The problem is that the land never gets retired from production when small farms (and even some larger ones, if they happen to have a number of really bad years) go belly up and leave. Think about it, all that land in the middle of the us isnt going to be bought out by developers. Other farmers end up farming it. Thus its hard to reduce production. (this is why the gov't pays people to put a certain amout of their acres into CRP(conservation reserve program) and maintain it as a sort of "wild" land. Lots of this "government money" is CRP money and disaster money (like when a drought wipes out 90% of your crop, i don't see anyone complaining about FEMA bailing out small businesses that get destroyed by tornadoes and floods.) I will agree that "family farming" (where one family farms a small amount of land) is doomed because of "economies of scale" (farms need to keep getting bigger due to the kinds of technology we use) The sad thing is that farming is/was one of the few good examples of perfect competition, but i fear that it wont be too much longer before the barriers of entry to farming cause it to be a less competitive market.
In the beginning, most capitalist socitety's had a incredible concentration of wealth, very few people could afford to own the means of production. Land was owned by the "noble classes"
Marx was convinced that the great masses would never have the resources to own captial. Thus he reasoned that the masses would rise up and over throw the extreamly wealthy.
What he didnt count on was publicly held stock, wide spread education, and that the investment of the extremely wealthy would make the whole country more wealthy. Thus marx's prediction never came to fruition.
yes, and all this feeling would be wonderful
if it actually worked
everyone really needs to read "the road to serfdom" to understand why socailism leads naturally to authoritarian governents.
It's pretty straight forward really.
And do you know why?
Becasue they will have a marginally easier time reducing CO2, because of all the highly innefficient factories in the former Warsaw Pact countries that got shut down since 1990 and are replaced in the economy by much more efficient ones. Germany is still suffering somewhat economically from the burden of reunification.
But all that aside, the US is 25% of all CO2 emmissions, not 36% IIRC, correct me if im wrong. That also assumes, of course, you believe China and some 3rd world countries underreported figures. The bottom line is this, the US is pretty efficient, considering the geographical issues (weather and distance.) that effect energy consumption. This doesnt mean that improvements arent needed, but kyoto only buys postpones the problem six years instead of 106, according to the best estimates of environmental groups. The technology for meaningful reduction in CO2 will become far cheeper in the next couple decades, but everyone is in a rush to try to "do something" now. What we really need is a CHEEP ENERGY SOURCE that produces no net CO2. But we dont have that yet, the technology isn't cheep enough. Remember, the serious damage predicted for global warming by the scientists who study it is predicted out to 100 years, using static technology and normal economic growth.
When Al Gore was sent to negotiate Kyoto,
the senate told him that certian things would be required before they would consider ratifying Kyoto. These included:
1. International CO2 permit trading.
2. Must include countries other than the EU (specifically china and india, who are not nearly as industrialized as the US and EU, but are rapidly developing, and will exceed our C02 outputs in the future.
3. A mechanism for crediting CO2 abatement, not just emissions reduction.
Not all of the senate's demands were met, but gore signed the final document anyways. Interestingly enough, when it became clear that the US wouldn't ratify the treaty, the EU gave Austrialia conecssions that it didnt give the US, because they wanted them on board badly.
2. copyrights and patents should last for 20 years with one possible 20 year extension. THEY SHOULD BE TRANSFERABLE! Thats just good market economics. For property to be useful it needs to be clearly defined, owned, and protected. (Public goods are a necessary evil, when these things objectives cannot be achieved without a massive violation of liberties, like privatizing air) All of this anti-corp bs is silly. The publicly held corp (as an institution idea, not necessarily individual entities, has been the single biggest contributor to income equality in the last 200 years i dare say!) (as i run for my flame suit:))
3. we simply need to do a better job screening out "trivial and obvious" patents that arent terribly innovative and we need to do a better job with prior art.
Basically IP needs to be harder to get with a shorter lifespan and the rights of all parties must be well defined.
In the vein of "capitalism" let me offer the thought that being anti abortion is entirely consistant with "capitalism" as defined by capitalism.org, follow me here.
There are two questions here, is it entitled to human rights, and what if its rights conflict with my right to do what i want with my body(ill happily recognize this one). Lets start with the first.
A severed human limb has no potential for life on its own, neither does an egg or sperm. They simply don't have the genetic material necessary to exist as a complete human being. The foot is differentiated, and the egg and sperm need to be paired to get a complete human chromosome. Thus a fetus/cluster of undifferentiated cells, are not physical the equivalent of a severed foot. They aren't, nor can they ever be human. You might be able to complare them (functionally) to a funtionally challened human being(handicapped or retarted). So then what kind of rights does a fetus have, the same as you or I? those of a minor child? those of a person too mentally handicapped to have any legal responsibility? The point is that some of them have fewer rights than others, but they are all guaranteed their right to life, as it is the most basic right one has, followed by liberty, property.
Someone sighted "everyone has the right to enjoy sex" and the difficultly of going through pregnancy, since contraceptives arent perfect, as grounds for legalizing abortion. Let me get this straight, sex, without concequences, is your right, but a fetus doesnt even have a bare minimum number of rights that we given to minors and such? I maintain that by having sex, you are contractually accepting the potential concequences of your actions (pregnancy being obvious, this is sex people, it's how we procreate:)) Thus you have given the fetus/cluster of cells permission to be there. Now rape and incest are a different matter, since consent of equal parties isnt the case, but they are less that 1-2% of all abortions. With the acception of rape or incest(here we can make an exception depending on the respective rights of each party?), is meerly allowing people to be irresponbile for their actions by allowing them to violate the most basic freedom that fetus has.
Any constructive critques, am i missing something?
well, this should be interesting given the obvious slashdot leaning toward freespeeh on one hand and abortion on the other.
A number of misconceptions have been bandied about here involving "pro-life/religious nuts", so let's correct the.
1. First of all, most anti-abortion/religious zealots WOULD also find this site offensive. A quick survery would attest to that. Actually to call them a group does us all a disservice. We tend to group people instead of recognize that there is a spectrum of opinions, not nearly so easily divisible into such camps. 2. Most of the "civilized world" (eg. europe) is just barely replacing its population, and the US would be too if it weren't for first generation immigrant families. Most of the population growth is in the third world, were abortions are not nearly as numerous or affordable to the population, compared to their relative cost in the developed world. Abortion is the least cost effective means of birth control that exists today. Condoms are much cheeper and more effective, plus they protect against things like AIDS and STDS, which are even bigger problems in the developing world than they are here. And the most effective form of population control has not been abortion, but wealth. Simply, wealthy people and wealthy countries have very few kids. Not because of abortion, simply cause of life style. 3. The argument about when life begins. Or when we become entitled to our legal protection of our "natural rights". May I point out, to those of you who seem to distain the religious, the delicious irony that the idea of "inalienable rights" was a "religious" concept(eg. rights were God given and we were entited to them, they arent a "gift" bestowed upon us by governents). Obviously a fetus (et al) is not capable of caring for itself and is dependant on a woman's body for survival, but so are newborn's and people with certian kinds of retardation and handicapss. Do they have different rights? The question really is, when does that fetus have civil rights?
It all comes down to whether the fetus is "human" and is entitled to legal rights. Just remember "blacks and indians count as 3/5ths!"
IIRC, Bush the Elder (actually Dan Quayle) proposed such a rule, which is common in Englsh law. It was part of a tort reform and conpetition package was lobbying for. The idea was that the loser of any lawsuits has to pay the winners legal fees, with the stipulation that the payment for fees not exceed what they spent on their own case(this way one company with really high priced lawyers can't use it to jack up the judgement way beyond damages.)
Not surprisingly, it was met with lots of resistance from Senate Democrats, who, get lots of $$$ from the trial lawyers and their PACs. Trial lawyers are one of the biggest contributors to the DNC.
We had to read Lomborg's article in The Economist in my environmental economics class. I guess some greens just couldn't avoid a typical knee jerk reaction. Anyone who disagrees with them is villified as a pro-pollution big business shill. It's this sort of dishonestand alarmist attitude that Lomborg is criticizing.
Lomborg isn't anti-environmental at all. Instead, Lomborg suggests that Environmental quality is a scarce good, and is subject to tradeoffs, just like everything else in this world.
This is where the greens go off the deep end. They refuse to see environmental quality as something that can be traded off. They refuse to admit that environmental quality carries an opportunity cost, just like all other choices.
Politicians, scientists, economists, and the public can all argue about how much and how best to reduce pollution. But the alarmism and distortions aren't helpful to making sound policy decisions.
Again, Lomborg is not opposed to enviromental protection, just to the alarmism and absolutism of many environmentalists.
you know, though i use IM,its really not anything other than low latency email and and ftp client/server. all they want to do now is add voice and video (and these would use different protocols and ports than the text and file transfers)
the benefit of a unified standard would be that you could simple use an email address as the common identifier, then any isp could set up their chat server (just ike ppl have irc and email servers)
your chat buddies then directly connect to you, and you become virtual client/servers
the programs would run ftp file transfers off one port, text messages off another, and voice/video communications of yet another port
all you isp does is act as a sort of dns for you IM client, so people log on to their isp's server and fire up their browser, email client, and IM client
all using the same web standards
why wouldnt this work?
I go to NDSU which runs on the same network (HECN) as UND. We rate limit based on packet type. And other stuff. Interesting actually, my only beef is the limit was too low for ftp when i was in the dorms last year. They bumped it up a little, but im not sure how it is now. http://www.ndsu.edu/its/web_internet/resnet_traffi c.shtml#
Slashdot Mirror
* The effect of patents and copyright in combatting Linux remains to be investigated. i think that about covers it
The problem is that the land never gets retired from production when small farms (and even some larger ones, if they happen to have a number of really bad years) go belly up and leave. Think about it, all that land in the middle of the us isnt going to be bought out by developers. Other farmers end up farming it. Thus its hard to reduce production. (this is why the gov't pays people to put a certain amout of their acres into CRP(conservation reserve program) and maintain it as a sort of "wild" land. Lots of this "government money" is CRP money and disaster money (like when a drought wipes out 90% of your crop, i don't see anyone complaining about FEMA bailing out small businesses that get destroyed by tornadoes and floods.)
I will agree that "family farming" (where one family farms a small amount of land) is doomed because of "economies of scale" (farms need to keep getting bigger due to the kinds of technology we use)
The sad thing is that farming is/was one of the few good examples of perfect competition, but i fear that it wont be too much longer before the barriers of entry to farming cause it to be a less competitive market.
actually thats not quite right either
In the beginning, most capitalist socitety's had a incredible concentration of wealth, very few people could afford to own the means of production. Land was owned by the "noble classes"
Marx was convinced that the great masses would never have the resources to own captial. Thus he reasoned that the masses would rise up and over throw the extreamly wealthy.
What he didnt count on was publicly held stock, wide spread education, and that the investment of the extremely wealthy would make the whole country more wealthy.
Thus marx's prediction never came to fruition.
yes, and all this feeling would be wonderful if it actually worked everyone really needs to read "the road to serfdom" to understand why socailism leads naturally to authoritarian governents. It's pretty straight forward really.
And do you know why? Becasue they will have a marginally easier time reducing CO2, because of all the highly innefficient factories in the former Warsaw Pact countries that got shut down since 1990 and are replaced in the economy by much more efficient ones. Germany is still suffering somewhat economically from the burden of reunification. But all that aside, the US is 25% of all CO2 emmissions, not 36% IIRC, correct me if im wrong. That also assumes, of course, you believe China and some 3rd world countries underreported figures. The bottom line is this, the US is pretty efficient, considering the geographical issues (weather and distance.) that effect energy consumption. This doesnt mean that improvements arent needed, but kyoto only buys postpones the problem six years instead of 106, according to the best estimates of environmental groups. The technology for meaningful reduction in CO2 will become far cheeper in the next couple decades, but everyone is in a rush to try to "do something" now. What we really need is a CHEEP ENERGY SOURCE that produces no net CO2. But we dont have that yet, the technology isn't cheep enough. Remember, the serious damage predicted for global warming by the scientists who study it is predicted out to 100 years, using static technology and normal economic growth.
why does everyone think that only "industrial" production produces CO2??? hmmm....
When Al Gore was sent to negotiate Kyoto, the senate told him that certian things would be required before they would consider ratifying Kyoto. These included: 1. International CO2 permit trading. 2. Must include countries other than the EU (specifically china and india, who are not nearly as industrialized as the US and EU, but are rapidly developing, and will exceed our C02 outputs in the future. 3. A mechanism for crediting CO2 abatement, not just emissions reduction. Not all of the senate's demands were met, but gore signed the final document anyways. Interestingly enough, when it became clear that the US wouldn't ratify the treaty, the EU gave Austrialia conecssions that it didnt give the US, because they wanted them on board badly.
1. trademarks are relatively good.
:))
2. copyrights and patents should last for 20 years with one possible 20 year extension. THEY SHOULD BE TRANSFERABLE! Thats just good market economics. For property to be useful it needs to be clearly defined, owned, and protected. (Public goods are a necessary evil, when these things objectives cannot be achieved without a massive violation of liberties, like privatizing air) All of this anti-corp bs is silly. The publicly held corp (as an institution idea, not necessarily individual entities, has been the single biggest contributor to income equality in the last 200 years i dare say!) (as i run for my flame suit
3. we simply need to do a better job screening out "trivial and obvious" patents that arent terribly innovative and we need to do a better job with prior art.
Basically IP needs to be harder to get with a shorter lifespan and the rights of all parties must be well defined.
To lay out broadband across a country so vast and a with such a low population density..... hmmm sounds like broadband in ND :)
In the vein of "capitalism" let me offer the thought that being anti abortion is entirely consistant with "capitalism" as defined by capitalism.org, follow me here.
:)) Thus you have given the fetus/cluster of cells permission to be there. Now rape and incest are a different matter, since consent of equal parties isnt the case, but they are less that 1-2% of all abortions. With the acception of rape or incest(here we can make an exception depending on the respective rights of each party?), is meerly allowing people to be irresponbile for their actions by allowing them to violate the most basic freedom that fetus has.
There are two questions here, is it entitled to human rights, and what if its rights conflict with my right to do what i want with my body(ill happily recognize this one).
Lets start with the first.
A severed human limb has no potential for life on its own, neither does an egg or sperm. They simply don't have the genetic material necessary to exist as a complete human being. The foot is differentiated, and the egg and sperm need to be paired to get a complete human chromosome. Thus a fetus/cluster of undifferentiated cells, are not physical the equivalent of a severed foot. They aren't, nor can they ever be human. You might be able to complare them (functionally) to a funtionally challened human being(handicapped or retarted). So then what kind of rights does a fetus have, the same as you or I? those of a minor child? those of a person too mentally handicapped to have any legal responsibility? The point is that some of them have fewer rights than others, but they are all guaranteed their right to life, as it is the most basic right one has, followed by liberty, property.
Someone sighted "everyone has the right to enjoy sex" and the difficultly of going through pregnancy, since contraceptives arent perfect, as grounds for legalizing abortion. Let me get this straight, sex, without concequences, is your right, but a fetus doesnt even have a bare minimum number of rights that we given to minors and such?
I maintain that by having sex, you are contractually accepting the potential concequences of your actions (pregnancy being obvious, this is sex people, it's how we procreate
Any constructive critques, am i missing something?
well, this should be interesting
given the obvious slashdot leaning toward freespeeh on one hand and abortion on the other.
A number of misconceptions have been bandied about here involving "pro-life/religious nuts", so let's correct the.
1. First of all, most anti-abortion/religious zealots WOULD also find this site offensive. A quick survery would attest to that. Actually to call them a group does us all a disservice. We tend to group people instead of recognize that there is a spectrum of opinions, not nearly so easily divisible into such camps.
2. Most of the "civilized world" (eg. europe) is just barely replacing its population, and the US would be too if it weren't for first generation immigrant families. Most of the population growth is in the third world, were abortions are not nearly as numerous or affordable to the population, compared to their relative cost in the developed world. Abortion is the least cost effective means of birth control that exists today. Condoms are much cheeper and more effective, plus they protect against things like AIDS and STDS, which are even bigger problems in the developing world than they are here. And the most effective form of population control has not been abortion, but wealth. Simply, wealthy people and wealthy countries have very few kids. Not because of abortion, simply cause of life style.
3. The argument about when life begins. Or when we become entitled to our legal protection of our "natural rights". May I point out, to those of you who seem to distain the religious, the delicious irony that the idea of "inalienable rights" was a "religious" concept(eg. rights were God given and we were entited to them, they arent a "gift" bestowed upon us by governents).
Obviously a fetus (et al) is not capable of caring for itself and is dependant on a woman's body for survival, but so are newborn's and people with certian kinds of retardation and handicapss. Do they have different rights? The question really is, when does that fetus have civil rights?
It all comes down to whether the fetus is "human"
and is entitled to legal rights.
Just remember "blacks and indians count as 3/5ths!"
IIRC, Bush the Elder (actually Dan Quayle) proposed such a rule, which is common in Englsh law. It was part of a tort reform and conpetition package was lobbying for.
The idea was that the loser of any lawsuits has to pay the winners legal fees, with the stipulation that the payment for fees not exceed what they spent on their own case(this way one company with really high priced lawyers can't use it to jack up the judgement way beyond damages.)
Not surprisingly, it was met with lots of resistance from Senate Democrats, who, get lots of $$$ from the trial lawyers and their PACs.
Trial lawyers are one of the biggest contributors to the DNC.
Actually, I remember from economic development class that intel used to, and maybe still does, manufacture their processors in malaysia.
Most of AMD's processors are made in fab 25 in Austin or in Fab 30 in Dresden.
how's that for ironic
so if we all "chmod 666" does that mean that jesux will get here faster :P
We had to read Lomborg's article in The Economist in my environmental economics class. I guess some greens just couldn't avoid a typical knee jerk reaction. Anyone who disagrees with them is villified as a pro-pollution big business shill. It's this sort of dishonestand alarmist attitude that Lomborg is criticizing. Lomborg isn't anti-environmental at all. Instead, Lomborg suggests that Environmental quality is a scarce good, and is subject to tradeoffs, just like everything else in this world. This is where the greens go off the deep end. They refuse to see environmental quality as something that can be traded off. They refuse to admit that environmental quality carries an opportunity cost, just like all other choices. Politicians, scientists, economists, and the public can all argue about how much and how best to reduce pollution. But the alarmism and distortions aren't helpful to making sound policy decisions. Again, Lomborg is not opposed to enviromental protection, just to the alarmism and absolutism of many environmentalists.
you know, though i use IM,its really not anything other than low latency email and and ftp client/server. all they want to do now is add voice and video (and these would use different protocols and ports than the text and file transfers) the benefit of a unified standard would be that you could simple use an email address as the common identifier, then any isp could set up their chat server (just ike ppl have irc and email servers) your chat buddies then directly connect to you, and you become virtual client/servers the programs would run ftp file transfers off one port, text messages off another, and voice/video communications of yet another port all you isp does is act as a sort of dns for you IM client, so people log on to their isp's server and fire up their browser, email client, and IM client all using the same web standards why wouldnt this work?
I go to NDSU which runs on the same network (HECN) as UND. We rate limit based on packet type. And other stuff. Interesting actually, my only beef is the limit was too low for ftp when i was in the dorms last year. They bumped it up a little, but im not sure how it is now. http://www.ndsu.edu/its/web_internet/resnet_traffi c.shtml#