I agree with practically everything you say except the last bit.
First, the Greek wages-to-productivity ratio must fall, by a combination of (1) Government-sector wage cuts (already started); (2) productivity increases in the government sector by (a) insisting that government workers actually do their job (b) firing redundant government workers and (c) privatization and (3) wage reduction and productivity increases in the private sector – made possible by freeing labour laws.
However, raising taxes makes the wages-to-productivity ratio worse, because it increases the cost of hiring the worker without a corresponding cost to productivity, or equivalently increases deadweight losses. Instead, wage cuts in the private sector should be achieved by freeing the labour market (which is currently among the most restricted in Europe). In fact, workers need to be compensated for the wage cuts by tax cuts.
As an aside, tax cuts would also increase compliance, which is the key problem with the Tax system (far more important than the rates).
Regarding the source of problems, clearly they all stem from the behaviour of Greece (both the country and its people) and not of the creditors. Greece cooked its books before joining the Eurozone, and the Greek voters had ample opportunity to vote for free-market, better-government and smaller-government reforms in the years since.
That said, the original creditors (eurozone banks) who lend to Greece until 2010 knew all this full well and decided to extend the credit anyway. The earned the interest rates they demanded, and should now have to eat the losses when, following the crisis and resulting economic contraction, Greece can't pay back. These banks may have had to suffer, but lending to sovereigns carries default risk (just like lending to private entities carries bankruptcy risk).
What you are ignoring, however, is that the people of Europe were not creditors before their governments decided to take on the debt in 2010 (giving the banks a 50% haircut). Since the governments of Europe voluntarily decided to make public what previously was debt to private entities, they shouldn't now be able to turn around and claim that the taxpayers of Europe will suffer unfairly if the debt isn't paid. If the taxpayers were concerned about non-payments and didn't want to go into the debt vulture hedge-fund business they could have left the bad loans with the banks who made them originally.
I personally thing that. beyond being against the EU treaties, the bailouts of Greece, Spain and Italy were also ill-conceived and morally wrong. But having gone into the sovereign loans business the EU can't complain about facing default risk.
Indeed, whether Syriza would implement the reforms is the most important question. Varoufakis was very vocal about the need for the reforms, but he has been forced out (by the EU !). The left-left wing of Syriza is opposed. It's not clear what the majority would do, and like you I would have preferred to see some reforms passed in February and March while the negotiations were ongoing.
However, some of the reforms Germany is asking for (higher taxes, pension cuts) cause me to doubt their bona fides here. The main problem is taxes in Greece is non-payment and the informal economy. Raising taxes is likely to exacerbate this problem by increasing the motivation to evade the higher taxes. Lowering taxes and simplifying the tax system is far more likely to raise more revenue.
Similarly, the main problem with government pensions is early retirement. The solution should therefore be to raise the retirement age for those currently working, which in the long term resolve the problems without creating short-term pain. The German solution (cut pensions now) means asking current pensioners who have no prospect of other sources of income and cannot choose to go back to the jobs they retired from to help repay the national debt.
Imagine you're a corporation (which in a lot of ways governments are kind of like). Now, imagine you get a new CEO who wants to get out of existing contracts because he didn't contract for them and doesn't want to pay them.
Too damned bad. You don't get to go "waaah, we can't afford this so we want a do-over".
In fact, corporations get exactly that when the file for bankruptcy. a procedure designed exactly to restructure their debt. It's true that sometimes this means the company is liquidated entirely, with the assets used to pay the creditors, but often what results is a bankruptcy plan in which (1) the company is reformed (2) the debt is cut to something manageable in order to keep the company going.
Here's an alternate explanation: If Germany starts forgiving debts for everybody, then the Germans are paying for someone else's prosperity, and asking Germans to pay for that is like a mugging, but on a large scale and in slow motion. That would be completely irresponsible to German taxpayers who work hard and don't get to retire early.
Recall that Germany didn't make the original loans at all. The original loans were made by private banks (many of them German). So if Greece had defaulted in 2008 or 2010, the citizens of Germany would have not been on the hook for anything. But in 2010 the government of Germany decided to act like a predatory debt hedge fund: by forcing the first bailout on Greece, they effectively bought the debt from the banks, probably on the idea that they could force Greece to pay better than the banks. Once Germany took over the loans (which it didn't have to), it took over the risk Greece would default. German workers have only their government to blame for taking over the debt -- not the Greek workers or the current government of Greece, neither of which who had any say in the original loans.
Second, it is agreed by the Greek government (at least, it was repeatedly stated by Varoufakis before he was forced out) that Greece needed serious reforms, including raising the retirement age. For Varoufakis the point of an additional loan would have been to bridge Greece while the reforms took effect,
noting that they have already achieved a primary surplus. But cutting existing pensions to pay back the government of Germany makes no sense. Basically, German bankers made bad loans, German taxpayers decided to save the bankers, and now Greek pensioners are being asked to help the much wealthier German taxpayers recover money on a bad loan gamble.
What was the Greek government thinking? that the EU will just give more money without asking for more responsible measures. Meanwhile the European Central Bank maintains a freeze on emergency liquidity assistance. Tsipras had a popular mandate to say NO, he said yes. Game over!
No -- the Greek government was thinking that they (Greece) needed to implement serious reforms, and that they have already achieved primary surplus. However, given the state of their economy the would never be able to pay back most of the debt. So what they needed was (1) forgiveness ("restructuring") for a big chunk of the debt (2) a bridge loan until the reforms kick in and the economy recovers enough. Some of the loans would be eventually paid, but much shouldn't be (and the lenders should have known better).
What the EU wants instead is (1) the pipe dream of Greece paying back everything and (2) higher taxes and lower pensions now to help this repayment. In other words, for the EU the goal of any reforms is not to get Greece back on its feet but to extract money from it to pay back the loans.
So, the question was not on whether reforms were needed before any further loans (which was universally agreed upon), but rather on the goals. What Greece capitulated was not on agreeing to the reforms, but on accepting that notion that they will try to pay back loans despite knowing full well that they will never be able to afford to.
"Greece" is not a unitary person here -- the governments changed over time. You can't blame the debt on the current government (which didn't contract for it). The people of Greece are partially to blame (for voting for the wrong governments).
Greece didn't just want extra money. What they finally recognized (at least, Varoufakis did) is the need for serious structural reforms: improving tax collection, raising the retirement age, reducing the public sector, actually providing government services, reducing red tape, and accompanying the cuts to government with tax cuts. If the economy returns to growth then it would quickly be able to afford current spending levels. An extra loan would needed as a bridge, but the key are the reforms not the loan.
What the EU (Germany, that is) is insisting on is very different: they wants the bad debt paid back via higher taxes. But Greece can't possibly afford to pay those debts, and higher taxes will just further damage the Greek economy.
I conclude Germany is destroying Greece to ensure that Spain and Italy toe the line from now on.
The most notable point is the that there is no firm agreement to restructure (cut) the debt. I wonder how Tsirpas will sell this to his constituents who just voted a firm "NO" to a deal without restructuring.
The Library of Congress being about preserving the cultural heritage of the US, it was an odd choice in the first place to give the Librarian of Congress a national regulatory function.
The real problem is the asymmetry: the costs of over-regulation are born by the public as a whole, but in very small increments. The notional costs of under-regulation will be born by obvious "aggrieved parties" with deep lobbying muscle. There's also the usual problem that assumes that the "stakeholders" in any copyright debate are just the people who stand to gain from extending copyright protection, but not the general public who enjoys the fruit of the copyright regime.
Yes, this is less convenient, but the loss of convenience is incurred by the customer, who made the voluntary choice to go with the unregistered unlicensed option. They always had the choice of hiring a licensed mover instead.
Can anyone explain why Jeff Bezos is doing the same thing that SpaceX is already doing ?
Why is GM doing the same thing that Ford is doing? As long as there is a market for space launches, competition will align the incentives better than other arrangements. We'll get to see more different approaches tried, and find out what's best. Costs will generally go down.
If competition takes root, then in 30 years a suborbital ticket would be affordable to many of us.
Beyond the privacy problem, a key issue here is the problem of false positives. The system claims a 96% accuracy in detecting people in passenger seats, which is a huge error rate for sending people fines. A policeman can actually stop you and look in the car, which they have to do before writing a ticket.
The problem is that such fines are expensive to contest (you have to take time off work, show up to court etc). Many people will just pay. This is not a criminal prosecution situation where "presumption of innocence" in the legal sense is relevant, but the principle applies here too: you should hold the government to a high standard of proof here.
The progress of computers in both power and miniaturization has had a strong effect on chess. The biggest effect is the end of the practice of adjourning tournament games. It used to be that games which ran long would be adjourned to the next day, but once overnight analysis by computer became a serious possibility (displacing overnight analysis by each player), the practice became pointless and now tournament games run continuously until they end.
The challenge of miniature devices both for chess analysis and for communication with analysis occurring elsewhere can't be so easily met by changing the rules, but diligent policing will help. Stricter no-cellphones-in-the-playing area policies would have to be implemented.
I am not going to discuss whether CS should or shouldn't be a "core" subject in the schools. Rather, I am much more disturbed by the idea that Congress, in D.C., wants to decide the "core" subjects for every school system in the US.
First and foremost, regulating education is not a function entrusted to the Federal Government. It is a quintessential State issue. It is not the kind of problem (unlike, say, national defence or immigration) which must be solved at the national level.
I think that many people believes most states are "getting it wrong" on education (say, here, by not mandating enough CS classes), so they are hoping the Feds will fix it. But the states making bad choices ought not to be, on its own, a source of power for Congress. Some people imagine that, once Congress takes over, it'll be easier to get things right, since there'll be only one decision-making body not many, but this ignores the massive lobbying that will take over once convincing Congress suffices to influence the whole country. It is much easier for interest groups to dominate Congress than to dominate each State and school district separately.
There are way too many people going to college. Perhaps one-third of current college students are sufficiently prepared to learn anything and have the talents to make use of the learning. Society and most people would be better served if the enormous waste of people's time that is useless college would be eliminated in favour of people getting job experience.
Not enough people understand the world in quantitative terms. This is a problem with the K-12 system, not the universities. Mathematics is the primary language by which we describe the world around us (yes, literature is another, but our society is based more on toasters and trains and lightbulbs than on novels). The problem is not "STEM education" but a fundamental rejection by most of society of the way of thinking that has created our civilization. What is needed is not more people who understand quantum physics, but more people who can understand basic economic reasoning and aren't fazed by designing a multi-step process.
Duly noted. In detail, the government views the "morning after" pill as providing contraception, while the company views it as providing abortion. This has no effect on the way the Hobby Lobby ruling is viewed by the public or what it actually means.
The word right is used today to denote two very different kinds of things. People talk about the "right to freedom of speech" but also about "the right to a living wage". Unfortunately, these are two very different kinds of legal arrangements.
Rights of the first kind (exemplified by the freedom of speech) are negative rights: rights to be free from interference by others. You can do as you please as long as you don't harm anyone. Respecting and protecting such rights is, in my opinion, a principal function of government.
"Rights" of the second kind (exemplified by the "right" to have your employer buy you a specific form of health insurance) are positive rights: they amount to an imposition on someone else to do something for you. In other words, they cannot be fulfilled without infringing someone's negative right to be free from interference. Positive rights are properly aspirational statements ("wouldn't it be great if people could have X even if they don't have X now?"), and are called "rights" as a rhetorical device: since we all agree that negative rights ought to be protected by the government, calling something a "right" creates the impression that it should be protected too.
When speaking about positive "rights", I use the word in quotes to highlight this distinction, and avoiding the rhetorical trap set by the proponents of such "rights".
In the case at hand, the employees of Hobby Lobby have every right (without quotes) to use their salary to buy contraception. They don't (and shouldn't) have the "right" to have Hobby Lobby buy them contraception. The owners of Hobby Lobby (acting jointly through the company) have a right to freedom of thought, and a right to dispose of their property (Hobby Lobby and its money) as they please, including by refusing to buy someone contraception.
You are entirely wrong. The Hobby Lobby ruling said nothing about the workers submitting to the religious beliefs of the company owners. The workers retain full access to all medical serviced they wish. For example they are free to use their own money to buy contraception and abortion, and to buy health insurance that covers contraception and abortion. The only "right" the lost was the "right" to have the employer buy them contraception. The workers certainly have a right to be compensated for their labour (and they are!) -- but are not "submitting to the religious beliefs of their employer" by being paid their salary in cash instead of in medical services.
The only abuse here is that salary paid in cash is taxable, while salary paid in medical insurance isn't. But that is a problem created by Congress, and the solution is to remove the loophole. Decoupling health insurance from employment would automatically solve the religious liberty problem (if each workers bought their own coverage, the employer's religious beliefs wouldn't be relevant) and would mean losing your job wouldn't automatically mean you lose your insurance..
This is a software issue, not a hardware issue. Unless you propose to personally code the entire operating system and every application program, that is not practical.
That said, replacing the preinstalled OS with a free one is my first step when buying a new computer. Most recently I managed to buy a PC without an OS at all, but that's rare,
If you don't understand how university research is funded, please don't write article summaries for slashdot on that topic. This scientist is described as having "made a fortune" for receiving research funds – but this is research money, not personal money. In fact his institution was given the $1.2M, and he just got to direct how it the money was spent (hint: his mortgage in not an allowable expense). Possibly the grants were used to cover part of his salary (though TFA doesn't say so), but that is a normal use of research funds and there are limitations on that.
I agree that he should have declared this funding in the paper (because the journal asks that funding sources be disclosed), but this is not him getting rich. This is him getting his research funded. You have a missing link:
Specifically finding SUSY would be great for the people who predicted it. From the point of view of particle physics as a whole, the goal is seeing some physics not covered by the standard model. In any case unless you can write papers on the topic, it's useless to speculate what will be found. Since the accelerator already exists we don't need any hype about it.
However, if even this energy upgrade doesn't bring signals beyond the standard model, it will be very hard to ask for many billions of USD to build the next accelerator, based only on the hope of "we might see something".
Mickey Mouse (the character) is very much protected by copyright -- the copyright on the original cartoons featuring him (yes, as Steamboat Willie). The reason is that any work made today featuring this character counts as a derivative work of the original cartoon, and (fair use excepted) the right to make derivative works is vested in the copyright owner.
Once Mickey Mouse enters the public domain, anyone will be free to make their own Mickey Mouse cartoons, or Mickey Mouse lunch boxes, or Mickey Mouse theme parks. These may only be based on the version of the character in public domain works, but they'd still be competing with Disney.
In the abstract, the situation seems obvious. First, it's ridiculous to think that there are any marginal artistic works which are only created because the extra 20 years of protection in US law make them profitable, whereas they would not be made otherwise. Moreover, any such works can't be any good, so why worry about them? Second, it clearly makes no sense to extend the term of protection of already-existing works: they have already been created, so we don't need to provide the artists any extra motivation to create them.
What matters here, however, is not the setting of incentives for authors, but the incentives of trade negotiators. Here, the US is behaving rationally: if the US negotiators convince Canada and Japan to keep Mickey Mouse under protection for 20 more years, then more royalties will flow from Canada to the US. This may be bad for Canadians, but not so much for US citizens. More generally, since the US is a large source of popular entertainment but a (relative to its size) a small importer, it wants other goverments to fleece their own citizens in favour of US interests.
While I'm sad that Canada caved on this, Canada is a (relatively) small country next to a big one, and (for example) trade restrictions on lumber are far more significant to Canada than the copyright extension. I stil think they should have stood firm, but it's not such an obvious call as it seems.
As you say, it's irrelevant that the supplements don't work: what matters is the false advertizing. This is a legitimate consumer protection issue, unlilke all the nannying and moralizing I'm using to getting from the NY State Attroneys General.
What about people who didn't sign up for a Gmail account? Their mail gets scanned when someone with a Gmail account receives it. I wonder if Google creates "shadow profiles" like Facebook does?
Suppose you send me a snail-mail letter and my secretary reads it to decide if it deserves my attention. Has your privacy been violated? Suppose I take your letter and put in on the company bulletin board so everyone can read it. It may offend you, it may be socially gauche, but would it be illegal?
My e-mail secretary is called GMail, and I chose to let it read all my incoming mail. That's between me and Google, and I don't see why you (the sender of my incoming messages) has any right to complain. Moreover, the text of the incoming messages is only used to show me targeted ads, so I really don't see why you should care.
If (and that's a big if) Google put information from scanned incoming messages into its online profile of you (for ads on non-google websites), then there might be some cause for concern, but that's not what they do, and even if the did I don't see the problem. If you send me a message and I decided to let Google read it then Google should be in the clear..
People are shocked, shocked! to discover that the email service that makes money by showing them targeted ads based on their messages examines the content of the messages for this purpose.
I mean, come on: nobody was forced to sign up for gmail.
A frictionless cable (as described by the summary) would be practically useless. TFA says the cable has high-friction coating, which makes a lot more sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with practically everything you say except the last bit.
First, the Greek wages-to-productivity ratio must fall, by a combination of (1) Government-sector wage cuts (already started); (2) productivity increases in the government sector by (a) insisting that government workers actually do their job (b) firing redundant government workers and (c) privatization and (3) wage reduction and productivity increases in the private sector – made possible by freeing labour laws.
However, raising taxes makes the wages-to-productivity ratio worse, because it increases the cost of hiring the worker without a corresponding cost to productivity, or equivalently increases deadweight losses. Instead, wage cuts in the private sector should be achieved by freeing the labour market (which is currently among the most restricted in Europe). In fact, workers need to be compensated for the wage cuts by tax cuts.
As an aside, tax cuts would also increase compliance, which is the key problem with the Tax system (far more important than the rates).
Regarding the source of problems, clearly they all stem from the behaviour of Greece (both the country and its people) and not of the creditors. Greece cooked its books before joining the Eurozone, and the Greek voters had ample opportunity to vote for free-market, better-government and smaller-government reforms in the years since.
That said, the original creditors (eurozone banks) who lend to Greece until 2010 knew all this full well and decided to extend the credit anyway. The earned the interest rates they demanded, and should now have to eat the losses when, following the crisis and resulting economic contraction, Greece can't pay back. These banks may have had to suffer, but lending to sovereigns carries default risk (just like lending to private entities carries bankruptcy risk).
What you are ignoring, however, is that the people of Europe were not creditors before their governments decided to take on the debt in 2010 (giving the banks a 50% haircut). Since the governments of Europe voluntarily decided to make public what previously was debt to private entities, they shouldn't now be able to turn around and claim that the taxpayers of Europe will suffer unfairly if the debt isn't paid. If the taxpayers were concerned about non-payments and didn't want to go into the debt vulture hedge-fund business they could have left the bad loans with the banks who made them originally.
I personally thing that. beyond being against the EU treaties, the bailouts of Greece, Spain and Italy were also ill-conceived and morally wrong. But having gone into the sovereign loans business the EU can't complain about facing default risk.
Indeed, whether Syriza would implement the reforms is the most important question. Varoufakis was very vocal about the need for the reforms, but he has been forced out (by the EU !). The left-left wing of Syriza is opposed. It's not clear what the majority would do, and like you I would have preferred to see some reforms passed in February and March while the negotiations were ongoing.
However, some of the reforms Germany is asking for (higher taxes, pension cuts) cause me to doubt their bona fides here. The main problem is taxes in Greece is non-payment and the informal economy. Raising taxes is likely to exacerbate this problem by increasing the motivation to evade the higher taxes. Lowering taxes and simplifying the tax system is far more likely to raise more revenue.
Similarly, the main problem with government pensions is early retirement. The solution should therefore be to raise the retirement age for those currently working, which in the long term resolve the problems without creating short-term pain. The German solution (cut pensions now) means asking current pensioners who have no prospect of other sources of income and cannot choose to go back to the jobs they retired from to help repay the national debt.
In fact, corporations get exactly that when the file for bankruptcy. a procedure designed exactly to restructure their debt. It's true that sometimes this means the company is liquidated entirely, with the assets used to pay the creditors, but often what results is a bankruptcy plan in which (1) the company is reformed (2) the debt is cut to something manageable in order to keep the company going.
Recall that Germany didn't make the original loans at all. The original loans were made by private banks (many of them German). So if Greece had defaulted in 2008 or 2010, the citizens of Germany would have not been on the hook for anything. But in 2010 the government of Germany decided to act like a predatory debt hedge fund: by forcing the first bailout on Greece, they effectively bought the debt from the banks, probably on the idea that they could force Greece to pay better than the banks. Once Germany took over the loans (which it didn't have to), it took over the risk Greece would default. German workers have only their government to blame for taking over the debt -- not the Greek workers or the current government of Greece, neither of which who had any say in the original loans.
Second, it is agreed by the Greek government (at least, it was repeatedly stated by Varoufakis before he was forced out) that Greece needed serious reforms, including raising the retirement age. For Varoufakis the point of an additional loan would have been to bridge Greece while the reforms took effect, noting that they have already achieved a primary surplus. But cutting existing pensions to pay back the government of Germany makes no sense. Basically, German bankers made bad loans, German taxpayers decided to save the bankers, and now Greek pensioners are being asked to help the much wealthier German taxpayers recover money on a bad loan gamble.
No -- the Greek government was thinking that they (Greece) needed to implement serious reforms, and that they have already achieved primary surplus. However, given the state of their economy the would never be able to pay back most of the debt. So what they needed was (1) forgiveness ("restructuring") for a big chunk of the debt (2) a bridge loan until the reforms kick in and the economy recovers enough. Some of the loans would be eventually paid, but much shouldn't be (and the lenders should have known better).
What the EU wants instead is (1) the pipe dream of Greece paying back everything and (2) higher taxes and lower pensions now to help this repayment. In other words, for the EU the goal of any reforms is not to get Greece back on its feet but to extract money from it to pay back the loans.
So, the question was not on whether reforms were needed before any further loans (which was universally agreed upon), but rather on the goals. What Greece capitulated was not on agreeing to the reforms, but on accepting that notion that they will try to pay back loans despite knowing full well that they will never be able to afford to.
Some important caveats:
I conclude Germany is destroying Greece to ensure that Spain and Italy toe the line from now on.
The most notable point is the that there is no firm agreement to restructure (cut) the debt. I wonder how Tsirpas will sell this to his constituents who just voted a firm "NO" to a deal without restructuring.
The Library of Congress being about preserving the cultural heritage of the US, it was an odd choice in the first place to give the Librarian of Congress a national regulatory function.
The real problem is the asymmetry: the costs of over-regulation are born by the public as a whole, but in very small increments. The notional costs of under-regulation will be born by obvious "aggrieved parties" with deep lobbying muscle. There's also the usual problem that assumes that the "stakeholders" in any copyright debate are just the people who stand to gain from extending copyright protection, but not the general public who enjoys the fruit of the copyright regime.
Yes, this is less convenient, but the loss of convenience is incurred by the customer, who made the voluntary choice to go with the unregistered unlicensed option. They always had the choice of hiring a licensed mover instead.
Why is GM doing the same thing that Ford is doing? As long as there is a market for space launches, competition will align the incentives better than other arrangements. We'll get to see more different approaches tried, and find out what's best. Costs will generally go down.
If competition takes root, then in 30 years a suborbital ticket would be affordable to many of us.
Beyond the privacy problem, a key issue here is the problem of false positives. The system claims a 96% accuracy in detecting people in passenger seats, which is a huge error rate for sending people fines. A policeman can actually stop you and look in the car, which they have to do before writing a ticket.
The problem is that such fines are expensive to contest (you have to take time off work, show up to court etc). Many people will just pay. This is not a criminal prosecution situation where "presumption of innocence" in the legal sense is relevant, but the principle applies here too: you should hold the government to a high standard of proof here.
The progress of computers in both power and miniaturization has had a strong effect on chess. The biggest effect is the end of the practice of adjourning tournament games. It used to be that games which ran long would be adjourned to the next day, but once overnight analysis by computer became a serious possibility (displacing overnight analysis by each player), the practice became pointless and now tournament games run continuously until they end.
The challenge of miniature devices both for chess analysis and for communication with analysis occurring elsewhere can't be so easily met by changing the rules, but diligent policing will help. Stricter no-cellphones-in-the-playing area policies would have to be implemented.
I am not going to discuss whether CS should or shouldn't be a "core" subject in the schools. Rather, I am much more disturbed by the idea that Congress, in D.C., wants to decide the "core" subjects for every school system in the US.
First and foremost, regulating education is not a function entrusted to the Federal Government. It is a quintessential State issue. It is not the kind of problem (unlike, say, national defence or immigration) which must be solved at the national level.
I think that many people believes most states are "getting it wrong" on education (say, here, by not mandating enough CS classes), so they are hoping the Feds will fix it. But the states making bad choices ought not to be, on its own, a source of power for Congress. Some people imagine that, once Congress takes over, it'll be easier to get things right, since there'll be only one decision-making body not many, but this ignores the massive lobbying that will take over once convincing Congress suffices to influence the whole country. It is much easier for interest groups to dominate Congress than to dominate each State and school district separately.
Duly noted. In detail, the government views the "morning after" pill as providing contraception, while the company views it as providing abortion. This has no effect on the way the Hobby Lobby ruling is viewed by the public or what it actually means.
The word right is used today to denote two very different kinds of things. People talk about the "right to freedom of speech" but also about "the right to a living wage". Unfortunately, these are two very different kinds of legal arrangements.
Rights of the first kind (exemplified by the freedom of speech) are negative rights: rights to be free from interference by others. You can do as you please as long as you don't harm anyone. Respecting and protecting such rights is, in my opinion, a principal function of government.
"Rights" of the second kind (exemplified by the "right" to have your employer buy you a specific form of health insurance) are positive rights: they amount to an imposition on someone else to do something for you. In other words, they cannot be fulfilled without infringing someone's negative right to be free from interference. Positive rights are properly aspirational statements ("wouldn't it be great if people could have X even if they don't have X now?"), and are called "rights" as a rhetorical device: since we all agree that negative rights ought to be protected by the government, calling something a "right" creates the impression that it should be protected too.
When speaking about positive "rights", I use the word in quotes to highlight this distinction, and avoiding the rhetorical trap set by the proponents of such "rights".
In the case at hand, the employees of Hobby Lobby have every right (without quotes) to use their salary to buy contraception. They don't (and shouldn't) have the "right" to have Hobby Lobby buy them contraception. The owners of Hobby Lobby (acting jointly through the company) have a right to freedom of thought, and a right to dispose of their property (Hobby Lobby and its money) as they please, including by refusing to buy someone contraception.
You are entirely wrong. The Hobby Lobby ruling said nothing about the workers submitting to the religious beliefs of the company owners. The workers retain full access to all medical serviced they wish. For example they are free to use their own money to buy contraception and abortion, and to buy health insurance that covers contraception and abortion. The only "right" the lost was the "right" to have the employer buy them contraception. The workers certainly have a right to be compensated for their labour (and they are!) -- but are not "submitting to the religious beliefs of their employer" by being paid their salary in cash instead of in medical services.
The only abuse here is that salary paid in cash is taxable, while salary paid in medical insurance isn't. But that is a problem created by Congress, and the solution is to remove the loophole. Decoupling health insurance from employment would automatically solve the religious liberty problem (if each workers bought their own coverage, the employer's religious beliefs wouldn't be relevant) and would mean losing your job wouldn't automatically mean you lose your insurance..
This is a software issue, not a hardware issue. Unless you propose to personally code the entire operating system and every application program, that is not practical.
That said, replacing the preinstalled OS with a free one is my first step when buying a new computer. Most recently I managed to buy a PC without an OS at all, but that's rare,
If you don't understand how university research is funded, please don't write article summaries for slashdot on that topic. This scientist is described as having "made a fortune" for receiving research funds – but this is research money, not personal money. In fact his institution was given the $1.2M, and he just got to direct how it the money was spent (hint: his mortgage in not an allowable expense). Possibly the grants were used to cover part of his salary (though TFA doesn't say so), but that is a normal use of research funds and there are limitations on that.
I agree that he should have declared this funding in the paper (because the journal asks that funding sources be disclosed), but this is not him getting rich. This is him getting his research funded. You have a missing link:
Specifically finding SUSY would be great for the people who predicted it. From the point of view of particle physics as a whole, the goal is seeing some physics not covered by the standard model. In any case unless you can write papers on the topic, it's useless to speculate what will be found. Since the accelerator already exists we don't need any hype about it.
However, if even this energy upgrade doesn't bring signals beyond the standard model, it will be very hard to ask for many billions of USD to build the next accelerator, based only on the hope of "we might see something".
Mickey Mouse (the character) is very much protected by copyright -- the copyright on the original cartoons featuring him (yes, as Steamboat Willie). The reason is that any work made today featuring this character counts as a derivative work of the original cartoon, and (fair use excepted) the right to make derivative works is vested in the copyright owner.
Once Mickey Mouse enters the public domain, anyone will be free to make their own Mickey Mouse cartoons, or Mickey Mouse lunch boxes, or Mickey Mouse theme parks. These may only be based on the version of the character in public domain works, but they'd still be competing with Disney.
In the abstract, the situation seems obvious. First, it's ridiculous to think that there are any marginal artistic works which are only created because the extra 20 years of protection in US law make them profitable, whereas they would not be made otherwise. Moreover, any such works can't be any good, so why worry about them? Second, it clearly makes no sense to extend the term of protection of already-existing works: they have already been created, so we don't need to provide the artists any extra motivation to create them.
What matters here, however, is not the setting of incentives for authors, but the incentives of trade negotiators. Here, the US is behaving rationally: if the US negotiators convince Canada and Japan to keep Mickey Mouse under protection for 20 more years, then more royalties will flow from Canada to the US. This may be bad for Canadians, but not so much for US citizens. More generally, since the US is a large source of popular entertainment but a (relative to its size) a small importer, it wants other goverments to fleece their own citizens in favour of US interests.
While I'm sad that Canada caved on this, Canada is a (relatively) small country next to a big one, and (for example) trade restrictions on lumber are far more significant to Canada than the copyright extension. I stil think they should have stood firm, but it's not such an obvious call as it seems.
As you say, it's irrelevant that the supplements don't work: what matters is the false advertizing. This is a legitimate consumer protection issue, unlilke all the nannying and moralizing I'm using to getting from the NY State Attroneys General.
What about people who didn't sign up for a Gmail account? Their mail gets scanned when someone with a Gmail account receives it. I wonder if Google creates "shadow profiles" like Facebook does?
Suppose you send me a snail-mail letter and my secretary reads it to decide if it deserves my attention. Has your privacy been violated? Suppose I take your letter and put in on the company bulletin board so everyone can read it. It may offend you, it may be socially gauche, but would it be illegal?
My e-mail secretary is called GMail, and I chose to let it read all my incoming mail. That's between me and Google, and I don't see why you (the sender of my incoming messages) has any right to complain. Moreover, the text of the incoming messages is only used to show me targeted ads, so I really don't see why you should care.
If (and that's a big if) Google put information from scanned incoming messages into its online profile of you (for ads on non-google websites), then there might be some cause for concern, but that's not what they do, and even if the did I don't see the problem. If you send me a message and I decided to let Google read it then Google should be in the clear..
People are shocked, shocked! to discover that the email service that makes money by showing them targeted ads based on their messages examines the content of the messages for this purpose.
I mean, come on: nobody was forced to sign up for gmail.
A frictionless cable (as described by the summary) would be practically useless. TFA says the cable has high-friction coating, which makes a lot more sense.