'Global Warming' is a multi-billion dollar a year industry around the world: if you wouldn't believe McDonalds if they said that their meals are good for you, why would you believe the global warming industry?
well, mainly because i had the chance to work in this "industry" for a while, so i actually know some of the people involved. a few of them are really, really smart, and not many of them are getting rich. as far as i can tell, the ones who ARE making a bundle are the ones whose research funding keeps going up as long as the idiot-in-chief insists that more research, rather than action, is called for.
There were definatly indentured servents, they didn't count as free Persons. Apparently there were also true slaves who were white for a variety of reasons.
1. Their mother was a slave and their father was a slave owner. The children, even the ones who were very white were used as slaves.
2. They were bought from deptors prison. Sometimes these slaves were "indentured" but often they were slaves for life.
3. Orfans in England, specially the irish were sold as slaves in often brough to America.
While there were many many racist views from the southeners who saw blacks as less than equal. Slaves were free labor, and most, had no moral problem with using any slave of any race to futher thier plantation.
Do you have any references for this? I know that there were lots of indentured servants, but as I said, I've never read anywhere that they were (or weren't) considered as Free Persons under the terms of the Constitution. Similarly, though I've done quite a bit of reading of Irish history, I've never seen any reference to white Irish people being brought to the US as slaves, rather than as indentured persons -- and there is a huge difference between the two.
Please note that I am not denying your claims, I'm pleading ignorance.
Oh, but one thing I do take issue with is your first point. It is true that "Even the ones who were very white" were used as slaves, but the reason was that they were legally black. I don't take issue with your claim, it's just that this was indeed racism. It was pure, intellectualized, philosophical racism, and led to all sorts of arguments about how much African ancestry you could have without being considered a Negro (as they used to say, "a single drop" of African blood? or maybe one great-grandparent? etc.)
The show was Saturday Night Live, the "announcer" was Producer Lorne Michaels, and the "huge sumo" of money was $3000: "You divide it up any way you want. If you want to give Ringo less, it's up to you"
Yes it was a long time ago true, but its not true anymore.
He said it is a racist (among other things) anachronism. Note the word "anachronism". The point is that the Electoral College system was created, in part, to prop up the racist slave institutions of the south. Since nobody is interested in doing that anymore, at least one intended function of the Electoral College is anachronistic.
It is too bad that all these years since President Clinton tried to explain it to y'all, many conservatives don't understand that it really does depend on what your definition of "is" is.
The Electoral College "is" a racist anachronism. That doesn't mean that it functions to enforce/abet racism today (although it might, and maybe Mr. Cobb thinks so -- but his followup discussion suggests that this is NOT what he was getting at).
there were non black slaves
Were there white slaves? Where? I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I'm unaware of it. The Constitution doesn't actually refer to slaves, it refers to "free Persons" and "all other Persons". To my knowledge, "all other Persons" was never interpreted to included indentured servants, but I don't know that for a fact. I've never even given it any thought.
You may not have even heard about the city of Samarra. Two weeks ago, that Sunni Triangle city was a "No-go" area for US troops. But guess what? The locals got sick of living in fear from the insurgents and foreign fighters that were there and let them know they weren't welcome. They stopped hosting them in their houses and the mayor of the town brokered a deal with the US commander to return Iraqi government sovereignty to the city without a fight. The people saw what was on the horizon and decided they didn't want their city looking like Fallujah in April or Najaf in August.
Judging from today's news, I guess those people are now disappointed.
This document is not an obvious fake, but it has fake written all over it.
Never assume that sanity is a prerequistite for editing the Constitution! Just remember the 18th Amendment, which shows that even the most far-out lunacies can be elevated to the highest law.
Good point. My Dad used to point out that if the Republicans hadn't jammed through the 2-term limit (in a spiteful, after-the-horse-is-out response to FDR's extended presidency) they could have had Eisenhower in office till the moment he dropped dead. True self-interest is not always obvious to the self.
Hmm, well, I guess I'm willing to support this statement, although I didn't make it.
I don't think the Electoral College is a bad idea per se -- I think that it makes some sense to group people geographically and then have them vote as one, and plenty of people have made arguments, including some interesting mathematical arguments, to demonstrate that the EC increases, rather than decreases, the value of the individual vote.
HOWEVER: What is not at all fair is the formula for distributing electoral college votes. In 2000, Montana had 1 vote for every 300K citizens, & California had only 1 vote for every 600K citizens. Every state gets a minimum of 3 electoral votes, which gives all those gunslingers in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana WAY more than their share -- just as it gives them an outrageously disproportionate influence in the Senate (which I actually consider to be a worse problem). The source for those numbers says:
While largely ignored by Presidential candidates in elections, the smaller states are not as completely irrelevant as they would be otherwise.
This misses the point -- the small states are ignored by the candidates because they ARE NOT SWING STATES. Most are overwhelmingly Republican.
The most surprising thing about American politics right now is that North Dakota and South Dakota have 4 Democratic senators, even though both states vote firmly Republican in the Presidential elections. I don't know what to make of this, other than to suppose that the Rs must be repeatedly nominating wackos for Senator in those states. If the party manages to get its extremists under control, we'll have 4 more R senators, with the result that about a dozen Republican senators will have been elected to represent about 10 million citizens, vs the 88 senators that represent the other 270 million of us.
In any case, since the Constitution isn't going to change anytime soon -- the Republicans would have to be crazy to allow it -- the only real hope for the Democratic party is mass migration. They need to move about 1 million liberal Democrats out of TX, OK, CO, NY and CA into each of ND, SD, WY, MT, ID and UT.
You will note that this is NOT that many people, when all is said and done. If somebody with a lot of money made it their objective, it could be done. Most of the migrants should come from Texas , Oklahoma, and Colorado, where their current residency just serves to increase the number of electors appointed by the Republicans in those states.
Who says a C is average? Generally speaking, a C is the minimum grade that indicates enough understanding to proceed to the next course. Whether you are speaking of the mean or the median, I would hope that the average would be well above C.
From this doc we can see that the college degree question is a bit tricky, because of at least two factors:
a. people over 60 have a much lower rate of college education, and bring down the overall average. presumably, we are more interested in comparing our children to those in the workforce -- the percentage for employed civilians age 25-64 is 32.7%, and for everyone 25-60 it looks like it is about 30%.
b. the 27% stat doesn't include associate's degrees. when you ask people your question, you should be careful to specify, "What percentage of Americans have a bachelor's degree or higher?" Over 50% of folks have SOME college education, though not necessarily a degree. Only 40% of all employed members of the labor force have NO college education, while 55% of unemployed members of the labor force have NO college education.
Beyond all of which, is it unreasonable to suppose that your aunt wished she had been to college, and wished she had been able to send her kids to college?
By the way, what percentage of Americans do you believe perform unskilled labor? (I don't know the answer to that, though I'm sure you can find out at the bureau of labor stats.
The repeating puzzle of these debates is why people feel compelled to have them. Apple will continue to successfully sell to a niche market that appreciates specific values of the Apple product line. I won't bother to enumerate them, it's been done before.
The nature of these disputes is fundamentally fundamentalist: Person A is angry because person B fails to see the revealed truth. The relativity of that truth always fails to impress itself upon the fundamentalist.
My own viewpoint is that instead of ragging at Apple for sticking with PowerPC, we should be ragging at Windows for sticking with Intel. The effect on policy would be identical, but at least we'd be advocating the better ideal. That's my truth.
Including the smokeless ashtray! I can still remember my astonishment the first time I saw an ad for one of these and thought, HEY! that was Al Jaffee's idea!
Why doesn't somebody have the right to put up a fence and say "it's mine" if nobody else has already done the same?
I've got a better question. Why would somebody have that right? Some guy says "I was here first" and puts up a fence. Why should anyone pay any attention to his fence? Why shouldn't everyone just walk over his fence as if it weren't there? Who the hell is this guy to just take permanent, endless possession of this little chunk of the universe? Who does he think he is?
Or, to enter into an agreement with others: "the land over here is mine, the land over there is yours.
This seems a little more reasonable. When somebody enters into such an agreement with others, and they all agree to abide by that agreement and to collectively enforce it, and establish institutions both to enforce that agreement, to define what limitations might apply to that agreement, and to resolve disputes about interpretations of that agreement -- that's what we call "government".
Are you saying that anything that "belongs to me," like the shirt I'm wearing now, only "belongs to me" because the government says so, and that without a government, it wouldn't be my shirt? That seems vapid
It may seem vapid, but only because you've chosen such an apparently trivial item of personal property. If you consider something like an automobile, which required the input of a huge quantity of natural resources, it's worth asking, who gave you the right to seize all those resources and keep them for yourself? And when you go to the particular limit of real estate, suddenly it becomes much less vapid. And when you go to the absurd limit of intellectual property, the argument begins to seem vapid from the other direction.
"Wait a minute. I have a fatal disease. The cure can be produced in my kitchen with an hour of work and a dollar's worth of ingredients -- but if I make this cure for myself, I have to pay the Very Big Corporation of America all the money I will ever earn. Or just give up and die. Who says so?"
So what gives governments the right to grant property to you? Can they walk out into an open plain and claim it? Uh, well, I don't know. That has been the basic assumption of our entire civilization. Most of the private property in the United States became private precisely because the government granted deeds to individuals. Nowadays, some people question whether this was/is okay -- but they are generally dismissed as Communists/ Socialists/ Anarchists/ PC/ Unamerican/etc.
My whole point is that Rand's statement makes no sense. What gives governments the right to grant property? I don't know, and maybe they don't have that right, but if they don't Rand's philosophy runs into some serious trouble, since it becomes difficult to understand why I shouldn't be able to just go walking out onto a 'private' beach and go swimming. Who made it private, and why should I care what they say?
In the U.S. Declaration of Independence the belief was that people had inalienable rights. These rights could not be taken away, even by government, and they were not granted by government. Among them was the right to property.
Actually, the only specified unalienable rights are "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Here's the actual content (boldface emphasis mine):
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
The Constitution itself is primarily concerned with defining the power relationships of the institutions of government. The Bill of Rights, however has this to say:
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...
Amendment V
No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Thus, in the Bill of Rights we see ourselves (We the People, you know) establishing through our government (deriving its authority from our consent to be governed) some fundamental limitations on how the government is to treat private property. The implication being that this needs to be spelled out. These amendments could just as easily have said "Officers of the government shall seize private property when and where it pleases them," except that We the People didn't want things to be that way.
Actually, the Rand quote mostly serves to demonstrate the complete intellectual bankruptcy of Rand's approach to ethics. Private property is established by and enforced by governments. No individual has the 'right' to walk out onto an open, uninhabited plain and say, "I WAS HERE FIRST! THIS IS ALL MINE! NOBODY CAN COME HERE!" You can disguise this reality with qualifiers like "legitimately earned", but here again, it is society that determines what is legitimate and what is not. You may be tempted to dissociate society from government, but it can't be reasonably done, which is why a true-believer like Thatcher found herself compelled to assert, "There is no such thing as society. There are individuals and there are families." What a silly creature she is.
This occurred to me a couple of years ago. I've since read a few essays about it.
I am confident that one day, some graduate student will insert the genes for THC into a dandelion, and that will be the end of the war on marijuana.
Shortly after that, terrorists will realize that they can compromise the entire food supply by putting even worse stuff into corn and wheat and letting nature take over.
Acadians are descended from French-Canadian exiles who fled Nova Scotia (aka Acadia) for south Louisiana centuries ago
"exiles who fled" is a bit of a misstatement. They were rounded up by the British, pushed onto ships, and carried off to Louisiana. If Dad happened to be out fishing when his family was carted off -- too bad.
So, like, a bazillion responders are saying, hey, it only references this one old newspaper article and Discover and doncha know Discover does April Fool's articles and blah blah blah blah.
Instead of yackety-yacking, try googling for "thermal depolymerization". You'll see quickly enough that there is plenty of other coverage. How many frickin links should I have put into the original post?
Note to self: NEVER submit an article to slashdot on March 31.
A lot of folks seem to be irked because this is "old news", but the "new" news is that the Con-Agra plant is about to go on-line, which to me moves this up out of the pie-in-the-sky category into the this-might-really-work category. And hey, I searched slashdot for "depolymerization" and came up empty.
Which reminds me, to whomever the guy was who sneeringly suggested that turkeys aren't made of polymers -- well, I could make a stupid joke about the quality of factory-farmed food, or I could observe that proteins are polymers. In any event, one of the cool things about this tech is that it can supposedly take plastics and turn them back into petroleum.
And, not to be whiny, but my original submission made the now-common observation that apparently even the REAL reason for the Iraqi war is invalid.
BS. My floor and deck are 100% pine, my couches are solid oak frames w/genuine leather cushions, my living room set is all oak, my exterior walls are stone, my bathtub is cast iron, my countertops are marble, my floor tiles are marble, my patio furniture is aluminum and my (non-LOTR) chess set is jade.
Hey, give me a break. My note referenced an archetypal "you" -- the average american living on an average wage. The examples you present identify you as someone who either a) makes a lot more money than the average american, or b) chooses expensive, high-quality natural materials and forgoes other varieties of comfort or indulgence that most Americans prefer not to sacrifice.
Drive by any middle-class suburban development and count the houses with vinyl siding versus those with stone walls. In these parts, the ratio is likely to be NAN. A cast iron bathtub (without whirlpool jets) costs $2000. An acrylic tub costs $200. The typical home today is built with a fiberglass tub/shower enclosure, not a cast-iron Kohler tub.
Many people these days can't even tell the difference. The last time I was shopping for used furniture, I saw several particle-board tables that had been advertised as oak by their owners.
We now know that people still live in wood and brick houses
Well, yes, but... Your kitchen cabinets and most of your cheap, assemble-it-yourself furniture are made of particle board (wood fibers glued together in a plastic matrix). Your countertops are particle board and formica if you're a working joe, and Corian if you're a yuppie. Your subfloor -- and your roof sheeting -- are Oriented StrandBoard (wood fibers glued together in a plastic matrix). Your floor is probably "tiled" with either polyurethane or vinyl, and carpeted with recycled polyester. Your exterior walls have an OSB layer (if you're lucky), a polystyrene insulating layer, and more probably vinyl than brick to face the elements. Your bathtub is either acrylic or fiberglass (silica fibers in a polyester matrix). Your deck is quite likely to be either sheathed in plastic, or simply made of plastic. Your couch is upholstered with polyurethane foam covered with polyester fabric. Your patio furniture is, of course, resin (plastic). Your LOTR chess set is resin (plastic).
etc.
Okay, nobody seems to have actually gotten this right. There are RIGHT NOW, ON THE ROAD, several models of vehicles that can run on up to 85% ethanol. You might be driving one. For example:
1998 & later Chrysler/Dodge/Plymouth minivans with the 3.3Liter (NOT the 3.8) V6
1999 & 2000 Ford Ranger 3.0L
some(?) 2001 & 2002 Ranger supercab 3.0L
misc Taurus sedans & wagons
etc.
2002 will see several SUVs hit the road too. The cars have smart fuel injection etc. that detects the relative ethanol content, so you can fill up anywhere, mixing E85 and regular fuel as necessary. This fuel is available in many places, especially in Minnesota, North Dakota, and around Chicago. Sometimes it is cheaper than gasoline. (Almost always in Minnesota, where the state subsidizes it.) The Bush government, by the way, has given pretty good lip service to the fuel. Advantages of ethanol include:
it's renewable
it's a highly oxygenated fuel, so produces less smog, without destroying the supply of drinking water (a la MTBE).
at 85% it's over 100 octane. YOW. You get about a 5% horsepower boost.
Disadvantages include:
it's apparently more expensive than oil. hard to say, really, since most calculations of the cost of gasoline don't include, for example, the price of two New York sky-scrapers.
you get about 5% fewer miles per gallon of fuel, so you need to fill up more often.
uh . . . that's about it really.
Most of websites that cover this fuel are pretty crummy, but this one doesn't seem too bad.
I wish people stopped using the word "evil". The moment you have to accuse your opponents of being evil, you should stop and think.
I understand where you're coming from, but on the other hand, if the conversation were really about Nazis, I wouldn't want someone to be afraid to say "Nazi".
Indeed, it's annoying that the word "fascist" is almost unavailable to us because of it's tight association with Naziism. If people knew anything about Mussolini's doctrine of Fascism, they might be surprised to see that it is almost indistinguishable from the sort of institutions created by the World Trade Org et al.
At any rate, I don't casually use the word evil, but the policies and practices of the pro-corporatists map way way out to the extreme negative end of my personal morality axis. Every day billions of human beings endure unconscionable suffering exactly and directly because of the activities of these people.
I find it interesting that even in this nice discussion of how the bad guys have managed to co-opt the terminology of the globalism debate, there is language that clouds our perspective:
due to lack of ability of most third world workers to move to democratic countries that respect workers' rights To me, the proper terminology here isn't about countries respecting rights; it's about power. Try this instead:
"due to lack of ability of most third world workers to move to democratic countries where they, rather than corporations, would have power and sovereignty over the terms of their lives and their society."
It may seem a trivial distinction, but it's not. Democratic countries may or may not respect workers' rights -- it is up to the workers to use democratic political power to ensure that this happens. In the US a huge number of workers vote against their own political and economic interests out of fear that the Democrats will take away their guns and lure their daughters into abortion clinics. (I make no claims about the validity of this fear; I only note that it allows the minions of evil, who are mostly unconcerned about guns or babies, to suck up these peoples' votes.)
The power elites are not served by copylefting. It undermines all the institutions that put them where they are and keep them there.
BG ignored the government until it attacked him.
Uh... yeah. If he hadn't been ignoring the government -- in particular, those laws the government made that didn't serve to make him wealthier -- the government wouldn't be attacking him.
because proprietary software can allow people with nothing more than a good idea and a few thousand dollars to become billionaires, it plainly represents a threat to the power elites.
Um... yeah. Except of course that the venture capital that funds most of these startups comes from the very wealthy. And the insiders who get to buy into the IPO, then sell the same day at huge profits -- they tend to pretty rich too.
The rich get richer by buying property and then renting it or selling it for much more than it originally cost them. Inventing new kinds of property (like copyrighted software, for instance) just gives them more opportunities. They also get richer by finding ways to create monopolies, which remove whatever limitations the "free market" might put on their potential profits. Again, software copyrights -- and patents -- are the purest of monopolies.
Slashdot Mirror
well, mainly because i had the chance to work in this "industry" for a while, so i actually know some of the people involved. a few of them are really, really smart, and not many of them are getting rich. as far as i can tell, the ones who ARE making a bundle are the ones whose research funding keeps going up as long as the idiot-in-chief insists that more research, rather than action, is called for.
free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years,
So the only remaining question in my mind is, were there any actual slaves who were of indisputable "pure" European ancestry?
1. Their mother was a slave and their father was a slave owner. The children, even the ones who were very white were used as slaves.
2. They were bought from deptors prison. Sometimes these slaves were "indentured" but often they were slaves for life.
3. Orfans in England, specially the irish were sold as slaves in often brough to America.
While there were many many racist views from the southeners who saw blacks as less than equal. Slaves were free labor, and most, had no moral problem with using any slave of any race to futher thier plantation.
Do you have any references for this? I know that there were lots of indentured servants, but as I said, I've never read anywhere that they were (or weren't) considered as Free Persons under the terms of the Constitution. Similarly, though I've done quite a bit of reading of Irish history, I've never seen any reference to white Irish people being brought to the US as slaves, rather than as indentured persons -- and there is a huge difference between the two.
Please note that I am not denying your claims, I'm pleading ignorance.
Oh, but one thing I do take issue with is your first point. It is true that "Even the ones who were very white" were used as slaves, but the reason was that they were legally black. I don't take issue with your claim, it's just that this was indeed racism. It was pure, intellectualized, philosophical racism, and led to all sorts of arguments about how much African ancestry you could have without being considered a Negro (as they used to say, "a single drop" of African blood? or maybe one great-grandparent? etc.)
The show was Saturday Night Live, the "announcer" was Producer Lorne Michaels, and the "huge sumo" of money was $3000: "You divide it up any way you want. If you want to give Ringo less, it's up to you"
He said it is a racist (among other things) anachronism. Note the word "anachronism". The point is that the Electoral College system was created, in part, to prop up the racist slave institutions of the south. Since nobody is interested in doing that anymore, at least one intended function of the Electoral College is anachronistic.
It is too bad that all these years since President Clinton tried to explain it to y'all, many conservatives don't understand that it really does depend on what your definition of "is" is.
The Electoral College "is" a racist anachronism. That doesn't mean that it functions to enforce/abet racism today (although it might, and maybe Mr. Cobb thinks so -- but his followup discussion suggests that this is NOT what he was getting at).
there were non black slaves
Were there white slaves? Where? I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I'm unaware of it. The Constitution doesn't actually refer to slaves, it refers to "free Persons" and "all other Persons". To my knowledge, "all other Persons" was never interpreted to included indentured servants, but I don't know that for a fact. I've never even given it any thought.
Judging from today's news, I guess those people are now disappointed.
This document is not an obvious fake, but it has fake written all over it.
Never assume that sanity is a prerequistite for editing the Constitution! Just remember the 18th Amendment, which shows that even the most far-out lunacies can be elevated to the highest law. Good point. My Dad used to point out that if the Republicans hadn't jammed through the 2-term limit (in a spiteful, after-the-horse-is-out response to FDR's extended presidency) they could have had Eisenhower in office till the moment he dropped dead. True self-interest is not always obvious to the self.
Hmm, well, I guess I'm willing to support this statement, although I didn't make it.
I don't think the Electoral College is a bad idea per se -- I think that it makes some sense to group people geographically and then have them vote as one, and plenty of people have made arguments, including some interesting mathematical arguments, to demonstrate that the EC increases, rather than decreases, the value of the individual vote.
HOWEVER: What is not at all fair is the formula for distributing electoral college votes. In 2000, Montana had 1 vote for every 300K citizens, & California had only 1 vote for every 600K citizens. Every state gets a minimum of 3 electoral votes, which gives all those gunslingers in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana WAY more than their share -- just as it gives them an outrageously disproportionate influence in the Senate (which I actually consider to be a worse problem). The source for those numbers says:
While largely ignored by Presidential candidates in elections, the smaller states are not as completely irrelevant as they would be otherwise.
This misses the point -- the small states are ignored by the candidates because they ARE NOT SWING STATES. Most are overwhelmingly Republican.
The most surprising thing about American politics right now is that North Dakota and South Dakota have 4 Democratic senators, even though both states vote firmly Republican in the Presidential elections. I don't know what to make of this, other than to suppose that the Rs must be repeatedly nominating wackos for Senator in those states. If the party manages to get its extremists under control, we'll have 4 more R senators, with the result that about a dozen Republican senators will have been elected to represent about 10 million citizens, vs the 88 senators that represent the other 270 million of us.
In any case, since the Constitution isn't going to change anytime soon -- the Republicans would have to be crazy to allow it -- the only real hope for the Democratic party is mass migration. They need to move about 1 million liberal Democrats out of TX, OK, CO, NY and CA into each of ND, SD, WY, MT, ID and UT.
You will note that this is NOT that many people, when all is said and done. If somebody with a lot of money made it their objective, it could be done. Most of the migrants should come from Texas , Oklahoma, and Colorado, where their current residency just serves to increase the number of electors appointed by the Republicans in those states.
From this doc we can see that the college degree question is a bit tricky, because of at least two factors:
a. people over 60 have a much lower rate of college education, and bring down the overall average. presumably, we are more interested in comparing our children to those in the workforce -- the percentage for employed civilians age 25-64 is 32.7%, and for everyone 25-60 it looks like it is about 30%.
b. the 27% stat doesn't include associate's degrees. when you ask people your question, you should be careful to specify, "What percentage of Americans have a bachelor's degree or higher?" Over 50% of folks have SOME college education, though not necessarily a degree. Only 40% of all employed members of the labor force have NO college education, while 55% of unemployed members of the labor force have NO college education.
Beyond all of which, is it unreasonable to suppose that your aunt wished she had been to college, and wished she had been able to send her kids to college?
By the way, what percentage of Americans do you believe perform unskilled labor? (I don't know the answer to that, though I'm sure you can find out at the bureau of labor stats.
The repeating puzzle of these debates is why people feel compelled to have them. Apple will continue to successfully sell to a niche market that appreciates specific values of the Apple product line. I won't bother to enumerate them, it's been done before.
The nature of these disputes is fundamentally fundamentalist: Person A is angry because person B fails to see the revealed truth. The relativity of that truth always fails to impress itself upon the fundamentalist.
My own viewpoint is that instead of ragging at Apple for sticking with PowerPC, we should be ragging at Windows for sticking with Intel. The effect on policy would be identical, but at least we'd be advocating the better ideal. That's my truth.
Including the smokeless ashtray! I can still remember my astonishment the first time I saw an ad for one of these and thought, HEY! that was Al Jaffee's idea!
Why doesn't somebody have the right to put up a fence and say "it's mine" if nobody else has already done the same?
I've got a better question. Why would somebody have that right? Some guy says "I was here first" and puts up a fence. Why should anyone pay any attention to his fence? Why shouldn't everyone just walk over his fence as if it weren't there? Who the hell is this guy to just take permanent, endless possession of this little chunk of the universe? Who does he think he is?
Or, to enter into an agreement with others: "the land over here is mine, the land over there is yours.
This seems a little more reasonable. When somebody enters into such an agreement with others, and they all agree to abide by that agreement and to collectively enforce it, and establish institutions both to enforce that agreement, to define what limitations might apply to that agreement, and to resolve disputes about interpretations of that agreement -- that's what we call "government".
Are you saying that anything that "belongs to me," like the shirt I'm wearing now, only "belongs to me" because the government says so, and that without a government, it wouldn't be my shirt? That seems vapid
It may seem vapid, but only because you've chosen such an apparently trivial item of personal property. If you consider something like an automobile, which required the input of a huge quantity of natural resources, it's worth asking, who gave you the right to seize all those resources and keep them for yourself? And when you go to the particular limit of real estate, suddenly it becomes much less vapid. And when you go to the absurd limit of intellectual property, the argument begins to seem vapid from the other direction.
"Wait a minute. I have a fatal disease. The cure can be produced in my kitchen with an hour of work and a dollar's worth of ingredients -- but if I make this cure for myself, I have to pay the Very Big Corporation of America all the money I will ever earn. Or just give up and die. Who says so?"
The government says so, baby.
So what gives governments the right to grant property to you? Can they walk out into an open plain and claim it?
...
... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Uh, well, I don't know. That has been the basic assumption of our entire civilization. Most of the private property in the United States became private precisely because the government granted deeds to individuals. Nowadays, some people question whether this was/is okay -- but they are generally dismissed as Communists/ Socialists/ Anarchists/ PC/ Unamerican/etc.
My whole point is that Rand's statement makes no sense. What gives governments the right to grant property? I don't know, and maybe they don't have that right, but if they don't Rand's philosophy runs into some serious trouble, since it becomes difficult to understand why I shouldn't be able to just go walking out onto a 'private' beach and go swimming. Who made it private, and why should I care what they say?
In the U.S. Declaration of Independence the belief was that people had inalienable rights. These rights could not be taken away, even by government, and they were not granted by government. Among them was the right to property.
Actually, the only specified unalienable rights are "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Here's the actual content (boldface emphasis mine):
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
The Constitution itself is primarily concerned with defining the power relationships of the institutions of government. The Bill of Rights, however has this to say:
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated
Amendment V
No person shall be
Thus, in the Bill of Rights we see ourselves (We the People, you know) establishing through our government (deriving its authority from our consent to be governed) some fundamental limitations on how the government is to treat private property. The implication being that this needs to be spelled out. These amendments could just as easily have said "Officers of the government shall seize private property when and where it pleases them," except that We the People didn't want things to be that way.
Actually, the Rand quote mostly serves to demonstrate the complete intellectual bankruptcy of Rand's approach to ethics. Private property is established by and enforced by governments. No individual has the 'right' to walk out onto an open, uninhabited plain and say, "I WAS HERE FIRST! THIS IS ALL MINE! NOBODY CAN COME HERE!" You can disguise this reality with qualifiers like "legitimately earned", but here again, it is society that determines what is legitimate and what is not.
You may be tempted to dissociate society from government, but it can't be reasonably done, which is why a true-believer like Thatcher found herself compelled to assert, "There is no such thing as society. There are individuals and there are families." What a silly creature she is.
This occurred to me a couple of years ago. I've since read a few essays about it.
I am confident that one day, some graduate student will insert the genes for THC into a dandelion, and that will be the end of the war on marijuana.
Shortly after that, terrorists will realize that they can compromise the entire food supply by putting even worse stuff into corn and wheat and letting nature take over.
Acadians are descended from French-Canadian exiles who fled Nova Scotia (aka Acadia) for south Louisiana centuries ago
"exiles who fled" is a bit of a misstatement. They were rounded up by the British, pushed onto ships, and carried off to Louisiana. If Dad happened to be out fishing when his family was carted off -- too bad.
So, like, a bazillion responders are saying, hey, it only references this one old newspaper article and Discover and doncha know Discover does April Fool's articles and blah blah blah blah.
Instead of yackety-yacking, try googling for "thermal depolymerization". You'll see quickly enough that there is plenty of other coverage. How many frickin links should I have put into the original post?
Note to self: NEVER submit an article to slashdot on March 31.
A lot of folks seem to be irked because this is "old news", but the "new" news is that the Con-Agra plant is about to go on-line, which to me moves this up out of the pie-in-the-sky category into the this-might-really-work category. And hey, I searched slashdot for "depolymerization" and came up empty.
Which reminds me, to whomever the guy was who sneeringly suggested that turkeys aren't made of polymers -- well, I could make a stupid joke about the quality of factory-farmed food, or I could observe that proteins are polymers. In any event, one of the cool things about this tech is that it can supposedly take plastics and turn them back into petroleum.
And, not to be whiny, but my original submission made the now-common observation that apparently even the REAL reason for the Iraqi war is invalid.
Hey, give me a break. My note referenced an archetypal "you" -- the average american living on an average wage. The examples you present identify you as someone who either a) makes a lot more money than the average american, or b) chooses expensive, high-quality natural materials and forgoes other varieties of comfort or indulgence that most Americans prefer not to sacrifice.
Drive by any middle-class suburban development and count the houses with vinyl siding versus those with stone walls. In these parts, the ratio is likely to be NAN. A cast iron bathtub (without whirlpool jets) costs $2000. An acrylic tub costs $200. The typical home today is built with a fiberglass tub/shower enclosure, not a cast-iron Kohler tub.
Many people these days can't even tell the difference. The last time I was shopping for used furniture, I saw several particle-board tables that had been advertised as oak by their owners.
Well, yes, but ... Your kitchen cabinets and most of your cheap, assemble-it-yourself furniture are made of particle board (wood fibers glued together in a plastic matrix). Your countertops are particle board and formica if you're a working joe, and Corian if you're a yuppie. Your subfloor -- and your roof sheeting -- are Oriented StrandBoard (wood fibers glued together in a plastic matrix). Your floor is probably "tiled" with either polyurethane or vinyl, and carpeted with recycled polyester. Your exterior walls have an OSB layer (if you're lucky), a polystyrene insulating layer, and more probably vinyl than brick to face the elements. Your bathtub is either acrylic or fiberglass (silica fibers in a polyester matrix). Your deck is quite likely to be either sheathed in plastic, or simply made of plastic. Your couch is upholstered with polyurethane foam covered with polyester fabric. Your patio furniture is, of course, resin (plastic). Your LOTR chess set is resin (plastic).
etc.
- 1998 & later Chrysler/Dodge/Plymouth minivans with the 3.3Liter (NOT the 3.8) V6
- 1999 & 2000 Ford Ranger 3.0L
- some(?) 2001 & 2002 Ranger supercab 3.0L
- misc Taurus sedans & wagons
- etc.
2002 will see several SUVs hit the road too. The cars have smart fuel injection etc. that detects the relative ethanol content, so you can fill up anywhere, mixing E85 and regular fuel as necessary.This fuel is available in many places, especially in Minnesota, North Dakota, and around Chicago. Sometimes it is cheaper than gasoline. (Almost always in Minnesota, where the state subsidizes it.) The Bush government, by the way, has given pretty good lip service to the fuel.
Advantages of ethanol include:
- it's renewable
- it's a highly oxygenated fuel, so produces less smog, without destroying the supply of drinking water (a la MTBE).
- at 85% it's over 100 octane. YOW. You get about a 5% horsepower boost.
Disadvantages include:- it's apparently more expensive than oil. hard to say, really, since most calculations of the cost of gasoline don't include, for example, the price of two New York sky-scrapers.
- you get about 5% fewer miles per gallon of fuel, so you need to fill up more often.
- uh . . . that's about it really.
Most of websites that cover this fuel are pretty crummy, but this one doesn't seem too bad.I wish people stopped using the word "evil".
The moment you have to accuse your opponents of being evil, you should stop and think.
I understand where you're coming from, but on the other hand, if the conversation were really about Nazis, I wouldn't want someone to be afraid to say "Nazi".
Indeed, it's annoying that the word "fascist" is almost unavailable to us because of it's tight association with Naziism. If people knew anything about Mussolini's doctrine of Fascism, they might be surprised to see that it is almost indistinguishable from the sort of institutions created by the World Trade Org et al.
At any rate, I don't casually use the word evil, but the policies and practices of the pro-corporatists map way way out to the extreme negative end of my personal morality axis. Every day billions of human beings endure unconscionable suffering exactly and directly because of the activities of these people.
How about 1 vote for every ancestor who ever died defending the property rights of the wealthy?
I find it interesting that even in this nice discussion of how the bad guys have managed to co-opt the terminology of the globalism debate, there is language that clouds our perspective:
due to lack of ability of most third world workers to move to democratic countries that respect workers' rights
To me, the proper terminology here isn't about countries respecting rights; it's about power. Try this instead:
"due to lack of ability of most third world workers to move to democratic countries where they, rather than corporations, would have power and sovereignty over the terms of their lives and their society."
It may seem a trivial distinction, but it's not. Democratic countries may or may not respect workers' rights -- it is up to the workers to use democratic political power to ensure that this happens. In the US a huge number of workers vote against their own political and economic interests out of fear that the Democrats will take away their guns and lure their daughters into abortion clinics. (I make no claims about the validity of this fear; I only note that it allows the minions of evil, who are mostly unconcerned about guns or babies, to suck up these peoples' votes.)
The power elites are not served by copylefting. It undermines all the institutions that put them where they are and keep them there.
... yeah. If he hadn't been ignoring the government -- in particular, those laws the government made that didn't serve to make him wealthier -- the government wouldn't be attacking him.
... yeah. Except of course that the venture capital that funds most of these startups comes from the very wealthy. And the insiders who get to buy into the IPO, then sell the same day at huge profits -- they tend to pretty rich too.
BG ignored the government until it attacked him.
Uh
because proprietary software can allow people with nothing more than a good idea and a few thousand dollars to become billionaires, it plainly represents a threat to the power elites.
Um
The rich get richer by buying property and then renting it or selling it for much more than it originally cost them. Inventing new kinds of property (like copyrighted software, for instance) just gives them more opportunities. They also get richer by finding ways to create monopolies, which remove whatever limitations the "free market" might put on their potential profits. Again, software copyrights -- and patents -- are the purest of monopolies.