If there is one thing economists agree on, it is that a freer economy is generally a better economy.
Better for who? People throw around the "the economy" like it's the end-all-be-all to everyones prosperity. Millionaire businessmen making more money so they can buy big houses and Hummers doesn't help me in the least (and spare me the trickle-down economics crap).
Just because they're from another country? That's not a legitimate excuse at all.
It's a perfectly legitimate excuse. Without limits on immigration we'd have massive drops in salaries. Other countries have immigration policies designed to protect job interests. This isn't some crazy US style protectionism.
Here here. Busses are inherently slow because they have to share the road with cars, which means they're affected by traffic. They also stop waaay too often which makes them even slower. Busses are also a lot more cramped, uncomfortable, and often more crowded that trains.
The reason for bus travel sucking and train travel not sucking are inherent to the limits placed on each form of transportation, not on some kind of classism.
Say it with me: "We have laws on immigration to protect US interests." We have a piss-poor history of doing that unfortunately.
This is how capitalism works. Either deal with it, or move to a non-capitalist country.
Except we don't live in a purely capitalist country. We have laws to regulate trade, we have laws regulating who's allowed to immigrate, we have laws imposing tarrifs on certain goods from certain countries. The US isn't an economic free for all.
And I'm getting a little tired of the "market forces determine everything". Duh, we all know that. The difference is the "market" isn't some mystical thing unaffected by laws. The whole reason we allow H1-B visas is for employers who can't find someone to do the job they're offering.
When we allow all these H1-B visas while there's already a glut of programmers that only drives down salaries and makes more people unemployed. That's good for corporations, but terrible for programmers/admins. And guess who gives more money to campaigns, has the most lobyiest, etc? It's not the programmers.
You missunderstand the meaning of standard. A standard doesn't mean everyone uses it and becomes widely accepted, it's simply a synonym for specification. The difference is a standard is an official specification made by some widely recognized body, in this case the IEEE.
Because that's what NASA's been doing for the last, oh, thirty years?
Huh? That's one of the things Nasa has been doing, but it's hardly the only thing. I guess you forgot about all the extrodinarily successfull robots that've photographed and taken readings from every planet in the solar system but Pluto.
At this point we've mostly lost control of our government. This place looks like any other third-world banana republic, except we have a new dictator every few years.
Who's the "we" that's lost control of the government? 51% of Americans feel completely in control and couldn't be happier. While I'm not one of those 51% it seems rather ridiculous to compare the US to a bananna republic. The American people re-elected Bush, and if you want to blame someone, blame the 51%.
Why does everyone think Nasa is mainly about sending up guys to circle the earth relentlessly? The best we can hope to accomplish by sending up people is to learn how to perfect long duration space flight (preventing bone and muscle mass loss, growing food, etc.).
While that's not a terrible goal, it's also not a very productive one per dollar in terms of science. How much have we learned from two cheap rovers on Mars? Compare that to the cost of sending up guys. I know, I know there's intangible benefits to sending up people into orbit vs robots to other planets. A lot of the time I do wonder how much is really just feel-good space exploration to satisfy people watching Star Trek, and how much really produces anything.
On a slightly different, but related topic Is there an exit strategy for the Shuttle once the space station is completed? Can we just ditch the shuttle and rely on the cheaper, probbably safer disposable Russian progress boosters?
How is it they let people become the network administrator for an entire technical college, a college that hands out degrees in technical fields, that are just that ignorant.
Because technical colleges are a joke as far as technology degrees are concerned. They also probbably pay jack shit to a network administrator, so they wind up with people who believe in computer voodoo. i.e. "it must have been that mysterious fire-fox and win-amp that those damn kids are all hopped up on these days." Remember, to anyone non-technical it's often hard to tell the difference between a good network administrator and a bad network administrator.
The devil is always in what they test for. I've always thought CU's testing is piss-poor when it comes to computers. I think it's inherently difficult to test a "computer" (as opposed to a hardware, OS, and software) since people do such widely varying things with it.
I haven't seen a report reviewing bicycles, but my guess it the problem lies in th subjectiveness of what constitutes a good bike. I'd guess it's like the stupid "what's the best tasting pasta sauce" reviews that you sometimes see in Comsumers Reports.
What I do tend to trust as far as CU is concerned is tests of simple products with widely agreed on metrics for measuring quality. Dish doap, batteries, garbage disposals, and even cars to some degree (I pay attention to reliability). At least for car reliability CU's rating has a high degree of correspondance to other sources of information I hear (Hondas are reliable, VWs are crap).
Look where space exploration is now...35 years since we've landed on the moon.
Looks pretty good to me. We've got two working robots on Mars, one probe orbiting a moon of Saturn, a probe on its way to Mercury, a wildly successfull space telescope, the list goes on.
Yah, I know you were talking about sending dudes to other planets like in Sci-Fi novels. Someday I'm sure, but try to appreciate the magnitude of difference in going from the moon to another planet. It's like the difference between a small island within site of your coast and another continent.
Then you should go home and sit in bed all day. Living life is a risk for death. Exploring space is especially dangerous and will be for the forseeable future. Doing great things people haven't done before sometimes costs lives. How many people died trying to climb Everest? People _still_ die trying to do it? The astronauts are willing to risk their lives working in space, who are you to say they shouldn't? As for zero-G, the best solution is to dramatically shorten the amount of time it takes to get to Mars, or anyplace else. We desparately need a propulsion breakthrough that can produce speeds an order of magnitude faster than currently possible. Until then, the juryrigged solution will be lots of exercise and simulated gravity via centrifugal force.
Sure, faster propulsion would solve the problem. That's a big order to fill though. Arificial gravity via spinning is possible too. Maybe a drug can be developed that will slow the de-calcification of bones and/or atrophy of muscles. To do either of the last two options we need somewhere to put people or animals that has zero-G.. like say a space station. As for Prince Henry, the only way for his sailors to learn to navigate on the ocean was to sail on the ocean. (In point of fact, they did tend to stay within sight of land.)
And that's pretty much what we're doing. Stay close enough to home until we can venture out further.
Carbohydrates are addictive because of the insulin cycle, which goes something like this:
You've been listening to the south beach/Atkins people. Shame on you. According to these geniuses the food we've been eating for most of our calories for.. oh a few thousand years is "addictive" and makes people fat. That's why we see so many fat people in China, where white rice is the staple food. That's why there was an epedemic of obesity in Ireland when potatoes were the staple food. What a load of nonsense. Carbs aren't new. Mass obesity in this country (and other western countries) is.
If you want to blame someone blame the food industry and the culture. The food industry produces TOO MUCH food, so they make large portions to justify the price (which many people like). We also have a screwed up view of wasting food, so people don't like to leave an empty plate. Couple that with the "on the go" lifestyle many people lead where they don't cook and eat overly large (value argument again) pre-made processed foods and it's easy to see what the problem is.
It's bad for you. To me that's reason enough to campaign against it. It raises the cost of health care because we all have to pay for the fat ones. Unless you pay for your medical care out of pocket, of course, but we're talking about social services and health insurance here.
Are we going to penalize anyone who doesn't conform to the commonly accepted "healthy lifestyle" because of some sort of fairness argument? The fairness arguement can go a long way...Please fill out this 150 page form with your medical history, your parents medical history, what all your grandparents died of, and don't forget to submit your DNA sample for testing. We'll the calculate your health insurance rate based on all those factors. Ooops.. turns out you're pre-disposed to diabetes.. that'll be $2000 a month please. Oh you've been fired from your job because of excessive health care costs? Sorry buddy, early grave for you.
As I believe I have shown above, it is not a personal choice. It affects all of us
With that kind of logic everything effects us all and there's no personal choices. Sin taxes on,rock climbing,sky diving,football playing, or whatever could increase the precious health care costs of the "healthy people". Just shut up and don't do anything "dangerous" or we'll tax the hell out of you to punish you. Man.. it's like some kind of capitalist health nut totalitarianism.
Would you have him ignore those recommendations only to lose another shuttle and crew trying to sustain an instrument that should be replaced, not repaired?
I guess I'd rather have that than lose another shuttle crew trying to build what sounds like a fairly useless space station. The Hubble is at least proven to return very valueable scientific data. If safety vs usefullness is the big concern, I don't see O'Keefe trying to say we should dump the whole idea of the ISS since there's no point in risking lives for something of questionable scientific merit.
The only forseeable benefit to a space station is the ability to study different ways of combatting the long-term effects of zero-G on humans. If we're ever going to go father into space we need to figure out how to avoid the bone density loss and other changes to the human body suffered from long-term zero-G exposure. One of the big problems with going to Mars is the astronauts won't be able to stand up on the surface when they get there due to muscle/bone atrophy. The Russians did some of this, but I never heard that they were very successfull.
To use your analogy if Prince Henry just invented the sailing ship, he just might confine his ships to waters within site of land until Portugal mastered the whole sailing long distances thing.
Food is now an addiction? People used to joke about that. Quitting the food or air addiction used to be a euphemism for death.
Does everything that people like to do, and don't want to stop doing now considered an addiction? This addiciton concept has just gone too far. Addiction used to involve tolerance, withdrawl, etc. Now it's just a convienent word to throw out whenever people don't want to stop a behaviour that's deemed "bad".
Obviously being overweight in unhealthy. Apparently being unhealthy is now wrong, bad, or immoral. You never made that implication, but the concepts are closely tied together. If someone wants to live an unhealthy lifestyle, no one else should judge them wrongly for it. There's nothing "wrong" with being unhealthy, it's just a personal choice people make every day. This is the same kind of thinking that drives some people toward putting extra taxes on "sin food" that's high in fat/calories/whatever.
Yah, and if you had actually read the article (or paid attention to it) you would have noticed that the intent is to re-create grand scenes like a mountain in a "you are there" fashion. That's obviously not a dinky 4x5 print, but more like an entire billboard or something like a photographic Imax with a curved screen.
If only it was as pure as you make it out to be. As you can see by the transcript below it's not about context. The things they were talking about are just as titillating as what goes on on Sterns show. It's not about context, it's about viewership and perception.
It's OK for Oprah to talk about it because she's perceived as a caring, loving black woman who gives out free cars. Her viewership is mostly middle aged suburban white woman who think of her as some kind of saint. Titillating lesbianism among hot teenage girls? Oh no, not on Oprah! It's uh.. educational! These damn kids and their hot hot descriptions of rampant sex!
It's NOT ok for Stern to talk about it because he's perceived as a perverted white guy. His listeners are young men.. crass bastards.
I guess you can call all of that context, but it's a LOT more twisted kind of context than you're making it out to be.
I'm sick of this stupid crap about "indecency". The whole thing is just a fight about the so called "culture war". The christian right doesn't want anyone exposed to things they don't like because they believe it'll turn everyone evil. They cloak the whole thing in a "protect our children" wrapping because a lot of people seem to lose their brains at any mention of the world children.
Hell, I'm offended by most of reality TV and I think its rotting peoples brains and beliefs. I don't however think the solution is banning it from the airwaves. Unfortunately the moral crusaders of the Christian right think they're the only ones with a moral system, (or at least the only possible "correct" moral system) and wish to enforce it on everyone else.
Uhh.. right. When you define something using a standard that also isn't defined you've done nothing. It's like answering a question with a question. The FCC basically says "indecency is what people think is indecent". As if everyone agrees or there's such a thing as an "average person". There's no concensus on what's indecent beyond a few extremes like child porn, snuff films, and bestiality.
Sure, but coverage doesn't imply usage. You could put up a few towers in high population density areas and put pricing out of the stratospere to satisfy the FCC. It's then cheap to hold onto your spectrum .
I've never liked the idea that landowners somehow owning the spectrum over their land. Does that mean that people who own massive tracts of dessert would get large amounts of money from the FCC for satelite TV (even though no one is utilizing that spectrum in those empty tracts of land)? I don't have a cogent argument against it, but the whole idea leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
My problem with the spectrum auction model is it encourages companies to buy up spectrum only for the purpose of keeping it from others companies. If you own the spectrum you should be forced to put it to use within N years by X% of the public in that area, otherwise it reverts back to the FCC.
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Sorry if I missed a single sentence in a three page article.
So .com already has a 25 cents charge, and .net is 3 times more expensive at 75 cents. Uhh.. why?
If there is one thing economists agree on, it is that a freer economy is generally a better economy.
Better for who? People throw around the "the economy" like it's the end-all-be-all to everyones prosperity. Millionaire businessmen making more money so they can buy big houses and Hummers doesn't help me in the least (and spare me the trickle-down economics crap).
Just because they're from another country? That's not a legitimate excuse at all.
It's a perfectly legitimate excuse. Without limits on immigration we'd have massive drops in salaries. Other countries have immigration policies designed to protect job interests. This isn't some crazy US style protectionism.
Here here. Busses are inherently slow because they have to share the road with cars, which means they're affected by traffic. They also stop waaay too often which makes them even slower. Busses are also a lot more cramped, uncomfortable, and often more crowded that trains.
The reason for bus travel sucking and train travel not sucking are inherent to the limits placed on each form of transportation, not on some kind of classism.
Say it with me: "We have laws on immigration to protect US interests." We have a piss-poor history of doing that unfortunately.
This is how capitalism works. Either deal with it, or move to a non-capitalist country.
Except we don't live in a purely capitalist country. We have laws to regulate trade, we have laws regulating who's allowed to immigrate, we have laws imposing tarrifs on certain goods from certain countries. The US isn't an economic free for all.
And I'm getting a little tired of the "market forces determine everything". Duh, we all know that. The difference is the "market" isn't some mystical thing unaffected by laws. The whole reason we allow H1-B visas is for employers who can't find someone to do the job they're offering.
When we allow all these H1-B visas while there's already a glut of programmers that only drives down salaries and makes more people unemployed. That's good for corporations, but terrible for programmers/admins. And guess who gives more money to campaigns, has the most lobyiest, etc? It's not the programmers.
You missunderstand the meaning of standard. A standard doesn't mean everyone uses it and becomes widely accepted, it's simply a synonym for specification. The difference is a standard is an official specification made by some widely recognized body, in this case the IEEE.
Because that's what NASA's been doing for the last, oh, thirty years?
Huh? That's one of the things Nasa has been doing, but it's hardly the only thing. I guess you forgot about all the extrodinarily successfull robots that've photographed and taken readings from every planet in the solar system but Pluto.
At this point we've mostly lost control of our government. This place looks like any other third-world banana republic, except we have a new dictator every few years.
Who's the "we" that's lost control of the government? 51% of Americans feel completely in control and couldn't be happier. While I'm not one of those 51% it seems rather ridiculous to compare the US to a bananna republic. The American people re-elected Bush, and if you want to blame someone, blame the 51%.
Why does everyone think Nasa is mainly about sending up guys to circle the earth relentlessly? The best we can hope to accomplish by sending up people is to learn how to perfect long duration space flight (preventing bone and muscle mass loss, growing food, etc.).
While that's not a terrible goal, it's also not a very productive one per dollar in terms of science. How much have we learned from two cheap rovers on Mars? Compare that to the cost of sending up guys. I know, I know there's intangible benefits to sending up people into orbit vs robots to other planets. A lot of the time I do wonder how much is really just feel-good space exploration to satisfy people watching Star Trek, and how much really produces anything.
On a slightly different, but related topic Is there an exit strategy for the Shuttle once the space station is completed? Can we just ditch the shuttle and rely on the cheaper, probbably safer disposable Russian progress boosters?
How is it they let people become the network administrator for an entire technical college, a college that hands out degrees in technical fields, that are just that ignorant.
Because technical colleges are a joke as far as technology degrees are concerned. They also probbably pay jack shit to a network administrator, so they wind up with people who believe in computer voodoo. i.e. "it must have been that mysterious fire-fox and win-amp that those damn kids are all hopped up on these days." Remember, to anyone non-technical it's often hard to tell the difference between a good network administrator and a bad network administrator.
Oh I'm very familiar with the CU method of product testing. It's just in the case of computers and bikes they pick the wrong things to test.
The devil is always in what they test for. I've always thought CU's testing is piss-poor when it comes to computers. I think it's inherently difficult to test a "computer" (as opposed to a hardware, OS, and software) since people do such widely varying things with it.
I haven't seen a report reviewing bicycles, but my guess it the problem lies in th subjectiveness of what constitutes a good bike. I'd guess it's like the stupid "what's the best tasting pasta sauce" reviews that you sometimes see in Comsumers Reports.
What I do tend to trust as far as CU is concerned is tests of simple products with widely agreed on metrics for measuring quality. Dish doap, batteries, garbage disposals, and even cars to some degree (I pay attention to reliability). At least for car reliability CU's rating has a high degree of correspondance to other sources of information I hear (Hondas are reliable, VWs are crap).
Look where space exploration is now...35 years since we've landed on the moon.
Looks pretty good to me. We've got two working robots on Mars, one probe orbiting a moon of Saturn, a probe on its way to Mercury, a wildly successfull space telescope, the list goes on.
Yah, I know you were talking about sending dudes to other planets like in Sci-Fi novels. Someday I'm sure, but try to appreciate the magnitude of difference in going from the moon to another planet. It's like the difference between a small island within site of your coast and another continent.
I'd prefer not risking any lives.
Then you should go home and sit in bed all day. Living life is a risk for death. Exploring space is especially dangerous and will be for the forseeable future. Doing great things people haven't done before sometimes costs lives. How many people died trying to climb Everest? People _still_ die trying to do it? The astronauts are willing to risk their lives working in space, who are you to say they shouldn't?
As for zero-G, the best solution is to dramatically shorten the amount of time it takes to get to Mars, or anyplace else. We desparately need a propulsion breakthrough that can produce speeds an order of magnitude faster than currently possible. Until then, the juryrigged solution will be lots of exercise and simulated gravity via centrifugal force.
Sure, faster propulsion would solve the problem. That's a big order to fill though. Arificial gravity via spinning is possible too. Maybe a drug can be developed that will slow the de-calcification of bones and/or atrophy of muscles. To do either of the last two options we need somewhere to put people or animals that has zero-G.. like say a space station.
As for Prince Henry, the only way for his sailors to learn to navigate on the ocean was to sail on the ocean. (In point of fact, they did tend to stay within sight of land.)
And that's pretty much what we're doing. Stay close enough to home until we can venture out further.
Carbohydrates are addictive because of the insulin cycle, which goes something like this:
You've been listening to the south beach/Atkins people. Shame on you. According to these geniuses the food we've been eating for most of our calories for.. oh a few thousand years is "addictive" and makes people fat. That's why we see so many fat people in China, where white rice is the staple food. That's why there was an epedemic of obesity in Ireland when potatoes were the staple food. What a load of nonsense. Carbs aren't new. Mass obesity in this country (and other western countries) is.
If you want to blame someone blame the food industry and the culture. The food industry produces TOO MUCH food, so they make large portions to justify the price (which many people like). We also have a screwed up view of wasting food, so people don't like to leave an empty plate. Couple that with the "on the go" lifestyle many people lead where they don't cook and eat overly large (value argument again) pre-made processed foods and it's easy to see what the problem is.
It's bad for you. To me that's reason enough to campaign against it. It raises the cost of health care because we all have to pay for the fat ones. Unless you pay for your medical care out of pocket, of course, but we're talking about social services and health insurance here.
Are we going to penalize anyone who doesn't conform to the commonly accepted "healthy lifestyle" because of some sort of fairness argument? The fairness arguement can go a long way...Please fill out this 150 page form with your medical history, your parents medical history, what all your grandparents died of, and don't forget to submit your DNA sample for testing. We'll the calculate your health insurance rate based on all those factors. Ooops.. turns out you're pre-disposed to diabetes.. that'll be $2000 a month please. Oh you've been fired from your job because of excessive health care costs? Sorry buddy, early grave for you.
As I believe I have shown above, it is not a personal choice. It affects all of us
With that kind of logic everything effects us all and there's no personal choices. Sin taxes on
Would you have him ignore those recommendations only to lose another shuttle and crew trying to sustain an instrument that should be replaced, not repaired?
I guess I'd rather have that than lose another shuttle crew trying to build what sounds like a fairly useless space station. The Hubble is at least proven to return very valueable scientific data. If safety vs usefullness is the big concern, I don't see O'Keefe trying to say we should dump the whole idea of the ISS since there's no point in risking lives for something of questionable scientific merit.
The only forseeable benefit to a space station is the ability to study different ways of combatting the long-term effects of zero-G on humans. If we're ever going to go father into space we need to figure out how to avoid the bone density loss and other changes to the human body suffered from long-term zero-G exposure. One of the big problems with going to Mars is the astronauts won't be able to stand up on the surface when they get there due to muscle/bone atrophy. The Russians did some of this, but I never heard that they were very successfull.
To use your analogy if Prince Henry just invented the sailing ship, he just might confine his ships to waters within site of land until Portugal mastered the whole sailing long distances thing.
or they are addicted to food
Food is now an addiction? People used to joke about that. Quitting the food or air addiction used to be a euphemism for death.
Does everything that people like to do, and don't want to stop doing now considered an addiction? This addiciton concept has just gone too far. Addiction used to involve tolerance, withdrawl, etc. Now it's just a convienent word to throw out whenever people don't want to stop a behaviour that's deemed "bad".
Obviously being overweight in unhealthy. Apparently being unhealthy is now wrong, bad, or immoral. You never made that implication, but the concepts are closely tied together. If someone wants to live an unhealthy lifestyle, no one else should judge them wrongly for it. There's nothing "wrong" with being unhealthy, it's just a personal choice people make every day. This is the same kind of thinking that drives some people toward putting extra taxes on "sin food" that's high in fat/calories/whatever.
Yah, and if you had actually read the article (or paid attention to it) you would have noticed that the intent is to re-create grand scenes like a mountain in a "you are there" fashion. That's obviously not a dinky 4x5 print, but more like an entire billboard or something like a photographic Imax with a curved screen.
Context is everything.
If only it was as pure as you make it out to be. As you can see by the transcript below it's not about context. The things they were talking about are just as titillating as what goes on on Sterns show. It's not about context, it's about viewership and perception.
It's OK for Oprah to talk about it because she's perceived as a caring, loving black woman who gives out free cars. Her viewership is mostly middle aged suburban white woman who think of her as some kind of saint. Titillating lesbianism among hot teenage girls? Oh no, not on Oprah! It's uh.. educational! These damn kids and their hot hot descriptions of rampant sex!
It's NOT ok for Stern to talk about it because he's perceived as a perverted white guy. His listeners are young men.. crass bastards.
I guess you can call all of that context, but it's a LOT more twisted kind of context than you're making it out to be.
I'm sick of this stupid crap about "indecency". The whole thing is just a fight about the so called "culture war". The christian right doesn't want anyone exposed to things they don't like because they believe it'll turn everyone evil. They cloak the whole thing in a "protect our children" wrapping because a lot of people seem to lose their brains at any mention of the world children.
Hell, I'm offended by most of reality TV and I think its rotting peoples brains and beliefs. I don't however think the solution is banning it from the airwaves. Unfortunately the moral crusaders of the Christian right think they're the only ones with a moral system, (or at least the only possible "correct" moral system) and wish to enforce it on everyone else.
Uhh.. right. When you define something using a standard that also isn't defined you've done nothing. It's like answering a question with a question. The FCC basically says "indecency is what people think is indecent". As if everyone agrees or there's such a thing as an "average person". There's no concensus on what's indecent beyond a few extremes like child porn, snuff films, and bestiality.
Sure, but coverage doesn't imply usage. You could put up a few towers in high population density areas and put pricing out of the stratospere to satisfy the FCC. It's then cheap to hold onto your spectrum .
I've never liked the idea that landowners somehow owning the spectrum over their land. Does that mean that people who own massive tracts of dessert would get large amounts of money from the FCC for satelite TV (even though no one is utilizing that spectrum in those empty tracts of land)? I don't have a cogent argument against it, but the whole idea leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
My problem with the spectrum auction model is it encourages companies to buy up spectrum only for the purpose of keeping it from others companies. If you own the spectrum you should be forced to put it to use within N years by X% of the public in that area, otherwise it reverts back to the FCC.
I strongly think you're an idiot who doesn't know that invent isn't the same word as create.