So you're saying you can organize, but only if you don't organize as a corporation? That makes a hell of a lot of no sense.
Corporation exists to allow an organization to continue beyond the lifetimes and the fortunes of its founders. It allows pooled risk and resources. Nearly every organization of any note formed to deal with money is a corporation of some kind.
Held to the letter of the law, the law struck down in Citizen's United would allow no media of any form that had political implications to be produced by anyone BUT the press corporations that had been specifically excluded. This is ridiculous.
And this is different from any individual buying any of this how? I'm pretty sure Bill Gates (or, if you prefer, Steve Forbes) can buy elections on his own just as well as most corporations can.
Rights do not disappear because you associate with someone, or because you have more money than them. Rush Limbaugh has just as much right to free speech as I do, despite the fact that he influences a great many more people.
Keep in mind that the New York Times is a corporation. So is every other news organization. Why should only "news" organizations be allowed political free speech?
A corporation is nothing more than a specific legal organization of individuals. Corporations do not have rights, but the individuals organized in them do not lose their rights just because they organized.
If you read the article, they actually seem to have a halfway decent compromise going.
Essentially, you can be un-censored and un-reviewed in anything you say or share with people on your friend's list, it's just public chat and anything shared for general consumption that gets reviewed. Which seems not intolerable for a kid's game.
So you and your friend can make giant lego penis starships, you just can't go park them in front of the city gates. At least, that's what the developer seemed to be saying.
How do you propose to grow an economy without someone to finance the businesses?
Economies grow through entrepreneurship. Apple and Google grow the economy. Whole foods grows the economy. Random guy with a family owned food mart who never expands does *not* grow the economy. The economy grows through businesses expanding and finding or creating new markets. You need rich people to do that! That doesn't mean they shouldn't have to live under the same rules as the rest of us, but what kind of communist fantasy-land do you think can maintain a modern economy without someone getting rich off of it?
Like I said, it all depends on degree. I guess its the difference between "spin" and "lying." There's a big difference between saying "I like hiking" when you don't get out as often as you want and saying "I was at work" when you were banging the secretary. Saying "I live for hiking" would be a similar level of lie.
If you limit people to what they actually spend *most* of their time doing, you're looking at a bunch of profiles saying "I sit in a cube for 8 hours and then wash a bunch of TV shows I don't really care, eat too much for dinner, and go to sleep."
You're acting as though the profile is going to set your relationship in stone. In reality, it's listing a set of things that
a) You think define you well enough to provide a useful match starting point. and b) Are attractive enough to someone else that they'll get to know you better.
I don't know that you have to view it that harshly. When combined with the white men's words, it seems like people are trying to pick the aspects of themselves that would most appeal to the opposite sex.
Men are trying to pick things that make them sound cool and masculine. Hard rock, outdoor activities, fixing stuff. That doesn't mean they don't like those things, but I'm going to bet that it hides a fair number of guys who also like a few girly artists or who enjoy racing, but probably spend as much time playing video games.
Similarly, with the girls, many probably do enjoy hiking and campfires - most girls I've met do like these things. They just don't do them every weekend. But it sounds a lot better in a profile than "well most weekends I go shopping and then hang around the house and watch movies."
I guess I'm saying, you can take it as lying and misrepresenting, or you can take it as filtering the truth about someone and only showing what they think will be he most interesting parts.
For example, if I wanted to make myself sound cool and manly, I could honestly say that I love camping, I race cars, I compete in pistol shooting competitions, I have build houses, I play guitar, and I play football. These are all true things about myself. I could also say that I work as a software engineer, bake bread and cakes for fun, enjoy musical theatre, love video games and DND, and build my own PC's. These descriptions are both completely factual - what this study is showing as much as anything is which one people will think will be more attractive to the other sex.
I'm sure that in a day of 500gb hard drives, base systems shipping with 4 gigs of memory, and 6 mbps download speeds being the base standard, making iTunes smaller is a *huge* priority.
Not that I wouldn't appreciate it, too:(
I would respond that you haven't practiced that release method long enough. Or, favorably, that the "slingshotting" method is easier to learn.
Pulling a trigger and thumbing the slide release are similarly fine motor skills that no one seems to think are impossible to do under pressure.
Also, the Glock's slide release is notoriously difficult to hit under the best of circumstances. Some other designs do not have this issue.
If you've practiced to the point where you can do as quick of a reload as I have seen using the slide lock, I very much doubt you're going to suddenly lose those trained motor skills in a firefight. That said, I am entirely willing to believe you that if you haven't practiced, you're going to flub the whole thing up and be slower.
One thing I wish people would pay more attention to regarding our recent governmental messes is the difference between "Deregulation" and "Regulatory Capture." Deregulation is when you actually reduce the scope of government oversight, giving corporations more room to work but also more room to screw up. Regulatory capture is when the foxes start running the hen house. It doesn't matter how many additional rules you make, because they are either going to write loopholes in them to begin with or simply ignore them later.
Regulatory capture is a more difficult problem to fix than deregulation because it is actually helped by increased regulations! More regulations give corporations even more incentive to spend money getting people friendly to in the regulator's chair, and once they are there, more ability to influence their industry. Right now government lobbying is one of the highest-return investments a company can make - often resulting in business worth 10x the lobbying cost itself.
Bush did very little deregulation, of the oil or the financial industries. Similarly, in the BP oil spill, there have been numerous reports that the well was not up to current inspections or code and that BP workers systematically lied on safety reports. Even under Bush's law, that would be significantly illegal if they had been audited and caught.
The solution to most of the issues is not to pass more red tape for companies to wade through to get work done, while their real environmental problems will just be ignored by the next president they put into office. You're just increasing their incentive to block what little good the regulations were intended to do.
It's like the online purchases section of the IRS forms that every accountant in the world will tell you to leave completely blank, or you're just begging them to make you prove every single thing you bought or didn't buy on the internet.
And the insurance company, hospital, or central dispatching system are the consumers of the market, not the person calling the ambulance.
Just like when you're building a house - you choose the general contractor, but he chooses the guys who do the drywall, the plumbing, and the foundation. The bill and the quality all go through him and affect his reputation, so he has a strong incentive to hire someone who knows what they're doing. Their bill comes out of his bottom line, so he has incentive to keep costs down.
Ambulances, as a service provided by the hospital should work the same, if each hospital were not granted a regional monopoly on care.
An additional factor here is that a few emergency situations that require emergency care within 5 minutes, but the vast majority simply need it in less than an hour. Our system is hugely weighted toward giving the 5 minute service in all cases, and that will drive up costs. Not making a value judgment, just saying that is the way it is.
Honestly, it has much less to do with population density than the fact that our cities have already been built around the car.
Take Columbus, OH - average midwestern city. No rail, but there is a public bus system. It kind of sucks, but it'll take you to the major destinations.
Here's a satellite view of one of our major shopping districts:
Trying to walk between these stores to go shopping is going to be a hike of several miles, across six lane roads and hundreds of yard of open concrete parking lots.
But it's not just the shopping centers. People live more spread out. The majority of people live in the suburbs.
As a comparison, the population of Columbus is about 1.7 million, 31st in the US. Let's compare that to Stockholm, largest city of Sweden at 1.2 million people. Population density of Columbus: 189.3 inhabitants/km. Population density of Stockholm: 3,318.36 inhabitants/km, or about SEVENTEEN TIMES more people per area. Even a place like LA metro area is only around 1,000/km.
In places like New York City and New Jersey, they do have public trains. I've used it - it's not as nice as Eurail, but it gets you places.
The problem with high speed rail in most American cities is that you will have to drive half an hour to get to the station, then drive another half hour to your destination after you disembark. This is neither efficient nor convenient for most travel.
I'm not making a value judgment hear about how people choose to live their lives - whether having a half acre yard is better than being able to walk to the grocery, I don't care. What matters is that this is how people live, this is how infrastructure has been built - it's not just a case of "if you build it they will come." Because if they do come, they'll get off the train at the other end and be stranded because there's nowhere useful you can go without a car. Maybe over time that can change if energy prices go up and people start moving back to the inner cities, but right now, it's not "do I take a car or a train", it's "do I take a car and a train or just a car".
Not saying I think it should be mandated, but for local talk radio I find quite a bit of benefit from the radio in my car. The local sports talk especially often has some interesting stories from well-known local players, or coverage of the current game. Indeed, I'd say that live sports coverage is probably the biggest reason I want any television or radio signal at all.
That is a very good point - in many cases, "customer information" is personal contact information that the worker has built up through his own time and investment. in many cases, the first thing the person is likely to do at their new job is call up their old customers and say "hey, I'm working for X-Corp now, would you be interested in switching firms to continue to work with me." Since many customers are choosing their business based more on the individual agent than on the corporate structure, they'll switch.
Technically, that information belongs to the company, but many people don't consider it unethical to keep it.
As for pens, I think that has more to do with the weird way we look at value. Few people think twice about stealing a couple pens out of the supply room, but would never steal a dollar from the office every time they came in.
I've enjoyed and loved many anime series in crappy realmedia files and divx rips. The story, humor, and even some of the action get through incredibly well even in low video quality, and I didn't consciously notice the pixellation.
That doesn't mean I wasn't blown away when I saw the same series at full quality. I had never fully appreciated Evangelion or Cowboy Bebop for the quality of animation and visuals.
Similarly, the great football games from days before HD were just as tense and enjoyable before they were available in HD. But that doesn't mean HD isn't appreciably better.
It's like drinking good wine from plastic cups versus fine crystal. You'll still enjoy it, and I at least wouldn't feel like something is "missing", but given the choice I'd take crystal any day.
Odd, I was getting the impression that it was progressives who were pushing cap and trade (because "tax" sounds bad) and conservatives were still saying that we don't have a problem to fix.
Although I always find it kind of interesting that lead deposits in a hillside is natural and good but lead in a battery buried in a hillside is an evil pollutant.
This does make me wish that environmentalists were more willing to use economic methods instead of brute force for these things. If there were a carbon tax, a lead tax, an emissions tax that covers the environmental damage done by a car, the price differences between the vehicles would sort themselves out pretty easily.
I avoid them like the plague now for the easy "accidental felonies" available when someone posts child porn as a joke, which will then put the illegal material in your browser cache, history, and in the server logs downloading it. Trolls on 4chan do this all the time, and moderators can never be fast enough to catch all of them.
I think many fewer people are anti-patent than are anti -"Stupid obvious overbroad software" patent or anti-"add useless stuff to a medicine so you can repatent it " patent.
Also, patents, unlike copyright, still expire, which is the whole point of having them to begin with. The whole concept of patents is to get information in the public domain, so you don't have the problem of, for example, an entire civilization forgetting how to make its best steel.
If you *do* have actual information that could be pertinent to their case, please *do* call your lawyer and give a statement he approves to the police, preferably with some immunity agreement. If no one talked to the police ever, they couldn't solve any crimes. The goal is to protect yourself while still allowing them to do their job of tracking down criminal and dangerous elements of society.
You can have your name removed from the organ donor's list. It takes a few minutes, but it's only an annoying phone call.
Parents have to make all decisions for their children at that age. I'd hope that when his children are old enough they will be allowed to chance the decision to their personal preference, but until then it is as any other major decision (including whether to be removed from life support or to perform serious surgery) and up to the parent.
They have roofs, but they don't have sun. Solar panel cost has to fall dramatically (or energy costs rise similarly) for solar to be worthwhile in the midwest, especially the northern half of it. You don't just have to deal with night time, you have to deal with several weeks of cloudy days in a row. To to mention clearing the foot of snow off of them to get power during the winter time.
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So you're saying you can organize, but only if you don't organize as a corporation? That makes a hell of a lot of no sense.
Corporation exists to allow an organization to continue beyond the lifetimes and the fortunes of its founders. It allows pooled risk and resources. Nearly every organization of any note formed to deal with money is a corporation of some kind.
Held to the letter of the law, the law struck down in Citizen's United would allow no media of any form that had political implications to be produced by anyone BUT the press corporations that had been specifically excluded. This is ridiculous.
And this is different from any individual buying any of this how? I'm pretty sure Bill Gates (or, if you prefer, Steve Forbes) can buy elections on his own just as well as most corporations can.
Rights do not disappear because you associate with someone, or because you have more money than them. Rush Limbaugh has just as much right to free speech as I do, despite the fact that he influences a great many more people.
Keep in mind that the New York Times is a corporation. So is every other news organization. Why should only "news" organizations be allowed political free speech?
A corporation is nothing more than a specific legal organization of individuals. Corporations do not have rights, but the individuals organized in them do not lose their rights just because they organized.
If you read the article, they actually seem to have a halfway decent compromise going.
Essentially, you can be un-censored and un-reviewed in anything you say or share with people on your friend's list, it's just public chat and anything shared for general consumption that gets reviewed. Which seems not intolerable for a kid's game.
So you and your friend can make giant lego penis starships, you just can't go park them in front of the city gates. At least, that's what the developer seemed to be saying.
How do you propose to grow an economy without someone to finance the businesses?
Economies grow through entrepreneurship. Apple and Google grow the economy. Whole foods grows the economy. Random guy with a family owned food mart who never expands does *not* grow the economy. The economy grows through businesses expanding and finding or creating new markets. You need rich people to do that! That doesn't mean they shouldn't have to live under the same rules as the rest of us, but what kind of communist fantasy-land do you think can maintain a modern economy without someone getting rich off of it?
Like I said, it all depends on degree. I guess its the difference between "spin" and "lying." There's a big difference between saying "I like hiking" when you don't get out as often as you want and saying "I was at work" when you were banging the secretary. Saying "I live for hiking" would be a similar level of lie.
If you limit people to what they actually spend *most* of their time doing, you're looking at a bunch of profiles saying "I sit in a cube for 8 hours and then wash a bunch of TV shows I don't really care, eat too much for dinner, and go to sleep."
You're acting as though the profile is going to set your relationship in stone. In reality, it's listing a set of things that
a) You think define you well enough to provide a useful match starting point. and
b) Are attractive enough to someone else that they'll get to know you better.
I don't know that you have to view it that harshly. When combined with the white men's words, it seems like people are trying to pick the aspects of themselves that would most appeal to the opposite sex.
Men are trying to pick things that make them sound cool and masculine. Hard rock, outdoor activities, fixing stuff. That doesn't mean they don't like those things, but I'm going to bet that it hides a fair number of guys who also like a few girly artists or who enjoy racing, but probably spend as much time playing video games.
Similarly, with the girls, many probably do enjoy hiking and campfires - most girls I've met do like these things. They just don't do them every weekend. But it sounds a lot better in a profile than "well most weekends I go shopping and then hang around the house and watch movies."
I guess I'm saying, you can take it as lying and misrepresenting, or you can take it as filtering the truth about someone and only showing what they think will be he most interesting parts.
For example, if I wanted to make myself sound cool and manly, I could honestly say that I love camping, I race cars, I compete in pistol shooting competitions, I have build houses, I play guitar, and I play football. These are all true things about myself. I could also say that I work as a software engineer, bake bread and cakes for fun, enjoy musical theatre, love video games and DND, and build my own PC's. These descriptions are both completely factual - what this study is showing as much as anything is which one people will think will be more attractive to the other sex.
I'm sure that in a day of 500gb hard drives, base systems shipping with 4 gigs of memory, and 6 mbps download speeds being the base standard, making iTunes smaller is a *huge* priority. Not that I wouldn't appreciate it, too :(
I actually carry a revolver, so if fine motor skills are out the window and I have to do a reload I am *completely* screwed :)
I would respond that you haven't practiced that release method long enough. Or, favorably, that the "slingshotting" method is easier to learn.
Pulling a trigger and thumbing the slide release are similarly fine motor skills that no one seems to think are impossible to do under pressure.
Also, the Glock's slide release is notoriously difficult to hit under the best of circumstances. Some other designs do not have this issue.
If you've practiced to the point where you can do as quick of a reload as I have seen using the slide lock, I very much doubt you're going to suddenly lose those trained motor skills in a firefight. That said, I am entirely willing to believe you that if you haven't practiced, you're going to flub the whole thing up and be slower.
I'm afraid that most competition shooters would disagree with you about the "faster" part.
One thing I wish people would pay more attention to regarding our recent governmental messes is the difference between "Deregulation" and "Regulatory Capture." Deregulation is when you actually reduce the scope of government oversight, giving corporations more room to work but also more room to screw up. Regulatory capture is when the foxes start running the hen house. It doesn't matter how many additional rules you make, because they are either going to write loopholes in them to begin with or simply ignore them later.
Regulatory capture is a more difficult problem to fix than deregulation because it is actually helped by increased regulations! More regulations give corporations even more incentive to spend money getting people friendly to in the regulator's chair, and once they are there, more ability to influence their industry. Right now government lobbying is one of the highest-return investments a company can make - often resulting in business worth 10x the lobbying cost itself.
Bush did very little deregulation, of the oil or the financial industries. Similarly, in the BP oil spill, there have been numerous reports that the well was not up to current inspections or code and that BP workers systematically lied on safety reports. Even under Bush's law, that would be significantly illegal if they had been audited and caught.
The solution to most of the issues is not to pass more red tape for companies to wade through to get work done, while their real environmental problems will just be ignored by the next president they put into office. You're just increasing their incentive to block what little good the regulations were intended to do.
It's like the online purchases section of the IRS forms that every accountant in the world will tell you to leave completely blank, or you're just begging them to make you prove every single thing you bought or didn't buy on the internet.
And the insurance company, hospital, or central dispatching system are the consumers of the market, not the person calling the ambulance.
Just like when you're building a house - you choose the general contractor, but he chooses the guys who do the drywall, the plumbing, and the foundation. The bill and the quality all go through him and affect his reputation, so he has a strong incentive to hire someone who knows what they're doing. Their bill comes out of his bottom line, so he has incentive to keep costs down.
Ambulances, as a service provided by the hospital should work the same, if each hospital were not granted a regional monopoly on care.
An additional factor here is that a few emergency situations that require emergency care within 5 minutes, but the vast majority simply need it in less than an hour. Our system is hugely weighted toward giving the 5 minute service in all cases, and that will drive up costs. Not making a value judgment, just saying that is the way it is.
Honestly, it has much less to do with population density than the fact that our cities have already been built around the car.
Take Columbus, OH - average midwestern city. No rail, but there is a public bus system. It kind of sucks, but it'll take you to the major destinations.
Here's a satellite view of one of our major shopping districts:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=store&sll=40.142829,-82.978663&sspn=0.020668,0.043473&ie=UTF8&hq=store&hnear=&t=h&z=15
Trying to walk between these stores to go shopping is going to be a hike of several miles, across six lane roads and hundreds of yard of open concrete parking lots.
But it's not just the shopping centers. People live more spread out. The majority of people live in the suburbs.
As a comparison, the population of Columbus is about 1.7 million, 31st in the US. Let's compare that to Stockholm, largest city of Sweden at 1.2 million people. Population density of Columbus: 189.3 inhabitants/km. Population density of Stockholm: 3,318.36 inhabitants/km, or about SEVENTEEN TIMES more people per area. Even a place like LA metro area is only around 1,000/km.
In places like New York City and New Jersey, they do have public trains. I've used it - it's not as nice as Eurail, but it gets you places.
The problem with high speed rail in most American cities is that you will have to drive half an hour to get to the station, then drive another half hour to your destination after you disembark. This is neither efficient nor convenient for most travel.
I'm not making a value judgment hear about how people choose to live their lives - whether having a half acre yard is better than being able to walk to the grocery, I don't care. What matters is that this is how people live, this is how infrastructure has been built - it's not just a case of "if you build it they will come." Because if they do come, they'll get off the train at the other end and be stranded because there's nowhere useful you can go without a car. Maybe over time that can change if energy prices go up and people start moving back to the inner cities, but right now, it's not "do I take a car or a train", it's "do I take a car and a train or just a car".
Not saying I think it should be mandated, but for local talk radio I find quite a bit of benefit from the radio in my car. The local sports talk especially often has some interesting stories from well-known local players, or coverage of the current game. Indeed, I'd say that live sports coverage is probably the biggest reason I want any television or radio signal at all.
That is a very good point - in many cases, "customer information" is personal contact information that the worker has built up through his own time and investment. in many cases, the first thing the person is likely to do at their new job is call up their old customers and say "hey, I'm working for X-Corp now, would you be interested in switching firms to continue to work with me." Since many customers are choosing their business based more on the individual agent than on the corporate structure, they'll switch.
Technically, that information belongs to the company, but many people don't consider it unethical to keep it.
As for pens, I think that has more to do with the weird way we look at value. Few people think twice about stealing a couple pens out of the supply room, but would never steal a dollar from the office every time they came in.
I've enjoyed and loved many anime series in crappy realmedia files and divx rips. The story, humor, and even some of the action get through incredibly well even in low video quality, and I didn't consciously notice the pixellation.
That doesn't mean I wasn't blown away when I saw the same series at full quality. I had never fully appreciated Evangelion or Cowboy Bebop for the quality of animation and visuals.
Similarly, the great football games from days before HD were just as tense and enjoyable before they were available in HD. But that doesn't mean HD isn't appreciably better.
It's like drinking good wine from plastic cups versus fine crystal. You'll still enjoy it, and I at least wouldn't feel like something is "missing", but given the choice I'd take crystal any day.
Given that no one has stepped up to *run* a site like wikileaks out of the goodness of their heart, I'll take what we can get.
Odd, I was getting the impression that it was progressives who were pushing cap and trade (because "tax" sounds bad) and conservatives were still saying that we don't have a problem to fix.
Although I always find it kind of interesting that lead deposits in a hillside is natural and good but lead in a battery buried in a hillside is an evil pollutant.
This does make me wish that environmentalists were more willing to use economic methods instead of brute force for these things. If there were a carbon tax, a lead tax, an emissions tax that covers the environmental damage done by a car, the price differences between the vehicles would sort themselves out pretty easily.
You ever been to a picture board?
I avoid them like the plague now for the easy "accidental felonies" available when someone posts child porn as a joke, which will then put the illegal material in your browser cache, history, and in the server logs downloading it. Trolls on 4chan do this all the time, and moderators can never be fast enough to catch all of them.
I think many fewer people are anti-patent than are anti -"Stupid obvious overbroad software" patent or anti-"add useless stuff to a medicine so you can repatent it " patent.
Also, patents, unlike copyright, still expire, which is the whole point of having them to begin with. The whole concept of patents is to get information in the public domain, so you don't have the problem of, for example, an entire civilization forgetting how to make its best steel.
If you *do* have actual information that could be pertinent to their case, please *do* call your lawyer and give a statement he approves to the police, preferably with some immunity agreement. If no one talked to the police ever, they couldn't solve any crimes. The goal is to protect yourself while still allowing them to do their job of tracking down criminal and dangerous elements of society.
You can have your name removed from the organ donor's list. It takes a few minutes, but it's only an annoying phone call.
Parents have to make all decisions for their children at that age. I'd hope that when his children are old enough they will be allowed to chance the decision to their personal preference, but until then it is as any other major decision (including whether to be removed from life support or to perform serious surgery) and up to the parent.
They have roofs, but they don't have sun. Solar panel cost has to fall dramatically (or energy costs rise similarly) for solar to be worthwhile in the midwest, especially the northern half of it. You don't just have to deal with night time, you have to deal with several weeks of cloudy days in a row. To to mention clearing the foot of snow off of them to get power during the winter time.