The problem with this is PACs.
Namely, you have an organization run by people inside the region. But *it* is funded from outside the region. Suddenly, Mom and Pop campaign is running against a billion dollar corporation - no competition.
Realize that it is not *direct* funding that is really an issue in the current landscape; it's funding funneled through different areas. Right now, PACs and lobbies are the biggest things; indeed, though, what is called for is something analogous to Unions. Individuals need to have a way to more efficiently pool their resources, and fund candidates that way. The ways an individual can contribute should always be greater than a non-human entity.
Matching funds is based on an ethically unsound idea.
Say I give $10 to a candidate that supports my viewpoint. Now the U.S. Government cuts checks to two or three other candidates whose views I do not support - indeed, that I am not willing to even give $10 to. Worse, now, assuming that there are two basic methods of campaigning - building yourself up and tearing your opponent down - I'm suddenly in a conundrum. If I give $10 to the candidate I choose, I have effectively caused my candidate's opposition to earn a collective $20. Let's say they each use half the money each to tear down my candidate: My candidate has $10 to build himself up, and $10 tearing him down. Each of my opponents are left with $5 to build themselves up. I have succeeded in sinking my candidate.
But lets take that a step farther; suppose I start fielding straw-man candidates? Does the government have to pay them, too? Suppose I field twenty candidates from my party to one from yours? I probably don't even need to do anything substantial with their campaigns; just collect money to tear yours down with. Mathematically speaking, matching funds works against the system, encouraging people to engage in tear-down campaigns with straw men.
There is a more insidious problem, though; namely where that money is coming from. It is not the people's burden to provide for all electoral campaigns. As a citizen, I certainly do *not* consent to giving my tax dollars to any candidate for the purposes of getting them elected. This has an entrenching effect; the government pays itself to elect itself. It flies in the face of democracy.
I recommend a far, far simpler plan. I'll even skip over the idea that greater (indeed complete) transparency of where money comes from would eliminate much of the corruption from the process. Rather, I will suggest we remove all restrictions to how much money you can raise. Indeed! All restrictions. Save one. The government - nay, the People - get's it's take, and gets it in a graduated fashion. I won't suggest a particular formula, but for illustrative purposes will use f(x) = 1 / x, where f(x) is the part of the next dollar you earn you get to take back to your campaign, and x is the count of the dollar you've earned. The first dollar you keep all of. The next dollar you keep fifty cents of. The third dollar you get a third of. The fourth, a quarter. The tenth a dime. Obviously you would not want such a severe progression, but any function whose f(x) goes to zero would work. That way, someone could have raised $10 to your one, but is only getting (not quite) $3 out of it. At a certain point diminishing returns sets in, and you *have* to turn your attention to being the sort of candidate people want to hire, rather than being the sort of candidate that people mindlessly hire. And in the process, the government has profited - perhaps paying for that oversight and transparency that would help root out the rest of our problems.
Bringing Nazi Germany into the argument means you lose.
Israelis all carry firearms because all Israelis are trained army personnel, and they are surrounded by countries who want to destroy them. That being said, while Israeli gun crime may be lower per person than the United States, I can guarantee their death-by-suicide-bomber is far higher. Different situations call for different responses.
You absolutely should fear people with guns. You only have a gun if you have the expectation of using lethal force or the threat of lethal force in order to get your way. Either way, you're working directly against any notion of civilization, domestic tranquility and individual rights. Saying that having a gun to fight other people with guns is like saying that being lawless is a perfectly acceptable response to people who are breaking the law.
I think another good move is for us not to treat environmental scientists like wackjobs. Just because they're working on a very large, relatively intractable problem does not mean they're all crackpots. I think our political atmosphere right now is very belligerent in regards to relatively 'soft' sciences; like serious thinking can't take place in them. There are plenty of lines of thought, such as the Cradle-to-Cradle idea that are not composed simply of a fad-of-the-moment kneejerk environmentalist reaction. This isn't the 80s anymore.
Shouldn't a nice white hat out there write a virus that uses similar social engineering to differentiate between those people uninformed enough to click on any old thing that shows up in their mailbox and those who know better? Because the test to determine which is which is being performed at the rate of, what, 60 million per day? Just to a detrimental end.
I think you've probably hit on the eventual outcome; desktop apps will become less prevalent, but people won't entirely rely on the network. Instead, there will be more major datacenters that administer the apps to remote clients. In security-needed situations, those clients will likely be segmented away from the internet at large as they are now. But I don't really see a reason that computers will need to be anything more than thin clients in the near future.
The major possible exception to this is gaming; but even there consoles are paving the way. I wonder if developers have started to think about utilizing local resources for the intense computational stuff, while maintaining an otherwise thin presence on the client machine?
What you're describing is perfectly reasonable and what everyone has subscribed to all along. If your downstream clients are hogging more of your bandwidth, you charge them more. If you hog more of your upstream provider's bandwidth, they charge you more. What Net Neutrality is about, though, is when your clients hog more of your bandwidth because they're going to Google, or to YouTube (oh, wait, that's Google...), or to Amazon, or to eBay, or to Wikipedia you charge *those* people in addition to your clients, even though there are several networks between you and, say, Google.
When you start charging people to whom you are providing no direct service is greedy and twisted. The net works because it distributes the economic power and burden across all links in the chain. Why mess with that to give a few large corporations more revenue streams? They already have locality-based monopolies.
Clearly no human wants to have their sole energy source be something that requires them to be stationary most of the time. On the other hand, I would totally go for the green skin if it meant that, sans other food, I could survive longer at 'low speed', or if I could add a boost of energy just by spending some time in the sun. You can certainly bet those croquet games would start to go on longer. Nevermind the fact that our society is becoming more and more lethargic and stationary; after all, how better to get your office workers to stay at their desks than if they need to because that's where the sunlight is let into the building, thus feeding them and not requiring them to leave for lunch?
I think you make a very good point; not all businesses are created equal.
By nature, free market business will seek to fill any findable niche. Some businesses succeed by consistent customer service. Some succeed by being right bastards and screwing everyone in sight. Some by simply having more capital. Some by doing persistent research and staying ahead of the curve. Over time, nearly every business will have to shift it's particular strategies, and become one or another type of business.
But does this apply to working a government? A government, at best, can be described like a whole hoard of businesses - much like Microsoft. But unlike Microsoft, the government is *not* working for a profit - at least not a monetary one. Yes, they need to be on budget, but their real 'profit' comes in terms of the things laid down in the Preamble. I think that this important lynchpin of our government is worth repeating:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
The government has diverse interest, diverse goals. The fundamental issue is not one of greed, or stupidity, but a reversal of a long-held though oft-ignored precept: separation of powers. In the attempt to consolidate power in the executive branch - most recently an agenda pushed by the attempt at refusal to allow Congress to call prisoners to testify and the DOJ's firing of judges - there has been a push to centralize the decision making process of our country. Whatever benefits might be gleaned from this is not worth the losses, however; no one centralized branch can properly execute the above mandate while still overseeing itself and being responsible to the People. Hence, checks and balances.
Hopefully, this is becoming apparent enough and people will learn the lesson for another generation or two.
It can get wearying at times the constant battle against the socialists
You know, you're not a good patriot unless you never tire of fighting the Commies.;)
There's a difference between stabilizing an area and just outright transferring wealth to an area.
Absolutely. But note that we are doing neither currently; most money given in foreign aid by the United States is spent on US companies working in the area. It is not necessarily going into any actual infrastructural investment, which is the key, I think, to - as you put it - provide opportunity for poorer regions. I do not believe handing out cash is useful, but projects like Kiva can actually target the people struggling against the number biggest thing you need to succeed in a free market economy: capital.
That is, after all, why they call it 'Capitalism', and while there are many good parts to capitalism, total free reign to exploit a worker base is not one of them. In the United States we made huge strides forward through the implementation of worker's rights and unions; simply because the power of corporations became more distributed - unions held some and the government held some. Note that this is distinct from Socialism, where the Party holds all the core power. Those checks and balances are required outside of the government itself.
The video you posted is very interesting. I somewhat disagree with the constant use of logarithmic scaling, because it reduces the precision of the visual display. The spread is actually a lot farther than it seems, but he is right in that it is ground that can be covered, and is trending in that direction as free markets spread. I am exceedingly happy that such technological movements are occurring.
By and large, technology is really the key to all of this. The Scientific American issue on the Millenium Goals talks a lot about bringing microtechnology to countries - like the $100 computer, or the treadle pump, that reduces their need to rely on a government to provide huge, resource-intensive, monolitic infrastructure. Rather, it gives individuals the ability to cross the barriers in small numbers and of their own volition - and not by providing them, simply, with money, but rather by ensconcing them in the financial and obligation-driven customs of civilization. The "Teaching A Man To Fish" philosophy. If our national enterprises followed a similar common-sense approach of helping the populace instead of concerning itself entirely with government, I think we'd make a lot more headway in stabilizing those regions.
In short, I don't think we actually disagree, though I'm probably somewhat more liberal in terms of how many resources I think we should be putting towards bringing the rest of that pack with us.
From a certain point of view, you're correct; we have no immediate need to concern ourselves in Darfur. But there is some very good evidence out there that countries with large disparities in wealth suffer all sorts of problems. A prime example is Brazil, wherein the rich are largely housed behind reinforced steel because crime is so prevalent.
We don't need to intervene, but it is a good idea for us to stabilize these regions before they spin out of control. I don't think military intervention is the best idea; I think that people are most peaceful when they have the most to lose. Instead, we let their infrastructures get destroyed, large itinerant populations to arise, and wealth to be suspiciously dealt to only a few. Wealth, like power, is best distributed as evenly as possible. The result of allowing wealth to concentrate in one place is that it creates a class of dispossessed; never as easy to deal with as we'd like to think. Any sane person would pay attention to these issues for their own long-term interest, if not for their humanitarian nature; especially if they're hands-down the richest country in the world.
In short, of course we shouldn't gut our way of life in an ill-aimed crusade to save the world. But we should share the wealth, and we should never believe that we are somehow more worthy of the wealth than the poorest of the poor in the backwater countries that are experiencing such strife. Realize you did not work for your wealth; you were born into it.
Who Wants To Move Apartments Every Year?
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There is a common thread in modern human life. During the early years, in college and for a few years after, people change their living space every single year - sometimes more often. But as you get on in years, this slows down. First you might only move every few years. Then you buy a house. Then you want to stay in a house for a long time.
Generally, in the material world, this is because you have too much stuff to make moving an inexpensive and hassle-free proposition. But is it really any different in the digital world?
What about these operating systems is changing *so* fundamentally that it requires a major system overhaul every few years? How long do we have to wait for a stable kernel upon which we can build the rest of our systems? The fact of the matter is that in a few short years, all of our systems will be distributed anyway. Already our applications live on servers in an environment whose hardware and underlying software can change instantly - without the end user noticing so much as a hiccup. Why is it that our desktop and laptop machines suffer from such a stuttering inability to avoid a major disruption all the freaking time?
I heartily applaud anyone who loves to get into the nitty gritty of how to put a computer together, or install an os, or fix a car, or brew their own beer. I've even had excellent, informative forays into those areas. But, frankly, they don't hold my interest. I'm paying cash on the barrelhead. I want an os that works. That is not a megalomaniacal freak that insists I tinker with it every few weeks, just so it doesn't start spewing "Squeegee The Pickle Wallaby!" whenever I try to boot it up. How is that so wrong? How is that Microsoft hasn't caught on yet?
Wouldn't cleaner energy, such as nuclear, wind, solar and even clean coal be a better idea then?
It would, in theory. Except that coal accounts for about 50% of our domestic energy production. How fast can our production be retooled, given capital costs *and* technological development costs? On the other hand, government regulations regarding the sale of CFLs is a much quicker way to effect change.
I'd hardly call mercury pollution a "doomsday prediction"
Well, as per another poster, if you only want to have the discussion regarding environmental effects that doom the day, there is not much point in talking about it. On the other hand, mercury is something that is actively being spilled into the environment, and has been shown to cause thousands of deaths and birth defects. So I think it's a good example of how enough 'walks' beats out 'erroring'.
You have to concede that human damage to human lives via government interventions is even more severe.
I don't concede that point, especially when the net effect is fewer lives lost and higher quality for everyone involved. We're not talking about North Korea ruling the world; and further, simply because fascism is bad, does not mean it's opposite (anarchy) is best. We have a government and make rules for a reason. It's not the rules that are an issue; it's how they're decided on and enforced. Hence, Democracy. (Ok, Republics.)
Nor do I in the least believe that technological development is slowed by constraints. In fact, I believe it is propelled. What is slowed is the profit made by the individual or the few. Yet in doing this, in creating niches for competition, innovation is given a new womb. I don't believe that being proactive in our constraints is problematic; and it seems that the only people for whom it is problematic are already wealthy, and are trying to protect entrenched concerns that will keep them that way. So even if 'lesser technology' could be shown to cause an increase in deaths (which is, I think, hard to prove - not to mention a terrible metric), you would also have to show that technology (which you'd have to define somewhat more precisely than it currently is) is being adversely impacted. Given that this argument is constantly waged, I don't know that your argument really can hold water yet.
Not to turn your example around, but politicians rarely pass laws based on actual numbers. While you are free to continue to use incandescent bulbs on the basis of them doing less mercury damage to the environment than CFCs, domestic energy production remains the largest uncontrolled source of mercury.
So; either you center your mercury pollution in the form of a bulb, which is easily dealt with in a controlled way, or you release it in the form of an entirely uncontrolled airborne particulate.
Either way, though, note that paying attention to the issue is a superior course to saying, "Oh, that BS about mercury isn't real. We don't need to worry about it." It seems to me that, in this case, the environmentalists have a point, and thus your positing that they're batting 0% is, in fact, erroneous.
I think the problem is less with blatant trolls, which, as you say, can easily be deleted or totally ignored. It's more about those people who say things that are nasty, ad hominem attacks, childish, churlish, or otherwise intellectually without content yet claim they aren't being listened to, or cry out that they're being suppressed because of their views, and not because they're being inappropriate.
If you define what parameters you are using to determine if someone is acting like an adult, you are far more in your rights to get rid of the people who are dragging down the quality of your blog by being uncivil. It is not unreasonable to demand adult conduct on a space you're managing. There are plenty of spaces for those who need to work out their inner eleven year old.
You're asking the oversight question like blogs have to fit into a hierarchical top-down review structure. They clearly do not, nor will they. What O'Reilly and the Code movement at large is getting at is the idea that bloggers will manage themselves according to some set of guidelines; that people who refuse to follow those guidelines will get cut out of the conversation in those places the guidelines are observed.
The problem with totally uncensored speech is that my "Blah blah gargle eff you no punctuation l33t h@xorspeek!" gets as much air than your well-reasoned and carefully edited argument. Except that I spent one one thousandth of the effort, meaning that you're paying a very high premium in terms of time for a very small portion of the bandwidth. The truth is, there is a cost for everything, even speech. If my (intellectually useless) speech costs me 1/1000th of your (intellectually potent) speech, then is speech really free? Worse, if I have a bot spewing out my viewpoint, how is that actually speech at all? And yet, by any casual economic analysis, it's actively reducing the value of your speech with each additional, valueless post.
But a blogger has a recourse. A blogger can set bars over which anyone wishing to talk must hurdle. We do this with voting, note: you have to be 18, you have to be a citizen, you have to be individually identifiable, etc. We have decided some things are not ok to use as bars to prevent voting; race, political affiliation, viewpoint. But others are. Why, then, should a blogger be forced to allow any random person to choke up his discussion, instead of requiring people to self-identify, and put a modicum of effort into their contribution? The alternative is to have your traditional Roman forum choked with masked, blubbering invalids, over whose din no reasoned discussion can be heard, much less responded to.
You have to choose your freedoms. You can choose the uncensored type of freedom; there will always be a place on the net for that. Or you can choose your unfettered by inanity type of freedom; and I think anyone who wants to promote that is perfectly within their rights - and so I won't complain if they do so by frowning at anyone who doesn't follow some reasonably light, civility-based requirements. Expecting people to act like adults is far from fascist.
I am constantly surprised at people who claim others are insane for worrying about environmental damage until something actually happens. How many ever doomsayers and shrieking drama queens the environmental movement attracts, you have to concede that human damage to the environment can have severe - and as in the example above, lethal - consequences to humans. It is not unreasonable to look at the possible sources for catastrophic events and eliminate them before those events occur.
For that matter, we see it as perfectly reasonable to do this in regards to terrorism; we curtail rights, increase security, reduce freedom of movement and increase privacy-invading scrutiny of citizens. We do this because "otherwise people might die". Why should the environmental issue be *any* different?
This is blatantly not true. You cannot equate children learning the bounds of physicality with the sort of true violence that adults inflict on each other. Scraped knees and bruised elbows do not compare.
Sin City had some fantastic art direction. That is not equivalent to saying that Sin City was a fantastic movie because of the art direction.
In fact, I think that if you took the story in Sin City and retold without the heavy noir elements or the eye-catching artistic work, it would be easy to see that it is fantastically misogynistic. Women are portrayed as alternately helpless, treacherous, or as objects of violence - which is occasionally sexual in nature. And that's not even getting into the child molestation being portrayed as alright. It's not simple snobbery to dislike the movie; it carried a legitimately stomach-churning message, very sweetly packaged. I think for the unshielded mind - be it 5 or 50 - it's a sick, sick message to be delivered; to think that these things are ok and 'cool'. I'm don't think the movie should be censored, but I do think that it's wrong to consider people who are against it to be 'snobs'.
All that being said, I think games can legitimately have violence in them. Still, one wonders if the violence is needed to carry the game, or merely keep the interest of the player. Most first person shooters are just that; a reticule and targets. Whether those targets are abstract or mutant aliens, the player's goal is simply to put one over the other. Some games manage to do this without the suggestion of violence, while still keeping the idea of desperation; I point to Elebits as an excellent example. On the other hand, you can also have a game where the violence is meaningful to the story; Half Life is an excellent example. It's not the same thing if you change the characters. The game is fundamentally altered. Basically; if a game is telling a story, I am far more behind the use of violence. If it's violence for the sake of being stimulating while you line up target and reticule... not so much.
There's nothing worse than isolating children from reality, because it will start hitting them in the face one day or another.
I think it is erroneous to suggest that you can learn 'reality' from a video game. Most video games are developed by white males, from 20 to 40, who grew up in America in the suburban middle class or higher. Note, I am not saying all video game developers fall into this demographic, but the majority do. Either as a correlation or a result most video games carry a set of assumptions, assumptions that are passed from game to game and throughout the industry and are heavily rooted in that culture. Suggesting to children that what is thereby portrayed is 'real' and applicable to actual meat-body interactions out in the world is to seriously lead them astray.
On the other hand, I would be (amongst) the first to support games as art and entertainment. The problem there is that the ability to appreciate art really does depend on having the ability to contextualize it. If children aren't exposed to a sufficient set of exterior inputs, those game worlds are going to seem authentic to them, and will stand alone. This really breaks those games' usefulness as an art form, and is something I think any parent should strive against.
So, definitely don't shelter kids; but don't think letting them play any given video game is a good way to do that. When they come face to face with how the world is subtly but significantly different, they won't thank you for it.
I wonder how that effect would change if the way people moderated was made transparent? That is, if I'm Rag1ngF@nboi #42, and all I do is down-vote stuff, or stuff in certain categories (i.e. Microsoft), that would somehow be made apparent to people or to the system?
It seems to me that if you know a user typically mods down, that they're not as useful as someone who mods up and down on a roughly equal basis. Similarly with people who only mod up. Is there a way to break down articles so you can see trends in how people mod up or down; their general bias? What about modding with or against the masses?
Simple scoring are well and good, but prone to being manipulated by the belligerent masses of which we all become a part from time to time. Isn't it about time we started experimenting with some serious math components to these things?
Given the state of genetics today, the 'sex' part of producing offspring is quickly becoming less of an obstacle. I'm not saying that it is extremely fuzzy at the moment, but it is fuzzier than the average person seems to think, and getting fuzzier all the time.
People have been considering these issues for thousands of years; Buddhism is based around the idea of 'mindfulness' - of being able to give the entirety of your attention to one thing (be it a task or a problem or what have you - or nothing at all), to fill your mind with it and not let your mind become distracted by other things. It has even been shown that consistent 'practice' allows you to alter your brain chemistry to something closer to what you want: perhaps the ultimate expression of free will.
But not everyone is in a position where they can make a reasonable attempt at that. Depression is a real problem, even if you deny that ADD is. There are many therapies, and I think the one thing anyone can take away from it is that no one solution fixes the problem. People need help over their pain points; sometimes that is cognitive behavioral therapy, and sometimes that is drugs, and sometimes that is them choosing to get over themselves. But all of this is predicated on the idea that you *want* to change; if you don't, then eschewing such options as anti-depressants is probably fine. On the other hand, if you want to change something about yourself you have to remember that change is change; that you are always losing a part of you for a new part of you - be that time, or the 'quiet' part of your personality, or what have you. Personally, I think it's a wonderful thing that a person who is losing hours and days and years of their life to depression can seek a chemical aid to help them regain that time. Indeed, I know plenty of people for whom 'losing part of their personality' is not such a risk, given the opportunity cost of staying depressed, or staying ADD or what have you. We are humans, and as humans we use tools to achieve our ends; sometimes chemical ones.
As W. Somerset Maugham said, "If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?"
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with this is PACs. Namely, you have an organization run by people inside the region. But *it* is funded from outside the region. Suddenly, Mom and Pop campaign is running against a billion dollar corporation - no competition. Realize that it is not *direct* funding that is really an issue in the current landscape; it's funding funneled through different areas. Right now, PACs and lobbies are the biggest things; indeed, though, what is called for is something analogous to Unions. Individuals need to have a way to more efficiently pool their resources, and fund candidates that way. The ways an individual can contribute should always be greater than a non-human entity.
Matching funds is based on an ethically unsound idea. Say I give $10 to a candidate that supports my viewpoint. Now the U.S. Government cuts checks to two or three other candidates whose views I do not support - indeed, that I am not willing to even give $10 to. Worse, now, assuming that there are two basic methods of campaigning - building yourself up and tearing your opponent down - I'm suddenly in a conundrum. If I give $10 to the candidate I choose, I have effectively caused my candidate's opposition to earn a collective $20. Let's say they each use half the money each to tear down my candidate: My candidate has $10 to build himself up, and $10 tearing him down. Each of my opponents are left with $5 to build themselves up. I have succeeded in sinking my candidate. But lets take that a step farther; suppose I start fielding straw-man candidates? Does the government have to pay them, too? Suppose I field twenty candidates from my party to one from yours? I probably don't even need to do anything substantial with their campaigns; just collect money to tear yours down with. Mathematically speaking, matching funds works against the system, encouraging people to engage in tear-down campaigns with straw men. There is a more insidious problem, though; namely where that money is coming from. It is not the people's burden to provide for all electoral campaigns. As a citizen, I certainly do *not* consent to giving my tax dollars to any candidate for the purposes of getting them elected. This has an entrenching effect; the government pays itself to elect itself. It flies in the face of democracy. I recommend a far, far simpler plan. I'll even skip over the idea that greater (indeed complete) transparency of where money comes from would eliminate much of the corruption from the process. Rather, I will suggest we remove all restrictions to how much money you can raise. Indeed! All restrictions. Save one. The government - nay, the People - get's it's take, and gets it in a graduated fashion. I won't suggest a particular formula, but for illustrative purposes will use f(x) = 1 / x, where f(x) is the part of the next dollar you earn you get to take back to your campaign, and x is the count of the dollar you've earned. The first dollar you keep all of. The next dollar you keep fifty cents of. The third dollar you get a third of. The fourth, a quarter. The tenth a dime. Obviously you would not want such a severe progression, but any function whose f(x) goes to zero would work. That way, someone could have raised $10 to your one, but is only getting (not quite) $3 out of it. At a certain point diminishing returns sets in, and you *have* to turn your attention to being the sort of candidate people want to hire, rather than being the sort of candidate that people mindlessly hire. And in the process, the government has profited - perhaps paying for that oversight and transparency that would help root out the rest of our problems.
Bringing Nazi Germany into the argument means you lose. Israelis all carry firearms because all Israelis are trained army personnel, and they are surrounded by countries who want to destroy them. That being said, while Israeli gun crime may be lower per person than the United States, I can guarantee their death-by-suicide-bomber is far higher. Different situations call for different responses. You absolutely should fear people with guns. You only have a gun if you have the expectation of using lethal force or the threat of lethal force in order to get your way. Either way, you're working directly against any notion of civilization, domestic tranquility and individual rights. Saying that having a gun to fight other people with guns is like saying that being lawless is a perfectly acceptable response to people who are breaking the law.
I think another good move is for us not to treat environmental scientists like wackjobs. Just because they're working on a very large, relatively intractable problem does not mean they're all crackpots. I think our political atmosphere right now is very belligerent in regards to relatively 'soft' sciences; like serious thinking can't take place in them. There are plenty of lines of thought, such as the Cradle-to-Cradle idea that are not composed simply of a fad-of-the-moment kneejerk environmentalist reaction. This isn't the 80s anymore.
Shouldn't a nice white hat out there write a virus that uses similar social engineering to differentiate between those people uninformed enough to click on any old thing that shows up in their mailbox and those who know better? Because the test to determine which is which is being performed at the rate of, what, 60 million per day? Just to a detrimental end.
The major possible exception to this is gaming; but even there consoles are paving the way. I wonder if developers have started to think about utilizing local resources for the intense computational stuff, while maintaining an otherwise thin presence on the client machine?
You're totally right. I'm just angling for a little sun in my life!
What you're describing is perfectly reasonable and what everyone has subscribed to all along. If your downstream clients are hogging more of your bandwidth, you charge them more. If you hog more of your upstream provider's bandwidth, they charge you more. What Net Neutrality is about, though, is when your clients hog more of your bandwidth because they're going to Google, or to YouTube (oh, wait, that's Google...), or to Amazon, or to eBay, or to Wikipedia you charge *those* people in addition to your clients, even though there are several networks between you and, say, Google.
When you start charging people to whom you are providing no direct service is greedy and twisted. The net works because it distributes the economic power and burden across all links in the chain. Why mess with that to give a few large corporations more revenue streams? They already have locality-based monopolies.
Clearly no human wants to have their sole energy source be something that requires them to be stationary most of the time. On the other hand, I would totally go for the green skin if it meant that, sans other food, I could survive longer at 'low speed', or if I could add a boost of energy just by spending some time in the sun. You can certainly bet those croquet games would start to go on longer. Nevermind the fact that our society is becoming more and more lethargic and stationary; after all, how better to get your office workers to stay at their desks than if they need to because that's where the sunlight is let into the building, thus feeding them and not requiring them to leave for lunch?
I think you make a very good point; not all businesses are created equal.
By nature, free market business will seek to fill any findable niche. Some businesses succeed by consistent customer service. Some succeed by being right bastards and screwing everyone in sight. Some by simply having more capital. Some by doing persistent research and staying ahead of the curve. Over time, nearly every business will have to shift it's particular strategies, and become one or another type of business.
But does this apply to working a government? A government, at best, can be described like a whole hoard of businesses - much like Microsoft. But unlike Microsoft, the government is *not* working for a profit - at least not a monetary one. Yes, they need to be on budget, but their real 'profit' comes in terms of the things laid down in the Preamble. I think that this important lynchpin of our government is worth repeating:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
The government has diverse interest, diverse goals. The fundamental issue is not one of greed, or stupidity, but a reversal of a long-held though oft-ignored precept: separation of powers. In the attempt to consolidate power in the executive branch - most recently an agenda pushed by the attempt at refusal to allow Congress to call prisoners to testify and the DOJ's firing of judges - there has been a push to centralize the decision making process of our country. Whatever benefits might be gleaned from this is not worth the losses, however; no one centralized branch can properly execute the above mandate while still overseeing itself and being responsible to the People. Hence, checks and balances.
Hopefully, this is becoming apparent enough and people will learn the lesson for another generation or two.
It can get wearying at times the constant battle against the socialists
You know, you're not a good patriot unless you never tire of fighting the Commies. ;)
There's a difference between stabilizing an area and just outright transferring wealth to an area.
Absolutely. But note that we are doing neither currently; most money given in foreign aid by the United States is spent on US companies working in the area. It is not necessarily going into any actual infrastructural investment, which is the key, I think, to - as you put it - provide opportunity for poorer regions. I do not believe handing out cash is useful, but projects like Kiva can actually target the people struggling against the number biggest thing you need to succeed in a free market economy: capital.
That is, after all, why they call it 'Capitalism', and while there are many good parts to capitalism, total free reign to exploit a worker base is not one of them. In the United States we made huge strides forward through the implementation of worker's rights and unions; simply because the power of corporations became more distributed - unions held some and the government held some. Note that this is distinct from Socialism, where the Party holds all the core power. Those checks and balances are required outside of the government itself.
The video you posted is very interesting. I somewhat disagree with the constant use of logarithmic scaling, because it reduces the precision of the visual display. The spread is actually a lot farther than it seems, but he is right in that it is ground that can be covered, and is trending in that direction as free markets spread. I am exceedingly happy that such technological movements are occurring.
By and large, technology is really the key to all of this. The Scientific American issue on the Millenium Goals talks a lot about bringing microtechnology to countries - like the $100 computer, or the treadle pump, that reduces their need to rely on a government to provide huge, resource-intensive, monolitic infrastructure. Rather, it gives individuals the ability to cross the barriers in small numbers and of their own volition - and not by providing them, simply, with money, but rather by ensconcing them in the financial and obligation-driven customs of civilization. The "Teaching A Man To Fish" philosophy. If our national enterprises followed a similar common-sense approach of helping the populace instead of concerning itself entirely with government, I think we'd make a lot more headway in stabilizing those regions.
In short, I don't think we actually disagree, though I'm probably somewhat more liberal in terms of how many resources I think we should be putting towards bringing the rest of that pack with us.
We don't need to intervene, but it is a good idea for us to stabilize these regions before they spin out of control. I don't think military intervention is the best idea; I think that people are most peaceful when they have the most to lose. Instead, we let their infrastructures get destroyed, large itinerant populations to arise, and wealth to be suspiciously dealt to only a few. Wealth, like power, is best distributed as evenly as possible. The result of allowing wealth to concentrate in one place is that it creates a class of dispossessed; never as easy to deal with as we'd like to think. Any sane person would pay attention to these issues for their own long-term interest, if not for their humanitarian nature; especially if they're hands-down the richest country in the world.
In short, of course we shouldn't gut our way of life in an ill-aimed crusade to save the world. But we should share the wealth, and we should never believe that we are somehow more worthy of the wealth than the poorest of the poor in the backwater countries that are experiencing such strife. Realize you did not work for your wealth; you were born into it.
There is a common thread in modern human life. During the early years, in college and for a few years after, people change their living space every single year - sometimes more often. But as you get on in years, this slows down. First you might only move every few years. Then you buy a house. Then you want to stay in a house for a long time.
Generally, in the material world, this is because you have too much stuff to make moving an inexpensive and hassle-free proposition. But is it really any different in the digital world?
What about these operating systems is changing *so* fundamentally that it requires a major system overhaul every few years? How long do we have to wait for a stable kernel upon which we can build the rest of our systems? The fact of the matter is that in a few short years, all of our systems will be distributed anyway. Already our applications live on servers in an environment whose hardware and underlying software can change instantly - without the end user noticing so much as a hiccup. Why is it that our desktop and laptop machines suffer from such a stuttering inability to avoid a major disruption all the freaking time?
I heartily applaud anyone who loves to get into the nitty gritty of how to put a computer together, or install an os, or fix a car, or brew their own beer. I've even had excellent, informative forays into those areas. But, frankly, they don't hold my interest. I'm paying cash on the barrelhead. I want an os that works. That is not a megalomaniacal freak that insists I tinker with it every few weeks, just so it doesn't start spewing "Squeegee The Pickle Wallaby!" whenever I try to boot it up. How is that so wrong? How is that Microsoft hasn't caught on yet?
It would, in theory. Except that coal accounts for about 50% of our domestic energy production. How fast can our production be retooled, given capital costs *and* technological development costs? On the other hand, government regulations regarding the sale of CFLs is a much quicker way to effect change.
I'd hardly call mercury pollution a "doomsday prediction"
Well, as per another poster, if you only want to have the discussion regarding environmental effects that doom the day, there is not much point in talking about it. On the other hand, mercury is something that is actively being spilled into the environment, and has been shown to cause thousands of deaths and birth defects. So I think it's a good example of how enough 'walks' beats out 'erroring'.
I don't concede that point, especially when the net effect is fewer lives lost and higher quality for everyone involved. We're not talking about North Korea ruling the world; and further, simply because fascism is bad, does not mean it's opposite (anarchy) is best. We have a government and make rules for a reason. It's not the rules that are an issue; it's how they're decided on and enforced. Hence, Democracy. (Ok, Republics.)
Nor do I in the least believe that technological development is slowed by constraints. In fact, I believe it is propelled. What is slowed is the profit made by the individual or the few. Yet in doing this, in creating niches for competition, innovation is given a new womb. I don't believe that being proactive in our constraints is problematic; and it seems that the only people for whom it is problematic are already wealthy, and are trying to protect entrenched concerns that will keep them that way. So even if 'lesser technology' could be shown to cause an increase in deaths (which is, I think, hard to prove - not to mention a terrible metric), you would also have to show that technology (which you'd have to define somewhat more precisely than it currently is) is being adversely impacted. Given that this argument is constantly waged, I don't know that your argument really can hold water yet.
Not to turn your example around, but politicians rarely pass laws based on actual numbers. While you are free to continue to use incandescent bulbs on the basis of them doing less mercury damage to the environment than CFCs, domestic energy production remains the largest uncontrolled source of mercury. So; either you center your mercury pollution in the form of a bulb, which is easily dealt with in a controlled way, or you release it in the form of an entirely uncontrolled airborne particulate. Either way, though, note that paying attention to the issue is a superior course to saying, "Oh, that BS about mercury isn't real. We don't need to worry about it." It seems to me that, in this case, the environmentalists have a point, and thus your positing that they're batting 0% is, in fact, erroneous.
I think the problem is less with blatant trolls, which, as you say, can easily be deleted or totally ignored. It's more about those people who say things that are nasty, ad hominem attacks, childish, churlish, or otherwise intellectually without content yet claim they aren't being listened to, or cry out that they're being suppressed because of their views, and not because they're being inappropriate. If you define what parameters you are using to determine if someone is acting like an adult, you are far more in your rights to get rid of the people who are dragging down the quality of your blog by being uncivil. It is not unreasonable to demand adult conduct on a space you're managing. There are plenty of spaces for those who need to work out their inner eleven year old.
The problem with totally uncensored speech is that my "Blah blah gargle eff you no punctuation l33t h@xorspeek!" gets as much air than your well-reasoned and carefully edited argument. Except that I spent one one thousandth of the effort, meaning that you're paying a very high premium in terms of time for a very small portion of the bandwidth. The truth is, there is a cost for everything, even speech. If my (intellectually useless) speech costs me 1/1000th of your (intellectually potent) speech, then is speech really free? Worse, if I have a bot spewing out my viewpoint, how is that actually speech at all? And yet, by any casual economic analysis, it's actively reducing the value of your speech with each additional, valueless post.
But a blogger has a recourse. A blogger can set bars over which anyone wishing to talk must hurdle. We do this with voting, note: you have to be 18, you have to be a citizen, you have to be individually identifiable, etc. We have decided some things are not ok to use as bars to prevent voting; race, political affiliation, viewpoint. But others are. Why, then, should a blogger be forced to allow any random person to choke up his discussion, instead of requiring people to self-identify, and put a modicum of effort into their contribution? The alternative is to have your traditional Roman forum choked with masked, blubbering invalids, over whose din no reasoned discussion can be heard, much less responded to.
You have to choose your freedoms. You can choose the uncensored type of freedom; there will always be a place on the net for that. Or you can choose your unfettered by inanity type of freedom; and I think anyone who wants to promote that is perfectly within their rights - and so I won't complain if they do so by frowning at anyone who doesn't follow some reasonably light, civility-based requirements. Expecting people to act like adults is far from fascist.
I am constantly surprised at people who claim others are insane for worrying about environmental damage until something actually happens. How many ever doomsayers and shrieking drama queens the environmental movement attracts, you have to concede that human damage to the environment can have severe - and as in the example above, lethal - consequences to humans. It is not unreasonable to look at the possible sources for catastrophic events and eliminate them before those events occur.
For that matter, we see it as perfectly reasonable to do this in regards to terrorism; we curtail rights, increase security, reduce freedom of movement and increase privacy-invading scrutiny of citizens. We do this because "otherwise people might die". Why should the environmental issue be *any* different?
This is blatantly not true. You cannot equate children learning the bounds of physicality with the sort of true violence that adults inflict on each other. Scraped knees and bruised elbows do not compare.
In fact, I think that if you took the story in Sin City and retold without the heavy noir elements or the eye-catching artistic work, it would be easy to see that it is fantastically misogynistic. Women are portrayed as alternately helpless, treacherous, or as objects of violence - which is occasionally sexual in nature. And that's not even getting into the child molestation being portrayed as alright. It's not simple snobbery to dislike the movie; it carried a legitimately stomach-churning message, very sweetly packaged. I think for the unshielded mind - be it 5 or 50 - it's a sick, sick message to be delivered; to think that these things are ok and 'cool'. I'm don't think the movie should be censored, but I do think that it's wrong to consider people who are against it to be 'snobs'.
All that being said, I think games can legitimately have violence in them. Still, one wonders if the violence is needed to carry the game, or merely keep the interest of the player. Most first person shooters are just that; a reticule and targets. Whether those targets are abstract or mutant aliens, the player's goal is simply to put one over the other. Some games manage to do this without the suggestion of violence, while still keeping the idea of desperation; I point to Elebits as an excellent example. On the other hand, you can also have a game where the violence is meaningful to the story; Half Life is an excellent example. It's not the same thing if you change the characters. The game is fundamentally altered. Basically; if a game is telling a story, I am far more behind the use of violence. If it's violence for the sake of being stimulating while you line up target and reticule... not so much.
I think it is erroneous to suggest that you can learn 'reality' from a video game. Most video games are developed by white males, from 20 to 40, who grew up in America in the suburban middle class or higher. Note, I am not saying all video game developers fall into this demographic, but the majority do. Either as a correlation or a result most video games carry a set of assumptions, assumptions that are passed from game to game and throughout the industry and are heavily rooted in that culture. Suggesting to children that what is thereby portrayed is 'real' and applicable to actual meat-body interactions out in the world is to seriously lead them astray.
On the other hand, I would be (amongst) the first to support games as art and entertainment. The problem there is that the ability to appreciate art really does depend on having the ability to contextualize it. If children aren't exposed to a sufficient set of exterior inputs, those game worlds are going to seem authentic to them, and will stand alone. This really breaks those games' usefulness as an art form, and is something I think any parent should strive against.
So, definitely don't shelter kids; but don't think letting them play any given video game is a good way to do that. When they come face to face with how the world is subtly but significantly different, they won't thank you for it.
It seems to me that if you know a user typically mods down, that they're not as useful as someone who mods up and down on a roughly equal basis. Similarly with people who only mod up. Is there a way to break down articles so you can see trends in how people mod up or down; their general bias? What about modding with or against the masses?
Simple scoring are well and good, but prone to being manipulated by the belligerent masses of which we all become a part from time to time. Isn't it about time we started experimenting with some serious math components to these things?
Given the state of genetics today, the 'sex' part of producing offspring is quickly becoming less of an obstacle. I'm not saying that it is extremely fuzzy at the moment, but it is fuzzier than the average person seems to think, and getting fuzzier all the time.
People have been considering these issues for thousands of years; Buddhism is based around the idea of 'mindfulness' - of being able to give the entirety of your attention to one thing (be it a task or a problem or what have you - or nothing at all), to fill your mind with it and not let your mind become distracted by other things. It has even been shown that consistent 'practice' allows you to alter your brain chemistry to something closer to what you want: perhaps the ultimate expression of free will. But not everyone is in a position where they can make a reasonable attempt at that. Depression is a real problem, even if you deny that ADD is. There are many therapies, and I think the one thing anyone can take away from it is that no one solution fixes the problem. People need help over their pain points; sometimes that is cognitive behavioral therapy, and sometimes that is drugs, and sometimes that is them choosing to get over themselves. But all of this is predicated on the idea that you *want* to change; if you don't, then eschewing such options as anti-depressants is probably fine. On the other hand, if you want to change something about yourself you have to remember that change is change; that you are always losing a part of you for a new part of you - be that time, or the 'quiet' part of your personality, or what have you. Personally, I think it's a wonderful thing that a person who is losing hours and days and years of their life to depression can seek a chemical aid to help them regain that time. Indeed, I know plenty of people for whom 'losing part of their personality' is not such a risk, given the opportunity cost of staying depressed, or staying ADD or what have you. We are humans, and as humans we use tools to achieve our ends; sometimes chemical ones. As W. Somerset Maugham said, "If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?"