It's something that has bugged me for a long time. No-one is willing to push the developmental benefits of free trade: it's a space that is dominated by groups and organisations that are so acculturated to left-ish thinking that the drawbacks of many of their activities are simply unthinkable.
The point of morality is that it is universal, and if you can't justify applying the morals you have to other places and situations, maybe you should take a long hard look at yourself. The reason that you are wrong - dead wrong - is that security of property is the most essential condition for economic growth. No-one works hard and tries to earn money unless they are reasonably certain they will get to keep it and not have it taken away from them by capricious governments, thieves, warlords, or pirates. Allowing a culture in which theft is permissible is hobbling any chance that culture has of serious development.
Support and fight for economic growth in places that desperately need it. Fight against bullshit like fairtrade tea and coffee, fight against the agricultural lobby that erects huge walls around the subsidised produce of North America and Europe, and try and help win free trade for Africa. The first thing any educated Nigerian does is start planning to leave the country, for very good reasons. Make it worth staying and eventually you'll see a culture and legal system that prevents this sort of thing.
Then regulate it in such a way that a free market is created. In the UK, BT own the wires but must allow anyone to install their own equipment in their exchanges. I can pick any ISP in the UK I like, and indeed I have. I'm very happy with them.
What I don't get about this is why you can't do any of these things with a laptop and why it's better to carry around a device with an unprotected screen instead. I just cannot imagine using one of these tablets and I can't imagine it having the mass market appeal that makes, say, the iPod or the iPhone the success that they are.
Sadly, it's nonsense. Microsoft are providing a service to Yahoo, which Yahoo are paying for. Yahoo are also paying for Yahoo to be the default in Ubuntu. In short, no money is flowing from Microsoft to Ubuntu.
I worked it out long ago during a similar such tedious discussion, and I'm not sure where the exact numbers I used came from (wikipedia somewhere), but yes, it would be an earlier year - taking back-bearings I think 2008, but the figure I gave was a mental rounding-up.
Yes, that's including all members of the population, all 300 million of 'em, working or not. There are two reasons for this: one, it values everyone equally. After all, all citizens (all residents, in fact) have equal rights and protections under the law and therefore should contribute equally. Secondly, it expresses the true cost of government (although I haven't adjusted for borrowing). Tax is, whatever its source, ultimately money that comes from someone's pocket or that was due to go into someone's pocket, and one of the reasons developed economies have grown such huge tax bases is that none of really appreciate what we're losing out on.
Ugh, I hate bell curves. Many, many things are not bell curves. Income is strongly right tailed, with a hump at roughly 5 times the median, and the best model of it is an obscure distribution called (IIRC) Dagun's Function. But we would probably all be better statisticians if teachers would just shut up about the bell curve.
Ah, yes, the argument by bad analogy. No. People with above median incomes are the ones who drive the economy, and the impact goes up with wealth (who employs the cleaners and janitors of this world?). Taking progressively larger shares from them does nothing for society.
Here's another way to put it. If you take total US government spending and divide it by the US population you get a figure of something like $7000. As a poll tax, that could be a pretty achievable number.
The requiring personal information will not go away, as it is essential to stopping money-laundering. Any financial service that lets you move large amounts of money swiftly is subject to these rules, just about anywhere in the world.
The bigger problem is that Tor is hardly deniable. Your traffic might be secure, but in many circumstances the fact that you are sending secure traffic is far more interesting. Given the right circumstances, that enough is sufficient for the state to use rubber hose cryptanalysis...
An old bridge engineer's trick is to chuck a large stone into water. If it goes 'splash', it's shallow. If it swallows it with a 'gloop', it's too deep for a person.
There's an old saying - the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Don't get me wrong: it took over a thousand years for the Roman Empire to over-extend itself, and with the massive supply of fresh bodies from Africa, it would have taken simple economics much longer to do for the American slave trade than it actually lasted due to other factors. But ultimately, it's comforting to know that in the long run you don't have to rely on people's moral sense to solve these problems.
Worse, actors may not be in control of their careers if some executive producer wants to include near pornographic portrayal of, say Summer Glau, where she otherwise refuses to do such scenes.
Could you have chosen a worse argument to make your point?;)
Case in point: It would be very profitable to chain your workers to the factory floor and have them work 18 hours a day for no money, and consumers would be able to buy the wares much cheaper, yet it would not be ethical.
Actually, it wouldn't. Slave labour is bad for an economy, because you have to feed and house your slaves (and you generally can't treat them badly, as they are expensive and difficult to replace), which is costly, and by allowing slavery the market for your product is smaller by the total number of slaves in the economy. You don't have to bother invoking ethics: it's just a dumb idea.
Children routinely learn perfect English with a complete generative grammar from corrupt sources. Indeed, if you put children in an environment where nobody speaks a complete language, they will spontaneously evolve a grammatically complete language. So it is possible (though I'm nt saying it will be easy...)
I suspect the quickest way to circumvent it would simply be to follow the law and deluge the authorities with several million videos of kittens chasing laser pointers.
Slashdot Mirror
It's something that has bugged me for a long time. No-one is willing to push the developmental benefits of free trade: it's a space that is dominated by groups and organisations that are so acculturated to left-ish thinking that the drawbacks of many of their activities are simply unthinkable.
In fact, I don't think people in most Asian nations place value on personal freedoms to the extent Americans do.
This is tendentious bullshit. They haven't been asked, ut still they get jailed and executed for pushing for it.
I wonder what his employees would think of not having a job if Ferrari boy wasn't employing them.
The point of morality is that it is universal, and if you can't justify applying the morals you have to other places and situations, maybe you should take a long hard look at yourself. The reason that you are wrong - dead wrong - is that security of property is the most essential condition for economic growth. No-one works hard and tries to earn money unless they are reasonably certain they will get to keep it and not have it taken away from them by capricious governments, thieves, warlords, or pirates. Allowing a culture in which theft is permissible is hobbling any chance that culture has of serious development.
Support and fight for economic growth in places that desperately need it. Fight against bullshit like fairtrade tea and coffee, fight against the agricultural lobby that erects huge walls around the subsidised produce of North America and Europe, and try and help win free trade for Africa. The first thing any educated Nigerian does is start planning to leave the country, for very good reasons. Make it worth staying and eventually you'll see a culture and legal system that prevents this sort of thing.
Then regulate it in such a way that a free market is created. In the UK, BT own the wires but must allow anyone to install their own equipment in their exchanges. I can pick any ISP in the UK I like, and indeed I have. I'm very happy with them.
What I don't get about this is why you can't do any of these things with a laptop and why it's better to carry around a device with an unprotected screen instead. I just cannot imagine using one of these tablets and I can't imagine it having the mass market appeal that makes, say, the iPod or the iPhone the success that they are.
Sadly, it's nonsense. Microsoft are providing a service to Yahoo, which Yahoo are paying for. Yahoo are also paying for Yahoo to be the default in Ubuntu. In short, no money is flowing from Microsoft to Ubuntu.
What about the capital they invested? Or is it OK just to take that off them?
Yes, that's including all members of the population, all 300 million of 'em, working or not. There are two reasons for this: one, it values everyone equally. After all, all citizens (all residents, in fact) have equal rights and protections under the law and therefore should contribute equally. Secondly, it expresses the true cost of government (although I haven't adjusted for borrowing). Tax is, whatever its source, ultimately money that comes from someone's pocket or that was due to go into someone's pocket, and one of the reasons developed economies have grown such huge tax bases is that none of really appreciate what we're losing out on.
Ugh, I hate bell curves. Many, many things are not bell curves. Income is strongly right tailed, with a hump at roughly 5 times the median, and the best model of it is an obscure distribution called (IIRC) Dagun's Function. But we would probably all be better statisticians if teachers would just shut up about the bell curve.
I hate to nitpick, but if the median salary was 60K, then *exactly* half would be making more than that. It's kinda the point.
Here's another way to put it. If you take total US government spending and divide it by the US population you get a figure of something like $7000. As a poll tax, that could be a pretty achievable number.
I got Mrs u38cg to try that. Turns out it doesn't help you crack passwords much.
Lows? In the UK, 1% of the population pays 25% of income tax.
Maybe you did need to update your account.
The requiring personal information will not go away, as it is essential to stopping money-laundering. Any financial service that lets you move large amounts of money swiftly is subject to these rules, just about anywhere in the world.
The bigger problem is that Tor is hardly deniable. Your traffic might be secure, but in many circumstances the fact that you are sending secure traffic is far more interesting. Given the right circumstances, that enough is sufficient for the state to use rubber hose cryptanalysis...
An old bridge engineer's trick is to chuck a large stone into water. If it goes 'splash', it's shallow. If it swallows it with a 'gloop', it's too deep for a person.
There's an old saying - the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Don't get me wrong: it took over a thousand years for the Roman Empire to over-extend itself, and with the massive supply of fresh bodies from Africa, it would have taken simple economics much longer to do for the American slave trade than it actually lasted due to other factors. But ultimately, it's comforting to know that in the long run you don't have to rely on people's moral sense to solve these problems.
Worse, actors may not be in control of their careers if some executive producer wants to include near pornographic portrayal of, say Summer Glau, where she otherwise refuses to do such scenes.
Could you have chosen a worse argument to make your point? ;)
Case in point: It would be very profitable to chain your workers to the factory floor and have them work 18 hours a day for no money, and consumers would be able to buy the wares much cheaper, yet it would not be ethical.
Actually, it wouldn't. Slave labour is bad for an economy, because you have to feed and house your slaves (and you generally can't treat them badly, as they are expensive and difficult to replace), which is costly, and by allowing slavery the market for your product is smaller by the total number of slaves in the economy. You don't have to bother invoking ethics: it's just a dumb idea.
The pre tag. Learn it, love it.
Children routinely learn perfect English with a complete generative grammar from corrupt sources. Indeed, if you put children in an environment where nobody speaks a complete language, they will spontaneously evolve a grammatically complete language. So it is possible (though I'm nt saying it will be easy...)
I suspect the quickest way to circumvent it would simply be to follow the law and deluge the authorities with several million videos of kittens chasing laser pointers.