Major financial centers can go down fairly easily, money being mobile. Catering to Western and Japanese tourists is not a way to maintain a large economy.
Right now there is no religious war in the middle east.
Last I looked there was a lot of fighting involving a group that claimed to be the new Caliphate, which allegedly should have dominion over all Muslims and use that to rule the world. It's different from the usual Muslim-Jew wars and the Sunni-Shiite wars, but they're all religious.
The baby boom generation is a problem only by its great size. The environment is far better than when my generation first got a chance to control it. I don't know what you mean by socially irresponsible, but crime rates have fallen during its dominance. The boomers took advantage of the financial opportunities they got, just like other generations.
The financial problem is the divorce of productivity and pay starting roughly around 1980. Reagan's big appeal was to people over 30 by then, which means people born in 1950 or earlier. Supply-side or trickle-down economics were primarily the result of the "Greatest Generation".
People absolutely hate falling standards of living. We're seeing social unrest in the US because it's harder to earn a decent living than it used to be. The elderly are likely to accept some decline, but if it starts cutting into the working-age standard of living there's going to be problems.
It's not money. It's goods and services. We can produce a certain amount of both, which is limited at any given time (and, one would hope, tending upwards over the years). Services are transient, and many goods are too, so we have to keep up production to maintain the same wealth. We have to keep producing enough food for everyone over and over, and most things wear out and have to be replaced.
Money is a claim on the goods and services. Without the goods and services, it's useless. Confederate money is just pretty paper, because it isn't a valid claim.
Unless we reach the Singularity, we're going to need working people to provide goods and services, and these people are going to have to make enough to give everyone enough stuff. Having a rapidly rising population means there's a lot of economically unproductive children, and having a rapidly aging population means there's a lot of economically unproductive or underproductive elderly, and that means that what working people produce has to be spread more thinly.
To put it in terms of money, as the population ages a lot of us old farts are going to need more nursing care, while the supply of people in the right age group to be nurses stays steady or diminishes. That means that nurses will become more expensive. Presumably this will attract people into nursing, but that will take people from other productive areas, so the supply of other stuff will get strained and get more expensive.
What we're going to see if we go along this path is inflation, since we'll have more demand for stuff and less supply. The money we've been putting away for retirement will be worth less and less.
Natural monopolies are created by high barriers to entry. The need to buy expensive infrastructure to enter the market is a barrier to entry.
How many power lines, internet connectivity lines, phone lines, water pipes, sewer pipes, cable TV lines, and gas pipes do you think I should have going into my property?
Depends. There's likely to be a road monopoly, and the owner has the right to bar whoever he or she wants from driving on the roads. If there's multiple stretches owned by different people, someone's likely to not care about maintenance, and there's nothing you can do. If not, someone went through and bought up all the rights of way, and had to pay what the land owners demanded or reroute. The system may well work in many places, but the failure cases can be very serious.
More like "Hi! I have pictures that prove you have a 'girl on the side'; do you want me to show them to your wife? No? OK, then please stop seeing that girl or your wife will receive the pictures."
I don't see that CNN acknowledged that identifying the guy would put him in danger. Apparently, the guy really doesn't want to be identified for undisclosed reasons. It's quite possible that the guy would suffer harm if identified, and Slashdot groupthink on that is "You put it on the net, you idiot! Shame on you!" The guy apparently proposed an agreement for anonymity, and CNN has pointed out that violating that agreement will result in removal of anonymity. CNN has not threatened him over anything else.
Do you have an actual point? The guy was apparently afraid of how perfectly normal reporting would affect him. That doesn't mean he has the right to censor a news source.
Nobody else is citing the correspondence before declaring CNN guilty of something or other. Why should I wait for it to suggest CNN's innocence?
Please name the goods, money, or services CNN wanted in exchange for anonymity. Please explain to me that, when one entity intended to do Y in response to another doing X, the first entity's change of mind is binding if the second does X again.
The person was lawfully exercising their first amendment right, and in no way was the government involved, so that's not an issue. The expectation of anonymity doesn't mean someone's identity is actually protected - at least not in the US, some EU countries might have laws about that. Lots of people here have warned that what you publish on the net may come back and bite you.
You don't get to decide what's in the public's interest. You are free to select news sources that operate the way you want them to. In this case, the President used the video in a public communication, which means it's automatically newsworthy. The creator is then somewhat newsworthy. Moreover, it's always been true that news media (and everybody else, for that matter) view things as they pertain to them. Since CNN was targeted in the video, any intelligent person would have to have expected them to take an interest.
In the US, the right to privacy is very limited, particularly when dealing with a private organization. There's an assumption of privacy for people who aren't newsworthy, but someone can become newsworthy at any moment. One morning, when I was finishing breakfast and getting ready to go to work, a TV reporter asked me about my next door neighbor being a suspected SS war criminal, and didn't seem to have any problem with revealing anyone's identity. I never signed any waiver or anything. (Yes, that's one of the weirder things to happen in my life.) I did in fact take Internet flak from talking about being sure and giving second chances. I don't know where you're from, but that's how things go in the US.
Therefore, CNN investigated and found out who the guy was, and I have no reason to think they used any illegal means. The guy did not want to be publicly identified, so he deleted all the offensive stuff he'd posted and offered to never do it again, and CNN agreed to not publish his identity as long as he didn't do it again.
CNN has the right to violate anyone's privacy to the extent of naming names. They usually do only if relevant to a story they're running. In some cases, they will agree to preserve anonymity. The guy in question apparently really wanted to remain anonymous, despite having no legal right to anonymity. The Slashdot groupthink on things like this is generally "serves him right for posting, should have expected this".
To summarize, CNN was going to publish the identify of a guy who made a video the President communicated to the public that mocked a news organization. The news organization investigated, and got his identity. The guy pleaded for anonymity, and volunteered to take down the offensive stuff he'd posted in exchange for it. CNN accepted the offer, but warned that they would not grant anonymity again for the same actions. The "or else" is having the guy's identity revealed, and the guy already modified his speech.
We agree that the guy had the right to do what he did, but in fact free speech can come with consequences in terms of lawful private action, and he didn't want those consequences.
No, the First Amendment (along with the Fourteenth) says that the government may not restrict what you say, what you publish, how you worship, or forbid gathering and protesting peacefully. It doesn't mean private entities are bound to that. Should Muslims be free to set up prayer services in a Catholic church? Should I be free to chase peaceful protesters off my lawn?
Murder is illegal. What we have here is a guy doing something, CNN planning to publish his identity, the guy argues against it and does certain things, and CNN will publish if he does those things again. My brother argued his way out of a parking ticket recently, but the official he talked to said he wouldn't get away with that again. Exact same thing.
The President's words and actions are newsworthy. Anything the government does related to them is also newsworthy. A group of Afghani girls entering an international robotics competition is newsworthy, and anything significant about them is therefore at least marginally newsworthy.
Printing inflammatory rhetoric against the President is a time-honored American tradition that I really don't want to go away. The President should always be faced with the consequences of what he did or said.
I'd assume visas are denied all the time with no evidence of problems. AFAIK, there's no real accountability, and the bureaucratic way is to deny requests when halfway reasonable because that's usually the safe decision.
I'm lazy, but I used to keep track of what money I had available at all times. Then I got to the point that my wife and I were making more money than we needed for our lifestyle, and so there's plenty of reserve money for odd expenses. Probably after retirement I'll have to start being more careful.
I don't like the idea of "plenty of low-cost alternatives" here. She earned a diploma, and I consider it unacceptable to deny it because she chose a potentially reasonable alternative that wasn't covered. There are people who can make a reasonable income, enough to support a family (I'd suggest that the US median household income of $56K has got to be more than enough), and marrying one of those right out of high school with intent to stay home and raise a family sounds like a plan to me. I'd strongly advocate having a backup plan if the marriage goes sour, and a high school diploma is useful in that.
Slashdot Mirror
Major financial centers can go down fairly easily, money being mobile. Catering to Western and Japanese tourists is not a way to maintain a large economy.
Last I looked there was a lot of fighting involving a group that claimed to be the new Caliphate, which allegedly should have dominion over all Muslims and use that to rule the world. It's different from the usual Muslim-Jew wars and the Sunni-Shiite wars, but they're all religious.
Which one unified empire that lasted for thousands of years? I hadn't noticed multi-millennium gaps in my history books and historical atlases.
I prefer Truth and Beauty, much as I prefer gigabytes as 2^30 bytes, and calling certain dinosaurs brontosauri.
Besides, I named the cats Truth and Beauty.
Love your comments in this thread, but you're making me wish H.P. Lovecraft could have studied modern particle physics.
That's a VERY long-range goal. How many people do you need for a modern technological economy in isolation? A hundred thousand? Ten million?
The baby boom generation is a problem only by its great size. The environment is far better than when my generation first got a chance to control it. I don't know what you mean by socially irresponsible, but crime rates have fallen during its dominance. The boomers took advantage of the financial opportunities they got, just like other generations.
The financial problem is the divorce of productivity and pay starting roughly around 1980. Reagan's big appeal was to people over 30 by then, which means people born in 1950 or earlier. Supply-side or trickle-down economics were primarily the result of the "Greatest Generation".
I'm curious. How do we solve this problem with a bit of political will? Round up undesirables and force them to live in rural Nebraska?
People absolutely hate falling standards of living. We're seeing social unrest in the US because it's harder to earn a decent living than it used to be. The elderly are likely to accept some decline, but if it starts cutting into the working-age standard of living there's going to be problems.
Money is a claim on the goods and services. Without the goods and services, it's useless. Confederate money is just pretty paper, because it isn't a valid claim.
Unless we reach the Singularity, we're going to need working people to provide goods and services, and these people are going to have to make enough to give everyone enough stuff. Having a rapidly rising population means there's a lot of economically unproductive children, and having a rapidly aging population means there's a lot of economically unproductive or underproductive elderly, and that means that what working people produce has to be spread more thinly.
To put it in terms of money, as the population ages a lot of us old farts are going to need more nursing care, while the supply of people in the right age group to be nurses stays steady or diminishes. That means that nurses will become more expensive. Presumably this will attract people into nursing, but that will take people from other productive areas, so the supply of other stuff will get strained and get more expensive.
What we're going to see if we go along this path is inflation, since we'll have more demand for stuff and less supply. The money we've been putting away for retirement will be worth less and less.
Natural monopolies are created by high barriers to entry. The need to buy expensive infrastructure to enter the market is a barrier to entry.
How many power lines, internet connectivity lines, phone lines, water pipes, sewer pipes, cable TV lines, and gas pipes do you think I should have going into my property?
Depends. There's likely to be a road monopoly, and the owner has the right to bar whoever he or she wants from driving on the roads. If there's multiple stretches owned by different people, someone's likely to not care about maintenance, and there's nothing you can do. If not, someone went through and bought up all the rights of way, and had to pay what the land owners demanded or reroute. The system may well work in many places, but the failure cases can be very serious.
More like "Hi! I have pictures that prove you have a 'girl on the side'; do you want me to show them to your wife? No? OK, then please stop seeing that girl or your wife will receive the pictures."
I don't see that CNN acknowledged that identifying the guy would put him in danger. Apparently, the guy really doesn't want to be identified for undisclosed reasons. It's quite possible that the guy would suffer harm if identified, and Slashdot groupthink on that is "You put it on the net, you idiot! Shame on you!" The guy apparently proposed an agreement for anonymity, and CNN has pointed out that violating that agreement will result in removal of anonymity. CNN has not threatened him over anything else.
Do you have an actual point? The guy was apparently afraid of how perfectly normal reporting would affect him. That doesn't mean he has the right to censor a news source.
Nobody else is citing the correspondence before declaring CNN guilty of something or other. Why should I wait for it to suggest CNN's innocence?
Please name the goods, money, or services CNN wanted in exchange for anonymity. Please explain to me that, when one entity intended to do Y in response to another doing X, the first entity's change of mind is binding if the second does X again.
The person was lawfully exercising their first amendment right, and in no way was the government involved, so that's not an issue. The expectation of anonymity doesn't mean someone's identity is actually protected - at least not in the US, some EU countries might have laws about that. Lots of people here have warned that what you publish on the net may come back and bite you.
You don't get to decide what's in the public's interest. You are free to select news sources that operate the way you want them to. In this case, the President used the video in a public communication, which means it's automatically newsworthy. The creator is then somewhat newsworthy. Moreover, it's always been true that news media (and everybody else, for that matter) view things as they pertain to them. Since CNN was targeted in the video, any intelligent person would have to have expected them to take an interest.
In the US, the right to privacy is very limited, particularly when dealing with a private organization. There's an assumption of privacy for people who aren't newsworthy, but someone can become newsworthy at any moment. One morning, when I was finishing breakfast and getting ready to go to work, a TV reporter asked me about my next door neighbor being a suspected SS war criminal, and didn't seem to have any problem with revealing anyone's identity. I never signed any waiver or anything. (Yes, that's one of the weirder things to happen in my life.) I did in fact take Internet flak from talking about being sure and giving second chances. I don't know where you're from, but that's how things go in the US.
Therefore, CNN investigated and found out who the guy was, and I have no reason to think they used any illegal means. The guy did not want to be publicly identified, so he deleted all the offensive stuff he'd posted and offered to never do it again, and CNN agreed to not publish his identity as long as he didn't do it again.
CNN has the right to violate anyone's privacy to the extent of naming names. They usually do only if relevant to a story they're running. In some cases, they will agree to preserve anonymity. The guy in question apparently really wanted to remain anonymous, despite having no legal right to anonymity. The Slashdot groupthink on things like this is generally "serves him right for posting, should have expected this".
To summarize, CNN was going to publish the identify of a guy who made a video the President communicated to the public that mocked a news organization. The news organization investigated, and got his identity. The guy pleaded for anonymity, and volunteered to take down the offensive stuff he'd posted in exchange for it. CNN accepted the offer, but warned that they would not grant anonymity again for the same actions. The "or else" is having the guy's identity revealed, and the guy already modified his speech.
We agree that the guy had the right to do what he did, but in fact free speech can come with consequences in terms of lawful private action, and he didn't want those consequences.
We agree that no crime was committed. Therefore, CNN not having power to enforce criminal law is completely irrelevant.
No, the First Amendment (along with the Fourteenth) says that the government may not restrict what you say, what you publish, how you worship, or forbid gathering and protesting peacefully. It doesn't mean private entities are bound to that. Should Muslims be free to set up prayer services in a Catholic church? Should I be free to chase peaceful protesters off my lawn?
Murder is illegal. What we have here is a guy doing something, CNN planning to publish his identity, the guy argues against it and does certain things, and CNN will publish if he does those things again. My brother argued his way out of a parking ticket recently, but the official he talked to said he wouldn't get away with that again. Exact same thing.
The President's words and actions are newsworthy. Anything the government does related to them is also newsworthy. A group of Afghani girls entering an international robotics competition is newsworthy, and anything significant about them is therefore at least marginally newsworthy.
Printing inflammatory rhetoric against the President is a time-honored American tradition that I really don't want to go away. The President should always be faced with the consequences of what he did or said.
I'd assume visas are denied all the time with no evidence of problems. AFAIK, there's no real accountability, and the bureaucratic way is to deny requests when halfway reasonable because that's usually the safe decision.
I'm lazy, but I used to keep track of what money I had available at all times. Then I got to the point that my wife and I were making more money than we needed for our lifestyle, and so there's plenty of reserve money for odd expenses. Probably after retirement I'll have to start being more careful.
I don't like the idea of "plenty of low-cost alternatives" here. She earned a diploma, and I consider it unacceptable to deny it because she chose a potentially reasonable alternative that wasn't covered. There are people who can make a reasonable income, enough to support a family (I'd suggest that the US median household income of $56K has got to be more than enough), and marrying one of those right out of high school with intent to stay home and raise a family sounds like a plan to me. I'd strongly advocate having a backup plan if the marriage goes sour, and a high school diploma is useful in that.
There's software for that now.
Prospective Employer: "You're going to work, sorta, up to the day you get your diploma, then you're going to never show up here again. Right?"