Well below the saddle point for the cheapest components you can possibly buy to build a laptop equivalent out of, since to get lower prices, you have to get quantity, and to get quantity, you have to fit into an existing price point, and to fit into an existing price point, you have to fit into an existing profit model.
No profit = no product.
Read "The Innovators Dilemma" to achieve more clue.
You get a boot-bitch screen which says "you are in developer mode", and get to wait 30 seconds for it to go away, or you need a human being to hit a key combo to bypass the wait.
A lot of people bitch about this because what they really want is a Linux or Windows machine with free wireless access for a limited amount of wireless per month. Let them buy their own machine, or pay for their wireless access themselves (this is why Cr-48 Chromebooks were so popular, since there was a standard BIOS you could flash onto it in order to get rid of the wait).
They are the screen, the battery, the SSD, the toucpad, and the keyboard in that order.
You need to read "The Innovators Dilemma" to understand why, regardless of capacity, the bottom end hard drive is always the same price. The same is true for laptops.
While it's true you could produce 4MB hard drives in volume for practically dirt cheap, you can't buy them for that price because no one is producing them in volume.
The saddle point for the low end machine is $300 today, and will be $300 tomorrow. The only thing that's going to change that is a "carrier subsidy", also know as a "payment plan" -- for which the price ends up being approximately, you guess it, $300.
What the market is willing to pay for a low end laptop dictates the lowest price you can offer any similar device at, regardless; anything else pushes you above the saddle.
1. It's visibly acknowledged that you are the source site 2. updates are either directly sent to you, or are sent to you by the other site within a time limit 3. All content on your site, including that sent to you by another (mirror) site, be watermarked as belong to your site. For pictures, this would be a visible watermark on the picture.
When they started installing "smart meters" in my area because "too many" people were installing solar, and PGE were paniced that they'd have to pay the same rate they were charging instead of cutting off the payout at net zero by having differential rates so they payed less when solar was active, my bandwidth went to hell, and I had to more centrally locate my AP to avoid the interference.
I would like to hear your reasoning behind this statement, "Libertarianism doesn't believe in laissez-faire capitalism." That runs completely contrary to my experience and knowledge. I understand that some left-leaning Libertarians do not subscribe to capitalism, but I have yet to find a Libertarian that does not believe in Laissez-Faire market systems as a foundational premise.
cej102937
Laissez faire means "1: a doctrine opposing governmental interference in economic affairs beyond the minimum necessary for the maintenance of peace and property rights. 2: a philosophy or practice characterized by a usually deliberate abstention from direction or interference especially with individual freedom of choice and action."
The key points here are "minimum necessary", which most certainly applies to the recent quantitative easing, and before that, the TARP II and TARP, and prior to that, the deregulation under Clinton of the credit card industry which resulted in the large scale conversion of uncollateralized credit card debt, which was offered to people, including college students, with no means to repay, into collateralized debt. This was inarguably government interference where it did not belong: let the credit card companies fail, hoist on their own petard; let AIG fail, hoist on its own petard.
Objectivists tend to conflate lassiez-faire with the concept of non-regulation; yet when the regulation falls in favor of the corporation, is that also laissez-faire? I think not.
If you understand that all of the free money in the economy was effectively removed when the risk to the credit card companies was removed, then you understand that all of the marginal availability of money was pretty much sucked out of the economy when that happened. Lately, we've seen the remaining margin being pulled out by the oil refining companies, which do not lack for input resources at low cost, but certainly control the refining process to limit the availability of finished product. This was pretty obviously manipulated in microcosm by Chevron in California when they manipulated the clean air laws in order to require reformulation of gasoline in California to isolate the input to the market of pre-refined petroleum: if you can't buy out of state gas, then the refinery supply controls the available total supply, and therefore the saddle point for the profit/cost margin.
Regulation would have prevented this.
From a purely Libertarian standpoint, then, the purpose of government is not to interfere in economic relationships (which you might incorrectly term as laissez-faire), but to regulate the market so that equal opportunity exists for all (which is definitely not traditional laissez-faire "economic hands off" in the traditional definition). To put it more plainly: Enforcement of fairness is not interference.
Where Objectivists tend to get it wrong is the same place where confidence men fail to see the illegality/immorality of their actions: the idea that "if someone is stupid enough to sell themselves into slavery, they deserve to be a slave" is contravened by true Libertarian philosophy, which agrees with the inalienability of certain rights: even should you wish to alienate those rights from yourself, a just, Libertarian society would not permit you to do so.
To put it another way, in a purely Libertarian society, you might be permitted to sell one kidney, but you would not be permitted to sell both of them, and you would not be permitted to sell your heart, since that would kill you, robbing you of your inalienable rights. Likewise, you might be able to indenture yourself for a limited period, but you would not be able to indenture your child, since the rights of the child supersede yours as a parent.
There is a limit to laissez-faire. That limit is the limit between anarchy and government.
Where a Libertarian would disagree with a Democrat or a Republican is anywhere there are laws at a federal level regulating something which was not str
Libertarianism doesn't believe in laissez-faire capitalism. In general, Libertarians are strict constitutional constructionists (definition here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_constructionism if you don't know what that means either).
Really, Objectivist views, particularly when expressed as if they were Libertarian views, do a disservice the philosohical distintion, and, since generally Objectivist viewpoints are abhorred by anyone who buys the idea of Rousseau's (definition here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Contract in case you need it), which includes the majority of the population -- including most Libertarians, who will support the idea of public assistance, if only, as one pundit put it, "to keep less well off people from having an incentive to steal our stuff".
Objectivists are generally those people who don't understand the difference between "Character" and "Charactertures", and don't realize that Rand's protagonists and antagonists aren't representative of real people: real people are much more complex and multifaceted.
I really am beginning to think that people need to have passed a political philosophy class before they are permitted to read her books, so they at least realize that they are getting a philosophy along with the story.
Maybe people should also have to read The GNU Manifesto http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html in order to realize the GPL is an instrumentality of that manifesto, rather than something which exists separate from it, before they are permitted to contribute code to a GPL'ed project (disclosure: I've personally contributed plenty of code to GPL'ed projects, but I did it with an understanding of the philosophical basis and emergent properties of that basis).
You are assigning value to a particular worldview. I was speaking to the qualitative improvement in job prospects, which you do not speak to, unless you are suggesting active discrimination on the basis of (non)religion, or that the original posters perceptions of their job prospects is a result of their personality?
The value that facebook and twitter bring to the advertising table is the network graph of user relationships. They actively block Google from getting this information, and as a result, the information Google has on the network relationships from its Google+ product is better information in terms of better representing the connectivity between people, and therefore social relevance.
If Facebook and Twitter quit blocking the connectivity information, then it's likely the rankings would be Facebook -> Twitter -> Google+, when comparing those networks bulk of data.
The real issue is that they feared people taking the network information, and exporting their information to other networks; be aware that the blocking Facebook does is also effective against Twitter importing network information from Facebook as well.
If the graph data were portable, then graph data hosting would be a commodity, and the user value proposition would exist only in the ability to utilize that graph data on behalf of the user. The advertising is a value proposition for the effective use of graph data by advertisers, not the users about whom the data has been collected.
What this means in reality is that these services generally perceive themselves as having little value beyond their network connectivity graphs, and that they are strongly fighting against the commoditization of the graph data because of this.
Effectively, they are admitting that users get little value from this data from the data hosting provider, that can't just as easily be obtained elsewhere - and probably better at the elsewhere, since as long as the data is proprietary, the hosting company can concentrate on the needs of advertisers rather than users, which is where their revenue base lies.
Or drop ceramic coated rebar on their pointy heads
on
The Great Meteor Grab
·
· Score: 1
No... but if somebody tries to take it away from you, you can try and go and try to take it away from them right back. It doesn't belong to anybody, that's the point.
As long as you can resolve the dispute without resorting to any form of violence against the other party (which would be a violation of human rights, which are assumed to not be subject to national borders), there's no problem.
And if they don't like it, they can come up to space themselves and stop you... Oh snap! Forgot! No launch systems capable of reaching space, unless the person dropping the rebar chooses to sell them to you, or you can get close enough to their launch site with your weapons while it's raining rebar. Whose dumb idea was that again?
Maybe the can contact Energia, and not get outbid by a space tourist this time...
If only because it inspire Gutenberg to invent the printing press and a usable alphabetic movable type, which was then used to print almost everything else I've ever read.
But for the original poster: a book won't magically make you a more productive, desirable person, or reprogram your brain to work better; you are looking in the wrong place for your inspiration.
Here are the recommendations from the CDC and the New Mexico Department of Health; notice the the NMH article specifically calls out tobacco smoke residue on surfaces, seats, and in carpet being sufficient to trigger an asthma attack.
You have an allergy to tobacco smoke, so it's okay to ban tobacco -- okay, you won't find too many objections.
Some people have an allergy to peanuts -- some incredibly sever, far worse than any tobacco smoke allergy. Should we ban peanuts? Maybe it makes sense in schools.
All daycare and K-6 in my area has banned peanuts in schools; no, I was not involved in it, but it beats a daycare worker hitting someone with a low body mass with an adult epipen. It also avoids hitting someone in the middle of a reaction with an epipen, hitting a vein, and causing an instant cerebral aneurism. Many airlines, including Delta, have voluntarily withdrawn peanut products from the in-flight snacks they offer when the flight isn't long enough that they are federally mandated to actually serve meals (or more likely, pick up a sack lunch on the way into the plane),
I have an allergy to the base in some perfumes -- my nose runs constantly, my eyes tear up, it's very unpleasant. Should we ban perfume? I'm on board!
Is it an anaphylactic reaction, or is it one that can be managed with oral H1 and/or H2 blockers? Most planes carry both benedryl (H1) and ranatidine (H2) blockers. But personally, I'd say this one is on you: your reaction comes from an aromatic with environmental exposure, it's generally manageable with over the counter medication, and you are voluntarily placing yourself in the situation where you are getting exposed. From that perspective, it might also be resonable to have DMV workers, court clerks, and other public employees refrain from bringing the allergen into situations where your presence is far less voluntary. Just like aromatized cigarette ash brought in by a smoker.
How about this: We err on the side of freedom. Let businesses decide to allow or not allow smoking, peanuts, or perfume. We consider any policy that discriminates against workers for engaging in legal activity (smoking, eating peanuts, wearing perfume) outside of work to be unlawful.
What about other substances, which I agree should be legalized, and other substances which are currently legal, such as alcohol, which would impair your performance, potentially in life threatening ways for someone? A coked-up lab tech or a drunk taxi driver are things you are only going to catch after the fact, when someone dies.
How about we take your examples to their reductio ad absurdum conclusion instead? How about we only file drunk driving charges when there are damages to person or property, and so long as they don't run over somone or into something, society minds its own business and lets them drive drunk?
When did we grow into a culture of "As long as it doesn't affect insurance premiums" The laws should quell insurance premiums and insure the liberty of its citizens not quell its citizens liberty and cow-toe to insurance.
Right after we put the insurance companies in charge by keeping them in the loop on healthcare rather than going to a single payer system.
Personally, I welcome anti-smoking campaigns, as I'm pretty sure anyone with a tobacco allergy or asthma welcomes them, even if the smoke is merely a residue on your clothing or hair which you bring back inside with you after smoking outside.
I'd say that there should not be outright bans, but on the other hand I have no problem with someone who mans the counter at the DMV, an agency the public is forced to interact with, not being allowed to expose the people who are forced to interact with them to particulates which could kill them, and due to medical conditions they may have, in a non-theoretical 30-years-down-the-road sense.
Once it's in the reserve, who owns what drop of syrup is no longer pertinent. It's just as believable that someone would do it for the same reasons as that Tylenol was poisoned http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders (least likely) or to drive up the price, given that there's no price/production floor for producers (good for producers in general as plowing under a large percentage of the corn crop was at one point, and as milk-dumping in 1939 and the late 1970's; by the 1980's, the government was buying excess supply to make cheese and keep public supply low).
An alternate possibility is to games the commodities market with a short term supply discontinuity.
The first possibility is most likely to be of long term benefit to various producers, merely by being a possibility.
If it can be proven non-toxic, I'd keep it separate from the reserve, and start bottling "kidnapped brand maple syrup" myself...
The other stuff is transient local infrastructure (why bring in concrete from another country, unless you are talking pre-stressed concrete girders, which, again, tend to get shipped from China).
Did they test it for poison, or did they just put it back in the reserve without testing? There was no chain of custody during the time it was missing, after all.
FYI, that study doesn't say half of college grads are out of work, many of them have jobs but are underemployed. People with philosophy degrees flipping burgers for example.
I refer you to the part of my post where I specifically stated "in-demand skill sets".
A lot of people would dearly like to be paid to do things which society simply does not value. I know at least one tone-deaf singer who'd like to be paid to sing, but I'm pretty sure Yoko Ono has cornered the market on that, unless you count autotuning as singing, in which case I'd say the market is larger than I initially thought, but she's probably still not going to get paid. Personally, I'd like it to be my job to live in amazing house in an amazing place, and cash a very very large check once a month, while I spend my time writing and working on things I think need to be worked on rather than what someone thinks will give them a good ROI on a short fiscal horizon. I am not holding my breath.
Getting a degree in something you value but which society doesn't means you will be stuck doing something for which you have skills which society does value enough in order to trade you money for exercising those skills, e.g. flipping burgers, and you will be paid commensurate with the apportioned value which society places on that role.
If you think you can change what society values, you are invited to do so.
Meanwhile, back on topic: if your skills are in-demand, you can get work, and your employer will overlook a multitude of sins and still be glad to have you.
Slashdot Mirror
Well below the saddle point for the cheapest components you can possibly buy to build a laptop equivalent out of, since to get lower prices, you have to get quantity, and to get quantity, you have to fit into an existing price point, and to fit into an existing price point, you have to fit into an existing profit model.
No profit = no product.
Read "The Innovators Dilemma" to achieve more clue.
You get a boot-bitch screen which says "you are in developer mode", and get to wait 30 seconds for it to go away, or you need a human being to hit a key combo to bypass the wait.
A lot of people bitch about this because what they really want is a Linux or Windows machine with free wireless access for a limited amount of wireless per month. Let them buy their own machine, or pay for their wireless access themselves (this is why Cr-48 Chromebooks were so popular, since there was a standard BIOS you could flash onto it in order to get rid of the wait).
They are the screen, the battery, the SSD, the toucpad, and the keyboard in that order.
You need to read "The Innovators Dilemma" to understand why, regardless of capacity, the bottom end hard drive is always the same price. The same is true for laptops.
While it's true you could produce 4MB hard drives in volume for practically dirt cheap, you can't buy them for that price because no one is producing them in volume.
The saddle point for the low end machine is $300 today, and will be $300 tomorrow. The only thing that's going to change that is a "carrier subsidy", also know as a "payment plan" -- for which the price ends up being approximately, you guess it, $300.
What the market is willing to pay for a low end laptop dictates the lowest price you can offer any similar device at, regardless; anything else pushes you above the saddle.
License the mirroring only in the event that:
1. It's visibly acknowledged that you are the source site
2. updates are either directly sent to you, or are sent to you by the other site within a time limit
3. All content on your site, including that sent to you by another (mirror) site, be watermarked as belong to your site. For pictures, this would be a visible watermark on the picture.
Like, oh, say, "smart meters".
When they started installing "smart meters" in my area because "too many" people were installing solar, and PGE were paniced that they'd have to pay the same rate they were charging instead of cutting off the payout at net zero by having differential rates so they payed less when solar was active, my bandwidth went to hell, and I had to more centrally locate my AP to avoid the interference.
I would like to hear your reasoning behind this statement, "Libertarianism doesn't believe in laissez-faire capitalism." That runs completely contrary to my experience and knowledge. I understand that some left-leaning Libertarians do not subscribe to capitalism, but I have yet to find a Libertarian that does not believe in Laissez-Faire market systems as a foundational premise.
cej102937
Laissez faire means "1: a doctrine opposing governmental interference in economic affairs beyond the minimum necessary for the maintenance of peace and property rights. 2: a philosophy or practice characterized by a usually deliberate abstention from direction or interference especially with individual freedom of choice and action."
The key points here are "minimum necessary", which most certainly applies to the recent quantitative easing, and before that, the TARP II and TARP, and prior to that, the deregulation under Clinton of the credit card industry which resulted in the large scale conversion of uncollateralized credit card debt, which was offered to people, including college students, with no means to repay, into collateralized debt. This was inarguably government interference where it did not belong: let the credit card companies fail, hoist on their own petard; let AIG fail, hoist on its own petard.
Objectivists tend to conflate lassiez-faire with the concept of non-regulation; yet when the regulation falls in favor of the corporation, is that also laissez-faire? I think not.
If you understand that all of the free money in the economy was effectively removed when the risk to the credit card companies was removed, then you understand that all of the marginal availability of money was pretty much sucked out of the economy when that happened. Lately, we've seen the remaining margin being pulled out by the oil refining companies, which do not lack for input resources at low cost, but certainly control the refining process to limit the availability of finished product. This was pretty obviously manipulated in microcosm by Chevron in California when they manipulated the clean air laws in order to require reformulation of gasoline in California to isolate the input to the market of pre-refined petroleum: if you can't buy out of state gas, then the refinery supply controls the available total supply, and therefore the saddle point for the profit/cost margin.
Regulation would have prevented this.
From a purely Libertarian standpoint, then, the purpose of government is not to interfere in economic relationships (which you might incorrectly term as laissez-faire), but to regulate the market so that equal opportunity exists for all (which is definitely not traditional laissez-faire "economic hands off" in the traditional definition). To put it more plainly: Enforcement of fairness is not interference.
Where Objectivists tend to get it wrong is the same place where confidence men fail to see the illegality/immorality of their actions: the idea that "if someone is stupid enough to sell themselves into slavery, they deserve to be a slave" is contravened by true Libertarian philosophy, which agrees with the inalienability of certain rights: even should you wish to alienate those rights from yourself, a just, Libertarian society would not permit you to do so.
To put it another way, in a purely Libertarian society, you might be permitted to sell one kidney, but you would not be permitted to sell both of them, and you would not be permitted to sell your heart, since that would kill you, robbing you of your inalienable rights. Likewise, you might be able to indenture yourself for a limited period, but you would not be able to indenture your child, since the rights of the child supersede yours as a parent.
There is a limit to laissez-faire. That limit is the limit between anarchy and government.
Where a Libertarian would disagree with a Democrat or a Republican is anywhere there are laws at a federal level regulating something which was not str
Objectivism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand)
Libertarianism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
Libertarianism doesn't believe in laissez-faire capitalism. In general, Libertarians are strict constitutional constructionists (definition here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_constructionism if you don't know what that means either).
Really, Objectivist views, particularly when expressed as if they were Libertarian views, do a disservice the philosohical distintion, and, since generally Objectivist viewpoints are abhorred by anyone who buys the idea of Rousseau's (definition here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Contract in case you need it), which includes the majority of the population -- including most Libertarians, who will support the idea of public assistance, if only, as one pundit put it, "to keep less well off people from having an incentive to steal our stuff".
Objectivists are generally those people who don't understand the difference between "Character" and "Charactertures", and don't realize that Rand's protagonists and antagonists aren't representative of real people: real people are much more complex and multifaceted.
I really am beginning to think that people need to have passed a political philosophy class before they are permitted to read her books, so they at least realize that they are getting a philosophy along with the story.
Maybe people should also have to read The GNU Manifesto http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html in order to realize the GPL is an instrumentality of that manifesto, rather than something which exists separate from it, before they are permitted to contribute code to a GPL'ed project (disclosure: I've personally contributed plenty of code to GPL'ed projects, but I did it with an understanding of the philosophical basis and emergent properties of that basis).
You are assigning value to a particular worldview. I was speaking to the qualitative improvement in job prospects, which you do not speak to, unless you are suggesting active discrimination on the basis of (non)religion, or that the original posters perceptions of their job prospects is a result of their personality?
It's a little more actively blocked than that:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-blocks-google-chrome-extension-for-exporting-friends/1935
The value that facebook and twitter bring to the advertising table is the network graph of user relationships. They actively block Google from getting this information, and as a result, the information Google has on the network relationships from its Google+ product is better information in terms of better representing the connectivity between people, and therefore social relevance.
If Facebook and Twitter quit blocking the connectivity information, then it's likely the rankings would be Facebook -> Twitter -> Google+, when comparing those networks bulk of data.
The real issue is that they feared people taking the network information, and exporting their information to other networks; be aware that the blocking Facebook does is also effective against Twitter importing network information from Facebook as well.
If the graph data were portable, then graph data hosting would be a commodity, and the user value proposition would exist only in the ability to utilize that graph data on behalf of the user. The advertising is a value proposition for the effective use of graph data by advertisers, not the users about whom the data has been collected.
What this means in reality is that these services generally perceive themselves as having little value beyond their network connectivity graphs, and that they are strongly fighting against the commoditization of the graph data because of this.
Effectively, they are admitting that users get little value from this data from the data hosting provider, that can't just as easily be obtained elsewhere - and probably better at the elsewhere, since as long as the data is proprietary, the hosting company can concentrate on the needs of advertisers rather than users, which is where their revenue base lies.
No... but if somebody tries to take it away from you, you can try and go and try to take it away from them right back. It doesn't belong to anybody, that's the point.
As long as you can resolve the dispute without resorting to any form of violence against the other party (which would be a violation of human rights, which are assumed to not be subject to national borders), there's no problem.
And if they don't like it, they can come up to space themselves and stop you... Oh snap! Forgot! No launch systems capable of reaching space, unless the person dropping the rebar chooses to sell them to you, or you can get close enough to their launch site with your weapons while it's raining rebar. Whose dumb idea was that again?
Maybe the can contact Energia, and not get outbid by a space tourist this time...
If only because it inspire Gutenberg to invent the printing press and a usable alphabetic movable type, which was then used to print almost everything else I've ever read.
But for the original poster: a book won't magically make you a more productive, desirable person, or reprogram your brain to work better; you are looking in the wrong place for your inspiration.
These guys monitor supply chains, and they include tables with PCs, which gives their top spot to Apple, the next to HP, and Lenovo comes in third:
http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/2012-will-bring-new-world-record-pc-shipments
When my mother had a TIA as a result of her two pack a day habit and lost her ability to read.
Smoke if you want; the cost to you is pretty phenomenal. Nothing I do for pleasure is worth my ability to read.
If you disagree, you are a complete idiot. If you don't, you are an incomplete idiot.
CRX HF = 72 MPG
http://www.unboundmedicine.com/medline/ebm/record/17376094/abstract/Angioedema_due_to_type_I_allergy_to_snuff_tobacco_
http://www.biomedsearch.com/nih/mechanism-tobacco-smoke-induced-allergy/2631.html
Here are the recommendations from the CDC and the New Mexico Department of Health; notice the the NMH article specifically calls out tobacco smoke residue on surfaces, seats, and in carpet being sufficient to trigger an asthma attack.
http://www.cdc.gov/asthma/triggers.html
http://nmhealth.org/eheb/documents/Cartipsnosmoking%5B1%5D.pdf
Where does it stop?
You have an allergy to tobacco smoke, so it's okay to ban tobacco -- okay, you won't find too many objections.
Some people have an allergy to peanuts -- some incredibly sever, far worse than any tobacco smoke allergy. Should we ban peanuts? Maybe it makes sense in schools.
All daycare and K-6 in my area has banned peanuts in schools; no, I was not involved in it, but it beats a daycare worker hitting someone with a low body mass with an adult epipen. It also avoids hitting someone in the middle of a reaction with an epipen, hitting a vein, and causing an instant cerebral aneurism. Many airlines, including Delta, have voluntarily withdrawn peanut products from the in-flight snacks they offer when the flight isn't long enough that they are federally mandated to actually serve meals (or more likely, pick up a sack lunch on the way into the plane),
I have an allergy to the base in some perfumes -- my nose runs constantly, my eyes tear up, it's very unpleasant. Should we ban perfume? I'm on board!
Is it an anaphylactic reaction, or is it one that can be managed with oral H1 and/or H2 blockers? Most planes carry both benedryl (H1) and ranatidine (H2) blockers. But personally, I'd say this one is on you: your reaction comes from an aromatic with environmental exposure, it's generally manageable with over the counter medication, and you are voluntarily placing yourself in the situation where you are getting exposed. From that perspective, it might also be resonable to have DMV workers, court clerks, and other public employees refrain from bringing the allergen into situations where your presence is far less voluntary. Just like aromatized cigarette ash brought in by a smoker.
How about this: We err on the side of freedom. Let businesses decide to allow or not allow smoking, peanuts, or perfume. We consider any policy that discriminates against workers for engaging in legal activity (smoking, eating peanuts, wearing perfume) outside of work to be unlawful.
What about other substances, which I agree should be legalized, and other substances which are currently legal, such as alcohol, which would impair your performance, potentially in life threatening ways for someone? A coked-up lab tech or a drunk taxi driver are things you are only going to catch after the fact, when someone dies.
How about we take your examples to their reductio ad absurdum conclusion instead? How about we only file drunk driving charges when there are damages to person or property, and so long as they don't run over somone or into something, society minds its own business and lets them drive drunk?
When did we grow into a culture of "As long as it doesn't affect insurance premiums" The laws should quell insurance premiums and insure the liberty of its citizens not quell its citizens liberty and cow-toe to insurance.
Right after we put the insurance companies in charge by keeping them in the loop on healthcare rather than going to a single payer system.
Personally, I welcome anti-smoking campaigns, as I'm pretty sure anyone with a tobacco allergy or asthma welcomes them, even if the smoke is merely a residue on your clothing or hair which you bring back inside with you after smoking outside.
I'd say that there should not be outright bans, but on the other hand I have no problem with someone who mans the counter at the DMV, an agency the public is forced to interact with, not being allowed to expose the people who are forced to interact with them to particulates which could kill them, and due to medical conditions they may have, in a non-theoretical 30-years-down-the-road sense.
Once it's in the reserve, who owns what drop of syrup is no longer pertinent. It's just as believable that someone would do it for the same reasons as that Tylenol was poisoned http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders (least likely) or to drive up the price, given that there's no price/production floor for producers (good for producers in general as plowing under a large percentage of the corn crop was at one point, and as milk-dumping in 1939 and the late 1970's; by the 1980's, the government was buying excess supply to make cheese and keep public supply low).
An alternate possibility is to games the commodities market with a short term supply discontinuity.
The first possibility is most likely to be of long term benefit to various producers, merely by being a possibility.
If it can be proven non-toxic, I'd keep it separate from the reserve, and start bottling "kidnapped brand maple syrup" myself...
... ...
* Natural drying process by the sun and wind (13-22 Months)
* Harvested from the clean oceans around New Zealand
Which means the salt from this is just about ready to harvest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rena_oil_spill
Actually, Dow Chemical owns UCC since 2001 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Chemical_Company#Bhopal_disaster but thank you for the correction, I misremembered the acquisition of UCC, whose subsidiary UCIL ran the Bhopal plant.
Monsanto, however, is a global company with 21,000 employees in 404 facilities in 66 countries, not a US one; here is a list of worldwide facilities from their web site: http://www.monsanto.com/whoweare/pages/our-locations.aspx
Likewise, Caterpillar does it's manufacturing close to its customers in various countries: http://www.caterpillar.com/company/global-footprint
Case tractors are also manufactured outside the US in many instances: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_IH#Factory_locations ; most of the engines used in the US models are manufactured in Brazil.
General Electric, which manufactures most of the train locomotives used in the US, makes nearly 2/3rds of its money outside the US, and has reduced their US workforce by 1/5 from 2002 to 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?scp=2&sq=ge&st=cse
I'll point out that most steel beams used in large construction are manufactured in China and shipped over for use in the US, since the US no longer has the facilities to manufacture them; for example, most of the recent San Francisco Bay Bridge superstructure is from China: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-11/sf-bay-bridge-gets-5-300-ton-delivery-from-china.html
The other stuff is transient local infrastructure (why bring in concrete from another country, unless you are talking pre-stressed concrete girders, which, again, tend to get shipped from China).
So tell me again how the US is doing?
Did they test it for poison, or did they just put it back in the reserve without testing? There was no chain of custody during the time it was missing, after all.
FYI, that study doesn't say half of college grads are out of work, many of them have jobs but are underemployed. People with philosophy degrees flipping burgers for example.
I refer you to the part of my post where I specifically stated "in-demand skill sets".
A lot of people would dearly like to be paid to do things which society simply does not value. I know at least one tone-deaf singer who'd like to be paid to sing, but I'm pretty sure Yoko Ono has cornered the market on that, unless you count autotuning as singing, in which case I'd say the market is larger than I initially thought, but she's probably still not going to get paid. Personally, I'd like it to be my job to live in amazing house in an amazing place, and cash a very very large check once a month, while I spend my time writing and working on things I think need to be worked on rather than what someone thinks will give them a good ROI on a short fiscal horizon. I am not holding my breath.
Getting a degree in something you value but which society doesn't means you will be stuck doing something for which you have skills which society does value enough in order to trade you money for exercising those skills, e.g. flipping burgers, and you will be paid commensurate with the apportioned value which society places on that role.
If you think you can change what society values, you are invited to do so.
Meanwhile, back on topic: if your skills are in-demand, you can get work, and your employer will overlook a multitude of sins and still be glad to have you.
Bhopal, India? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster