When the populace has become that complacent and trusting, it's open season on the Constitution.
Oh, now it's open season on the Constitution, is it? Not when Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Not when Wilson nationalized industries, jailed protestors, and created an income tax. Not when Roosevelt put citizens in concentration camps, set up price controls, and nationalized some more industries. Not when the Senate held hearings of suspected Communists in show business. No, now that 1300 people let police conduct 10-second bag checks, now the Constitution is going down in flames.
And then you sue all those companies for umpteen billions. Indeed, why should Big Cocaine be different from Big Tobacco?
Hey now, relax. Currently we're only sending the US Marines against the drug cartels. Now you want to unleash an army of lawyers on them?! Talk about your cruel and unusual punishment.
Heck, forget waterboarding. Let's just put the terrorists at the Gitmo through a prolonged child custody battle. They'll crack in no time.
Fair enough, I guess, but if your mind is that open I wonder whether you think it's arrogant to assume that the sun will rise tomorrow. It might not, of course, but barring some evidence to the contrary, I think it's just fine to proceed on the assumption that it will. When every shred of evidence points to hypothesis A, even the open-minded can fairly assume A is true. The scientific mind will proceed with this hypothesis until some piece of conflicting data shows up.
Bees can signal the location of flowers dozens of miles away to others in the hive. [snip] After centuries of study, we still have virtually no idea what's being communicated in whalesong. How arrogant for we humans to assume that we are the only ones capable of "high level" communication when we don't even know what communications are going on in other species.
Is there any evidence anywhere that all this animal communication helps them in ways similar to what human communication can accomplish? Do bees communicate better ways to build hives, for example? If a dolphin is taught how to do a trick, and is put near other dolphins but only allowed to communicate by sound, can the other dolphins learn the trick?
The fact is that there is no such evidence. I'm totally willing to believe that humans are on a continuum and that it isn't a bright line between us and the animals, but I also don't think it's arrogant to claim that we have them beat pretty soundly in the communication department. I leave it to you to demonstrate otherwise.
Let me introduce you to the world of offshore mutual funds...
Thanks, but I work in the industry, and I know very well that you're never going to consistently get 14-20% in "moderate-risk" investments. You might get that in a good year. In a high-risk investment you could get 50-100%, but you could also get -50%. It's absolutely crazy to predict 14-20% returns in perpetuity.
...assuming she can get 14-20% returns from smart, medium risk investments...
More economic brilliance from Slashdot! Ha! If you can get that kind of performance, become a portfolio manager immediately. You'll be a Warren Buffett-level billionaire before you know it.
My wife is Vietnamese and I interact with some people from Viet Nam regularly. The most astonishing thing I have ever learned about the "American War" is the near absence of animosity that is today held by the Vietnamese towards the United States for our military action there. This is in stark contrast to my own discontent with US behavior and involvement. To paraphrase my wife: people there simply recognize that brutality is inescapable in armed conflict.
Not to speak for your wife, but the reason might also have something to do with the fact that the North Vietnamese were far more brutal towards their own people than the Americans ever were.
There are all sorts of events that can mess up your clear causality. What if labor costs fall relative to capital? What if the cost of a key input goes up? You're certainly correct that as a general rule increased production (not demand, though - you slightly misspoke on that point) leads to lower marginal unit costs of production. But this rule is not as universal as the law of supply and demand and certainly does nothing to invalidate it, as the GP was implying.
Ever since Henry Ford, the simple law of "supply and demand" is not so simple anymore. More often than not, the higher the demand, the lower the prices.
That's a shame - you were on a roll, writing the truth, etc. Then you wrote the above and went right off a cliff.
There's a lot of economic illiteracy in this thread, so let me clear up a couple of things. The law of supply and demand is basically a static law, making the implicit assumption that the supply and demand curves won't change (i.e. that supply and demand respond only to price, ignoring capital improvement, consumer needs, etc.). Since it's (nearly) always the case that, ignoring these other factors, higher prices result in lower demand and higher supply, the demand curve is downward sloping the the supply curve is upward sloping. Therefore, if the demand curve shifts up (which is what we mean when we say that "demand has increased"), the price will go up.
What you're talking about is that suppliers are predicting this and building out capital to expand capacity. This shifts the supply curve up. When both the supply and demand curves rise, the price may rise, stay the same or fall, and volume always increases. Your contention that prices will fall is simply untrue - what is true is that since marginal unit cost of production (esp. of tech products) tends to fall over time, supply can sometimes be increased dramatically. This is all perfectly captured by the old, boring law of supply and demand.
Sell it as environmentalism. "We take discarded bugs from software around the world, run them through our industrial-grade recycling plant, and turn it into pure, post-consumer recycled BUGS(r)."
You don't just want to... give the nuclear people so much of an unfair advantage that they can get 1960's white elephant designs to make a profit instead of developing something worth the effort to build on it's own merits.
Don't worry, if that happens we'll just implement radiation taxes!
Government should own and maintain all of the lines and rent space on them to the (to any) ISPs. Not control over what goes over the lines, just the physical wire connecting 2 points.
Thank goodness they already have high-speed fiber optic lines to nationalize! If the government had controlled all the communications lines all along we'd be accessing the Internet over a 50-baud coffee-can-and-string modem. This one post would take you 3 minutes to download.
The autonomy is less than 500 miles in the air, not so great for interstate trips.
Depends where you live - if you're in the western U.S., Canada or Australia, it's not so great. In the eastern U.S. or Europe it's fine. 500 miles range can get me from NYC to Boston or DC easily, bypassing heavily-trafficked roadways.
The air mileage mileage, however is 25 mpg. That's good mileage.
Eh, it's OK. Per passenger-mile a 747 is better.:)
And it has a 120 gallons fuel capacity, not bad at all for a car.
Not bad? That's freakin' huge for a car. However, it has a 120 pound fuel capacity, which is more like 17-18 gallons.
...the real reason is that it intrudes on the private property owner's rights to operate his business in a peaceful manner.
Which part of the Constitution covers this right, exactly?
The real real reason is that yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater is likely to cause injury as people storm for the exits. It's the same reason why you can fire a gun at a target in a shooting range, but not at a target on the outside of the building across the street.
I think a better argument would be that it's a power grid, so anyone on the grid using power is contributing to the pollution caused by all generators on the grid. If Microsoft weren't using the hydro power, it could be used by consumers closer to fossil-fuel burners and those burners would need to burn less fuel.
They don't really care if they make you angry, because you are not their customer.
Well, they should care, because if they make me angry at the company that hired them, it's less likely that company will hire them again. The company I am doing business with usually has some interest in good PR.
Incidentally, I bought a printer in May that came with a $100 mail-in rebate. I just received the check this week. I had written that one off a month ago!
...a lot of these 1st world countries throw massive amounts of subsidies at their farmers...
True, but this is primarily done in the EU, not the US and Canada. (I'm not saying it doesn't take place at all in North America, just not so much that it's wildly skewing the numbers.) My point was about the US and Canada.
However, this is irrelevant to the larger point OP was making, which was that industrial countries were offshoring their agriculture. As you yourself point out, this is not the case. In the US and Canada, it's because we're quite efficient at growing food and have vast tracts of open, arable land on which to do it. In the EU, it's because the government subsidizes it. I'm honestly not sure whether the EU is food self-sufficient (which is why I didn't mention them in my previous post), but it wouldn't surprise me. The only "offshoring" that is done is to obtain specific foods that are expensive (or impossible) to grow locally at certain times of the year.
That's pretty interesting, and I think this idea actually has some merit to it.
But it also has some problems. If there's a relationship between entropy and value, it's only that the two are in an inverse relationship of some kind (i.e., lower entropy yields higher value). It's certainly not the case that this relationship is consistent, though - two objects with the same entropy may have wildly different values. Furthermore, the same object may have a different value to two different people, which obviously has nothing to do with entropy. You might also ask yourself as a thought experiment what would be the value of a car on an Earth devoid of people.
The point being that we assign value to objects (and services). Our assignments may be related to entropy calculations - this only makes sense, after all, although I'll bet I could come up with counterexamples (demolition is a valued service, for instance) - but the entropy does not itself create the value; we do.
The worth of the car is determined by the price of negotiated pension, health benefits, and mortgage amounts that the members of the auto workers union have.
You use "worth" instead of using my term "value" for some reason. But what you're really describing is "cost". The "value" of the car is determined by what people are willing to pay for it (a purely subjective measure). Cost is not a factor.
That being said, many service industries exist by leaching value from others. Examples would include lawyers, brokers, etc.
Let's not be too hard on the middlemen (such as brokers). They actually do generally provide value, by lowering transaction costs. (There surely are cases where middlemen have an entrenched position due to regulations or market failure and actually do "leach value", but this is not usually the case.)
Lawyers should be treated almost like a branch of the government, though. To the extent that government "leaches value" (hopefully minimally! but in practice, maximally it seems:) so will lawyers.
Large scale industrial farming generates a large amount of food available relatively cheaply. But, it's effectively off-shoring of your agriculture. It's cheap because a country with lower labour costs is producing it for you.
If this were true, how would it explain the fact that countries with among the highest labor costs in the world (USA and Canada, to name two) are enormous exporters of food, while lots of countries with low labor costs (the African countries, for example) are net importers?
It's certainly true that the US (for example) buys nonlocal produce, but that isn't because we aren't growing enough to feed ourselves. It's because we grow huge surpluses of stuff that we don't need (like rice and soybeans) so we (effectively) trade it for stuff we want (like avocadoes in January).
...the consumer expects that everyone can sell it for the same price as Wal Mart does.
Obviously not true, or else all the other grocery stores would have no customers.
Eventually, they get gouged too badly and go out of business entirely, and we lose even more farming capacity.
OK, but if/when this happens, then prices go up, which helps out all the other suppliers. Look, you're essentially arguing that suppliers have no control at all over prices, and that consumers control everything. This is obviously false, since food prices have been rising faster than inflation lately (in the US).
But, glitches in the supply chain (or massive recalls of California produce due to E-Coli contamination) can cause major upheaval in the markets.
Naturally, but so what? Any unexpected shock to supply or demand is going to cause sudden changes in price. This doesn't say much about the industry - it just expresses a law of economics. You aren't going to able to change this. (However, what you can change is whether or not it causes famine. Did the recent E. Coli spinach scare cause any risk of famine? No, because there's plenty of substitutes that we have huge surpluses of. So even if the price of spinach did some crazy roller-coastering, the effect on the consumer was basically inconvenience, not an empty belly.)
We certainly haven't reached the point where we can efficiently feed everyone.
Of course we have, and we've been able to for decades. I think it's easy to argue that these days, all famines are caused by (a) government control, (b) wars, and (c) disasters. All of which affect the distribution networks, not the supply.
Do you not see the inconsistency here? If prices have fallen, it's because supply is becoming ever more efficient and is outstripping demand. So in what sense has agriculture "fallen behind"?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, now it's open season on the Constitution, is it? Not when Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Not when Wilson nationalized industries, jailed protestors, and created an income tax. Not when Roosevelt put citizens in concentration camps, set up price controls, and nationalized some more industries. Not when the Senate held hearings of suspected Communists in show business. No, now that 1300 people let police conduct 10-second bag checks, now the Constitution is going down in flames.
Get some perspective.
Hey now, relax. Currently we're only sending the US Marines against the drug cartels. Now you want to unleash an army of lawyers on them?! Talk about your cruel and unusual punishment.
Heck, forget waterboarding. Let's just put the terrorists at the Gitmo through a prolonged child custody battle. They'll crack in no time.
Fair enough, I guess, but if your mind is that open I wonder whether you think it's arrogant to assume that the sun will rise tomorrow. It might not, of course, but barring some evidence to the contrary, I think it's just fine to proceed on the assumption that it will. When every shred of evidence points to hypothesis A, even the open-minded can fairly assume A is true. The scientific mind will proceed with this hypothesis until some piece of conflicting data shows up.
Is there any evidence anywhere that all this animal communication helps them in ways similar to what human communication can accomplish? Do bees communicate better ways to build hives, for example? If a dolphin is taught how to do a trick, and is put near other dolphins but only allowed to communicate by sound, can the other dolphins learn the trick?
The fact is that there is no such evidence. I'm totally willing to believe that humans are on a continuum and that it isn't a bright line between us and the animals, but I also don't think it's arrogant to claim that we have them beat pretty soundly in the communication department. I leave it to you to demonstrate otherwise.
Thanks, but I work in the industry, and I know very well that you're never going to consistently get 14-20% in "moderate-risk" investments. You might get that in a good year. In a high-risk investment you could get 50-100%, but you could also get -50%. It's absolutely crazy to predict 14-20% returns in perpetuity.
More economic brilliance from Slashdot! Ha! If you can get that kind of performance, become a portfolio manager immediately. You'll be a Warren Buffett-level billionaire before you know it.
Not to speak for your wife, but the reason might also have something to do with the fact that the North Vietnamese were far more brutal towards their own people than the Americans ever were.
There are all sorts of events that can mess up your clear causality. What if labor costs fall relative to capital? What if the cost of a key input goes up? You're certainly correct that as a general rule increased production (not demand, though - you slightly misspoke on that point) leads to lower marginal unit costs of production. But this rule is not as universal as the law of supply and demand and certainly does nothing to invalidate it, as the GP was implying.
That's a shame - you were on a roll, writing the truth, etc. Then you wrote the above and went right off a cliff.
There's a lot of economic illiteracy in this thread, so let me clear up a couple of things. The law of supply and demand is basically a static law, making the implicit assumption that the supply and demand curves won't change (i.e. that supply and demand respond only to price, ignoring capital improvement, consumer needs, etc.). Since it's (nearly) always the case that, ignoring these other factors, higher prices result in lower demand and higher supply, the demand curve is downward sloping the the supply curve is upward sloping. Therefore, if the demand curve shifts up (which is what we mean when we say that "demand has increased"), the price will go up.
What you're talking about is that suppliers are predicting this and building out capital to expand capacity. This shifts the supply curve up. When both the supply and demand curves rise, the price may rise, stay the same or fall, and volume always increases. Your contention that prices will fall is simply untrue - what is true is that since marginal unit cost of production (esp. of tech products) tends to fall over time, supply can sometimes be increased dramatically. This is all perfectly captured by the old, boring law of supply and demand.
They'll just have to up the power on those lasers. A lot.
Sell it as environmentalism. "We take discarded bugs from software around the world, run them through our industrial-grade recycling plant, and turn it into pure, post-consumer recycled BUGS(r)."
Why would they do that? Wouldn't it hurt the bottom line?
Don't worry, if that happens we'll just implement radiation taxes!
Thank goodness they already have high-speed fiber optic lines to nationalize! If the government had controlled all the communications lines all along we'd be accessing the Internet over a 50-baud coffee-can-and-string modem. This one post would take you 3 minutes to download.
I prefer N - A - Z - I - S.
Depends where you live - if you're in the western U.S., Canada or Australia, it's not so great. In the eastern U.S. or Europe it's fine. 500 miles range can get me from NYC to Boston or DC easily, bypassing heavily-trafficked roadways.
Eh, it's OK. Per passenger-mile a 747 is better. :)
Not bad? That's freakin' huge for a car. However, it has a 120 pound fuel capacity, which is more like 17-18 gallons.
Which part of the Constitution covers this right, exactly?
The real real reason is that yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater is likely to cause injury as people storm for the exits. It's the same reason why you can fire a gun at a target in a shooting range, but not at a target on the outside of the building across the street.
I think a better argument would be that it's a power grid, so anyone on the grid using power is contributing to the pollution caused by all generators on the grid. If Microsoft weren't using the hydro power, it could be used by consumers closer to fossil-fuel burners and those burners would need to burn less fuel.
Well, they should care, because if they make me angry at the company that hired them, it's less likely that company will hire them again. The company I am doing business with usually has some interest in good PR.
Incidentally, I bought a printer in May that came with a $100 mail-in rebate. I just received the check this week. I had written that one off a month ago!
True, but this is primarily done in the EU, not the US and Canada. (I'm not saying it doesn't take place at all in North America, just not so much that it's wildly skewing the numbers.) My point was about the US and Canada.
However, this is irrelevant to the larger point OP was making, which was that industrial countries were offshoring their agriculture. As you yourself point out, this is not the case. In the US and Canada, it's because we're quite efficient at growing food and have vast tracts of open, arable land on which to do it. In the EU, it's because the government subsidizes it. I'm honestly not sure whether the EU is food self-sufficient (which is why I didn't mention them in my previous post), but it wouldn't surprise me. The only "offshoring" that is done is to obtain specific foods that are expensive (or impossible) to grow locally at certain times of the year.
That's pretty interesting, and I think this idea actually has some merit to it.
But it also has some problems. If there's a relationship between entropy and value, it's only that the two are in an inverse relationship of some kind (i.e., lower entropy yields higher value). It's certainly not the case that this relationship is consistent, though - two objects with the same entropy may have wildly different values. Furthermore, the same object may have a different value to two different people, which obviously has nothing to do with entropy. You might also ask yourself as a thought experiment what would be the value of a car on an Earth devoid of people.
The point being that we assign value to objects (and services). Our assignments may be related to entropy calculations - this only makes sense, after all, although I'll bet I could come up with counterexamples (demolition is a valued service, for instance) - but the entropy does not itself create the value; we do.
How can it possibly be an objective judgment whether a car is "socially necessary"?
The Labor Theory of Value is an old idea... and long debunked.
Correct.
You use "worth" instead of using my term "value" for some reason. But what you're really describing is "cost". The "value" of the car is determined by what people are willing to pay for it (a purely subjective measure). Cost is not a factor.
Let's not be too hard on the middlemen (such as brokers). They actually do generally provide value, by lowering transaction costs. (There surely are cases where middlemen have an entrenched position due to regulations or market failure and actually do "leach value", but this is not usually the case.)
Lawyers should be treated almost like a branch of the government, though. To the extent that government "leaches value" (hopefully minimally! but in practice, maximally it seems :) so will lawyers.
If this were true, how would it explain the fact that countries with among the highest labor costs in the world (USA and Canada, to name two) are enormous exporters of food, while lots of countries with low labor costs (the African countries, for example) are net importers?
It's certainly true that the US (for example) buys nonlocal produce, but that isn't because we aren't growing enough to feed ourselves. It's because we grow huge surpluses of stuff that we don't need (like rice and soybeans) so we (effectively) trade it for stuff we want (like avocadoes in January).
Obviously not true, or else all the other grocery stores would have no customers.
OK, but if/when this happens, then prices go up, which helps out all the other suppliers. Look, you're essentially arguing that suppliers have no control at all over prices, and that consumers control everything. This is obviously false, since food prices have been rising faster than inflation lately (in the US).
Naturally, but so what? Any unexpected shock to supply or demand is going to cause sudden changes in price. This doesn't say much about the industry - it just expresses a law of economics. You aren't going to able to change this. (However, what you can change is whether or not it causes famine. Did the recent E. Coli spinach scare cause any risk of famine? No, because there's plenty of substitutes that we have huge surpluses of. So even if the price of spinach did some crazy roller-coastering, the effect on the consumer was basically inconvenience, not an empty belly.)
Of course we have, and we've been able to for decades. I think it's easy to argue that these days, all famines are caused by (a) government control, (b) wars, and (c) disasters. All of which affect the distribution networks, not the supply.
Do you not see the inconsistency here? If prices have fallen, it's because supply is becoming ever more efficient and is outstripping demand. So in what sense has agriculture "fallen behind"?