Government, on the whole, can martial resources more quickly and get them to where they are needed faster than can civilian institutions. However, that requires that both parties not be at each other's throats during the process.
Maybe the government can, but the government doesn't. Wal-Mart stationed tractor trailers all around the outside of the area expected to be flooded by Katrina, so that they could immediately bring in supplies. FEMA wouldn't let them inm because their "plan" didn't account for it.
Given a choice between doing nothing, and doing something that might not work out, the Government chooses wait-and-see. Better to not act, and not be blamed, than act and clearly be accountable if something goes wrong.
A coworker provided me this formula, and it's the only thing that works. Take your normal estimate, let's say one week. Double the number, that gives you two weeks. Then, increase the timescale to the next unit, that gives you two months. That's your estimate.
Actually, even the observations are in question. Check out surveystations.org where a bunch of volunteers are physically surveying the United States Historical Climatology Network's stations. Most of these have heat biases of a significantly greater magnitude than the warming they're trying to detect. Only 11% of stations have a bias of less than 1C according to the USHCN's own standards.
We use it as a reference all the time (why do you think it's harder to find your way in a new area, when it's dark?).
WTF!?! Are you serious? You're really suggesting that it's harder to find my way in the dark because I can't easily determine south from north, and not that it has something to do with NOT BEING ABLE TO FUCKING SEE!
If my friend gets a great deal on a bucket of apples (say 5$), and offers to sell them to me at 10$ a bucket.. I won't feel too happy about that, knowing full well he is taking advantage of and making profit off my skin.
Nobody is being taken advantage of! There's no such thing! If you're willing to pay $X for something, that's how much its worth. As you said:
... and don't feel harshly towards him for selling me the apples (which at 10$ a bucket is still a great deal.)
It's not that you're being "taken advantage of", it's that you know there's a cheaper source of apples. Nobody wants to pay more than they have to, but people often overlook that cheaper unit prices require the purchase of large lots (as in your DSL modems).
I'm not a food scientist, but I think labeling laws and food safety inspection regulations are very necessary. Who doesn't think that?
I don't. The thing you overlook is that when the government "provides" a service (by which I mean it forces itself on you at gunpoint), it delivers whatever it feels like, and not what people actually want.
The food industry that doesn't want me to know that their product contains transfats...
Why do you think it is only recently that the government has mandated trans-fats on food labels? Because they have no incentive to provide a product that is actually useful to people. After all, what can you do about some random guy in the FDA? He's not elected. He's not even appointed by an elected official... Were there a market for private sector food information (a la Consumer Reports, Edmunds, Top Gear, etc. in the car market) this would have happened years ago. But because the government provides a "free" and admittedly decent alternative, there's too little incentive for too little return.
Speaking of Consumer Reports and the superiority of the private sector, if you've ever read Consumer Reports, you'll notice that their mileage ratings for cars differ significantly from the ratings stated by the EPA. The reason is that the EPA tests cars on a treadmill, while Consumer Reports tests them in the real world. The private sector tests are reflective of what consumers actually want to know, whereas the public sector tests are reflective of... nothing.
... and which would be happy to sell me contaminated meat.
What is it you think that means? They'd willfully kill or poison their customers? You really think that is what a business wants to do? While in some cases that sort of behavior is harder to directly attribute (global warming, for example) and therefore harder for consumers to punish, the example you've given is not one.
At least if you're going to be dishonest, try to be clever. The ACLU doesn't just not "waste resources" protecting the 2nd Amendment, they are opposed to private gun ownership (private being the only kind that matters):
We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain militias to assure their own freedom and security against the central government. In today's world, that idea is somewhat anachronistic and in any case would require weapons much more powerful than handguns or hunting rifles. The ACLU therefore believes that the Second Amendment does not confer an unlimited right upon individuals to own guns or other weapons nor does it prohibit reasonable regulation of gun ownership, such as licensing and registration.
This is ridiculous for a number of reasons, such as:
Why is the 2nd Amendment the only one that declares a right of the government, rather than of the people?
Would anyone honestly not mock similar reasoning if applied to freedom of speech? Why do we need blogs when we've got corporate newspapers? Or hell, lets just stick to official government propaganda. After all, the 1st Amendment says
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Did you see that? "Congress shall make no law... Clearly that means that the States can regulate religion, speech, and assembly however they see fit.
Does anybody honestly believe that only the government can be trusted with guns? The government? The crazy bastards that want to pray to Jebus in science class? The ones that spy on you illegaly? You wants those guys to have the guns?
And I'm not some crazy right-winger, I'm a crazy Libertarian; I'm in favor of on-demand abortions, shall-issue laws, and decriminalization.
Private property is now a fiction in the United States.
That has been the case for some time now. Every state where you pay property taxes, "your" property is only yours for as long as you can continue to afford to rent it from the goverment.
The end result will be familiar to anyone who'se lived in a radically unjust society: violence.
Sometimes that is what is called for. You can damn well be certain that the people making the decision about whose homes are destroyed won't be choosing their own; it's only fair that someone else make a life altering choice for them. I can with absolute certainty state that if I was on a jury where a guy was on trial for having assaulted or killed some councilman who stole his house out from underneath him and paid the guy 65% of what his property was worth that jury would be hung. Jury nullification is the last bit of reason left in this country.
Onced sued by a major company, you only really have two choices: bankruptcy by your lawyer or theirs. The only hope normal people have anymore is defending themselves and jury nullification.
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Terrorists and pedophiles use the regular internet, but I don't see that detering you. Consider yourself lumped in.
[The information about Apple's unreleased products] is stolen property, just as any physical item, such as a laptop computer containing the same information on its hard drive [or not] would be.
So the judge says that knowledge of a product that someone doesn't want disclosed is the same as having stolen the product. That's a great precdent. The information isn't "stolen property" anymore than downloading a song is stealing. It's copyright infringement at worst, which is not, and never will be, the same thing as depriving someone of the use of a physical object. Apple's product did not cease to be simply due to a wider audience knowing more about it.
No good will come of attacking you, but I'm going to do it anyway.
A tsunami that takes away their children, their friends, and everything they own. What do they do? Shrug it off eventually and mark it off as karma, god's will, or god's punishment depending on their religion (no, most poor Indians cannot afford the luxuries of athesim or agnosticism).
What is that supposed to mean? The luxuries of atheism or agnosticism? It seems to me the luxury is being able to blindly write off any misfortune on god. And honestly, why should anyone help these people when it's god's will that they suffer? I certainly don't want god to drown me, so I'll be spending my money on drugs and whores.
I don't fault the victims of this tragedy for using whatever mechanism they can to cope, but don't describe people's blindness as their greatest attribute.
Gallup Poll: 70% of Americans support the death penalty.
The vast majority of Americans feel that, at least in some cases, killing is not wrong. What's that you say, the beliefs of Americans don't determine morality? Why then, should your "ethical philosophers" (do you mean philosophers of ethics?) and religious authorities (we'll come back to this one) be the ones who decide what's right and wrong? Because they've studied it? They sat on a mountain somewhere with their legs crossed, and thirty-six minutes later knew all that which is Good and Just?
On to the religious folks. Now, if anyone is going to know what's right and what's not, it should be these people, no, for here we have some folks that god has chosen to enlighten. I'm not sure if you're familiar with most versions of god, but in general god's pretty old, and its opinion on various matters hasn't changed to much, certainly in the last couple of years. But since that's the case, how do you explain it being okay for missionaries to go slaughter people they couldn't convert, just a few centuries ago. Certainly god's thoughts on the matter haven't changed since then, which must mean man's understanding has. If man was wrong then, who's to say he's right now?
While I was in highschool I was taking apart my computer for fun one day. I was new to the whole hardware side at this point, but that didn't stop me from removing every last component from the chassis. Seeing as I hadn't built the system myself, this wasn't the brightest move. I start putting the thing back together, and I remember how every piece went in except one: the CPU.
This was back in the days when the chip didn't have one pin out of place on the grid to keep you from putting it in wrong... One in four odds, what the hell I said. Slap it in, lock down the ZIF handle. Push the power button with my crossed fingers. Nothing... nothing... nothing... *blap blap blap* and a burning smell. Half the powered transistors on one side of the board had blown apart.
How is this insightful? Hell, how is this good news? "Uh, both of these things have problems, therefore the sucky one must be better than it appears to be." The fact that two systems have failures says nothing about their successes.
My maze provider is now a huge corporation. Should they have to pay if their supposed security system fails?
Whether or not they are a huge corporation should have nothing to do with whether or not they pay. Just pointing it out...
Should a company be allowed to continue to "upgrade" their technology and make even more money, while they know their product will never be fit for this particular purpose?
You're implying that it is my responsibility to look out for you. If you go the grocery store and buy romaine instead of iceberg lettuce, is it the grocer's fault? Clearly not. Nevertheless, you're suggesting that it's my job to ensure whatever I sell you is fit for whatever you're doing, an impossible task.
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Government, on the whole, can martial resources more quickly and get them to where they are needed faster than can civilian institutions. However, that requires that both parties not be at each other's throats during the process.
Maybe the government can, but the government doesn't. Wal-Mart stationed tractor trailers all around the outside of the area expected to be flooded by Katrina, so that they could immediately bring in supplies. FEMA wouldn't let them inm because their "plan" didn't account for it.
Given a choice between doing nothing, and doing something that might not work out, the Government chooses wait-and-see. Better to not act, and not be blamed, than act and clearly be accountable if something goes wrong.
A coworker provided me this formula, and it's the only thing that works. Take your normal estimate, let's say one week. Double the number, that gives you two weeks. Then, increase the timescale to the next unit, that gives you two months. That's your estimate.
1 hour -> 2 weeks
2 weeks -> 4 months
4 months -> 8 years
Done!
How else are you supposed to learn when to walk it off, and when to rub some dirt on it?
Actually, even the observations are in question. Check out surveystations.org where a bunch of volunteers are physically surveying the United States Historical Climatology Network's stations. Most of these have heat biases of a significantly greater magnitude than the warming they're trying to detect. Only 11% of stations have a bias of less than 1C according to the USHCN's own standards.
Windows has consistently failed to deliver what customers want, but free software does that by definition
No, free software delivers what commiters want. Commiters are only some of the users.
WTF!?! Are you serious? You're really suggesting that it's harder to find my way in the dark because I can't easily determine south from north, and not that it has something to do with NOT BEING ABLE TO FUCKING SEE!
Nobody is being taken advantage of! There's no such thing! If you're willing to pay $X for something, that's how much its worth. As you said:
It's not that you're being "taken advantage of", it's that you know there's a cheaper source of apples. Nobody wants to pay more than they have to, but people often overlook that cheaper unit prices require the purchase of large lots (as in your DSL modems).
I don't. The thing you overlook is that when the government "provides" a service (by which I mean it forces itself on you at gunpoint), it delivers whatever it feels like, and not what people actually want.
Why do you think it is only recently that the government has mandated trans-fats on food labels? Because they have no incentive to provide a product that is actually useful to people. After all, what can you do about some random guy in the FDA? He's not elected. He's not even appointed by an elected official... Were there a market for private sector food information (a la Consumer Reports, Edmunds, Top Gear, etc. in the car market) this would have happened years ago. But because the government provides a "free" and admittedly decent alternative, there's too little incentive for too little return.
Speaking of Consumer Reports and the superiority of the private sector, if you've ever read Consumer Reports, you'll notice that their mileage ratings for cars differ significantly from the ratings stated by the EPA. The reason is that the EPA tests cars on a treadmill, while Consumer Reports tests them in the real world. The private sector tests are reflective of what consumers actually want to know, whereas the public sector tests are reflective of... nothing.
What is it you think that means? They'd willfully kill or poison their customers? You really think that is what a business wants to do? While in some cases that sort of behavior is harder to directly attribute (global warming, for example) and therefore harder for consumers to punish, the example you've given is not one.
At least if you're going to be dishonest, try to be clever. The ACLU doesn't just not "waste resources" protecting the 2nd Amendment, they are opposed to private gun ownership (private being the only kind that matters):
From http://www.aclu.org/police/gen/14523res20020304.ht ml, ACLU Policy #47:
This is ridiculous for a number of reasons, such as:
Does anybody honestly believe that only the government can be trusted with guns? The government? The crazy bastards that want to pray to Jebus in science class? The ones that spy on you illegaly? You wants those guys to have the guns?
And I'm not some crazy right-winger, I'm a crazy Libertarian; I'm in favor of on-demand abortions, shall-issue laws, and decriminalization.
That has been the case for some time now. Every state where you pay property taxes, "your" property is only yours for as long as you can continue to afford to rent it from the goverment.
Sometimes that is what is called for. You can damn well be certain that the people making the decision about whose homes are destroyed won't be choosing their own; it's only fair that someone else make a life altering choice for them. I can with absolute certainty state that if I was on a jury where a guy was on trial for having assaulted or killed some councilman who stole his house out from underneath him and paid the guy 65% of what his property was worth that jury would be hung. Jury nullification is the last bit of reason left in this country.
Onced sued by a major company, you only really have two choices: bankruptcy by your lawyer or theirs. The only hope normal people have anymore is defending themselves and jury nullification.
Terrorists and pedophiles use the regular internet, but I don't see that detering you. Consider yourself lumped in.
The judge doesn't really seem to get it:
So the judge says that knowledge of a product that someone doesn't want disclosed is the same as having stolen the product. That's a great precdent. The information isn't "stolen property" anymore than downloading a song is stealing. It's copyright infringement at worst, which is not, and never will be, the same thing as depriving someone of the use of a physical object. Apple's product did not cease to be simply due to a wider audience knowing more about it.
No good will come of attacking you, but I'm going to do it anyway.
What is that supposed to mean? The luxuries of atheism or agnosticism? It seems to me the luxury is being able to blindly write off any misfortune on god. And honestly, why should anyone help these people when it's god's will that they suffer? I certainly don't want god to drown me, so I'll be spending my money on drugs and whores.
I don't fault the victims of this tragedy for using whatever mechanism they can to cope, but don't describe people's blindness as their greatest attribute.
Paste it into notepad first, then copy the pasted text, then paste it into word. Voila, no more formatting just straight ASCII goodness.
Notepad is the great sterilizer of Windows.
Gallup Poll: 70% of Americans support the death penalty.
The vast majority of Americans feel that, at least in some cases, killing is not wrong. What's that you say, the beliefs of Americans don't determine morality? Why then, should your "ethical philosophers" (do you mean philosophers of ethics?) and religious authorities (we'll come back to this one) be the ones who decide what's right and wrong? Because they've studied it? They sat on a mountain somewhere with their legs crossed, and thirty-six minutes later knew all that which is Good and Just?
On to the religious folks. Now, if anyone is going to know what's right and what's not, it should be these people, no, for here we have some folks that god has chosen to enlighten. I'm not sure if you're familiar with most versions of god, but in general god's pretty old, and its opinion on various matters hasn't changed to much, certainly in the last couple of years. But since that's the case, how do you explain it being okay for missionaries to go slaughter people they couldn't convert, just a few centuries ago. Certainly god's thoughts on the matter haven't changed since then, which must mean man's understanding has. If man was wrong then, who's to say he's right now?
In conclusion, bite me you hippy.
While I was in highschool I was taking apart my computer for fun one day. I was new to the whole hardware side at this point, but that didn't stop me from removing every last component from the chassis. Seeing as I hadn't built the system myself, this wasn't the brightest move. I start putting the thing back together, and I remember how every piece went in except one: the CPU.
This was back in the days when the chip didn't have one pin out of place on the grid to keep you from putting it in wrong... One in four odds, what the hell I said. Slap it in, lock down the ZIF handle. Push the power button with my crossed fingers. Nothing... nothing... nothing... *blap blap blap* and a burning smell. Half the powered transistors on one side of the board had blown apart.
How is this insightful? Hell, how is this good news? "Uh, both of these things have problems, therefore the sucky one must be better than it appears to be." The fact that two systems have failures says nothing about their successes.
A few points:
My maze provider is now a huge corporation. Should they have to pay if their supposed security system fails?
Whether or not they are a huge corporation should have nothing to do with whether or not they pay. Just pointing it out...
Should a company be allowed to continue to "upgrade" their technology and make even more money, while they know their product will never be fit for this particular purpose?
You're implying that it is my responsibility to look out for you. If you go the grocery store and buy romaine instead of iceberg lettuce, is it the grocer's fault? Clearly not. Nevertheless, you're suggesting that it's my job to ensure whatever I sell you is fit for whatever you're doing, an impossible task.
Caffinated beef! It's only a matter of time...