They're called domesticated so that we can feel better about how we treat them. So yes, it is for a reason. But cats are still wild beasties. The only reason they don't eat your face when they're mad at you is that they are too small.
Please. Not even close. They've had thousands of years of domestication and selective breeding and are very different than their wildcat ancestors. The "house cats are undomesticated and still wild!" thing is either a romantic myth, or just a lazy observation of owners stemming from them being relatively less social and harder to train than dogs. However domestic cats are vastly more social than actual wildcats, and heavily neotenized both in features and in temperament. An adult cat is still basically a kitten. If you tried raising a wildcat like a house cat, once it became an adult it would have no more use for you and would try to rip your face off if you kept trying to treat it like a pet, size be damned.
Of course if you treat your cat like its feral it will tend to be more so. Just like dogs.
I'll agree with you on the shady practices of Intel when the Athlon line was launched - but I don't think a one hit wonder like that should magically position AMD as the top chip maker.
Nobody said they should have been the top chip maker -- that would have been impossible simply based on AMD's manufacturing capacity relative to Intel's. They should have gotten a lot more marketshare than they did, though, and that difference would have been huge for AMD. Companies like Dell and HP wanted to sell (more) AMD processors based on their merits, but the financial punishment that would come from Intel made it not worth it. That's a big deal.
Brand recognition is one reason. Reluctance of professionals trusting AMD processors in server grade machines could be another. The P4 may have sucked but keep in mind that previously AMDs chips sucked as well, and for a long time the only thing AMD was good for was reverse engineering Intel designs
Yes but those days were also long gone. AMD earned recognition as a chip designer in their own right with K6 as a budget processor, earned recognition as a chip maker capable of going toe-to-toe with Intel with the K7, and then knocked it out of the park with K8. The true customers of Intel and AMD, the OEMs, were well aware of AMD's "brand" and had no qualms about using them in server parts... Except for the interference by Intel. Did you see the email from Dell to Intel where they're basically telling intel that they're getting killed in the server market and Intel better do something? And intel's response is that the $billion they'd given Dell should compensate for their competitive disadvantage? Customers wanted to use AMD, but Intel made sure that AMDs marketshare was artificially limited.
I'm not a pet owner, but I thought cats were _supposed_ to be let out on their own (at least that's what cat owners tell me), because otherwise they go crazy and tear up furniture or start eating the children...
Naw that's crap. Many cats are solely indoor cats and they're just fine. They tear up furniture because they have a scratching instinct which they aren't able to satisfy on trees if they're indoors, and their owners probably didn't give them anything appropriate for scratching. My cat was an outdoor cat and is now indoor, and he doesn't scratch my furniture, just his scratching mat. A post didn't work, but a mat with catnip in it did the trick.:)
Or maybe their cats are going crazy because the children are tormenting it. Kids can be mean.
(e.g. if you give me big bucks for being CEO then I'll give you big bucks for being CEO through my buddy who sits on your board of directors)
If it's even that indirect as to have to be "a buddy" rather than the CEO in question themselves.
My company's last CEO was, in addition to being Chairman of the Board of the company he headed, also on the Boards of two other companies.
It's a big incestuous network. When would the board ever not vote to increase executive compensation, or to create actual incentives not to run companies into the ground? Golden parachutes and ever-increasing bonuses (always to "maintain competitive with industry standards" that they created) are a direct result of this inbreeding.
Spot measurements? For speed? GPS does the same as any speed measurement - calculates the time it takes to cover a prescribed distance, if you know of another way I'd be interested;)
Your speedometer does it by multiplying wheel RPMs by (assumed) wheel circumference.
Anyway, the point was, the speed measurement |(end +/- error) - (start +/- GPS error)|/time is going to be a lot more accurate when the start and end positions are very far apart to calculate e.g. average trip speed, vs measuring your "instantaneous" velocity by using measurements where the start and end are close together.
GPS is not a good technology to use to measure your instantaneous speed.
The name escapes me, but I read a SF story that speculated on that. With super intelligent mice, rats, cats and dogs, the rats and cats ate the mice, the dogs ate the cats, then the really smart ones teamed up with people against the rats and other dogs.
I saw something similar to what you describe only much more schlocky in the late-80s or early-90s Twilight Zone series. A pair of young men exploring an abandoned lab find the corpses of giant mutant rats, which had been killed by giant mutant cats, which had been killed by giant mutant dogs, which had, the boys concluded, been killed by "something bigger". Which turned out to be a giant spider. Obviously! The spider was still alive and ate them both. The end.
Try it: stand on the accelerator with your left foot for a while, then stand on the brake.
Trying to drum up business for your brake company, eh? This recession is tough all over.
I've seen drivers who, when they're presented with a scary situation, take their hands off the wheel and cover their eyes.
That's why I wear Peril Sensitive Sunglasses while driving. That way, I don't have to take my hands off the wheel to avoid seeing things that might alarm me.
And personally, I'm not especially afraid the armed forces are going to change their tune on that aspect. They most definitely want to have a human being in the firing loop. And I bet part of the reason is that we may be close to having machines that can find and attack targets on their own, we're a hell of a long way from having machines that you can usefully reprimand for fucking up.:) But in all seriousness, this seems like a deeply ingrained philosophy in the military that humans should be in charge of the technology.
Sounds a little autobiographical. Indeed, memories can be a curse. But don't worry, there is someone who can help you. Maybe you would be interested in making an appointment with Lacuna, Inc?
if we have learned anything in the past, just because it works in a simulation doesn't mean it will work in reality, more or less in Zero G.
FYI, this wasn't a simulation in the sense of a computer simulation, but rather in the sense that they were not actually required to perform this test on the moon. As far as I can tell from TFA, the only thing "simulated" was the Level 2 landing site which instead of a flat landing pad was a rocky surface designed to "simulate" the surface of the moon.
So, these were real rockets that were really taking off, traveling horizontally, and landing vertically. Yes gravity would be lower on the moon (not zero) and that could certainly introduce some kinds but I think this is still a worthwhile demonstration of working technology.
Ha, not so! Inspired by many hours playing asteroid, to this day I love the idea of blasting the fuck out of asteroids! NASA's Deep Impact mission was just about the coolest thing ever! Comet, asteroid, planet, the freaking moon, whatever. I say bring it on!
In fact, if you made the (granted somewhat dubious) assumption that the portion of my allowance that I spent on pretending to blow shit up in space as a kid should be reflected by the federal budget, then not only would the entirety of NASA be devoted to building rockets for fucking up asteroids and other heavenly bodies, NASA would be about 80% of the budget. The DoJ would be operating on a shoestring budget. Sorry guys, I know you have stuff to blow up here, but Titan is acting cocky and needs its ass kicked!
A film reel which was shown as the first thing in my graduate level AI class, I might add. Sadly, I no longer have the reference to this clip.
Heh. Day 1 of my AI class, the lecture was titled: "It's 2001 -- where's HAL?"
The other lesson from that first day of AI class was that the above properties made AI into the incredible shrinking discipline: each of its successes weren't recognized as "intelligence", but often did spawn entire new disciplines of powerful problem solving that are used everywhere today. So "AI" research gets no credit, even though its researchers have made great strides for computing in general.
Yeah that's when the prof introduced the concept of "Strong AI" (HAL) and "Weak AI" (expert systems, computer learning, chess algorithms etc). "Strong" AI hasn't achieved its goals, but "Weak" AI has been amazingly successful, often due to the efforts of those trying to invent HAL.
Of course the rest of the semester was devoted to "Weak AI". But it's quite useful stuff!
Umm, just FYI, as a Canadian who is perfectly happy living in a nation that most Americans would consider virtually communist, I have to disagree rather strongly with this. And I'm sure your average European would agree with me.
Well that's the thing, most Americans can't and don't distinguish between communism and socialism, which is why when he said socialism has never worked before, I'm certain in his head he was thinking of the USSR and Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
I think it was during the 50s McCarthyism when Socialism somehow got equated to Communism. So while Western Europe et. al. were implementing rational socialist policies while still resisting the Soviets, we had to reject all of these things as somehow being equal to what our enemy was doing... even though they aren't...
The funny thing is that since both McCarthyism and the Cold War are long gone, you'd sound pretty silly accusing someone of being a communist. First because almost nobody really is, and second because it's considered a non-threat in this day and age, like accusing someone of being a British sympathizer it has no weight. Socialism still retains it's swear-word status, and since it's still alive and well in the world, it still retains its weight as a threat and thus insult -- at least if you don't distinguish between it and communism.
It suggests that someone is in favor of abortions, rather than the stated goals of core constituents of the movement: to make abortions "legal, safe, and rare".
Only if you're an idiot.
It obviously means "in favor of abortion being legal" since that's the whole fucking point of the debate: the legality of abortion.
As a medic in Desert Storm, I was quite annoyed that the "video game war" they showed on CNN bore no apparent relation to the bloody mess I saw.
Oh man, I can only imagine (literally, since I only saw the CNN video game footage). And you should be more than annoyed, because I think that had a direct result on the people's acceptance of the second Iraq war. It's why so many people actually believed we could bomb a city -- not military targets in, but literally the city of Falluja where every building could be an insurgent stronghold -- without killing a single civilian. The government said so on CNN.
but there is no such thing, nor will there ever be such a thing as a coherent subject matter called DRUG legalization
I find it funny how you assume it is impossible to acknowledge and take into consideration the different effects of different drugs and still conclude that they all should be legalized and thus support what can only be called in a small number of words "drug legalization", without being an idiot.
It can be rationally argued that there is no existing drug whose effects are such that the harm is not worsened by prohibition. Ergo, supporting the end of prohibition for all drugs is a rational stance to take. That isn't the end of the issue (even legal drugs have many regulations, and these indeed would have to be different just as a practical matter), and its not simplifying it. It is most definitely a "serious" stance that people who do in fact understand the issues can take.
every single drug is completely different in its pharmacological effects, and therefore every single drug should have a completely different legal framework around it.
Completely different legal framework? Really? Even today, drugs are organized into only a few broad classes of illegality. Let's assume I agree with your position that amphetamines, coke, and opiates should never be legalized. Why would they require "completely different legal frameworks" beyond changing the quantities specified by statutes?
Besides, I already know that reason you think those drugs should remain illegal is because they are in the "inebriating/toxic AND addictive" category, which is already a gross oversimplification. "Inebriation" as a description of the mental effects of alcohol is wildly different from the mental effects of cocaine which is wildly different from LSD. Having already boiled down the entire constellation of drugs into basically 4 categories*, why is it so hard to accept that if you consider the "worst" drug on the few axes you are concerned with and decide that it should be legalized, it makes sense to say that all the others should be too. Even considered individually.
Not saying you have to agree, just see that this is not the logic of idiots. It's not actually my opinion either as what I think of when I think "worst", PCP, I think should be illegal.
you refrain your opinions to marijuana, and marijuana alone, in the discussion about marijuana legalization, or you are HURTING THE CAUSE.
Okay now you're talking how rather than should, a completely different issue, but I agree completely. For two reasons. One, the argument against prohibition is a much surer thing with such a mild drug, and thus a much easier sell (who doesn't know at least one stoner to know that they're harmless:P). Two: If the trend is going to be to rollback prohibition, we need a period where mj is separated from other drugs, because one thing you touched on I agree with completely is that we need to stop viewing all drugs the same. Regardless of legality, the question of "Do I want to take this drug now?" should be a more informed and more nuanced opinion than "Drugs are bad, mmmkay?" That's going to take time.
* Giving credit where credit is due, this is vastly more nuanced than usual.
One is to charge the company, who will turn around and charge the consumers with higher prices.
That assumes that they are not already charging what the market will bear, or that their margin is approximately zero.
In general, the price a company sells their product at is not a direct function of the cost to produce it. Instead, it's a function of the demand curve at different price points. They price the item to maximize their expected revenue. The difference between that and their costs is their profit margin. As long as their margin remains positive, then they won't increase the price due to an increase in costs because that increase would actually reduce their revenue. Only in situations where the product is commoditized and the margin is very small will changes in cost directly translate to changes in price.
And in commodity markets, the drop-off for raising prices relative to competitors is even higher. The cost of, e.g., copper is fixed by the supply, not by what any particular provider wants to charge for it. If they can't make money selling copper at that price, tough for them because raising the price won't help. What this means for environmental costs is that if there is an environment-damaging technique that provides a marginal increase in supply (e.g. using arsenic pools to siphon extra gold from ore mentioned in another post), but they have to pay for the cleanup, then the cost of acquiring that supply will be higher than what they can sell it for (especially since introducing extra supply tends to drive the price down), and it becomes unprofitable to use the environmentally dangerous technique.
Think of another commodity, oil, only this time without the "environment" factor. Why aren't oil companies drilling for the oil that's in the Gulf shale? Because it's uneconomical to do so. Why can't they just raise the price of oil? Because it's a global market, and nobody cares how expensive their oil was to acquire. Only when the global supply shrinks and the price of oil rises will it become economical to get that oil.
Sure there may be some cases where a company is able to simply raise prices and continue damaging the environment, but in many cases that's simply not an option, and ergo the cost will not be born by the customer. By making an externality an internality, we've changed the economics of damaging the environment so that the more you damage the environment, the less economical it becomes. So either they stop doing it, or they make less money.
The second option is to make the taxpayers pay for it. In my mind taxpayers = consumers and so there is no real difference.
I can think of three significant differences. 1: Taxes are an even more indirect way of relaying costs to citizens. It's highly unlikely that the tax burden of an individual would increase in proportion to the cost of environmental cleanup. Much more likely is that their tax burden stays the same, and NASA (or whatever) gets less funding. 2: By hiding the cost, you're removed the incentive for companies to not pollute, and individuals to not buy from polluting companies, and that's even if (1) didn't hold true. "Oh don't buy from company X because my taxes will go up by Y" is not something most people will think about. 3: Corporations and the rich pay a lower percentage of their incomes in taxes than the middle class, because much more of their income comes from capital gains. Also individuals are taxed on income, while corporations are taxed on income minus costs. Also this burden would be placed on people who did not purchase products from the offending company. Allowing society at large to pay the cost for a corporation's environmental negligence is the whole problem in the first place.
By the way, liberatarian != hates the environment. Liberatarian == hates the government.
Well that's good. The question is, how exactly are you going to internalize this significant cost without the government? Of the two optio
What is this ethics thing you are talking about and since when was it relevant to fight in a political arena ?
I'll field this one.
"Ethics" is the name of one of a number of flags that politicians can drape over their shoulders, automatically causing their arguments to be perceived to represent the trait represented by the flag, and just as importantly their opponent's arguments as being against that trait. Only the first side of an argument to don a given flag receives the benefit, as opposing sides attempting to follow suit are seen as cynical and insincere because they were obviously against the trait to begin with.
Other flags include but are not limited to "responsibility", "freedom", "concern for children", "dislike of criminals/terrorists", "concern for the poor", and of course "love of country".
No idea how this fits into the OP's post though.:)
both of our enemies are the thugs. so you fight your short term war, i'll fight my long term war, and we will both prevail (in the long term;-)
I'm just saying -- you should care about this law, and we should not let them pass any law they want.
Well okay, but "who fucking cares" and "let them pass any law they want" makes it sound like you aren't fighting any kind of war, and are just waiting for the inevitable outcome. Taken that as just a turn of speech not implying an actual lack of caring, then sure, our views are complementary.
who fucking cares? its just so much damage to route around
People who care about the ramifications and consequences of these laws on our lives today, rather than just the inevitable long-term outcome.
therefore, let them pass all of the half-assed measures that don't essentially kill the joy that is the internet all they want.
The DMCA and the DRM schemes protected by it have completely failed to kill internet piracy, much less the internet. Yet, they have resulted in people being inconvenienced, hassled, sued, even arrested. Legitimate research that works best when not attempting to operate under the radar of the Powers That Be has been stymied. Progress has been slowed. The fact that progress wasn't stopped, cannot be stopped, doesn't change that this is a Bad Thing.
These Three Strikes laws will similarly fail, but in the meantime many people be cut off from "the joy that is the internet" simply because of accusations by organizations known to not give a shit about verifying their accusations. This will have a real effect on peoples' lives.
game over, douchebags
it doesn't reflect well on you when you are already defeated, and don't know it or won't admit it
The game may be decided but it's a long, long way from over. There's no game clock here, so it's only over when they either concede defeat or every last party pursuing this no longer has the resources to continue. Before that happens, they can do a lot of damage. Ergo, I care.
Assuming that they're going to create something stupid, what would be the least stupid alternative?
I have no idea, but I think I can figure out how to go in the opposite direction. The main problem, to me, is that they're using a baseball analogy instead of a boxing analogy.
Instead of "3 strikes and you're out", it should be "roughly between 10 and 100 blows to the head and you're out". With an optional "technical knockout rule" where if you fall over three times watching illegally downloaded porn you're out, or if the referee feels it would be unsafe to allow you to continue masturbating to internet porn.
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They're called domesticated so that we can feel better about how we treat them. So yes, it is for a reason. But cats are still wild beasties. The only reason they don't eat your face when they're mad at you is that they are too small.
Please. Not even close. They've had thousands of years of domestication and selective breeding and are very different than their wildcat ancestors. The "house cats are undomesticated and still wild!" thing is either a romantic myth, or just a lazy observation of owners stemming from them being relatively less social and harder to train than dogs. However domestic cats are vastly more social than actual wildcats, and heavily neotenized both in features and in temperament. An adult cat is still basically a kitten. If you tried raising a wildcat like a house cat, once it became an adult it would have no more use for you and would try to rip your face off if you kept trying to treat it like a pet, size be damned.
Of course if you treat your cat like its feral it will tend to be more so. Just like dogs.
I'll agree with you on the shady practices of Intel when the Athlon line was launched - but I don't think a one hit wonder like that should magically position AMD as the top chip maker.
Nobody said they should have been the top chip maker -- that would have been impossible simply based on AMD's manufacturing capacity relative to Intel's. They should have gotten a lot more marketshare than they did, though, and that difference would have been huge for AMD. Companies like Dell and HP wanted to sell (more) AMD processors based on their merits, but the financial punishment that would come from Intel made it not worth it. That's a big deal.
Brand recognition is one reason. Reluctance of professionals trusting AMD processors in server grade machines could be another. The P4 may have sucked but keep in mind that previously AMDs chips sucked as well, and for a long time the only thing AMD was good for was reverse engineering Intel designs
Yes but those days were also long gone. AMD earned recognition as a chip designer in their own right with K6 as a budget processor, earned recognition as a chip maker capable of going toe-to-toe with Intel with the K7, and then knocked it out of the park with K8. The true customers of Intel and AMD, the OEMs, were well aware of AMD's "brand" and had no qualms about using them in server parts... Except for the interference by Intel. Did you see the email from Dell to Intel where they're basically telling intel that they're getting killed in the server market and Intel better do something? And intel's response is that the $billion they'd given Dell should compensate for their competitive disadvantage? Customers wanted to use AMD, but Intel made sure that AMDs marketshare was artificially limited.
I'm not a pet owner, but I thought cats were _supposed_ to be let out on their own (at least that's what cat owners tell me), because otherwise they go crazy and tear up furniture or start eating the children...
Naw that's crap. Many cats are solely indoor cats and they're just fine. They tear up furniture because they have a scratching instinct which they aren't able to satisfy on trees if they're indoors, and their owners probably didn't give them anything appropriate for scratching. My cat was an outdoor cat and is now indoor, and he doesn't scratch my furniture, just his scratching mat. A post didn't work, but a mat with catnip in it did the trick. :)
Or maybe their cats are going crazy because the children are tormenting it. Kids can be mean.
(e.g. if you give me big bucks for being CEO then I'll give you big bucks for being CEO through my buddy who sits on your board of directors)
If it's even that indirect as to have to be "a buddy" rather than the CEO in question themselves.
My company's last CEO was, in addition to being Chairman of the Board of the company he headed, also on the Boards of two other companies.
It's a big incestuous network. When would the board ever not vote to increase executive compensation, or to create actual incentives not to run companies into the ground? Golden parachutes and ever-increasing bonuses (always to "maintain competitive with industry standards" that they created) are a direct result of this inbreeding.
It's a single UK standard plug and that's it and has been since I can remember (I'm 40).
Which is the age where the memory really starts to go, thus explaining why you can't remember that it was last week. ;)
And yet he was unable to reach forward with his right hand and pull the floor mat off the pedal?
What the fuck? Are you serious?
Spot measurements? For speed? GPS does the same as any speed measurement - calculates the time it takes to cover a prescribed distance, if you know of another way I'd be interested ;)
Your speedometer does it by multiplying wheel RPMs by (assumed) wheel circumference.
Anyway, the point was, the speed measurement |(end +/- error) - (start +/- GPS error)|/time is going to be a lot more accurate when the start and end positions are very far apart to calculate e.g. average trip speed, vs measuring your "instantaneous" velocity by using measurements where the start and end are close together.
GPS is not a good technology to use to measure your instantaneous speed.
The name escapes me, but I read a SF story that speculated on that. With super intelligent mice, rats, cats and dogs, the rats and cats ate the mice, the dogs ate the cats, then the really smart ones teamed up with people against the rats and other dogs.
I saw something similar to what you describe only much more schlocky in the late-80s or early-90s Twilight Zone series. A pair of young men exploring an abandoned lab find the corpses of giant mutant rats, which had been killed by giant mutant cats, which had been killed by giant mutant dogs, which had, the boys concluded, been killed by "something bigger". Which turned out to be a giant spider. Obviously! The spider was still alive and ate them both. The end.
I don't think that series lasted long. :P
You can really taste the intelligence!
Try it: stand on the accelerator with your left foot for a while, then stand on the brake.
Trying to drum up business for your brake company, eh? This recession is tough all over.
I've seen drivers who, when they're presented with a scary situation, take their hands off the wheel and cover their eyes.
That's why I wear Peril Sensitive Sunglasses while driving. That way, I don't have to take my hands off the wheel to avoid seeing things that might alarm me.
And personally, I'm not especially afraid the armed forces are going to change their tune on that aspect. They most definitely want to have a human being in the firing loop. And I bet part of the reason is that we may be close to having machines that can find and attack targets on their own, we're a hell of a long way from having machines that you can usefully reprimand for fucking up. :) But in all seriousness, this seems like a deeply ingrained philosophy in the military that humans should be in charge of the technology.
Sounds a little autobiographical. Indeed, memories can be a curse. But don't worry, there is someone who can help you. Maybe you would be interested in making an appointment with Lacuna, Inc?
if we have learned anything in the past, just because it works in a simulation doesn't mean it will work in reality, more or less in Zero G.
FYI, this wasn't a simulation in the sense of a computer simulation, but rather in the sense that they were not actually required to perform this test on the moon. As far as I can tell from TFA, the only thing "simulated" was the Level 2 landing site which instead of a flat landing pad was a rocky surface designed to "simulate" the surface of the moon.
So, these were real rockets that were really taking off, traveling horizontally, and landing vertically. Yes gravity would be lower on the moon (not zero) and that could certainly introduce some kinds but I think this is still a worthwhile demonstration of working technology.
Also apparently if this came to pass, the Department of Justice would be responsible for blowing shit up on earth...
No one grows up wanting to fuck up an asteroid.
Ha, not so! Inspired by many hours playing asteroid, to this day I love the idea of blasting the fuck out of asteroids! NASA's Deep Impact mission was just about the coolest thing ever! Comet, asteroid, planet, the freaking moon, whatever. I say bring it on!
In fact, if you made the (granted somewhat dubious) assumption that the portion of my allowance that I spent on pretending to blow shit up in space as a kid should be reflected by the federal budget, then not only would the entirety of NASA be devoted to building rockets for fucking up asteroids and other heavenly bodies, NASA would be about 80% of the budget. The DoJ would be operating on a shoestring budget. Sorry guys, I know you have stuff to blow up here, but Titan is acting cocky and needs its ass kicked!
A film reel which was shown as the first thing in my graduate level AI class, I might add. Sadly, I no longer have the reference to this clip.
Heh. Day 1 of my AI class, the lecture was titled: "It's 2001 -- where's HAL?"
The other lesson from that first day of AI class was that the above properties made AI into the incredible shrinking discipline: each of its successes weren't recognized as "intelligence", but often did spawn entire new disciplines of powerful problem solving that are used everywhere today. So "AI" research gets no credit, even though its researchers have made great strides for computing in general.
Yeah that's when the prof introduced the concept of "Strong AI" (HAL) and "Weak AI" (expert systems, computer learning, chess algorithms etc). "Strong" AI hasn't achieved its goals, but "Weak" AI has been amazingly successful, often due to the efforts of those trying to invent HAL.
Of course the rest of the semester was devoted to "Weak AI". But it's quite useful stuff!
Umm, just FYI, as a Canadian who is perfectly happy living in a nation that most Americans would consider virtually communist, I have to disagree rather strongly with this. And I'm sure your average European would agree with me.
Well that's the thing, most Americans can't and don't distinguish between communism and socialism, which is why when he said socialism has never worked before, I'm certain in his head he was thinking of the USSR and Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
I think it was during the 50s McCarthyism when Socialism somehow got equated to Communism. So while Western Europe et. al. were implementing rational socialist policies while still resisting the Soviets, we had to reject all of these things as somehow being equal to what our enemy was doing... even though they aren't...
The funny thing is that since both McCarthyism and the Cold War are long gone, you'd sound pretty silly accusing someone of being a communist. First because almost nobody really is, and second because it's considered a non-threat in this day and age, like accusing someone of being a British sympathizer it has no weight. Socialism still retains it's swear-word status, and since it's still alive and well in the world, it still retains its weight as a threat and thus insult -- at least if you don't distinguish between it and communism.
It suggests that someone is in favor of abortions, rather than the stated goals of core constituents of the movement: to make abortions "legal, safe, and rare".
Only if you're an idiot.
It obviously means "in favor of abortion being legal" since that's the whole fucking point of the debate: the legality of abortion.
As a medic in Desert Storm, I was quite annoyed that the "video game war" they showed on CNN bore no apparent relation to the bloody mess I saw.
Oh man, I can only imagine (literally, since I only saw the CNN video game footage). And you should be more than annoyed, because I think that had a direct result on the people's acceptance of the second Iraq war. It's why so many people actually believed we could bomb a city -- not military targets in, but literally the city of Falluja where every building could be an insurgent stronghold -- without killing a single civilian. The government said so on CNN.
but there is no such thing, nor will there ever be such a thing as a coherent subject matter called DRUG legalization
I find it funny how you assume it is impossible to acknowledge and take into consideration the different effects of different drugs and still conclude that they all should be legalized and thus support what can only be called in a small number of words "drug legalization", without being an idiot.
It can be rationally argued that there is no existing drug whose effects are such that the harm is not worsened by prohibition. Ergo, supporting the end of prohibition for all drugs is a rational stance to take. That isn't the end of the issue (even legal drugs have many regulations, and these indeed would have to be different just as a practical matter), and its not simplifying it. It is most definitely a "serious" stance that people who do in fact understand the issues can take.
every single drug is completely different in its pharmacological effects, and therefore every single drug should have a completely different legal framework around it.
Completely different legal framework? Really? Even today, drugs are organized into only a few broad classes of illegality. Let's assume I agree with your position that amphetamines, coke, and opiates should never be legalized. Why would they require "completely different legal frameworks" beyond changing the quantities specified by statutes?
Besides, I already know that reason you think those drugs should remain illegal is because they are in the "inebriating/toxic AND addictive" category, which is already a gross oversimplification. "Inebriation" as a description of the mental effects of alcohol is wildly different from the mental effects of cocaine which is wildly different from LSD. Having already boiled down the entire constellation of drugs into basically 4 categories*, why is it so hard to accept that if you consider the "worst" drug on the few axes you are concerned with and decide that it should be legalized, it makes sense to say that all the others should be too. Even considered individually.
Not saying you have to agree, just see that this is not the logic of idiots. It's not actually my opinion either as what I think of when I think "worst", PCP, I think should be illegal.
you refrain your opinions to marijuana, and marijuana alone, in the discussion about marijuana legalization, or you are HURTING THE CAUSE.
Okay now you're talking how rather than should, a completely different issue, but I agree completely. For two reasons. One, the argument against prohibition is a much surer thing with such a mild drug, and thus a much easier sell (who doesn't know at least one stoner to know that they're harmless :P). Two: If the trend is going to be to rollback prohibition, we need a period where mj is separated from other drugs, because one thing you touched on I agree with completely is that we need to stop viewing all drugs the same. Regardless of legality, the question of "Do I want to take this drug now?" should be a more informed and more nuanced opinion than "Drugs are bad, mmmkay?" That's going to take time.
* Giving credit where credit is due, this is vastly more nuanced than usual.
One is to charge the company, who will turn around and charge the consumers with higher prices.
That assumes that they are not already charging what the market will bear, or that their margin is approximately zero.
In general, the price a company sells their product at is not a direct function of the cost to produce it. Instead, it's a function of the demand curve at different price points. They price the item to maximize their expected revenue. The difference between that and their costs is their profit margin. As long as their margin remains positive, then they won't increase the price due to an increase in costs because that increase would actually reduce their revenue. Only in situations where the product is commoditized and the margin is very small will changes in cost directly translate to changes in price.
And in commodity markets, the drop-off for raising prices relative to competitors is even higher. The cost of, e.g., copper is fixed by the supply, not by what any particular provider wants to charge for it. If they can't make money selling copper at that price, tough for them because raising the price won't help. What this means for environmental costs is that if there is an environment-damaging technique that provides a marginal increase in supply (e.g. using arsenic pools to siphon extra gold from ore mentioned in another post), but they have to pay for the cleanup, then the cost of acquiring that supply will be higher than what they can sell it for (especially since introducing extra supply tends to drive the price down), and it becomes unprofitable to use the environmentally dangerous technique.
Think of another commodity, oil, only this time without the "environment" factor. Why aren't oil companies drilling for the oil that's in the Gulf shale? Because it's uneconomical to do so. Why can't they just raise the price of oil? Because it's a global market, and nobody cares how expensive their oil was to acquire. Only when the global supply shrinks and the price of oil rises will it become economical to get that oil.
Sure there may be some cases where a company is able to simply raise prices and continue damaging the environment, but in many cases that's simply not an option, and ergo the cost will not be born by the customer. By making an externality an internality, we've changed the economics of damaging the environment so that the more you damage the environment, the less economical it becomes. So either they stop doing it, or they make less money.
The second option is to make the taxpayers pay for it. In my mind taxpayers = consumers and so there is no real difference.
I can think of three significant differences.
1: Taxes are an even more indirect way of relaying costs to citizens. It's highly unlikely that the tax burden of an individual would increase in proportion to the cost of environmental cleanup. Much more likely is that their tax burden stays the same, and NASA (or whatever) gets less funding.
2: By hiding the cost, you're removed the incentive for companies to not pollute, and individuals to not buy from polluting companies, and that's even if (1) didn't hold true. "Oh don't buy from company X because my taxes will go up by Y" is not something most people will think about.
3: Corporations and the rich pay a lower percentage of their incomes in taxes than the middle class, because much more of their income comes from capital gains. Also individuals are taxed on income, while corporations are taxed on income minus costs. Also this burden would be placed on people who did not purchase products from the offending company. Allowing society at large to pay the cost for a corporation's environmental negligence is the whole problem in the first place.
By the way, liberatarian != hates the environment. Liberatarian == hates the government.
Well that's good. The question is, how exactly are you going to internalize this significant cost without the government? Of the two optio
What is this ethics thing you are talking about and since when was it relevant to fight in a political arena ?
I'll field this one.
"Ethics" is the name of one of a number of flags that politicians can drape over their shoulders, automatically causing their arguments to be perceived to represent the trait represented by the flag, and just as importantly their opponent's arguments as being against that trait. Only the first side of an argument to don a given flag receives the benefit, as opposing sides attempting to follow suit are seen as cynical and insincere because they were obviously against the trait to begin with.
Other flags include but are not limited to "responsibility", "freedom", "concern for children", "dislike of criminals/terrorists", "concern for the poor", and of course "love of country".
No idea how this fits into the OP's post though. :)
both of our enemies are the thugs. so you fight your short term war, i'll fight my long term war, and we will both prevail (in the long term ;-)
I'm just saying -- you should care about this law, and we should not let them pass any law they want.
Well okay, but "who fucking cares" and "let them pass any law they want" makes it sound like you aren't fighting any kind of war, and are just waiting for the inevitable outcome. Taken that as just a turn of speech not implying an actual lack of caring, then sure, our views are complementary.
who fucking cares? its just so much damage to route around
People who care about the ramifications and consequences of these laws on our lives today, rather than just the inevitable long-term outcome.
therefore, let them pass all of the half-assed measures that don't essentially kill the joy that is the internet all they want.
The DMCA and the DRM schemes protected by it have completely failed to kill internet piracy, much less the internet. Yet, they have resulted in people being inconvenienced, hassled, sued, even arrested. Legitimate research that works best when not attempting to operate under the radar of the Powers That Be has been stymied. Progress has been slowed. The fact that progress wasn't stopped, cannot be stopped, doesn't change that this is a Bad Thing.
These Three Strikes laws will similarly fail, but in the meantime many people be cut off from "the joy that is the internet" simply because of accusations by organizations known to not give a shit about verifying their accusations. This will have a real effect on peoples' lives.
game over, douchebags
it doesn't reflect well on you when you are already defeated, and don't know it or won't admit it
The game may be decided but it's a long, long way from over. There's no game clock here, so it's only over when they either concede defeat or every last party pursuing this no longer has the resources to continue. Before that happens, they can do a lot of damage. Ergo, I care.
Assuming that they're going to create something stupid, what would be the least stupid alternative?
I have no idea, but I think I can figure out how to go in the opposite direction. The main problem, to me, is that they're using a baseball analogy instead of a boxing analogy.
Instead of "3 strikes and you're out", it should be "roughly between 10 and 100 blows to the head and you're out". With an optional "technical knockout rule" where if you fall over three times watching illegally downloaded porn you're out, or if the referee feels it would be unsafe to allow you to continue masturbating to internet porn.