I am a libertarian and reckon the market is the natural way.
I'm a libertarian too, but I'm not sure I'd describe the market as "natural", as such. From what I can see in history, kleptocracies and tyrannies are far more common, and freedom requires considerable effort to establish and maintain it.
amazon is in a position to extort billions from every online store, auction site, and reseller.
I don't think so. The patent only covers one particular implementation of on-line ordering, and most of the other internet businesses are doing fine without it.
What should we do with them? Bring them into the United States and run them through the civilian justice system?
We should issue letters of marque and reprisal, and offer rewards for their capture. Back when we ratified the constitution, we had a very similar situation with the barbary pirates. If they're captured, they should be tried, convicted, and executed or imprisoned as the jury may find.
I'm quite comfortable knowing that unless I'm actively trying to destablize the government, they don't care about what I am up to.
Do you trust all future administrations with anything they might find out about you? Don't forget that Dick Nixon and Bill Clinton both illegally accessed IRS records on their political opponents, for example.
How about preemptively incarcerating members of some other class of people that you despise? That worked out so brilliantly when FDR did it to the Japanese-Americans, didn't it?
I have a somewhat different reason for opposing punitive taxation of smokers. First, taxation for behavior control is a terrible idea in itself; it's not the place of the government to command us. Secondly, the more money government gets by whatever means, the more government we'll have.
Either way, it's best not to give them too much authority, because they'll misuse it.
As PJ O'Rourke put it, giving money to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to adolescents.
I disagree. Tolerating routine violations of privacy for one class of people desensitizes us to routine violations of privacy for everyone.
Thankfully, with Obama becoming president, the odds of you getting Gitmo'd have reduced drastically.
The odds were always far lower than the odds of getting killed by a drunk driver, but that's beside the point. The problem is that our government has gotten away with imprisoning people without charges for the first time since the Roosevelt administration, and the public outcry was negligible.
CRTs tend to make noise at the frequency of their horizontal sweep, due to EMF from the changing magnetic field in the deflection yoke. For a TV, that would be 15.75 Khz. There would also be some noise at lower harmonics of that frequency.
I actually learned more algebra in my 10th grade Physics class than I did in the actual algebra class.
Regrettably, my physics teacher in 10th grade was an idiot who couldn't add directly opposed vectors of equal magnitude.
However, I did have the good fortune to learn trigonometry at work rather than at school. My boss needed me to understand AC power, so he sat me down and explained it to me. The following school year, when I got to the trig class, I looked at the graphs, and said "Oh, sine is voltage, cosine is current. I know this."
I agree with you that application is vital to making a subject interesting. In math, it's not too hard to spot the relevant applications. When it comes to history though, most of our schools only want to teach you the Party Line, and only give the most superficial descriptions of what happened and why.
All states would suck less if they didn't leave important policy decisions to clowns in state governments.
Oh, do tell us how great a job the federal government has done making policy decisions. How are America's schools doing since Carter gave us the Department of Education?
For as long as I can remember, I've been able to tell when I was near a wall in a dark room, or with my eyes closed. I don't know if I'd describe it as sonar per se, but I can also tell if someone is standing close to me, no matter what our relative positions are.
FWIW, the last time I tested it with a tone genererator, my hearing topped out somewhere around 25Khz. I'm sure it's far lower now, but I can still tell if there's a CRT monitor powered on anywhere within fifty feet of me or so.
Two points: 1) privately owned roads would be a capital asset, and it would be worthwhile to spend the money on better construction, making repairs less frequent, and 2) coordination doesn't require monopoly.
Re:Want to revitalize the stock market?
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How To Create More Jobs
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· Score: 2, Interesting
they don't know how much they are really making when they are working for another entity instead of owning their own business.
That's one of the most insidious things about our current tax system. So many people are happy to get a refund from the IRS, and they never realize what they earned but didn't get to keep.
I think we're not using the term the same way. Alcoa was a monopoly, but I wouldn't describe it as a "natural monopoly" just because it arose without legislation to prevent competition.
When most people say "natural monopoly", they're claiming that the activity in question should be a monopoly (like, because it supposedly would be bad to have multiple sets of power lines running through a neighborhood.) That's idea I'm rejecting, not the fact that monopolies can occur even without a government to mandate them.
Incidentally, although Alcoa had a monopoly on aluminum in the USA for a while, they still were in competition with other materials, so their prices declined steadily as their production costs fell.
I wouldn't go quite that far, since there are many examples of mathematics that had no application initially, and then were found useful some time later. (Imaginary numbers and AC power spring to mind.)
Computing is a technical subject, which our schools are very poorly equipped to teach. The thing is, I don't believe that giving schools a bunch of new funding for computer science is going to get much in the way of useful results.
When I was a kid, I taught programming to my peers in high school (because the teacher really wasn't getting through to them), and I really can't say that learning how to write a BASIC program to scan a set of data and compute its mode, mean, median, and standard deviation will prove in any way beneficial to the people I taught it to.
For the time being at least, kids should learn how to type, and enough about the operation of computers to be able to use them. In other words, about the same depth that we give in Driver's education. Maybe some of them should also learn how to swap a drive or install an OS (like all drivers should know how to change a tire or their oil), but I think the idea that we need to teach computer science to everyone makes no more sense than teaching everyone how to use a structural steel catalog and materials data sheets to specify framing members for an office building.
For those kids who have an interest in computing and choose to pursue it, we should offer computing courses in about the same depth that we offer for other specialized areas (like we do for AP classes in biology or physics.)
-jcr
Re:Want to revitalize the stock market?
on
How To Create More Jobs
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· Score: 2, Interesting
they're already down to what is essentially a trivial amount,
A double-digit hit is a trivial amount to you? Don't forget that we overthrew our king over a 2% excise tax.
I'd like to see the tax code reworked, simplified, and modified so that income is generally treated as income, and taxed similarly.
I'd prefer to get away from taxing incomes at all, and go entirely to consumption taxes. We need all the savings we can get.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's a great idea.
It worked pretty well against piracy in the mediterranean and the caribbean in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
It would never happen in the modern world though.
Oh, I'm not sure of that. Some of the countries with coastlines near Somalia are getting pretty fed up with today's pirates.
-jcr
I am a libertarian and reckon the market is the natural way.
I'm a libertarian too, but I'm not sure I'd describe the market as "natural", as such. From what I can see in history, kleptocracies and tyrannies are far more common, and freedom requires considerable effort to establish and maintain it.
-jcr
I may have faith in humanity, I don't have faith in religion.
You sound like the kind of AC who makes /. worth visiting.
-jcr
amazon is in a position to extort billions from every online store, auction site, and reseller.
I don't think so. The patent only covers one particular implementation of on-line ordering, and most of the other internet businesses are doing fine without it.
-jcr
What should we do with them? Bring them into the United States and run them through the civilian justice system?
We should issue letters of marque and reprisal, and offer rewards for their capture. Back when we ratified the constitution, we had a very similar situation with the barbary pirates. If they're captured, they should be tried, convicted, and executed or imprisoned as the jury may find.
-jcr
Pushing this absurd patent is costing Amazon more in negative PR than the patent could possibly be worth.
-jcr
I wasn't aware we could hear magnetic fields.
You can't. What you hear is the noise made by the small amount of motion in the deflection coils.
-jcr
fuck any country who wants to treat me as a criminal when I first enter the country.
I agree with your sentiment, but please don't conflate a country and its government.
-jcr
I'm quite comfortable knowing that unless I'm actively trying to destablize the government, they don't care about what I am up to.
Do you trust all future administrations with anything they might find out about you? Don't forget that Dick Nixon and Bill Clinton both illegally accessed IRS records on their political opponents, for example.
-jcr
tracking non-citizens is just common sense
How about preemptively incarcerating members of some other class of people that you despise? That worked out so brilliantly when FDR did it to the Japanese-Americans, didn't it?
Get bent.
-jcr
I have a somewhat different reason for opposing punitive taxation of smokers. First, taxation for behavior control is a terrible idea in itself; it's not the place of the government to command us. Secondly, the more money government gets by whatever means, the more government we'll have.
Either way, it's best not to give them too much authority, because they'll misuse it.
As PJ O'Rourke put it, giving money to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to adolescents.
-jcr
This doesn't effect me as I am a citizen.
I disagree. Tolerating routine violations of privacy for one class of people desensitizes us to routine violations of privacy for everyone.
Thankfully, with Obama becoming president, the odds of you getting Gitmo'd have reduced drastically.
The odds were always far lower than the odds of getting killed by a drunk driver, but that's beside the point. The problem is that our government has gotten away with imprisoning people without charges for the first time since the Roosevelt administration, and the public outcry was negligible.
-jcr
CRTs tend to make noise at the frequency of their horizontal sweep, due to EMF from the changing magnetic field in the deflection yoke. For a TV, that would be 15.75 Khz. There would also be some noise at lower harmonics of that frequency.
-jcr
I actually learned more algebra in my 10th grade Physics class than I did in the actual algebra class.
Regrettably, my physics teacher in 10th grade was an idiot who couldn't add directly opposed vectors of equal magnitude.
However, I did have the good fortune to learn trigonometry at work rather than at school. My boss needed me to understand AC power, so he sat me down and explained it to me. The following school year, when I got to the trig class, I looked at the graphs, and said "Oh, sine is voltage, cosine is current. I know this."
I agree with you that application is vital to making a subject interesting. In math, it's not too hard to spot the relevant applications. When it comes to history though, most of our schools only want to teach you the Party Line, and only give the most superficial descriptions of what happened and why.
-jcr
All states would suck less if they didn't leave important policy decisions to clowns in state governments.
Oh, do tell us how great a job the federal government has done making policy decisions. How are America's schools doing since Carter gave us the Department of Education?
-jcr
Laugh it up all you want, I'm right.
-jcr
For as long as I can remember, I've been able to tell when I was near a wall in a dark room, or with my eyes closed. I don't know if I'd describe it as sonar per se, but I can also tell if someone is standing close to me, no matter what our relative positions are.
FWIW, the last time I tested it with a tone genererator, my hearing topped out somewhere around 25Khz. I'm sure it's far lower now, but I can still tell if there's a CRT monitor powered on anywhere within fifty feet of me or so.
-jcr
Two points: 1) privately owned roads would be a capital asset, and it would be worthwhile to spend the money on better construction, making repairs less frequent, and 2) coordination doesn't require monopoly.
BTW, Reason TV did a very interesting story on privatizing highways.
-jcr
they don't know how much they are really making when they are working for another entity instead of owning their own business.
That's one of the most insidious things about our current tax system. So many people are happy to get a refund from the IRS, and they never realize what they earned but didn't get to keep.
-jcr
Capitalism without regulation has failed worse than Russian communism
Oh really? Would you care to explain when we had capitalism without regulation within living memory?
We were regulated right into this mess that we're facing today. The federal register grew faster under Bush II than it did under Clinton.
-jcr
Do you really believe roads are not a natural monopoly?
No more so than land is. Most of the time, there's more that one route to get to wherever you're going.
-jcr
I think we're not using the term the same way. Alcoa was a monopoly, but I wouldn't describe it as a "natural monopoly" just because it arose without legislation to prevent competition.
When most people say "natural monopoly", they're claiming that the activity in question should be a monopoly (like, because it supposedly would be bad to have multiple sets of power lines running through a neighborhood.) That's idea I'm rejecting, not the fact that monopolies can occur even without a government to mandate them.
Incidentally, although Alcoa had a monopoly on aluminum in the USA for a while, they still were in competition with other materials, so their prices declined steadily as their production costs fell.
The laissez-faire option is the correct answer.
On that, we agree.
-jcr
Without application, mathematics is worthless
I wouldn't go quite that far, since there are many examples of mathematics that had no application initially, and then were found useful some time later. (Imaginary numbers and AC power spring to mind.)
-jcr
Computing is a technical subject, which our schools are very poorly equipped to teach. The thing is, I don't believe that giving schools a bunch of new funding for computer science is going to get much in the way of useful results.
When I was a kid, I taught programming to my peers in high school (because the teacher really wasn't getting through to them), and I really can't say that learning how to write a BASIC program to scan a set of data and compute its mode, mean, median, and standard deviation will prove in any way beneficial to the people I taught it to.
For the time being at least, kids should learn how to type, and enough about the operation of computers to be able to use them. In other words, about the same depth that we give in Driver's education. Maybe some of them should also learn how to swap a drive or install an OS (like all drivers should know how to change a tire or their oil), but I think the idea that we need to teach computer science to everyone makes no more sense than teaching everyone how to use a structural steel catalog and materials data sheets to specify framing members for an office building.
For those kids who have an interest in computing and choose to pursue it, we should offer computing courses in about the same depth that we offer for other specialized areas (like we do for AP classes in biology or physics.)
-jcr
they're already down to what is essentially a trivial amount,
A double-digit hit is a trivial amount to you? Don't forget that we overthrew our king over a 2% excise tax.
I'd like to see the tax code reworked, simplified, and modified so that income is generally treated as income, and taxed similarly.
I'd prefer to get away from taxing incomes at all, and go entirely to consumption taxes. We need all the savings we can get.
-jcr