I haven't physically checked out a book in a long time, but only because I have such a stack of books that I own at present and haven't read yet.
Partly the same here, and partly that the library doesn't have the same taste in books I do. I've made suggestions for books that they should obtain and nothing ever happens.
I have used them for online books. This feature is very nice. And yet, when I suggest ebooks I'd like to see them get, I get no response back at all. The "Overdrive" library software has a limit of two recommendations, as well. That's moronic, but I guess the librarians feel they'd have to deal with too many recommendations if they let every patron suggest as many books as they'd like to see the library get.
There's something about sitting down with a book that just doesn't work as well with a digital device, at least not yet.
It isn't the device, it is your familiarity and comfort with it.
Pocketwatches lost the battle even though they could be more easily read when a generation got used to the wristwatch. Wristwatches are currently losing their battle, despite being really convenient to look at quickly and having batteries that last for a year or more without maintenance, to the cell phone that has the time displayed on the front. A cell phone has to be pulled out of a pocket to look at, a button or two pressed, and their batteries need repeated recharging on a regular nearly daily basis. You can't "butt dial" your BFF when you sit on your wristwatch, either. Wristwatches are clearly superior devices.
I wear one because I grew up wearing one and I'm more comfortable looking at my wrist to see what time it is than pulling the new-fangled phone out of my pocket. You read dead-paper books for fun because you grew up reading dead-paper books for fun and haven't grown up having more books that you could read in your lifetime available online for free on your ebook reader.
My first Sony reader came with my selection of 100 free classics. If I could manage two books a week, it would take a year to read them all. Then I could get another 1000 for free from a lot of places (MobiRead is one of my favorites.) That's 9 years more at two a week. Project Gutenberg has an uncountable (in the sense of "one, two, three, infinity") number of free books, including the entire series of Tom Swift (just one example.)
Your children pick up computers more easily than you, on average, because they have grown up with them. They'll pick up on ebooks that way, too.
As things stand today, libraries are more than a repository of books: they provide programs for everyone from toddlers to seniors.
Yes, many public libraries have extended their useful lives based not on the books they house but on the social programs they host. They have public meeting rooms used by a large number of groups, and those groups aren't all "book clubs".
Sure, this will happen right after the paperless office.
The paperless office concept failed in general because it is still much easier to move a single piece of paper with important information around than it is to do it completely digitally. A physical piece of paper can sit on your desk as a constant visible and physical reminder that you need to deal with it. It takes up space, the boss sees it when he walks by. You can't just drop it into your email inbox and forget about it.
Digital libraries will succeed over dead-tree ones for at least one reason: dead tree books are less convenient than digital ones. Physical weight, consumable resources, cost of copying, susceptibility to mold/mildew/water/fire/small children ripping pages out. Digital libraries allow children in places where books are a rarity access to the world. One computer in a village can go anywhere in the world to get a book from a digital library, and that child may never go more than ten miles from where he was born in his lifetime. A dead-tree library eleven miles away is useless to him.
The summary makes the statement that there are no bad books for children. I disagree. Were the issue of "bad books for children" just "bad books" in general (bad authors), then yeah. But "bad books for children" also mean complex subjects that children don't have the capacity to grasp (a discussion of the FED and worldwide monetary policy, when the child still thinks money is "allowance", e.g.). Or concepts that we don't want children to grasp ("Daddy and sister went to the lake by the cabin for their special time together..."). Those may not be "bad books" per se, but bad books for children nonetheless.
You didn't read carefully. If the CORPORATION commits a felony, the CORPORATION goes to jail. Not their chosen scapegoat, the CORPORATION itself.
I read very carefully. It is you that missed out. A corporation is "people" because corporations are made up of people. People who go to jail when they commit crimes in the name of the corporation.
If you think that Kenneth Lay or any of the other CEOs I listed who went to jail are the 'scapegoats' for the crimes they committed, then you really have no clue what a corporation, or a CEO, is at all. When the top guy goes to jail, it's really hard for anyone to honestly claim that there was a scapegoat involved.
If it is really going to be treated as a person under the law, let it face the liabilities as well as the benefits.
I've already provided a list of people who went to jail as people who are the heart of corporations for crimes committed under that corporate identity. Are you seriously trying to demand that the janitors at Enron go to jail too because the top corporate officers committed a crime and went to jail? The "corporation" committed a crime and the entire "corporation" should go to jail? That's just looney.
It can pay the personal income tax rate as well.
The people who make up those corporations already do that, and there is a corporate tax they get to pay, too. If you want to just cut the taxes back to the personal taxes, ok. I don't think you'd be happy with that, though.
You're deliberating conflating the act of communicating with the resources necessary to communicate.
The two are inseparable. Freedom of speech requires an ability to speak, and if you can't speak because the federal government has said you've reached your maximum allowable spending for that speech, it is an infringement plain and simple.
Note the vociferous complaints from those who object to "free speech zones" created around various political activities. If the freedom of speech was disjoint from the resources to perform that speech, then such zones would be perfectly acceptable.
Most specifically, it legitimizes flat-out bribes.
Untrue. Illegal actions performed in return for money are not speech. You can't claim that paying your hooker for a happy ending falls under your right to free speech.
Instead, individuals in small states influence national politics more than those from large states. Explain why that is better than the other way around.
First, because your initial premise is false. Second, because were it true, those small states do not have enough power to veto the acts of the large states, while the large states in any such "American people" lever pulling contest do. Imagine, the "American people" vote to decide to have a congressional recall. The east and west coast have considerably more people than the middle of the country (the "flyover zone"). Those few states can force the recall on all of those states, even if those states are happy with their current elected officials. Those elected officials, at best, will be forced to run again to maintain their seats, even though the people who elected them didn't want them removed in the first place. Then this "2/3" rule that was proposed -- no sitting congressman can run for the seat -- means that those large coastal states can force smaller states to get rid of the people they elected and they have to pick someone new. You really think that is fair? Essentially, New York can say to Wyoming, "we don't like who you elected, elect someone else". That's crap.
What's a productive life? Your corporate bias is showing.
Corporate bias bullshit. If you aren't going to discuss this honestly, don't bother. "Productive life" is however I want to define it. I could be the local hippie tie-dye shirt producer for my community and run the recycle/composting center in my spare time. That may be what I want to do with my life. I call that productive and you call that "corporate bias?" And then this asinine sentate-juror call comes and I can't do that anymore because I'm too busy dealing with crap I don't care about.
Not nearly as idiotic as thinking that the government is a corporation.
The US government is one of the largest corporations on the planet. It hires more people, it manages more people, handles more money. The fact that some of the people involved are elected (by the "shareholders", eh, like a real corporation) and it's supposed to be "non-profit" doesn't change the fact that it requires the same skills running a large company does. What's idiotic is to ignore all the similarities because you don't want to have an honest discussion.
You consider public service to be fucking up your life.
And you think so highly of "public service" that you'd deliberately force it upon others because you cannot imagine that it might create hardships for them. Who is closer to reality here? Yes, involuntary servitude can and does fuck up people's lives. Whether that servitude is a week on a jury, a year as a slave/senator, or even four years as a draftee in the military, each one can create hardships for people. A year-long hiatus in the composting service I provide to my community will be a hardship for many people, and if my tie-dye business goes bust because I can't make and sell my product I'll be looking for a new job when I get done
Well, yea I do have a clue. I was following the breakup hen it was happening.
So was I.
Characterizing it as if the government just waltzed in and said "okay boys,
That's not how I "characterized it".
As is characterizing it as a "monopoly" that just happened without a government grant of monopoly.
I did not speak about how AT&T became the monopoly, only why it broke up. And no, it wasn't because AT&T "asked" for it. Unless "here's a compromise if you'll drop the anti-trust suit" is what you consider "asking for", and even then they kept the very part of the company that you claimed they didn't want to be. If AT&T didn't want to do long distance, it's really odd that they'd spin off the local parts and keep the long distance.
The predecessor to the FCC made them a monopoly,
That's nice, but irrelevant to why they were broken up and how it happened.
No, AT&T was "broken up" because they *asked* to stop being the exclusive national long distance phone service utility.
You have no clue. AT&T was broken up as part of a consent decree where they divested themselves of the LOCAL telephone services (the RBOC -- regional Bell operating companies) so they could KEEP the long distance operation. This consent decree came about as the result of an anti-trust lawsuit from their vertical integration of everything from local to long distance to telephone equipment.
MCI also helped the breakup by filing anti-trust lawsuits.
To claim that AT&T asked to be broken up is just ridiculous.
How is sending someone money related to free speech?
I would hope that you aren't naive enough to think that the right to free speech means free as in beer, not free as in unfettered. It costs money to speak. That's what campaign contributions go towards for the most part. TV, radio, print ads. Speech.
Free speech and financial campaign contributions are completely different things,
No, they really aren't. For the reason I just stated. And for reasons you allude to later when you talk about PACs. PACs don't get people elected by handing money to voters. They get people elected by paying for SPEECH that convinces people to vote for their candidate. That speech requires money. Ergo, money is speech.
Right now, there is no lever that the American people have against a failed Congress.
Perhaps that's because the "American people" didn't elect "the Congress", specific subsets of them elected their own representatives. Having this "lever" would mean that the large number of voters in New York State, for example, would have the ability to determine who could NOT represent the voters in Wyoming. In any "American people" lever pulling contest, the smaller states would be dictated to by the larger ones.
Even if it takes two months for a new crew to come into office with a government shut down, that is better than an unlimited duration of the current circus we have right now.
You are wrong. The current news reports are optimistic about a solution soon, a solution that your "solution" would mandate coming after two months of absolutely no hope of a solution. And, franky, I think two months during a government shutdown is very optimistic. I think it is optimistic in the best of circumstances. Imagine having to spin the FEC and FCC back up to monitor a nationwide polling process...
Going out on a limb, maybe the answer isn't voting people in at all. It might just be a lottery draw from the pool of US citizens similar to how juries are done.
What an amazingly idiotic idea this is. You want people who have no desire to be there making decisions on how to run a corporation as large the the US government. You'd pull people from productive lives doing what they want to do off to Washington DC dealing with things they have no interest in or knowledge about, for how long? A year?
Of course, there are issues with that,
I'd say so. I, for one, have planned on voting guilty for every person who appears in front of me as a juror. I will have no problem saying that out loud. I expect that any defense attorney would try to get me out of jury duty as soon as possible. Imagine the havok I could wreak by voting 'no' on every bill that appears in front of me as a juror-senator. You want to fuck up my life by sending me to be a senator against my will, well fine. Are you planning on having a slave selection process for the slave senators? Well, you've just put in place a political selection process controlled by whoever vets the senators. "You're going to vote this way on that topic? Excused..."
might just bring less corruption
I can honestly say I would rather have a system with a modicum of corruption that comes up with answers every so often over a slave labor system that never does anything because all the slaves are drunk with either alcohol or power.
Even better, if a corporate citizen commits a felony, it goes to jail just like everyone else.
Here's how trivial it is to google the facts.
123 (and the only reason he's not in prison is because he's dead.) That's three from one corporation. More? 456
Took about ten seconds to find two "top" lists of corporate legal scoundrals and another few minutes to look up the people and provide references. Now go look them up for yourself. All examples of corporate citizens who went to prison, most for felonies. Ok, one didn't. He died before he was sentenced. You appear to be more interested in spreading nonsense than in finding out the facts. In the time it took you to post to/. you could have found examples that ended your rant.
I'd be in favor of a system that prevented the formation of districts that resulted in minimization of noncompetitive elections.
While this may sound good to a large city dweller, it smells bad to rural folk. You see, many rural areas have a large percentage of one party voters. When a district is made up of "these three adjoining rural counties in Oregon", there is little surprise when that district votes almost exclusively one way, creating the very "noncompetitive election" you seek to abolish. How do you fix this? Gerrymandering! "Three adjacent rural counties and 100,000 people from Portland, three hour's drive away". There, that's balance.
What you seem to be calling for is deliberately creating voting "districts" in as complicated a way as is required to have an equal number of each party included, no matter how far away you have to go to find them, or how mis-representative of the people in the majority of the district that may be.
Another problem is the makeup of the Senate - the lack of population sensitivity causes gross underrepresentation of much of the US population.
The Senate wasn't intended to represent the US population. They were intended to represent the State's interests. That's why each state has two Senators no matter how many people live in the state.
The House is the people's representative. That's why the house is the body outlined in the Constitution as the source of bills to raise revenue. No taxation without representation, eh?
If the Senate was just another version of the House, why bother having two? I'm sure the founders considered that.
I don't have a suggestion on how to fix it though.
Fixing something requires first understanding what it is you want to fix and whether it is broken or not.
2: 100 dollars per US citizen with documentation that this was done.
And we abolish the first amendment at the same time? Isn't telling someone how much speech they can have an infringement on the right to free speech itself?
No, corporations are not citizens. If a court wants to dispute that, then allow people to take their LLC incorporation articles
"Papers" are not people. D'oh. But the people who formed that corporation are still people and still have rights. Your analogy would be more correct if you said "corporations are not people..... then allow people to take the four members of the board of directors in a car and drive in the HOV lane." That makes the issue a bit more obvious. Of course they could use the HOV lane, they are still people despite forming a corporation.
6: No non-US company or person can give money to campaigns, period.
I believe this is already part of the federal election regulations. I recall some issue of Chinese money laundering into a presidential campaign.
7: Allow a no confidence vote to be taken. If Congress fails the American people like it is doing now, there should be a capability of a recall election,
Oh, this would work really well. No CR for continuing government, government closed? Let's hold an election to replace them all. We can count on at least two months between calling for the election and the swearing in, during which time nobody gets paid for nothin'.
And your 2/3 result? If my state likes who we have, why should any other voter in any other state say we can't re-elect them?
8: Have Congress be under the same laws of insider trading that everyone else has to abide by.
I think that one is also in the books, it just isn't enforced. At some point you have to realize that the correct solution for laws being ignored is not to create more laws, nor to have the same people who are ignoring the laws already there write the new ones.
When most of the population (both US and World) collectively say, "That is an ridiculous and unreasonable abuse of power!!!!" I am fairly sure it is covered by the fourth amendment.
This is the reasonably discredited concept that the world has some vote on what the US Constitution should say. What the Fourth Amendment says is not subject to the opinion of Germany or Kenya or Mexico or China or... nor should it be.
Even though some errant Supreme Court justices keep yapping about applying world concepts to US constitutional law, that's not how it is supposed to work. If the founders had wanted us to follow Greek laws, they would have put Greek laws in the US books, not assumed that 21st century justices would look to Greece as an example of how to run a country.
Simply put, if they want to search a citizen's property (digital or physical), then they need to get a warrant for that specific search.
Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment did not put it so simply. The founders could have worded it that simply. The fact that they included the term "unreasonable" in the prohibition means they meant for there to be a concept of "reasonable" that wasn't prohibited. Nor did they use the simple words "A warrant is required for all searches."
These were simple people, doing a large task. They could have used simple words if they said what they meant. Since they did not, the clear implication is that the concepts are more complex than you make them out to be, and that they understood that.
1. Past history of Presidents elected despite not having a plurality of votes.
This ignores the fact that there is no national election for President. There are a lot of smaller elections in which the States decide who wins the State electors. You cannot have a "plurality" in a vote unless there is a real total to count. Just taking the results of fifty or more individual elections and summing them up isn't how the system was designed to work, and it doesn't accomplish the goals that drove that design.
2. Proposal by Rance Priebus describing a method to corrupt the election process by tying electoral college votes to gerrymandered congressional districts.
I could come up with a lot of dreamscape systems for corrupting the existing system, none of which is a valid reason for getting rid of it. On the other hand, the States are free to determine how their electors are chosen, which is how it should be. Any State that falls for the "add the entire country up and assign the electors based on that" nonsense is violating their responsibility to their residents and disenfranchising them in favor of larger states with more people.
There are huge problems with the current gerrymandering system. For example, we have a Republican majority in Congress despite the fact that 55% of the votes for Congressmen in the last election were for Democrats.
What does "55% of the votes for congressmen" mean? Are you seriously trying to argue that because democrats in some states got more votes than the republicans in others, that those republicans shouldn't be there? Let's use a simple example to see if you really mean what you are saying or not.
In State A, a democrat congressman wins with a vote of 200,000 to 100,000. In State B, a republican wins with a vote of 50,000 to 40,000. The "total" vote for democrats was 240,000, the total for republicans was just 140,000. Should the republican be replaced by a democrat because of this? Or would that be stripping the right to representation from those in state B?
This difference may have nothing at all to do with Gerrymandering, it simply has to do with the relative populations of various states and districts. And natural differences in population density and proclivities.
For example, Oregon has two major population centers, half a dozen medium ones, and lots and lots of empty space. The major centers, and some of the mediums, are heavily democratic. A lot of the rest of the state is republican. It is impossible to draw reasonable district boundaries that completely balance voter numbers without also making those districts heavily biased one way or the other.
By the way, the last Oregon redistricting was done by a Democrat controlled Oregon Senate and a Democrat Governor, with an evenly split House. You can't blame "republican bias" in the US Congress on gerrymandering by nasty republicans. And you can't claim that the evil Republicans in Congress did the gerrymandering that keep them there, since the US Congress doesn't decide the district boundaries.
You seem to think that the USA is one homogenous federal area where the federal government is in total control. National elections for president must naturally be a simple tally of all the votes, under that imaginary system. But the system that exists should be a red flag indicating that your simplistic view is the wrong view. Those of us in smaller states appreciate very much the ability to have some say in the Presidential election, and would even go so far as to call for a system where that small say is made larger, not eliminated altogether. Don't feel too bad about your ignorance, it is propagated by the mainstream media who seem to think that there is some significance to the "national vote total" and strive to be the first to tell you what it is.
They both tell you what's happening, but the problem with the second sentence is that you refrained from mentioning why they're censoring the book,
They both describe the same situation. Now, it is interesting that you note that the second sentence doesn't tell you why they are "censoring" the book, so apparently saying they are "censoring" the book doesn't add anything to the description of what is happening. That is why it is meaningless.
Not even the first sentence is entirely clear since it uses subjective words like "decency"; you need a bit more information than that to grasp the entire situation.
No, I don't, because it isn't my interpretation of decency that is being used, and it doesn't matter what I think is indecent or not. The reason the company decided to stop selling the book is spelled out clearly. It fails to meet their decency standards. The job of defining what those standards are is neither yours nor mine. You may want to argue with them about their standards, but the fact remains that the first sentence tells you why they acted and the second doesn't tell you what they did at all.
Again, it's not that it's not true;
The implication is that LBS, Inc is cutting pages out of the book, or is in some way trying to prevent any access to that book by anyone. Neither is true, but that's the desired implication when someone uses the word "censorship". You've done it yourself when you claimed that a book seller who isn't selling a book is trying to prevent anyone from getting a copy.
it's just that people are using a word in ways that you disagree with.
Well, yes, that is obvious. I disagree with turning valid, meaningful words into meaningless hyperbole, and that is what has happened to "censorship", as demonstrated by this entire discussion.
so far as I know no one was ever booted by their ISP for running a VPN or hosting a multi-player game (though occasionally their networks settings made it difficult to do things).
The second reason for a written ban was so that when you complained that their network settings were making it difficult to run your multi-player game server, they could say "you aren't supposed to be doing that" and they could ignore you, instead of waste, I means expend, engineer time fixing it.
I don't think it's useless, but say what you will.
One action, two sentences that describe it. Which one means something, using the new definition of censorship?
LargeBookSeller Inc. has stopped selling copies of "A Rape in a New Jersey Elementary School" because it fails to meet their published standards for decency.
LargeBookSeller Inc. is censoring the book "A Rape in a New Jersey Elementary School".
Now, to me, sentence one tells me exactly what is happening and why. Sentence two says nothing specific except the name of the company and the title of the book. Did they just decide not to sell it because it wasn't selling well, or are they actually getting the publisher to withdraw it so nobody can buy it, or was there a legal challenge somewhere that forced the decision, or what? Is LBS, Inc actually paying someone to sit in the warehouse cutting pages out of the paper copy? Did they redact large sections of the electronic version? You see, the word "censoring" added exactly nothing to the content or meaning of the sentence and only created confusion.
Now, I understand that the emotional value of sentence 2 for someone who wants to stir up a frenzy about big bad awful LargeBookSeller is important, and that's why the word "censoring" was used. It brings to mind a large megacompany pouring tons of legal money and talent onto the poor helpless author trying to force his work off of the face of the planet. But that's not what actually happened. This abuse of the word creates an implication that is not true. That's the only reason to use it when it truly means anything the writer wants it to mean.
If the offsets don't do what they advertise, it isn't Al Gore's fault that they don't.
When it is his company he's buying them from, it is.
Generation Investment Management is a multi-national (offices in New York and London) investment strategy company. In other words, they exist to make a profit off of investing in... whatever they can make a profit from investing in.
The "About Us" page claims there are 55 people who "represent[s] 16 countries and speaks 21 languages." The only financial disclosure I can find at that site lists "Investment Management" remuneration at a total of GPB19,742,000. That's US$31,567,458, or an average of US$574,000 per "investment manager".
Now, how much does Mr. Gore pay in "carbon offsets"? I can't find a number, but this NY Times article says that a competing company (TerraPass) would charge about $1300 for a house such as Gore's.
$1300 spent for at least a $574,000 income? (And as Chairman, you can't expect Mr. Gore to make less than the average for his employees, can you?)
This article defending Gore reports Gore's office saying:
Gore has had a consistent position of purchasing carbon offsets to offset the family's carbon footprint -- a concept the right-wing fails to understand.
No, I think even right-wingers can understand what's going on.
Then you are happy with the newer, useless definition of censorship, because those companies have always, in brick and mortar form especially, dropped books they've previously carried when they age and aren't selling well, or for any reason they chose. Lack of shelf space, for example. Or, in the extreme case, the bookstore went bankrupt and won't sell you ANY books anymore. That, too, fits the new definition of censorship.
And publishers have always chosen which books to keep in print and which to allow to fade away. This fits your useless definition of censorship, too. This is even closer to the original meaning since it truly does keep people from buying a copy, at least a freshly printed one. "Censorship! Evil Publisher!" This clearly calls for pitchforks and blazing torches. "Monster! Burn the witches!"
But no, this is business as it has always been. What you miss is that Amazon dropping a book doesn't mean it is unavailable any longer, it only means you can't buy it from Amazon. This is perhaps the most egregious part of this discussion, the hyperbole that pounces from every corner. Nobody can buy anything unless it comes from (insert name of favorite bookstore).
The truth is Amazon is hardly the only source of books. I've found many books at other book seller's sites. I've found eBooks at sites where Amazon didn't have that form -- is this censorship? In a digital world the epub is king, and failing to provide in the modern form is suppression of distribution of a kind unacceptable to the digiterati. It is censorship of the most meaningless kind.
Why would you call it "censorship" instead of "doesn't stock" except for the pejorative meaning and an attempt at painting the errant vendor in a negative light? What is gained by using the emotionally laden term if emotion is not the goal? Is there any real emotion relevant to "doesn't stock", except perhaps boredom on the part of the casual observer and mild annoyance on the part of the buyer?
You argued that forcing people to buy health insurance would be bad.
I argued that your understanding of the mandate for car insurance is very poor, since not everyone is forced to buy that insurance and it is not a federal mandate. I argued that your claim that the mandate for car insurance is "working well" and "minimal government intervention" is laughable at best. You seem to continue to think that this is a good model for how a federal mandate for forcing everyone to buy health insurance should operate.
Yes, if you assume what you want to prove, it doesn't matter how you get there. You might as well use the imperfect car insurance example and ignore the facts that contradict your claims.
The grocery store is private property. If you don't want anyone watching you as you wander about their private property, perhaps you shouldn't be there?
noun 1. an official who examines material that is about to be released, such as books, movies, news, and art, and suppresses any parts that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
2. (in ancient Rome) either of two magistrates who held censuses and supervised public morals.
The Production Code Administration was true censorship, and even though it wasn't a government official, it did control what was produced. Not just sold, but what made it to film.
The PCA was given the authority to review and delete what it felt was morally objectionable material from both the final script before a movie was shot, and the finished movie before it was released.
This wasn't a case of simply finding a different movie house to view the film you wanted to see, it simply wasn't made.
In 1942, Byron Price published this article identifying censorship as an evil, albeit a necessary evil during time of war. He was the US Director of Censorship, and even he admitted it was evil. Even as late as that time, censorship was viewed as "bad".
Today, it means any limit put on anyone's free expression in any medium. It's "censorship" if Jeff Bezos decides not to sell a book based on its content. But amazingly, it is not censorship if a librarian decides not to buy a book for the library based on the content. This makes "censorship" a useless word. Ultimately, is it not suppression of your right of free expression if I choose not to read your article in/., and even moreso if I choose not to buy your book? That makes it "censorship" under this useless definition.
And please don't tell me that those who cry "censorship" when denouncing the evil capitalist Amazon or BandN or whatever aren't trying to draw on the collective memory of when censorship truly was a bad thing and not a normal part of everyday life. They count on the pejorative meaning sticking to the victim, not the useless one.
While the amount of greenhouse gas used now by low-income countries isn't high, improving their electric grid and using renewable resources will not only decrease the rate of growth in CO2, but it will also be a good test bed for building a new grid. Eventually these new areas will ramp up demand and there will need to be something there.
This. The issue is not how little they produce today, but how can we tell them "no" when they want to produce more tomorrow? They won't want to wait for the zero-carbon final solution in a decade, they want to join the developed world today. Any attempt to tell them how bad it will be for the globe if they do would be viewed with the same disdain population control discussions are.
If we assume arguendo that universal health insurance is a goal,
Yes, assume what you want as the result and then everything else falls into place naturally.
do you see a specific problem with using the car insurance model as a way to achieve that goal?
Yes, and I've told you why twice.
Or are you ranting just to rant?
It's not my rant. I simply pointed out your errors of fact in one statement ("everyone" doesn't have to buy car insurance), and then had to point out that since "everyone" doesn't have to buy car insurance using it as a model for a system where everyone DOES have to buy something is ridiculous. Your only response was that you didn't really mean "everyone", but "everyone" is applicable to the case you want to assume.
Add on that this is hardly the "minimal government involvement" model that you keep claiming it is, and, well... the only way to get to your desired end-point in your argument is to assume, arguendo, that you've arrived. "Now arriving on track 27, we assume a train of a certain number of passengers in a certain number of cars...." Perhaps we should assume a spherical train?
Thanks for the handy tip on knowing when people use word they don't really mean. In this case, the difference between "everyone" and "not really everyone, just all the people I want to refer to" is significant. Protip: use the right words. It makes communication in a written medium easier.
Do we want everyone to have car insurance?
It would be nice if everyone who operates a motor vehicle on the public streets had coverage for their vehicle, but should it be a mandate? The issue comes when an uninsured driver causes damage to another person. How do we protect the other driver?
Do we want everyone to have health insurance?
Do we WANT them to, or do we want to DEMAND that they have it? Gosh, pesky words that have meaning getting in the way of communicating. I assume you mean the latter based on the context, although you said the former.
The answer is "no" we should not demand that people buy something they don't need or want, and the failure to have does not create a danger to others. If the failure of someone to have health insurance just to exist in the US were to cause damage to another person, maybe. But your uninsured kidney failure doesn't cause a medical problem for me. That's how this differs from car insurance. You driving your car into mine does cause damage that YOU need to pay for.
I take no stance here on those issues, all I'm saying is since we've decided to do both, why not use the successfully approach for the former as a model for the latter?
Because 1) not everybody is forced to buy car insurance and they are forced to buy health insurance, 2) the STATE requires insurance for cars driven on the public streets, not the federal government, and 3) the issues covered by the two kinds of insurance are vastly different.
And BTW, by the wording of your question and attempt at arguing semantics of "everyone" you are, indeed, expressing a position. It's no different than a push-pollster trying to influence an election by his choice of poll questions.
Solve the "problem" of getting everyone health insurance with the least possible government involvement,
A federal mandate to "buy this or pay the government a fine" is hardly "least possible government involvement", just as "buy this or you can't drive your car on the streets" is "minimal government involvement".
Well, that question answered itself.
Yes, it did. Given the context of the questions it could not have ended differently.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't physically checked out a book in a long time, but only because I have such a stack of books that I own at present and haven't read yet.
Partly the same here, and partly that the library doesn't have the same taste in books I do. I've made suggestions for books that they should obtain and nothing ever happens.
I have used them for online books. This feature is very nice. And yet, when I suggest ebooks I'd like to see them get, I get no response back at all. The "Overdrive" library software has a limit of two recommendations, as well. That's moronic, but I guess the librarians feel they'd have to deal with too many recommendations if they let every patron suggest as many books as they'd like to see the library get.
There's something about sitting down with a book that just doesn't work as well with a digital device, at least not yet.
It isn't the device, it is your familiarity and comfort with it.
Pocketwatches lost the battle even though they could be more easily read when a generation got used to the wristwatch. Wristwatches are currently losing their battle, despite being really convenient to look at quickly and having batteries that last for a year or more without maintenance, to the cell phone that has the time displayed on the front. A cell phone has to be pulled out of a pocket to look at, a button or two pressed, and their batteries need repeated recharging on a regular nearly daily basis. You can't "butt dial" your BFF when you sit on your wristwatch, either. Wristwatches are clearly superior devices.
I wear one because I grew up wearing one and I'm more comfortable looking at my wrist to see what time it is than pulling the new-fangled phone out of my pocket. You read dead-paper books for fun because you grew up reading dead-paper books for fun and haven't grown up having more books that you could read in your lifetime available online for free on your ebook reader.
My first Sony reader came with my selection of 100 free classics. If I could manage two books a week, it would take a year to read them all. Then I could get another 1000 for free from a lot of places (MobiRead is one of my favorites.) That's 9 years more at two a week. Project Gutenberg has an uncountable (in the sense of "one, two, three, infinity") number of free books, including the entire series of Tom Swift (just one example.)
Your children pick up computers more easily than you, on average, because they have grown up with them. They'll pick up on ebooks that way, too.
As things stand today, libraries are more than a repository of books: they provide programs for everyone from toddlers to seniors.
Yes, many public libraries have extended their useful lives based not on the books they house but on the social programs they host. They have public meeting rooms used by a large number of groups, and those groups aren't all "book clubs".
Sure, this will happen right after the paperless office.
The paperless office concept failed in general because it is still much easier to move a single piece of paper with important information around than it is to do it completely digitally. A physical piece of paper can sit on your desk as a constant visible and physical reminder that you need to deal with it. It takes up space, the boss sees it when he walks by. You can't just drop it into your email inbox and forget about it.
Digital libraries will succeed over dead-tree ones for at least one reason: dead tree books are less convenient than digital ones. Physical weight, consumable resources, cost of copying, susceptibility to mold/mildew/water/fire/small children ripping pages out. Digital libraries allow children in places where books are a rarity access to the world. One computer in a village can go anywhere in the world to get a book from a digital library, and that child may never go more than ten miles from where he was born in his lifetime. A dead-tree library eleven miles away is useless to him.
The summary makes the statement that there are no bad books for children. I disagree. Were the issue of "bad books for children" just "bad books" in general (bad authors), then yeah. But "bad books for children" also mean complex subjects that children don't have the capacity to grasp (a discussion of the FED and worldwide monetary policy, when the child still thinks money is "allowance", e.g.). Or concepts that we don't want children to grasp ("Daddy and sister went to the lake by the cabin for their special time together..."). Those may not be "bad books" per se, but bad books for children nonetheless.
You didn't read carefully. If the CORPORATION commits a felony, the CORPORATION goes to jail. Not their chosen scapegoat, the CORPORATION itself.
I read very carefully. It is you that missed out. A corporation is "people" because corporations are made up of people. People who go to jail when they commit crimes in the name of the corporation.
If you think that Kenneth Lay or any of the other CEOs I listed who went to jail are the 'scapegoats' for the crimes they committed, then you really have no clue what a corporation, or a CEO, is at all. When the top guy goes to jail, it's really hard for anyone to honestly claim that there was a scapegoat involved.
If it is really going to be treated as a person under the law, let it face the liabilities as well as the benefits.
I've already provided a list of people who went to jail as people who are the heart of corporations for crimes committed under that corporate identity. Are you seriously trying to demand that the janitors at Enron go to jail too because the top corporate officers committed a crime and went to jail? The "corporation" committed a crime and the entire "corporation" should go to jail? That's just looney.
It can pay the personal income tax rate as well.
The people who make up those corporations already do that, and there is a corporate tax they get to pay, too. If you want to just cut the taxes back to the personal taxes, ok. I don't think you'd be happy with that, though.
You're deliberating conflating the act of communicating with the resources necessary to communicate.
The two are inseparable. Freedom of speech requires an ability to speak, and if you can't speak because the federal government has said you've reached your maximum allowable spending for that speech, it is an infringement plain and simple.
Note the vociferous complaints from those who object to "free speech zones" created around various political activities. If the freedom of speech was disjoint from the resources to perform that speech, then such zones would be perfectly acceptable.
Most specifically, it legitimizes flat-out bribes.
Untrue. Illegal actions performed in return for money are not speech. You can't claim that paying your hooker for a happy ending falls under your right to free speech.
Instead, individuals in small states influence national politics more than those from large states. Explain why that is better than the other way around.
First, because your initial premise is false. Second, because were it true, those small states do not have enough power to veto the acts of the large states, while the large states in any such "American people" lever pulling contest do. Imagine, the "American people" vote to decide to have a congressional recall. The east and west coast have considerably more people than the middle of the country (the "flyover zone"). Those few states can force the recall on all of those states, even if those states are happy with their current elected officials. Those elected officials, at best, will be forced to run again to maintain their seats, even though the people who elected them didn't want them removed in the first place. Then this "2/3" rule that was proposed -- no sitting congressman can run for the seat -- means that those large coastal states can force smaller states to get rid of the people they elected and they have to pick someone new. You really think that is fair? Essentially, New York can say to Wyoming, "we don't like who you elected, elect someone else". That's crap.
What's a productive life? Your corporate bias is showing.
Corporate bias bullshit. If you aren't going to discuss this honestly, don't bother. "Productive life" is however I want to define it. I could be the local hippie tie-dye shirt producer for my community and run the recycle/composting center in my spare time. That may be what I want to do with my life. I call that productive and you call that "corporate bias?" And then this asinine sentate-juror call comes and I can't do that anymore because I'm too busy dealing with crap I don't care about.
Not nearly as idiotic as thinking that the government is a corporation.
The US government is one of the largest corporations on the planet. It hires more people, it manages more people, handles more money. The fact that some of the people involved are elected (by the "shareholders", eh, like a real corporation) and it's supposed to be "non-profit" doesn't change the fact that it requires the same skills running a large company does. What's idiotic is to ignore all the similarities because you don't want to have an honest discussion.
You consider public service to be fucking up your life.
And you think so highly of "public service" that you'd deliberately force it upon others because you cannot imagine that it might create hardships for them. Who is closer to reality here? Yes, involuntary servitude can and does fuck up people's lives. Whether that servitude is a week on a jury, a year as a slave/senator, or even four years as a draftee in the military, each one can create hardships for people. A year-long hiatus in the composting service I provide to my community will be a hardship for many people, and if my tie-dye business goes bust because I can't make and sell my product I'll be looking for a new job when I get done
Well, yea I do have a clue. I was following the breakup hen it was happening.
So was I.
Characterizing it as if the government just waltzed in and said "okay boys,
That's not how I "characterized it".
As is characterizing it as a "monopoly" that just happened without a government grant of monopoly.
I did not speak about how AT&T became the monopoly, only why it broke up. And no, it wasn't because AT&T "asked" for it. Unless "here's a compromise if you'll drop the anti-trust suit" is what you consider "asking for", and even then they kept the very part of the company that you claimed they didn't want to be. If AT&T didn't want to do long distance, it's really odd that they'd spin off the local parts and keep the long distance.
The predecessor to the FCC made them a monopoly,
That's nice, but irrelevant to why they were broken up and how it happened.
No, AT&T was "broken up" because they *asked* to stop being the exclusive national long distance phone service utility.
You have no clue. AT&T was broken up as part of a consent decree where they divested themselves of the LOCAL telephone services (the RBOC -- regional Bell operating companies) so they could KEEP the long distance operation. This consent decree came about as the result of an anti-trust lawsuit from their vertical integration of everything from local to long distance to telephone equipment.
MCI also helped the breakup by filing anti-trust lawsuits.
To claim that AT&T asked to be broken up is just ridiculous.
How is sending someone money related to free speech?
I would hope that you aren't naive enough to think that the right to free speech means free as in beer, not free as in unfettered. It costs money to speak. That's what campaign contributions go towards for the most part. TV, radio, print ads. Speech.
Free speech and financial campaign contributions are completely different things,
No, they really aren't. For the reason I just stated. And for reasons you allude to later when you talk about PACs. PACs don't get people elected by handing money to voters. They get people elected by paying for SPEECH that convinces people to vote for their candidate. That speech requires money. Ergo, money is speech.
Right now, there is no lever that the American people have against a failed Congress.
Perhaps that's because the "American people" didn't elect "the Congress", specific subsets of them elected their own representatives. Having this "lever" would mean that the large number of voters in New York State, for example, would have the ability to determine who could NOT represent the voters in Wyoming. In any "American people" lever pulling contest, the smaller states would be dictated to by the larger ones.
Even if it takes two months for a new crew to come into office with a government shut down, that is better than an unlimited duration of the current circus we have right now.
You are wrong. The current news reports are optimistic about a solution soon, a solution that your "solution" would mandate coming after two months of absolutely no hope of a solution. And, franky, I think two months during a government shutdown is very optimistic. I think it is optimistic in the best of circumstances. Imagine having to spin the FEC and FCC back up to monitor a nationwide polling process ...
Going out on a limb, maybe the answer isn't voting people in at all. It might just be a lottery draw from the pool of US citizens similar to how juries are done.
What an amazingly idiotic idea this is. You want people who have no desire to be there making decisions on how to run a corporation as large the the US government. You'd pull people from productive lives doing what they want to do off to Washington DC dealing with things they have no interest in or knowledge about, for how long? A year?
Of course, there are issues with that,
I'd say so. I, for one, have planned on voting guilty for every person who appears in front of me as a juror. I will have no problem saying that out loud. I expect that any defense attorney would try to get me out of jury duty as soon as possible. Imagine the havok I could wreak by voting 'no' on every bill that appears in front of me as a juror-senator. You want to fuck up my life by sending me to be a senator against my will, well fine. Are you planning on having a slave selection process for the slave senators? Well, you've just put in place a political selection process controlled by whoever vets the senators. "You're going to vote this way on that topic? Excused..."
might just bring less corruption
I can honestly say I would rather have a system with a modicum of corruption that comes up with answers every so often over a slave labor system that never does anything because all the slaves are drunk with either alcohol or power.
Even better, if a corporate citizen commits a felony, it goes to jail just like everyone else.
Here's how trivial it is to google the facts.
1 2 3 (and the only reason he's not in prison is because he's dead.) That's three from one corporation. More? 4 5 6
Took about ten seconds to find two "top" lists of corporate legal scoundrals and another few minutes to look up the people and provide references. Now go look them up for yourself. All examples of corporate citizens who went to prison, most for felonies. Ok, one didn't. He died before he was sentenced. You appear to be more interested in spreading nonsense than in finding out the facts. In the time it took you to post to /. you could have found examples that ended your rant.
I'd be in favor of a system that prevented the formation of districts that resulted in minimization of noncompetitive elections.
While this may sound good to a large city dweller, it smells bad to rural folk. You see, many rural areas have a large percentage of one party voters. When a district is made up of "these three adjoining rural counties in Oregon", there is little surprise when that district votes almost exclusively one way, creating the very "noncompetitive election" you seek to abolish. How do you fix this? Gerrymandering! "Three adjacent rural counties and 100,000 people from Portland, three hour's drive away". There, that's balance.
What you seem to be calling for is deliberately creating voting "districts" in as complicated a way as is required to have an equal number of each party included, no matter how far away you have to go to find them, or how mis-representative of the people in the majority of the district that may be.
Another problem is the makeup of the Senate - the lack of population sensitivity causes gross underrepresentation of much of the US population.
The Senate wasn't intended to represent the US population. They were intended to represent the State's interests. That's why each state has two Senators no matter how many people live in the state.
The House is the people's representative. That's why the house is the body outlined in the Constitution as the source of bills to raise revenue. No taxation without representation, eh?
If the Senate was just another version of the House, why bother having two? I'm sure the founders considered that.
I don't have a suggestion on how to fix it though.
Fixing something requires first understanding what it is you want to fix and whether it is broken or not.
2: 100 dollars per US citizen with documentation that this was done.
And we abolish the first amendment at the same time? Isn't telling someone how much speech they can have an infringement on the right to free speech itself?
No, corporations are not citizens. If a court wants to dispute that, then allow people to take their LLC incorporation articles
"Papers" are not people. D'oh. But the people who formed that corporation are still people and still have rights. Your analogy would be more correct if you said "corporations are not people. .... then allow people to take the four members of the board of directors in a car and drive in the HOV lane." That makes the issue a bit more obvious. Of course they could use the HOV lane, they are still people despite forming a corporation.
6: No non-US company or person can give money to campaigns, period.
I believe this is already part of the federal election regulations. I recall some issue of Chinese money laundering into a presidential campaign.
7: Allow a no confidence vote to be taken. If Congress fails the American people like it is doing now, there should be a capability of a recall election,
Oh, this would work really well. No CR for continuing government, government closed? Let's hold an election to replace them all. We can count on at least two months between calling for the election and the swearing in, during which time nobody gets paid for nothin'.
And your 2/3 result? If my state likes who we have, why should any other voter in any other state say we can't re-elect them?
8: Have Congress be under the same laws of insider trading that everyone else has to abide by.
I think that one is also in the books, it just isn't enforced. At some point you have to realize that the correct solution for laws being ignored is not to create more laws, nor to have the same people who are ignoring the laws already there write the new ones.
When most of the population (both US and World) collectively say, "That is an ridiculous and unreasonable abuse of power!!!!" I am fairly sure it is covered by the fourth amendment.
This is the reasonably discredited concept that the world has some vote on what the US Constitution should say. What the Fourth Amendment says is not subject to the opinion of Germany or Kenya or Mexico or China or ... nor should it be.
Even though some errant Supreme Court justices keep yapping about applying world concepts to US constitutional law, that's not how it is supposed to work. If the founders had wanted us to follow Greek laws, they would have put Greek laws in the US books, not assumed that 21st century justices would look to Greece as an example of how to run a country.
Simply put, if they want to search a citizen's property (digital or physical), then they need to get a warrant for that specific search.
Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment did not put it so simply. The founders could have worded it that simply. The fact that they included the term "unreasonable" in the prohibition means they meant for there to be a concept of "reasonable" that wasn't prohibited. Nor did they use the simple words "A warrant is required for all searches."
These were simple people, doing a large task. They could have used simple words if they said what they meant. Since they did not, the clear implication is that the concepts are more complex than you make them out to be, and that they understood that.
1. Past history of Presidents elected despite not having a plurality of votes.
This ignores the fact that there is no national election for President. There are a lot of smaller elections in which the States decide who wins the State electors. You cannot have a "plurality" in a vote unless there is a real total to count. Just taking the results of fifty or more individual elections and summing them up isn't how the system was designed to work, and it doesn't accomplish the goals that drove that design.
2. Proposal by Rance Priebus describing a method to corrupt the election process by tying electoral college votes to gerrymandered congressional districts.
I could come up with a lot of dreamscape systems for corrupting the existing system, none of which is a valid reason for getting rid of it. On the other hand, the States are free to determine how their electors are chosen, which is how it should be. Any State that falls for the "add the entire country up and assign the electors based on that" nonsense is violating their responsibility to their residents and disenfranchising them in favor of larger states with more people.
There are huge problems with the current gerrymandering system. For example, we have a Republican majority in Congress despite the fact that 55% of the votes for Congressmen in the last election were for Democrats.
What does "55% of the votes for congressmen" mean? Are you seriously trying to argue that because democrats in some states got more votes than the republicans in others, that those republicans shouldn't be there? Let's use a simple example to see if you really mean what you are saying or not.
In State A, a democrat congressman wins with a vote of 200,000 to 100,000. In State B, a republican wins with a vote of 50,000 to 40,000. The "total" vote for democrats was 240,000, the total for republicans was just 140,000. Should the republican be replaced by a democrat because of this? Or would that be stripping the right to representation from those in state B?
This difference may have nothing at all to do with Gerrymandering, it simply has to do with the relative populations of various states and districts. And natural differences in population density and proclivities. For example, Oregon has two major population centers, half a dozen medium ones, and lots and lots of empty space. The major centers, and some of the mediums, are heavily democratic. A lot of the rest of the state is republican. It is impossible to draw reasonable district boundaries that completely balance voter numbers without also making those districts heavily biased one way or the other.
By the way, the last Oregon redistricting was done by a Democrat controlled Oregon Senate and a Democrat Governor, with an evenly split House. You can't blame "republican bias" in the US Congress on gerrymandering by nasty republicans. And you can't claim that the evil Republicans in Congress did the gerrymandering that keep them there, since the US Congress doesn't decide the district boundaries.
You seem to think that the USA is one homogenous federal area where the federal government is in total control. National elections for president must naturally be a simple tally of all the votes, under that imaginary system. But the system that exists should be a red flag indicating that your simplistic view is the wrong view. Those of us in smaller states appreciate very much the ability to have some say in the Presidential election, and would even go so far as to call for a system where that small say is made larger, not eliminated altogether. Don't feel too bad about your ignorance, it is propagated by the mainstream media who seem to think that there is some significance to the "national vote total" and strive to be the first to tell you what it is.
They both tell you what's happening, but the problem with the second sentence is that you refrained from mentioning why they're censoring the book,
They both describe the same situation. Now, it is interesting that you note that the second sentence doesn't tell you why they are "censoring" the book, so apparently saying they are "censoring" the book doesn't add anything to the description of what is happening. That is why it is meaningless.
Not even the first sentence is entirely clear since it uses subjective words like "decency"; you need a bit more information than that to grasp the entire situation.
No, I don't, because it isn't my interpretation of decency that is being used, and it doesn't matter what I think is indecent or not. The reason the company decided to stop selling the book is spelled out clearly. It fails to meet their decency standards. The job of defining what those standards are is neither yours nor mine. You may want to argue with them about their standards, but the fact remains that the first sentence tells you why they acted and the second doesn't tell you what they did at all.
Again, it's not that it's not true;
The implication is that LBS, Inc is cutting pages out of the book, or is in some way trying to prevent any access to that book by anyone. Neither is true, but that's the desired implication when someone uses the word "censorship". You've done it yourself when you claimed that a book seller who isn't selling a book is trying to prevent anyone from getting a copy.
it's just that people are using a word in ways that you disagree with.
Well, yes, that is obvious. I disagree with turning valid, meaningful words into meaningless hyperbole, and that is what has happened to "censorship", as demonstrated by this entire discussion.
so far as I know no one was ever booted by their ISP for running a VPN or hosting a multi-player game (though occasionally their networks settings made it difficult to do things).
The second reason for a written ban was so that when you complained that their network settings were making it difficult to run your multi-player game server, they could say "you aren't supposed to be doing that" and they could ignore you, instead of waste, I means expend, engineer time fixing it.
I don't think it's useless, but say what you will.
One action, two sentences that describe it. Which one means something, using the new definition of censorship?
Now, to me, sentence one tells me exactly what is happening and why. Sentence two says nothing specific except the name of the company and the title of the book. Did they just decide not to sell it because it wasn't selling well, or are they actually getting the publisher to withdraw it so nobody can buy it, or was there a legal challenge somewhere that forced the decision, or what? Is LBS, Inc actually paying someone to sit in the warehouse cutting pages out of the paper copy? Did they redact large sections of the electronic version? You see, the word "censoring" added exactly nothing to the content or meaning of the sentence and only created confusion.
Now, I understand that the emotional value of sentence 2 for someone who wants to stir up a frenzy about big bad awful LargeBookSeller is important, and that's why the word "censoring" was used. It brings to mind a large megacompany pouring tons of legal money and talent onto the poor helpless author trying to force his work off of the face of the planet. But that's not what actually happened. This abuse of the word creates an implication that is not true. That's the only reason to use it when it truly means anything the writer wants it to mean.
If the offsets don't do what they advertise, it isn't Al Gore's fault that they don't.
When it is his company he's buying them from, it is.
Generation Investment Management is a multi-national (offices in New York and London) investment strategy company. In other words, they exist to make a profit off of investing in ... whatever they can make a profit from investing in.
The "About Us" page claims there are 55 people who "represent[s] 16 countries and speaks 21 languages." The only financial disclosure I can find at that site lists "Investment Management" remuneration at a total of GPB19,742,000. That's US$31,567,458, or an average of US$574,000 per "investment manager".
Now, how much does Mr. Gore pay in "carbon offsets"? I can't find a number, but this NY Times article says that a competing company (TerraPass) would charge about $1300 for a house such as Gore's.
$1300 spent for at least a $574,000 income? (And as Chairman, you can't expect Mr. Gore to make less than the average for his employees, can you?)
This article defending Gore reports Gore's office saying:
No, I think even right-wingers can understand what's going on.
And publishers have always chosen which books to keep in print and which to allow to fade away. This fits your useless definition of censorship, too. This is even closer to the original meaning since it truly does keep people from buying a copy, at least a freshly printed one. "Censorship! Evil Publisher!" This clearly calls for pitchforks and blazing torches. "Monster! Burn the witches!"
But no, this is business as it has always been. What you miss is that Amazon dropping a book doesn't mean it is unavailable any longer, it only means you can't buy it from Amazon. This is perhaps the most egregious part of this discussion, the hyperbole that pounces from every corner. Nobody can buy anything unless it comes from (insert name of favorite bookstore).
The truth is Amazon is hardly the only source of books. I've found many books at other book seller's sites. I've found eBooks at sites where Amazon didn't have that form -- is this censorship? In a digital world the epub is king, and failing to provide in the modern form is suppression of distribution of a kind unacceptable to the digiterati. It is censorship of the most meaningless kind.
Why would you call it "censorship" instead of "doesn't stock" except for the pejorative meaning and an attempt at painting the errant vendor in a negative light? What is gained by using the emotionally laden term if emotion is not the goal? Is there any real emotion relevant to "doesn't stock", except perhaps boredom on the part of the casual observer and mild annoyance on the part of the buyer?
You argued that forcing people to buy health insurance would be bad.
I argued that your understanding of the mandate for car insurance is very poor, since not everyone is forced to buy that insurance and it is not a federal mandate. I argued that your claim that the mandate for car insurance is "working well" and "minimal government intervention" is laughable at best. You seem to continue to think that this is a good model for how a federal mandate for forcing everyone to buy health insurance should operate.
Yes, if you assume what you want to prove, it doesn't matter how you get there. You might as well use the imperfect car insurance example and ignore the facts that contradict your claims.
The grocery store is private property. If you don't want anyone watching you as you wander about their private property, perhaps you shouldn't be there?
It still does, but you simply disagree with how people are using it. Still, I'm curious as to what you think it used to mean.
This.
The Production Code Administration was true censorship, and even though it wasn't a government official, it did control what was produced. Not just sold, but what made it to film.
This wasn't a case of simply finding a different movie house to view the film you wanted to see, it simply wasn't made.
In 1942, Byron Price published this article identifying censorship as an evil, albeit a necessary evil during time of war. He was the US Director of Censorship, and even he admitted it was evil. Even as late as that time, censorship was viewed as "bad".
Today, it means any limit put on anyone's free expression in any medium. It's "censorship" if Jeff Bezos decides not to sell a book based on its content. But amazingly, it is not censorship if a librarian decides not to buy a book for the library based on the content. This makes "censorship" a useless word. Ultimately, is it not suppression of your right of free expression if I choose not to read your article in /., and even moreso if I choose not to buy your book? That makes it "censorship" under this useless definition.
And please don't tell me that those who cry "censorship" when denouncing the evil capitalist Amazon or BandN or whatever aren't trying to draw on the collective memory of when censorship truly was a bad thing and not a normal part of everyday life. They count on the pejorative meaning sticking to the victim, not the useless one.
While the amount of greenhouse gas used now by low-income countries isn't high, improving their electric grid and using renewable resources will not only decrease the rate of growth in CO2, but it will also be a good test bed for building a new grid. Eventually these new areas will ramp up demand and there will need to be something there.
This. The issue is not how little they produce today, but how can we tell them "no" when they want to produce more tomorrow? They won't want to wait for the zero-carbon final solution in a decade, they want to join the developed world today. Any attempt to tell them how bad it will be for the globe if they do would be viewed with the same disdain population control discussions are.
If we assume arguendo that universal health insurance is a goal,
Yes, assume what you want as the result and then everything else falls into place naturally.
do you see a specific problem with using the car insurance model as a way to achieve that goal?
Yes, and I've told you why twice.
Or are you ranting just to rant?
It's not my rant. I simply pointed out your errors of fact in one statement ("everyone" doesn't have to buy car insurance), and then had to point out that since "everyone" doesn't have to buy car insurance using it as a model for a system where everyone DOES have to buy something is ridiculous. Your only response was that you didn't really mean "everyone", but "everyone" is applicable to the case you want to assume.
Add on that this is hardly the "minimal government involvement" model that you keep claiming it is, and, well ... the only way to get to your desired end-point in your argument is to assume, arguendo, that you've arrived. "Now arriving on track 27, we assume a train of a certain number of passengers in a certain number of cars. ..." Perhaps we should assume a spherical train?
protip: when normal people say
Thanks for the handy tip on knowing when people use word they don't really mean. In this case, the difference between "everyone" and "not really everyone, just all the people I want to refer to" is significant. Protip: use the right words. It makes communication in a written medium easier.
Do we want everyone to have car insurance?
It would be nice if everyone who operates a motor vehicle on the public streets had coverage for their vehicle, but should it be a mandate? The issue comes when an uninsured driver causes damage to another person. How do we protect the other driver?
Do we want everyone to have health insurance?
Do we WANT them to, or do we want to DEMAND that they have it? Gosh, pesky words that have meaning getting in the way of communicating. I assume you mean the latter based on the context, although you said the former.
The answer is "no" we should not demand that people buy something they don't need or want, and the failure to have does not create a danger to others. If the failure of someone to have health insurance just to exist in the US were to cause damage to another person, maybe. But your uninsured kidney failure doesn't cause a medical problem for me. That's how this differs from car insurance. You driving your car into mine does cause damage that YOU need to pay for.
I take no stance here on those issues, all I'm saying is since we've decided to do both, why not use the successfully approach for the former as a model for the latter?
Because 1) not everybody is forced to buy car insurance and they are forced to buy health insurance, 2) the STATE requires insurance for cars driven on the public streets, not the federal government, and 3) the issues covered by the two kinds of insurance are vastly different.
And BTW, by the wording of your question and attempt at arguing semantics of "everyone" you are, indeed, expressing a position. It's no different than a push-pollster trying to influence an election by his choice of poll questions.
Solve the "problem" of getting everyone health insurance with the least possible government involvement,
A federal mandate to "buy this or pay the government a fine" is hardly "least possible government involvement", just as "buy this or you can't drive your car on the streets" is "minimal government involvement".
Well, that question answered itself.
Yes, it did. Given the context of the questions it could not have ended differently.