Then why does every nuclear power plant require government backed loans, insurance and legally mandated limited liability?
Same reason that the 30-year mortgage exists only due to government intervention: there is too much uncertainty in a 30-year span for most companies to commit. The "free market" sucks at long term planning. It's better at optimizing the price of things in the near-term.
Also, you are making the grandious assumption that by reducing the COST of producing/marketing/selling an item or service, that the savings is passed on to consumers. Yet as we have clearly seen over the last 9 years, that is not the case.
That is a pretty bad assumption. Price is not determined by COGS of a product unless there is a monopoly or some other extenuating circumstance. Price is determined by what the market will bear. This is why oil refiners don't make much money while the oil companies make enormous profits.
Countries we refer to as banana republics have a better distribution of wealth than we do.
But is distribution of wealth important? Isn't standard of living more important? Could our imbalance have different causes than Uganda? You point to a CEO salary being 400 times larger than the workers - but now they run huge global companies. Take McDonalds. They operate in almost every country in the world. Compared to a chain that only operates domestically, they are going to have a lot more revenue. Why shouldn't the CEO be paid accordingly?
Note that I'm not arguing either way, but I haven't seen any convincing argument that we should fear an off-kilter distribution of wealth all by itself. And I'm also convinced that it is partially influenced by our legacy of racism - so that it is more complicated than simply "destruction of the middle class".
Not that the middle class - especially the lower middle class - isn't suffering from the loss of manufacturing jobs. I honestly have no idea what to do about that problem. When even Chinese firms are looking at factory automation, you can bet that manual labor isn't coming back to the US at 1960s levels ever again.
Because the only way it makes any financial sense to buy panels is when the government gives you money to put them on your house. A co-worker of mine got 1/3 of the money from the state and 1/3 from the feds, and it will still take 6 years to pay off. A good bargain for him, but at full price it's a joke.
If they want to sell these things, then come at me with a 15-year guarantee and a 15-year loan with a payment that is the same as my utility bill.
I agree. So far the capable Android units - the good 3.0 running variety - haven't dropped their prices. Eventually one of those companies will be willing to make less money per unit and Apple will lose market share. Apple will never make cheap units (well, unless Mr. Jobs meets his demise)... they value margin over market share.
Then again, they did make the almost laughable iPod Shuffle! I actually had one that I got for opening a bank account, and it worked fine - but there were (and are!) cheaper devices with about the same size... and some kind of display! LOL. Margin again, I guess.
User-replaceable and portable are at odds in any engineering decision. Doors and connectors and sockets all add weight and take up space. You aren't looking at consumerism as much as you are at the demand for ultra-portable.
Granted, consumerism (and subsidized phones!) are what make it feasible - but there are real engineering factors at work, too.
The ipad succeeded because... drumroll... it was made by Apple.
I have to disagree. The iPad had no rival at launch. Other companies made tablets that looked just like notebook computers in size and weight, and tried to run Windows as a tablet OS. The other popular tablet-like device (the Kindle) is similarly portable, and very cheap.
Windows needs a keyboard - that's why netbooks were so hot. Apple's MacOS would make a similarly atrocious tablet. The iOS made a very nice tablet. The others have caught on and sell non-Windows devices, but they are a year or so behind Apple in the software department. The result is fewer available applications and that new software smell. I think you'll see inroads into Apple's market share as the devices all copy each others' best features and the various platforms mature.
That said, I have no need for such a device, and Apple making a nice one certainly doesn't change that.
The value is measured in some kind of market. You get paid according to that measure. What could be more capitalist than that?
It's not capitalist because you are not letting the market determine what is valuable. You declare that something is valuable based on some measure (say, popularity) and then declare compensation based on that measure. In a capital market, any arbitrary thing can influence the perception of value.
The part where the corruption sneaks in is the defining of the measure and the method of measurement. So for music everyone might agree on "popularity", but there might be a very complicated system involving companies in certain home congressional districts for actually measuring popularity. The established big guys might push for emphasis on radio airplay, effectively locking out independents altogether.
Well, those of us still breeding always seem to have a kid under 6 months:)
But seriously, you can't just put your life on hold for 6 months every time you have a kid. You still have to go to the store, you still have to sit on the bus/train (if you don't have a car), you still have to get in taxis, your other filthy kid is still in school bringing home everything communicable. You might be going to work yourself, bringing home everything that your co-workers have. You might even have to put that little baby into daycare if you aren't well-off enough to have one parent take time off. That first 6 months is really, really scary.
We like to think of ourselves as individuals, but the fact is that we rely on the herd. If one of the herd gets out of line in a way that puts the rest of us at risk, we need to crack down.
Certainly abolishing copyright law isn't "radical" by historical standards - all you are doing is erasing a weird 200-or-so-year blip where ideas, songs, and knowledge can "belong" to someone. Not because they are keeping it a secret, but because they have the full force of law behind them!
But changing the way that people are paid to some kind of non-capitalist merit system is quite radical. You'd first have to devise a system of ranking merit, which I think you'll find very close to impossible to beat the capitalist system. You might even succeed for a little while, but power breeds corruption, and the corrupt would eventually at least partially control the merit system.
When did conquest stop being a reason to claim something? If conquest were illegitimate, the US would have to cede Puerto Rico to Spain, which would in turn have to cede it to the Taino, which would in turn have to cede it to the two tribes they wiped out. But since they were wiped out, who does it pass to? I guess the Taino could keep it, but since most of the people in Puerto Rico are not Taino, now you have a minority-rule situation. Oh, the moral dilemma!
It supports the point that "skip MMR = disease magnet" is false.
But no one with any reasonable education on the matter would say that if the alternative presented was to administer the vaccines separately. The Jenny McCartney crowd was skipping the vaccines altogether, not taking the responsible course that you did.
Woah... I hope you aligned the silver energy with Pisces first.
Either give full instruction, or don't give any at all! Who knows what forces could be unleashed when you make a sacrifice to Jo'Bu without proper energy alignment!
If I can do a small part to save over a hundred thousand kids from death each year by inoculating my kids, then I feel that is worth risking the consequences of your completely unsubstantiated theory about negative immune system effects.
I advocate yanking their kids out of school. No vaccination, by choice? Get the hell away from my kids. Herd immunity can probably take care of the vanishingly small number of kids who can't have the vaccine for whatever medical reason.
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Then why does every nuclear power plant require government backed loans, insurance and legally mandated limited liability?
Same reason that the 30-year mortgage exists only due to government intervention: there is too much uncertainty in a 30-year span for most companies to commit. The "free market" sucks at long term planning. It's better at optimizing the price of things in the near-term.
Also, you are making the grandious assumption that by reducing the COST of producing/marketing/selling an item or service, that the savings is passed on to consumers. Yet as we have clearly seen over the last 9 years, that is not the case.
That is a pretty bad assumption. Price is not determined by COGS of a product unless there is a monopoly or some other extenuating circumstance. Price is determined by what the market will bear. This is why oil refiners don't make much money while the oil companies make enormous profits.
Countries we refer to as banana republics have a better distribution of wealth than we do.
But is distribution of wealth important? Isn't standard of living more important? Could our imbalance have different causes than Uganda? You point to a CEO salary being 400 times larger than the workers - but now they run huge global companies. Take McDonalds. They operate in almost every country in the world. Compared to a chain that only operates domestically, they are going to have a lot more revenue. Why shouldn't the CEO be paid accordingly?
Note that I'm not arguing either way, but I haven't seen any convincing argument that we should fear an off-kilter distribution of wealth all by itself. And I'm also convinced that it is partially influenced by our legacy of racism - so that it is more complicated than simply "destruction of the middle class".
Not that the middle class - especially the lower middle class - isn't suffering from the loss of manufacturing jobs. I honestly have no idea what to do about that problem. When even Chinese firms are looking at factory automation, you can bet that manual labor isn't coming back to the US at 1960s levels ever again.
why is that?
Because the only way it makes any financial sense to buy panels is when the government gives you money to put them on your house. A co-worker of mine got 1/3 of the money from the state and 1/3 from the feds, and it will still take 6 years to pay off. A good bargain for him, but at full price it's a joke.
If they want to sell these things, then come at me with a 15-year guarantee and a 15-year loan with a payment that is the same as my utility bill.
I agree. So far the capable Android units - the good 3.0 running variety - haven't dropped their prices. Eventually one of those companies will be willing to make less money per unit and Apple will lose market share. Apple will never make cheap units (well, unless Mr. Jobs meets his demise)... they value margin over market share.
Then again, they did make the almost laughable iPod Shuffle! I actually had one that I got for opening a bank account, and it worked fine - but there were (and are!) cheaper devices with about the same size... and some kind of display! LOL. Margin again, I guess.
(a) do not use styli, and (b) do not depend on handwriting recognition for primary text input.
Yeah, but finger operated devices sucked before capacitive screens were perfected, so that wasn't really an option quite yet in '03.
Fair enough, but would a whole new motherboard with integrated video have cost much more?
User-replaceable and portable are at odds in any engineering decision. Doors and connectors and sockets all add weight and take up space. You aren't looking at consumerism as much as you are at the demand for ultra-portable.
Granted, consumerism (and subsidized phones!) are what make it feasible - but there are real engineering factors at work, too.
Anyone who thinks that iPods are "throwaway" never had a walkman.
The ipad succeeded because... drumroll... it was made by Apple.
I have to disagree. The iPad had no rival at launch. Other companies made tablets that looked just like notebook computers in size and weight, and tried to run Windows as a tablet OS. The other popular tablet-like device (the Kindle) is similarly portable, and very cheap.
Windows needs a keyboard - that's why netbooks were so hot. Apple's MacOS would make a similarly atrocious tablet. The iOS made a very nice tablet. The others have caught on and sell non-Windows devices, but they are a year or so behind Apple in the software department. The result is fewer available applications and that new software smell. I think you'll see inroads into Apple's market share as the devices all copy each others' best features and the various platforms mature.
That said, I have no need for such a device, and Apple making a nice one certainly doesn't change that.
The value is measured in some kind of market. You get paid according to that measure. What could be more capitalist than that?
It's not capitalist because you are not letting the market determine what is valuable. You declare that something is valuable based on some measure (say, popularity) and then declare compensation based on that measure. In a capital market, any arbitrary thing can influence the perception of value.
The part where the corruption sneaks in is the defining of the measure and the method of measurement. So for music everyone might agree on "popularity", but there might be a very complicated system involving companies in certain home congressional districts for actually measuring popularity. The established big guys might push for emphasis on radio airplay, effectively locking out independents altogether.
I'm just thinking out loud :)
In boosting food supplies in Africa you damage the food supplies in say South America, and create a problem there instead.
Which might bother the Africans if they weren't largely subsistence farmers.
Well, those of us still breeding always seem to have a kid under 6 months :)
But seriously, you can't just put your life on hold for 6 months every time you have a kid. You still have to go to the store, you still have to sit on the bus/train (if you don't have a car), you still have to get in taxis, your other filthy kid is still in school bringing home everything communicable. You might be going to work yourself, bringing home everything that your co-workers have. You might even have to put that little baby into daycare if you aren't well-off enough to have one parent take time off. That first 6 months is really, really scary.
We like to think of ourselves as individuals, but the fact is that we rely on the herd. If one of the herd gets out of line in a way that puts the rest of us at risk, we need to crack down.
this position is not as radical as you suggest.
Certainly abolishing copyright law isn't "radical" by historical standards - all you are doing is erasing a weird 200-or-so-year blip where ideas, songs, and knowledge can "belong" to someone. Not because they are keeping it a secret, but because they have the full force of law behind them!
But changing the way that people are paid to some kind of non-capitalist merit system is quite radical. You'd first have to devise a system of ranking merit, which I think you'll find very close to impossible to beat the capitalist system. You might even succeed for a little while, but power breeds corruption, and the corrupt would eventually at least partially control the merit system.
No qc which is in sight will fit on a pci card anytime soon.
That's okay, I have an ISA slot open.
China was once a part of the Japanese Empire!
When did conquest stop being a reason to claim something? If conquest were illegitimate, the US would have to cede Puerto Rico to Spain, which would in turn have to cede it to the Taino, which would in turn have to cede it to the two tribes they wiped out. But since they were wiped out, who does it pass to? I guess the Taino could keep it, but since most of the people in Puerto Rico are not Taino, now you have a minority-rule situation. Oh, the moral dilemma!
Then it's too late, and I'm not sure that people who listen to Jenny McCarthy have any money to sue.
It supports the point that "skip MMR = disease magnet" is false.
But no one with any reasonable education on the matter would say that if the alternative presented was to administer the vaccines separately. The Jenny McCartney crowd was skipping the vaccines altogether, not taking the responsible course that you did.
We mentioned that we'd skipped MMR and the doctor confirmed that the single vaccines give a higher level of protection.
So what? All that does is change the booster schedule.
with a silver knife.
Woah... I hope you aligned the silver energy with Pisces first.
Either give full instruction, or don't give any at all! Who knows what forces could be unleashed when you make a sacrifice to Jo'Bu without proper energy alignment!
If I can do a small part to save over a hundred thousand kids from death each year by inoculating my kids, then I feel that is worth risking the consequences of your completely unsubstantiated theory about negative immune system effects.
That's great unless your kid is too young to have the shot.
Your reply is perfect, but I feel that you missed an opportunity for hilarious irony.
I advocate yanking their kids out of school. No vaccination, by choice? Get the hell away from my kids. Herd immunity can probably take care of the vanishingly small number of kids who can't have the vaccine for whatever medical reason.
No fair! You didn't quote data from 100 years ago!
Isn't that Propane?