We didn't have any of this fancy-pants CPU-on-a-chip stuff. We built our computers by hand. 74xx TTL IC chips wirewrapped together. And by god we LIKED it.
Wirewrap? Luxury. We used to round up a brace of kids from t'orphanage, and build our prototypes by telling 'em to lick their fingers and touch t'pins of the vacuum tubes. And back then, there weren't no fancy '1's -- our binary were all '0's!
Chile had a 17 year dictatorship that was Capitalist/conservative/right-wing oriented. So you cant link dictatorship with a political orientation, neither OSS for that matter.
Whoa, boy, you left your sense of humour running all night long, and it has gone flat!
I am not familiar with Darfur nor the activities taking place there, so I can't comment.
Oh, don't worry about it, just a little light genocide.
We're working to help them replace what they already had, which most likely wasn't given to them, but earned.
This 'earned' notion has nothing to do with charity. The people of Florida haven't ever done anything to 'earn' my loyalty; hell, I'm not even a US citizen. But that didn't stop me from giving to the Red Cross to help them out.
The onus is not on the needy to get over their sense of entitlement. The onus is on the well-off to recognize their resposibility to others less fortunate than themselves. Of course, nobody can -- or should -- enforce this responsibility; but nevertheless, duty to others is a fundamental part of what makes us human.
1. Count only governmental aid. The U.S. is different from most other Western countries in that we are not a centralized, government-controlled society (although admittedly we become more so every year). The percentage of private vs. government aid is much higher for the U.S. that it is for most other countries.
Firstly, I'm not sure I understand your comments about centralized, government-controlled societies. Are you claiming that Germany is not a federal republic? Or Switzerland? Are you claiming that in the UK, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland do not have regional semi-independence?
Secondly, I've heard this claim about private vs. public donations. I would be willing to listen if you could back it up with some facts and/or figures.
2. Ignore perhaps the most colossal subsidy of all: Defense. For 50 years, the only thing preventing the Red Army from pouring through the Fulda Gap and into Western Europe, or the North Koreans from smashing through the DMZ into South Korea, was the U.S. military. Same situation vis-a-vis China and Taiwan. Freed from the colossal burden of defense spending, those countries used their resources instead to develop stable polities, healthy economies and the freedom to bitch about the U.S. everytime something goes wrong.
Well, not altogether. Both the UK and France have had viable nuclear deterrents since the 1950s, although it is debatable whether these would ever have been useful in preventing a conventional invasion through Eastern Europe. In any case, however, its important to note that the US expenditure on defence has often had a very damaging effect on the poorest countries of the world. During the Star Wars programme of the 1980s, the US went through a capital crisis, and hiked up the interest rates many-fold on the foreign debt it held.
Unfortunately, much of this debt was in the forms of loans to third-world countries. These loans were made in the late 1970s, when the US was awash with cash from Middle-East oil-producing nations; hence they had low, affordable repayment rates. The hike in interest rates in the 1980s, caused indirectly by Star Wars expenditure, raised these repayment rates to crippling levels, which is one of the reasons so many third-world countries are in such a dire state today.
This is only one example; I'm not trying to convince you to change your argument completely, simply attempting to show you that there are more subtleties to the issues at hand than might appear to be the case.
While the MythTV software may be free, how much money did you spend on the hardware?
If you look at my post here, you'll see I built my system for $210 -- with the proviso that I had an old computer knocking around to use at 'zero' cost, and I also had a lot of time on my hands. But all in all I still think it was a good deal; I saved a little money, learned a lot, and had fun.
Oh, and my MythTV box isn't a sexy mico-ITX; it's a midi tower with huge HD fans on it, sounding like a small vacuum cleaner. It sits in my basement, with three cables coming up (discreetly, mind you!) through the living room floor to connect it to the TV: picture, sound and IR remote. Boy it's ugly, but it works!
But if you'd rather talk national budgets, things get far uglier for Argentina:
Only if you screw up the figures. The 2003 external debt for the USA is $6.494 trillon, the figure coming from the article I posted. The 2003 external debt for Argentina was c. $145 billion (see here); I'm not sure where you got the $432.7 billon figure, but it certainly wasn't the CIA factbook, which quotes a 2002 estimated value of $142 billion.
Based on these figures, we see that the US has a debt/income ratio of 3.34, while Argentina has a debt/income ratio of 3.30.
hy? Because you don't help people get on their feet by giving them everything. If you give them everything then they develop no responsibility. Whether it be individuals or nations.
That's an all-to-easy way to absolve oneself of all resposibility to one's fellow humans. Would you apply this rubric to the starving people of Darfur? To those presently homeless in Florida?
OK, what about the cost of the dedicated PC? Surely you can't find a PC of the required capability for $99, or even $99+$200 for the lifetime subscription. Or am I missing something?
Nope, you do need a spare PC. But it doesn't have to be particularly speccy; when I upgraded to a cheap eMachines Athlon workstation, I used my old machine as the basis for my MythTV box: 700Mhz Pentium III, 256Mb RAM, Voodoo 3 graphics card. The only outlay for me was the capture card ($150) and the 80Gb hard drive ($60 after rebate). Given that I was upgrading my computer anyway, the net cost to get my MythTV box going was therefore $210 -- not hugely cheaper than TiVO, but the box does quite a bit more than TiVO can (it acts as my home network's music server, and I also run various other services off it, since it is always up).
How user friendly is MythTV? My 3 year old knows how to watch and record shows with TiVo. I think the 6 year old taught him how. The only problem I have is he's filling up the disk.
It's pretty good -- my wife learned to use it without any 'formal' instruction, just playing around. Of course, getting it set up is a different matter -- but there is good documentation for that too.
For the past several decades, the US could get out of financial troubles by simply printing more money. Since we had the only currency that was universally accepted as a unit of international monetary excange, this seldom caused the kind of inflation it should have. Now that the Euro is challenging the Dollar as the international currency of choice, and east Asia is talking about a unified currency, it's unlikely that we'll be able to continue this strategy.
Exactamundo -- congratulations on being the first responder to my post to get the point! Just imagine if OPEC starts pricing oil in Euros rather than dollars...
The government (read "your tax dollars") is not responsible for covering debts incurred by private organizations, even if they are financial institutions.
That's neither here nor there; we are talking about a country's external debt as measured against its GDP. While part of that debt is indeed incurred by private organizations, so too is the country's GDP earned by private organizations. The fact that not all of the debt is governmental is immaterial when considering the financial viability of a country as a whole.
By the way, the parent's numbers seem to come from the CIA World Factbook.
Oops, I was looking at the wrong WFB page. In any case, the figures quoted in the WFB are estimates for 2001. I think the 2003 treasury figures are (a) far more trusworthy, and (b) far more relevant to the present debate.
Maybe by then some of the nations will be kind enough to absolve us of some debt like we have done to countless other nations, specifically those in Europe.
And, along the same lines, you will be kind enough to absolve many developing nations from their debts, which in their cases mean a majority of their population living in crippling, often-fatal poverty?
National Socialist Party. Yep, sounds like a far right party to me.
I was waiting for a fuckwit to make that remark. The Nazi party was no more Socialist than, for instance, East Germany was a Democratic Republic. Why do you think the Nazis were known as the fascists?
A house? A wife? Kids? Things that take up time you can spend on hacking to get the thing to work?
Check. check. check. And sure -- I spent a while getting the system set up. But now it runs fine, and by not having to pay subscriptions, I save money that I can spend on my family. But, as you point out, YMMV.
You don't want to surf and watch TV at the same time but others do. Some people want a MP3/Video collection manager on their TV. Let them do it.
I already access my videos and MP3s (actually, OGGs) via MythTV. On top of that, I check the weather, get news headlines, and play games. I can also schedule programs from halfway around the world, via the web interface.
On top of all this, MythTV is free free. I'm not sure what would ever convince me to switch to TiVO or a similarly-limited product.
Maybe so, but only because we give our cash to practically every other country in the world as 'aid'
As a percentage of GDP given as foreign aid, the USA rates as one of the meanest countries in the developed world. Add to that the strings attached to the meagre aid they do give, such as the withdrawl by the Bush adminstration of funding for NGOs which advocate the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS.
But you see, when the US is more overextended there's more money to be made on interest, and the US has more money to pay it. Hence the interest (ha ha) in lending more money to the US. Hence the fact that we have more debt is actually a good thing - for everyone but us.
Sure, so long as the rest of the world has faith that the US can keep up its repayments. As soon as that faith evaporates (and it will -- I don't know when, but one day -- no empire lasts forever), the dollar will go south, and the US economy will be in really big trouble.
From the WFB:
Argentina purchasing power parity - $432.7 billion (2003 est.), external debt $142 billion (2002 est.)
USA purchasing power parity - $10.98 trillion (2003 est.), external debt $1.4 trillion (2001 est.)
I agree with all your figures apart from the USA external debt (the national debt value quoted in the WFB is for 1995 -- where did your value of $1.4 trillion come from?). Consider the following report:
US external debt up to $6.494 tln at end of Sept
U.S. debt owed to foreigners totaled $6.494 trillion at the end of
September, up 2.2 percent over the $6.357 trillion in external debt
seen at the end of June, the Treasury Department said on Wednesday.
In its quarterly Web posting of the U.S. external debt position, the
Treasury said a large portion, about $1.374 trillion in principal and
$51.52 billion in interests payments, were due in the next three
months.
The data cover government and private bank debt owed to foreign
investors, governments, banks and monetary authorities. Treasury first
published the data in October in an effort to comply with the
International Monetary Fund's Special Data Dissemination System
guidelines for economic data.
Source: Reuters Wed December 31, 2003
That paints a rather different picture, doesn't it? Based on these figures, the USA appears to be more overextended than Argentina, not less.
Indeed. The irony is that Argentina's debts, when the World Bank shat on them, were far less severe than the USA's. The USA is the most indebted nation on the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
Err simple. Most of that money is owed to US citizens...
No, the $6.494 trillion debt being discussed in this thread is external debt. Therefore, by definition, it is not owed to US citizens.
We didn't have any of this fancy-pants CPU-on-a-chip stuff. We built our computers by hand. 74xx TTL IC chips wirewrapped together. And by god we LIKED it.
Wirewrap? Luxury. We used to round up a brace of kids from t'orphanage, and build our prototypes by telling 'em to lick their fingers and touch t'pins of the vacuum tubes. And back then, there weren't no fancy '1's -- our binary were all '0's!
Chile had a 17 year dictatorship that was Capitalist/conservative/right-wing oriented. So you cant link dictatorship with a political orientation, neither OSS for that matter.
Whoa, boy, you left your sense of humour running all night long, and it has gone flat!
I am not familiar with Darfur nor the activities taking place there, so I can't comment.
Oh, don't worry about it, just a little light genocide.
We're working to help them replace what they already had, which most likely wasn't given to them, but earned.
This 'earned' notion has nothing to do with charity. The people of Florida haven't ever done anything to 'earn' my loyalty; hell, I'm not even a US citizen. But that didn't stop me from giving to the Red Cross to help them out.
The onus is not on the needy to get over their sense of entitlement. The onus is on the well-off to recognize their resposibility to others less fortunate than themselves. Of course, nobody can -- or should -- enforce this responsibility; but nevertheless, duty to others is a fundamental part of what makes us human.
1. Count only governmental aid. The U.S. is different from most other Western countries in that we are not a centralized, government-controlled society (although admittedly we become more so every year). The percentage of private vs. government aid is much higher for the U.S. that it is for most other countries.
Firstly, I'm not sure I understand your comments about centralized, government-controlled societies. Are you claiming that Germany is not a federal republic? Or Switzerland? Are you claiming that in the UK, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland do not have regional semi-independence?
Secondly, I've heard this claim about private vs. public donations. I would be willing to listen if you could back it up with some facts and/or figures.
2. Ignore perhaps the most colossal subsidy of all: Defense. For 50 years, the only thing preventing the Red Army from pouring through the Fulda Gap and into Western Europe, or the North Koreans from smashing through the DMZ into South Korea, was the U.S. military. Same situation vis-a-vis China and Taiwan. Freed from the colossal burden of defense spending, those countries used their resources instead to develop stable polities, healthy economies and the freedom to bitch about the U.S. everytime something goes wrong.
Well, not altogether. Both the UK and France have had viable nuclear deterrents since the 1950s, although it is debatable whether these would ever have been useful in preventing a conventional invasion through Eastern Europe. In any case, however, its important to note that the US expenditure on defence has often had a very damaging effect on the poorest countries of the world. During the Star Wars programme of the 1980s, the US went through a capital crisis, and hiked up the interest rates many-fold on the foreign debt it held.
Unfortunately, much of this debt was in the forms of loans to third-world countries. These loans were made in the late 1970s, when the US was awash with cash from Middle-East oil-producing nations; hence they had low, affordable repayment rates. The hike in interest rates in the 1980s, caused indirectly by Star Wars expenditure, raised these repayment rates to crippling levels, which is one of the reasons so many third-world countries are in such a dire state today.
This is only one example; I'm not trying to convince you to change your argument completely, simply attempting to show you that there are more subtleties to the issues at hand than might appear to be the case.
While the MythTV software may be free, how much money did you spend on the hardware?
If you look at my post here, you'll see I built my system for $210 -- with the proviso that I had an old computer knocking around to use at 'zero' cost, and I also had a lot of time on my hands. But all in all I still think it was a good deal; I saved a little money, learned a lot, and had fun.
Oh, and my MythTV box isn't a sexy mico-ITX; it's a midi tower with huge HD fans on it, sounding like a small vacuum cleaner. It sits in my basement, with three cables coming up (discreetly, mind you!) through the living room floor to connect it to the TV: picture, sound and IR remote. Boy it's ugly, but it works!
But if you'd rather talk national budgets, things get far uglier for Argentina:
Only if you screw up the figures. The 2003 external debt for the USA is $6.494 trillon, the figure coming from the article I posted. The 2003 external debt for Argentina was c. $145 billion (see here); I'm not sure where you got the $432.7 billon figure, but it certainly wasn't the CIA factbook, which quotes a 2002 estimated value of $142 billion.
Based on these figures, we see that the US has a debt/income ratio of 3.34, while Argentina has a debt/income ratio of 3.30.
So, once more, I'm not following your point.
hy? Because you don't help people get on their feet by giving them everything. If you give them everything then they develop no responsibility. Whether it be individuals or nations.
That's an all-to-easy way to absolve oneself of all resposibility to one's fellow humans. Would you apply this rubric to the starving people of Darfur? To those presently homeless in Florida?
OK, what about the cost of the dedicated PC? Surely you can't find a PC of the required capability for $99, or even $99+$200 for the lifetime subscription. Or am I missing something?
Nope, you do need a spare PC. But it doesn't have to be particularly speccy; when I upgraded to a cheap eMachines Athlon workstation, I used my old machine as the basis for my MythTV box: 700Mhz Pentium III, 256Mb RAM, Voodoo 3 graphics card. The only outlay for me was the capture card ($150) and the 80Gb hard drive ($60 after rebate). Given that I was upgrading my computer anyway, the net cost to get my MythTV box going was therefore $210 -- not hugely cheaper than TiVO, but the box does quite a bit more than TiVO can (it acts as my home network's music server, and I also run various other services off it, since it is always up).
How user friendly is MythTV? My 3 year old knows how to watch and record shows with TiVo. I think the 6 year old taught him how. The only problem I have is he's filling up the disk.
It's pretty good -- my wife learned to use it without any 'formal' instruction, just playing around. Of course, getting it set up is a different matter -- but there is good documentation for that too.
For the past several decades, the US could get out of financial troubles by simply printing more money. Since we had the only currency that was universally accepted as a unit of international monetary excange, this seldom caused the kind of inflation it should have. Now that the Euro is challenging the Dollar as the international currency of choice, and east Asia is talking about a unified currency, it's unlikely that we'll be able to continue this strategy.
Exactamundo -- congratulations on being the first responder to my post to get the point! Just imagine if OPEC starts pricing oil in Euros rather than dollars...
And it shows that OSS really is like communism because it has a dictator.
And also like fascisim, since the Nazis were National Socialists, and we all know socialism is the same as communism.
The government (read "your tax dollars") is not responsible for covering debts incurred by private organizations, even if they are financial institutions.
That's neither here nor there; we are talking about a country's external debt as measured against its GDP. While part of that debt is indeed incurred by private organizations, so too is the country's GDP earned by private organizations. The fact that not all of the debt is governmental is immaterial when considering the financial viability of a country as a whole.
By the way, the parent's numbers seem to come from the CIA World Factbook.
Oops, I was looking at the wrong WFB page. In any case, the figures quoted in the WFB are estimates for 2001. I think the 2003 treasury figures are (a) far more trusworthy, and (b) far more relevant to the present debate.
Maybe by then some of the nations will be kind enough to absolve us of some debt like we have done to countless other nations, specifically those in Europe.
And, along the same lines, you will be kind enough to absolve many developing nations from their debts, which in their cases mean a majority of their population living in crippling, often-fatal poverty?
National Socialist Party. Yep, sounds like a far right party to me.
I was waiting for a fuckwit to make that remark. The Nazi party was no more Socialist than, for instance, East Germany was a Democratic Republic. Why do you think the Nazis were known as the fascists?
No, the left is full of religous bigots, people who are anti-semites, and worse.
You craptard, anti-semitism has historically been conducted by the right, not the left. Think of the Nazis, you chuzzlewit!
A house? A wife? Kids? Things that take up time you can spend on hacking to get the thing to work?
Check. check. check. And sure -- I spent a while getting the system set up. But now it runs fine, and by not having to pay subscriptions, I save money that I can spend on my family. But, as you point out, YMMV.
You don't want to surf and watch TV at the same time but others do. Some people want a MP3/Video collection manager on their TV. Let them do it.
I already access my videos and MP3s (actually, OGGs) via MythTV . On top of that, I check the weather, get news headlines, and play games. I can also schedule programs from halfway around the world, via the web interface.
On top of all this, MythTV is free free. I'm not sure what would ever convince me to switch to TiVO or a similarly-limited product.
In both senses, the US is more indebted -- see my post above quoting actual figures for the GDP versus debt.
Maybe so, but only because we give our cash to practically every other country in the world as 'aid'
As a percentage of GDP given as foreign aid, the USA rates as one of the meanest countries in the developed world. Add to that the strings attached to the meagre aid they do give, such as the withdrawl by the Bush adminstration of funding for NGOs which advocate the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS.
But you see, when the US is more overextended there's more money to be made on interest, and the US has more money to pay it. Hence the interest (ha ha) in lending more money to the US. Hence the fact that we have more debt is actually a good thing - for everyone but us.
Sure, so long as the rest of the world has faith that the US can keep up its repayments. As soon as that faith evaporates (and it will -- I don't know when, but one day -- no empire lasts forever), the dollar will go south, and the US economy will be in really big trouble.
From the WFB:
Argentina purchasing power parity - $432.7 billion (2003 est.), external debt $142 billion (2002 est.)
USA purchasing power parity - $10.98 trillion (2003 est.), external debt $1.4 trillion (2001 est.)
I agree with all your figures apart from the USA external debt (the national debt value quoted in the WFB is for 1995 -- where did your value of $1.4 trillion come from?). Consider the following report:
That paints a rather different picture, doesn't it? Based on these figures, the USA appears to be more overextended than Argentina, not less.
Ask Argentina
Indeed. The irony is that Argentina's debts, when the World Bank shat on them, were far less severe than the USA's. The USA is the most indebted nation on the planet.
Which circle do Cilicon Valley venture capitalists go to?
I think you meant 'ring'. Anyway, surely it's the bottomless pit?
Projects that have proven future potential such as Zero Point Energy should be pursued far more vigorously...
Can you cite a single paper in a peer-reviewed journal which supports this statement?
I thought not.