Unlike some/.'ers, having been alive in 1980, I remember the differences between the Carter and Reagan energy policies quite clearly.
The most obvious difference in "Energy Policy" was that Carter instituted price controls, causing gasoline shortages and an estimated 150,000 wasted barrels of oil a day spent on cars idling in gas station lines, while Reagan got rid of price controls shortly after taking office in 1981 and all the shortages magically vanished.
Magically, if you don't understand basic economics, of course.
It's an important lesson to remember when the talking heads get up on TV and start pushing price controls, like they're starting to do in Hawaii.
So if some of us think that/. user 531777 is a threat to those around him and we need to silence him completely, user 531777 realizes that since we don't have a consensus on the facts, he should assume and act according to the worst case scenario that he is in fact a threat to those around him and needs to be silenced?
Pretty stupid decision process, don't you think? Obviously only bother to reply to this if you think so, since otherwise you'll remain completely silent.
How about instead, if we don't have a consensus on the facts, we act according to the range of most likely scenarios combined with evaluating the trade-ofs (or costs) of various actions? You know, act rationally instead of like scared sheep at every overblown potential threat?
One of the continual options the OMB lists at budget is to stop subsidizing insurance on repeatedly flooded properties at a cost of a couple hundred million every year.
You're right, they have started trying to charge more realistic estimates of insurance recently, but they still have all those grandfathered structures that they subsizide.
They also keep rebuilding destroyed structures. That's the real loss, when they let people build their newly re-insured structure in the same place the last one got washed away and get the same insurance again.
At the very least, stop taxing everyone else to subsidize flood insurance for people who insist on building in flood-prone areas.
If they want insurance, let them pay the real cost of it. If they don't, let them take the risk themselves.
Of course, we'd probably have to transition such a system into place by instead of banning existing structures from getting the current subsidized insurance, simply telling everyone who got flooded out that if they insist on rebuilding in their flood-susceptible location, they're going to have to do it without flood insurance. Otherwise, they can turn their property over for parkland and take it's pre-flood value to go rebuild somewhere else.
I know that a lot of not as wealthy people also live in flood-prone areas, but can't the taxpayers stop paying for rebuilding millionaires beach and river-front property over and over again in the same locations?
Even better. He's got access to the database to extract the stored fingerprint data... wouldn't it be simpler to just insert his own information into the database as an authorized user of everything? Even better, since it's warped one-way, they won't be able to back-trace it to his actual info.
Does this mean we might actually get some good new spices, once they start playing around with modifying existing ones somewhat gastronomically scientifically?
The one that demonstrates his actual knowledge of the subject matter by answering my questions on it.
You don't hire people without actually interviewing them, do you?
If by some miracle I was hiring someone who was supposed to know more than me about a particular subject, I'd find other people with expert knowledge in that subject and have them either help interview the candidates or provide me with some Q&A that would be useful.
Anyone who makes a hiring decision based on a cert/degree listed on a resume instead of a candidate's actual knowledge and skills is taking an unnecesary risk that has the potential to cost their company a lot of money.
People are expensive to hire and pay, but they are even more expensive if they aren't right for the job.
A cert or degree is useful only for when you have a large pool of applicants and you need some help narrowing that pool down. That said, in some instances you can use a cert/degree to remove candidates from the pool, becuase they can demonstrate extra focuses that you don't want for a particular job.
Circa 1996, I started a local ISP with a buddy of mine. I was the "technical" guy and he was the "sales" guy. I kept my day job until we had enough revenue to pay for us both.
Our main system was a BSDi box that handled user authentication and POP3 email. Since he had to deal with signing up users in the office while I worked my day job, I showed my buddy how to add and edit users on the system.
So one day he calls me and tells me that users have started complaining that they can't login. I start looking around and finally figure out the problem after some questioning.
That day he was bored, so he decided to "clean up" the passwd file. There were some deleted users removed from the file, so the uid's were no longer in sequence. He merrily went through and renumbered them all so that they'd be in sequence in the file.
The good news is that the user's mail directories were named after their username, so I could quickly use that as a reference to recreate which UID went with which username originally.
In the summer of 1994, I was trying to fix a broken Compaq while working in an authorized service center. Generally, Compaq would credit us with 1.5 hours labor for a bad motherboard and usually it only took me 30 minutes to replace one. In this case, it was taking forever.
I replaced the motherboard, but it wouldn't power up. After a little fiddling to double-check everything, I decided the new motherboard might be DOA and replaced it with another new one.
Same result. Now I wondered if something else was wrong, like the power supply, since I couldn't even get any POST codes out of it. Still, the fans spun and such, so it was getting at least some power.
So I hooked the power supply up to another machine. Worked fine, so I put it back. Still dead. At this point, nothing but the power supply, motherboard, cpu, ram and video card were connected, so I tried it without the video card. From previous tests when it first came in, I knew the cpu and ram were ok. Still nothing.
Finally, I grabbed another new motherboard and plugged it into the power supply without even bothering to put it into the case. Started up just fine with me standing there holding it in the air.
So relieved, I shut it down and put the new motherboard in the computer, asking myself what the odds were of having two DOA motherboards in a row.
Apparently pretty slim, since once again I turned the computer on and got nothing. Pulled the Motherboard back out and held it and it worked fine again. Put it back in, got nothing.
At this point, I obviously decided it was something with the case and went looking. Sure enough, there was an extra small metal clip that was supposed to help attach the motherboard to the case that had come loose and then wedged itself into a corner. It was in just the right position to make contact with a couple of the solder points on the motherboard, shorting them and causing the motherboard to shut itself down immediately without even POSTing.
One removed, the whole thing worked fine. Later, I tried the original motherboard and it also worked fine, so somehow that clip worked it's way out while it was running.
"seperation of church and state" is not a phrase contained within the United States Constitution.
Funding a Catholic private school is no more a violation of the Constitution than funding a Catholic homeless shelter or a Catholic children's hospital or providing Federal College tuition aide to a student attending a Catholic College. Or didn't you know all of those occur today?
For tax money that goes to a religious-based organization, the test should be pretty simple. They should be treated in exactly the same way as any other organization in the same situation, no special bonuses or penalties as compared to any other religion, non-religious, anti-religious, secular humanist, atheist or whatever organization is treated. Or is that not fair enough for you?
I have no problem with teachers who want to teach their students how to think critically, and/or how to research and evaluate both sides of an issue. That is a valuable skill that they should actually teach more of.
The problem is that most (not all) of the teacher's that I have seen in a public school environment prefer to teach the students NOT to think critically about things, to avoid points of view that the teacher opposes and emotionally stigmatize and give poor grades to those who don't agree with them. But hey, it's not my money and my kids, right? Oh wait, that's right, it is.
Please re-read what I actually said. To clarify, I suggest as the ideal situation, private charity to take care of those who can't afford to pay for their own children's education and public tax funds as a last resort to cover poor children who can't afford it and who can't find private charity.
Still, your objection is a bit silly, considering that right this second lots of public funds are used "in non-transparent, non-publicly accountable institutions". Ever heard of the food stamps program? I suppose you object to that program on the same grounds? After all, some poor Muslim, Jewish or Hispanic family might purchase something from an ethnic food store or something labeled "Kosher" that partially funds their religion.
Wow, that would just be "untennable" (sic), wouldn't it?
What is your big objection to parents educating their own children how they see fit instead of how you prefer? Is it really that somehow some of your tax money might go to help fund something you don't agree with? Or is it that they might not pick the same philosophy you would?
When I was the coach for a local high school's Model UN team, during a break I sat in the teacher's lounge listening to the public school teachers discuss various ways to convince their students that the local prevailing political philosophy, held by the majority of the kid's parents, was wrong. They essentially went over various brainwashing techniques they could use to get the kids away from their parent's beliefs. It was a very matter-of-fact discussion, as if they couldn't conceive that any of the other teachers in the room might disagree with them. They lamented and laughed about what the kids had learned from their parents.
Most people in the US right now don't agree with at least part of the philosophy their own children are taught in school with their tax money, let alone someone else's children. What about them?
Somehow I don't see you suggesting a total ban on using tax money for education. Isn't that just a little inconsistent and hypocritical?
I said empirical evidence, not studies. From the first definition on Google: "Evidence derived from direct observation and sense experience."
As for related studies, you'd almost need a full economics course to cover them in proper depth.
What you question about school choice makes my point as well. If parents are purchasing education as consumers instead of taxpayers, there is no need for anyone to worry about if the school is going to teach "their way" with their tax money. If it doesn't, they can just switch schools and who they are paying. Parents could make an informed decision and have their children taught based on their own values instead of the values of whatever the predominate government-bureacrat-sanctioned philosophy is.
See, with a real divorce of school from being a government forced-pay business, you aren't forced to pay for schools that you don't agree with how they teach, unlike now where just about everyone with a kid in school would change some aspect of how or what that school teaches, no matter what side of whatever popular argument they are currently on.
Why can't the atheists pay for a school that teaches their philosophy and the religious pay for a school that teaches their philosophy? The only real reason is that there are some people who insist on using government power to brainwash other people's kids into their own ways of thinking, despite the desires of the kid's parents.
Just like not everyone wants or needs the exact same food preferences, not everyone wants or needs the exact same education preferences. Why are we forcing people to use one and subsume their needs into a bland majority and not the other? What about kids who can't afford a good education? We can handle that the same way we handle people who can't afford decent food. Use private (or even public if you must involve tax money) charity for scholarships available to all who need them. There are tons of schemes out there to take care of that side of the issue.
Sure, in neither case would you want truely abusive parents who would starve their kids, make them eat nothing but dirt or fail to teach them anything at all. There is a very small minority of people who do things wrong, but why force everyone else in the country to forsake food or educational opportunities and preferences instead of simply dealing with and punishing a small number of abusive situations?
Let's let you do your own personal empirical study and see if it is similar to other's experiences.
List the top 5 or 10 least regulated, least government controlled areas of interaction with others you have. That's somewhat vague, but things like the Internet (but not the local loop portion of it, since that's heavily government influenced), various areas of merchandise sales, local lawn trimming service, whatever, as long as you can mentally classify it into a group of related stuff with a somewhat common level of government intervention or lack thereof. Areas we look to private industry for the "answers" to the problems.
Ask yourself how much you've complained about those things in the last year because of unreasonable cost, wasted resources, lack of options or poor service without many alternatives.
Now list the top 5 or 10 most regulated, most government controlled areas of interaction with others you have. Areas we look to private government for the "answers" to the problems.
Ask yourself how much you've complained about those things in the last year because of unreasonable cost, wasted resources, lack of options or poor service without many alternatives.
Now compare the lists and see which appears to be serving you personally better. This completes our empirical study. You might be interested in speculating what other people's personal interaction study results would lead you to conclude also.
Now, I am not saying that in every single case, government is not the answer. Just that in a large number of cases that are currently considered "government solution or no solution" by many people, we at least deserve to do some trial runs to see if perhaps a non-government solution isn't better, based on the evidence comparing previous government vs non-government solutions.
I am saying that we should be looking at ways to move some of these wasteful forced government ventures out of the realm of government, rather than continue to come up with new things to put under the purvey of government, like this wifi program. Over the last 150 years it's been going in the direction of more forced government control of our lives and some of us think our lives would be better if the trend went the other way for a while.
For example, with school choice initiatives, isn't it interesting that not only did the overall average student performance increase, but so did the average student performance for student's inside the public schools, just because of the highly visible competition?
It is somewhat humourous that you cite the very areas I was talking about, areas in which high amounts of regulation and government forced monopolies have caused problems.
Healthcare: Massive government programs, super-regulated insurance policies, massive market distortions through tax policies regarding company and personal health expenses, government prevention of medicine use through the FDA, government enforced licensing to keep out competition, typically government funded and run facilities in most areas, especially large cities.
Energy: Highly regulated, most customer facing portions of the industry are government granted or owned monopolies for geographic areas, most production and refining facilities are severely limited by government in terms of construction and placement. The major reason gas prices have been steadily increasing is that we don't have enough refineries to meet the demand. We haven't built a new refinery in the US in 30 years not because no one thinks one would be profitable, but because government typically won't let them be built.
Telecommunications: Again, a major history of government regulation and government enforced monopoly status.
MSM: (Main stream media, I presume?) How did it become the main stream media, at least the broadcase networks? That's right, government granted monopolies on broadcast spectrum.
How about you pick some areas that are actually free of government and not examples of major government interference, control and forced non-competition?
There is a difference between saying "schools should be funded through the government" and "schools should exist and teach people things, even people who can't afford it".
You are setting up a false dichotomy where supposedly the only way we could have the "public good" you mention is through government forcing people to pay for it in taxes, wasting 50% of the money and then providing the services, usually poorly and to most people's dissatisfaction. The only alternative you apparently can imagine is that no one has those things.
Imagine if the government turned grocery stores into a "public good" so as to provide everyone with their basic food needs. That's at least as reasonable and necessary (if not more so) than your other examples of government providing a "public good".
Based on current examples of similar government programs, what we'd end up with is overpaying for lousy food in a poor selection, with some people who still buy their food elsewhere at an extreme premium in addition to funding their "free" food.
And people with your mentality would be talking about how everyone in the country would starve if the government hadn't stepped in to provide free food and what are people complaining about...
See, it's not that we disagree about the goals. We all want a good road/network/whatever infrastructure, a good educational system, etc... it's just that we don't all agree that the only choices are central planners forcing people to do it their way or nothing at all.
Think of the worst run things in our country that people complain about the most how they are handled and that they are problems that need to be solved still. Something you'll find in common is that they are almost all government run or highly-regulated government-granted monopolies.
It's the empirical evidence that makes the rest of us question why people keep wanting to do things the same way, just becuase some power-hungry politician wants to be in control of it so that he can claim to be providing it for "free" as a benefit to the people.
At some point they'll stop the subterfuge and just advertise special abilities, bonuses and in-game items if you send the company cash directly, instead of making people buy a bunch of playing cards to get them.
The article takes issue with the FCC calling anything over 200 Kbps broadband.
Maybe I'm just alone in this, but I've always thought of pretty much anything faster than 56K dial-up as broadband.
Sure, 200 Kbps isn't super-fast, but it's certainly not dial-up.
Another issue they have is that a lot of "broadband" is upstream limited to as little as 128 Kbps and thus they don't think it should count.
While I decry providers who don't give people much upstream bandwidth, it's a bit much to claim something "isn't broadband" if it's say, 1.5 Meg down and 128 K up. For a lot of people (the less techy amongst us, not/. readers) that's a pretty typical usage ratio.
To bring this back on the original topic a little. The article is by someone at the Von Mises Institute. Ludwig Von Mises is best known for his books demonstrating that socialist and communist systems have an inherent tendancy to end up controlled by power-hungry groups and individuals. He predicted the results of socialist policies years before they came to pass, because he had been exposed to them as an economist in Austria before they become academically popular worldwide.
Essentially, the personal qualities that get you promoted fastest in a socialist government also happen to be the personal qualities that lead someone to set themselves up as a dictator or at best an oligarchy.
The problem with "true socialism" is that due to human nature, it's not stable. It quickly devolves into "true totalitarianism" and has every time it's been tried on any national scale.
As for the Nazi's, you know the "National Socialist German Workers Party", they might have been in competition with the Russian Communists, but that doesn't mean they weren't also Socialists, not some sort of idealogical opposite. Sure, they had a slightly different agenda and wanted their group to be in charge instead, but it wasn't anything like Laissez-faire economics, which WOULD be the opposite of them and the Russians at the time.
Lastly, it's not a coincidence that the countries listed as having the most economic freedom every year also happen to have the highest economic growth rates and the ones at the bottom of the list have the lowest (or even mostly negative) growth rates.
You have to literally ignore history in order to make any sort of case that socialism is the solution to starvation instead of the primary current cause of starvation in the world.
Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear enough in my comment.
I agree that there are plenty of places in the world where people are actually starving. (The US not being among them). I was simply pointing out that those places are very highly concentrated in countries with particular totalitarian/dictatorship political models, typically originally created on a marxist model, generally because that was the academic "ideal" at the time they become independent nations.
In other words, the starvation problems in the world are currently primarily due to political issues and systems, not to a lack of food production, land for agriculture, overpopulation, greedy corporations, etc... that generally get the blame from people who fail to address the real reason food can't even be given to many of the real starving people out there.
The point is that severe lack of food just isn't a widespread problem in the US.
If you knew someone who was currently starving, you'd give them food. So would I. So would pretty much anyone I know in the US.
About the only cases of potential starving in the US is where for some reason, the person chooses to starve (out of protest, or whatever) or where someone is effectively kidnapped or abused or something. There aren't really economic causes of starvation in the US, and there aren't exactly a lot of deaths from starvation in the US.
I've lived in "poor" neighborhoods in a few different parts of the country, and while in some places saner people tended not to go out much at night because the Police didn't always respond to the neighborhood after dark, the most common problem in terms of food was that the people on welfare got way more in food stamps than they could ever spend on rational food purchases. This led to massive stockpiling and waste in people's pantries, but not starvation.
The reality in the US is that the only way to starve nowadays would be to do it on purpose and refuse help, or to do it in secret somehow. If ANYONE on/. that reads this personally knows someone who is starving in the US and can't or won't help them, tell me publicly or privately and I'll make sure they have some food to eat tonight.
Somehow I suspect that no one is going to come forward.
You state "even socialist countries".
The biggest cause of starvation in other countries? Socialist, marxist and communist govermental policies combined with their natural outcrop, dictators. There is plenty of food in existance for everyone and plenty more land to harvest more if needed.
Ethiopia used to be known as the "bread basket" of Africa because they produced and exported so much food. Then they decided to have a marxist revolution, since it was intellectualy in style at the time they got independence. Only after that they became the butt of starvation jokes, a complete turnaround.
It's the same story in country after country.
Unless people wake up and start attacking the real causes of real starvation (you know, people actually dieing from lack of food) in the world, all the rotting farm production and feel-good concerts aren't going to solve world hunger.
About the various substitutes mentioned and the lack of a "ban": From the American Council on Science and Health (disclaimer, they receive 75% of their funding from private chemical/pharmaceutical companies, although since DDT replacements are more patented and higher cost, you'd think that'd prejudice them the other way): "Despite the cost in human lives, many groups stubbornly defend the ban. While the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, and UNICEF have recommended continued DDT use, influential organizations such as the Norwegian Development Agency, the Swedish International Development Agency, the Swedish Aid Agency, and USAID -- the sorts of groups from whom some poor nations such as Belize, Mozambique, and Madagascar receive the majority of their public health money -- continue to insist that DDT be left out of malaria-control efforts.
Countries have found themselves faced with malaria upsurges due to pressure from such international aid organizations to avoid DDT use, according to a report in the March 11, 2000 British Medical Journal. The use of DDT in Mozambique, noted the Journal, "was stopped several decades ago, because 80% of the country's health budget came from donor funds, and donors refused to allow the use of DDT."
The WHO estimates that malathion, the cheapest alternative to DDT, costs more than twice as much as DDT and must be sprayed twice as often, while another mosquito-fighting chemical, deltamethrin, is over three times as expensive, and the highly effective propoxur costs twenty-three times as much. For countries with minimal public health budgets, dependent on foreign aid, such substitutes are impractical. More importantly, there is no compelling public health reason to substitute these chemicals for DDT, which as stated is harmless to humans."
Anyway, Wikipedia has a relatively balanced article that covers both sides of the issue.
My conclusion is that DDT was banned in many areas in the early 70's at the behest of environmentalists relying on flawed science. A large number of people who would currently be alive are dead due to bans in various countries that still suffered malaria. Using DDT for regular agriculture instead of just anti-malarial spraying is probably a bad idea due to the possibility of mosquitos developing resistance.
The deaths are real, but probably exaggerated. Likely only hundreds of thousands per year have died uneccesarily since the bans started, not millions. The millions figure is an extrapolation that uses primarily most of the people who die from Malaria each year. Some contries who've substituted more expensive and/or less effective anti-malarial programs for widespread anti-malarial uses of DDT may not have as good of results as those who still use DDT widely have had, so it's better to be conservative on the numbers.
Finally, that hotbed of right-wing extremists, the British Medical journal states that "The Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty aims to completely phase out global use of dicophane (DDT), while many donor agencies will not fund any malaria control programmes that use this insecticide. But dicophane is effective, with a remarkable safety record when used in small quantities for indoor spraying in endemic regions. Malaria cases soared in the KwaZulu Natal province of South Africa after it stopped using dicophane in 1996. Its reintroduction together with artemisinin based combination therapy for treating malaria brought the disease back under control. Dicophane, a "dirty word" in the malaria world, must surely be reintroduced into the conversation on rolling back malaria."
So it's fine and good to say "oops, the environmentalists screwed up and should stop pressuring people not to save li
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Unlike some /.'ers, having been alive in 1980, I remember the differences between the Carter and Reagan energy policies quite clearly.
The most obvious difference in "Energy Policy" was that Carter instituted price controls, causing gasoline shortages and an estimated 150,000 wasted barrels of oil a day spent on cars idling in gas station lines, while Reagan got rid of price controls shortly after taking office in 1981 and all the shortages magically vanished.
Magically, if you don't understand basic economics, of course.
It's an important lesson to remember when the talking heads get up on TV and start pushing price controls, like they're starting to do in Hawaii.
Yeah. let's bring the second to last Democratic President Carter back. Now HE had a sensible foreign policy that kept gas prices in line, didn't he?
So if some of us think that /. user 531777 is a threat to those around him and we need to silence him completely, user 531777 realizes that since we don't have a consensus on the facts, he should assume and act according to the worst case scenario that he is in fact a threat to those around him and needs to be silenced?
Pretty stupid decision process, don't you think? Obviously only bother to reply to this if you think so, since otherwise you'll remain completely silent.
How about instead, if we don't have a consensus on the facts, we act according to the range of most likely scenarios combined with evaluating the trade-ofs (or costs) of various actions? You know, act rationally instead of like scared sheep at every overblown potential threat?
"The Cassini probe has been making waves ever since it's arrival to the Saturn system."
What, now there's water on Saturn, too!
(I know, I know, it's not a rock like Mars is... gimme a little rope here for the joke, k?)
One of the continual options the OMB lists at budget is to stop subsidizing insurance on repeatedly flooded properties at a cost of a couple hundred million every year.
e x=450-05
See http://www.cbo.gov/bo2003/bo2003_showhit1.cfm?ind
You're right, they have started trying to charge more realistic estimates of insurance recently, but they still have all those grandfathered structures that they subsizide.
They also keep rebuilding destroyed structures. That's the real loss, when they let people build their newly re-insured structure in the same place the last one got washed away and get the same insurance again.
Only once?
Maybe something has changed since this article was written or maybe the laws for your locale are different.
At the very least, stop taxing everyone else to subsidize flood insurance for people who insist on building in flood-prone areas.
If they want insurance, let them pay the real cost of it. If they don't, let them take the risk themselves.
Of course, we'd probably have to transition such a system into place by instead of banning existing structures from getting the current subsidized insurance, simply telling everyone who got flooded out that if they insist on rebuilding in their flood-susceptible location, they're going to have to do it without flood insurance. Otherwise, they can turn their property over for parkland and take it's pre-flood value to go rebuild somewhere else.
I know that a lot of not as wealthy people also live in flood-prone areas, but can't the taxpayers stop paying for rebuilding millionaires beach and river-front property over and over again in the same locations?
Even better. He's got access to the database to extract the stored fingerprint data... wouldn't it be simpler to just insert his own information into the database as an authorized user of everything? Even better, since it's warped one-way, they won't be able to back-trace it to his actual info.
Does this mean we might actually get some good new spices, once they start playing around with modifying existing ones somewhat gastronomically scientifically?
Which one?
The one that demonstrates his actual knowledge of the subject matter by answering my questions on it.
You don't hire people without actually interviewing them, do you?
If by some miracle I was hiring someone who was supposed to know more than me about a particular subject, I'd find other people with expert knowledge in that subject and have them either help interview the candidates or provide me with some Q&A that would be useful.
Anyone who makes a hiring decision based on a cert/degree listed on a resume instead of a candidate's actual knowledge and skills is taking an unnecesary risk that has the potential to cost their company a lot of money.
People are expensive to hire and pay, but they are even more expensive if they aren't right for the job.
A cert or degree is useful only for when you have a large pool of applicants and you need some help narrowing that pool down. That said, in some instances you can use a cert/degree to remove candidates from the pool, becuase they can demonstrate extra focuses that you don't want for a particular job.
Circa 1996, I started a local ISP with a buddy of mine. I was the "technical" guy and he was the "sales" guy. I kept my day job until we had enough revenue to pay for us both.
Our main system was a BSDi box that handled user authentication and POP3 email. Since he had to deal with signing up users in the office while I worked my day job, I showed my buddy how to add and edit users on the system.
So one day he calls me and tells me that users have started complaining that they can't login. I start looking around and finally figure out the problem after some questioning.
That day he was bored, so he decided to "clean up" the passwd file. There were some deleted users removed from the file, so the uid's were no longer in sequence. He merrily went through and renumbered them all so that they'd be in sequence in the file.
The good news is that the user's mail directories were named after their username, so I could quickly use that as a reference to recreate which UID went with which username originally.
In the summer of 1994, I was trying to fix a broken Compaq while working in an authorized service center. Generally, Compaq would credit us with 1.5 hours labor for a bad motherboard and usually it only took me 30 minutes to replace one. In this case, it was taking forever.
I replaced the motherboard, but it wouldn't power up. After a little fiddling to double-check everything, I decided the new motherboard might be DOA and replaced it with another new one.
Same result. Now I wondered if something else was wrong, like the power supply, since I couldn't even get any POST codes out of it. Still, the fans spun and such, so it was getting at least some power.
So I hooked the power supply up to another machine. Worked fine, so I put it back. Still dead. At this point, nothing but the power supply, motherboard, cpu, ram and video card were connected, so I tried it without the video card. From previous tests when it first came in, I knew the cpu and ram were ok. Still nothing.
Finally, I grabbed another new motherboard and plugged it into the power supply without even bothering to put it into the case. Started up just fine with me standing there holding it in the air.
So relieved, I shut it down and put the new motherboard in the computer, asking myself what the odds were of having two DOA motherboards in a row.
Apparently pretty slim, since once again I turned the computer on and got nothing. Pulled the Motherboard back out and held it and it worked fine again. Put it back in, got nothing.
At this point, I obviously decided it was something with the case and went looking. Sure enough, there was an extra small metal clip that was supposed to help attach the motherboard to the case that had come loose and then wedged itself into a corner. It was in just the right position to make contact with a couple of the solder points on the motherboard, shorting them and causing the motherboard to shut itself down immediately without even POSTing.
One removed, the whole thing worked fine. Later, I tried the original motherboard and it also worked fine, so somehow that clip worked it's way out while it was running.
"seperation of church and state" is not a phrase contained within the United States Constitution.
Funding a Catholic private school is no more a violation of the Constitution than funding a Catholic homeless shelter or a Catholic children's hospital or providing Federal College tuition aide to a student attending a Catholic College. Or didn't you know all of those occur today?
For tax money that goes to a religious-based organization, the test should be pretty simple. They should be treated in exactly the same way as any other organization in the same situation, no special bonuses or penalties as compared to any other religion, non-religious, anti-religious, secular humanist, atheist or whatever organization is treated. Or is that not fair enough for you?
I have no problem with teachers who want to teach their students how to think critically, and/or how to research and evaluate both sides of an issue. That is a valuable skill that they should actually teach more of.
The problem is that most (not all) of the teacher's that I have seen in a public school environment prefer to teach the students NOT to think critically about things, to avoid points of view that the teacher opposes and emotionally stigmatize and give poor grades to those who don't agree with them. But hey, it's not my money and my kids, right? Oh wait, that's right, it is.
Please re-read what I actually said. To clarify, I suggest as the ideal situation, private charity to take care of those who can't afford to pay for their own children's education and public tax funds as a last resort to cover poor children who can't afford it and who can't find private charity.
Still, your objection is a bit silly, considering that right this second lots of public funds are used "in non-transparent, non-publicly accountable institutions". Ever heard of the food stamps program? I suppose you object to that program on the same grounds? After all, some poor Muslim, Jewish or Hispanic family might purchase something from an ethnic food store or something labeled "Kosher" that partially funds their religion.
Wow, that would just be "untennable" (sic), wouldn't it?
What is your big objection to parents educating their own children how they see fit instead of how you prefer? Is it really that somehow some of your tax money might go to help fund something you don't agree with? Or is it that they might not pick the same philosophy you would?
When I was the coach for a local high school's Model UN team, during a break I sat in the teacher's lounge listening to the public school teachers discuss various ways to convince their students that the local prevailing political philosophy, held by the majority of the kid's parents, was wrong. They essentially went over various brainwashing techniques they could use to get the kids away from their parent's beliefs. It was a very matter-of-fact discussion, as if they couldn't conceive that any of the other teachers in the room might disagree with them. They lamented and laughed about what the kids had learned from their parents.
Most people in the US right now don't agree with at least part of the philosophy their own children are taught in school with their tax money, let alone someone else's children. What about them?
Somehow I don't see you suggesting a total ban on using tax money for education. Isn't that just a little inconsistent and hypocritical?
I said empirical evidence, not studies. From the first definition on Google: "Evidence derived from direct observation and sense experience."
As for related studies, you'd almost need a full economics course to cover them in proper depth.
What you question about school choice makes my point as well. If parents are purchasing education as consumers instead of taxpayers, there is no need for anyone to worry about if the school is going to teach "their way" with their tax money. If it doesn't, they can just switch schools and who they are paying. Parents could make an informed decision and have their children taught based on their own values instead of the values of whatever the predominate government-bureacrat-sanctioned philosophy is.
See, with a real divorce of school from being a government forced-pay business, you aren't forced to pay for schools that you don't agree with how they teach, unlike now where just about everyone with a kid in school would change some aspect of how or what that school teaches, no matter what side of whatever popular argument they are currently on.
Why can't the atheists pay for a school that teaches their philosophy and the religious pay for a school that teaches their philosophy? The only real reason is that there are some people who insist on using government power to brainwash other people's kids into their own ways of thinking, despite the desires of the kid's parents.
Just like not everyone wants or needs the exact same food preferences, not everyone wants or needs the exact same education preferences. Why are we forcing people to use one and subsume their needs into a bland majority and not the other? What about kids who can't afford a good education? We can handle that the same way we handle people who can't afford decent food. Use private (or even public if you must involve tax money) charity for scholarships available to all who need them. There are tons of schemes out there to take care of that side of the issue.
Sure, in neither case would you want truely abusive parents who would starve their kids, make them eat nothing but dirt or fail to teach them anything at all. There is a very small minority of people who do things wrong, but why force everyone else in the country to forsake food or educational opportunities and preferences instead of simply dealing with and punishing a small number of abusive situations?
Let's let you do your own personal empirical study and see if it is similar to other's experiences.
List the top 5 or 10 least regulated, least government controlled areas of interaction with others you have. That's somewhat vague, but things like the Internet (but not the local loop portion of it, since that's heavily government influenced), various areas of merchandise sales, local lawn trimming service, whatever, as long as you can mentally classify it into a group of related stuff with a somewhat common level of government intervention or lack thereof. Areas we look to private industry for the "answers" to the problems.
Ask yourself how much you've complained about those things in the last year because of unreasonable cost, wasted resources, lack of options or poor service without many alternatives.
Now list the top 5 or 10 most regulated, most government controlled areas of interaction with others you have. Areas we look to private government for the "answers" to the problems.
Ask yourself how much you've complained about those things in the last year because of unreasonable cost, wasted resources, lack of options or poor service without many alternatives.
Now compare the lists and see which appears to be serving you personally better. This completes our empirical study. You might be interested in speculating what other people's personal interaction study results would lead you to conclude also.
Now, I am not saying that in every single case, government is not the answer. Just that in a large number of cases that are currently considered "government solution or no solution" by many people, we at least deserve to do some trial runs to see if perhaps a non-government solution isn't better, based on the evidence comparing previous government vs non-government solutions.
I am saying that we should be looking at ways to move some of these wasteful forced government ventures out of the realm of government, rather than continue to come up with new things to put under the purvey of government, like this wifi program. Over the last 150 years it's been going in the direction of more forced government control of our lives and some of us think our lives would be better if the trend went the other way for a while.
For example, with school choice initiatives, isn't it interesting that not only did the overall average student performance increase, but so did the average student performance for student's inside the public schools, just because of the highly visible competition?
It is somewhat humourous that you cite the very areas I was talking about, areas in which high amounts of regulation and government forced monopolies have caused problems.
Healthcare: Massive government programs, super-regulated insurance policies, massive market distortions through tax policies regarding company and personal health expenses, government prevention of medicine use through the FDA, government enforced licensing to keep out competition, typically government funded and run facilities in most areas, especially large cities.
Energy: Highly regulated, most customer facing portions of the industry are government granted or owned monopolies for geographic areas, most production and refining facilities are severely limited by government in terms of construction and placement. The major reason gas prices have been steadily increasing is that we don't have enough refineries to meet the demand. We haven't built a new refinery in the US in 30 years not because no one thinks one would be profitable, but because government typically won't let them be built.
Telecommunications: Again, a major history of government regulation and government enforced monopoly status.
MSM: (Main stream media, I presume?) How did it become the main stream media, at least the broadcase networks? That's right, government granted monopolies on broadcast spectrum.
How about you pick some areas that are actually free of government and not examples of major government interference, control and forced non-competition?
"public funds to supply a public good"
There is a difference between saying "schools should be funded through the government" and "schools should exist and teach people things, even people who can't afford it".
You are setting up a false dichotomy where supposedly the only way we could have the "public good" you mention is through government forcing people to pay for it in taxes, wasting 50% of the money and then providing the services, usually poorly and to most people's dissatisfaction. The only alternative you apparently can imagine is that no one has those things.
Imagine if the government turned grocery stores into a "public good" so as to provide everyone with their basic food needs. That's at least as reasonable and necessary (if not more so) than your other examples of government providing a "public good".
Based on current examples of similar government programs, what we'd end up with is overpaying for lousy food in a poor selection, with some people who still buy their food elsewhere at an extreme premium in addition to funding their "free" food.
And people with your mentality would be talking about how everyone in the country would starve if the government hadn't stepped in to provide free food and what are people complaining about...
See, it's not that we disagree about the goals. We all want a good road/network/whatever infrastructure, a good educational system, etc... it's just that we don't all agree that the only choices are central planners forcing people to do it their way or nothing at all.
Think of the worst run things in our country that people complain about the most how they are handled and that they are problems that need to be solved still. Something you'll find in common is that they are almost all government run or highly-regulated government-granted monopolies.
It's the empirical evidence that makes the rest of us question why people keep wanting to do things the same way, just becuase some power-hungry politician wants to be in control of it so that he can claim to be providing it for "free" as a benefit to the people.
At some point they'll stop the subterfuge and just advertise special abilities, bonuses and in-game items if you send the company cash directly, instead of making people buy a bunch of playing cards to get them.
The article takes issue with the FCC calling anything over 200 Kbps broadband.
/. readers) that's a pretty typical usage ratio.
Maybe I'm just alone in this, but I've always thought of pretty much anything faster than 56K dial-up as broadband.
Sure, 200 Kbps isn't super-fast, but it's certainly not dial-up.
Another issue they have is that a lot of "broadband" is upstream limited to as little as 128 Kbps and thus they don't think it should count.
While I decry providers who don't give people much upstream bandwidth, it's a bit much to claim something "isn't broadband" if it's say, 1.5 Meg down and 128 K up. For a lot of people (the less techy amongst us, not
To bring this back on the original topic a little. The article is by someone at the Von Mises Institute. Ludwig Von Mises is best known for his books demonstrating that socialist and communist systems have an inherent tendancy to end up controlled by power-hungry groups and individuals. He predicted the results of socialist policies years before they came to pass, because he had been exposed to them as an economist in Austria before they become academically popular worldwide.
Essentially, the personal qualities that get you promoted fastest in a socialist government also happen to be the personal qualities that lead someone to set themselves up as a dictator or at best an oligarchy.
The problem with "true socialism" is that due to human nature, it's not stable. It quickly devolves into "true totalitarianism" and has every time it's been tried on any national scale.
As for the Nazi's, you know the "National Socialist German Workers Party", they might have been in competition with the Russian Communists, but that doesn't mean they weren't also Socialists, not some sort of idealogical opposite. Sure, they had a slightly different agenda and wanted their group to be in charge instead, but it wasn't anything like Laissez-faire economics, which WOULD be the opposite of them and the Russians at the time.
Lastly, it's not a coincidence that the countries listed as having the most economic freedom every year also happen to have the highest economic growth rates and the ones at the bottom of the list have the lowest (or even mostly negative) growth rates.
You have to literally ignore history in order to make any sort of case that socialism is the solution to starvation instead of the primary current cause of starvation in the world.
Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear enough in my comment.
I agree that there are plenty of places in the world where people are actually starving. (The US not being among them). I was simply pointing out that those places are very highly concentrated in countries with particular totalitarian/dictatorship political models, typically originally created on a marxist model, generally because that was the academic "ideal" at the time they become independent nations.
In other words, the starvation problems in the world are currently primarily due to political issues and systems, not to a lack of food production, land for agriculture, overpopulation, greedy corporations, etc... that generally get the blame from people who fail to address the real reason food can't even be given to many of the real starving people out there.
The point is that severe lack of food just isn't a widespread problem in the US.
/. that reads this personally knows someone who is starving in the US and can't or won't help them, tell me publicly or privately and I'll make sure they have some food to eat tonight.
If you knew someone who was currently starving, you'd give them food. So would I. So would pretty much anyone I know in the US.
About the only cases of potential starving in the US is where for some reason, the person chooses to starve (out of protest, or whatever) or where someone is effectively kidnapped or abused or something. There aren't really economic causes of starvation in the US, and there aren't exactly a lot of deaths from starvation in the US.
I've lived in "poor" neighborhoods in a few different parts of the country, and while in some places saner people tended not to go out much at night because the Police didn't always respond to the neighborhood after dark, the most common problem in terms of food was that the people on welfare got way more in food stamps than they could ever spend on rational food purchases. This led to massive stockpiling and waste in people's pantries, but not starvation.
The reality in the US is that the only way to starve nowadays would be to do it on purpose and refuse help, or to do it in secret somehow. If ANYONE on
Somehow I suspect that no one is going to come forward.
You state "even socialist countries".
The biggest cause of starvation in other countries? Socialist, marxist and communist govermental policies combined with their natural outcrop, dictators. There is plenty of food in existance for everyone and plenty more land to harvest more if needed.
Ethiopia used to be known as the "bread basket" of Africa because they produced and exported so much food. Then they decided to have a marxist revolution, since it was intellectualy in style at the time they got independence. Only after that they became the butt of starvation jokes, a complete turnaround.
It's the same story in country after country.
Unless people wake up and start attacking the real causes of real starvation (you know, people actually dieing from lack of food) in the world, all the rotting farm production and feel-good concerts aren't going to solve world hunger.
"if not simply left to starve"
Do you personally know anyone in the US who is currently starving?
See my detailed reply at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158428&cid=132 91785
Figured it was better than writing it all twice.
Historical Background of the _harms_
About the various substitutes mentioned and the lack of a "ban": From the American Council on Science and Health (disclaimer, they receive 75% of their funding from private chemical/pharmaceutical companies, although since DDT replacements are more patented and higher cost, you'd think that'd prejudice them the other way):
"Despite the cost in human lives, many groups stubbornly defend the ban. While the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, and UNICEF have recommended continued DDT use, influential organizations such as the Norwegian Development Agency, the Swedish International Development Agency, the Swedish Aid Agency, and USAID -- the sorts of groups from whom some poor nations such as Belize, Mozambique, and Madagascar receive the majority of their public health money -- continue to insist that DDT be left out of malaria-control efforts.
Countries have found themselves faced with malaria upsurges due to pressure from such international aid organizations to avoid DDT use, according to a report in the March 11, 2000 British Medical Journal. The use of DDT in Mozambique, noted the Journal, "was stopped several decades ago, because 80% of the country's health budget came from donor funds, and donors refused to allow the use of DDT."
The WHO estimates that malathion, the cheapest alternative to DDT, costs more than twice as much as DDT and must be sprayed twice as often, while another mosquito-fighting chemical, deltamethrin, is over three times as expensive, and the highly effective propoxur costs twenty-three times as much. For countries with minimal public health budgets, dependent on foreign aid, such substitutes are impractical. More importantly, there is no compelling public health reason to substitute these chemicals for DDT, which as stated is harmless to humans."
Anyway, Wikipedia has a relatively balanced article that covers both sides of the issue.
My conclusion is that DDT was banned in many areas in the early 70's at the behest of environmentalists relying on flawed science. A large number of people who would currently be alive are dead due to bans in various countries that still suffered malaria. Using DDT for regular agriculture instead of just anti-malarial spraying is probably a bad idea due to the possibility of mosquitos developing resistance.
The deaths are real, but probably exaggerated. Likely only hundreds of thousands per year have died uneccesarily since the bans started, not millions. The millions figure is an extrapolation that uses primarily most of the people who die from Malaria each year. Some contries who've substituted more expensive and/or less effective anti-malarial programs for widespread anti-malarial uses of DDT may not have as good of results as those who still use DDT widely have had, so it's better to be conservative on the numbers.
Finally, that hotbed of right-wing extremists, the British Medical journal states that "The Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty aims to completely phase out global use of dicophane (DDT), while many donor agencies will not fund any malaria control programmes that use this insecticide. But dicophane is effective, with a remarkable safety record when used in small quantities for indoor spraying in endemic regions. Malaria cases soared in the KwaZulu Natal province of South Africa after it stopped using dicophane in 1996. Its reintroduction together with artemisinin based combination therapy for treating malaria brought the disease back under control. Dicophane, a "dirty word" in the malaria world, must surely be reintroduced into the conversation on rolling back malaria."
So it's fine and good to say "oops, the environmentalists screwed up and should stop pressuring people not to save li