
If you just pick one industry, you can diffuse (or should I say obfuscate?) the cost over enough people that maybe everyone can be high and still convince at least one doctor to help at least one person. I guess the rest of the people can just wait in line, but they shouldn't worry because they have a life-long right to health care. So, if you just start granting entitlements in one industry, you can have a quasi-socialism that results in some of those people being able to do drugs and some people getting medical care by a sober doctor.
However, if you apply the same principles to other industries, you run out of places to hide the costs and you end up needing to tell people they can't use LSD, because the government promised someone that they'd get something, and they need you to deliver it.
BTW the ONLY known negative effects of marijuana are incurred when smoking it, if one bakes or vaporizes the pot, there are no known detrimental side effects.
Yeah, I know. I just didn't want 50 links to someone who breathes more pot smoke than they do air getting lung cancer when they're 50. I've always thought that pot really stands out from other drugs in that regard. Can you name a drug with a lower risk of, well, anything? I haven't even heard of an overdose, or even a bad drug interaction. I mean, seriously, if people didn't enjoy it, there would be no way to even know that there is a drug in there somewhere!
And you missed the point. The point was, your post begged the questions: "is the media controlled by few people, or many?" and "compared to what?".
That's a big question, with no easy answer. Radio might be more centrally controlled than it once was, but that is merely one aspect of the overall media picture. The internet is a very powerful media tool, never available before, and it has the opposite tendency: very decentralized content creation.
My attitudes toward moderates: if I say 2 + 2 = 4, and you say it's 6, does the truth "lie in the middle?"
Hah. When I hear people say "moderate", all I can think is that they don't want to make the effort to determine the better policy, and just default to splitting the difference.
But if I say that the First Amendment protects my right to say whatever I want on my website, no matter how unpopular, is that radical? By world standards, it is. In other countries, like France and Canada, you are not free to express whatever idea you want. Does a moderate in the United States "split the difference" on the First Amendment?