by objective measures their systems leave a lot to be desired and often don't justify the TCO, or the inevitable lock in to the providers total solution suite.
While vendor lock-in is a common feature in products from established Western vendors, folks in the far East have been building their own custom solutions from a varietyofproviders for a long while now. Some newer, upstart Western vendors also eschew lock-in.
Of course, at some point in deciding whether the TCO is justified or not we need to ask just what is religion, anyway?
I think the current economic crisis is a sign of what happens when governments get involved with the decision making of private businesses
Wait wait wait. Deregulation and lax enforcement brings on a bunch of bad business practices, and you want to argue that the problem is governments getting involved?
Now, if you want to take a long view and say that it's only because of government action that some businesses become "too big to fail", fine. But I don't think you're going to join me in calling for strict limits on the creation and growth of corporations (entities created, after all, by government fiat).
Name one government program that has been successful over the long haul or even the short term.
The New Deal, which ended the Great Depression in the U.S. (Go on, recite the right-wing talking points how it didn't, I'll point you at the numbers.) Social Security, which while far from perfect has done a significant job in protecting the elderly and disabled. The Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe. The Apollo program, which put human beings on the Moon. ARPAnet, which gave us the Internet. (Which always makes it ironic when someone posts about how no government program ever did anything useful.)
Public education works just fine in most parts of the country. It fails where poverty makes for a low tax base, where violence distracts students, where multi-generational poverty induces learned helplessness and a lack of respect for education.
I mean - if we can get businesses to supplement education funds in any way that is not a rise in taxes, why not?
And why is an ad-supported education better than better than a tax-supported one? Consumers end up paying for the ads in the form of higher prices anyway, and the ads corrode culture and give incentive for the distortion of the curriculum.
Suck it up and raise taxes. A couple extra bucks on our property tax bills each year are worth keeping mega-marketer's filthy hands off kids' brains during the school day.
MVC (original or model 2, thats about as far as defining it needs to go) is a documented softare design pattern. By definition, software design patterns are meant to be standard
Documented by whom?
I've regarded the whole "Design Patterns" thing as 80% sound and fury, 10% obvious ideas restated in high-falutin' language, and 10% that might be useful to some people somewhere, so haven't paid much attention, but I'm really surprised to hear that there's some sort of official standard for them. ISO? ANSI? IETF? What's the standards board for "design patterns"? Thanks.
Now, "irrefutable evidence"? Evidence is always subject to review and refutation by later observation. If you want "irrefutable" go talk to a Bible literalist.
The fact is that most of the global warming theories are based on poor evidence and conjecture.
No, the fact is that most of the "human activity is not impacting the climate" excuses for inaction are based on no evidence and a load of wishful thinking.
You mean the guy who was a licensed plumber, but then bought into a business where he takes on a managerial role and sends out other fully licensed plumbers?
That guy would neither be Samuel Joseph "Joe" Wurzelbacher, nor a plumber. He was never a licensed plumber, nor even a trained one. And did not buy into the business, he was only considering it - a pipe dream, his personal finances were nowhere near in order.
where he takes on a managerial role and sends out other fully licensed plumbers
Well, such a guy would be "Joe the Manager". Again, he would not be Samuel Joseph "Joe" Wurzelbacher.
Even the revised food pyramid puts too much emphasis on carbs, even if you eat mostly complex ones.
Not at all. The majority of caloric intake should be from carbohydrates - at least 55% with 30% fat and 15% protein as maximums, probably more like 70-85% with 10-20% fat and 5-10% protein. (With perhaps slightly higher levels of fat and protein for children, who are building new tissue.)
With their emphasis on fatty and high-protein animal products, the USDA guidelines put too little emphasis on carbs. They're not the best guidelines, but they're a damn sight better than the Standard American Diet or the Low Carb Tragedies.
The reason that Americans have been getting fatter has little to do with the relative proportion of macronutrients in their calories, it's that we're eating more calories - and burning fewer. A perfectly balanced diet won't help you be healthy if you eat 500 calories a day more than you burn.
Fruits and veggies are in a different category, with many fewer recommended servings.
No, there are not "many fewer" recommended servings of fruits and vegetables in the food pyramid, 7 servings of fruits and vegetables versus 9 of grains at 2,200 calories.
Ketosis is a natural state for mankind to enter once a year during the "hunter" phase of the "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle.
The "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle is a hack on top of an ape metabolism based around foraging. Using it as a guide to optimum health is unwise.
Ketosis is great if you like kidney failure and brain damage. It also leads to fatigue, making exercise - the absolute best thing you can do for long-term weight loss and general health - more difficult.
This is most explicitly not what the Food Pyramid on which we have raised our children says. It explicitly instructed you to eat a minimally varied diet based primarily around carbohydrates, and today the situation is little better.
Yes, they rightly told you to get most of your calories from carbs, with a preference for complex carbs. No, they didn't tell you to eat a minimally varied diet - if you got that impression then I'm sorry but you need remedial training in reading comprehension.
"Choose a diet with plenty of vegetables, fruits, and grain products."
"Vegetables, fruits, and grain products...are emphasized in this guideline especially for their complex carbohydrates, dietary fiber, and other food components linked to good health."
"Choose a diet with plenty of grain products, vegetables, and fruits."
"Most of the calories in your diet should come from grain products, vegetables, and fruits.
These include grain products high in complex carbohydrates -- breads, cereals, pasta, rice -- found at the base of the Food Guide Pyramid, as well as vegetables such as potatoes and corn."
"Eat products made from a variety of whole grains...Eat several servings of whole-grain breads and cereals daily."
Human history is only a few thousand years old. It stretches back only as far as the earliest written records.
The historical period was preceded by a more lengthy prehistorical period. Prehistorical humans are, by definition, not part of human history. (No offense, great-great-great-great-...great-great-great-great-pop. But you didn't write down your story.)
When we say "Throughout human history...", we're actually talking about a small percentage of the existence of the species.
It's the measure of money moved around, using goods and services as a way of measuring it.
No. The GDP is the measure of goods and services produced, using money moved around as a way of measuring it.
Summing the market value of all production will only tell you how much was produced. I can give you a bottle of milk. After you drink it, what's left of its value?
The value of a consumable good, just like that of a service, lies in the satisfaction of human needs and wants. The value of that milk after I drink it goes into the satisfaction of my thirst and the improved nutritional state of my body. (Pretending that I consumed dairy products, that is.) It's the same value I create when I give someone a shiatsu session: I have improved the state of their body in a manner which they value.
Other people are investing their past efforts (but it's only money now) on the company, you're not the only one creating value there.
The workers are the only ones creating value. The owners of capital aren't creating anything, any more than I'm creating something when I lend out my hammer. Sure, the owners are a necessary catalyst under the current system; but their necessity is an artifact of an insane system.
If you're the one with a good package for hammer renting (price + convenience + etc), there is nothing wrong with it. Your hammer is not a godsend, it has its own value. He can buy his own if he wants to.
It's hard for him to save enough to buy his own hammer while I'm sucking away most of the value he produces. (Obviously, not literally true in the case of hammers.) The fact that under our current system it's hard for our "carpenter" to "buy his own hammer" - for the people who do the work to control the capital with which they do it - is the problem.
This system whereby control of capital is concentrated into the hands of a few is not a "godsend" either. It is the result of deliberate actions by the state, which creates and enforces various "property rights" and which enacts policies that favor the interests of capital over those of labor.
That does not changes who the money owner is. It is still the average worker. Your disagreement with the rules or management of these funds is a whole different issue.
There is no "money owner", as there is no money. There is stock that may be eventually sold for money.
Ownership is defined by control. If you don't control the stock, if you can't vote it in favor of your interests rather than those of the fund, you don't own it. Making up an idea of "money owners" is a sad way to try to deny this fact.
In the end, all of your points were extremely weak and mostly based on right-wing capitalist ideology. The worst part of your message was all that nonsense and ranting about how drinking milk destroys its value - followed quickly by that "money owner" nonsense. I give it a 4 out of ten: unoriginal and lacking rhythm, you can't even dance to it. But at least the instruments were played competently.
You appear to be the sort of nutjob^H^H^H^H^H^Hfellow that confuses private personal property with private control of capital; such people often become confused when it is pointed out that modern corporate capitalism is not necessary the final apex of human society, that something other than the L-curve is possible.
For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew
Bullshit.
First of all, "history" post-dates civilization. People have been gathering into villages, larger than small tribes, for longer than we've known how to write. So, no, we haven't lived in small tribes for most of human history. Most of us have been living in agricultural villages for all of human history - those few who still maintained a hunter-gatherer lifestyle didn't get recorded and are ahistorical.
Anyway. For most of human existence, to get privacy all you had to do was walk away a bit. If I wanted to have a private conversation with you, walking for twenty minutes out of the campsite or village would do it. And what went on in another hut or teepee was not your business; spying was non-trivial.
This idea that privacy is a temporary anomaly is a bullshit justification by lovers of a surveillance society.
I'm still trying to figure out how all these people got the idea that it was God's given right to owe less on your mortgage than the house is worth.
You do have a right to an accurate and honest assessment of what your home is worth. Anything else is fraud - I presume we agree that fraud is a violation of a person's rights. (Booting for the moment the question of whether these rights are bestowed by supernatural fiat, by deep psychology, or by human need.)
because the USDA, operating on completely bullshit findings from the NIH, told us to eat a lot of carbs on purpose.
They told you to eat a diet based around complex carbs. They were right. They never told you to eat a lot.
Somehow "complex" was too complicated for the average American to comprehend (especially with agribusiness staticing up the channel), and some people (like you) heard "eat a lot", and loaded up on the starches and sugars rather than on whole grains and vegetables.
Linking to an article defending the quack Atkins diet would be merely funny if it weren't tragic. People on Atkins and similar diets put themselves at increased risk of many diseases, and do not lose any more weight than people on other diets of the same calorie level. They're about the worst diet possible - excepting only the aptly-named SAD, the Standard American Diet.
Aside from fads and misinterpretations, the basic message has been consistent and correct for decades: eat a varied and calorically-moderate diet based around vegetables and whole grains, rich in complex carbs and fiber, moderate in protein, and low in fat.
There is increasing understanding of the benefits of monounsaturated fats, but that doesn't mean you should drink fish or flaxseed oil by the cup. There's increased evidence of the benefits of traditional soy foods like miso or natto, but that doesn't mean you should eat a whole bunch of TSP or other processed soy foods.
For an out-of-print book, it seems like the right thing to do is buy it wherever possible
Why? A book that's out of print is only available on the secondary market (unless it just went out of print yesterday or something); the author gets nothing when I buy a used copy. The author gets infinitely more out of the deal if I copy the e-book and send him or her a crisp one dollar bill in the mail, than if I spend five dollars on a used copy of the dead trees version.
The better the second hand price is, the more can be charged for new books.
What new books? The work in question is out of print.
If you want it in a format that isn't legally available, at least buy it in a format that is legally available as well. This is my conclusion to the situation that has been presented of someone who wants to act ethically.
General Electric has a Net Income of 22 billion dollars, and 370 000 workers. That's nearly 60 thousand dollars worth of profit for every single employee.
That "net income" is what's left of their gross profit of $100 billion after expenses, including payroll. So if your numbers are correct, each worker is on average creating $60,000 worth of value that isn't going to them, but goes to stockholders. (Of course some employees own some stock, but not enough to distort the general picture; it's not like GE is an employee-owned company.) That's bit higher than the $50,000 of my previous calculation but well within back-of-the-envelope tolerances. Thank you for the supporting evidence.
Taking only 60k of profit per employee while having to finance such a massive infrastructure is pretty fair.
Rubbish. That "financing" is an artifact of our system, of the centralized control of capital. If I loan a carpenter a hammer, and he creates $25 of value an hour with his skilled labor, something is fundamentally wrong with a system where I can charge him $15 an hour for the use of my hammer.
You also fail to account the fact that most companies are owned by the average american.
Because that's not a fact, but a misconception. Stock owned by your pension fund is not owned by you. If you're invested in MegaBank's Growth and Income fund, and that fund owns 1,000 shares of Amalgamated Profits, Inc., there's not a share with your name on it, and you don't get to vote at their stockholder's meeting, MegaBank does.
These funds are mostly a means of putting more wealth under the control of Wall Street bankers and managers, any wealth that trickles down to fund participants is a side-effect.
Most of it is invested into other parts of the economy. Providing jobs and growth. It would be better if wealth were more evenly distributed but it's not that bad. In effect they are paying everyone elses wages at market rates, ie. supply and demand sets the price not them.
The investment class doesn't "provide jobs and growth" so much as it skims wealth off of the top. The U.S. GDP is about $14 trillion, the workforce of about 150,000,000: the average American worker creates about $93,000 worth of value per year.
This idea that we should be grateful to the wealthy for giving us jobs and growth is like beggars at the back door of the palace heaping praises on the nobility for passing out scraps from the banquet. I say fsck the nobility, time for a little peasant uprising.
Not so much. Yes, reprocessing reduces it somewhat - but creates plutonium factories, great terrorist targets and a huge security problem if we want to find a solution that's globally applicable. And reprocessing produces pollution itself, and doesn't eliminate all the waste. France's "solution" has been the same as the U.S.'s: stick your head in the sand.
Uranium or plutonium fission is a highly sub-optimal energy source. Much better to put resources into developing accelerator-based "energy amplifier" reactors that are subcritical, can burn up nuclear waste, and run on thorium, and also of course fusion, including making better use of that big fusion reactor just 93 million miles away.
The "progressives", the semi-lefties (communists in denial, who "hate russia") were exactly the people who put you-know-who in power, who filled his ranks, who killed Jews for him.
Um, no, I don't know who. The "who killed Jews for him" brings Hitler to mind, but he was a hard-right anti-communist who put "lefties" into concentration camps. It was right-wing union-busters like Henry Ford who were supporting him here in the US. So clearly "you-know-who" isn't Adolf; who, then?
I like to say that the specific progress "progressives" are after is closing the hole between (obviously involuntary) abortion and (mostly obviously involuntary) euthanasia.
WTF? No progressives are in favor of forcing a woman into involuntary abortion; and except for a few edge cases I don't know anyone who favors involuntary euthanasia. (Edge cases being of the form where someone is obviously in a tremendous amount of pain, is obviously going to die very very shortly, and is incapable of communicating and have left no prior instructions dealing with the situation.)
By 1954, Japan had soaked up a tremendous amount of Western culture - deliberately in the period after the Meiji restoration, and via the occupation after WWII. How much influence did Western myths of fire-breathing dragons have here?
Like Mickey Mouse or Zeus or Hamlet, Godzilla belongs to the world.
I've heard the argument that you can't use a name or a derivative thereof in many situations because it would devalue the brand name.
The legitimate purpose of trademark is to protect the consumer by accurately depicting the manufacturer of a good, not to create "value" for "holders" of "brand names".
No doubt it devalues the brand name Microsoft when I say that Vista sucks donkey balls. That doesn't restrict my right to make such a statement.
Sealand can't make the British fuck off. It just doesn't have the power. That makes the claim of sovereignty empty posturing.
Perhaps. But if sovereignty relies on being able to repel invasion by powerful foreign nations, then only the handful of nuclear weapons states and their protectorates are actually sovereign nations. (Mexico? Canada? When we want your land, we'll take it.)
You mean the planned economy that starved tens of millions
The famine of 1931-33, which killed about 4.5 million, was a pre-WWII event, caused by a combination of poor planning and natural disasters and possibly deliberately exploited by Stalin for political ends.
Around the same time, the U.S. experienced the Dust Bowl, caused by a combination of poor planning and natural disasters. Few people died, because of centralized relief efforts and programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Soil Conservation Service.
Is the lesson here a) centralized planning == doubleplus ungood, b) centralized planning == doubleplus good, or c) life is too complicated for simple answers? I"m going with c.
I'm afraid it's not at all clear that FDR's policies did anything to lift us out of the Great Depression.
It has become a favorite canard of conservatives that FDR's policies were either ineffective or lengthened the Depression. A look at the numbers shows that it's nonsense.
The hole dug by Hoover was so deep that it took a while, but FDR's policies reversed the downward trends in production and employment. Employment was higher in 1937 than in any previous year except 1929, the peak of the boom, and reached a new high by 1940. The GDP exceeded 1929 levels in 1937. In fact, looking at these numbers, I have to retract my statement that WWII brought us out of the Depression - contrary to popular wisdom, it seems that the New Deal did that well before the war.
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While vendor lock-in is a common feature in products from established Western vendors, folks in the far East have been building their own custom solutions from a variety of providers for a long while now. Some newer, upstart Western vendors also eschew lock-in.
Of course, at some point in deciding whether the TCO is justified or not we need to ask just what is religion, anyway?
Wait wait wait. Deregulation and lax enforcement brings on a bunch of bad business practices, and you want to argue that the problem is governments getting involved?
Now, if you want to take a long view and say that it's only because of government action that some businesses become "too big to fail", fine. But I don't think you're going to join me in calling for strict limits on the creation and growth of corporations (entities created, after all, by government fiat).
The New Deal, which ended the Great Depression in the U.S. (Go on, recite the right-wing talking points how it didn't, I'll point you at the numbers.) Social Security, which while far from perfect has done a significant job in protecting the elderly and disabled. The Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe. The Apollo program, which put human beings on the Moon. ARPAnet, which gave us the Internet. (Which always makes it ironic when someone posts about how no government program ever did anything useful.)
Public education works just fine in most parts of the country. It fails where poverty makes for a low tax base, where violence distracts students, where multi-generational poverty induces learned helplessness and a lack of respect for education.
And why is an ad-supported education better than better than a tax-supported one? Consumers end up paying for the ads in the form of higher prices anyway, and the ads corrode culture and give incentive for the distortion of the curriculum.
Remember the kid who got suspended for wearing a Pepsi t-shirt during his school's "Coke in Education" day? Is that the kind of country you want to live in?
Suck it up and raise taxes. A couple extra bucks on our property tax bills each year are worth keeping mega-marketer's filthy hands off kids' brains during the school day.
Documented by whom?
I've regarded the whole "Design Patterns" thing as 80% sound and fury, 10% obvious ideas restated in high-falutin' language, and 10% that might be useful to some people somewhere, so haven't paid much attention, but I'm really surprised to hear that there's some sort of official standard for them. ISO? ANSI? IETF? What's the standards board for "design patterns"? Thanks.
Why, yes, actually, it is fairly well established that solar variation is not enough to account for observed climatic effects, and that fossil fuel CO2 emissions are a significant factor.
Now, "irrefutable evidence"? Evidence is always subject to review and refutation by later observation. If you want "irrefutable" go talk to a Bible literalist.
No, the fact is that most of the "human activity is not impacting the climate" excuses for inaction are based on no evidence and a load of wishful thinking.
That guy would neither be Samuel Joseph "Joe" Wurzelbacher, nor a plumber. He was never a licensed plumber, nor even a trained one. And did not buy into the business, he was only considering it - a pipe dream, his personal finances were nowhere near in order.
Well, such a guy would be "Joe the Manager". Again, he would not be Samuel Joseph "Joe" Wurzelbacher.
Not at all. The majority of caloric intake should be from carbohydrates - at least 55% with 30% fat and 15% protein as maximums, probably more like 70-85% with 10-20% fat and 5-10% protein. (With perhaps slightly higher levels of fat and protein for children, who are building new tissue.)
With their emphasis on fatty and high-protein animal products, the USDA guidelines put too little emphasis on carbs. They're not the best guidelines, but they're a damn sight better than the Standard American Diet or the Low Carb Tragedies.
The reason that Americans have been getting fatter has little to do with the relative proportion of macronutrients in their calories, it's that we're eating more calories - and burning fewer. A perfectly balanced diet won't help you be healthy if you eat 500 calories a day more than you burn.
Americans' average caloric intake increased by 24.5 percent between 1970 and 2000, from about 2,170 to 2,700 a day. We sure as hell didn't increase our average activity level by one quarter over that time.
No, there are not "many fewer" recommended servings of fruits and vegetables in the food pyramid, 7 servings of fruits and vegetables versus 9 of grains at 2,200 calories.
The "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle is a hack on top of an ape metabolism based around foraging. Using it as a guide to optimum health is unwise.
Ketosis is great if you like kidney failure and brain damage. It also leads to fatigue, making exercise - the absolute best thing you can do for long-term weight loss and general health - more difficult.
Yes, they rightly told you to get most of your calories from carbs, with a preference for complex carbs. No, they didn't tell you to eat a minimally varied diet - if you got that impression then I'm sorry but you need remedial training in reading comprehension.
1990 dietary guidelines:
1995 dietary guidelines:
2000 dietary guidelines:
Human history is only a few thousand years old. It stretches back only as far as the earliest written records.
The historical period was preceded by a more lengthy prehistorical period. Prehistorical humans are, by definition, not part of human history. (No offense, great-great-great-great-...great-great-great-great-pop. But you didn't write down your story.)
When we say "Throughout human history...", we're actually talking about a small percentage of the existence of the species.
No. The GDP is the measure of goods and services produced, using money moved around as a way of measuring it.
The value of a consumable good, just like that of a service, lies in the satisfaction of human needs and wants. The value of that milk after I drink it goes into the satisfaction of my thirst and the improved nutritional state of my body. (Pretending that I consumed dairy products, that is.) It's the same value I create when I give someone a shiatsu session: I have improved the state of their body in a manner which they value.
The workers are the only ones creating value. The owners of capital aren't creating anything, any more than I'm creating something when I lend out my hammer. Sure, the owners are a necessary catalyst under the current system; but their necessity is an artifact of an insane system.
It's hard for him to save enough to buy his own hammer while I'm sucking away most of the value he produces. (Obviously, not literally true in the case of hammers.) The fact that under our current system it's hard for our "carpenter" to "buy his own hammer" - for the people who do the work to control the capital with which they do it - is the problem.
This system whereby control of capital is concentrated into the hands of a few is not a "godsend" either. It is the result of deliberate actions by the state, which creates and enforces various "property rights" and which enacts policies that favor the interests of capital over those of labor.
There is no "money owner", as there is no money. There is stock that may be eventually sold for money.
Ownership is defined by control. If you don't control the stock, if you can't vote it in favor of your interests rather than those of the fund, you don't own it. Making up an idea of "money owners" is a sad way to try to deny this fact.
In the end, all of your points were extremely weak and mostly based on right-wing capitalist ideology. The worst part of your message was all that nonsense and ranting about how drinking milk destroys its value - followed quickly by that "money owner" nonsense. I give it a 4 out of ten: unoriginal and lacking rhythm, you can't even dance to it. But at least the instruments were played competently.
You appear to be the sort of nutjob^H^H^H^H^H^Hfellow that confuses private personal property with private control of capital; such people often become confused when it is pointed out that modern corporate capitalism is not necessary the final apex of human society, that something other than the L-curve is possible.
HTH. TTFN.
Bullshit.
First of all, "history" post-dates civilization. People have been gathering into villages, larger than small tribes, for longer than we've known how to write. So, no, we haven't lived in small tribes for most of human history. Most of us have been living in agricultural villages for all of human history - those few who still maintained a hunter-gatherer lifestyle didn't get recorded and are ahistorical.
Anyway. For most of human existence, to get privacy all you had to do was walk away a bit. If I wanted to have a private conversation with you, walking for twenty minutes out of the campsite or village would do it. And what went on in another hut or teepee was not your business; spying was non-trivial.
This idea that privacy is a temporary anomaly is a bullshit justification by lovers of a surveillance society.
You do have a right to an accurate and honest assessment of what your home is worth. Anything else is fraud - I presume we agree that fraud is a violation of a person's rights. (Booting for the moment the question of whether these rights are bestowed by supernatural fiat, by deep psychology, or by human need.)
Some lenders conspired to get false assessments to justify huge loans. Federal and state regulators who were supposed to stop this were lax.
A lot - not all, of course, but a lot - of people who now have "upside-down" mortgages were victims of this sort of fraud.
They told you to eat a diet based around complex carbs. They were right. They never told you to eat a lot.
Somehow "complex" was too complicated for the average American to comprehend (especially with agribusiness staticing up the channel), and some people (like you) heard "eat a lot", and loaded up on the starches and sugars rather than on whole grains and vegetables.
Linking to an article defending the quack Atkins diet would be merely funny if it weren't tragic. People on Atkins and similar diets put themselves at increased risk of many diseases, and do not lose any more weight than people on other diets of the same calorie level. They're about the worst diet possible - excepting only the aptly-named SAD, the Standard American Diet.
Aside from fads and misinterpretations, the basic message has been consistent and correct for decades: eat a varied and calorically-moderate diet based around vegetables and whole grains, rich in complex carbs and fiber, moderate in protein, and low in fat.
There is increasing understanding of the benefits of monounsaturated fats, but that doesn't mean you should drink fish or flaxseed oil by the cup. There's increased evidence of the benefits of traditional soy foods like miso or natto, but that doesn't mean you should eat a whole bunch of TSP or other processed soy foods.
Of course, it's basically impossible to argue that using government force to keep people from sharing literature or music or art is ethical.
Why? A book that's out of print is only available on the secondary market (unless it just went out of print yesterday or something); the author gets nothing when I buy a used copy. The author gets infinitely more out of the deal if I copy the e-book and send him or her a crisp one dollar bill in the mail, than if I spend five dollars on a used copy of the dead trees version.
What new books? The work in question is out of print.
You seem to be confusing "law" with "ethics".
The GDP is "the total market value of all final goods and services produced in a country in a given year". It is exactly the measure of the value produced in the economy. (Putting aside for the moment the broken window problem and the need for a GPI.)
That "net income" is what's left of their gross profit of $100 billion after expenses, including payroll. So if your numbers are correct, each worker is on average creating $60,000 worth of value that isn't going to them, but goes to stockholders. (Of course some employees own some stock, but not enough to distort the general picture; it's not like GE is an employee-owned company.) That's bit higher than the $50,000 of my previous calculation but well within back-of-the-envelope tolerances. Thank you for the supporting evidence.
Rubbish. That "financing" is an artifact of our system, of the centralized control of capital. If I loan a carpenter a hammer, and he creates $25 of value an hour with his skilled labor, something is fundamentally wrong with a system where I can charge him $15 an hour for the use of my hammer.
Because that's not a fact, but a misconception. Stock owned by your pension fund is not owned by you. If you're invested in MegaBank's Growth and Income fund, and that fund owns 1,000 shares of Amalgamated Profits, Inc., there's not a share with your name on it, and you don't get to vote at their stockholder's meeting, MegaBank does.
These funds are mostly a means of putting more wealth under the control of Wall Street bankers and managers, any wealth that trickles down to fund participants is a side-effect.
Only if you're buying in a public offering. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of stock transactions take place on the secondary market.
When you have most of the supply locked up, you call the tune. Wealthy individuals and companies don't operate in markets, they use their wealth to control markets.
The investment class doesn't "provide jobs and growth" so much as it skims wealth off of the top. The U.S. GDP is about $14 trillion, the workforce of about 150,000,000: the average American worker creates about $93,000 worth of value per year.
But the average annual wage is only about $39,000.
So where does the majority of that value created by workers go? GDP = rents + interests + profits + wages + some statistical fudge factors. Most of the value created by the average worker goes to the investing class in the form of "unearned" income - profits, interest, and rents.
This idea that we should be grateful to the wealthy for giving us jobs and growth is like beggars at the back door of the palace heaping praises on the nobility for passing out scraps from the banquet. I say fsck the nobility, time for a little peasant uprising.
Not so much. Yes, reprocessing reduces it somewhat - but creates plutonium factories, great terrorist targets and a huge security problem if we want to find a solution that's globally applicable. And reprocessing produces pollution itself, and doesn't eliminate all the waste. France's "solution" has been the same as the U.S.'s: stick your head in the sand.
Some of the wast they ship to Russia. A lot of it lies around in short-term storage, big barrels or holding tanks, and everybody prays for no leaks. They've designated the town of Bure as their main nuclear waste dump, like the U.S. has designated Yucca Mountain, but are getting the same sort of push-back about it.
Uranium or plutonium fission is a highly sub-optimal energy source. Much better to put resources into developing accelerator-based "energy amplifier" reactors that are subcritical, can burn up nuclear waste, and run on thorium, and also of course fusion, including making better use of that big fusion reactor just 93 million miles away.
Um, no, I don't know who. The "who killed Jews for him" brings Hitler to mind, but he was a hard-right anti-communist who put "lefties" into concentration camps. It was right-wing union-busters like Henry Ford who were supporting him here in the US. So clearly "you-know-who" isn't Adolf; who, then?
WTF? No progressives are in favor of forcing a woman into involuntary abortion; and except for a few edge cases I don't know anyone who favors involuntary euthanasia. (Edge cases being of the form where someone is obviously in a tremendous amount of pain, is obviously going to die very very shortly, and is incapable of communicating and have left no prior instructions dealing with the situation.)
Who's culture, indeed - the American version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters , did well in Japan, and introduced Gojira/Godzilla to a worldwide audience.
By 1954, Japan had soaked up a tremendous amount of Western culture - deliberately in the period after the Meiji restoration, and via the occupation after WWII. How much influence did Western myths of fire-breathing dragons have here?
Like Mickey Mouse or Zeus or Hamlet, Godzilla belongs to the world.
The legitimate purpose of trademark is to protect the consumer by accurately depicting the manufacturer of a good, not to create "value" for "holders" of "brand names".
No doubt it devalues the brand name Microsoft when I say that Vista sucks donkey balls. That doesn't restrict my right to make such a statement.
Perhaps. But if sovereignty relies on being able to repel invasion by powerful foreign nations, then only the handful of nuclear weapons states and their protectorates are actually sovereign nations. (Mexico? Canada? When we want your land, we'll take it.)
The problem seem to be that they haven't figured out CSS...if they had figured it out, these pages would be usable and non-ugly.
The famine of 1931-33, which killed about 4.5 million, was a pre-WWII event, caused by a combination of poor planning and natural disasters and possibly deliberately exploited by Stalin for political ends.
Around the same time, the U.S. experienced the Dust Bowl, caused by a combination of poor planning and natural disasters. Few people died, because of centralized relief efforts and programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Soil Conservation Service.
Is the lesson here a) centralized planning == doubleplus ungood, b) centralized planning == doubleplus good, or c) life is too complicated for simple answers? I"m going with c.
It has become a favorite canard of conservatives that FDR's policies were either ineffective or lengthened the Depression. A look at the numbers shows that it's nonsense.
Employment began to recover as the New Deal were put into place. In 1937, due to conservative opposition, New Deal programs were cut - and employment dived. It rose with their restoration. (That's non-farm, non-WPA employment, BTW.)
The GDP shows the same pattern. As does industrial production.
The hole dug by Hoover was so deep that it took a while, but FDR's policies reversed the downward trends in production and employment. Employment was higher in 1937 than in any previous year except 1929, the peak of the boom, and reached a new high by 1940. The GDP exceeded 1929 levels in 1937. In fact, looking at these numbers, I have to retract my statement that WWII brought us out of the Depression - contrary to popular wisdom, it seems that the New Deal did that well before the war.