Research is food for the economy. We won't be able to balance the budget if there's no revenue, and there won't be revenue without businesses providing jobs, and there won't be jobs without innovative new technologies and products.
Your proposal for the economy is like balancing a household's budget by eliminating all spending on food. Sure, if you can do that over 10 years you'll go a long way towards balancing your budget, but more than likely by that point your household's members are either all dead or spending all their time subsistence begging while living under a bridge (with a household budget of $0).
And if research is food, education is water. Sorry this is a food analogy instead of a car analogy.
It won't dynamically load for me... just sits and spins with "Please Wait". Ahh, for some reason I have to allow "Cloudfront.net" to run scripts on my computer in order to get content from Kickstarter. Stupid web 2.0.
What annoys the hell out of me is that the "newly listed" section and the topical sections are mutually exclusive. Want to look at board game projects? Sure, here are a few staff picks or some most popular. Want to look at all of them? Want to look at new ones to get in early on something promising? Oops, clicking those links pulls you out of the board games category, and you have to wade through hundreds of other uninteresting projects to spot something in your category.
That alone keeps kickstarter out of my regular website rotation. Fucking annoying.
You have the right to life, but that's different than obligating someone else to support you.
So you claim to have the right to life, but prove it. You might claim that you need air to breathe and live. But it just so happens that I already have a factory that is polluting my air. It's not my fault that my air later becomes your air. By claiming a right to live, you are obligating me to support that right by cleaning up my factory.*
I think it's much easier to justify the right to life if you simultaneously obligate everyone else to support that right, to a certain degree. The collective compact increases mutual success.
* I don't specify what the pollution is. I can think of several examples of "pollution" that would render the air deadly to you but that you'd never be able to sue me for.
I spend my days designing modern electronic devices, and I have seen other parts with plenty of defects. But...capacitors are generally crap. We as a company have decided to stop using tantalum electrolytics in our products because they fail far too often, and do so with flashy results. But ceramics while stable crack too often in the manufacturing process and still aren't always available in larger capacitance values. We're moving towards polymers for bulk use and ceramics for pretty much everything else, and have to design boards around protecting the ceramics from cracking.
In high school and my first summer of college I worked for a Radio Shack freight forwarder in DFW. He supplied Radio Shacks in other parts of the world with official RS merchandise, but he also distributed products from other manufacturers that complemented and competed with RS's merchandise. His stores had the option to buy whatever they wanted to fill their store if they thought it would sell. It didn't seem like RS enforced any brand loyalty or branded merchandise requirements on franchisees.
The other 39.1% - many of which are all the educated engineers and professionals that got their quality public eduction somewhere else in the U.S. then moved to Texas for their career - aren't that likely to go with the secession. Nor, more importantly, would be all the corporations doing business in Texas. I think that would kill any real effort right there.
In Cleveland you can buy a four-bedroom house for $30,000 - the same kind of house that would run $200,000 in Texas or $800,000 on either coast. And food is cheaper in the Midwest as well. The only staples that aren't cheaper are fuel (unless you count subsidized ethanol) and health care. You could solve the former with better public transportation to/from work and solve the latter with a healthy respect for exercise and planning.
I don't think it's impossible to bring those jobs back, just challenging.
Some other random thread indicated that, for a typical electronic device like the iPad or iPhone, manufacturing it in China saves Apple maybe $20-$30 per device compared to manufacturing it in the U.S. So a $599 iPad with maybe a 2X? markup would be $649 produced in the U.S.A.
It's really not that big of a difference, unless you're a corporate executive responsible solely to your stockholders and your own annual bonus (aka a greedy bastard) who'd rather squeeze out that money by working Chinese in sweat shops than lose even a single sale.
And prices in China have started going up. Besides Brazil, companies are starting to look at Vietnam and Africa to reduce labor costs because of the rising Chinese cost of living.
There's generally a reason musicians need a label, too, but in both cases the people providing useful screening and critique can also act as leeches on the artists and block excellent material from every being noticed.
I'd rather live in a world with 9000 crap titles and 1000 good ones, all independently published, than a world with 1000 crap titles and 300 good ones, all screened by a label or publisher. The indy world has way more crap but it also has three times as much excellence, and I can use the internet and things like Pandora to find the good stuff and weed out the crap.
One of my high school friends is a doctor. He finally finished his last year of school/residency/fellowship/whatever and got a Full Time Job around when we were both 32.
His job is to look at slides of liver cells and decide if they are cancerous. That's it. Now, I understand that could be a very tough decision, and a huge one in many people's lives, and I'm sure making that decision earns him a doctor's salary.
But... did he really need 15 years of education to make that decision? I know his last two years of education were in a fellowship just for liver cancer, and I assume some previous amount of his training covered cancer and livers, but all the rest is sort of wasted. Isn't there an option for those that want to specialize to learn less and be licensed for less?
I'm an electrical engineer. I know that I could never design a safe bridge (unless there's a good application note I could read). If engineering was like medicine, I would have been expected to go to school for 15 years to become an "engineer" capable of doing civil/electrical/mechanical/software/materials science/etc. and I would need to be paid drastically more to cover the staggering loan payments. But instead engineers figured out how to specialize and keep costs low.
I just don't want them all to run afoul of antitrust law. If there's a way it could be done through a third-party consortium (i.e. EMI is bought by the "Internet Commerce Association of America" which just happens to be funded by Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft) without getting it held up in reviews and lawsuits for five years, great!
The trade group complains that sites aren't held responsible for the infringing activities of their users, a rule the trade group says 'excuses willful blindness and outright complicity in illegal activity.'
This is, again, the scariest part of their campaign. The ability of sites to not be liable (unless they ignore takedown requests) is the best part of the (otherwise pretty crappy) DMCA, and the XXAA want to undo it. They don't care in the least that it would end every social collaboration web site (like slashdot), because they think their old business models (pay the radio, tv, and newspaper to advertise, then reap profit via local stores and theaters) would spring back to life if we didn't waste all our time and money on the internet.
Seriously, the only way this will end is if someone puts a bullet in them. And by bullet, I mean hostile takeover. And by someone, I mean Google. And if Apple just so happens to take over another one of them a few days later, oh well. Maybe Microsoft would even like to own a music label? Hell, isn't EMI suffering and looking for a buyer?
Alomst every intrusion Bush pushed; Homeland Security, NoNock warrants, NoTell warrants, warrantless searches, control of the Internet, indefinite arrest without charges - The Obama administration has enlarged on. And I not only voted for him, I campaigned for him.
Okay, so you have an emotional attachment, and you're angry and want to punish him. I get that. I voted for him too, and I'm disappointed.
But take a minute and look at this from a financial standpoint. Think about all the wrong things he's done, and consider them all sunk cost. They're done and (at least this election) you can't get them back.
Then focus on future costs. Of the two available options, which one will be worst moving forward? I see no indication that the Republican nominee would undo any of those things. Indeed, comparing Obama and Romney/Gingrich, I think Romney/Gingrich would trample first and fifth amendment rights faster than Obama would. Romney/Gingrich want smaller government, but only where it regulates business or taxes rich people or helps poor people. Neither of them have any interest in stopping the things you hate about Obama, and I suspect both of them would further intensify those things so as to pander to the warhawk/"nothing to hide"/"with us or against us" base.
So by reacting with your emotions, I think you'll end up making things even worst. "Cutting off your nose to spite your face", so to speak.
Obviously your opinions about Obama's second term versus Romney/Gingrich's first might differ, but at least make sure you've thought them through before you vote.
If I owned land at the edge of one state, and I built a skyscraper tall enough to cover your farm in perpetual shade (at least half the day) which hurts your production, then yeah, that would absolutely be a federal issue. That's pretty much book definition of commerce clause though.
This is precious, why have a Constitution if you can 'interpret' it at all, so in reality nothing that government wants to do can be prevented?
Because the people who wrote the Constitution expected it to be regularly amended, so they wrote it using very vague terms that they though could be amended over time.
Later, when the Supreme Court established itself as arbiters of what is and isn't Constitutional, most of those same people were still around and could have stopped this... with a Constitutional amendment. But they didn't.
And then it became way too difficult to get an amendment passed, but there's still a Supreme Court and that vaguely worded document. And since there's no indication that we could ever pass amendments to override anything (and theoretically "reset" the Supreme Court's basis for opinions) the best we can hope for is to change them over time via stacking the court. And that doesn't work since, at least with regard to the commerce clause, I doubt either party would nominate someone who's view differs from the current standard.
That's a really bad argument. The Supreme Court can be and is regularly wrong. Their word may be law, but that does not make their work right and everyone else wrong. Big difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Research is food for the economy. We won't be able to balance the budget if there's no revenue, and there won't be revenue without businesses providing jobs, and there won't be jobs without innovative new technologies and products.
Your proposal for the economy is like balancing a household's budget by eliminating all spending on food. Sure, if you can do that over 10 years you'll go a long way towards balancing your budget, but more than likely by that point your household's members are either all dead or spending all their time subsistence begging while living under a bridge (with a household budget of $0).
And if research is food, education is water. Sorry this is a food analogy instead of a car analogy.
It won't dynamically load for me... just sits and spins with "Please Wait". Ahh, for some reason I have to allow "Cloudfront.net" to run scripts on my computer in order to get content from Kickstarter. Stupid web 2.0.
It's not just the voltage issue, which yes we compensate for. They also have temperature and lifetime and vibration problems.
Sure, so let's increase our focus on education instead of cutting budgets across the country and see if we can create more engineers!
What annoys the hell out of me is that the "newly listed" section and the topical sections are mutually exclusive. Want to look at board game projects? Sure, here are a few staff picks or some most popular. Want to look at all of them? Want to look at new ones to get in early on something promising? Oops, clicking those links pulls you out of the board games category, and you have to wade through hundreds of other uninteresting projects to spot something in your category.
That alone keeps kickstarter out of my regular website rotation. Fucking annoying.
You have the right to life, but that's different than obligating someone else to support you.
So you claim to have the right to life, but prove it. You might claim that you need air to breathe and live. But it just so happens that I already have a factory that is polluting my air. It's not my fault that my air later becomes your air. By claiming a right to live, you are obligating me to support that right by cleaning up my factory.*
I think it's much easier to justify the right to life if you simultaneously obligate everyone else to support that right, to a certain degree. The collective compact increases mutual success.
* I don't specify what the pollution is. I can think of several examples of "pollution" that would render the air deadly to you but that you'd never be able to sue me for.
I spend my days designing modern electronic devices, and I have seen other parts with plenty of defects. But...capacitors are generally crap. We as a company have decided to stop using tantalum electrolytics in our products because they fail far too often, and do so with flashy results. But ceramics while stable crack too often in the manufacturing process and still aren't always available in larger capacitance values. We're moving towards polymers for bulk use and ceramics for pretty much everything else, and have to design boards around protecting the ceramics from cracking.
In high school and my first summer of college I worked for a Radio Shack freight forwarder in DFW. He supplied Radio Shacks in other parts of the world with official RS merchandise, but he also distributed products from other manufacturers that complemented and competed with RS's merchandise. His stores had the option to buy whatever they wanted to fill their store if they thought it would sell. It didn't seem like RS enforced any brand loyalty or branded merchandise requirements on franchisees.
I don't think states have regained the right to secede. The only state remotely stupid enough to try would be Texas, and only 60.9% of its residents are natives. (Per http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/05/17/3083057/in-many-northeast-tarrant-cities.html)
The other 39.1% - many of which are all the educated engineers and professionals that got their quality public eduction somewhere else in the U.S. then moved to Texas for their career - aren't that likely to go with the secession. Nor, more importantly, would be all the corporations doing business in Texas. I think that would kill any real effort right there.
Your post makes no sense. Sorry I can't give it a better reply.
I mean, seriously, if the SCUSA didn't do it, then who would? If the SCUSA didn't decide the constitutionality of statutes, then what would they do?
No clue. The Constitution didn't specify.
But they aren't final. Next year's Supreme Court can overrule them.
In Cleveland you can buy a four-bedroom house for $30,000 - the same kind of house that would run $200,000 in Texas or $800,000 on either coast. And food is cheaper in the Midwest as well. The only staples that aren't cheaper are fuel (unless you count subsidized ethanol) and health care. You could solve the former with better public transportation to/from work and solve the latter with a healthy respect for exercise and planning.
I don't think it's impossible to bring those jobs back, just challenging.
Replying to my own post with a source.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?pagewanted=all
Some other random thread indicated that, for a typical electronic device like the iPad or iPhone, manufacturing it in China saves Apple maybe $20-$30 per device compared to manufacturing it in the U.S. So a $599 iPad with maybe a 2X? markup would be $649 produced in the U.S.A.
It's really not that big of a difference, unless you're a corporate executive responsible solely to your stockholders and your own annual bonus (aka a greedy bastard) who'd rather squeeze out that money by working Chinese in sweat shops than lose even a single sale.
And prices in China have started going up. Besides Brazil, companies are starting to look at Vietnam and Africa to reduce labor costs because of the rising Chinese cost of living.
There's generally a reason musicians need a label, too, but in both cases the people providing useful screening and critique can also act as leeches on the artists and block excellent material from every being noticed.
I'd rather live in a world with 9000 crap titles and 1000 good ones, all independently published, than a world with 1000 crap titles and 300 good ones, all screened by a label or publisher. The indy world has way more crap but it also has three times as much excellence, and I can use the internet and things like Pandora to find the good stuff and weed out the crap.
A high school friend (not the one I mentioned in another post) is a doctor of internal medicine and is completely deaf. (Though he can read lips.)
One of my high school friends is a doctor. He finally finished his last year of school/residency/fellowship/whatever and got a Full Time Job around when we were both 32.
His job is to look at slides of liver cells and decide if they are cancerous. That's it. Now, I understand that could be a very tough decision, and a huge one in many people's lives, and I'm sure making that decision earns him a doctor's salary.
But... did he really need 15 years of education to make that decision? I know his last two years of education were in a fellowship just for liver cancer, and I assume some previous amount of his training covered cancer and livers, but all the rest is sort of wasted. Isn't there an option for those that want to specialize to learn less and be licensed for less?
I'm an electrical engineer. I know that I could never design a safe bridge (unless there's a good application note I could read). If engineering was like medicine, I would have been expected to go to school for 15 years to become an "engineer" capable of doing civil/electrical/mechanical/software/materials science/etc. and I would need to be paid drastically more to cover the staggering loan payments. But instead engineers figured out how to specialize and keep costs low.
Why can't doctors?
I just don't want them all to run afoul of antitrust law. If there's a way it could be done through a third-party consortium (i.e. EMI is bought by the "Internet Commerce Association of America" which just happens to be funded by Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft) without getting it held up in reviews and lawsuits for five years, great!
The trade group complains that sites aren't held responsible for the infringing activities of their users, a rule the trade group says 'excuses willful blindness and outright complicity in illegal activity.'
This is, again, the scariest part of their campaign. The ability of sites to not be liable (unless they ignore takedown requests) is the best part of the (otherwise pretty crappy) DMCA, and the XXAA want to undo it. They don't care in the least that it would end every social collaboration web site (like slashdot), because they think their old business models (pay the radio, tv, and newspaper to advertise, then reap profit via local stores and theaters) would spring back to life if we didn't waste all our time and money on the internet.
Seriously, the only way this will end is if someone puts a bullet in them. And by bullet, I mean hostile takeover. And by someone, I mean Google. And if Apple just so happens to take over another one of them a few days later, oh well. Maybe Microsoft would even like to own a music label? Hell, isn't EMI suffering and looking for a buyer?
Yeah, unfortunately some of their lofty ideals had dirty, dirty undertones, and we had to fight a war to sort those out. States Rights lost that war.
Alomst every intrusion Bush pushed; Homeland Security, NoNock warrants, NoTell warrants, warrantless searches, control of the Internet, indefinite arrest without charges - The Obama administration has enlarged on.
And I not only voted for him, I campaigned for him.
Okay, so you have an emotional attachment, and you're angry and want to punish him. I get that. I voted for him too, and I'm disappointed.
But take a minute and look at this from a financial standpoint. Think about all the wrong things he's done, and consider them all sunk cost. They're done and (at least this election) you can't get them back.
Then focus on future costs. Of the two available options, which one will be worst moving forward? I see no indication that the Republican nominee would undo any of those things. Indeed, comparing Obama and Romney/Gingrich, I think Romney/Gingrich would trample first and fifth amendment rights faster than Obama would. Romney/Gingrich want smaller government, but only where it regulates business or taxes rich people or helps poor people. Neither of them have any interest in stopping the things you hate about Obama, and I suspect both of them would further intensify those things so as to pander to the warhawk/"nothing to hide"/"with us or against us" base.
So by reacting with your emotions, I think you'll end up making things even worst. "Cutting off your nose to spite your face", so to speak.
Obviously your opinions about Obama's second term versus Romney/Gingrich's first might differ, but at least make sure you've thought them through before you vote.
If I owned land at the edge of one state, and I built a skyscraper tall enough to cover your farm in perpetual shade (at least half the day) which hurts your production, then yeah, that would absolutely be a federal issue. That's pretty much book definition of commerce clause though.
This is precious, why have a Constitution if you can 'interpret' it at all, so in reality nothing that government wants to do can be prevented?
Because the people who wrote the Constitution expected it to be regularly amended, so they wrote it using very vague terms that they though could be amended over time.
Later, when the Supreme Court established itself as arbiters of what is and isn't Constitutional, most of those same people were still around and could have stopped this... with a Constitutional amendment. But they didn't.
And then it became way too difficult to get an amendment passed, but there's still a Supreme Court and that vaguely worded document. And since there's no indication that we could ever pass amendments to override anything (and theoretically "reset" the Supreme Court's basis for opinions) the best we can hope for is to change them over time via stacking the court. And that doesn't work since, at least with regard to the commerce clause, I doubt either party would nominate someone who's view differs from the current standard.
That's a really bad argument. The Supreme Court can be and is regularly wrong. Their word may be law, but that does not make their work right and everyone else wrong. Big difference.