Terrible crime will continue so long as terrible abridgements of liberty continue--people are always going to want grog, coke, meth and weed, and many people are ready to pay a lot of money for it. And just as many people are ready to do whatever they need to to make some money.
This is going to do is cause prices to go up, which in turn will lead to worse turf wars and drug related violence, which shakes everything else around it up. It's a white elephant, I hope this post will encourage some/.ers to look into this. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) is a great place to start. We're talking $69,000,000,000/year to fight MARIJUANA. In fact, well over 800,000 in '06 went to prison solely for marijuana related charges, of these something like 70, 80% are minorities (though by a very large margin, drug users are white). If you want to get rid of crime, you need to get rid of the black market for drugs.
if this piece of hardware was capable of "overc[oming] the built-in system redundancy", perhaps its ilk ought to be patrolling the transistorized wunderplatz of interconnected morsels governing our most hubris means of transportation? I, for one, would certainly feel safer.
There are just certain 'cracks' as you call them that may never be explainable in the scientific sense.
I'm afraid the inability of classical science to handle your examples doesn't mean the reactions could be a sign of God--science isn't a pole across from God; it's a changing set of laws, theories and analogs with recommended procedure for refining (or completely changine) the set of laws, theories and analogs. The cracks in our knowledge are real and need no diety to exist.
Lightning, earthquakes and the stars in the sky are one thing. However qualia [wikipedia.org], the birth of the universe, and most of all, the mind-body problem are issues which are not just going to go away, no matter how much people wish them to.
Complex phenomena arises from increased basic phenomena, and there is alot of basic phenomena that humans understand. God lives where humans' ability to attribute phenomena to basic understanding falls short. My friend is a great mechanic, and just yesterday we were on our way to Pennsylvania in his Ford Taurus. Half way, the engine started backfiring. The car has been well maintained, is fuel injected, and is driven quite often. The first thing that probably comes to mind is ignition problems, however that spans everything from timing sensors to ignition modules and coils, spark plugs, etc. There a million mechanical things we could've pulled over and checked, and when we did, there was nothing wrong. Turns out we bought bad gas at the Shell at 5 points in Levittown (not the first time, which is why I've listed the location). But what if he had been running low on gas, and while we were debating which part of the ignition system it was, we filled up and didn't even think of the gas? We'd be bad mechanics, just like anyone entertaining the idea of an actual diety--acutely, those who believe in the god of the Bible and other widely accepted religions they had shown to them--is being a bad free thinking individual. If we took away the books and memories, there'd be no evidence until a "prophet" wrote new ones, and then there'd be all the evidence in the world. Unless, of course, you're going to defend Zoroaster.
There's a difference between the government holding records of your whereabouts and associations indefinately so that one day they may incarcerate you/fine you/make you late for something just so you know who's in charge, and a credit card company having access to your financial records. As your post pointed out, GP CAN choose to get rid of his cell phone and stop using credit cards, which is the beauty of a free society. He could NOT, however, choose to get away from government monitoring in places like London.
First of all, burning an American flag is already illegal... not to mention a good way to get yourself injured/killed by patriotic citizens.
If burning an American flag makes you feel better and it's not toxic, why should it be illegal? A fellow patriot would not injur/kill a flag burner; they'd understand that's their right (as it does not infringe on anyone elses essential liberties) and, no matter if they found it offensive or not, would tolerate it. Besides, it's the message and philosophies of freedom that make liberty-centered places great, a flag's just a flag.
Now, who decides what laws are asinine?
Vigilant people decide what laws are asinine--the rest of the population let other people decide what laws are asinine, if they care enough to believe at all (both of which, regardless of how ignorant, are their right). And maybe you've heard of elected officials populating the corpus of our legislative branch?
You used the example of the American flag, only to then turn around and try to defend drug abuse.
You used the example of a high-volume/indefinate/ data retention system, only to turn around and use the bullying by "patriotic citizens" to curtail someone's efforts to burn a flag they own on their own property. Do you think you're protecting people? How compatible are your ideals?
In my book, drug addicts are the most significant problem we deal with today in the country. In Oregon, according to the last article I read, 80% of all property crime in the state was methamphetamine related. Since we disagree, are drug laws asinine or not?
When methamphetamine is illegal, cartels control prices (and, in the US, the government controls supplies and cartels as well, but that's another story) and they're always artificially high because of the risk associated with transporting illegal substances (/especially/ something like meth). If you're a free citizen of this country and you decide you'd like to try methamphetamines, you can't get it anywhere but drug dealers. When people start getting addicted to methamphetamine, all of a sudden they have no money for anything else because it's so expensive/which directly leads to property rights infringment/. People steal shit to settle drug scores, you obviously don't disagree, so wouldn't making meth legal (and thusly cheaper, more consistent and higher quality) be a better deterent for meth addicts to make off with your junk? Then there's the issue of drug related violence: if that same citizen realizes what they're doing and want to stop doing meth, but their dealer doesn't want a good customer gone, the dealer can bully the user into whatever they want. Since drugs are illegal, the user generally has no recourse with the branches of government that are supposed to protect individual liberties. Even in this example where the user wants to stop, the user probably has a long history that would be dug through by police to get other "criminals"--this might include her friends (friends that might not necessarily have a meth problem, but use it when they deem appropriate to no abuse), and she's not about to turn them in (and plus she's just scared after years of living in fear of police). As others have stated, drug laws (and many laws in general) exist only as revenue generators for law enforcement/judiciaries and as support boons for politicians.
The second part of your argument that really made no sense was when you used that statement "vigorously pursue average peaceful citizens". You do realize that in order to violate a crime, a person does not have to be violent, right? According to that statement, you make it sound as though as long as a criminal is not committing a violent crime, they should not be pursed. Could you please explain your flawed logic?
I agree that if laws are passed, they should be followed--why go to the lengths/costs to make a law if not to enforce it?, not to mention it waters down the usability of other laws (if a's not in trouble, why should b be?) However these laws are clearly asinine (especially at a FEDERAL level), and should be sorted out by local government. You're really a stupid fucker.
|| It costs a lot of money to run 25,000 watts all day!!
| Using residential rate of $0.075/kWh (which I seem to be paying these days) this amounts to whopping 45 dollars for a non-stop 24 hours broadcast. This expense is not even on the radar of a TV broadcaster; the coffee and water service costs more.
That's the transmission power--the power needed by the transmitters to create that much radiation is considerably more. It's been a few years since I've looked at the figures (my friends and I were trying to open a radio station), but all large transmitters radiate quite a bit of heat, which is lost efficiency right off the bat. Not to mention, because of the heat and the nature of radio wave transmission of that magnitude, parts need to be replaced quite often; the power tubes alone are several hundred to several thousand dollars a piece, and parts for most solid state transmitters of comparable size are even more expensive. And these were just numbers for middling 1-10kW AM stations; TV is no doubt slightly different, especially at so many watts. Running at peak constantly costs quite a bit of money.
I've got better things to do than learn how to look for such things, especially when the results will be meaningless. As others have pointed out, if speech to text is used and only keywords are sent back as hashes or codes, what you see will just be an unidentifiable nothing. With free software, there is no such monkey business.
God forbid you learn something. If we'd like to talk about meaningless, how about speech recognition: even people talking clearly into good-quality mics make a mockery out of the whole genre of software on a regular basis--if you're trying to posit google could sit in the background of your computer and turn an ill-placed computer microphone's signals into useful speech-to-text data, you're insane. Not only do most soundcard designs (and verily, the mics attached to them) lack enough dynamic range to turn even on-axis noise into recognizeable text, the processing power associated with performing the task would dissuade most people from using the software anyway. People have accents and a host of other individual facets that make up their voice--a TV show stands a much better chance of being recognized by software (if google knows what time it is and where you live, it wouldn't take much power at all). And you're right, what we see/will/ be unidentifiable--but you can only fit so much information into so many bits, and from that we can deduce whether or not any useful audio is getting to google. Granted, they could encode extra data into search queries, etc, but by examing their current software's network usage with that of their new software that discrepancy would be spotted as well. Client-side speech recognition without a significant amount of setup and calibration simply is not reliable enough. Their only chance for real big brother intrusion with this sort of trojan method would be sending real (or condensed) audio information server side for further processing. Get off it.
If it's not free software, you have no way of knowing. This is true of all non free software you put on your computer.
Forgive me if I'm biting, but won't the information the software produces (or, as some are alleging, collects) actually have to be transmitted? Even if it's obfuscated somehow, we should be able to see how much information is, in fact, being transmitted, and thence deduce if any useable audio could be derived thereof, free or not free, source or no source.
There's a difference between personal morals and the morals exhibited by a society at a given moment to further aide that society's prosperity. I believe it can be argued that for a person to actually be 'moral'--or at least the closest one can get to an objective definition of that--all the mores one holds must be validated, understood, and reinforced by that one person. That means that about 75% of Christians one will meet are immoral: mores are forced down their throats, and they just comply. If I quizzed a bunch of highschool kids about the Pythagorean Thereom, I'll bet most could tell me a^2 + b^2 = c^2. But how many of them could tell me why? It's the difference between knowing and understanding, and they verily represent two levels of consciousness on a given subject. Thusly I find your assertion to be ignoring a basic human fact, and so may I take the liberty of creating my own: There is a difference between individual beliefs/mores and those compromised beliefs/mores that take hold when one is subject to a prevailing consensus of the times. Also that the less a person thinks through and understands the mores he holds, the less should he be considered a moral man, because indeed: you don't call a kid with a calculus book a mathematician.
I think Moofie screwed up not understanding this difference, though you certainly seemed to be looking for an easy fight. Furthermore your second to last paragraph takes arbitrary to new heights in regards to misplacing yourself in the pecking order. Speaking for everyone is seldom a good idea--who is "us"?
No, I mean the other large corporations. The ones who produce the components that enabled me to type this are mostly either "good" (e.g. Apple and IBM) or foreign (so they don't lobby in the US).
I hope that post was a joke. Just because your computer was made by a company you deem good for some arbitrary reason (Big Blue used to be a very derogatory term, remember), what about all of the Microsoft-powered computers you connect to just to access the internet? Or all of the companies who beat their employees and make them live on premises and poison their water to make your memory chips cheaper? The memory chips in the servers you connect to? That was a rather unfocused iceberg tip on my part, but a tip no less. I don't mean to be too much of a dick, but you've gotta look a little further than your own monitor. Even inside the monitor. Where'd the boards come from? Even the cables. The companies that cleared the land to lay communication lines, that send you your electricity to power the thing, and the servers and etc etc etc. To say that none of these companies has lobbyist/campaign ties to the US government is reckless ignorance.
Privatising healthcare and such is pretty much guaranteed to raise, not lower prices, because medical services are a basic requirement and there really is no need to actually compete with your neighbours. Your customers can hardly shop around for the best value-for-money hospital and ambulance service.
Actually, that's not entirely accurate. When you get picked up in an ambulance here (South Eastern part of Pennsylvania in the US), they ask what hospital you want to go to. Granted, I live within 20 minutes of at least 3 hospitals, probably 7-10 within 40 minutes, so it's quite practical. There's a/lot/ of competition between medical practices here--commercials (TV and radio), tons of billboards, newspapers, etc. I think it's much more the fault of insurance companies in regards to high prices: there's so much potential for lawsuits they're trying extra hard to cover their asses. Not that insurance companies are fair at all, but all of the extra litigation certainly wasn't going to lower their rates. My old doctor had said she paid something like between $1-200,000 per year for insurance. Ridiculous.
Can you gimme some links to US forfeiture laws? I didn't know we had any privatization in police, except bounty hunters. I'm curious.
As for real-life examples, how well did privitization of electricity go in California?
I live in Pennsylvania, and our privatization went off quite well in 2000. The 70 or so companies are regulated by the Public Utilities Comission and need to be certified before they can operate, so it's not completely deregulated, but perhaps equilibrium is the most practical way. Unfortunately, half of your electricity bill is from the local utilities who actually deliver the power--but better than nothing.
As far as the government ensuring safe roads--where do you live? Here (south eastern PA), the roads are/awful/--no one knows how to manage money. Point being, the government is just as susceptible to corruption as a private company--and given the heirarchial upward movements of those who master that art and what they control, I think it's much more dangerous. You contract a company or three to do garbage, a company to fix the roads, a company to manage water, a seperate company for every service, and you have a nice, smooth decentralized power. You have a government doing all of the aforementioned services, and power becomes more centralized. If the president of Le Garbage Company decides he wants to cook some books, oh well--no garbage for a week, but at least the roads are still driveable when he's arrested. If the Mayor of Subsidyville wants to cook some books, everything suffers. Partitioning of power and competition are really the best ways to manage localities. The government is huge and extremely powerful--which is why it needs to be in charge of the military. Other than defense, its size gets in the way and it can't keep up. All bad.
Listen, I don't hold your views against you: it's your government's fault. SA doesn't even allow arms out of the window. You can grow pot, but you can't rest a limb on the outside of a vehicle. Go figure.
Just some ribbing from a yank who imported one of your fine ladies after a visit. Love the cockney rhyming slang though, that shit cracks me up.
Yeah, except that I'm beginning to believe that violence is the only way to defeat the large corporations that make all those bribes^Wcampaign contributions.
You mean the same large corporations who produce the components that enabled you to post that?
It might be interesting to note that (at least in the US) the public has been clamoring for the privitization of certain government services, thinking it would save money. The joke's on them.
Who has more incentive to operate smoothly, efficiently and effectively--the government or a private company? A large part of answering that rests on whom has more competition--and if the government is subsidizing an entire field, they don't have much competition at all. Privatizing in itself does little--it's competition that keeps things going. Also, people in other people's pockets will always exist, public or private. But privatization is, on the whole, a much better way to run things.
The rest of your post seems willynilly and I have no idea what you're talking about, but the begining was hogwash.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the only place I've smoked opium, they're on to me!!!
So far, the rest of these blew. This one had me laughing.
Terrible crime will continue so long as terrible abridgements of liberty continue--people are always going to want grog, coke, meth and weed, and many people are ready to pay a lot of money for it. And just as many people are ready to do whatever they need to to make some money.
This is going to do is cause prices to go up, which in turn will lead to worse turf wars and drug related violence, which shakes everything else around it up. It's a white elephant, I hope this post will encourage some /.ers to look into this. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) is a great place to start. We're talking $69,000,000,000/year to fight MARIJUANA. In fact, well over 800,000 in '06 went to prison solely for marijuana related charges, of these something like 70, 80% are minorities (though by a very large margin, drug users are white). If you want to get rid of crime, you need to get rid of the black market for drugs.
if this piece of hardware was capable of "overc[oming] the built-in system redundancy", perhaps its ilk ought to be patrolling the transistorized wunderplatz of interconnected morsels governing our most hubris means of transportation? I, for one, would certainly feel safer.
precision alignment of forcibly assembled nanoparticles is expensive
The article said they used an evaporative method to deposit the layer
There are just certain 'cracks' as you call them that may never be explainable in the scientific sense.
I'm afraid the inability of classical science to handle your examples doesn't mean the reactions could be a sign of God--science isn't a pole across from God; it's a changing set of laws, theories and analogs with recommended procedure for refining (or completely changine) the set of laws, theories and analogs. The cracks in our knowledge are real and need no diety to exist.
Lightning, earthquakes and the stars in the sky are one thing. However qualia [wikipedia.org], the birth of the universe, and most of all, the mind-body problem are issues which are not just going to go away, no matter how much people wish them to.
Complex phenomena arises from increased basic phenomena, and there is alot of basic phenomena that humans understand. God lives where humans' ability to attribute phenomena to basic understanding falls short. My friend is a great mechanic, and just yesterday we were on our way to Pennsylvania in his Ford Taurus. Half way, the engine started backfiring. The car has been well maintained, is fuel injected, and is driven quite often. The first thing that probably comes to mind is ignition problems, however that spans everything from timing sensors to ignition modules and coils, spark plugs, etc. There a million mechanical things we could've pulled over and checked, and when we did, there was nothing wrong. Turns out we bought bad gas at the Shell at 5 points in Levittown (not the first time, which is why I've listed the location). But what if he had been running low on gas, and while we were debating which part of the ignition system it was, we filled up and didn't even think of the gas? We'd be bad mechanics, just like anyone entertaining the idea of an actual diety--acutely, those who believe in the god of the Bible and other widely accepted religions they had shown to them--is being a bad free thinking individual. If we took away the books and memories, there'd be no evidence until a "prophet" wrote new ones, and then there'd be all the evidence in the world. Unless, of course, you're going to defend Zoroaster.
There's a difference between the government holding records of your whereabouts and associations indefinately so that one day they may incarcerate you/fine you/make you late for something just so you know who's in charge, and a credit card company having access to your financial records. As your post pointed out, GP CAN choose to get rid of his cell phone and stop using credit cards, which is the beauty of a free society. He could NOT, however, choose to get away from government monitoring in places like London.
First of all, burning an American flag is already illegal... not to mention a good way to get yourself injured/killed by patriotic citizens.
/indefinate/ data retention system, only to turn around and use the bullying by "patriotic citizens" to curtail someone's efforts to burn a flag they own on their own property. Do you think you're protecting people? How compatible are your ideals?
/which directly leads to property rights infringment/. People steal shit to settle drug scores, you obviously don't disagree, so wouldn't making meth legal (and thusly cheaper, more consistent and higher quality) be a better deterent for meth addicts to make off with your junk? Then there's the issue of drug related violence: if that same citizen realizes what they're doing and want to stop doing meth, but their dealer doesn't want a good customer gone, the dealer can bully the user into whatever they want. Since drugs are illegal, the user generally has no recourse with the branches of government that are supposed to protect individual liberties. Even in this example where the user wants to stop, the user probably has a long history that would be dug through by police to get other "criminals"--this might include her friends (friends that might not necessarily have a meth problem, but use it when they deem appropriate to no abuse), and she's not about to turn them in (and plus she's just scared after years of living in fear of police). As others have stated, drug laws (and many laws in general) exist only as revenue generators for law enforcement/judiciaries and as support boons for politicians.
If burning an American flag makes you feel better and it's not toxic, why should it be illegal? A fellow patriot would not injur/kill a flag burner; they'd understand that's their right (as it does not infringe on anyone elses essential liberties) and, no matter if they found it offensive or not, would tolerate it. Besides, it's the message and philosophies of freedom that make liberty-centered places great, a flag's just a flag.
Now, who decides what laws are asinine?
Vigilant people decide what laws are asinine--the rest of the population let other people decide what laws are asinine, if they care enough to believe at all (both of which, regardless of how ignorant, are their right). And maybe you've heard of elected officials populating the corpus of our legislative branch?
You used the example of the American flag, only to then turn around and try to defend drug abuse.
You used the example of a high-volume
In my book, drug addicts are the most significant problem we deal with today in the country. In Oregon, according to the last article I read, 80% of all property crime in the state was methamphetamine related. Since we disagree, are drug laws asinine or not?
When methamphetamine is illegal, cartels control prices (and, in the US, the government controls supplies and cartels as well, but that's another story) and they're always artificially high because of the risk associated with transporting illegal substances (/especially/ something like meth). If you're a free citizen of this country and you decide you'd like to try methamphetamines, you can't get it anywhere but drug dealers. When people start getting addicted to methamphetamine, all of a sudden they have no money for anything else because it's so expensive
The second part of your argument that really made no sense was when you used that statement "vigorously pursue average peaceful citizens". You do realize that in order to violate a crime, a person does not have to be violent, right? According to that statement, you make it sound as though as long as a criminal is not committing a violent crime, they should not be pursed. Could you please explain your flawed logic?
I agree that if laws are passed, they should be followed--why go to the lengths/costs to make a law if not to enforce it?, not to mention it waters down the usability of other laws (if a's not in trouble, why should b be?) However these laws are clearly asinine (especially at a FEDERAL level), and should be sorted out by local government. You're really a stupid fucker.
Yes.
Thanks for the info, I didn't know they made posts like that anymore.
|| It costs a lot of money to run 25,000 watts all day!!
| Using residential rate of $0.075/kWh (which I seem to be paying these days) this amounts to whopping 45 dollars for a non-stop 24 hours broadcast. This expense is not even on the radar of a TV broadcaster; the coffee and water service costs more.
That's the transmission power--the power needed by the transmitters to create that much radiation is considerably more. It's been a few years since I've looked at the figures (my friends and I were trying to open a radio station), but all large transmitters radiate quite a bit of heat, which is lost efficiency right off the bat. Not to mention, because of the heat and the nature of radio wave transmission of that magnitude, parts need to be replaced quite often; the power tubes alone are several hundred to several thousand dollars a piece, and parts for most solid state transmitters of comparable size are even more expensive. And these were just numbers for middling 1-10kW AM stations; TV is no doubt slightly different, especially at so many watts. Running at peak constantly costs quite a bit of money.
I've got better things to do than learn how to look for such things, especially when the results will be meaningless. As others have pointed out, if speech to text is used and only keywords are sent back as hashes or codes, what you see will just be an unidentifiable nothing. With free software, there is no such monkey business.
/will/ be unidentifiable--but you can only fit so much information into so many bits, and from that we can deduce whether or not any useful audio is getting to google. Granted, they could encode extra data into search queries, etc, but by examing their current software's network usage with that of their new software that discrepancy would be spotted as well. Client-side speech recognition without a significant amount of setup and calibration simply is not reliable enough. Their only chance for real big brother intrusion with this sort of trojan method would be sending real (or condensed) audio information server side for further processing. Get off it.
God forbid you learn something. If we'd like to talk about meaningless, how about speech recognition: even people talking clearly into good-quality mics make a mockery out of the whole genre of software on a regular basis--if you're trying to posit google could sit in the background of your computer and turn an ill-placed computer microphone's signals into useful speech-to-text data, you're insane. Not only do most soundcard designs (and verily, the mics attached to them) lack enough dynamic range to turn even on-axis noise into recognizeable text, the processing power associated with performing the task would dissuade most people from using the software anyway. People have accents and a host of other individual facets that make up their voice--a TV show stands a much better chance of being recognized by software (if google knows what time it is and where you live, it wouldn't take much power at all). And you're right, what we see
If it's not free software, you have no way of knowing. This is true of all non free software you put on your computer.
Forgive me if I'm biting, but won't the information the software produces (or, as some are alleging, collects) actually have to be transmitted? Even if it's obfuscated somehow, we should be able to see how much information is, in fact, being transmitted, and thence deduce if any useable audio could be derived thereof, free or not free, source or no source.
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
What do you mean "What. the. fuck."? Haven't we all done things we're not proud of after a good track meet?
favorite*
I heard hyperion sux0rs
- anonymous coward
"There is no spone" - the matricks
We're not all typing obscure commands in consoles all day, you know :)
You're right--vim works just as well in X.
There's a difference between personal morals and the morals exhibited by a society at a given moment to further aide that society's prosperity. I believe it can be argued that for a person to actually be 'moral'--or at least the closest one can get to an objective definition of that--all the mores one holds must be validated, understood, and reinforced by that one person. That means that about 75% of Christians one will meet are immoral: mores are forced down their throats, and they just comply. If I quizzed a bunch of highschool kids about the Pythagorean Thereom, I'll bet most could tell me a^2 + b^2 = c^2. But how many of them could tell me why? It's the difference between knowing and understanding, and they verily represent two levels of consciousness on a given subject. Thusly I find your assertion to be ignoring a basic human fact, and so may I take the liberty of creating my own: There is a difference between individual beliefs/mores and those compromised beliefs/mores that take hold when one is subject to a prevailing consensus of the times. Also that the less a person thinks through and understands the mores he holds, the less should he be considered a moral man, because indeed: you don't call a kid with a calculus book a mathematician.
I think Moofie screwed up not understanding this difference, though you certainly seemed to be looking for an easy fight. Furthermore your second to last paragraph takes arbitrary to new heights in regards to misplacing yourself in the pecking order. Speaking for everyone is seldom a good idea--who is "us"?
No, I mean the other large corporations. The ones who produce the components that enabled me to type this are mostly either "good" (e.g. Apple and IBM) or foreign (so they don't lobby in the US).
I hope that post was a joke. Just because your computer was made by a company you deem good for some arbitrary reason (Big Blue used to be a very derogatory term, remember), what about all of the Microsoft-powered computers you connect to just to access the internet? Or all of the companies who beat their employees and make them live on premises and poison their water to make your memory chips cheaper? The memory chips in the servers you connect to? That was a rather unfocused iceberg tip on my part, but a tip no less. I don't mean to be too much of a dick, but you've gotta look a little further than your own monitor. Even inside the monitor. Where'd the boards come from? Even the cables. The companies that cleared the land to lay communication lines, that send you your electricity to power the thing, and the servers and etc etc etc. To say that none of these companies has lobbyist/campaign ties to the US government is reckless ignorance.
Privatising healthcare and such is pretty much guaranteed to raise, not lower prices, because medical services are a basic requirement and there really is no need to actually compete with your neighbours. Your customers can hardly shop around for the best value-for-money hospital and ambulance service.
/lot/ of competition between medical practices here--commercials (TV and radio), tons of billboards, newspapers, etc. I think it's much more the fault of insurance companies in regards to high prices: there's so much potential for lawsuits they're trying extra hard to cover their asses. Not that insurance companies are fair at all, but all of the extra litigation certainly wasn't going to lower their rates. My old doctor had said she paid something like between $1-200,000 per year for insurance. Ridiculous.
Actually, that's not entirely accurate. When you get picked up in an ambulance here (South Eastern part of Pennsylvania in the US), they ask what hospital you want to go to. Granted, I live within 20 minutes of at least 3 hospitals, probably 7-10 within 40 minutes, so it's quite practical. There's a
Can you gimme some links to US forfeiture laws? I didn't know we had any privatization in police, except bounty hunters. I'm curious.
As for real-life examples, how well did privitization of electricity go in California?
/awful/--no one knows how to manage money. Point being, the government is just as susceptible to corruption as a private company--and given the heirarchial upward movements of those who master that art and what they control, I think it's much more dangerous. You contract a company or three to do garbage, a company to fix the roads, a company to manage water, a seperate company for every service, and you have a nice, smooth decentralized power. You have a government doing all of the aforementioned services, and power becomes more centralized. If the president of Le Garbage Company decides he wants to cook some books, oh well--no garbage for a week, but at least the roads are still driveable when he's arrested. If the Mayor of Subsidyville wants to cook some books, everything suffers. Partitioning of power and competition are really the best ways to manage localities. The government is huge and extremely powerful--which is why it needs to be in charge of the military. Other than defense, its size gets in the way and it can't keep up. All bad.
I live in Pennsylvania, and our privatization went off quite well in 2000. The 70 or so companies are regulated by the Public Utilities Comission and need to be certified before they can operate, so it's not completely deregulated, but perhaps equilibrium is the most practical way. Unfortunately, half of your electricity bill is from the local utilities who actually deliver the power--but better than nothing.
As far as the government ensuring safe roads--where do you live? Here (south eastern PA), the roads are
Listen, I don't hold your views against you: it's your government's fault. SA doesn't even allow arms out of the window. You can grow pot, but you can't rest a limb on the outside of a vehicle. Go figure.
Just some ribbing from a yank who imported one of your fine ladies after a visit. Love the cockney rhyming slang though, that shit cracks me up.
Yeah, except that I'm beginning to believe that violence is the only way to defeat the large corporations that make all those bribes^Wcampaign contributions.
You mean the same large corporations who produce the components that enabled you to post that?
It might be interesting to note that (at least in the US) the public has been clamoring for the privitization of certain government services, thinking it would save money. The joke's on them.
Who has more incentive to operate smoothly, efficiently and effectively--the government or a private company? A large part of answering that rests on whom has more competition--and if the government is subsidizing an entire field, they don't have much competition at all. Privatizing in itself does little--it's competition that keeps things going. Also, people in other people's pockets will always exist, public or private. But privatization is, on the whole, a much better way to run things.
The rest of your post seems willynilly and I have no idea what you're talking about, but the begining was hogwash.