Who pays your private entity for the certification?
If it's the gas station, the incentive is to pick a private entity that's not going to look too closely. The private entities know this, so they're going to hedge as close as they think they can get away with to what the gas station wants. Think of a product that's a bit more complicated that does use rating agencies, namely mortgage backed securities. They routinely rated MBS's with garbage mortgages as AAA, which is one of the reasons why we're in a financial crisis.
It's true that almost any government function could be done by a private company instead. But a lot of tasks, like firefighting, became government functions because it's demonstrably cheaper (and more efficient) for the government to do it than for private companies to do it.
Federal Reserve (red line is government, blue line is private sector, the spike in the red line in 2010 is the constitutionally mandated Census)
The graphs in your link conveniently stop right when the private sector was bottoming out, which coincided with the Census hiring. We've actually fired approximately 600,000 government workers in the last 4 years.
The gun make it a lot easier for a bad guy to kill a lot of people. That's the difference.
Imagine, if you will, a maniac runs into a school with a sword and starts attacking people. We'll even say he knows what he's doing with one beyond "the pointy end goes in the other guy". There's no question that a few people will get killed. But everyone there will also have a much easier time running away, throwing things at him, putting barriers between him and themselves, using improvised weapons like mop handles to slow him down, etc. So you're now dealing with a situation where, say, 3-5 people are dead instead of 26.
Or if a maniac uses a crossbow instead, his targets can make effective use of potential shields like garbage cans and desks, have a better chance of dodging, his rate of fire is much much slower (about 1 per minute) which enables defenders to tackle him while he's reloading, and his ammunition is heavy and cumbersome.
Lone Starr: What's this? I said power only what you need to survive. Vespa: It's my industrial strength hair dryer, and I can't live without it! Lone Starr: Okay, princess. That's it. The fairy-tale is over. Welcome to real life. You want this hot-air machine, you crank a generator to power it.
All they care about is that every house looks the same and their devotion to local housing politics pays off in the form of pushing people around.
The basic problem with HOAs, condo boards, and similar organizations is that they become tyrannies of the minority of people who give a damn. You would think that most people wouldn't care much about somebody letting their lawn get 2 inches too tall, and you'd be right. But the 3 people that do care show up to every HOA meeting to make absolutely certain that this regulation remains in place, while the people who don't care are too busy living their lives to gain the power they'd need to change a rule like that.
and enforcing the law on those people who have a 49" fence...
Your problem probably isn't with the bureaucrat enforcing the 48" rule on the 49" fence, but rather with the neighborhood having a 48" maximum fence height at all. You are incorrectly blaming the bureaucrat for doing his job correctly and diligently, rather than with the zoning board (or other government body) who made the rule in the first place. That said, the bureaucrat should probably have started his enforcement efforts with a verbal warning, but since I have nothing other than an anecdote to go on it's quite possible that's exactly what happened.
A law that is selectively enforced is actually worse than no law at all, because it undermines trust in the body that's making and enforcing the law. For example, if you have a police force that stops only certain kinds of people going less than 5 mph over the speed limit, then those certain kinds of people are going to (correctly) believe that the police are arbitrary and capricious rather than fair enforcers of the law.
Here's the thing: As bad as government with bureaucracy is, a government without bureaucracy is even worse.
A real-life example: States in the US have laws to require that gasoline pumps actually dispense 1 gallon of fuel when they register 1 gallon of fuel on the meter. There are bureaucracies set up for inspectors to go around and check on each pump periodically to ensure that the owner isn't cheating their customers.
Now, you may be wondering what the possible value of having and enforcing such a law is - after all, if a gas station cheats its customers no one will go there, right? But what actually happens is that each gas station is motivated to cheat its customers just a bit so that they won't notice right away, and meanwhile it's basically impossible for drivers (especially those from out of town) to price shop because they don't know how much gasoline they'll actually get for the listed price per gallon.
So, for, say, a city or county of 40,000 people, it's advantageous for everyone but crooked gas station owners to pay $3 in taxes annually for a bureaucrat to spend time testing all the gas pumps in the area (in unannounced visits of course), because they'll save more than $3 in not getting cheated by the crooked gas stations. And this also helps the honest gas station owners, because they know that they aren't going to be out-competed by crooked competition. This math works even if the bureaucrat in question is the mayor's no-good brother-in-law who's getting the $105K + benefits to do this full time: The only people who are harmed by this policy are crooks.
Seriously. If you live in the United States, you should to be making plans to leave, and acting on them as soon as possible. A lot of people won't. Hell, I'll be honest and admit I likely won't - family, lack of a second language, a specialized skill set, and a personal aversion to travel combine to keep me in the Northwest, although I do keep an eye peeled for potential jobs in the cross-border parts of Canada. But if you can, you really should think about your exit process.
Why not stick around and fight it out with the good guys? Yes, the good guys are losing, badly. But all is not lost, and resistance has a tendency to keep cropping up.
Wake up, folks. We have been living in an authoritarian military oligarchy since World War I, when the finance-military-industrial-congressional complex got started in earnest.
What makes you think it got started in WW I? Read A People's History of the United States because Matt Damon was right - that book will knock you on your ass.
McCarthy was screwing up people's lives based on often completely specious accusations of communism, while these upstanding civil servants are screwing up people's lives based on often completely specious accusations of terrorism. Anybody who can't see the obvious differences between the two must be a terrorist.
Which means, in fact, that the UN Security Council is doing its job. Otherwise, it would be quite possible for a relatively small conflict (e.g. Austria-Hungary versus Serbia) to turn into a giant war involving millions of soldiers on both sides getting slaughtered.
For instance, imagine this scenario instead: Assad fires at rebels in Turkey. Turkey activates its NATO alliance which requires that the US and most of Europe come to their aid. The Assad regime in turn demands that its allies defend it from NATO, drawing in Russia, China, and Iran. Russia in turn calls on its allies, drawing in the rest of Europe. Iraq and Pakistan, possibly on demands from Washington, attack Iran (Pakistan travelling through Afghanistan to do so, giving the Taliban an opportunity to fight the Karzai government). India takes advantage of Pakistan's distraction to try to take over Kashmir. Most Middle Eastern countries pick sides, rather than being caught in the middle. Israel decides to get in on the action and takes the opportunity to try to take over Lebanon again and expand from the Golon Heights, as well as attacking the Palestinians again.
I could go on, but the point is that with so many alliances, it would be quite possible for the relatively small conflict in Syria to become WW III. And that's also my guess as to why Obama sucked in the first presidential debate: Syria had just fired into Turkey, and Obama might well have been working around the clock trying to prevent exactly this kind of spiraling out of control.
Doesn't work: The US has had several major cities completely wrecked by hurricanes and flooding in the past decade, and still doesn't seem to think that this might be a problem we should look into addressing more thoroughly.
It depends not just on how much the lottery ticket costs, but also the odds of winning and the payoff.
For instance, in the recent big Powerball jackpot on this side of the pond, a $2 ticket had a 1 in 165 million odds of winning a jackpot worth $550 million. That means that, on average, your $2 ticket is worth 550/165=$3.33. Which means it's not really a losing proposition to have one.
Now, I wouldn't give up something essential to get one or even a bunch of them, but taking a shot at it is not necessarily a bad idea.
Some atheists do have a belief system, namely that a complete understanding of the universe can be discovered by scientific inquiry given sufficient resources, time, and intelligence. That's definitely a different sort of belief system than thinking there's an invisible man with 10 things he doesn't want you to do, but it is a proposition that this variety of atheist has no proof of and accepts on faith.
It allows for advanced Facebook integration with cutting edge cloud computing advertisers running the new touch-screen oriented Windows Server. This delivers high quality targeted rich media advertising to the world's most common platform.
To give an idea of how ridiculous this is, there are currently web-enabled toasters that allow you to take an image off the Internet and burn it into a piece of toast. I'm glad that I'm not the only one thinking "Why would you ever remotely want to do that?" rather than "Cool, I can put pictures on toast!"
1. The US spends more than the entire rest of the world combined. 2. US military spending in 2011 was higher than it was at the peak of Vietnam. 3. The US military currently can blow up anything in the world with a drone in a matter of hours.
The sovereignty of Canada, Australia, Mexico, Japan, Brazil and the rest of South America, most of Africa, all the Scandinavian countries and southern Europe, and Switzerland have been teetering daily on the brink for decades.
Revision to GP's statement is plainly necessary: The only guarantee that any country who isn't backed by Russia, China, or the US can have sovereignty, for some decades now, is nuclear capacity.
But your assessment of the apparent stability of South America and Africa seems questionable. Since 2000, approximately 40% of South American and African governments have faced at least 1 coup attempt, significant rebellion, popular uprising, or invasion. If you go back to the 1990's, it's even more than that. In many of these cases, the forces opposing the government were backed by the US, Russia, or China.
Your post advocates a ( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (X) No one will be able to find the guy (X) The police will not put up with it (specifically, murder is still illegal however justified it might be)
Specifically, your plan fails to account for (X) Laws expressly prohibiting it (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems (X) Extreme profitability of spam
and the following philosophical objections may also apply: (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you: (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
Slashdot Mirror
Who pays your private entity for the certification?
If it's the gas station, the incentive is to pick a private entity that's not going to look too closely. The private entities know this, so they're going to hedge as close as they think they can get away with to what the gas station wants. Think of a product that's a bit more complicated that does use rating agencies, namely mortgage backed securities. They routinely rated MBS's with garbage mortgages as AAA, which is one of the reasons why we're in a financial crisis.
It's true that almost any government function could be done by a private company instead. But a lot of tasks, like firefighting, became government functions because it's demonstrably cheaper (and more efficient) for the government to do it than for private companies to do it.
The fact is, you are completely wrong:
Gallup
Federal Reserve (red line is government, blue line is private sector, the spike in the red line in 2010 is the constitutionally mandated Census)
The graphs in your link conveniently stop right when the private sector was bottoming out, which coincided with the Census hiring. We've actually fired approximately 600,000 government workers in the last 4 years.
The gun make it a lot easier for a bad guy to kill a lot of people. That's the difference.
Imagine, if you will, a maniac runs into a school with a sword and starts attacking people. We'll even say he knows what he's doing with one beyond "the pointy end goes in the other guy". There's no question that a few people will get killed. But everyone there will also have a much easier time running away, throwing things at him, putting barriers between him and themselves, using improvised weapons like mop handles to slow him down, etc. So you're now dealing with a situation where, say, 3-5 people are dead instead of 26.
Or if a maniac uses a crossbow instead, his targets can make effective use of potential shields like garbage cans and desks, have a better chance of dodging, his rate of fire is much much slower (about 1 per minute) which enables defenders to tackle him while he's reloading, and his ammunition is heavy and cumbersome.
Lone Starr: What's this? I said power only what you need to survive.
Vespa: It's my industrial strength hair dryer, and I can't live without it!
Lone Starr: Okay, princess. That's it. The fairy-tale is over. Welcome to real life. You want this hot-air machine, you crank a generator to power it.
All they care about is that every house looks the same and their devotion to local housing politics pays off in the form of pushing people around.
The basic problem with HOAs, condo boards, and similar organizations is that they become tyrannies of the minority of people who give a damn. You would think that most people wouldn't care much about somebody letting their lawn get 2 inches too tall, and you'd be right. But the 3 people that do care show up to every HOA meeting to make absolutely certain that this regulation remains in place, while the people who don't care are too busy living their lives to gain the power they'd need to change a rule like that.
and enforcing the law on those people who have a 49" fence...
Your problem probably isn't with the bureaucrat enforcing the 48" rule on the 49" fence, but rather with the neighborhood having a 48" maximum fence height at all. You are incorrectly blaming the bureaucrat for doing his job correctly and diligently, rather than with the zoning board (or other government body) who made the rule in the first place. That said, the bureaucrat should probably have started his enforcement efforts with a verbal warning, but since I have nothing other than an anecdote to go on it's quite possible that's exactly what happened.
A law that is selectively enforced is actually worse than no law at all, because it undermines trust in the body that's making and enforcing the law. For example, if you have a police force that stops only certain kinds of people going less than 5 mph over the speed limit, then those certain kinds of people are going to (correctly) believe that the police are arbitrary and capricious rather than fair enforcers of the law.
It destroys all.
Here's the thing: As bad as government with bureaucracy is, a government without bureaucracy is even worse.
A real-life example:
States in the US have laws to require that gasoline pumps actually dispense 1 gallon of fuel when they register 1 gallon of fuel on the meter. There are bureaucracies set up for inspectors to go around and check on each pump periodically to ensure that the owner isn't cheating their customers.
Now, you may be wondering what the possible value of having and enforcing such a law is - after all, if a gas station cheats its customers no one will go there, right? But what actually happens is that each gas station is motivated to cheat its customers just a bit so that they won't notice right away, and meanwhile it's basically impossible for drivers (especially those from out of town) to price shop because they don't know how much gasoline they'll actually get for the listed price per gallon.
So, for, say, a city or county of 40,000 people, it's advantageous for everyone but crooked gas station owners to pay $3 in taxes annually for a bureaucrat to spend time testing all the gas pumps in the area (in unannounced visits of course), because they'll save more than $3 in not getting cheated by the crooked gas stations. And this also helps the honest gas station owners, because they know that they aren't going to be out-competed by crooked competition. This math works even if the bureaucrat in question is the mayor's no-good brother-in-law who's getting the $105K + benefits to do this full time: The only people who are harmed by this policy are crooks.
Seriously. If you live in the United States, you should to be making plans to leave, and acting on them as soon as possible. A lot of people won't. Hell, I'll be honest and admit I likely won't - family, lack of a second language, a specialized skill set, and a personal aversion to travel combine to keep me in the Northwest, although I do keep an eye peeled for potential jobs in the cross-border parts of Canada. But if you can, you really should think about your exit process.
Why not stick around and fight it out with the good guys? Yes, the good guys are losing, badly. But all is not lost, and resistance has a tendency to keep cropping up.
For the next incarnation of the government I vote we model it after something a little less dystopian, like Star Trek.
At this point, I might be OK with strange women lying in ponds distributing swords.
Wake up, folks. We have been living in an authoritarian military oligarchy since World War I, when the finance-military-industrial-congressional complex got started in earnest.
What makes you think it got started in WW I? Read A People's History of the United States because Matt Damon was right - that book will knock you on your ass.
McCarthy was screwing up people's lives based on often completely specious accusations of communism, while these upstanding civil servants are screwing up people's lives based on often completely specious accusations of terrorism. Anybody who can't see the obvious differences between the two must be a terrorist.
I mean, it could be a river, or it could be something else. Let's plan on taking a closer look before deciding what this thing really is.
Sure, North Korea is not ... gingham.
Yup, there's definitely a big difference between a minor nuclear power and checker-pattern cotton cloth.
Which means, in fact, that the UN Security Council is doing its job. Otherwise, it would be quite possible for a relatively small conflict (e.g. Austria-Hungary versus Serbia) to turn into a giant war involving millions of soldiers on both sides getting slaughtered.
For instance, imagine this scenario instead: Assad fires at rebels in Turkey. Turkey activates its NATO alliance which requires that the US and most of Europe come to their aid. The Assad regime in turn demands that its allies defend it from NATO, drawing in Russia, China, and Iran. Russia in turn calls on its allies, drawing in the rest of Europe. Iraq and Pakistan, possibly on demands from Washington, attack Iran (Pakistan travelling through Afghanistan to do so, giving the Taliban an opportunity to fight the Karzai government). India takes advantage of Pakistan's distraction to try to take over Kashmir. Most Middle Eastern countries pick sides, rather than being caught in the middle. Israel decides to get in on the action and takes the opportunity to try to take over Lebanon again and expand from the Golon Heights, as well as attacking the Palestinians again.
I could go on, but the point is that with so many alliances, it would be quite possible for the relatively small conflict in Syria to become WW III. And that's also my guess as to why Obama sucked in the first presidential debate: Syria had just fired into Turkey, and Obama might well have been working around the clock trying to prevent exactly this kind of spiraling out of control.
Doesn't work: The US has had several major cities completely wrecked by hurricanes and flooding in the past decade, and still doesn't seem to think that this might be a problem we should look into addressing more thoroughly.
It depends not just on how much the lottery ticket costs, but also the odds of winning and the payoff.
For instance, in the recent big Powerball jackpot on this side of the pond, a $2 ticket had a 1 in 165 million odds of winning a jackpot worth $550 million. That means that, on average, your $2 ticket is worth 550/165=$3.33. Which means it's not really a losing proposition to have one.
Now, I wouldn't give up something essential to get one or even a bunch of them, but taking a shot at it is not necessarily a bad idea.
Come on, he couldn't possibly compare with Silvio Berlusconi in that department.
How many Discordians does it take to change a light bulb?
Depends on the sect. In some cases, 17 or 23. In my personal offshoot branch, the answer is a kumquat.
Some atheists do have a belief system, namely that a complete understanding of the universe can be discovered by scientific inquiry given sufficient resources, time, and intelligence. That's definitely a different sort of belief system than thinking there's an invisible man with 10 things he doesn't want you to do, but it is a proposition that this variety of atheist has no proof of and accepts on faith.
Oh wait, many of them are innocent? Well they can't be that innocent, or they wouldn't have been arrested to begin with.
Reminds me of the silly Star Wars Cops parody Troops: "All suspects are guilty--period! Otherwise, they wouldn't be suspects, would they?"
It allows for advanced Facebook integration with cutting edge cloud computing advertisers running the new touch-screen oriented Windows Server. This delivers high quality targeted rich media advertising to the world's most common platform.
Bingo, sir.
To give an idea of how ridiculous this is, there are currently web-enabled toasters that allow you to take an image off the Internet and burn it into a piece of toast. I'm glad that I'm not the only one thinking "Why would you ever remotely want to do that?" rather than "Cool, I can put pictures on toast!"
Obama's gutted the military like a fish.
1. The US spends more than the entire rest of the world combined.
2. US military spending in 2011 was higher than it was at the peak of Vietnam.
3. The US military currently can blow up anything in the world with a drone in a matter of hours.
How is that "gutting"?
The sovereignty of Canada, Australia, Mexico, Japan, Brazil and the rest of South America, most of Africa, all the Scandinavian countries and southern Europe, and Switzerland have been teetering daily on the brink for decades.
Revision to GP's statement is plainly necessary: The only guarantee that any country who isn't backed by Russia, China, or the US can have sovereignty, for some decades now, is nuclear capacity.
But your assessment of the apparent stability of South America and Africa seems questionable. Since 2000, approximately 40% of South American and African governments have faced at least 1 coup attempt, significant rebellion, popular uprising, or invasion. If you go back to the 1990's, it's even more than that. In many of these cases, the forces opposing the government were backed by the US, Russia, or China.
Somebody had to do it.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(X) No one will be able to find the guy
(X) The police will not put up with it (specifically, murder is still illegal however justified it might be)
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.