In order for this to be a true statement, intervention by courts now would not exist. Since it does now happen, your statement is a logical null.
You describe a world where intervention by the courts is the sole means of government regulation, whereas in today's world we have the courts and direct regulation. I don't see how X AND Y implies NOT Y.
This is the argument of someone who wants to impose their opinions of good and bad on others. Just because someone else doesn't use a product or service that I believe to be wonderfully fantastic and know it would benefit them greatly, I still have no right to force it on them. Why do you believe you do have that right?
I, and society, have that right because we generally agree on it and we have elected people who enforce it (the only true source of a right is the ability to enforce it), and frankly, we don't give a shit about your right to own unsafe products or fly on unsafe airplanes. One with your political views will probably shudder in horror at that statement, but it's the plain truth.
That's why liability insurance exists. Or do you believe that regulation somehow eliminates risk? I've got several thousand dead people on the other side of that equation, dead as a direct result of regulators creating an environment where jet planes could be hyjacked in flight by a handful of idiots with pocket knives.
Now I have to pay more liability insurance. Your savings from eliminating regulation are getting smaller and smaller.
No, regulation does not "eliminate" risk, as the fact that my apartment caught on fire due to faulty wiring proves (home inspectors seem to be deaf, dumb, and blind in my experience). It does, however, reduce it. That's as good as you can hope for in the real world, where nothing is perfect.
And how are regulators to blame for 9/11? I don't recall reading about any regulations that required airlines to let Jihadists with pocket knives on their airplanes. It's true that they failed miserably to do their job, but it seems that they were doing too little rather than too much, and it's hard to believe the outcome would have been different if there were no regulation.
It is unfortunate that so many people labor under such fear of their neighbors. Now you show how you're afraid of me, afraid of my argument for liberty is somehow just a show, a lie.
Quite the opposite. I would consider allowing civil suits against companies that make faulty products a limitation on liberty, and a form of government coercion, so I suspected that you would probably actually oppose it. Your position, as stated, seems logically inconsistent to me. But I apologize for putting words in your mouth.
How do you get out of bed in the morning with such a load of fear on your heart?
That's the way to debate the issues! Accuse your opponent of lying about the viewpoints he has expressed, on the basis of viewpoints he has not expressed, but you assume without any evidence that he holds anyway! Then make a huge leap of logic (tort reform = elimination of regulation by the courts ?!?) without making any attempt to connect the points at either end of the leap.
Way to pick on only one (admittedly questionable) point out of six, while completely ignoring the qualifying words "probably" and "generally" which keep it from being an accusation.
If I'm wrong about Bob_Robertson's opinion on tort reform, I apologize to him. But it's logically inconsistent to be against government regulation, yet be favor of regulation by the courts, because the courts are part of the government.
Then make a huge leap of logic (tort reform = elimination of regulation by the courts ?!?) without making any attempt to connect the points at either end of the leap.
This is what the parent said:
The airline's insurance company does not want to pay out, neither do passengers want to die. Therefore, they will make efforts to be safe and reliable in order to get more business.
His mechanism for keeping flights safe is lawsuits + customer preference. Tort reform means that lawsuits are either no longer a problem for the airlines, or less of a problem, depending on the details of the reform. Yes, that would mean the end of regulation by the courts in his dream world where there is no direct regulation (assuming a strong version of "tort reform"). If there's no direct regulation and no lawsuits, what room is left for government intervention? That's not a huge leap of logic. In fact, it's quite obvious, and should not require further explanation to anyone who read both posts.
Folks who talk about deregulation or decriminalization being "dangerous" do so because they fear their neighbors. They project that because some "government" wouldn't be holding a gun to other peoples heads, those people will act in irresponsible and evil ways. It is a very pervasive irrational belief.
On Planet Libertarian, people only want to enrich themselves through the Free Market, which ultimately benefits us all. Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, the world is full of irresponsible, idiotic, or just plain evil people who are out to do harm to others. Hell yes, I want the government holding a gun to the head of my neighbors keeping them from driving drunk down my street, looting my house, contaminating my water, etc, etc.
It's actually very easy to imagine deregulation. No more excuses that "we were following regulations, so you can't sue us."
The airline's insurance company does not want to pay out, neither do passengers want to die. Therefore, they will make efforts to be safe and reliable in order to get more business. It might indeed raise the price of a ticket on a reputable airline, but that price is paid only by those who choose to use that service. No tax-supported bureaucracy, no regulatory overhead. The actual "costs" to "society" are reduced dramatically, and there are more resources available to do something productive.
This is wrong in several ways:
You're not describing deregulation - you're describing regulation by the courts. Courts have a non-zero cost, and lawyers are quite expensive. Probably more expensive than the regulators we have now. And what are the courts but a gun to your neighbors head, anyway?
There is also a non-zero cost to knowing all of the "good" brands and companies. In your perfect libertarian world, I have to do research to buy a damned toaster if I don't want it to catch on fire and burn my house down, or buy an expensive one. In my imperfect world, I can buy the cheapest toaster at Wal-mart, confident that it meets safety standards.
Somebody else's safety choices can affect me. When the apartment below mine caught fire due to faulty wiring, it affected me. If a driver chooses to buy an unsafe vehicle and we have a collision, it's my problem, not his choice. Even in your airplane example, somebody is going to be on the ground when it crashes.
It's not always possible to know which businesses are reputable and which ones aren't. A "good" brand could become a "bad" brand if some manager decides he's going to throw away the companies reputation to increase this quarter's profits, and it'll take awhile to figure that out even if you do your homework. It wasn't long ago that Arthur Andersen and Enron were considered reputable.
Finally, you're probably lying. People who think like you are generally in favor of tort reform, which would eliminate your idea of regulation by the courts.
Most of NPR's content is completely non-political, and when they do politics they are usually balanced. Conservative columnist David Brooks is a regular commentator, for example.
Of course, to most people on the Right, anything that isn't a Republican version of Pravda is liberally biased.
It takes time to train somebody to be an effective admin. Everybody in this thread is saying that they could pick up [insert skill] quickly, but there's an awful damned lot of skills to pick up. A new person who doensn't even know the basics will just get in the way for quite a while.
Since that OP is apparently paying crap, barely-livable wages, anyone she hires and trains will probably quit and move on to a better paying job once they have experience.
Point 2 is more important as worker-company and company-worker loyalty declines. That's why nobody wants to train anymore.
As a programmer, you don't necessarily need to know about ssh, but as a sysadmin, well, that's almost as bad as a programmer who doesn't know what gcc is. If you've never run any servers or a home network, why would you take offense to being considered unqualified to be a sysadmin for a web hosting company?
It might be better to *let* them google it. Ask an obscure question, and see if they're clueful enough to figure out how to get the answer given an internet connection. That's what you have to do for a lot of real world problems anyway.
I make 40 grand now in NY and I have to live at home or else I'll be near homeless that's how ridiculous housing costs is. It's why I'm looking to relocate to the south.
I make a little more than that and I live at home in KC - my home, I mean, that I own. The South is even cheaper. Good call getting out of there, if you can handle living in a red state.
If you can't get a job from a minumum wage employer, I would suspect that you're doing something wrong in the interview or application process. Those people aren't very picky.
There was a time when the area we now call the Midwest was just called the West, back when the area we now call the West was populated by Indians and prairie dogs and wasn't really in the consciousness of white Americans, or even part of the US. During the Civil War, they called the Missouri state guard the Army of the West. That legacy survives in the term "Midwest."
It's because the "Red Staters" have different values. They'd rather be fucked by someone who doesn't consider them inferior creatures.
Why does it have to be an either/or dichotomy between voting for latte-sipping liberal elitists or corporate cronies who are out to fuck them? There used to be populist politicians who were pro-labor but socially conservative.
And I seriously doubt that the Bushes, Halliburton management, neocon intellectuals, etc, don't consider typical red-staters to be far inferior to themselves. Maybe they're just a little better at hiding it.
Why do you think factories are closing in rural midwestern towns? could most likly have to do with the manditory rise in the min. wage that my state (IL, and many other midwestern states) are forcing down buisnesses throats.
Yeah, I'm sure that factory jobs that pay $18/hour are going overseas because Illinois raised their minimum wage to $6.50.
Nobody's trying to shove KDE down anybody's throat. Slackware's decision to drop GNOME is because one guy with health problems can't keep up with packaging it, when Dropline GNOME is available anyway. It's not some industry scheme to standardize on one desktop. It's fine with me if other people prefer GNOME. I just don't care for it myself and don't want to be pushed towards using it.
If I understand what you're saying, it's that the KDE Control Panel is an addictive waste of time on a scale comparable to crack cocaine or Everquest, and GNOME's lack of configurability saves us from ourselves. While that's probably true for some people, surely it's possible for large institutions to lock down a control panel if it's a productivity killer for them.
For my wife it just came down to which one had saner defaults. KDE looks and feels like Windows, which she and everybody else already knows, and GNOME looks like something that was designed from first principles as if today's users were blank slates who had nothing invested in any particular UI, so she she chose KDE.
If I ever have 8 kids like Dick Van Patten, I might need to buy things in the quantities that Costco sells. I checked them out once - you can buy cantaloupes there, as long as you want five of them. For now, I'm sticking with Wal-Mart for disposable crap and Target for things that I could conceivably still be using in 6 months (because Wal-Mart crap usually doesn't last that long).
I sat my non-techie wife down in front of a KDE desktop and she used it with no problems and no guidance from me, which is not surprising considering that the UI is essentially a windows rip-off. I'm not sure what usability problems you're referring to.
They should really make one of those the default. I just rejected GNUstep a week ago when I was setting up a system for my wife based on those screenshots. I thought it looked just like WindowMaker, but uglier, so there was no reason to use it. When you're quickly evaluating several different WM/DEs, you're not going to dig deeply into any of them and find out what they look like themed. I ended up going with XFCE and she seems happy with it.
I'm not even saying MS couldn't come up with a better product, just as Pepsi could come up with a far better cola than Coke. But what neither MS or Pepsi will ever have is the brand name recognition associated with Coca Cola or Google's market spheres.
I think you're overrating the importance of brand recognition. Google is, first and foremost, a search engine. I've been using the web since the beginning, and at any given time there has always been a search engine that gave better results than the others. Every so often, something superior to the reigning champion would come along, and I and other users would switch in a heartbeat because there's nothing locking you in to a search engine. It's not like you won't be able to read your old documents, get your old emails, or play video games if you switch search engines. So brand loyalty has always been very limited.
Google is still the best, but their lead over other search engines isn't as large as it used to be. A better search engine than Google doesn't exist, but it could, and if it ever does I think you'll be surprised at how fickle their users really are, and quickly the new meme becomes "Google is so 2005. They're over."
Interesting. My dad was a psychologist and in the '70s he had a grant to study the effects of microwaves on human behavior. He said that at the time, the Russians were beaming microwaves at the US embassy there, but he (and apparently the American government) didn't know what they were trying to do. They just ended up deflecting it with tinfoil or something (maybe tinfoil hats aren't so crazy!).
If customers demanded secure software, then vendors would produce secure software. People instead buy software that's either the most familiar, easiest to use, cheapest, or has the most features checked off, so that's what vendors. That's why the utter pile of crap known as Windows 3.1/95 won while OS/2 and other more secure alternatives lost, and Windows continues to win over more secure alternatives today. Why should vendors spend their resources on something people have proven they don't care about?
If people really cared about security, MS would have been driven out of business a long time ago, and other vendors would have taken note of that and made sure the same thing didn't happen to them. We would have more secure, less featureful, less convenient, more expensive software. But people don't care that much, so that didn't happen.
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No, regulation does not "eliminate" risk, as the fact that my apartment caught on fire due to faulty wiring proves (home inspectors seem to be deaf, dumb, and blind in my experience). It does, however, reduce it. That's as good as you can hope for in the real world, where nothing is perfect. And how are regulators to blame for 9/11? I don't recall reading about any regulations that required airlines to let Jihadists with pocket knives on their airplanes. It's true that they failed miserably to do their job, but it seems that they were doing too little rather than too much, and it's hard to believe the outcome would have been different if there were no regulation.
Quite the opposite. I would consider allowing civil suits against companies that make faulty products a limitation on liberty, and a form of government coercion, so I suspected that you would probably actually oppose it. Your position, as stated, seems logically inconsistent to me. But I apologize for putting words in your mouth. Very carefully.If I'm wrong about Bob_Robertson's opinion on tort reform, I apologize to him. But it's logically inconsistent to be against government regulation, yet be favor of regulation by the courts, because the courts are part of the government.
This is what the parent said: His mechanism for keeping flights safe is lawsuits + customer preference. Tort reform means that lawsuits are either no longer a problem for the airlines, or less of a problem, depending on the details of the reform. Yes, that would mean the end of regulation by the courts in his dream world where there is no direct regulation (assuming a strong version of "tort reform"). If there's no direct regulation and no lawsuits, what room is left for government intervention? That's not a huge leap of logic. In fact, it's quite obvious, and should not require further explanation to anyone who read both posts.Of course, to most people on the Right, anything that isn't a Republican version of Pravda is liberally biased.
What, and the mime header is a guarantee of the file type? You should never trust anything off the net, period.
Yes, Firefox sucks, it's a memory-leaking, slow, somewhat unstable pig. The only thing worse than Firefox is every other browser.
- It takes time to train somebody to be an effective admin. Everybody in this thread is saying that they could pick up [insert skill] quickly, but there's an awful damned lot of skills to pick up. A new person who doensn't even know the basics will just get in the way for quite a while.
- Since that OP is apparently paying crap, barely-livable wages, anyone she hires and trains will probably quit and move on to a better paying job once they have experience.
Point 2 is more important as worker-company and company-worker loyalty declines. That's why nobody wants to train anymore.As a programmer, you don't necessarily need to know about ssh, but as a sysadmin, well, that's almost as bad as a programmer who doesn't know what gcc is. If you've never run any servers or a home network, why would you take offense to being considered unqualified to be a sysadmin for a web hosting company?
It might be better to *let* them google it. Ask an obscure question, and see if they're clueful enough to figure out how to get the answer given an internet connection. That's what you have to do for a lot of real world problems anyway.
If you can't get a job from a minumum wage employer, I would suspect that you're doing something wrong in the interview or application process. Those people aren't very picky.
I find 486s and Pentiums on the curb on trash day. Homeless people can afford them now.
There was a time when the area we now call the Midwest was just called the West, back when the area we now call the West was populated by Indians and prairie dogs and wasn't really in the consciousness of white Americans, or even part of the US. During the Civil War, they called the Missouri state guard the Army of the West. That legacy survives in the term "Midwest."
And I seriously doubt that the Bushes, Halliburton management, neocon intellectuals, etc, don't consider typical red-staters to be far inferior to themselves. Maybe they're just a little better at hiding it.
Their market research must have shown that they don't cater to a health conscious demographic.
Nobody's trying to shove KDE down anybody's throat. Slackware's decision to drop GNOME is because one guy with health problems can't keep up with packaging it, when Dropline GNOME is available anyway. It's not some industry scheme to standardize on one desktop. It's fine with me if other people prefer GNOME. I just don't care for it myself and don't want to be pushed towards using it.
Open Source is about freedom of choice. If you want ONE DE, try Windows XP. Some of us didn't switch to Linux to have GNOME shoved down our throats.
For my wife it just came down to which one had saner defaults. KDE looks and feels like Windows, which she and everybody else already knows, and GNOME looks like something that was designed from first principles as if today's users were blank slates who had nothing invested in any particular UI, so she she chose KDE.
If I ever have 8 kids like Dick Van Patten, I might need to buy things in the quantities that Costco sells. I checked them out once - you can buy cantaloupes there, as long as you want five of them. For now, I'm sticking with Wal-Mart for disposable crap and Target for things that I could conceivably still be using in 6 months (because Wal-Mart crap usually doesn't last that long).
I sat my non-techie wife down in front of a KDE desktop and she used it with no problems and no guidance from me, which is not surprising considering that the UI is essentially a windows rip-off. I'm not sure what usability problems you're referring to.
They should really make one of those the default. I just rejected GNUstep a week ago when I was setting up a system for my wife based on those screenshots. I thought it looked just like WindowMaker, but uglier, so there was no reason to use it. When you're quickly evaluating several different WM/DEs, you're not going to dig deeply into any of them and find out what they look like themed. I ended up going with XFCE and she seems happy with it.
Google is still the best, but their lead over other search engines isn't as large as it used to be. A better search engine than Google doesn't exist, but it could, and if it ever does I think you'll be surprised at how fickle their users really are, and quickly the new meme becomes "Google is so 2005. They're over."
Maybe your story explains it.
If people really cared about security, MS would have been driven out of business a long time ago, and other vendors would have taken note of that and made sure the same thing didn't happen to them. We would have more secure, less featureful, less convenient, more expensive software. But people don't care that much, so that didn't happen.