So that links to only one such blowhard which is a bit less than what you indicated. Do you have "quite a few" more such links? We have anti-gun people fantasizing about killing pro-gun people in this very thread.
I don't really find this stuff threatening. The anti-gun side is notorious for being all bark and no bite. But it is just a bit odd to claim that the pro-gun side does it too without any real support for the claim.
That undermines any internal oversight, since nothing can be handled discreetly in an official capacity.
Internal oversight is a bad joke. There's the huge, obvious conflict of interest - foxes are in charge of watching the henhouse. And there are no repercussions when it fails.
Let's give a particularly notorious example using the current administration. Back in 2010 and 2011, in the "Fast and Furious" gunwalking scheme, the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, a US federal law enforcement bureau) enabled the smuggling of about 2,000 high quality firearms into Mexico without any sort of precaution, either a plan to prevent their use in crime or passing on a warning to Mexican law enforcement so that they could deal with the problem. I say "enabled" because among other things, they encouraged legitimate gun dealers to sell those firearms to the smugglers in question and then allowed those firearms to cross the border into Mexico unchecked (and who knows what else the smugglers carried at that time!).
By the summer of 2011, it was apparent that these firearms were turning up at crime scenes, including murder, because they had a report to that effect which indicated several hundred of these weapons had already turned up at crime scenes. This includes murders and probably includes US crime scenes. Yet the program was continued (that is, criminals were allowed to continue to smuggle firearms into Mexico that the US had a really good idea would be used in crimes in the US and Mexico) till a US law enforcement agent was killed in a firefight involving two weapons from this program.
Here's the problem. In the US and probably in Mexico, if you provide a weapon which is used in a crime, knowing that it'll get used for crime, then you are an accessory to that crime. In particular, a number of those crimes were murders. What we have here is a fairly straightforward case of ATF agents committing (probably a large number of times) the felony of accessory to murder and similar crimes. Or maybe criminal negligence, if you're feeling kind to people who may be partly responsible for a couple hundred deaths.
So what came of the "internal oversight"? Nobody higher up the food chain remembers anything even though there's evidence that they were informed of the progress of the program on occasion. Similarly, the people directly involved work somewhere in DC now. The head of the ATF had to resign without any other consequence. There's no indication that the Department of Justice will ever investigate the activities of Fast and Furious much less prosecute anyone for the crimes committed.
That's the reality of "internal oversight". It doesn't get done unless the people with external oversight apply enough pressure. That's where FOIA comes in. It allows you to learn enough about what happened that you can apply that pressure.
If the libertarian fringe had their way, all governments (even ones like the US or China) would end up having a few hundred paper dragons, rubber stamping the occasional decision made in the "real world" of the pure free market.
Note that I said nothing about libertarianism in my prior post, but rather just made an observation that should have been painfully obvious to the poster claiming that Apple is somehow indistinguishable from a government.
Maybe you ought to adjust your rhetorical reflexes a bit.
I doubt that as well. As an AC noted, even when comparing corporations and governments of similar economic size, the two are incomparable. It's apples and oranges.
What's Apple's direct GDP contribution? That's the actual apples to apples comparison after all. I imagine it's much closer to their net income than their revenue. That drops their GDP contribution by almost a factor of four. I'd say it contributes about as much GDP as Uruguay did in 2012. That's nice, but that's not a large country.
Uruguay is a country of a bit under 3.4 million people, and it has a military of about 25,000 people. Apple has power only as long as it maintains that GDP contribution and its profit. Uruguay's power comes from its monopoly of power status over 3.4 million people. When you toss in the substantial constraints on the power of Apple, I think it's rash to compare the power of a corporation to that of even a government of comparable size.
And there are plenty of blog tyrants out there doing just that. With the spam and trolls out there, one actually needs to censor comments on occasion just to keep the thing viable for readers.
you'll also find that most of that "free government money" was in the form of loans that have largely been repaid
Let's not get too hasty. We don't know how much debt these companies actually owe to the federal government via quantitative easing (QE) and perhaps public loans or stimulus. The Federal Reserve has bought a lot of private debt as part of its QE process - not just US treasuries. It would very simple for a business to sell bonds to the Fed and then use the cash to pay off TARP or ARRA loans.
It'd be insightful only if you ignore niche markets. Smart game shoppers might not be numerous enough to change the ways of a behemoth like EA, but they can jump start new competitors quite easily. Even if those competitors get snapped up by EA or its like, that's still an ample flow of wealth from the lazy or ignorant to clever game makers.
But you see, that's the power of a great theory. It explains everything you want to explain when you need to and generates a few tens of billions of dollars a year in public funding for your societal engineering schemes.
I did and then I gave you the example you asked for. One doesn't get to rule it out because it is inconvenient, especially since there is no neat distinction between older and newer bullet trains in Japan.
Quit blaming the victim. The voters were lied to about the budget. The Greek people were defrauded by their own government.
In a democracy, the citizens bear the ultimate responsibility. So they are "victims"? Too bad. Maybe they'll remember this little episode the next time some politicians start making ridiculously extravagant promises.
I also don't buy that the Greek citizenry are victims. I think they're willing collaborators who got stuck with the bill.
How is austerity "a way out"? I've asked you this several times now, and you never explain. I've described a mechanism by which stimulus spending would improve the economy, and yet you call my solution "magical". You're the one waving your hands around here.
Austerity stops the problem of uncontrolled and irrational spending. Your approach of stimulus spending ignores that Greece similar doesn't have the authority to borrow or print that kind of money. And nobody else will do it for them. Further, I'm not convinced that stimulus spending ever works.
Recessions end naturally, there's centuries of history of even the worst of them doing so without stimulus spending. Even the explanation for how stimulus spending works doesn't make sense. The argument is that it is supposed to help by stimulating some part of the economy, such as aggregate demand. Why does that doe for you? As far as I can tell, it just means higher economic activity as long as the stimulus is in play. Once the stimulus stops, so does the economic activity.
But that money comes from somewhere either in the present or future. And that part gets depressed. So we have one part of the economy arbitrarily stimulated while another part gets arbitrarily depressed.
That doesn't seem that useful to me and I'd have to say that it doesn't appear to be working out for Greece either. They did their stimulus thing in 2009 after all, and that lead directly to austerity.
We also have the rest of Europe, the US, and Japan as more examples of countries with great, big stimulus packages, some going back more than two decades, and yet we still don't see stimulus working very well. It's just creating more public debt and more opportunities for Greece-style austerity.
it was canned or smoked or candied, NEVER a single chemical preservative.
Smoked and candied foods are chemically preserved. You just don't recognize the preservatives as "chemical". In addition, the wood smoking process which preserves food uses cancer-causing chemicals including benzene.
I guess the difference is that your grandparents' benzene came "straight from the land". Heh.
Never confuse lucky genetics with a lack of "chemicals".
Name one bullet train line anywhere in the world that's at least a few years old but still doesn't make a profit.
The Shinkansen trains in Japan which have operated for over three decades. Most of the construction cost was just eaten by the Japanese government and eventually sold for about a third (ignoring inflation) of the original construction costs to a stable of private companies. Googling around, I still see public funds for development for these trains, meaning that they're being subsidized - as I see it, a sure sign that they aren't running a profit on their own.
Means of production: again, you're judging the past based on modern values.
I think that is as it should be. I use modern values because those are the means by which capitalism is determined. That the ancients didn't know of or couldn't implement some of those values is merely more evidence that full blown capitalism is a modern construct even if parts of capitalism may predate humanity itself.
Slashdot Mirror
So that links to only one such blowhard which is a bit less than what you indicated. Do you have "quite a few" more such links? We have anti-gun people fantasizing about killing pro-gun people in this very thread.
I don't really find this stuff threatening. The anti-gun side is notorious for being all bark and no bite. But it is just a bit odd to claim that the pro-gun side does it too without any real support for the claim.
That settles it! You'll do awesome in court!
but you always have to consider whether it'll damage the pelt, if its a nice specimen you might want to have them stuffed ya know.
Gives a whole new meaning to "stuffed shirt".
It has less bullet points. Of course, it's simpler! What part of "2. ?" don't you get?
Our infrastructure's and societal functions' dependency on the Internet is grossly underestimated.
Or overstated. That's the other general possibility. Maybe even both.
This is a fact.
Or more accurately, an opinion gussied up as a fact.
The Clinton administration was much more open.
There always is a day of reckoning.
Meh, I'm "comparing" the "incomparable". I could have worded that better. All in a day's work at Slashdot.
That undermines any internal oversight, since nothing can be handled discreetly in an official capacity.
Internal oversight is a bad joke. There's the huge, obvious conflict of interest - foxes are in charge of watching the henhouse. And there are no repercussions when it fails.
Let's give a particularly notorious example using the current administration. Back in 2010 and 2011, in the "Fast and Furious" gunwalking scheme, the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, a US federal law enforcement bureau) enabled the smuggling of about 2,000 high quality firearms into Mexico without any sort of precaution, either a plan to prevent their use in crime or passing on a warning to Mexican law enforcement so that they could deal with the problem. I say "enabled" because among other things, they encouraged legitimate gun dealers to sell those firearms to the smugglers in question and then allowed those firearms to cross the border into Mexico unchecked (and who knows what else the smugglers carried at that time!).
By the summer of 2011, it was apparent that these firearms were turning up at crime scenes, including murder, because they had a report to that effect which indicated several hundred of these weapons had already turned up at crime scenes. This includes murders and probably includes US crime scenes. Yet the program was continued (that is, criminals were allowed to continue to smuggle firearms into Mexico that the US had a really good idea would be used in crimes in the US and Mexico) till a US law enforcement agent was killed in a firefight involving two weapons from this program.
Here's the problem. In the US and probably in Mexico, if you provide a weapon which is used in a crime, knowing that it'll get used for crime, then you are an accessory to that crime. In particular, a number of those crimes were murders. What we have here is a fairly straightforward case of ATF agents committing (probably a large number of times) the felony of accessory to murder and similar crimes. Or maybe criminal negligence, if you're feeling kind to people who may be partly responsible for a couple hundred deaths.
So what came of the "internal oversight"? Nobody higher up the food chain remembers anything even though there's evidence that they were informed of the progress of the program on occasion. Similarly, the people directly involved work somewhere in DC now. The head of the ATF had to resign without any other consequence. There's no indication that the Department of Justice will ever investigate the activities of Fast and Furious much less prosecute anyone for the crimes committed.
That's the reality of "internal oversight". It doesn't get done unless the people with external oversight apply enough pressure. That's where FOIA comes in. It allows you to learn enough about what happened that you can apply that pressure.
If the libertarian fringe had their way, all governments (even ones like the US or China) would end up having a few hundred paper dragons, rubber stamping the occasional decision made in the "real world" of the pure free market.
Note that I said nothing about libertarianism in my prior post, but rather just made an observation that should have been painfully obvious to the poster claiming that Apple is somehow indistinguishable from a government.
Maybe you ought to adjust your rhetorical reflexes a bit.
I doubt that as well. As an AC noted, even when comparing corporations and governments of similar economic size, the two are incomparable. It's apples and oranges.
What's Apple's direct GDP contribution? That's the actual apples to apples comparison after all. I imagine it's much closer to their net income than their revenue. That drops their GDP contribution by almost a factor of four. I'd say it contributes about as much GDP as Uruguay did in 2012. That's nice, but that's not a large country.
Uruguay is a country of a bit under 3.4 million people, and it has a military of about 25,000 people. Apple has power only as long as it maintains that GDP contribution and its profit. Uruguay's power comes from its monopoly of power status over 3.4 million people. When you toss in the substantial constraints on the power of Apple, I think it's rash to compare the power of a corporation to that of even a government of comparable size.
No corporation is sufficiently large to be confused with larger governments.
And there are plenty of blog tyrants out there doing just that. With the spam and trolls out there, one actually needs to censor comments on occasion just to keep the thing viable for readers.
you'll also find that most of that "free government money" was in the form of loans that have largely been repaid
Let's not get too hasty. We don't know how much debt these companies actually owe to the federal government via quantitative easing (QE) and perhaps public loans or stimulus. The Federal Reserve has bought a lot of private debt as part of its QE process - not just US treasuries. It would very simple for a business to sell bonds to the Fed and then use the cash to pay off TARP or ARRA loans.
It'd be insightful only if you ignore niche markets. Smart game shoppers might not be numerous enough to change the ways of a behemoth like EA, but they can jump start new competitors quite easily. Even if those competitors get snapped up by EA or its like, that's still an ample flow of wealth from the lazy or ignorant to clever game makers.
But you see, that's the power of a great theory. It explains everything you want to explain when you need to and generates a few tens of billions of dollars a year in public funding for your societal engineering schemes.
Why should we call them guesses?
I assumed, apparently incorrectly, that you wanted accurate terms for the process.
Do you think predictions yet to be confirmed by General Relativity like gravitational waves are just merely guesses?
There's a lot more backing up the model of GR than there is for climate models, including many observations of various predicted GR effects.
So you're saying a theory can't make predictions?
It can indeed. We would be correct to call those "guesses" in the absence of evidence.
I did and then I gave you the example you asked for. One doesn't get to rule it out because it is inconvenient, especially since there is no neat distinction between older and newer bullet trains in Japan.
Quit blaming the victim. The voters were lied to about the budget. The Greek people were defrauded by their own government.
In a democracy, the citizens bear the ultimate responsibility. So they are "victims"? Too bad. Maybe they'll remember this little episode the next time some politicians start making ridiculously extravagant promises.
I also don't buy that the Greek citizenry are victims. I think they're willing collaborators who got stuck with the bill.
How is austerity "a way out"? I've asked you this several times now, and you never explain. I've described a mechanism by which stimulus spending would improve the economy, and yet you call my solution "magical". You're the one waving your hands around here.
Austerity stops the problem of uncontrolled and irrational spending. Your approach of stimulus spending ignores that Greece similar doesn't have the authority to borrow or print that kind of money. And nobody else will do it for them. Further, I'm not convinced that stimulus spending ever works.
Recessions end naturally, there's centuries of history of even the worst of them doing so without stimulus spending. Even the explanation for how stimulus spending works doesn't make sense. The argument is that it is supposed to help by stimulating some part of the economy, such as aggregate demand. Why does that doe for you? As far as I can tell, it just means higher economic activity as long as the stimulus is in play. Once the stimulus stops, so does the economic activity.
But that money comes from somewhere either in the present or future. And that part gets depressed. So we have one part of the economy arbitrarily stimulated while another part gets arbitrarily depressed.
That doesn't seem that useful to me and I'd have to say that it doesn't appear to be working out for Greece either. They did their stimulus thing in 2009 after all, and that lead directly to austerity.
We also have the rest of Europe, the US, and Japan as more examples of countries with great, big stimulus packages, some going back more than two decades, and yet we still don't see stimulus working very well. It's just creating more public debt and more opportunities for Greece-style austerity.
it was canned or smoked or candied, NEVER a single chemical preservative.
Smoked and candied foods are chemically preserved. You just don't recognize the preservatives as "chemical". In addition, the wood smoking process which preserves food uses cancer-causing chemicals including benzene.
I guess the difference is that your grandparents' benzene came "straight from the land". Heh.
Never confuse lucky genetics with a lack of "chemicals".
Name one bullet train line anywhere in the world that's at least a few years old but still doesn't make a profit.
The Shinkansen trains in Japan which have operated for over three decades. Most of the construction cost was just eaten by the Japanese government and eventually sold for about a third (ignoring inflation) of the original construction costs to a stable of private companies. Googling around, I still see public funds for development for these trains, meaning that they're being subsidized - as I see it, a sure sign that they aren't running a profit on their own.
They're taking a good representation of the current and past atmosphere, using that as a guide for the future atmosphere.
They don't have that yet. You see where we're going with this "guessing" thing?
Means of production: again, you're judging the past based on modern values.
I think that is as it should be. I use modern values because those are the means by which capitalism is determined. That the ancients didn't know of or couldn't implement some of those values is merely more evidence that full blown capitalism is a modern construct even if parts of capitalism may predate humanity itself.