Of course the kid isn't going to be harmed by sexually explicit stuff. The average kid sees his first female breast within their first day of existence, probably plays "doctor" before he's in school, and has probably kissed someone of the appropriate sex with somewhat sexual intent by the time he's about 10 or 12. I distinctly remember my middle school principle getting on the PA to tell students to stop copping feels the hallways. And a bunch of my high school classmates ended up pregnant years before turning 20. In short, kids are nowhere near as naive as their parents would like them to be.
These legal efforts aren't and have never been about protecting kids. They're about protecting parents from the thought that their little angel will at some point in their life have sex. Kids are rather horrified at the thought that mom & dad would get it on too, but they're legally second-class citizens and can't vote so their opinions don't matter politically.
So you're going to kill everyone who produces the things you want?
Why not? There are enough potential producers of apples within a few square miles of me that I could easily kill of a few dozen and still have somebody producing apples. (Again, assuming an amoral economically rational person.)
And no one is going to stop you just because the government isn't doing it? If someone broke into your house and tried to kill you, would you just let them because the police aren't there to save you? If you knew there was no government, you wouldn't get your own protection (buy a gun, pay someone else to protect you, etc)?
Whether I succeed or not, enough people will be trying to pull off what I just described that there will be definitely a few who manage to accomplish it. This sort of lawless situation has happened before, and those who succeeded became the monarchs and nobility.
(2) Obummer's Administration will get it all wrong so (a) we have many more years of scams (b) it will provide endless opportunity for DHS, TSA, CIA and FBI to act ultra-vires and outside the constitution.
I don't care who's administration is running a program, because I know for certain that whoever is running it now won't be forever. That means whether or not I trust the guy currently in office, I can't assume that the next person to hold that office won't completely screw it up.
In other words, I judge based on the merits of the proposal, not who's proposing it or who's going to be in charge of implementing it.
I haven't seen the good old anarcho-capitalist argument in a while, but it's easy to take apart.
Based on your declared philosophy, your desire no taxes to exist, because any taxes that did exist would be an unjust theft. Therefor, the government can't do anything, because in a capitalist economy anything that anybody does is done either for themselves or in exchange for money, and you've just made sure that the government has no money, making them just another guy on the block. Ergo, your tax-free country has no functional government whatsoever.
If the government doesn't exist or is in the very least rendered completely impotent due to its lack of funds, then the capitalist side of your ideal world also falls apart, because I make a deal with you to buy, say, 10 bushels of apples for 1 ounce of gold, and when you give me the apples the economically rational thing to do is shoot you and keep the gold. And by making many such deals, I eventually acquire both enough stuff and gold to be able to raise my own private army, and before you know it we've got a bunch of warlords with armies running around trying to slaughter each other.
Even if you don't make any bad deals with people, you still have to deal with the large number of people who don't have anything of value to start with who can and will do what it takes to survive. So at the very least, you end up with large hordes of bandits running around trying to steal stuff from whoever has it.
With that being my other option, I'll take paying taxes. Nobody likes paying taxes, but it sure beats the alternative.
I'd be opposed to it for another totally obvious reason: The cape manufacturer probably is either a committee member's brother-in-law, or bribed the committee to spend public money on their company's stupid product.
Although I guess the cape could help the unemployed stay warm and dry when they're thrown out onto the street.
Bruce didn't mention: - Oracle has big piles of cash - Oracle has what the pro-proprietary guys seem to think is critical to the success of a project, namely a professional management and marketing staff.
And he's right not to mention them. What FOSS has been proving again and again is that a bunch of only semi-organized geeks operating on a shoestring budget are at least as effective and in some ways more effective than the absolute best corporate software companies can muster. And furthermore, in the projects that major corporations tried to really control, like MySql and Java, the corporation proved to be effectively a stuck brake pedal.
The NY Times has done a decent job of this actually. Not a system as good as/., where users have a bit more investment in sticking around and not trolling since modding is done by the community and sticks with you, as opposed to the invisible hand system of the NY Times.
There are several major flaws in the NY Times's online commenting system. They include: 1. Vulnerability to a group of people with an axe to grind: It's relatively trivial to sign up a few hundred accounts and use them to independently recommend comments that support your political position, giving the impression that it has much more support than it really does. 2. A high premium on being one of the first 15 posters to post, leading to people waiting until a story likely to be popular is posted and then scrambling to get one of the early comments in. It also means that by about 7:30 AM EST of the day the column or article is supposed to be published, the comment section is completely full. 3. Efforts by a few dedicated regulars to use comments primarily to pimp their blogs, typically by using the first 2 techniques combined with posts vaguely related to the topic at hand. 4. Vulnerability to biases of the Times's human moderators - they can easily pick comments to "highlight" that agree with their own positions rather than opposition positions, and can delay moderation of comments they disagree with so that nobody sees them. Since there's no meta-moderation, there's no way to ensure that their choices are reasonable.
Really,/. does a much better job of handling this problem.
The reason Hollywood produces stuff is because they think it will make money. Period. Any artistic value in film is purely coincidental. They've discovered that re-hashing the same old material is much cheaper and easier than doing something really new and innovative, and still sells well. Ergo they will do so whenever possible.
Eclipse may be a memory hungry pig, but a lot of programmers use Emacs as their dev environment. Besides the fact that you can tweak Emacs to do absolutely anything, you have great debugger and compiler integration right out of the box, and it also has a pretty good text editor.
There are at least 2 major problems with your argument: 1. A lot of Third World nations have actually been showing signs of improved government stability and democracy. It's still the Third World, there are still problems, but it's gotten better than it once was.
2. A lack of food is a quick way to create political unrest. Cases in point: Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Hungry people will do what it takes to get food and are generally willing to risk life and limb to get it, because it's preferably to starving to death.
The Hospital IT department doesn't offer any iPhone compatible calendar tool, so I bought (with my cash) a tiny server, installed BSD and OpenLDAP for accounts, and installed and configured DAViCal. After I tested it out, I emailed IT to ask to allow port 8443 through the hospital firewall to this server. The tech (after asking what port 8443 was for), said he would unblock the port after I provide him with a login account on the machine (though 'I don't need root access').
From the point of view of the hospital IT department, they now have a rogue server inside their network from a guy that tried to get around their (possibly misguided) policy of only using approved software on hospital equipment. Then this jackass that went around their policy with unapproved equipment and software is now trying to get IT to do favors for him.
Basically, he needs to count himself lucky that this machine isn't unplugged right now.
I think you could have shortened it to that. A company has one goal: make money. As a general rule, everything not stipulated in the contract is something they can and will stiff you on if the PR won't be too bad, and everything stipulated in the contract is something they can and will stiff you on if the ensuing lawsuit won't be too bad.
That's part of the reason you hear all these cases of people dying from contaminated milk products and the like. Capitalists making a killing. Saving money at any cost.
Another way of thinking about this is that the modern-day Chinese capitalists are doing exactly what every other country's capitalists did regularly during their countries early industrial period. The British capitalist's abuses along the same lines (e.g. adulterated bread) was part of Karl Marx's evidence that pure capitalism necessarily led to suboptimal outcomes. The American capitalist's abuses along the same lines (e.g. sick cattle getting sold as premium beef) was vividly described by Upton Sinclair. The list goes on.
Keynesians to economics is what astrologists are to Astronomy, so shut up about 'economists' who are on the government/system payroll.
Consider: Through most of the 1930s and 1940s, the US government implemented Keynesian economics, and by 1945 had basically recovered from the greatest financial disaster since we've started really keeping track. The one time they backed away from Keynesian policies, in 1937, the GDP growth dropped. Compare this to 2008, when policymakers responded with mostly supply-side and monetarist policies. It's been showing results, but not as good results as the Keynesian policies of the 1930s.
Now, anything that purports to be a science in my book needs to be judged on whether it accurately describes reality. Keynesians came up with something that appears to correctly describe and predict reality at least as well as any of the competing theories. So to call them astrologers is at best unfair.
USD is currently experiencing a 10% inflation. Since the bulk of inflationary pressures caused by the US Gov spending was expected to kick in throughout 2011, it's only expected to get worse.
I have no idea where you're getting that number, or that suggested cause, but neither of them are even remotely correct. My guess is the rantings of some TV personality, but you and other readers need to know that it's pure nonsense.
The 12-month price change index (one of the more common measures of inflation) is close to 2.7%, slightly higher than normal but not really out of whack given the huge sums of money destroyed when the real estate market crashed. As far as government spending, in the last year the federal government went from spending about $3.6 trillion in 2010 to spending about $3.7 trillion in 2011 (both of those figures include Social Security and Medicare, which are not part of the general fund). That's an increase that's actually slightly less than inflation.
The first chart also has a clear answer on what is inflating, although it doesn't add up close to the suspiciously round 10% you cited: Gas prices are much higher in the US than they were a year ago. The most likely reason for this appears to be oil speculators buying up futures in anticipation of the Libya War causing supplies to drop. An increase in the price of crude would also cause a price increase in industrially-produced food, which we're also seeing. But that's different from having $1 today worth only $0.91 next year.
When software gets to be around 40 years of age, wrinkles that were once minor are more and more apparent, what was once new and exciting isn't so much anymore, and it gets rather set in its ways and resistant to change. Decisions made in its youth often become a cause of later regret, and there's a certain amount of jealously of those who are now doing the same job it once did but in a snazzier way.
But at the same time, it's likely to be far more established and dependable than its younger counterparts. You can count on it getting the job done, one way or another. It won't be flashy, but it will work.
If I'm an organized group with an ax to grind, I can get around your idea 1 fairly easily - organize my group off $SOCIAL_NETWORK, and instruct my loyal group members to specifically avoid detection by not friending or viewing each other's stuff on $SOCIAL_NETWORK. Your distance graph no longer shows these folks as connected in any way, problem solved.
Offline astroturfers have been doing that kind of thing for years.
Thing is, this problem isn't one of mere trolls. Trolls, spammers, and other forms of lesser life are relatively easy to recognize.
No, these are paid shills and organized groups with an agenda. And that's much much harder to stop, because they will have 'spies' trying to infiltrate and/or control your jury selection, 'lawyers' looking for loopholes in your system, and a semi-disciplined mob who will be happy to carry out their plans carefully.
An example of what they might do if they were trying to take over/. : 1. See if they could find and crack old accounts that haven't been used in a while, so they could have nice low UIDs. These are your 'pioneer' accounts. If you aren't willing or able to pull that off, make some new accounts, but expect the takeover to take longer. 2. Have the 'pioneers' post some smart and funny comments about stuff unrelated to your organization's angle to build karma and become moderators. 3. Have your larger Wave 2 come in, possibly with new accounts. Still be reasonably smart and funny on stuff unrelated to the organization's angle. Have your pioneers mod up the Wave 2 posts. 4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until your group has a large enough pool of mods so that you can have at least 5 moderators ready whenever a story related to the organization's ideology comes up. 5. Now let your mob in. Have your moderators mod up the not-totally-stupid mob posts in support of your organization's ideological position, and posssibly mod down as 'Overrated' (because that's not metamodded) anything that would serve to disprove it. You now have the desired results: +5 Insightful on posts that agree with $POSITION, -1 Overrated on posts that disagree with it, and an ever-increasing pool of moderators who will behave as you want them to with regards to $POSITION.
I have no knowledge of whether anyone has carried out this plan already, but it wouldn't surprise me if they had. The system on/. is considerably more resilient than, say, the New York Times comment section or Youtube, but still hackable.
Just because two people share some distant, obscure ancestor doesn't mean they won't try to kill each other. Heck, even if they share the same parents it doesn't always stop them.
I'm just imagining how much trouble could have been prevented if Abraham had just said to Ishmael and Isaac "If you don't stop bickering I'm going to pull this camel over right now!"
As far as how to stop people from blowing each other up, the only way I can think of is to run out of explosives, although you can also limit things by convincing the top leadership of any group considering blowing something up that it is their solemn duty to go serve in the front lines. This would especially take care of groups that specialize in suicide bombings, but would also make it harder for a president or senator to be so casually gung-ho about starting wars.
This is what happens when you consistently underpay your regular workers and/or ship their jobs elsewhere: you undermine the entire economy.
From the point of view of an economically rational capitalist, here's the basic thinking: "Sure, I could pay my workers more, but with nice high unemployment I really don't need to - I can just threaten to fire them if they don't like it, and thanks to the economy and effective blacklisting of anyone who is currently unemployed, they have no other choice. Now, that could conceivably cut into the middle class that I think is my consumer base, but even if my employees can't pay for my product the employees of those other companies can and will." This is perfectly smart thinking for an individual rational capitalist, but when everyone makes the same decision the results are exactly what you've been seeing in the US for about 30 years.
Also, the primary reason Ford paid his workers as much as he did is that he had real trouble recruiting people to work on his assembly lines. That's because word had gotten out that his jobs involved a lot of noise, a lot of repetitive motion, a lot of boredom, and a lack of safety (this was the pre-OSHA days, remember). So he raised the price he was paying until he got recruits. Smart thinking, but nowhere near as altruistic as it's made out to be in the popular imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the kid isn't going to be harmed by sexually explicit stuff. The average kid sees his first female breast within their first day of existence, probably plays "doctor" before he's in school, and has probably kissed someone of the appropriate sex with somewhat sexual intent by the time he's about 10 or 12. I distinctly remember my middle school principle getting on the PA to tell students to stop copping feels the hallways. And a bunch of my high school classmates ended up pregnant years before turning 20. In short, kids are nowhere near as naive as their parents would like them to be.
These legal efforts aren't and have never been about protecting kids. They're about protecting parents from the thought that their little angel will at some point in their life have sex. Kids are rather horrified at the thought that mom & dad would get it on too, but they're legally second-class citizens and can't vote so their opinions don't matter politically.
This sort of this simply doesn't happen.
Now we know: All it takes is one admin screwing up and replacing an "ng" with an "s".
the near slave conditions of early American workers.
If by "early" you mean "after 1865", then yes. Otherwise, the word "near" is at least partially inaccurate.
Actually, the US uses both as well.
Case in point: carbonated beverage sizes. 8 fl oz, 12 fl oz, 16 fl oz, 1 liter, 2 liters, 3 liters.
So you're going to kill everyone who produces the things you want?
Why not? There are enough potential producers of apples within a few square miles of me that I could easily kill of a few dozen and still have somebody producing apples. (Again, assuming an amoral economically rational person.)
And no one is going to stop you just because the government isn't doing it? If someone broke into your house and tried to kill you, would you just let them because the police aren't there to save you? If you knew there was no government, you wouldn't get your own protection (buy a gun, pay someone else to protect you, etc)?
Whether I succeed or not, enough people will be trying to pull off what I just described that there will be definitely a few who manage to accomplish it. This sort of lawless situation has happened before, and those who succeeded became the monarchs and nobility.
(2) Obummer's Administration will get it all wrong so (a) we have many more years of scams (b) it will provide endless opportunity for DHS, TSA, CIA and FBI to act ultra-vires and outside the constitution.
I don't care who's administration is running a program, because I know for certain that whoever is running it now won't be forever. That means whether or not I trust the guy currently in office, I can't assume that the next person to hold that office won't completely screw it up.
In other words, I judge based on the merits of the proposal, not who's proposing it or who's going to be in charge of implementing it.
I haven't seen the good old anarcho-capitalist argument in a while, but it's easy to take apart.
Based on your declared philosophy, your desire no taxes to exist, because any taxes that did exist would be an unjust theft. Therefor, the government can't do anything, because in a capitalist economy anything that anybody does is done either for themselves or in exchange for money, and you've just made sure that the government has no money, making them just another guy on the block. Ergo, your tax-free country has no functional government whatsoever.
If the government doesn't exist or is in the very least rendered completely impotent due to its lack of funds, then the capitalist side of your ideal world also falls apart, because I make a deal with you to buy, say, 10 bushels of apples for 1 ounce of gold, and when you give me the apples the economically rational thing to do is shoot you and keep the gold. And by making many such deals, I eventually acquire both enough stuff and gold to be able to raise my own private army, and before you know it we've got a bunch of warlords with armies running around trying to slaughter each other.
Even if you don't make any bad deals with people, you still have to deal with the large number of people who don't have anything of value to start with who can and will do what it takes to survive. So at the very least, you end up with large hordes of bandits running around trying to steal stuff from whoever has it.
With that being my other option, I'll take paying taxes. Nobody likes paying taxes, but it sure beats the alternative.
I'd be opposed to it for another totally obvious reason: The cape manufacturer probably is either a committee member's brother-in-law, or bribed the committee to spend public money on their company's stupid product.
Although I guess the cape could help the unemployed stay warm and dry when they're thrown out onto the street.
Bruce didn't mention:
- Oracle has big piles of cash
- Oracle has what the pro-proprietary guys seem to think is critical to the success of a project, namely a professional management and marketing staff.
And he's right not to mention them. What FOSS has been proving again and again is that a bunch of only semi-organized geeks operating on a shoestring budget are at least as effective and in some ways more effective than the absolute best corporate software companies can muster. And furthermore, in the projects that major corporations tried to really control, like MySql and Java, the corporation proved to be effectively a stuck brake pedal.
The NY Times has done a decent job of this actually. Not a system as good as /., where users have a bit more investment in sticking around and not trolling since modding is done by the community and sticks with you, as opposed to the invisible hand system of the NY Times.
There are several major flaws in the NY Times's online commenting system. They include:
1. Vulnerability to a group of people with an axe to grind: It's relatively trivial to sign up a few hundred accounts and use them to independently recommend comments that support your political position, giving the impression that it has much more support than it really does.
2. A high premium on being one of the first 15 posters to post, leading to people waiting until a story likely to be popular is posted and then scrambling to get one of the early comments in. It also means that by about 7:30 AM EST of the day the column or article is supposed to be published, the comment section is completely full.
3. Efforts by a few dedicated regulars to use comments primarily to pimp their blogs, typically by using the first 2 techniques combined with posts vaguely related to the topic at hand.
4. Vulnerability to biases of the Times's human moderators - they can easily pick comments to "highlight" that agree with their own positions rather than opposition positions, and can delay moderation of comments they disagree with so that nobody sees them. Since there's no meta-moderation, there's no way to ensure that their choices are reasonable.
Really, /. does a much better job of handling this problem.
The reason Hollywood produces stuff is because they think it will make money. Period. Any artistic value in film is purely coincidental. They've discovered that re-hashing the same old material is much cheaper and easier than doing something really new and innovative, and still sells well. Ergo they will do so whenever possible.
That was the most beautiful way of saying "Geekus eunt domus!" I've ever read.
Eclipse may be a memory hungry pig, but a lot of programmers use Emacs as their dev environment. Besides the fact that you can tweak Emacs to do absolutely anything, you have great debugger and compiler integration right out of the box, and it also has a pretty good text editor.
There are at least 2 major problems with your argument:
1. A lot of Third World nations have actually been showing signs of improved government stability and democracy. It's still the Third World, there are still problems, but it's gotten better than it once was.
2. A lack of food is a quick way to create political unrest. Cases in point: Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Hungry people will do what it takes to get food and are generally willing to risk life and limb to get it, because it's preferably to starving to death.
The Hospital IT department doesn't offer any iPhone compatible calendar tool, so I bought (with my cash) a tiny server, installed BSD and OpenLDAP for accounts, and installed and configured DAViCal. After I tested it out, I emailed IT to ask to allow port 8443 through the hospital firewall to this server. The tech (after asking what port 8443 was for), said he would unblock the port after I provide him with a login account on the machine (though 'I don't need root access').
From the point of view of the hospital IT department, they now have a rogue server inside their network from a guy that tried to get around their (possibly misguided) policy of only using approved software on hospital equipment. Then this jackass that went around their policy with unapproved equipment and software is now trying to get IT to do favors for him.
Basically, he needs to count himself lucky that this machine isn't unplugged right now.
don't ever trust a company
I think you could have shortened it to that. A company has one goal: make money. As a general rule, everything not stipulated in the contract is something they can and will stiff you on if the PR won't be too bad, and everything stipulated in the contract is something they can and will stiff you on if the ensuing lawsuit won't be too bad.
That's part of the reason you hear all these cases of people dying from contaminated milk products and the like. Capitalists making a killing. Saving money at any cost.
Another way of thinking about this is that the modern-day Chinese capitalists are doing exactly what every other country's capitalists did regularly during their countries early industrial period. The British capitalist's abuses along the same lines (e.g. adulterated bread) was part of Karl Marx's evidence that pure capitalism necessarily led to suboptimal outcomes. The American capitalist's abuses along the same lines (e.g. sick cattle getting sold as premium beef) was vividly described by Upton Sinclair. The list goes on.
Keynesians to economics is what astrologists are to Astronomy, so shut up about 'economists' who are on the government/system payroll.
Consider: Through most of the 1930s and 1940s, the US government implemented Keynesian economics, and by 1945 had basically recovered from the greatest financial disaster since we've started really keeping track. The one time they backed away from Keynesian policies, in 1937, the GDP growth dropped. Compare this to 2008, when policymakers responded with mostly supply-side and monetarist policies. It's been showing results, but not as good results as the Keynesian policies of the 1930s.
Now, anything that purports to be a science in my book needs to be judged on whether it accurately describes reality. Keynesians came up with something that appears to correctly describe and predict reality at least as well as any of the competing theories. So to call them astrologers is at best unfair.
USD is currently experiencing a 10% inflation. Since the bulk of inflationary pressures caused by the US Gov spending was expected to kick in throughout 2011, it's only expected to get worse.
I have no idea where you're getting that number, or that suggested cause, but neither of them are even remotely correct. My guess is the rantings of some TV personality, but you and other readers need to know that it's pure nonsense.
The 12-month price change index (one of the more common measures of inflation) is close to 2.7%, slightly higher than normal but not really out of whack given the huge sums of money destroyed when the real estate market crashed. As far as government spending, in the last year the federal government went from spending about $3.6 trillion in 2010 to spending about $3.7 trillion in 2011 (both of those figures include Social Security and Medicare, which are not part of the general fund). That's an increase that's actually slightly less than inflation.
The first chart also has a clear answer on what is inflating, although it doesn't add up close to the suspiciously round 10% you cited: Gas prices are much higher in the US than they were a year ago. The most likely reason for this appears to be oil speculators buying up futures in anticipation of the Libya War causing supplies to drop. An increase in the price of crude would also cause a price increase in industrially-produced food, which we're also seeing. But that's different from having $1 today worth only $0.91 next year.
When software gets to be around 40 years of age, wrinkles that were once minor are more and more apparent, what was once new and exciting isn't so much anymore, and it gets rather set in its ways and resistant to change. Decisions made in its youth often become a cause of later regret, and there's a certain amount of jealously of those who are now doing the same job it once did but in a snazzier way.
But at the same time, it's likely to be far more established and dependable than its younger counterparts. You can count on it getting the job done, one way or another. It won't be flashy, but it will work.
If I'm an organized group with an ax to grind, I can get around your idea 1 fairly easily - organize my group off $SOCIAL_NETWORK, and instruct my loyal group members to specifically avoid detection by not friending or viewing each other's stuff on $SOCIAL_NETWORK. Your distance graph no longer shows these folks as connected in any way, problem solved.
Offline astroturfers have been doing that kind of thing for years.
Thing is, this problem isn't one of mere trolls. Trolls, spammers, and other forms of lesser life are relatively easy to recognize.
No, these are paid shills and organized groups with an agenda. And that's much much harder to stop, because they will have 'spies' trying to infiltrate and/or control your jury selection, 'lawyers' looking for loopholes in your system, and a semi-disciplined mob who will be happy to carry out their plans carefully.
An example of what they might do if they were trying to take over /. :
1. See if they could find and crack old accounts that haven't been used in a while, so they could have nice low UIDs. These are your 'pioneer' accounts. If you aren't willing or able to pull that off, make some new accounts, but expect the takeover to take longer.
2. Have the 'pioneers' post some smart and funny comments about stuff unrelated to your organization's angle to build karma and become moderators.
3. Have your larger Wave 2 come in, possibly with new accounts. Still be reasonably smart and funny on stuff unrelated to the organization's angle. Have your pioneers mod up the Wave 2 posts.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until your group has a large enough pool of mods so that you can have at least 5 moderators ready whenever a story related to the organization's ideology comes up.
5. Now let your mob in. Have your moderators mod up the not-totally-stupid mob posts in support of your organization's ideological position, and posssibly mod down as 'Overrated' (because that's not metamodded) anything that would serve to disprove it.
You now have the desired results: +5 Insightful on posts that agree with $POSITION, -1 Overrated on posts that disagree with it, and an ever-increasing pool of moderators who will behave as you want them to with regards to $POSITION.
I have no knowledge of whether anyone has carried out this plan already, but it wouldn't surprise me if they had. The system on /. is considerably more resilient than, say, the New York Times comment section or Youtube, but still hackable.
Just because two people share some distant, obscure ancestor doesn't mean they won't try to kill each other. Heck, even if they share the same parents it doesn't always stop them.
I'm just imagining how much trouble could have been prevented if Abraham had just said to Ishmael and Isaac "If you don't stop bickering I'm going to pull this camel over right now!"
As far as how to stop people from blowing each other up, the only way I can think of is to run out of explosives, although you can also limit things by convincing the top leadership of any group considering blowing something up that it is their solemn duty to go serve in the front lines. This would especially take care of groups that specialize in suicide bombings, but would also make it harder for a president or senator to be so casually gung-ho about starting wars.
This is what happens when you consistently underpay your regular workers and/or ship their jobs elsewhere: you undermine the entire economy.
From the point of view of an economically rational capitalist, here's the basic thinking: "Sure, I could pay my workers more, but with nice high unemployment I really don't need to - I can just threaten to fire them if they don't like it, and thanks to the economy and effective blacklisting of anyone who is currently unemployed, they have no other choice. Now, that could conceivably cut into the middle class that I think is my consumer base, but even if my employees can't pay for my product the employees of those other companies can and will." This is perfectly smart thinking for an individual rational capitalist, but when everyone makes the same decision the results are exactly what you've been seeing in the US for about 30 years.
Also, the primary reason Ford paid his workers as much as he did is that he had real trouble recruiting people to work on his assembly lines. That's because word had gotten out that his jobs involved a lot of noise, a lot of repetitive motion, a lot of boredom, and a lack of safety (this was the pre-OSHA days, remember). So he raised the price he was paying until he got recruits. Smart thinking, but nowhere near as altruistic as it's made out to be in the popular imagination.
I hear the problem was that it developed a hole in the outer hull, and the giant sucking sound was too much for him.