So, if you got pulled into an interrogation room, and the police say "if you sign this confession, you'll be free. All taken care of." clearly any normal person should just sign the paperwork, right? Except this happens all the time to trick black men into signing confessions for crimes without support of a lawyer. Your analogy is ridiculous.
This agent of the government asked Arrington to commit fraud, and he's just supposed to "sign the fucking paperwork"? Enjoy that boot stomping on your face.
Without having RTFA yet, it looks like we're talking optimal strategies here. The rules for MTG are finite and can be printed, read, and analyzed. The absolute maximum winning strategy for each play, depending on what cards your opponent has in hand, in play, and in their library is not so easy to lay out for Standard play or even a single block. Strategic complexity, not rules complexity.
If you're going to pick an example of the failure of free market capitalism and call for regulation, maybe you should choose an industry other than the one that has an entire agency of the federal government dedicated to regulating it.
One of the FCC's main goals is to promote competition. Instead, look at the concentration of power of radio, television, telephony, and increasingly the web, in the hands of a few powerful corporations. If "deregulation" looks like a $350 Million dollar FCC budget with 2000 employees and the dismal selection choices I have for mobile phones (4 companies), cable TV (2 in my area) or dish (2 companies), radio (all owned by ClearChannel), and high speed internet (nothing at Google/FiOS speed here)... then I really don't want to know what the limitations created by more regulation will bring us.
There are 5 commissioners that head the FCC. It is so much easier for a corporation to convince 5 people that competition is bad than it is to have to convince 200 million plus people that you have the best product or service. You fear a monopoly. I say the monopoly is already here. It's a cartel corporation called Verizon Sprint AT & T Mobile, and they're working the FCC and the Senate to make sure you and I never get another company to choose.
Ah, yes, it's the Godwin's Law of Libertarianism: As an online discussion on Libertarianism grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Somalia approaches 1.
Similarly to Godwin's Law, the person invoking the comparison loses all credibility as they are forced to resort to hyperbolic comparison rather than factual information.
From the Wikipedia link: "many claims are expected to be met administratively from the fund set up for that purpose under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990"
The Oil Pollution Act set up funds to prevent civil liability for spills. It capped BP's maximum liability for the spill at $75M. So I ask, what lawsuit risk? The government already set up a system such that BP knew exactly what it was liable for - a total risk of $75M.
No, the reality is regulatory capture. The only people with enough expertise to oversee something as complex as oil drilling are largely people who have worked in the industry, who have friends in the industry, and often benefit financially from the very companies they have to regulate. BP gets a pass, regardless of how many regulations are on the books, because the guy that's regulating went to college and worked for 15 years with the guy he's trying to regulate.
But really, keep calling people that disagree with you anti-science, or anti-evidence. It makes it easy to tell you're being partisan instead of rational.
Honestly, do you believe the parent to my original post "points out the clear and obvious holes in my ideology". Or is it just a worthless, throw-away straw man argument? Do you want to tell me about those "flaws that any five year old can identify", or is that your equally worthless straw man argument?
I mean, how could I ever hope to attain a level of argument with the nuance of "Somalia = Libertarian government, therefore Libertarianism is wrong"?
Oh look, it's the new Godwin's Law - As an online discussion of libertarianism grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Somalia approaches 1.
Will be waiting for your next response, maybe something regarding privatized roads or police departments.
"But to the extent that carmakers have complied with CAFE, it is less through radical innovation and more by simply slashing vehicle weight. In the 15 years after CAFE standards were first introduced in 1974, vehicle weight diminished by 23 percent. But every 100-pound weight reduction results in a 4.7 to 5.6 percent increase in the fatality rate. A 2002 National Academy of Sciences study concluded that CAFE's downsizing effect contributed to between 1,300 and 2,600 deaths in a single representative year, and to 10 times that many serious injuries."
I totally agree that the cars will have to be made incredibly light in order to meet the new standards. I don't agree that so many additional deaths are worth the savings in fuel. Given a choice, you could make a decision as to whether the increased risk of dying or being seriously injured in a car accident was worth the savings to your pocketbook and the environment. Here, there is no choice, the government has decided for you - you will increase your likelihood of dying in a car wreck because we say cars have to follow these standards.
Another important point, imo, from the same article:
"Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Center for Automotive Research, notes that it is technologically impossible to squeeze anything beyond 45 mpg in fuel economy from current vehicles. That’s why Europe’s fuel economy has plateaued at that level, despite $8 per gallon gas. The 56-mpg-mandate will require a total, top-to-bottom overhaul of cars. Every part of a vehicle from its transmission to its engine would have to be replaced."
So, even with the large taxation on fuel in Europe, they can't seem to get current technology to perform at the levels needed by these standards. Now, what costs less for these companies (ie, better for the bottom line): To completely top-to-bottom overhaul their entire manufacturing systems and pour immense amounts of money into R&D, or to lobby the government to reduce the new standards? Want to guess which one will happen?
It will have moved on to the next cheapest source of energy, through the nature of global supply and demand.
When I read your comment, I hear "I don't think the third-world should get to increase their standard of living, I'm OK with keeping them perpetually poor by artificially restricting their sources of energy." It's the same argument as "Walmart makes cheap goods that end up in landfills" - what you want is for everyone to have the nice things that you can afford or to go without.
Environmentalism is a first-world priority. Everyone else is too busy trying to feed themselves and stay alive.
With 9 people not voting, the measure needed 284 of 425 votes to pass. If every single republican, Tea Party included, voted for the bill, it still needed 48 Democrats to vote for it to pass. They got 67.
You can complain all you want about Republicans voting like Republicans. I want to know about these supposed guardians of civil liberties on the left that voted for more Patriot Act.
You're going to have to cite your "belief". Most studies I have seen have shown that an increase in pornography has resulted in a decrease in rape and child sexual assault.
Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined.
Nice straw man. At no point did OP say anything about it being OK to double the level of atmospheric CO2. OPs point IMHO is that there are significant things we can do today to solve this problem without legislation, but even some of the staunchest advocates of CC refuse to do those things. These people are showing that they don't really care to do what's necessary to fix the problem; instead they'd rather use government to force others to do things they won't willingly do themselves.
But, to OP, I would say: since when did anyone seem to care about being hypocritical? I'd venture that a large majority of people hold 2 or more opinions that are logically inconsistent. Being fully principled is extremely rare.
Any person that believes banking is a "free market" has no understanding of the concept of fractional reserve banking.
Fractional reserve banking increases the money supply through lending, literally creating money from thin air. In order to maintain the money supply and keep inflation from spiraling out of control, the Central Bank must both manipulate the currency through the prime rate, and regulate the banks through reserve requirements. So, core to the concept of banking under fractional reserve is the necessity of the government to regulate banks in order to keep the money supply safe.
This doesn't even include the volumes of laws on what types of products banks can sell, or who they can sell them to. It doesn't include the thousands of pages of regulations on their employees and their facilities. It doesn't count all the tax regulations they must abide by.
It doesn't take more than a few minutes of research to find out that the "free market" line is not an argument, but some sort of uneducated attack that tries to dismiss the problem as easily as possible - just blame some mythical "free market" that doesn't exist, and move on rather than consider the reality of things.
1. All tweets are mindless drivel about what someone ate, the weather, and other trivialities. 2. Your potential employer will mine this deeply personal information and use it against you.
It's "self-sufficient" in the sense that they do not get direct taxpayer dollars to pay for operation like other departments. It is not "self-sufficient" in the sense that it runs at a massive deficit and has to borrow money from the US Treasury like crazy to stay afloat. For the last 3 years, the post office has borrowed the maximum $3B from the Treasury, and is expected to lose $238B in the next 10 years.
There's a limit. The municipality can offer 100% "free" service to users by taxing people to pay for it. The private corporation is dependent on people paying for service - they cannot use force to take money from people in order to pay for it.
Does "funded entirely by its own revenue" include the near $15 billion that the post office has borrowed from the US Treasury?
GAO report: "In each of the last 3 fiscal years, the USPS borrowed the maximum $3B from the US Treasury and incurred record financial losses. In fiscal year 2010, the USPS plans to borrow another $3B from the US Treasury." "In fiscal year 2010, USPS expects a record loss of over $7B, and its outstanding debt to increase to $13.2B."
Sorry, but just because the Post Office is "independent" does not mean that it does not receive taxpayer assistance, or that the government is not going to assume those liabilities over time, especially if the Post Office continues to run at record losses. In fact, with respect to retirement benefit payments, the Post Office has unique requirements above other government agencies precisely because "[u]nlike other federal agencies, whose future ability to pay retirement benefits remains unquestioned, the USPS's ever-declining mail volume has made prepayment seem like a sensible precaution. If the Postal Service can't afford to pay for these retiree benefits now, what makes Congress think it will be able to pay in the future, when the number of postal ratepayers will have plummeted still further? If first-class mail volume continues its downward spiral, taxpayers will be next to foot the bill." [link]
I would question how Comcast got monopoly status over ISP service in the area. I thought the government was supposed to do something about monopolies, not pass laws that permanently entrench the monopolies as long as they don't do certain things to their consumers.
One thing that is sorely lacking from this discussion is NN's impact on the poor. What if I only care about those 200 sites? What if it reduced my bill to $10 a month because I'm only pulling from cached content on Comcast's servers? The NN position is that there should be no such plans, because all people must get access to all the internet. So now those that may want the internet but have trouble affording a $60 a month broadband plan have their choices artificially limited by government regulation - they can either find a way to pay the $60, or go without the internet at all.
I agree with the majority of posters in this thread - there is an absence of competition in this market, and so therefore regulation seems to be the optimum solution. But the argument also seems to be so selfish - that *I* want to be able to access all the sites, and *I* shouldn't have to bother finding another company that will provide it for me, so the easiest solution is to get the government to force companies to do what *I* want, and never mind the consequences to those that are less fortunate than me.
Slashdot Mirror
When I went to school (I'm 33), "A Wrinkle in Time" was the 23rd most frequently banned book in the United States.
Why do you have a Facebook if you don't want to be monetized and tracked?
So, if you got pulled into an interrogation room, and the police say "if you sign this confession, you'll be free. All taken care of." clearly any normal person should just sign the paperwork, right? Except this happens all the time to trick black men into signing confessions for crimes without support of a lawyer. Your analogy is ridiculous.
This agent of the government asked Arrington to commit fraud, and he's just supposed to "sign the fucking paperwork"? Enjoy that boot stomping on your face.
Without having RTFA yet, it looks like we're talking optimal strategies here. The rules for MTG are finite and can be printed, read, and analyzed. The absolute maximum winning strategy for each play, depending on what cards your opponent has in hand, in play, and in their library is not so easy to lay out for Standard play or even a single block. Strategic complexity, not rules complexity.
If you're going to pick an example of the failure of free market capitalism and call for regulation, maybe you should choose an industry other than the one that has an entire agency of the federal government dedicated to regulating it.
One of the FCC's main goals is to promote competition. Instead, look at the concentration of power of radio, television, telephony, and increasingly the web, in the hands of a few powerful corporations. If "deregulation" looks like a $350 Million dollar FCC budget with 2000 employees and the dismal selection choices I have for mobile phones (4 companies), cable TV (2 in my area) or dish (2 companies), radio (all owned by ClearChannel), and high speed internet (nothing at Google/FiOS speed here)... then I really don't want to know what the limitations created by more regulation will bring us.
There are 5 commissioners that head the FCC. It is so much easier for a corporation to convince 5 people that competition is bad than it is to have to convince 200 million plus people that you have the best product or service. You fear a monopoly. I say the monopoly is already here. It's a cartel corporation called Verizon Sprint AT & T Mobile, and they're working the FCC and the Senate to make sure you and I never get another company to choose.
Ah, yes, it's the Godwin's Law of Libertarianism: As an online discussion on Libertarianism grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Somalia approaches 1.
Similarly to Godwin's Law, the person invoking the comparison loses all credibility as they are forced to resort to hyperbolic comparison rather than factual information.
From the Wikipedia link: "many claims are expected to be met administratively from the fund set up for that purpose under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990"
The Oil Pollution Act set up funds to prevent civil liability for spills. It capped BP's maximum liability for the spill at $75M. So I ask, what lawsuit risk? The government already set up a system such that BP knew exactly what it was liable for - a total risk of $75M.
But we need those regulators, right? I mean, they obviously kept the spill from happening, or at least knew it was going to occur... U.S. exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico drilling from environmental impact study
No, the reality is regulatory capture. The only people with enough expertise to oversee something as complex as oil drilling are largely people who have worked in the industry, who have friends in the industry, and often benefit financially from the very companies they have to regulate. BP gets a pass, regardless of how many regulations are on the books, because the guy that's regulating went to college and worked for 15 years with the guy he's trying to regulate.
But really, keep calling people that disagree with you anti-science, or anti-evidence. It makes it easy to tell you're being partisan instead of rational.
Is TARP an example of deregulation? Just checking.
Honestly, do you believe the parent to my original post "points out the clear and obvious holes in my ideology". Or is it just a worthless, throw-away straw man argument? Do you want to tell me about those "flaws that any five year old can identify", or is that your equally worthless straw man argument?
I mean, how could I ever hope to attain a level of argument with the nuance of "Somalia = Libertarian government, therefore Libertarianism is wrong"?
Oh look, it's the new Godwin's Law - As an online discussion of libertarianism grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Somalia approaches 1.
Will be waiting for your next response, maybe something regarding privatized roads or police departments.
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/07/21/072111-opinions-column-cafe-dalmia-1-2/
"But to the extent that carmakers have complied with CAFE, it is less through radical innovation and more by simply slashing vehicle weight. In the 15 years after CAFE standards were first introduced in 1974, vehicle weight diminished by 23 percent. But every 100-pound weight reduction results in a 4.7 to 5.6 percent increase in the fatality rate. A 2002 National Academy of Sciences study concluded that CAFE's downsizing effect contributed to between 1,300 and 2,600 deaths in a single representative year, and to 10 times that many serious injuries."
I totally agree that the cars will have to be made incredibly light in order to meet the new standards. I don't agree that so many additional deaths are worth the savings in fuel. Given a choice, you could make a decision as to whether the increased risk of dying or being seriously injured in a car accident was worth the savings to your pocketbook and the environment. Here, there is no choice, the government has decided for you - you will increase your likelihood of dying in a car wreck because we say cars have to follow these standards.
Another important point, imo, from the same article:
"Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Center for Automotive Research, notes that it is technologically impossible to squeeze anything beyond 45 mpg in fuel economy from current vehicles. That’s why Europe’s fuel economy has plateaued at that level, despite $8 per gallon gas. The 56-mpg-mandate will require a total, top-to-bottom overhaul of cars. Every part of a vehicle from its transmission to its engine would have to be replaced."
So, even with the large taxation on fuel in Europe, they can't seem to get current technology to perform at the levels needed by these standards. Now, what costs less for these companies (ie, better for the bottom line): To completely top-to-bottom overhaul their entire manufacturing systems and pour immense amounts of money into R&D, or to lobby the government to reduce the new standards? Want to guess which one will happen?
I've been on slashdot long enough to be very afraid of clicking on any links in this post. I could live with Rick Roll security, but not this...
That sound you hear is the woosh of ePhil_One's comment going over the heads of most of these respondents. Must we actually use sarcasm tags?
Wait, are we talking about Microsoft or Apple now?
Where will your civilization be then?
It will have moved on to the next cheapest source of energy, through the nature of global supply and demand.
When I read your comment, I hear "I don't think the third-world should get to increase their standard of living, I'm OK with keeping them perpetually poor by artificially restricting their sources of energy." It's the same argument as "Walmart makes cheap goods that end up in landfills" - what you want is for everyone to have the nice things that you can afford or to go without.
Environmentalism is a first-world priority. Everyone else is too busy trying to feed themselves and stay alive.
You can complain all you want about Republicans voting like Republicans. I want to know about these supposed guardians of civil liberties on the left that voted for more Patriot Act.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57169/#ixzz17eM23WmL
Nice straw man. At no point did OP say anything about it being OK to double the level of atmospheric CO2. OPs point IMHO is that there are significant things we can do today to solve this problem without legislation, but even some of the staunchest advocates of CC refuse to do those things. These people are showing that they don't really care to do what's necessary to fix the problem; instead they'd rather use government to force others to do things they won't willingly do themselves.
But, to OP, I would say: since when did anyone seem to care about being hypocritical? I'd venture that a large majority of people hold 2 or more opinions that are logically inconsistent. Being fully principled is extremely rare.
Gonna go out on a limb here and guess you don't own a business...
Any person that believes banking is a "free market" has no understanding of the concept of fractional reserve banking.
Fractional reserve banking increases the money supply through lending, literally creating money from thin air. In order to maintain the money supply and keep inflation from spiraling out of control, the Central Bank must both manipulate the currency through the prime rate, and regulate the banks through reserve requirements. So, core to the concept of banking under fractional reserve is the necessity of the government to regulate banks in order to keep the money supply safe.
This doesn't even include the volumes of laws on what types of products banks can sell, or who they can sell them to. It doesn't include the thousands of pages of regulations on their employees and their facilities. It doesn't count all the tax regulations they must abide by.
It doesn't take more than a few minutes of research to find out that the "free market" line is not an argument, but some sort of uneducated attack that tries to dismiss the problem as easily as possible - just blame some mythical "free market" that doesn't exist, and move on rather than consider the reality of things.
Behold, the Twitter dualism:
1. All tweets are mindless drivel about what someone ate, the weather, and other trivialities.
2. Your potential employer will mine this deeply personal information and use it against you.
It's "self-sufficient" in the sense that they do not get direct taxpayer dollars to pay for operation like other departments. It is not "self-sufficient" in the sense that it runs at a massive deficit and has to borrow money from the US Treasury like crazy to stay afloat. For the last 3 years, the post office has borrowed the maximum $3B from the Treasury, and is expected to lose $238B in the next 10 years.
There's a limit. The municipality can offer 100% "free" service to users by taxing people to pay for it. The private corporation is dependent on people paying for service - they cannot use force to take money from people in order to pay for it.
Does "funded entirely by its own revenue" include the near $15 billion that the post office has borrowed from the US Treasury?
GAO report: "In each of the last 3 fiscal years, the USPS borrowed the maximum $3B from the US Treasury and incurred record financial losses. In fiscal year 2010, the USPS plans to borrow another $3B from the US Treasury." "In fiscal year 2010, USPS expects a record loss of over $7B, and its outstanding debt to increase to $13.2B."
Sorry, but just because the Post Office is "independent" does not mean that it does not receive taxpayer assistance, or that the government is not going to assume those liabilities over time, especially if the Post Office continues to run at record losses. In fact, with respect to retirement benefit payments, the Post Office has unique requirements above other government agencies precisely because "[u]nlike other federal agencies, whose future ability to pay retirement benefits remains unquestioned, the USPS's ever-declining mail volume has made prepayment seem like a sensible precaution. If the Postal Service can't afford to pay for these retiree benefits now, what makes Congress think it will be able to pay in the future, when the number of postal ratepayers will have plummeted still further? If first-class mail volume continues its downward spiral, taxpayers will be next to foot the bill." [link]
I would question how Comcast got monopoly status over ISP service in the area. I thought the government was supposed to do something about monopolies, not pass laws that permanently entrench the monopolies as long as they don't do certain things to their consumers.
One thing that is sorely lacking from this discussion is NN's impact on the poor. What if I only care about those 200 sites? What if it reduced my bill to $10 a month because I'm only pulling from cached content on Comcast's servers? The NN position is that there should be no such plans, because all people must get access to all the internet. So now those that may want the internet but have trouble affording a $60 a month broadband plan have their choices artificially limited by government regulation - they can either find a way to pay the $60, or go without the internet at all.
I agree with the majority of posters in this thread - there is an absence of competition in this market, and so therefore regulation seems to be the optimum solution. But the argument also seems to be so selfish - that *I* want to be able to access all the sites, and *I* shouldn't have to bother finding another company that will provide it for me, so the easiest solution is to get the government to force companies to do what *I* want, and never mind the consequences to those that are less fortunate than me.