Repression of citizens, granted.... I lost most of my family during the occupation
My condolences. That's one reason I strongly favor capitalism over socialism; for all of the evils attributed to capitalism, none compare to the horrific atrocities committed by socialist governments gone astray.
Yes, it is interesting that the American System did not collapse... although the USA has an equivalent amount of citizens, and thus should have the same economic potential per person -- it is peculiar. Perhaps this is a result of the lack of willingness to work in pure Communism?
That would be my guess. See "tragedy of the commons". I'll work harder to support myself and my family than I will for the anonymous collective, and so will millions of others even if they won't admit it.
Take China for example... they have an odd system where Communism exists, yet there are for-profit companies which do quite well in manufacturing
Yes, China is strange. I don't even think you can call them communist at this point, they're closer to fascism.
In a free market, commodity prices inevitably trend toward the marginal cost. With software, the marginal cost is zero
Can't moderate, but this is exactly correct. Lots of otherwise reasonable people are confused by open source and say silly things like "they must all be socialists, you don't see Ford giving away cars". Well, if cars cost nothing to make, somebody would be giving them away. Nanotech is going to be fun...
Because I installed Linux I now have more money in my pocket, Brewing industry gains. As long as such changes are gradual, the impact on the economy is nil.
Actually, it's positive. Without Linux, you have to buy Windows (for the sake of this example at least). You get software, and Microsoft gets a profit. But now Linux comes along, and you decide it's as good as Windows, so you buy beer instead. What would have been Microsoft's gain is now Budweiser's (or whoever), so that's a wash. But *you* are better off; instead of just software you now have software plus beer.
The economy almost always benefits when a product that used to be expensive becomes cheap or free. Some will say otherwise because they only see the reduced profits of the sellers, but that ignores the benefits to which the customer puts his saved money. This is one of the many forms of the broken window fallacy.
Communism can work.... although the USSR failed, it failed only because of the Arms Race with the United States -- if those funds were left where they should have been 'With the People', they would have remained.
Your definition of the term "work" is unfamiliar to me. First, the USSR depended on brutal repression of its citizens; I submit that a government which must resort to such measures is a failure by definition. Second, even if the arms race ultimately led to the USSR's collapse, it's interesting that the US was able to spend just as much, while maintaining a vastly higher standard of living.
China is an interesting hybrid of Communism and Capitalism, I am not fully aware of to what degree, but hear that it keeps their astonishing population fed (for the most part) as opposed to suffering and starving as compared with the Capitalist counterparts.
To what capitalist counterparts are you referring?
C# and Java provide "reflection" APIs for implementing things like this. It would be quite easy to create a class entirely analagous to NSUndoManager in either language
No it wouldn't. Check the documentation; NSUndoManager intercepts *any* message sent to it, and stores it for later invocation on a different target. You can't do that with reflection, which only allows you to call one of a fixed number of methods.
Another example: there are third party libraries that add higher order messaging to Cocoa collection classes. They allow you to write code like "[[array select] isFroody]", which will return all objects in array for which the method -isFroody returns true. Again, the initial "isFroody" message is intercepted, then forwarded to each object in the array.
I also understand there's this product called "Linux", created largely with foreign labor, that's cutting into the profits of real American companies like Microsoft and SCO.
The point you are trying to make here is completely lost on me other than I assume you are trying to slam Linux and troll using Microsoft and SCO. Didn't work. Your statement is just bait still dangling on a forlorn hook.
Sorry, guess I needed a sarcasm tag there. The argument against using foreign labor to produce goods cheaper is very similar to the (stupid) argument that free software is bad for the economy because it hurts the profits some proprietary software companies.
Well then why do the Republicans keep howling about the corporate tax burden? You glossed over the basic problem, why should a corporation be able to make money, not pay taxes on it and then dole it out share holders as dividends who also don't have to pay taxes on it.
I didn't say that at all. I'd have no problem with getting rid of corporate taxes and then treating dividends just like income. Actually the better solution is getting rid of income and payroll taxes completely and replacing them with a national sales tax.
Social security was simply a dumb idea in its inception. When it was passed most people didn't live to retirement age. Now everyone lives 20-30 years past it and its eventually going to be untenable, now its just a huge burden on the young. Since the early eighties when the taxes were jack up its been mostly a regressive tax on the young and both parties are to blame for looting.
Agreed 100%.
It is an interesting theory and is one of the few ways you can explain how the U.S. went from nearly no military before World War II to a military expenditures as large as the rest of the world combined for most of the time since.
It doesn't seem like a mystery to me. Europe was devastated by WWII; the United States was relatively unharmed and thus the only power capable of balancing the USSR.
I think it is interesting the U.S. had budget surpluses and economic boom during one of the few periods since World War II, the 90's, when military spending was in a sharp decline. I'd sure take it over now when defense spending is around a half trillion dollars(counting Iraq and Afghanistan costs which they leave out of the DOD budget so people don't blow a gasket if they saw how much the DOD is really spending now which is way more than $410 billion in the budget).
No disagreement there. I certainly don't want to spend any more on the military (or any other government program) than we have to, and I have no doubt that the "peace dividend" was a major factor in the strong economy of the 90s. The question is how much we have to spend, and I believe it's a lot more now than it was 10 years ago.
Its a fact of life in guns and butter economics guns don't contribute real economic value unless you use them to loot and pillage, build empires, or at least intimidate.
Or to defend against attacks. What would be the economic damage of a nuke going off in NYC? It's worth spending quite a bit to reduce the probability of that by a few percent.
All those wealthy people who recieved thousands or even millions of dollars from the government went out and created jobs with that money, right?
First, "they" are "we", because everybody who pays income taxes got a tax cut, and the percentage cut for the "wealthy" was less. Second, a tax cut is not "receiving" money from the government, it's being allowed to keep slightly more of the money that you earned. Third, just what do you think people did with that extra money? Short of stuffing it under mattresses, anything they do is going to help create jobs.
Besides, it was just a blip. The overall trend line is definitely on the upside
Er, yes, it pretty clearly is. And not because of anything the Bush administration did (the tax cuts probably helped some, but not a huge amount), but because the economy runs in cycles.
Yes, Enron and pets.com were doing great. If only Bush had allowed criminal organizations to continue making fraudulent profits, and supported business models doomed to failure.
With prices as high as they are you would think they would at least stop filling the reserve until after the election.
Yeah, how dare they put national security above political expediency?
A key reason jobs do better under Democrats is a simple fact. Republicans care first and foremost about profits and wealth accumulation for the wealthiest few percent
I see you and Michael Moore share the same definition of "fact".
Free trade, container shipping, cheap telecommunications was a god send to the Republicans because now corporations can tap cheap, disciplined, labor in China and India, and can grow without the annoyance of high costs and increasingly poor labor quality in the U.S. ever again.
Yes please, save me from the tyranny of Walmart's low prices. I also understand there's this product called "Linux", created largely with foreign labor, that's cutting into the profits of real American companies like Microsoft and SCO.
The corporate share of the tax burden is down to %9, an historic low. Its a myth U.S. corporations face a huge tax burden.
Actually it's 0%. Corporations don't pay taxes, they collect them. When you tax a corporation, it must raise prices, lower profits, cut wages, or some combination thereof. A tax on corporations is really a tax on its customers, shareholders, and employees.
Meanwhile payroll taxes, which hit the low and middle income people, are still at record highs
Finally something we can agree on. But isn't it funny how the left howls in protest every time conservatives make an attempt to reform Social Security? The FairTax, for example, abolishes all income and payroll taxes, replacing them with a retail sales tax, and it's progressive because everyone gets a fixed monthly rebate. I don't see Democrats lining up to support it though.
They control the size of the Federal Budget and deficit.
Not really. Most government spending is on entitlements where spending levels increase automatically. True, they could change the structure of the entitlements, and in many cases I wish they would, but doing so has huge political costs since the demagogues on your side will claim they want old people to starve to death.
Iraq is kind of this, excepting we are wasting far more resource on it than we will ever get back.
Sort of true, except that the Iraq war wasn't intended to show a profit. If we wanted their oil, all we had to do was buy it (like France); that's far cheaper than paying to blow stuff up and paying again to rebuild it.
Here is an interesting interview with Noam Chomsky.
And I could point you to several scholarly works by Ann Coulter which prove that liberals are liars, traitors, and smell bad, but quoting lunatics on either side isn't productive.
If you knew any history you'd know that massive government spending (mainly on WWII, also on various New Deal programs) is what ended the Great Depression
Wrong. FDR's "progressive" policies exacerbated the depression. Hoover deserves much of the blame as well; not because he was an uber-capitalist who refused to intervene, exactly the opposite.
(these days the Repubs spend like drunken sailors too)
Sadly true, which creates a problem for those of us who support individual freedom and limited government, yet who see the Libertarian Party as a bunch of nutjobs.
This is not meant to start a fight, just point out (what I think is) Hypocrisy.
And you're wrong. These observations prove nothing either way, because with our present technology even if there are Earth-like planets out there, it's exceptionally unlikely that we'd detect them. So as a good Bayesian I'll lower my prior probability slightly, but *very* slightly.
Apple doesn't have to sell you music for $.99 They could raise the price to make up for the sales lost to Real.
Yes, they certainly could. They could also lower the price to make their store more attractive than Real's. Again, so what? Why should Apple's preferred business model have the force of law?
That is such juvenile reasoning. Of course there's no reason Apple can't do that. They already are doing that! What they aren't(and shouldn't be) granted is the force of law to support their business model. There's no reason someone shouldn't be able to do anything they want with a product they purchased, and hence, own.
Absolutely. While I'm a supporter of Apple's products, I'm annoyed to see so many people here willing to abandon their property rights because it's Apple instead of Microsoft or Lexmark or Cuecat.
Saying that Apple can't control the formats on the iPod, or that Lexmark can't control the origin of replacement cartridges, is equivalent to saying that mobile carriers have to give you a free phone and then let you cancel the service contract (at no cost to you) so you can take it to a new carrier.
They certainly don't "have" to give me a free phone. But if they do, and foolishly don't require me to sign a fixed term contract, then absolutely I can take it to a new carrier. Because it's, like, *my* phone.
That's silly. Do you understand that the result of claiming that as your right is that the phones will not be free any more?
So what? Given what we've learned from the dot-com era, why would we want to encourage the "give stuff away for free and make it up on volume" business model?
When people buy their iPods, they know exactly what they're getting and exactly what is compatible with it. And that compatibility does not include Real's store. How is it something they "should have" or anything of that sort?
Yeah, God forbid people try to do new things with technology. That could lead to innovation, and we know how much that annoys established businesses.
If Apple wanted it to work with other stores, they'd license it. They haven't.
That's nice, but Apple's wishes are irrelevant regarding a product that I own.
Perhaps you didn't notice that the "tax rebate" check (if this is the original one from August, 2001) you got was actually a loan against your upcoming tax return (the following year), and you'd actually still owe that money? Everyone got that check and paid it back.
Not true. The rebate check was an early payment reflecting the reduced tax rate. Then when you computed your taxes for the year, you used the original tax rate, because the rebate already accounted for the rate change. So yes, it was a real tax cut.
Software licenses "work" because the act of installing a program (or even of loading a program into memory) itself violates the prohibition on duplicating a copyrighted work. If the user agrees to the license, he is allowed to perform these rather prosaic tasks, but his legal rights in other areas may be further restricted.
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1)
that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner
In other words, you are not violating copyright simply by running a program that you've bought, and thus you don't need a license to do so.
Me, for one. It's partially a hedge; if MS actually does achieve complete dominance (Longhorn,.NET, and Palladium everywhere, open source effectively killed by IP laws, etc), my career options become a lot worse, but at least I'll make a decent profit.
Which often consist of "convert to Islam and follow sharia, or die".
They would like jobs, and goodies, and reasonable prices, and many of the same things you like.
Most of the 9/11 hijackers were from middle class backgrounds. This isn't about jobs and food; it's about our infidel behaviors like allowing women to drive cars.
Sometimes you have to make some concessions, even if it's really, really distasteful and you don't want to.
A terrorist wishes to kill 1000 people. You wish him to kill 0 people. Do you compromise on 500? Or perhaps you sit down with him and discuss the "root causes" of his anger. Sorry, but when someone starts deliberately murdering innocent civilians he instantly loses any moral claims he may have had.
Oh, and congratulations on your "lasting peace" in both Afghanistan and Iraq, I hear that's working out really well.
Thank you. Yes, both are significant improvements over the previous regimes.
If anything, a user of a more user-friendly OS is less likely to be brighter, not the other way around. Their tool requires less thinking on their part, and they like it that way.
And why shouldn't they? The less mental energy you need to expend to simply make your computer work, the more you have to actually accomplish useful things with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Repression of citizens, granted.... I lost most of my family during the occupation
My condolences. That's one reason I strongly favor capitalism over socialism; for all of the evils attributed to capitalism, none compare to the horrific atrocities committed by socialist governments gone astray.
Yes, it is interesting that the American System did not collapse... although the USA has an equivalent amount of citizens, and thus should have the same economic potential per person -- it is peculiar. Perhaps this is a result of the lack of willingness to work in pure Communism?
That would be my guess. See "tragedy of the commons". I'll work harder to support myself and my family than I will for the anonymous collective, and so will millions of others even if they won't admit it.
Take China for example... they have an odd system where Communism exists, yet there are for-profit companies which do quite well in manufacturing
Yes, China is strange. I don't even think you can call them communist at this point, they're closer to fascism.
In a free market, commodity prices inevitably trend toward the marginal cost. With software, the marginal cost is zero
Can't moderate, but this is exactly correct. Lots of otherwise reasonable people are confused by open source and say silly things like "they must all be socialists, you don't see Ford giving away cars". Well, if cars cost nothing to make, somebody would be giving them away. Nanotech is going to be fun...
Because I installed Linux I now have more money in my pocket, Brewing industry gains. As long as such changes are gradual, the impact on the economy is nil.
Actually, it's positive. Without Linux, you have to buy Windows (for the sake of this example at least). You get software, and Microsoft gets a profit. But now Linux comes along, and you decide it's as good as Windows, so you buy beer instead. What would have been Microsoft's gain is now Budweiser's (or whoever), so that's a wash. But *you* are better off; instead of just software you now have software plus beer.
The economy almost always benefits when a product that used to be expensive becomes cheap or free. Some will say otherwise because they only see the reduced profits of the sellers, but that ignores the benefits to which the customer puts his saved money. This is one of the many forms of the broken window fallacy.
Communism can work.... although the USSR failed, it failed only because of the Arms Race with the United States -- if those funds were left where they should have been 'With the People', they would have remained.
Your definition of the term "work" is unfamiliar to me. First, the USSR depended on brutal repression of its citizens; I submit that a government which must resort to such measures is a failure by definition. Second, even if the arms race ultimately led to the USSR's collapse, it's interesting that the US was able to spend just as much, while maintaining a vastly higher standard of living.
China is an interesting hybrid of Communism and Capitalism, I am not fully aware of to what degree, but hear that it keeps their astonishing population fed (for the most part) as opposed to suffering and starving as compared with the Capitalist counterparts.
To what capitalist counterparts are you referring?
C# and Java provide "reflection" APIs for implementing things like this. It would be quite easy to create a class entirely analagous to NSUndoManager in either language
No it wouldn't. Check the documentation; NSUndoManager intercepts *any* message sent to it, and stores it for later invocation on a different target. You can't do that with reflection, which only allows you to call one of a fixed number of methods.
Another example: there are third party libraries that add higher order messaging to Cocoa collection classes. They allow you to write code like "[[array select] isFroody]", which will return all objects in array for which the method -isFroody returns true. Again, the initial "isFroody" message is intercepted, then forwarded to each object in the array.
Sorry, guess I needed a sarcasm tag there. The argument against using foreign labor to produce goods cheaper is very similar to the (stupid) argument that free software is bad for the economy because it hurts the profits some proprietary software companies.
Well then why do the Republicans keep howling about the corporate tax burden? You glossed over the basic problem, why should a corporation be able to make money, not pay taxes on it and then dole it out share holders as dividends who also don't have to pay taxes on it.
I didn't say that at all. I'd have no problem with getting rid of corporate taxes and then treating dividends just like income. Actually the better solution is getting rid of income and payroll taxes completely and replacing them with a national sales tax.
Social security was simply a dumb idea in its inception. When it was passed most people didn't live to retirement age. Now everyone lives 20-30 years past it and its eventually going to be untenable, now its just a huge burden on the young. Since the early eighties when the taxes were jack up its been mostly a regressive tax on the young and both parties are to blame for looting.
Agreed 100%.
It is an interesting theory and is one of the few ways you can explain how the U.S. went from nearly no military before World War II to a military expenditures as large as the rest of the world combined for most of the time since.
It doesn't seem like a mystery to me. Europe was devastated by WWII; the United States was relatively unharmed and thus the only power capable of balancing the USSR.
I think it is interesting the U.S. had budget surpluses and economic boom during one of the few periods since World War II, the 90's, when military spending was in a sharp decline. I'd sure take it over now when defense spending is around a half trillion dollars(counting Iraq and Afghanistan costs which they leave out of the DOD budget so people don't blow a gasket if they saw how much the DOD is really spending now which is way more than $410 billion in the budget).
No disagreement there. I certainly don't want to spend any more on the military (or any other government program) than we have to, and I have no doubt that the "peace dividend" was a major factor in the strong economy of the 90s. The question is how much we have to spend, and I believe it's a lot more now than it was 10 years ago.
Its a fact of life in guns and butter economics guns don't contribute real economic value unless you use them to loot and pillage, build empires, or at least intimidate.
Or to defend against attacks. What would be the economic damage of a nuke going off in NYC? It's worth spending quite a bit to reduce the probability of that by a few percent.
I don't see how you can view the repulican party as good for "individual freedom" in any sense of the word.
That was my point, they're not. And Kerry is no better. I'll be reluctantly voting for Bush only because there's no credible alternative.
Terrible nightmares of naked homosexual Cylons hell-bent on manipulating the universe...
Provided the Cylons in question are portrayed by Tricia Holfer and Grace Park, I have no problem with that scenario.
All those wealthy people who recieved thousands or even millions of dollars from the government went out and created jobs with that money, right?
First, "they" are "we", because everybody who pays income taxes got a tax cut, and the percentage cut for the "wealthy" was less. Second, a tax cut is not "receiving" money from the government, it's being allowed to keep slightly more of the money that you earned. Third, just what do you think people did with that extra money? Short of stuffing it under mattresses, anything they do is going to help create jobs.
Besides, it was just a blip. The overall trend line is definitely on the upside
Er, yes, it pretty clearly is. And not because of anything the Bush administration did (the tax cuts probably helped some, but not a huge amount), but because the economy runs in cycles.
You and most other Americans need to understand something: as an American worker, you should WANT the demand for labor to outpace the supply.
What about as an American purchaser?
It is not so good for the business owners and investors, but who cares, they are by definition a small minority of the population.
Over half of Americans own stock, which is why the left's class warfare is becoming less and less effective.
The boom was in private industry.
Yes, Enron and pets.com were doing great. If only Bush had allowed criminal organizations to continue making fraudulent profits, and supported business models doomed to failure.
With prices as high as they are you would think they would at least stop filling the reserve until after the election.
Yeah, how dare they put national security above political expediency?
A key reason jobs do better under Democrats is a simple fact. Republicans care first and foremost about profits and wealth accumulation for the wealthiest few percent
I see you and Michael Moore share the same definition of "fact".
Free trade, container shipping, cheap telecommunications was a god send to the Republicans because now corporations can tap cheap, disciplined, labor in China and India, and can grow without the annoyance of high costs and increasingly poor labor quality in the U.S. ever again.
Yes please, save me from the tyranny of Walmart's low prices. I also understand there's this product called "Linux", created largely with foreign labor, that's cutting into the profits of real American companies like Microsoft and SCO.
The corporate share of the tax burden is down to %9, an historic low. Its a myth U.S. corporations face a huge tax burden.
Actually it's 0%. Corporations don't pay taxes, they collect them. When you tax a corporation, it must raise prices, lower profits, cut wages, or some combination thereof. A tax on corporations is really a tax on its customers, shareholders, and employees.
Meanwhile payroll taxes, which hit the low and middle income people, are still at record highs
Finally something we can agree on. But isn't it funny how the left howls in protest every time conservatives make an attempt to reform Social Security? The FairTax, for example, abolishes all income and payroll taxes, replacing them with a retail sales tax, and it's progressive because everyone gets a fixed monthly rebate. I don't see Democrats lining up to support it though.
They control the size of the Federal Budget and deficit.
Not really. Most government spending is on entitlements where spending levels increase automatically. True, they could change the structure of the entitlements, and in many cases I wish they would, but doing so has huge political costs since the demagogues on your side will claim they want old people to starve to death.
Iraq is kind of this, excepting we are wasting far more resource on it than we will ever get back.
Sort of true, except that the Iraq war wasn't intended to show a profit. If we wanted their oil, all we had to do was buy it (like France); that's far cheaper than paying to blow stuff up and paying again to rebuild it.
Here is an interesting interview with Noam Chomsky.
And I could point you to several scholarly works by Ann Coulter which prove that liberals are liars, traitors, and smell bad, but quoting lunatics on either side isn't productive.
If you knew any history you'd know that massive government spending (mainly on WWII, also on various New Deal programs) is what ended the Great Depression
Wrong. FDR's "progressive" policies exacerbated the depression. Hoover deserves much of the blame as well; not because he was an uber-capitalist who refused to intervene, exactly the opposite.
(these days the Repubs spend like drunken sailors too)
Sadly true, which creates a problem for those of us who support individual freedom and limited government, yet who see the Libertarian Party as a bunch of nutjobs.
This is not meant to start a fight, just point out (what I think is) Hypocrisy.
And you're wrong. These observations prove nothing either way, because with our present technology even if there are Earth-like planets out there, it's exceptionally unlikely that we'd detect them. So as a good Bayesian I'll lower my prior probability slightly, but *very* slightly.
Apple doesn't have to sell you music for $.99 They could raise the price to make up for the sales lost to Real.
Yes, they certainly could. They could also lower the price to make their store more attractive than Real's. Again, so what? Why should Apple's preferred business model have the force of law?
That is such juvenile reasoning. Of course there's no reason Apple can't do that. They already are doing that! What they aren't(and shouldn't be) granted is the force of law to support their business model. There's no reason someone shouldn't be able to do anything they want with a product they purchased, and hence, own.
Absolutely. While I'm a supporter of Apple's products, I'm annoyed to see so many people here willing to abandon their property rights because it's Apple instead of Microsoft or Lexmark or Cuecat.
Saying that Apple can't control the formats on the iPod, or that Lexmark can't control the origin of replacement cartridges, is equivalent to saying that mobile carriers have to give you a free phone and then let you cancel the service contract (at no cost to you) so you can take it to a new carrier.
They certainly don't "have" to give me a free phone. But if they do, and foolishly don't require me to sign a fixed term contract, then absolutely I can take it to a new carrier. Because it's, like, *my* phone.
That's silly. Do you understand that the result of claiming that as your right is that the phones will not be free any more?
So what? Given what we've learned from the dot-com era, why would we want to encourage the "give stuff away for free and make it up on volume" business model?
When people buy their iPods, they know exactly what they're getting and exactly what is compatible with it. And that compatibility does not include Real's store. How is it something they "should have" or anything of that sort?
Yeah, God forbid people try to do new things with technology. That could lead to innovation, and we know how much that annoys established businesses.
If Apple wanted it to work with other stores, they'd license it. They haven't.
That's nice, but Apple's wishes are irrelevant regarding a product that I own.
Perhaps you didn't notice that the "tax rebate" check (if this is the original one from August, 2001) you got was actually a loan against your upcoming tax return (the following year), and you'd actually still owe that money? Everyone got that check and paid it back.
Not true. The rebate check was an early payment reflecting the reduced tax rate. Then when you computed your taxes for the year, you used the original tax rate, because the rebate already accounted for the rate change. So yes, it was a real tax cut.
Argh. This meme has got to die. From 17 USC 117:
In other words, you are not violating copyright simply by running a program that you've bought, and thus you don't need a license to do so.
seriously how many /.actually have MS stock.
.NET, and Palladium everywhere, open source effectively killed by IP laws, etc), my career options become a lot worse, but at least I'll make a decent profit.
Me, for one. It's partially a hedge; if MS actually does achieve complete dominance (Longhorn,
Actually, I doubt that the typical American has any problem with cameras in public places. It's mostly just the Slashbots that care.
The "typical American" doesn't care about the Patriot Act, DMCA or software patents either. I guess that makes them ok?
Even terrorists have demands.
Which often consist of "convert to Islam and follow sharia, or die".
They would like jobs, and goodies, and reasonable prices, and many of the same things you like.
Most of the 9/11 hijackers were from middle class backgrounds. This isn't about jobs and food; it's about our infidel behaviors like allowing women to drive cars.
Sometimes you have to make some concessions, even if it's really, really distasteful and you don't want to.
A terrorist wishes to kill 1000 people. You wish him to kill 0 people. Do you compromise on 500? Or perhaps you sit down with him and discuss the "root causes" of his anger. Sorry, but when someone starts deliberately murdering innocent civilians he instantly loses any moral claims he may have had.
Oh, and congratulations on your "lasting peace" in both Afghanistan and Iraq, I hear that's working out really well.
Thank you. Yes, both are significant improvements over the previous regimes.
BTW, the my "three times" figure come from personal experience. I added up the cost of my home built system.
And what value did you place on your time?
If anything, a user of a more user-friendly OS is less likely to be brighter, not the other way around. Their tool requires less thinking on their part, and they like it that way.
And why shouldn't they? The less mental energy you need to expend to simply make your computer work, the more you have to actually accomplish useful things with it.