Do you have the slightest evidence that Google examines thoughtcrime and gets rid of the offenders, let alone can enforce industry-wide blacklists? If you're going to throw James Damore at me, read the proceedings of the Labor Board that heard his case. He wasn't fired for having unpopular views. He was fired for being obnoxious and disruptive about them.
Not as long as we've still got some semblance of Net Neutrality, and a reasonable DNS system, that can't happen. If you can go to an arbitrary web address, nobody can control what you can see. If the Daily Stormer can get a host, you can. Google and Facebook can control only what you do on their sites.
Zuckerberg can prevent you from putting something on Facebook. He can't stop you from putting it elsewhere. Facebook is top dog now, but if it annoys too many people that can change. Twitter could lose top dog status even faster, since it doesn't have quite the same network effect.
Do you realize what you'd have to do to get your say in, say, the 1960s? News was controlled by relatively few organizations. You technically could start your own paper, but it would be expensive to get it out to people, and the distribution could be stopped relatively easily. Unless you had something satisfactory to the mainstream, you were mostly silenced.
Now you're bitching, not because you can't say what you want, but because you can't say what you want on somebody else's podium. Get your own. The Daily Stormer could do it, and so can you.
That's REAL tenuous. The hippies had very little political power or influence. The establishment of the time scorned them. They got some of the things they wanted, but largely for other reasons.
You can trace fear of nukes back before the hippies. There were 1950s movies about monsters created by radioactivity. That's basically the theme of Godzilla. At that time, nuclear deterrence relied on fragile bombers, considered vulnerable on the ground and effectively unstoppable in the air. There was no solid evidence that mutually assured destruction would work. (Damn, I'm bringing up memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis I could do without.)
Anti-nuclear protesters are one reason why we don't have more nuclear power plants, but there are others. If people in general were comfortable with the things, the protesters wouldn't be nearly as effective. At the time, nuclear plants were dubious financially, because nobody really knew the cost at the end of service life.
IIRC, Project Orion saw a nuclear takeoff from Earth, which isn't the most reassuring concept of the Space Race. It required large amounts of nukes to get into space, back when we didn't have decades of experience in getting stuff into space. The "what could possibly go wrong?" was terrifying. Remember the nuclear aircraft proposals? There were good reasons those never got off the ground.
Fusion plants? Maybe. I'm still not convinced they're going to be practical. We're at a point where we get positive energy under carefully defined constraints, and we know a whole lot more about the science behind fusion power than we did then. I have vague memories of nuclear power being pushed as incredibly cheap, and I don't think fusion would turn out to be as good as its advocates sometimes say.
So, assume that there were no anti-nukers back then. We'd have made more nuclear plants. We'd have put a lot more radioactives into the atmosphere. We'd use significantly less coal, which would help reduce global warming. We'd still be using coal power plants. They wouldn't have gone away entirely by now. We'd still be burning oil.
Assume that fusion power were too cheap to meter, at least on the residential level, and that fusion plants were reasonably inexpensive and safe and producing all those neutrons is harmless. That doesn't solve our energy problems. It solves our electricity problems. Electricity isn't portable. We're just now getting practical electric cars, with experiments into electric ships and aircraft. This isn't a matter of electricity being expensive, but rather that storage is difficult.
What would cheap electricity do to stop wars in Africa? Wars typically don't happen because there's not enough electricity.
They did. A look at the map shows that a foreign power in control of Estonia would be very dangerous to Leningrad (to use the period name) and a lot of industry and manpower. Historically, the Soviets controlled the Baltic states and the Germans still got to the outskirts of Leningrad.
The Soviets had a legitimate security concern that Germany might move into the Baltic states to prepare an attack against the Soviet Union. The British and French simply refused to consider that and didn't offer any other suggestions. Would the Soviets have been satisfied by treaty commitments to attack Germany in case any foreign troops entered the Baltic States? We'll never know, because the West refused to consider any such possibility.
The free market, basically. Different sites will have different standards, and those will give the companies more or less profit. The companies will normally go in the direction of more profit.
I don't see what's so hard about this. Sites that give their consumers what they want will have more consumers they can sell to actual customers. Most people don't want what you want. That doesn't mean you're wrong, of course; lots of us have unusual preferences.
Consider a grocery store that needs one clerk to operate. When the store is open in the late evening, it makes $50/hour profit, not counting what's paid to the clerk. If the clerk is there, the owner collects that profit. If the clerk is not, then the store is perforce closed. Having the clerk there is the difference between $50/hour profit and no profit. (Assume that the store is profitable in the daytime and the early evening, and that all non-clerk stuff is done then.)
Therefore, the clerk is worth $50/hour to the owner, It doesn't matter what any other financials are. If the clerk can be gotten for less than $50/hour, the clerk's worth his or her pay.
Now, what does the owner pay the clerk? The answer is, of course, as little as the owner can get away with. If the owner can hire a clerk for $10/hour, the owner will hire the clerk and pay $10/hour. If the owner can hire a clerk for $15/hour and no lower, then the owner will hire the clerk and pay $15/hour. There's obviously a limit, and if the clerk costs pretty close to $50/hour all told the owner's likely to just close the store in the late evening.
Therefore, there is a difference between how much an employee is paid and how much they're worth.
You're now claiming that paying people a minimum wage cuts into profits to the point where it will hurt the economy. For most businesses, the cost of low-wage employees is not a large part of the expenses. (This isn't the case in every business, of course. Certain farms have been heavily reliant on abusable low-wage illegal immigrants, and they can't pay legal workers enough to pick the fruit without going bankrupt. That's an exception, though.) Having to pay them higher wages doesn't significantly affect profits. Moreover, we're a long way away from demand-driven inflation and have been for a long time. Giving money to people who will spend it instead of those who won't will typically be good for the economy in general. In our example, if the clerk gets an extra $5/hour, the clerk will spend it and raise the profits of those who sell what the clerk buys.
So, becoming more valuable to one's employer won't necessarily result in being paid significantly more. If the clerk somehow attracts double the business, the owner's likely to give the clerk a small raise, not in proportion to the extra $50/hour profit, since that's still more money than the clerk is likely to get elsewhere.
You may have noticed that productivity has gone way up in the past several decades, and inflation-adjusted wages haven't. That's empirical evidence that being more productive doesn't mean being paid more.
And, of course, you're wrong about unions, which have fixed a lot of problems for workers. What they do is change the amount of bargaining leverage workers have vs. owners to be more equitable.
See? I don't see any short-term hope of changing this world-view to a more realistic one, even when confronted with verifiable facts. The Southern Strategy wasn't racist, despite statements from the people involved. The programs that harm black communities were done by Democrats, ignoring how the War on Drugs was declared.
It seems a bit harsh to blame people for mismanaging provided resources as pre-teens. If they were mature and knowledgeable enough to manage their lives, why would we consider them minors?
Education is worth real money, yes. Past the high school level, it's also really expensive and has been going up much faster than inflation. The guy with the Ph.D. either had richer parents or is stuck with large student loans.
Lots of people work hard, at least much harder than I do. Most of them make a lot less than I do. They know the value of hard effort. Pretty low. However, they have to do it.
There is nothing I or the government can do to raise people's real wages; people can only earn what their labor is actually worth to other people.
So, what's "actually worth"? There's now much the workers benefit the company, and there's what the company can replace the workers for. The former would seem to be actual worth, and the latter is what the company will pay.
An attempt to raise pay above how much the worker contributes to the company won't work. An attempt to raise pay above the current replacement rate can work very nicely, as long as it doesn't raise too many people's pay above their worth to the company.
Assume a not particularly skilled job that provides $50/hour to the company. With a minimum wage of $10/hour, the company pays $10/hour. Let's say that employee cost is double the pay. Now, the company pays $20/hour for a minimum wage worker, and makes $30/hour profit. Raise the minimum wage to $15, and the company pays $30/hour for a profit of $20/hour.
This shows that raising the minimum wage doesn't necessarily hurt employment significantly. There's also more economic activity with the poor having more spending money, so that tends to help the economy.
That's basic economics. Learn about supply-demand curves and how they work.
The best way to raise people's real wages is to tell them the truth: they need to improve themselves and figure out how to become more useful and productive members of society.
Ah yes, if someone isn't rich, it's because they didn't choose to be, and therefore they're to be blamed. Telling people to make more money is useless, since most people really want to make more money. They'll normally try to improve themselves all on their own if the money's there. And then, as they become more useful and productive members of society...they still get underpaid because the companies manipulate the labor market.
Because most people like getting filtered content. They don't want to have to go around and block every source of hate speech individually. If a social media site is to keep enough people to monetize successfully, they have to provide something a large number of people will want.
However, because people whose ideas you like are crap at expressing them in a generally acceptable manner, you want to regulate private companies into bankruptcy.
Boldfacing an argument doesn't actually make it stronger.
There are claims that have evidence, and claims that don't. There are claims with lots of evidence, and claims with very little. There are claims that stand up to tests, and claims that are made sometimes and always refuted in the same way. Establishment science is usually pretty much right. It's possible to challenge it, but to do so usefully takes evidence. There have been corrections in establishment science, but they almost all came from people who were thoroughly familiar with the currently accepted science.
Repeating the same lame claim over and over again doesn't help anything. When one person is saying something that's backed by lots of evidence, and there's five other people pulling ideas out of their asses, mandating equal treatment is a Bad Idea.
What you will get in such a case is a discussion where nobody knows anything significant and nobody has evidence, because all the people with a clue will be discouraged and leave.
You're making handwavy arguments without references and then saying it shows that the gravitational constant has varied significantly over a fairly short time (in astronomical or even geological scales). Have you considered what other things a changing gravitational constant might affect?
A quick Google search finds references that say that some dinosaurs were actually at the size limits for their particular shape, but not over. I don't see any backing for it, but I don't see any reference to support in your claims either.
You seem to be under the delusion that US health care costs are reasonable. Last I checked, we paid about 50% more per capita than the next most expensive, and twice what lots of very healthy countries pay.
If we were able to reduce health care costs per capita to be only tied for first, we'd be able to more than double the defense budget or whatever we wanted to do. Two years of those savings would more than pay for the entire F-35 project.
So, it's not that Europe saves money on the military so it can afford universal health care. It's that their health care systems are relatively inexpensive.
There's also the question of how much defense Europe actually needs. I don't trust the US to judge European needs.
US health care is technically superb. It's also extremely expensive and not available to everyone in the US. There's a lot of medical tourism from the US, because it's often cheaper to go to another continent, pay full price for good medical practice, and take a nice vacation afterwards, than it is to get a procedure done in the US.
Socialized medicine is much cheaper and produces better overall results than the US "system".
The diplomatic history is interesting. Before WWII, the Soviets were negotiating with Britain and France for mutual defense treaties. The Western Allies did not take the negotiations seriously. The British envoy, in particular, had no authorization other than to pass things to and from the Foreign Ministry in London. There were other problems in the negotiations, and after a short while the Soviets decided to negotiate a non-aggression and economic treaty with Germany.
So, there's good reasons the Soviet Union started as a German ally.
That's as idiotic as saying "yeah smoking has severe consequences, do we need to stop doing it?"
Smoking has very few advantages. It can make asthmatics feel better, and there's at least talk that it can be moderately effective self-medication for schizophrenia. Almost everyone, if not everyone, who smokes would be better off quitting. What generally holds the smoker back is the fact that tobacco is addictive, not that (as in Woody Allen's "Sleeper") it's good for the smoker.
Burning fossil fuels has lots of advantages. It's an efficient way to get energy. Only recently have we been coming up with electricity sources that rival coal and natural gas in economy. Petroleum products are a wonderful way to get transportable energy, Not only is the energy already caught for us, it's in a really efficient portable form. If a smoker were to quite smoking cold turkey, the smoker would be better off. If we were to stop burning fossil fuels cold turkey, civilization would fall and billions would die.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have the slightest evidence that Google examines thoughtcrime and gets rid of the offenders, let alone can enforce industry-wide blacklists? If you're going to throw James Damore at me, read the proceedings of the Labor Board that heard his case. He wasn't fired for having unpopular views. He was fired for being obnoxious and disruptive about them.
Not as long as we've still got some semblance of Net Neutrality, and a reasonable DNS system, that can't happen. If you can go to an arbitrary web address, nobody can control what you can see. If the Daily Stormer can get a host, you can. Google and Facebook can control only what you do on their sites.
Zuckerberg can prevent you from putting something on Facebook. He can't stop you from putting it elsewhere. Facebook is top dog now, but if it annoys too many people that can change. Twitter could lose top dog status even faster, since it doesn't have quite the same network effect.
Do you realize what you'd have to do to get your say in, say, the 1960s? News was controlled by relatively few organizations. You technically could start your own paper, but it would be expensive to get it out to people, and the distribution could be stopped relatively easily. Unless you had something satisfactory to the mainstream, you were mostly silenced.
Now you're bitching, not because you can't say what you want, but because you can't say what you want on somebody else's podium. Get your own. The Daily Stormer could do it, and so can you.
That's REAL tenuous. The hippies had very little political power or influence. The establishment of the time scorned them. They got some of the things they wanted, but largely for other reasons.
You can trace fear of nukes back before the hippies. There were 1950s movies about monsters created by radioactivity. That's basically the theme of Godzilla. At that time, nuclear deterrence relied on fragile bombers, considered vulnerable on the ground and effectively unstoppable in the air. There was no solid evidence that mutually assured destruction would work. (Damn, I'm bringing up memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis I could do without.)
Anti-nuclear protesters are one reason why we don't have more nuclear power plants, but there are others. If people in general were comfortable with the things, the protesters wouldn't be nearly as effective. At the time, nuclear plants were dubious financially, because nobody really knew the cost at the end of service life.
IIRC, Project Orion saw a nuclear takeoff from Earth, which isn't the most reassuring concept of the Space Race. It required large amounts of nukes to get into space, back when we didn't have decades of experience in getting stuff into space. The "what could possibly go wrong?" was terrifying. Remember the nuclear aircraft proposals? There were good reasons those never got off the ground.
Fusion plants? Maybe. I'm still not convinced they're going to be practical. We're at a point where we get positive energy under carefully defined constraints, and we know a whole lot more about the science behind fusion power than we did then. I have vague memories of nuclear power being pushed as incredibly cheap, and I don't think fusion would turn out to be as good as its advocates sometimes say.
So, assume that there were no anti-nukers back then. We'd have made more nuclear plants. We'd have put a lot more radioactives into the atmosphere. We'd use significantly less coal, which would help reduce global warming. We'd still be using coal power plants. They wouldn't have gone away entirely by now. We'd still be burning oil.
Assume that fusion power were too cheap to meter, at least on the residential level, and that fusion plants were reasonably inexpensive and safe and producing all those neutrons is harmless. That doesn't solve our energy problems. It solves our electricity problems. Electricity isn't portable. We're just now getting practical electric cars, with experiments into electric ships and aircraft. This isn't a matter of electricity being expensive, but rather that storage is difficult.
What would cheap electricity do to stop wars in Africa? Wars typically don't happen because there's not enough electricity.
I'd bet that a significant quantity of dihydrogen monoxide could be found in her body tissues!
Wrong question. Of course there can be a year zero. The correct question is why there isn't one, and that's answered in detail.
They did. A look at the map shows that a foreign power in control of Estonia would be very dangerous to Leningrad (to use the period name) and a lot of industry and manpower. Historically, the Soviets controlled the Baltic states and the Germans still got to the outskirts of Leningrad.
The Soviets had a legitimate security concern that Germany might move into the Baltic states to prepare an attack against the Soviet Union. The British and French simply refused to consider that and didn't offer any other suggestions. Would the Soviets have been satisfied by treaty commitments to attack Germany in case any foreign troops entered the Baltic States? We'll never know, because the West refused to consider any such possibility.
The free market, basically. Different sites will have different standards, and those will give the companies more or less profit. The companies will normally go in the direction of more profit.
I don't see what's so hard about this. Sites that give their consumers what they want will have more consumers they can sell to actual customers. Most people don't want what you want. That doesn't mean you're wrong, of course; lots of us have unusual preferences.
Okay, let's get really specific here.
Consider a grocery store that needs one clerk to operate. When the store is open in the late evening, it makes $50/hour profit, not counting what's paid to the clerk. If the clerk is there, the owner collects that profit. If the clerk is not, then the store is perforce closed. Having the clerk there is the difference between $50/hour profit and no profit. (Assume that the store is profitable in the daytime and the early evening, and that all non-clerk stuff is done then.)
Therefore, the clerk is worth $50/hour to the owner, It doesn't matter what any other financials are. If the clerk can be gotten for less than $50/hour, the clerk's worth his or her pay.
Now, what does the owner pay the clerk? The answer is, of course, as little as the owner can get away with. If the owner can hire a clerk for $10/hour, the owner will hire the clerk and pay $10/hour. If the owner can hire a clerk for $15/hour and no lower, then the owner will hire the clerk and pay $15/hour. There's obviously a limit, and if the clerk costs pretty close to $50/hour all told the owner's likely to just close the store in the late evening.
Therefore, there is a difference between how much an employee is paid and how much they're worth.
You're now claiming that paying people a minimum wage cuts into profits to the point where it will hurt the economy. For most businesses, the cost of low-wage employees is not a large part of the expenses. (This isn't the case in every business, of course. Certain farms have been heavily reliant on abusable low-wage illegal immigrants, and they can't pay legal workers enough to pick the fruit without going bankrupt. That's an exception, though.) Having to pay them higher wages doesn't significantly affect profits. Moreover, we're a long way away from demand-driven inflation and have been for a long time. Giving money to people who will spend it instead of those who won't will typically be good for the economy in general. In our example, if the clerk gets an extra $5/hour, the clerk will spend it and raise the profits of those who sell what the clerk buys.
So, becoming more valuable to one's employer won't necessarily result in being paid significantly more. If the clerk somehow attracts double the business, the owner's likely to give the clerk a small raise, not in proportion to the extra $50/hour profit, since that's still more money than the clerk is likely to get elsewhere.
You may have noticed that productivity has gone way up in the past several decades, and inflation-adjusted wages haven't. That's empirical evidence that being more productive doesn't mean being paid more.
And, of course, you're wrong about unions, which have fixed a lot of problems for workers. What they do is change the amount of bargaining leverage workers have vs. owners to be more equitable.
See? I don't see any short-term hope of changing this world-view to a more realistic one, even when confronted with verifiable facts. The Southern Strategy wasn't racist, despite statements from the people involved. The programs that harm black communities were done by Democrats, ignoring how the War on Drugs was declared.
It seems a bit harsh to blame people for mismanaging provided resources as pre-teens. If they were mature and knowledgeable enough to manage their lives, why would we consider them minors?
Education is worth real money, yes. Past the high school level, it's also really expensive and has been going up much faster than inflation. The guy with the Ph.D. either had richer parents or is stuck with large student loans.
Lots of people work hard, at least much harder than I do. Most of them make a lot less than I do. They know the value of hard effort. Pretty low. However, they have to do it.
Of course, "the system" is not divinely ordained, and we can change it for the better. It won't be easy, but it can be done.
To ooloorie, Democrats and unions are necessarily racist, and Republicans aren't racist. Good luck shaking that belief.
So, what's "actually worth"? There's now much the workers benefit the company, and there's what the company can replace the workers for. The former would seem to be actual worth, and the latter is what the company will pay.
An attempt to raise pay above how much the worker contributes to the company won't work. An attempt to raise pay above the current replacement rate can work very nicely, as long as it doesn't raise too many people's pay above their worth to the company.
Assume a not particularly skilled job that provides $50/hour to the company. With a minimum wage of $10/hour, the company pays $10/hour. Let's say that employee cost is double the pay. Now, the company pays $20/hour for a minimum wage worker, and makes $30/hour profit. Raise the minimum wage to $15, and the company pays $30/hour for a profit of $20/hour.
This shows that raising the minimum wage doesn't necessarily hurt employment significantly. There's also more economic activity with the poor having more spending money, so that tends to help the economy.
That's basic economics. Learn about supply-demand curves and how they work.
Ah yes, if someone isn't rich, it's because they didn't choose to be, and therefore they're to be blamed. Telling people to make more money is useless, since most people really want to make more money. They'll normally try to improve themselves all on their own if the money's there. And then, as they become more useful and productive members of society...they still get underpaid because the companies manipulate the labor market.
Because most people like getting filtered content. They don't want to have to go around and block every source of hate speech individually. If a social media site is to keep enough people to monetize successfully, they have to provide something a large number of people will want.
However, because people whose ideas you like are crap at expressing them in a generally acceptable manner, you want to regulate private companies into bankruptcy.
Boldfacing an argument doesn't actually make it stronger.
There are claims that have evidence, and claims that don't. There are claims with lots of evidence, and claims with very little. There are claims that stand up to tests, and claims that are made sometimes and always refuted in the same way. Establishment science is usually pretty much right. It's possible to challenge it, but to do so usefully takes evidence. There have been corrections in establishment science, but they almost all came from people who were thoroughly familiar with the currently accepted science.
Repeating the same lame claim over and over again doesn't help anything. When one person is saying something that's backed by lots of evidence, and there's five other people pulling ideas out of their asses, mandating equal treatment is a Bad Idea.
What you will get in such a case is a discussion where nobody knows anything significant and nobody has evidence, because all the people with a clue will be discouraged and leave.
You're making handwavy arguments without references and then saying it shows that the gravitational constant has varied significantly over a fairly short time (in astronomical or even geological scales). Have you considered what other things a changing gravitational constant might affect?
A quick Google search finds references that say that some dinosaurs were actually at the size limits for their particular shape, but not over. I don't see any backing for it, but I don't see any reference to support in your claims either.
You seem to be under the delusion that US health care costs are reasonable. Last I checked, we paid about 50% more per capita than the next most expensive, and twice what lots of very healthy countries pay.
If we were able to reduce health care costs per capita to be only tied for first, we'd be able to more than double the defense budget or whatever we wanted to do. Two years of those savings would more than pay for the entire F-35 project.
So, it's not that Europe saves money on the military so it can afford universal health care. It's that their health care systems are relatively inexpensive.
There's also the question of how much defense Europe actually needs. I don't trust the US to judge European needs.
US health care is technically superb. It's also extremely expensive and not available to everyone in the US. There's a lot of medical tourism from the US, because it's often cheaper to go to another continent, pay full price for good medical practice, and take a nice vacation afterwards, than it is to get a procedure done in the US.
Socialized medicine is much cheaper and produces better overall results than the US "system".
The Armed Forces are integrated. There are different arms of service largely because different jobs require very different approaches.
The diplomatic history is interesting. Before WWII, the Soviets were negotiating with Britain and France for mutual defense treaties. The Western Allies did not take the negotiations seriously. The British envoy, in particular, had no authorization other than to pass things to and from the Foreign Ministry in London. There were other problems in the negotiations, and after a short while the Soviets decided to negotiate a non-aggression and economic treaty with Germany.
So, there's good reasons the Soviet Union started as a German ally.
Smoking has very few advantages. It can make asthmatics feel better, and there's at least talk that it can be moderately effective self-medication for schizophrenia. Almost everyone, if not everyone, who smokes would be better off quitting. What generally holds the smoker back is the fact that tobacco is addictive, not that (as in Woody Allen's "Sleeper") it's good for the smoker.
Burning fossil fuels has lots of advantages. It's an efficient way to get energy. Only recently have we been coming up with electricity sources that rival coal and natural gas in economy. Petroleum products are a wonderful way to get transportable energy, Not only is the energy already caught for us, it's in a really efficient portable form. If a smoker were to quite smoking cold turkey, the smoker would be better off. If we were to stop burning fossil fuels cold turkey, civilization would fall and billions would die.
As an aged tech nerd who is seriously thinking about buying the phone, can I do a little whine about the jacks?