The WTO will eventually even the playing field out to the most stupid and corrupt will be the law of the globalist land. Europe is holding out on some things, but eventually they will succumb to software patents, food patents, acceptance of GMO foods, etc. As more and more of the wealth production shifts elsewhere, the suits will insist that "IP" is the way to make money, to "save" the economy. When it comes to food, no patents on open pollinated heriloom seeds are possible, so out they go! They've been on a buying binge to aquire existing seed companies then trash them, dropping diversity and honest choice. And with the so called "law" saying that GM pollen crossing over into your non-GM field means you have "stolen their intellectual property"..well...ain't that special. There ain't gonna be no winnin' there. All they do is get enough of their crap planted in every county, eventually everyone who doesn't pay the yearly patent seed ripoff price is now a criminal, legally, as it becomes impossible to grow non GM patented stuff, the wind takes care of that. Check out that vid I posted in my original post, quite the eye opener. With corn, it pretty much is too late, so much cross pollination now with patented GM seeds that it is near impossible to try and grow "pure". Look at the refs in the vid to the poor campesinos in Mexico who grew nutritious specialized for their locale corn for like many generations, now it is crap, and isn't near as good to eat, because it got cross contaminated.
Of course this is rubbish, but that is what they have done to the US now, they *looted* the place, not only with the food supply but with any number of things, and got away with it promising us the magic beans for the cow, and it eventually will be all over, because of these globalist treaties that place international corporate profits over everything else. The farmers are screwed, do it their way and make some pitiful profit, or try to fight them and go bust. The options are limited.
Some of this stuff now it is *both*. They are adding in genes/whatnot to make normal food crops also produce strong medicines.
well..it's neat they can do that..cheaper and better and more effective medicines is a worthy goal...but if this stuff escapes and crosses over with the "regular" food....eventually you'll have little choice, eat said and consume a dose of medicine, or no eat. Yes, that would be a choice, Hobson's choice.
Thanks for the backup on the science side. I am mostly looking at the practical economic side and it is pure vendor lockin and hidden everything and patented everything from this viewpoint. There are several overlapping bad ideas and practices there.
Our modern corporate wall street/governmental approved ag is really screwing over both the end consumer and the primary producers, the farmers. Everyone is going into some sort of food bondage to this octopus of corporate/governmental (false)control. It just weirds me out. And I so much think there will be not one but many "whoopsies!" coming I started a program to not only do my primary crop, but hit generalization and grow as much of my own food as possible (getting closer every year to total, too). I even maintain an open pollinated-no patents seed stash, I just do the old traditional "keep the best" every season, and I have contingency plans to add airfilters to the greenhouse and continue production there for our personal food if I absolutely have to.
It's sad, but I have gradually lost faith in the impartiality of the science community. Just too much stuff tied to huge profits and patents and global trade policies today, I just don't think it is as "impartial" as they want us to believe. Look at the recent revelations with h1n1 and WHO, or the corruption scandals in the european emissions trading market, and now a proposed trillions of dollars global co2 market. There's just too much money and political power, etc., to be garnered from gaming the system, even the "independent" science system, that it leaves joe food eater or taxpayer just bewildered who to believe or not anymore.
I mean, this *sucks*, I don't want to have that viewpoint, but am forced to more and more because we keep finding out about weird stuff that was kept hidden or altered for profit.
Usually pointy haired bosses are mid level though. These big decisions are made by the muckety mucks at the top.
I think that if it can be proved that research studies were obfuscated to hide the negative, or fudged..purely for economic gain, or that an official regulator used their authority position to further that shady goal, that it should be treated as a crime against humanity, like attempted genocide, along those levels. As in major criminal felony, not some white collar BS civil matter where they might get some joke fine either.
There are normal accidental mistakes, then there are deliberate decisions made to go ahead and issue some governmental stamp of approval and then produce and sell something that they know has questionable and dangerous traits. The latter non accidental occurrence should be a serious criminal violation. And repeated occurrences within the same corporation should result in a corporate death sentence, disallowal of corporate charter, declaring all outstanding stock to be worthless and untradeable. If they can do it to poor people with normal crimes, "three strikes" laws, they should apply the same thing to corporations. Three major criminal foulups-out ya go, dissolved, physical plant and other assets seized and auctioned off.
"Maximizing shareholder value" should not be the only criteria for allowing corporate charters. Just screw that and that mindset and belief. I like what the original design had, corporations had to prove to be of the public benefit to retain their charters. Now it is..they can do anything crooked sleazy or illegal they want and if they can afford to eat the fines if they are caught..they keep doing it. Nuts. Whack a few dozen of the top infringers down. Shareholders would *finally* get the message that they better be watching over their employees conduct a little better, that there's no such thing as a free lunch, and with profits come duties and responsibilities.
And with that, we need some whistleblower protections with big sharp teeth in them. It's still a joke and lower level employees in government and business are still afraid of getting the word out on malfeasance and unethical or illegal behavior they are aware of. That should just not be.
I've seen this a lot on this site (unfortunately). Luddite is tossed around as a swear word to ridicule those who don't understand or see any benefits of modern tech. The opposite exists but we don't have a single word for it, people who automatically trust any new tech to be safe, without any evidence that it is safe, other than the inventor's and corporation's word for it. There's a word used that is close, but doesn't specify "as regards newer tech", that is a "pollyanna". We really need a new word for those who blindly "trust" but never "verify" all new high tech advances.
This issue with some of the GM corn mods has been known for years now, and dismissed by the big business sycophants/pollyannas. The largest misconception I have seen is equating *cross species modification* with naturally occurring or man made same species hybrids. These get equated all the freaking time by alleged tech savvy people as the excuse to just "trust". The "tech pollyannas" knee jerk automatically trust, based on a starting point of falsehood belief. It's just as loony and stupid as being a luddite based on erroneous or even zero knowledge of the subject.
I am a farmer and I will say I do NOT trust corporate big ag business (nor ag college academia that relies on the same big business for funding and has tame scientists in and out of the same big business) to be self regulating as to safety concerns nor do I trust the governmental regulators because of the revolving door "jobs" aspect that occur. (exactly the same as occurs with Wall Street/Federal Reserve/Treasury/SEC revolving door jobs). There's WAY too much money involved for there not to be corruption. Just human nature. Just because some person has many letters next to their name, or some official government title, is not any guarantee they are trustworthy as to being non corrupt or "bought off". They are just as likely or not as likely as anyone else, and as the currency units involved go up in number..we should take closer and closer looks as to this trust and verify business.
It would be nice to trust the system, but I can't the way it is set up now.
Here's an interesting video on this food subject, on how much trust we should place in huge global ag business and regulations as they exist now.
Look at software code. A chunk can be written, looked at, have other people look at it, vetted..few months later they missed something and there is an 0-day. Well, that can be patched.
Can't say the same thing for food stuff once it is planted all over. Won't be any patches once it is out in the wild and air pollination starts spreading it. We are already seeing some of the first minor examples with canola/rapeseed "superweeds". Just wait until there are major examples.
It isn't a matter of if, it is a matter of when. There will be a hugemongous "whoops..heh heh heh, guess we missed that" excuse mumbling major screwup, by guys in black suits and white lab coats at some news conference, with the global food supply. This corn might be it, who knows, but it is coming.
Google has a tangibles option. They could start not emphasizing ads as much as actually selling stuff themselves, ie a super amazon effort. They are starting now with their cellphone, this branching out..and there is nothing stopping them from going on to all sorts of other tangible products, which would make their advertising just a force multiplier instead of an economic end game, even if all they started out with was a profit sharing deal with ad buyers..
It's just as common as not, at least from my experience, as full time trade show worker for fifteen years before I semi retired back to farming. I have helped set up displays and product and arranged tables of literature and swag in any number of hotel rooms before, with the main action down in the exhibit halls or in the larger conference rooms, and I have always known it to go on and really..vendors meeting with clients in hotel rooms? Oh hey, look, I have the widget we are selling right here in my case... This is as common as anything, all over the planet, like as long as there have been hotels. A lot of times people make some contacts then they go back to the more private rooms to work out deals, etc, and they might still be looking at the products then. It just widely varies, and unless the show management and the hotels actually denied this practice in advance, and they can prove it, those folks got at least semi shafted. (guessing based on lack of more detail in TFA, it is all hearsay. Even if it was just coattail riding and they paid ces nothing, they still paid the hotel, and the hotel should have that restriction in some contract and be upfront about it in advance.)
Generating plants would still have to be built near the cities across private roads paying huge fees for transit, all the materials have to be mined/refined/ manufactured, value added in many places to get to the plants, then they need to be fueled, primarily from coal, that would come from private coal mines, which might be far away and have to be trucked, barged or railed to the plant, across other private property. Every foot of that construction and delivery process would be paying transit fees.
Your costs therefore would be much larger than they are today..because they gotcha. It doesn't matter if you use uranium, all of the above still applies. Pure wall street rules, which are no rules short of theft or contract fraud, would indicated a major cartel pricing structure, similar to opec, with not much cheating as there isn't anything in it for big private mine operators to engage in a fratricidal race to the bottom when they can sit back and establish a guaranteed high profits syndicate.
A simple-from the rural landowner perspective- "I get all my electricity for free for letting you cross my property hauling your coal or establishing power lines" that rural access seekers would want at a minimum-I really couldn't imagine anyone demanding *less* than that, and they would likely want cash on top of that- would establish that their prices would be zero, whereas any urban dwellers would be extra large. Next step would just demand access to high speed communications, as long as the poles where there, just demand it, or stifle access. So..the companies go to the neighbor, look for access there. neighbor knows the score, demands the same thing, at a minimum. Lather, rinse repeat and local neighbors could band together knowing full well that the line had to cross *someplace* around there, and just contract with themselves so that all of them got the free electricity, as a condition of that line going in, or the road to cross, etc. Really, ask yourself if you were in that position, what would you ask for, or would you allow free transit, then offer to pay some huge fee for electricity on top of that? You'd have to be a pretty dull crayon to want that latter deal, yes?
So they wouldn't be paying through the roof, they would be getting it for *free*, at the expense of higher prices in the remote from the coal cities. This is a much more likely scenario.
And as for self powered, again, many would be in a position to do just that, and it is happening across the USA as we speak now, all those wind turbines for example are going up in farmers fields, and they aren't going up for free either.
Before we had massive centralized power delivery all over, many areas of the rural US were going to home windchargers, or carbide to water acetylene gas generators.. You can go look this up, jacobs was one such windcharger company and one of their models is still running in Antarctica today, from one of the earlier explorers. the tech is just not hard at smallish scales. And many rural people are now for a fact going to solar PV at least as a decent adjunct (that would be me), and eventually you will see them go all the way. They might stay grid tied, but they will be getting a check every month, not sending in a check.
It's a no-cheap-win simple extrapolation as regards what the remote (remote being far from the original sources, ie, the big cities, they would be the "new remote") demand would be price wise, it would be much higher than today for the urban dwellers, with total privatization and the loss of your governmental guaranteed subsidized commons.
Everything the big cities need has to be imported if they insist on living remotely where nothing tangible really comes from. Big cities produce *demand*, they don't really produce much stuff, except (and shrinking fast in the US) the very last stage assembly styled manufacturing, which still is tied heavily to mandated commons access for raw materials back down stream. "Demand" is not a pr
Try, a wooden box on the wall with the speaker on a cord, the mouth piece on the box, and a crank handle to get the operators attention. That was one granny had that, I remember talking on it. My other granny had an icebox, and some dude would trot down the alley with a horse and ice wagon and come in and put a huge chunk of ice in it. We had a rotary at home though, think it was made out of cast iron.
We had the first TV in the 'hood, a 9" philco IIRC, and a buncha neighbors and relatives would come over and sit around and watch TV, not a whole lotta channels though and it all went off at night.
Lemme see...35 cent indoor movies, that was the only place with air conditioning, nickle cokes, nickle candy bars, and a real five and dime store that had tons of stuff for a nickle or a dime.
I don't remember all the prices on stuff, but a lot of it, like hamburger 5 lbs for a buck. Lot of cars still under a grand brand new. A portable radio was half a suitcase with heavy batteries in it.
Oh man, my fav, REAL army navy stores that had all the great stuff, just everything, you could go nuts in there poking through the junk, they had everything including surplus rifles. Dang giant rubber rafts hanging from the ceiling, old torpedoes, tons of neat stuff like that.
Bicycles were like harleys with no engines., about the same amount of steel.
Wimminks all still wore real stockings all the time...err..that was major cool....;)
Dang, ain't a year goes by I don't regret losing my baseball cards, comic books, all my early sci fiction paper backs, stuff like that.
A lot of tech and some aspects of society today are a lot better, a lot isn't though. Leaving keys in the car was common, never locking the door, etc. No school massacres, but we could carry our.22s to school to go shooting after school, etc. It was no big deal at all, stick 'em in your locker.
Back then, most everything was fixable, and did get fixed, now..not much, it works or it is junk.
Would I trade..uhh "timezones"? Nope, not a straight swap, but I would if I could pick and choose various things from then and now.
They'll wind up using this for advertising. Instead of regular "dumb" windows in stores they will all be "smart windows" with changeable ads, visible from both sides of the glass.
I believe aluminum smelters sometimes work using this model, only running production at times of cheaper power, or if they are power producers themselves, selling into the grid when what they can get for it exceeds the profits they would get from making aluminum. Or say any factory that was capable of fast startup, then fast shutdown, perhaps highly automated and not needing too many humans involved, something that didn't need to run exactly full time or on an exact set schedule.
There are similar arrangements that could be put into place to usefully soak up surplus power at times, and google's idea of energy metering goes along with that. Example, charging electric car fleets, or perhaps whenever home battery bank tech gets better and cheaper, you would buy to charge your bank when the rates are the cheapest. You could stagger your home demands, such as running the washing machine when it is cheaper, etc., automatically. The power companies themselves have started using pumped water during low demand times to return water upstream of their dams and turbines, when there is lower demand for their electric product.
Basically though, I don't think excess power is near the problem that lack of power causes, when demand exceeds supply. In the UK now they are shutting off natgas delivery to factories because other demand is so huge because of the deep freeze going on. (although I think they should shut off power to artificial paper financial product trading houses that are mostly just gambling around with their synthetics before they restrict power to their remaining tangibles goods factories.. that's just another side issue on priorities and what really helps an economy or not)
You just don't like it when your little insular urban centric "oh so superior" bubble gets burst. You exist at cheap affordable rates for basic life necessities in the larger cities from the government using a LOT of eminent domain seizures and mandated "right of ways" and massive centralized infrastructure building using tax payer dollars over the generations and regulations to keep your costs down. And the government seems to not pay much to the actual rural owners for this transit action, as in zero. Pure taking.
I bet you've never even thought before about how much your life is economically stealth subsidized because of that. Just imagine if all that "commons" action was gone and it was all private, your big city "wall street rules". All private roads, people charging whatever the market would bear, to get food to you..heh. Electric delivery companies having to negotiate transit fees. heh. Municipal water service and pipelines just taking water from the rural areas when this would be private water, where they could charge a sales fee per gallon before it even entered the pipeline, and then have to keep adding to the fees as the pipeline crossed a lot of private land and boundaries, heh. Tons of examples there.
You have no idea *at all* how cheap you have it from that "commons" and subsidized access. Just go back in US history and look what urban costs were before commons access. Every step of the way as the commons developed, starting with such things as the "post roads", your costs for food water and energy have dropped radically as a percentage of your income, and your comfort quality of life has gone up. But now that we would like a little more modern commons access to better communications, wow, what a reaction! See it all the time here. "Oh noes, string some better copper on already existing poles, OMGWTFBBQ, break the bank, we can't afford it, wah, no subsidies, how dare those people want modern communications, as if their chintzy water and food and power is so valuable!!"
Go to a system like I outlined, all private, a for-profit model, and see what your food and water and electricity and natural gas would cost. Government intervention and the creation of a commons for centralized delivery systems keep your prices really low in the cities. The rural areas would easily be able to afford a lot more things than just cheap broadband under that model. Just your water bill in some large cities would shoot through the roof, let alone all the other stuff.
I agree, it's a rip. And why should the government provide subsidized access to provide much cheaper food, water delivery, electricity delivery and natural gas deliveries to those remote densely packed areas where none of those valuable resources occur naturally in the quantities those densely packed areas demand and use now? Why should they be allowed to "vote" to take from other people far away in the rural areas, or to use any public tax monies collected to help provide these goods and services?
Should go to a pure profit, supply and demand based model, no government interference? All private roads, no more government mandated free "right of ways" for pipelines or electrical towers. Let private corporations negotiate with each individual landowner for transit fees and access fees, etc. If they want to move products to these "broadband rich" densely populated areas, those people there should also pay what it is really worth. Then all of our goods and services will be more fairly priced.
Works both ways, man, so do you want that trade? That's what you indicate you want, so are you willing to pay the real free market no government interference/ no tax payer ripoff price of your existence, or do you want to keep the government tax payer help in setting some "commons" that you get now?
He said he buys them, legally, on disk, but used in the pawnshop for much closer to what they are really worth. I do the same thing, because I know what digital copies on a piece of plastic cost. I am perfectly willing for them to charge a full doubling of their actual digital copy costs, a 100% markup, but I won't pay thousands or tens of thousands of percent markup. So, I wait until I get them used or severely marked down in the bargain bin.
If the big studios and distributors would just stop price gouging, and really make copies impulse purchase cost, they would sell billions more copies a year to people. But see, they are fixated on "per unit" pricing that reflects copy production costs from like 30 years ago, something like that. They refuse to drop their prices down "enough" so that people are willing to buy them in larger quantities.
At 20 bux, I buy zero DVDs, I don't care what movie it is, that's a price gouging level, a serious one. At ten, I start to think about it,but resist, because it is still way too high for a dime's worth of plastic and some printed cardboard, at five, sometimes I buy one out of the bargain bin at importmegamart. At 4 or lower, I pick some up used, pawnshops, yard sales, etc. I don't pirate any, but I also refuse to pay their obvious cartel full ripoff pricing model either.
These guys could probably make MORE money by seriously dropping their prices, from much larger volume sales. I know I have paid as little as two dollars brand new at the store for some older titles, just the disk in a plain paper sleeve, printed, no fancy box even. If they started doing all releases like that, I'd buy one or two a week, as it is now, I buy a couple disks a year new, but only severly marked down, or used, and zero at full retail. They just annoyed an old faithful customer who started paying for entertainment media in the 50s, and now I just can't stand their ripoff prices. I'm not cheap, I just hate getting gouged, and there is a difference.
If you go back and remember, when downloading/pirating really took off seriously, with Napster, it was about exactly the same time that home CD recorders became more or less affordable, and people started buying blank CDs by the millions. This hit huge mass consciousness as to just *how much* they were getting price gouged for digital bits on a plastic disk. This caused a profound seachange in the mindset towards the music industry, and now the movie industry. People just drop most "moral qualms" in circumventing annoyances when dealing with ripoff scammers, and the traditional distributors sure as heck have been engaging in this blatant price gouging for a long time now. It USED to cost quite a bit to make a "copy" for sale, when I first started buying it was music vinyl and expensive to make a single copy for sale, so you expected to pay a lot for a copy, but once it got to close to zero to make copies, which digitally it is today..people reacted accordingly, they stopped being so interested in paying the same or similar prices as before.
There's obviously a nice market for music and movies, just "official" prices don't reflect a true market level, the "black market" level is closer to a real price. The old "AllofMP3" was much closer to a real/rational market level that would have been fair all around, to both sides of the transaction.
Something is needed that would encourage people to outright buy, and discourage not paying a penny/pirating, and that "something" is extremely easy to see, and that is drastically reduced "legit" copy prices.
The ball is in the producers and distributors courts now, they can see this is true, it will be up to them to adapt to a more fair and much cheaper price that reflects bona fide modern tech advances. Their costs dropped dramatically, they need to pass similar savings along to their legit customers. Until then, all their schemes and plans will get ignored by a large amount of the public as they will take the "black market" price instead, given the option and opportuni
I've been paying attention to US politics since Eisenhower/JFK transition years and I have yet to see this asshat voting out theory turn to practice. What happens is one group of asshats replaces another one. We have two groups of asshats who swap off every other election or so, but the continuation is corrupt government, whistleblowers or potential whistleblowers in government bureaucracy are always afraid of repercussions in their jobs (or worse...). Both those government hijacking groups lobby hard and perpetually to scare the population into "not wasting their vote" on any alternative to the asshat nominee, to insure only asshats get voted for. It is a remarkable effective and simple technique in keeping the asshat party, the one with two wings, in power.
So even if you decide to "run for office yourself" to help clean things up, you are lucky to make it past real local elections, county or above, you toe the asshat party line or..nothing. You most likely won't get elected, big fat waste of time, and if you do get elected, you are in peril of either being marginalized, or heck, they off people man. The dual wing corrupt asshat "shadow government" just plain do not like honest people who aren't bribed or blackmailed off. Stuff happens to those folks, or they just get completely ignored, one or the other.
The closest we have come to breaking this power sharing corrupt criminal cartel and kleptocracy is the reform party efforts, but they scared the two wing asshat party so much that they decided that they "wouldn't allow" anything *but* asshats on the stage at the big national debates, and the asshat controlled media went along with that. Pretty much knocked the stuffing out of any third party/alternative vote efforts.
The League of Women Voters, to their credit, dropped their sponsorship of the asshat national debates at that time. Which should have been a major clue to the electorate..but around 97% or so now have caved in and decided to "not waste their vote" and have kept electing asshat criminals right along since then. And the asshats make damn sure government is run as a for profit bribery and influence and jobs peddling organization.
Any real mavericks, perhaps with new ideas or..gasp..not corrupt, really honest people, get marginalized and demonized immediately in the controlled asshat press, labeled as "fringe", or they just get completely ignored.
So..my conclusion is..there's about no diff anymore if some corporation or alleged government runs things, the asshats are in charge in both areas, and its the same people with revolving door government to global corporation jobs, etc, where just about everything at the decision making level is done with behind the scenes payoffs and bribes, etc, and our form of government should more fairly and accurately be labeled as a Corporatocracy.
It is not as bad as it could get yet, obviously there are some other rather extreme heinously run nations that are even more despotic and corrupt, but this has been the trend and direction, heading towards that total despotism, as long as I have been paying attention.
What is sad and funny at the same time is sitting in the middle, having to shift all around all the time so as not to catch any asshat cooties, and watching both asshat extremes of the vigorous "true believers" types point fingers at each other across some fairy tale imaginary dividing line while they chant in unison "It's all your fault!! If only all of OUR asshats where in charge, things would be just so much bettah!".
Damn funny really.
What this has to do with Google and whitespaces and spectrum, etc I can't say in exact terms, but I am fairly confident to predict that in general terms, which ever policy that will go to ship the most amount of cash into the fewest amount of hands will eventually turn out to be "the" policy or regulation, etc. What asshat spokesmodel they slap in front of that will be mostly irrelevant.
Carry the tablet around, touch screen, at home or at the office, or on the table at galaxy caffeine bux. Seamless synch with the keyboard and mouse, you now have a netbook/notebook thing. Also could be synched/tethered auto-apple-magically with the iPhone providing the connectivity needed. I would also imagine they have a tweaked safari to make all this work well, so you can transition from phone screen to tablet. Heck, that would give you two screens to use as well, simultaneously, a small portable "dual monitor" set up. Like your important work stuff on the iPhone screen, and "world of facewarbook craft" going on the iSlab. Ya know, *priorities*...
It's 1920's-30's tech, sheet aluminum and rivets, a thousand pieces all needing to be meticulously fabbed and machined and drilled, then assembled. It was fantastic when first developed. I mean it works obviously..my Grumman canoe is built exactly the same way and it works pretty well, but it is still bleeding edge 1930s..and these sort of planes costs a mint to make today and two mints to keep working, and a fourth mint for inspections and insurance. that's 4 mints. I think it is time to drop that down to just 1 mint cost.
I think we can go beyond that now, enter the 21st century, maybe something like rutan's models. In fact exactly like rutan's ideas. Likely this is what will happen, composite construction once more manufacturers do it and the engineering and costs drop down and we have a better handle on "carbon nanotubes" and so on, graphene construction. I think that has a lot more potential to both improve quality and robustness and drop costs in the medium and long run today, rather than just keep slapping out sheet aluminum and rivets.
well, hell, if you want to go pedantic, you can head off any number of directions and hit "Asia" eventually, including both east and west and tangents thereof. Go over the polar area, starting from the central US, head mostly north and a scosh west and you'll hit some reasonably populated area in Asia. Go exactly straight north you will eventually hit way the heck out in the boonies Asia, for another example. Got any other points to make? I'll make a note of this and next time instead of using the commonly accepted "east and west" terms referring to global regions, I will use a proper noun instead. Fair enough?
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Fanboi would fit. It needs to be even more pejorative I think.
The WTO will eventually even the playing field out to the most stupid and corrupt will be the law of the globalist land. Europe is holding out on some things, but eventually they will succumb to software patents, food patents, acceptance of GMO foods, etc. As more and more of the wealth production shifts elsewhere, the suits will insist that "IP" is the way to make money, to "save" the economy. When it comes to food, no patents on open pollinated heriloom seeds are possible, so out they go! They've been on a buying binge to aquire existing seed companies then trash them, dropping diversity and honest choice. And with the so called "law" saying that GM pollen crossing over into your non-GM field means you have "stolen their intellectual property"..well...ain't that special. There ain't gonna be no winnin' there. All they do is get enough of their crap planted in every county, eventually everyone who doesn't pay the yearly patent seed ripoff price is now a criminal, legally, as it becomes impossible to grow non GM patented stuff, the wind takes care of that. Check out that vid I posted in my original post, quite the eye opener. With corn, it pretty much is too late, so much cross pollination now with patented GM seeds that it is near impossible to try and grow "pure". Look at the refs in the vid to the poor campesinos in Mexico who grew nutritious specialized for their locale corn for like many generations, now it is crap, and isn't near as good to eat, because it got cross contaminated.
Of course this is rubbish, but that is what they have done to the US now, they *looted* the place, not only with the food supply but with any number of things, and got away with it promising us the magic beans for the cow, and it eventually will be all over, because of these globalist treaties that place international corporate profits over everything else. The farmers are screwed, do it their way and make some pitiful profit, or try to fight them and go bust. The options are limited.
Some of this stuff now it is *both*. They are adding in genes/whatnot to make normal food crops also produce strong medicines.
well..it's neat they can do that..cheaper and better and more effective medicines is a worthy goal...but if this stuff escapes and crosses over with the "regular" food....eventually you'll have little choice, eat said and consume a dose of medicine, or no eat. Yes, that would be a choice, Hobson's choice.
Thanks for the backup on the science side. I am mostly looking at the practical economic side and it is pure vendor lockin and hidden everything and patented everything from this viewpoint. There are several overlapping bad ideas and practices there.
Our modern corporate wall street/governmental approved ag is really screwing over both the end consumer and the primary producers, the farmers. Everyone is going into some sort of food bondage to this octopus of corporate/governmental (false)control. It just weirds me out. And I so much think there will be not one but many "whoopsies!" coming I started a program to not only do my primary crop, but hit generalization and grow as much of my own food as possible (getting closer every year to total, too). I even maintain an open pollinated-no patents seed stash, I just do the old traditional "keep the best" every season, and I have contingency plans to add airfilters to the greenhouse and continue production there for our personal food if I absolutely have to.
It's sad, but I have gradually lost faith in the impartiality of the science community. Just too much stuff tied to huge profits and patents and global trade policies today, I just don't think it is as "impartial" as they want us to believe. Look at the recent revelations with h1n1 and WHO, or the corruption scandals in the european emissions trading market, and now a proposed trillions of dollars global co2 market. There's just too much money and political power, etc., to be garnered from gaming the system, even the "independent" science system, that it leaves joe food eater or taxpayer just bewildered who to believe or not anymore.
I mean, this *sucks*, I don't want to have that viewpoint, but am forced to more and more because we keep finding out about weird stuff that was kept hidden or altered for profit.
It's a brand new bouncing baby word!
Usually pointy haired bosses are mid level though. These big decisions are made by the muckety mucks at the top.
I think that if it can be proved that research studies were obfuscated to hide the negative, or fudged..purely for economic gain, or that an official regulator used their authority position to further that shady goal, that it should be treated as a crime against humanity, like attempted genocide, along those levels. As in major criminal felony, not some white collar BS civil matter where they might get some joke fine either.
There are normal accidental mistakes, then there are deliberate decisions made to go ahead and issue some governmental stamp of approval and then produce and sell something that they know has questionable and dangerous traits. The latter non accidental occurrence should be a serious criminal violation. And repeated occurrences within the same corporation should result in a corporate death sentence, disallowal of corporate charter, declaring all outstanding stock to be worthless and untradeable. If they can do it to poor people with normal crimes, "three strikes" laws, they should apply the same thing to corporations. Three major criminal foulups-out ya go, dissolved, physical plant and other assets seized and auctioned off.
"Maximizing shareholder value" should not be the only criteria for allowing corporate charters. Just screw that and that mindset and belief. I like what the original design had, corporations had to prove to be of the public benefit to retain their charters. Now it is..they can do anything crooked sleazy or illegal they want and if they can afford to eat the fines if they are caught..they keep doing it. Nuts. Whack a few dozen of the top infringers down. Shareholders would *finally* get the message that they better be watching over their employees conduct a little better, that there's no such thing as a free lunch, and with profits come duties and responsibilities.
And with that, we need some whistleblower protections with big sharp teeth in them. It's still a joke and lower level employees in government and business are still afraid of getting the word out on malfeasance and unethical or illegal behavior they are aware of. That should just not be.
I've seen this a lot on this site (unfortunately). Luddite is tossed around as a swear word to ridicule those who don't understand or see any benefits of modern tech. The opposite exists but we don't have a single word for it, people who automatically trust any new tech to be safe, without any evidence that it is safe, other than the inventor's and corporation's word for it. There's a word used that is close, but doesn't specify "as regards newer tech", that is a "pollyanna". We really need a new word for those who blindly "trust" but never "verify" all new high tech advances.
This issue with some of the GM corn mods has been known for years now, and dismissed by the big business sycophants/pollyannas. The largest misconception I have seen is equating *cross species modification* with naturally occurring or man made same species hybrids. These get equated all the freaking time by alleged tech savvy people as the excuse to just "trust". The "tech pollyannas" knee jerk automatically trust, based on a starting point of falsehood belief. It's just as loony and stupid as being a luddite based on erroneous or even zero knowledge of the subject.
I am a farmer and I will say I do NOT trust corporate big ag business (nor ag college academia that relies on the same big business for funding and has tame scientists in and out of the same big business) to be self regulating as to safety concerns nor do I trust the governmental regulators because of the revolving door "jobs" aspect that occur. (exactly the same as occurs with Wall Street/Federal Reserve/Treasury/SEC revolving door jobs). There's WAY too much money involved for there not to be corruption. Just human nature. Just because some person has many letters next to their name, or some official government title, is not any guarantee they are trustworthy as to being non corrupt or "bought off". They are just as likely or not as likely as anyone else, and as the currency units involved go up in number..we should take closer and closer looks as to this trust and verify business.
It would be nice to trust the system, but I can't the way it is set up now.
Here's an interesting video on this food subject, on how much trust we should place in huge global ag business and regulations as they exist now.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6262083407501596844
Look at software code. A chunk can be written, looked at, have other people look at it, vetted..few months later they missed something and there is an 0-day.
Well, that can be patched.
Can't say the same thing for food stuff once it is planted all over. Won't be any patches once it is out in the wild and air pollination starts spreading it. We are already seeing some of the first minor examples with canola/rapeseed "superweeds". Just wait until there are major examples.
It isn't a matter of if, it is a matter of when. There will be a hugemongous "whoops..heh heh heh, guess we missed that" excuse mumbling major screwup, by guys in black suits and white lab coats at some news conference, with the global food supply. This corn might be it, who knows, but it is coming.
Google has a tangibles option. They could start not emphasizing ads as much as actually selling stuff themselves, ie a super amazon effort. They are starting now with their cellphone, this branching out..and there is nothing stopping them from going on to all sorts of other tangible products, which would make their advertising just a force multiplier instead of an economic end game, even if all they started out with was a profit sharing deal with ad buyers..
It's just as common as not, at least from my experience, as full time trade show worker for fifteen years before I semi retired back to farming. I have helped set up displays and product and arranged tables of literature and swag in any number of hotel rooms before, with the main action down in the exhibit halls or in the larger conference rooms, and I have always known it to go on and really..vendors meeting with clients in hotel rooms? Oh hey, look, I have the widget we are selling right here in my case... This is as common as anything, all over the planet, like as long as there have been hotels. A lot of times people make some contacts then they go back to the more private rooms to work out deals, etc, and they might still be looking at the products then. It just widely varies, and unless the show management and the hotels actually denied this practice in advance, and they can prove it, those folks got at least semi shafted. (guessing based on lack of more detail in TFA, it is all hearsay. Even if it was just coattail riding and they paid ces nothing, they still paid the hotel, and the hotel should have that restriction in some contract and be upfront about it in advance.)
in replying, missed this one.
Generating plants would still have to be built near the cities across private roads paying huge fees for transit, all the materials have to be mined/refined/ manufactured, value added in many places to get to the plants, then they need to be fueled, primarily from coal, that would come from private coal mines, which might be far away and have to be trucked, barged or railed to the plant, across other private property. Every foot of that construction and delivery process would be paying transit fees.
Your costs therefore would be much larger than they are today..because they gotcha. It doesn't matter if you use uranium, all of the above still applies. Pure wall street rules, which are no rules short of theft or contract fraud, would indicated a major cartel pricing structure, similar to opec, with not much cheating as there isn't anything in it for big private mine operators to engage in a fratricidal race to the bottom when they can sit back and establish a guaranteed high profits syndicate.
A simple-from the rural landowner perspective- "I get all my electricity for free for letting you cross my property hauling your coal or establishing power lines" that rural access seekers would want at a minimum-I really couldn't imagine anyone demanding *less* than that, and they would likely want cash on top of that- would establish that their prices would be zero, whereas any urban dwellers would be extra large. Next step would just demand access to high speed communications, as long as the poles where there, just demand it, or stifle access. So..the companies go to the neighbor, look for access there. neighbor knows the score, demands the same thing, at a minimum. Lather, rinse repeat and local neighbors could band together knowing full well that the line had to cross *someplace* around there, and just contract with themselves so that all of them got the free electricity, as a condition of that line going in, or the road to cross, etc. Really, ask yourself if you were in that position, what would you ask for, or would you allow free transit, then offer to pay some huge fee for electricity on top of that? You'd have to be a pretty dull crayon to want that latter deal, yes?
So they wouldn't be paying through the roof, they would be getting it for *free*, at the expense of higher prices in the remote from the coal cities. This is a much more likely scenario.
And as for self powered, again, many would be in a position to do just that, and it is happening across the USA as we speak now, all those wind turbines for example are going up in farmers fields, and they aren't going up for free either.
Before we had massive centralized power delivery all over, many areas of the rural US were going to home windchargers, or carbide to water acetylene gas generators.. You can go look this up, jacobs was one such windcharger company and one of their models is still running in Antarctica today, from one of the earlier explorers. the tech is just not hard at smallish scales. And many rural people are now for a fact going to solar PV at least as a decent adjunct (that would be me), and eventually you will see them go all the way. They might stay grid tied, but they will be getting a check every month, not sending in a check.
It's a no-cheap-win simple extrapolation as regards what the remote (remote being far from the original sources, ie, the big cities, they would be the "new remote") demand would be price wise, it would be much higher than today for the urban dwellers, with total privatization and the loss of your governmental guaranteed subsidized commons.
Everything the big cities need has to be imported if they insist on living remotely where nothing tangible really comes from. Big cities produce *demand*, they don't really produce much stuff, except (and shrinking fast in the US) the very last stage assembly styled manufacturing, which still is tied heavily to mandated commons access for raw materials back down stream. "Demand" is not a pr
Try, a wooden box on the wall with the speaker on a cord, the mouth piece on the box, and a crank handle to get the operators attention. That was one granny had that, I remember talking on it. My other granny had an icebox, and some dude would trot down the alley with a horse and ice wagon and come in and put a huge chunk of ice in it. We had a rotary at home though, think it was made out of cast iron.
We had the first TV in the 'hood, a 9" philco IIRC, and a buncha neighbors and relatives would come over and sit around and watch TV, not a whole lotta channels though and it all went off at night.
Lemme see...35 cent indoor movies, that was the only place with air conditioning, nickle cokes, nickle candy bars, and a real five and dime store that had tons of stuff for a nickle or a dime.
I don't remember all the prices on stuff, but a lot of it, like hamburger 5 lbs for a buck. Lot of cars still under a grand brand new. A portable radio was half a suitcase with heavy batteries in it.
Oh man, my fav, REAL army navy stores that had all the great stuff, just everything, you could go nuts in there poking through the junk, they had everything including surplus rifles. Dang giant rubber rafts hanging from the ceiling, old torpedoes, tons of neat stuff like that.
Bicycles were like harleys with no engines., about the same amount of steel.
Wimminks all still wore real stockings all the time...err..that was major cool.... ;)
Dang, ain't a year goes by I don't regret losing my baseball cards, comic books, all my early sci fiction paper backs, stuff like that.
A lot of tech and some aspects of society today are a lot better, a lot isn't though. Leaving keys in the car was common, never locking the door, etc. No school massacres, but we could carry our .22s to school to go shooting after school, etc. It was no big deal at all, stick 'em in your locker.
Back then, most everything was fixable, and did get fixed, now..not much, it works or it is junk.
Would I trade..uhh "timezones"? Nope, not a straight swap, but I would if I could pick and choose various things from then and now.
They'll wind up using this for advertising. Instead of regular "dumb" windows in stores they will all be "smart windows" with changeable ads, visible from both sides of the glass.
I believe aluminum smelters sometimes work using this model, only running production at times of cheaper power, or if they are power producers themselves, selling into the grid when what they can get for it exceeds the profits they would get from making aluminum. Or say any factory that was capable of fast startup, then fast shutdown, perhaps highly automated and not needing too many humans involved, something that didn't need to run exactly full time or on an exact set schedule.
There are similar arrangements that could be put into place to usefully soak up surplus power at times, and google's idea of energy metering goes along with that. Example, charging electric car fleets, or perhaps whenever home battery bank tech gets better and cheaper, you would buy to charge your bank when the rates are the cheapest. You could stagger your home demands, such as running the washing machine when it is cheaper, etc., automatically. The power companies themselves have started using pumped water during low demand times to return water upstream of their dams and turbines, when there is lower demand for their electric product.
Basically though, I don't think excess power is near the problem that lack of power causes, when demand exceeds supply. In the UK now they are shutting off natgas delivery to factories because other demand is so huge because of the deep freeze going on. (although I think they should shut off power to artificial paper financial product trading houses that are mostly just gambling around with their synthetics before they restrict power to their remaining tangibles goods factories.. that's just another side issue on priorities and what really helps an economy or not)
You just don't like it when your little insular urban centric "oh so superior" bubble gets burst. You exist at cheap affordable rates for basic life necessities in the larger cities from the government using a LOT of eminent domain seizures and mandated "right of ways" and massive centralized infrastructure building using tax payer dollars over the generations and regulations to keep your costs down. And the government seems to not pay much to the actual rural owners for this transit action, as in zero. Pure taking.
I bet you've never even thought before about how much your life is economically stealth subsidized because of that. Just imagine if all that "commons" action was gone and it was all private, your big city "wall street rules". All private roads, people charging whatever the market would bear, to get food to you..heh. Electric delivery companies having to negotiate transit fees. heh. Municipal water service and pipelines just taking water from the rural areas when this would be private water, where they could charge a sales fee per gallon before it even entered the pipeline, and then have to keep adding to the fees as the pipeline crossed a lot of private land and boundaries, heh. Tons of examples there.
You have no idea *at all* how cheap you have it from that "commons" and subsidized access. Just go back in US history and look what urban costs were before commons access. Every step of the way as the commons developed, starting with such things as the "post roads", your costs for food water and energy have dropped radically as a percentage of your income, and your comfort quality of life has gone up. But now that we would like a little more modern commons access to better communications, wow, what a reaction! See it all the time here. "Oh noes, string some better copper on already existing poles, OMGWTFBBQ, break the bank, we can't afford it, wah, no subsidies, how dare those people want modern communications, as if their chintzy water and food and power is so valuable!!"
Go to a system like I outlined, all private, a for-profit model, and see what your food and water and electricity and natural gas would cost. Government intervention and the creation of a commons for centralized delivery systems keep your prices really low in the cities. The rural areas would easily be able to afford a lot more things than just cheap broadband under that model. Just your water bill in some large cities would shoot through the roof, let alone all the other stuff.
I agree, it's a rip. And why should the government provide subsidized access to provide much cheaper food, water delivery, electricity delivery and natural gas deliveries to those remote densely packed areas where none of those valuable resources occur naturally in the quantities those densely packed areas demand and use now? Why should they be allowed to "vote" to take from other people far away in the rural areas, or to use any public tax monies collected to help provide these goods and services?
Should go to a pure profit, supply and demand based model, no government interference? All private roads, no more government mandated free "right of ways" for pipelines or electrical towers. Let private corporations negotiate with each individual landowner for transit fees and access fees, etc. If they want to move products to these "broadband rich" densely populated areas, those people there should also pay what it is really worth. Then all of our goods and services will be more fairly priced.
Works both ways, man, so do you want that trade? That's what you indicate you want, so are you willing to pay the real free market no government interference/ no tax payer ripoff price of your existence, or do you want to keep the government tax payer help in setting some "commons" that you get now?
He said he buys them, legally, on disk, but used in the pawnshop for much closer to what they are really worth. I do the same thing, because I know what digital copies on a piece of plastic cost. I am perfectly willing for them to charge a full doubling of their actual digital copy costs, a 100% markup, but I won't pay thousands or tens of thousands of percent markup. So, I wait until I get them used or severely marked down in the bargain bin.
If the big studios and distributors would just stop price gouging, and really make copies impulse purchase cost, they would sell billions more copies a year to people. But see, they are fixated on "per unit" pricing that reflects copy production costs from like 30 years ago, something like that. They refuse to drop their prices down "enough" so that people are willing to buy them in larger quantities.
At 20 bux, I buy zero DVDs, I don't care what movie it is, that's a price gouging level, a serious one. At ten, I start to think about it,but resist, because it is still way too high for a dime's worth of plastic and some printed cardboard, at five, sometimes I buy one out of the bargain bin at importmegamart. At 4 or lower, I pick some up used, pawnshops, yard sales, etc. I don't pirate any, but I also refuse to pay their obvious cartel full ripoff pricing model either.
These guys could probably make MORE money by seriously dropping their prices, from much larger volume sales. I know I have paid as little as two dollars brand new at the store for some older titles, just the disk in a plain paper sleeve, printed, no fancy box even. If they started doing all releases like that, I'd buy one or two a week, as it is now, I buy a couple disks a year new, but only severly marked down, or used, and zero at full retail. They just annoyed an old faithful customer who started paying for entertainment media in the 50s, and now I just can't stand their ripoff prices. I'm not cheap, I just hate getting gouged, and there is a difference.
If you go back and remember, when downloading/pirating really took off seriously, with Napster, it was about exactly the same time that home CD recorders became more or less affordable, and people started buying blank CDs by the millions. This hit huge mass consciousness as to just *how much* they were getting price gouged for digital bits on a plastic disk. This caused a profound seachange in the mindset towards the music industry, and now the movie industry. People just drop most "moral qualms" in circumventing annoyances when dealing with ripoff scammers, and the traditional distributors sure as heck have been engaging in this blatant price gouging for a long time now. It USED to cost quite a bit to make a "copy" for sale, when I first started buying it was music vinyl and expensive to make a single copy for sale, so you expected to pay a lot for a copy, but once it got to close to zero to make copies, which digitally it is today..people reacted accordingly, they stopped being so interested in paying the same or similar prices as before.
There's obviously a nice market for music and movies, just "official" prices don't reflect a true market level, the "black market" level is closer to a real price. The old "AllofMP3" was much closer to a real/rational market level that would have been fair all around, to both sides of the transaction.
Something is needed that would encourage people to outright buy, and discourage not paying a penny/pirating, and that "something" is extremely easy to see, and that is drastically reduced "legit" copy prices.
The ball is in the producers and distributors courts now, they can see this is true, it will be up to them to adapt to a more fair and much cheaper price that reflects bona fide modern tech advances. Their costs dropped dramatically, they need to pass similar savings along to their legit customers. Until then, all their schemes and plans will get ignored by a large amount of the public as they will take the "black market" price instead, given the option and opportuni
Howdy back! Same addy as I had before, I sent you an email, maybe it got snagged by your filter.
I've been paying attention to US politics since Eisenhower/JFK transition years and I have yet to see this asshat voting out theory turn to practice. What happens is one group of asshats replaces another one. We have two groups of asshats who swap off every other election or so, but the continuation is corrupt government, whistleblowers or potential whistleblowers in government bureaucracy are always afraid of repercussions in their jobs (or worse...). Both those government hijacking groups lobby hard and perpetually to scare the population into "not wasting their vote" on any alternative to the asshat nominee, to insure only asshats get voted for. It is a remarkable effective and simple technique in keeping the asshat party, the one with two wings, in power.
So even if you decide to "run for office yourself" to help clean things up, you are lucky to make it past real local elections, county or above, you toe the asshat party line or ..nothing. You most likely won't get elected, big fat waste of time, and if you do get elected, you are in peril of either being marginalized, or heck, they off people man. The dual wing corrupt asshat "shadow government" just plain do not like honest people who aren't bribed or blackmailed off. Stuff happens to those folks, or they just get completely ignored, one or the other.
The closest we have come to breaking this power sharing corrupt criminal cartel and kleptocracy is the reform party efforts, but they scared the two wing asshat party so much that they decided that they "wouldn't allow" anything *but* asshats on the stage at the big national debates, and the asshat controlled media went along with that. Pretty much knocked the stuffing out of any third party/alternative vote efforts.
The League of Women Voters, to their credit, dropped their sponsorship of the asshat national debates at that time. Which should have been a major clue to the electorate..but around 97% or so now have caved in and decided to "not waste their vote" and have kept electing asshat criminals right along since then. And the asshats make damn sure government is run as a for profit bribery and influence and jobs peddling organization.
Any real mavericks, perhaps with new ideas or..gasp..not corrupt, really honest people, get marginalized and demonized immediately in the controlled asshat press, labeled as "fringe", or they just get completely ignored.
So..my conclusion is..there's about no diff anymore if some corporation or alleged government runs things, the asshats are in charge in both areas, and its the same people with revolving door government to global corporation jobs, etc, where just about everything at the decision making level is done with behind the scenes payoffs and bribes, etc, and our form of government should more fairly and accurately be labeled as a Corporatocracy.
It is not as bad as it could get yet, obviously there are some other rather extreme heinously run nations that are even more despotic and corrupt, but this has been the trend and direction, heading towards that total despotism, as long as I have been paying attention.
What is sad and funny at the same time is sitting in the middle, having to shift all around all the time so as not to catch any asshat cooties, and watching both asshat extremes of the vigorous "true believers" types point fingers at each other across some fairy tale imaginary dividing line while they chant in unison "It's all your fault!! If only all of OUR asshats where in charge, things would be just so much bettah!".
Damn funny really.
What this has to do with Google and whitespaces and spectrum, etc I can't say in exact terms, but I am fairly confident to predict that in general terms, which ever policy that will go to ship the most amount of cash into the fewest amount of hands will eventually turn out to be "the" policy or regulation, etc. What asshat spokesmodel they slap in front of that will be mostly irrelevant.
This fits with a tablet. http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/02/new-apple-bluetooth-keyboard-arrives-at-the-fcc-new-mouse-rumor/
Carry the tablet around, touch screen, at home or at the office, or on the table at galaxy caffeine bux. Seamless synch with the keyboard and mouse, you now have a netbook/notebook thing. Also could be synched/tethered auto-apple-magically with the iPhone providing the connectivity needed. I would also imagine they have a tweaked safari to make all this work well, so you can transition from phone screen to tablet. Heck, that would give you two screens to use as well, simultaneously, a small portable "dual monitor" set up. Like your important work stuff on the iPhone screen, and "world of facewarbook craft" going on the iSlab. Ya know, *priorities*...
It isn't a perfect solution for a Martian environment, ie, no rain to help, but it is a step in the right direction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-cleaning_glass
Well, that sucks when you are trying to find legit work related info. I suppose all the newsgroups are out then as well....
Oh well, every job I ever had working for other people has similar. Goes with the turf, only alternative is completely self employed.
Google cache?
It's 1920's-30's tech, sheet aluminum and rivets, a thousand pieces all needing to be meticulously fabbed and machined and drilled, then assembled. It was fantastic when first developed. I mean it works obviously..my Grumman canoe is built exactly the same way and it works pretty well, but it is still bleeding edge 1930s..and these sort of planes costs a mint to make today and two mints to keep working, and a fourth mint for inspections and insurance. that's 4 mints. I think it is time to drop that down to just 1 mint cost.
I think we can go beyond that now, enter the 21st century, maybe something like rutan's models. In fact exactly like rutan's ideas. Likely this is what will happen, composite construction once more manufacturers do it and the engineering and costs drop down and we have a better handle on "carbon nanotubes" and so on, graphene construction. I think that has a lot more potential to both improve quality and robustness and drop costs in the medium and long run today, rather than just keep slapping out sheet aluminum and rivets.
well, hell, if you want to go pedantic, you can head off any number of directions and hit "Asia" eventually, including both east and west and tangents thereof. Go over the polar area, starting from the central US, head mostly north and a scosh west and you'll hit some reasonably populated area in Asia. Go exactly straight north you will eventually hit way the heck out in the boonies Asia, for another example. Got any other points to make? I'll make a note of this and next time instead of using the commonly accepted "east and west" terms referring to global regions, I will use a proper noun instead. Fair enough?