It's probably because we don't need one because we have a history instead. As above, we've had time to do it wrong and so we can now do it right without needing a document that tells us how to do it right.
Here in the Netherlands we do have a written constitution but also more fundamental unwritten constitutional law in some areas. The argument often made against codification is that codification disentrenches it, making it possible for parliament to mess it up, and reduces its normative force. A quote from the English Wikipedia article:
Some of the most basic fundamental laws in the Dutch constitutional system are not explicitly expressed in the written Constitution. These include the rule that a cabinet must fall or an individual minister resign if a motion of non-confidence is passed by the Second Chamber; that the King cannot dissolve more than once a Second Chamber because of a conflict over a single political issue; that the ministerial responsibility extends to even private acts of the King if these have public consequences and that the First Chamber shall never block legislation for mere party politics [..] The unwritten laws are most influential when a cabinet is formed; the procedure is not regulated by the Constitution but purely based on tradition. [..] As Dutch political parties are strongly internally divided, shift alliance easily and are hesitant to commit themselves to any future coalition before the elections, a competent King can often have a decisive personal influence on what coalition is formed. [..] In common law systems these rules would not be seen as laws but as mere legal conventions as they cannot be upheld by judges; within the Dutch civil law system however they are part of the more extended Dutch-German legal concept of the Recht, the total "legal" normative structure, be it written or unwritten, so that they have full normative force. Indeed that force is much larger than with written constitutional rules; any breach of the unwritten rules would cause an immediate constitutional crisis.
Another important difference with US/French-style constitutional law is the absence of slogans [ibid]:
Contrary to many others, the Dutch constitution has no preamble stating the sovereignty by which it would be founded or the general principles on which it would be based. This is in line with a long tradition within the Dutch legislative to avoid any explicit reference to ideology or legal doctrine in its written laws.
Best of all we don't have "we the people" claptrap suggesting a sort of contract between you and the government. This is an unfortunate mixup of metaphors: if a parliament (or constitutional convention) decides by majority instead of by unanimity (like parliament used to do here), the decision is obviously not mandated by each individual citizen represented by an agent in parliament. The worst totalitarian governments in the world claimed being "we the people". Modesty is an important virtue, for a government and for its subjects.
One of the things I like about the EU, is that it sort of functions as an feudal unanimity parliament with the member states as members. But the increasing power of the European Parliament and the conflicts over the constitutional treaty (now Lisbon treaty; for instance whether god should be mentioned in the preamble) are reasons for worry.
The "correlation is not causation" statement is also a dumbing down of science as far as I am concerned. Causality is as relevant to scientific theories as impetus is to the explanation of movement of objects. It's folk science.
To claim that X causes Y means no more than that you know of some mechanism that explains why the correlation is observed. For a physicist this mechanism should for instance consist of physical (that is spatio-temporally located) processes, while in a court of law mental processes often take the center stage and the explanation can consist of such mechanisms as "supplying a motive to do Y". The real issue is the explanatory/predictive power of the theory.
I don't blame the media for explaining science in terms of causality because abstracting explanations to a level of granularity that their readers understand is what they are supposed to do. The real issue is the way the media selects its "news": the point of theory-driven empirical research is not to "discover" things but to test the predictive power of the theory. "Ruthlessness gene discovered" is a moronic description of this uninteresting and unconvincing experiment. They weren't looking for a gene: they already had it and tested whether its presence correlates with certain behaviour in a game setting.
the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, don't come even close to the percentage of people killed with stone axes and stone-tipped arrows in tribal conflicts. I find that a scary thought.
This is true averaged out over the population of Japan. For the population of the inner city of Nagasaki and Hiroshima it was 100% inescapable and unforeseeable death. Same with the numbers for Russia, Germany etc: locally death rates are considerably higher. I find that lack of influence over one's fate scary myself. I prefer being attacked with a stone axe.
You mean the dolmen south of the Rhine and the hunebed/hünengrab (which is confused with the dolmen in the English wikipedia) north of the Rhine in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and Poland. There are thousands of them, and most are older than Stonehenge (3450-3250 BC).
Many hunebeds are a lot bigger than you suggest: hunebed D27, the largest one in the Netherlands, for instance consists of 42 large stones. The majority have been harvested for stone (which doesn't naturally occur here) in the past. Just 54 remain in (what used to be) hard to reach areas. Some have been known to be uncovered for many centuries in the Netherlands (they are first described in a 1660 encyclopedia) while others are the result of more recent pre-WWII excavations of intact burrows. There is also one hunebed burrow that was discovered in 1982 and in its entirety moved to a museum.
For some reason everyone who discovers them immediately wants to dig them out. Maybe Stonehenge was just discovered and dug out by a successor culture who built a visitor centre in it. Didn't they also find the remains of a Roman visitor centre at Stonehenge?
That may be, but my point still stands: The projections in the article (in a US publication) were made at a time when the US had been spending massively on infrastructure for decades, so it seems likely that to the author it was entirely plausible that major changes and improvements to infrastructure could occur.
You are probably right about that. The author probably didn't foresee it.
I also think that Dutch infrastructure is better than US infrastructure, better than infrastructure in most of Europe really (and I travel a lot for my job, and regularly rent cars abroad).
And of course there are dissimilarities between the US and Europe, but in this we are similar: the time of great projects is over. The percentage of GDP eaten up by the state leveled off somewhere around 1970, and this level is a bit higher in countries that also have health care included, more generous disability and unemployment arrangements, or have better roads, etc. but the difference in efficiency of providing the services does not have to be that great. Central Bureau of Statistics data here suggest that discretionary incomes in the Netherlands and the US are about the same as a percentage of gross income, so I am not really impressed with the US's "lower taxes": the only way the US can increase it to European levels is to pay with it for the same necessities that Europe buys with that money.
We are basically paying upkeep for what we created in the past, and both infrastructure and, let's say, welfare benefits share the same problem: the cost of upkeep in nearly all areas is correlated with GDP growth. As purchase power goes up, the poverty level goes up and the cost of hiring a company to repair a road goes up.
Any politician who wants to initiate a great project these days, has to intentionally underfund some other area or run a big budget deficit. That's my explanation of why roads in Italy (example chosen because I go there often and have friends there) are for instance complete crap and better in the Netherlands: we are run by stewards who promise to deliver nothing and try to deliver nothing, while Italian politics promises the voters to pave the whole country in gold, try to do so at the expense of upkeep, and then in the end deliver a failed project.
A thing that helps immensely in the Netherlands is that the highways (which are considered elevated earthworks) in this country are administrated by the same influential, venerable, and nearly autonomous administration ("water state" literally translated) responsible for flood defences; being caught underfunding water state is political suicide. When I said that the 17th/18th century budget contained three items most of the time I was thinking of the occasional fourth item: water state extraordinary expenses. Water counties collect their own taxes, date from the middle ages, and in those days largely funded themselves.
The US highways are apparently less well entrenched in the system.
As far as the budget deficit goes: I agree how it came about, and that the US had a fiscally prudent policy in the time of Clinton. Getting it down is not just a matter of cutting Bush's items on the budget, though: you also have to deal with increased interest payments on increased debt, hidden debts in delayed maintenance, like the roads, and falling credit worthiness to the rest of the world (see the dollar). The next president has to stop a vicious circle.
1. Microwave: I'll use my stove instead. Kitchen stoves were also commonplace in 1968. I don't really see the point of microwave ovens anyway: gas/wood/coal ovens typically heat up faster. 2. Fridge: I have a supermarket, baker, butcher, and fish shop in my street less than a 100 meters away, and I can do shopping before I go to work. I can easily do without a fridge. I have in fact lived without a fridge for months as a student. Before the fridge people used their cellar, and blocks of ice were delivered to your door. 3. Washing machine: I can survive without a washing machine on vacation. It is actually possible to wash your clothes with your bare hands, but I would definitely want to avoid this. There used to be hand-driven machines for washing, but washing by hand is still going to be a waste of time.
The computer is the only device in the list that provides fundamentally new functionality, and is irreplacable for me.
I think part of the reason it seems implausible in hindsight is that over the past 40 years we simply haven't spent the massive sums on public works that we did from the 1930s to the 1960s. In fact, we went in quite the opposite direction in spending on our infrastructure, and now by at least one estimate we need to spend $3+ trillion just to keep what we have already built from falling apart (let alone improve or replace it).
Ever played a computer game where you have to pay upkeep for buildings and armies? If you don't plan well at some point your upkeep is going to surpass your income, and the fun is over. In most Western countries the public sector grew from perhaps 10% of GDP in 1815 to over a third now: that's what financed all those new services. Today we pay taxes just to keep what we have. It's incredibly hard for governments to find money to do new things: most of the time new things are financed with a budget deficit.
In the 17th and 18th century we (in the Netherlands) paid taxes for a federal budget that most of the time contained only three items: the secretary of parliament (tiny amount), state of war (about half), and interest payments on debts accumulated during previous wars (the other half). Tax pressure varied between 10% of GDP in peacetime and up to 55% in wartime depending on the size of the enemy, and we were at war nearly half of the time in those two centuries.
Today the average NATO country spends about 2% of GDP on defence, for 63 years of no foreign invasions, no pillaged cities, no naval blockades crippling the economy, and no famines. That's an incredible increase in efficiency at providing the public service of basic security. Today's unglamorous welfare states are no fun for politicians compared to the expansion of the public sector between 1815 and 1970, but for me as a citizen it is a pretty good deal.
There is simply no money for big new projects like the highways: upkeep costs surpass income, and will continue to do so regardless of economic growth due to Baumol's cost disease. By my standards resolving the current US budget deficit problem would already be a heroic feat for the next US president.
Surely the Dutch Goalkeeper CIWS is superior for this purpose, as it can track more targets at the same time and keeps tracking and prioritizing targets while engaging. Phalanx has one transmitter/receiver which is coupled to either the search radar or the tracking radar but not both at the same time. A phalanx-based system would be easier to overwhelm with cheap rockets.
How about your house be for auction every 10 years or so, and if someone outbids you, he will pay you the money he bid and see you on your way? Good idea, provided that you can choose domicile in one house you own, if you can show you physically reside there at least part of the year, and that this one house is excluded from auction. And you need good renter's protection, obviously.
Some variety of the arm's length principle or a use value extrapolated from the income derived from products that involve the IP, obviously. Tax administrations have to assess the value of unique things regularly. Dealing with the big multinationals is going to be easy, at least initially: they already publish estimates of how much income they derive from IP and how much income they lose from violation of it.
The big question is: who is going to pay the tax on open source IP? IP tax could kill the open source movement.
Let's try to use your policy in Europe in 1940. Clearly the US should ally with Stalin and Hitler since they controlled a lot of territory. Poland, Czechoslovakia and so on were spent forces and should be ditched.
At one point Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait and was militarily quite capable of overrunning Saudi Arabia. Your principle seems to be that once he took over, the US should recognize that and attempt to engage with him.
In both examples territorial integrity was violated by *another* country. The point of TS is IMO about waiting for the smoke to settle after civil war and recognizing the winner. If external forces don't meddle, the side with more popular support is more likely to win. Do impose an economic blockade however on countries that have an economy that is inordinately dependent on exporting a single raw resource (oil, diamonds), because otherwise the civil war will be won by whomever starts out controlling the resource, certainly if they can keep buying superior weapons.
Hitler's treatment of the jews would have made a better case, but we can be pretty sure that nobody would have gone to war on Germany just to save Germany's jews. Even today nobody would (think Darfur, Ruanda). There is a difference between liberating a country that was already stable before from a foreign oppressor, and interfering on behalf of the underdog in inherently unstable ones. In the first case you can immediately leave after you are finished throwing out the invader.
I think the problem I have with international diplomacy is that most of the principles were invented long before the era of mass democracy. Then, at least by modern standards, very few governments were representative. So in the absence of democratic legitimacy territorial control is a reasonable principle. But times have changed, and it is quite possible for a thoroughly barbarous and hostile government to take over countries by sheer ruthlessness. But ruthlessness should not confer legitimacy, quite the reverse in fact.
What difference does democracy make? Also in the past there were more and less ruthless governments, and governments that considered themselves more legitimate than their neighbours. The kingdom of France felt morally justified to attack the Dutch republic because it was clearly a misfit in the natural order of things. Protestant and Muslim polities were fair game for Catholic ones for the same reason. Prussia, Austria, and Russia divided the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between them in the interest of civilization (everbody knew that Poles couldn't govern themselves and rampant Polish banditry made normal economic relations impossible). Piracy, human sacrifices, headhunting, etc. have been considered valid reasons for colonial powers to conquer backward native kingdoms.
Look at the chronological list of NATO countries recognizing Kosovo's independence. Are the first ones the freest and most democratic? I don't think so. They are the *biggest* among the free and democratic. Many of the smaller ones have serious misgivings about this NATO-orchestrated violation of free and democratic Serbia's territorial integrity for the simple reason that they don't like the precedent it sets. The US ignores the rules of international diplomacy at times because it thinks it can get away with it, not because the rules have lost applicability for some reason.
Back the less ruthless underdog generously, with no strings attached except that they must move towards full democracy over a decade or so if they do not already have it.
Less ruthless and underdog don't necessarily go hand in hand. Take the Palestinians as an example: clearly the underdog, but capable of great ruthlessness.
Re:If you want to see the real Cuba, go now...
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
·
· Score: 1
Cuba is only unique in that the destruction caused by communism is so apparent everywhere. The crumbling buildings. The antiquated automobiles. The authoritarian presence. The warning to tourists to stay in designated tourist zones. The many desperate women offering their daughters as prostitutes.
Unique? Is neighbour Haiti any better off? It has half the GDP per capita, even though it has been ruled by the US and capitalism-friendly dictators since 1915.
Is communism the sine qua non cause of Cuba being poor? What about decades of economic blockade, the collapse of sponsor the Soviet Union, scarce natural resources, etc.
When Cuba was still a fairly wealthy colony sugar was a very expensive commodity. 21st century Cuba cannot run on sugar and tobacco.
However, the original document also refers to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which obviously is an EU document, albeit without any formal status (the Convention is a treaty).
Some EU member states do accept EU treaties as formal law with direct vertical application (i.e. government-citizen relations), and besides that, the European Court of Justice, the highest court in the European Union, has competence to rule on the application of EU treaties by member states. My Dutch law collection contains it in the constitutional law section.
Problem is it's far cheaper to let the people use the pump themselves.
Pumps in then Netherlands are generally speaking self service, and increasingly you pay with your bank card directly at the pump before you use it. The idea is that just one pump in major gas stations is robotic as a service for invalids, and for less courageous people during the night, mainly. At least that's how it was presented in the Dutch news. The next step is obviously completely unmanned larger (> 12 pumps) gas stations along highways. The smaller local ones are often already unmanned.
Lots of folks I know can slaughter a cow, at least pretend to fix a microwave, certainly fix an internal combustion engine, use a complex piece of electronic equipment (and I'm not talking about an iPod), shoot a gun, etc.
Surely someone who can shoot a gun doesn't necessarily 'know' more than someone who can shoot a bow. As I understand it guns replaced bows because they require less skill. The replacement of simple tools by complicated machines is usually intended to make tasks less knowledge-intensive. The machine embodies the knowledge its user doesn't have. Calculators don't make people better at arithmetic, etc. Just because you can meaningfully interact with complicated devices doesn't mean you know a lot about them. Even being able to repair them doesn't mean you know a lot about them if they were specifically designed for exchangeability and easy replacement of standard components and then mass produced.
Programmers should intuitively know this: making a foolproof tool is harder than making a professional tool.
Let's not get all excited by this "royal we" concept. Some of us can slaughter a cow - you need not be a medieval peasant, just someone who grew up or has worked on a farm or ranch.
In the middle ages 95% of the population consisted of peasants, and in the absence of a money economy for peasants they didn't bring cows to slaughterhouses but did the work themselves. Today's butcher is a specialist. Today's (European or American) equivalent of the peasant, who lives in an urban environment, cannot slaughter a cow: he has few skills that qualitatively set him apart from that peasant, even though the skills he does have are the skills needed in a more advanced society. Transported back into time, his best bet for making a living is probably his skill in reading and writing, and even that skill would not be good enough to be a decent literatim copier.
The well educated among us are a different story, but intellectual conceits like the flat earth myth are not intended for them.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Well, let's see. I can't set bones and butcher hogs, but this shouldn't be too hard to learn. As a father I am an expert diaper changer. If I understand conning a ship correctly (I am not a native English speaker), I can control sloops and schooners. I am a good hand-to-hand and sword fighter by today's standards, and a decent lancer (I have some experience with traditional ring jousting), but I have no experience with ranged weapons other than bow and air rifle (guns prohibited here and we have no conscription). Except for the dying gallantly part which is definitely the last thing I want to do, I have at least some experience with the other ones as a scientist and owner of a house I regularly modify, but only computer game and outdoor play experience in the case of planning invasions.
Did you learn how to cut carcasses especially to meet Heinlein's standards?
TFA appears to be biased somewhat towards technological dead ends.
One thing that for instance popped up in my mind thinking of a pre-20th century gadget is the early 17th century gearbox of the mechanical fireplace spit fork in a castle near Amsterdam. At that time it was inhabited by a friend of scientist Christiaan Huygens (who invented a number of things involving the principle of transmission, including of course the pendulum clock). I have no idea whether it is unique or just rare for that era, and whether Huygens was personally involved, but I can imagine it was definitely considered an unusually clever piece of technology in those times. Differential transmissions only became a mainstream technology during the industrial revolution in the late 18th century.
The mechanical calculator and the computer are basically a development from location-based calculi that were mainstream in the middle ages but later, in educated circles, replaced by pen reckoning with arabic numerals which is completely different. The historical importance of jeton-based arithmetic to modern computer science is unfortunately underappreciated. On a logical level the operation of a computer is probably more obvious to a medieval clerk who was used to mechanically moving jetons around all day than to the modern computer illiterate person. On the other hand the mechanics of the calculator were obviously much more amazing then than now.
So true. When in the 19th century the literary fiction of the medieval flat Earth was invented, I imagine this was to be able to illustrate how Enlightenment scholars revolutionized cosmological views without directly confronting the readers with their own ignorance of those cosmological innovations made centuries earlier.
People like to think they individually know substantially more than their ancestors, while in reality they just know different things. Medieval peasants knew how to slaughter a cow: we don't. We know how to operate a microwave: they didn't. Only collectively we clearly know more.
Here and here. Cuba is going to be connected to Venezuela in 2009. So apparently Cuba does want to be connected, despite the political risks involved in a 1000 fold increase in Internet traffic. The major problem for Cuba, I can imagine, is the US telecomms blockade, and the Helms-Burton act, which penalizes foreign companies doing business in the US for doing business with Cuba. European and Asian engineering companies are not going to defy the US over one minor cable to Cuba from a nearby island, and the Cuban government obviously doesn't have the equipment and cannot financially justify acquiring it.
Well, the US has a lot bigger job than the Netherlands. A LOT of the world's communication goes through our networks, whereas you've only really got your country to worry about.
Definitely not: US imports and exports are for instance less than three times larger than those of the Netherlands, with twenty times the population, so the US has the smaller proportional burden watching what crosses its borders.
We host the biggest internet exchange point of the world, and redistribute a large share of Europe's imports and exports by sea (deriving more than two-thirds of GDP from trade), in a small country with completely open borders to its neighbours. Sure the US is important as a transit route for Internet between Europe and Asia as long as Central Asia remains poor, unstable, and undemocratic, but this is peanuts compared to US internal traffic, just like US international trade is peanuts compared to the size of the US's internal economy.
The real question is how you divide your attention between monitoring foreigner's business and your own citizens, which is a matter of attitude.
Your scale argument makes more sense if you turn it around: the US's preoccupation with what enters or wants to enter the US, as opposed to what happens inside the US, is maybe explained better by the relative isolation of the US from rest of the world, both geographically and economically, than by its connectedness.
Sheer size also matters in another way, which is what I was aiming at. There is simply a difference in attitude towards the rest of the world between a superpower and a more modest power, and elected leaders will be more circumspect with the rights of their voters than with the rights of others if they get away with it. Hence the tendency of the US to attack its societal problems (drugs, terrorism) "at the source", i.e. abroad, instead of antagonizing its own citizens by limiting their rights like more modest powers will do. US citizens get a good deal.
My first reaction to this article was: I smell a spin doctor. The 'news' the audit reveals is the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations, which raises serious issues. This anecdote makes it seem harmless. Late payment is perfectly normal even in the most anal retentive organizations that *do* check how every penny is spent. More interesting is how money that went missing was used, and whether there are incentives to be 'lax'. If you want to get away with being lax, it is good to behave incompetently once in a while.
I live in the Netherlands, the world's wiretapping paradise. The number of taps per capita doesn't really bother me, as long as there is proper accountability for use of that power (which, for the record, leaves much to be desired here).
The US in comparison is pretty amateurish when it comes to collecting information about its own citizens, which is pretty remarkable for a country that pretends to be policing, and eavesdropping on, the whole world. It is also pretty unique in granting itself greater investigative powers over the rest of the world population than over its own population, so US citizens shouldn't complain until they have rectified that.
Then again, the fact that the Army was able to outrun its communications equipment is equally a credit upon its operations
More likely the impotence of the enemy. This is reminiscent of the 'failure' without negative consequences of the German army around half May 1940 to keep up with the tanks of Rommel and Guderian.
There is nothing new in asymmetry of means and, therefore, asymmetry of tactics. The successful weaker side picks the form, time and place of battle, and often innovates. Defending interior lines (Frederick the Great), using space to draw the enemy away from his supplies (Russians against French and Germans), depending on city walls, fortifications, or inundations (Flemish against the French, Dutch against the Spanish), picking narrow battlefields with protected flanks to overcome bigger quality armies (Greeks against Persians, Flemish against the French, Crusader armies), change of weapon technology to neutralize the enemy's main weapon (pikes, cavalry, longbows, etc).
One familiar pattern keep repeating itself: the way to get a battle on your conditions is to refuse battle to the stronger side until they are ready for battle on your conditions, and refusing battle always involves civilian sacrifices on your side (and not necessarily voluntarily). The French didn't offer battle to the Flemish pikemen behind a ditch in 1302 just because they were stupid and arrogant, but mainly because their field army was incredibly expensive to keep on the field, and this was the first battle on the open field that the Flemish offered them.
That's just selective attention. The Nazis also taught us a lot about counter insurgency warfare. I know that in the Netherlands Dutch former Germanic SS soldiers were appointed as officers of counter insurgency units in the Netherlands Indies in the late 40s, because of their valuable counter insurgency experience in Russia.
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably because we don't need one because we have a history instead. As above, we've had time to do it wrong and so we can now do it right without needing a document that tells us how to do it right.
Here in the Netherlands we do have a written constitution but also more fundamental unwritten constitutional law in some areas. The argument often made against codification is that codification disentrenches it, making it possible for parliament to mess it up, and reduces its normative force. A quote from the English Wikipedia article:
Some of the most basic fundamental laws in the Dutch constitutional system are not explicitly expressed in the written Constitution. These include the rule that a cabinet must fall or an individual minister resign if a motion of non-confidence is passed by the Second Chamber; that the King cannot dissolve more than once a Second Chamber because of a conflict over a single political issue; that the ministerial responsibility extends to even private acts of the King if these have public consequences and that the First Chamber shall never block legislation for mere party politics [..] The unwritten laws are most influential when a cabinet is formed; the procedure is not regulated by the Constitution but purely based on tradition. [..] As Dutch political parties are strongly internally divided, shift alliance easily and are hesitant to commit themselves to any future coalition before the elections, a competent King can often have a decisive personal influence on what coalition is formed. [..] In common law systems these rules would not be seen as laws but as mere legal conventions as they cannot be upheld by judges; within the Dutch civil law system however they are part of the more extended Dutch-German legal concept of the Recht, the total "legal" normative structure, be it written or unwritten, so that they have full normative force. Indeed that force is much larger than with written constitutional rules; any breach of the unwritten rules would cause an immediate constitutional crisis.
Another important difference with US/French-style constitutional law is the absence of slogans [ibid]:
Contrary to many others, the Dutch constitution has no preamble stating the sovereignty by which it would be founded or the general principles on which it would be based. This is in line with a long tradition within the Dutch legislative to avoid any explicit reference to ideology or legal doctrine in its written laws.
Best of all we don't have "we the people" claptrap suggesting a sort of contract between you and the government. This is an unfortunate mixup of metaphors: if a parliament (or constitutional convention) decides by majority instead of by unanimity (like parliament used to do here), the decision is obviously not mandated by each individual citizen represented by an agent in parliament. The worst totalitarian governments in the world claimed being "we the people". Modesty is an important virtue, for a government and for its subjects.
One of the things I like about the EU, is that it sort of functions as an feudal unanimity parliament with the member states as members. But the increasing power of the European Parliament and the conflicts over the constitutional treaty (now Lisbon treaty; for instance whether god should be mentioned in the preamble) are reasons for worry.
The "correlation is not causation" statement is also a dumbing down of science as far as I am concerned. Causality is as relevant to scientific theories as impetus is to the explanation of movement of objects. It's folk science.
To claim that X causes Y means no more than that you know of some mechanism that explains why the correlation is observed. For a physicist this mechanism should for instance consist of physical (that is spatio-temporally located) processes, while in a court of law mental processes often take the center stage and the explanation can consist of such mechanisms as "supplying a motive to do Y". The real issue is the explanatory/predictive power of the theory.
I don't blame the media for explaining science in terms of causality because abstracting explanations to a level of granularity that their readers understand is what they are supposed to do. The real issue is the way the media selects its "news": the point of theory-driven empirical research is not to "discover" things but to test the predictive power of the theory. "Ruthlessness gene discovered" is a moronic description of this uninteresting and unconvincing experiment. They weren't looking for a gene: they already had it and tested whether its presence correlates with certain behaviour in a game setting.
the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, don't come even close to the percentage of people killed with stone axes and stone-tipped arrows in tribal conflicts. I find that a scary thought.
This is true averaged out over the population of Japan. For the population of the inner city of Nagasaki and Hiroshima it was 100% inescapable and unforeseeable death. Same with the numbers for Russia, Germany etc: locally death rates are considerably higher. I find that lack of influence over one's fate scary myself. I prefer being attacked with a stone axe.
You mean the dolmen south of the Rhine and the hunebed/hünengrab (which is confused with the dolmen in the English wikipedia) north of the Rhine in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and Poland. There are thousands of them, and most are older than Stonehenge (3450-3250 BC).
Many hunebeds are a lot bigger than you suggest: hunebed D27, the largest one in the Netherlands, for instance consists of 42 large stones. The majority have been harvested for stone (which doesn't naturally occur here) in the past. Just 54 remain in (what used to be) hard to reach areas. Some have been known to be uncovered for many centuries in the Netherlands (they are first described in a 1660 encyclopedia) while others are the result of more recent pre-WWII excavations of intact burrows. There is also one hunebed burrow that was discovered in 1982 and in its entirety moved to a museum.
For some reason everyone who discovers them immediately wants to dig them out. Maybe Stonehenge was just discovered and dug out by a successor culture who built a visitor centre in it. Didn't they also find the remains of a Roman visitor centre at Stonehenge?
That may be, but my point still stands: The projections in the article (in a US publication) were made at a time when the US had been spending massively on infrastructure for decades, so it seems likely that to the author it was entirely plausible that major changes and improvements to infrastructure could occur.
You are probably right about that. The author probably didn't foresee it.
I also think that Dutch infrastructure is better than US infrastructure, better than infrastructure in most of Europe really (and I travel a lot for my job, and regularly rent cars abroad).
And of course there are dissimilarities between the US and Europe, but in this we are similar: the time of great projects is over. The percentage of GDP eaten up by the state leveled off somewhere around 1970, and this level is a bit higher in countries that also have health care included, more generous disability and unemployment arrangements, or have better roads, etc. but the difference in efficiency of providing the services does not have to be that great. Central Bureau of Statistics data here suggest that discretionary incomes in the Netherlands and the US are about the same as a percentage of gross income, so I am not really impressed with the US's "lower taxes": the only way the US can increase it to European levels is to pay with it for the same necessities that Europe buys with that money.
We are basically paying upkeep for what we created in the past, and both infrastructure and, let's say, welfare benefits share the same problem: the cost of upkeep in nearly all areas is correlated with GDP growth. As purchase power goes up, the poverty level goes up and the cost of hiring a company to repair a road goes up.
Any politician who wants to initiate a great project these days, has to intentionally underfund some other area or run a big budget deficit. That's my explanation of why roads in Italy (example chosen because I go there often and have friends there) are for instance complete crap and better in the Netherlands: we are run by stewards who promise to deliver nothing and try to deliver nothing, while Italian politics promises the voters to pave the whole country in gold, try to do so at the expense of upkeep, and then in the end deliver a failed project.
A thing that helps immensely in the Netherlands is that the highways (which are considered elevated earthworks) in this country are administrated by the same influential, venerable, and nearly autonomous administration ("water state" literally translated) responsible for flood defences; being caught underfunding water state is political suicide. When I said that the 17th/18th century budget contained three items most of the time I was thinking of the occasional fourth item: water state extraordinary expenses. Water counties collect their own taxes, date from the middle ages, and in those days largely funded themselves.
The US highways are apparently less well entrenched in the system.
As far as the budget deficit goes: I agree how it came about, and that the US had a fiscally prudent policy in the time of Clinton. Getting it down is not just a matter of cutting Bush's items on the budget, though: you also have to deal with increased interest payments on increased debt, hidden debts in delayed maintenance, like the roads, and falling credit worthiness to the rest of the world (see the dollar). The next president has to stop a vicious circle.
Most willing to do without:
1. Microwave: I'll use my stove instead. Kitchen stoves were also commonplace in 1968. I don't really see the point of microwave ovens anyway: gas/wood/coal ovens typically heat up faster.
2. Fridge: I have a supermarket, baker, butcher, and fish shop in my street less than a 100 meters away, and I can do shopping before I go to work. I can easily do without a fridge. I have in fact lived without a fridge for months as a student. Before the fridge people used their cellar, and blocks of ice were delivered to your door.
3. Washing machine: I can survive without a washing machine on vacation. It is actually possible to wash your clothes with your bare hands, but I would definitely want to avoid this. There used to be hand-driven machines for washing, but washing by hand is still going to be a waste of time.
The computer is the only device in the list that provides fundamentally new functionality, and is irreplacable for me.
I think part of the reason it seems implausible in hindsight is that over the past 40 years we simply haven't spent the massive sums on public works that we did from the 1930s to the 1960s. In fact, we went in quite the opposite direction in spending on our infrastructure, and now by at least one estimate we need to spend $3+ trillion just to keep what we have already built from falling apart (let alone improve or replace it).
Ever played a computer game where you have to pay upkeep for buildings and armies? If you don't plan well at some point your upkeep is going to surpass your income, and the fun is over. In most Western countries the public sector grew from perhaps 10% of GDP in 1815 to over a third now: that's what financed all those new services. Today we pay taxes just to keep what we have. It's incredibly hard for governments to find money to do new things: most of the time new things are financed with a budget deficit.
In the 17th and 18th century we (in the Netherlands) paid taxes for a federal budget that most of the time contained only three items: the secretary of parliament (tiny amount), state of war (about half), and interest payments on debts accumulated during previous wars (the other half). Tax pressure varied between 10% of GDP in peacetime and up to 55% in wartime depending on the size of the enemy, and we were at war nearly half of the time in those two centuries.
Today the average NATO country spends about 2% of GDP on defence, for 63 years of no foreign invasions, no pillaged cities, no naval blockades crippling the economy, and no famines. That's an incredible increase in efficiency at providing the public service of basic security. Today's unglamorous welfare states are no fun for politicians compared to the expansion of the public sector between 1815 and 1970, but for me as a citizen it is a pretty good deal.
There is simply no money for big new projects like the highways: upkeep costs surpass income, and will continue to do so regardless of economic growth due to Baumol's cost disease. By my standards resolving the current US budget deficit problem would already be a heroic feat for the next US president.
That's how you can get caught easily. If power companies have their act together, they know in which areas they have unexplained losses, and the police can simply check the neighbourhood out with infrared cameras. That's how the Netherlands pushed its "industrial hemp" plantations into Germany and Belgium.
Ouch. Better replace the incandescents with candle flame or kerosene lamps then. Much safer.
Surely the Dutch Goalkeeper CIWS is superior for this purpose, as it can track more targets at the same time and keeps tracking and prioritizing targets while engaging. Phalanx has one transmitter/receiver which is coupled to either the search radar or the tracking radar but not both at the same time. A phalanx-based system would be easier to overwhelm with cheap rockets.
Some variety of the arm's length principle or a use value extrapolated from the income derived from products that involve the IP, obviously. Tax administrations have to assess the value of unique things regularly. Dealing with the big multinationals is going to be easy, at least initially: they already publish estimates of how much income they derive from IP and how much income they lose from violation of it.
The big question is: who is going to pay the tax on open source IP? IP tax could kill the open source movement.
Let's try to use your policy in Europe in 1940. Clearly the US should ally with Stalin and Hitler since they controlled a lot of territory. Poland, Czechoslovakia and so on were spent forces and should be ditched.
At one point Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait and was militarily quite capable of overrunning Saudi Arabia. Your principle seems to be that once he took over, the US should recognize that and attempt to engage with him.
In both examples territorial integrity was violated by *another* country. The point of TS is IMO about waiting for the smoke to settle after civil war and recognizing the winner. If external forces don't meddle, the side with more popular support is more likely to win. Do impose an economic blockade however on countries that have an economy that is inordinately dependent on exporting a single raw resource (oil, diamonds), because otherwise the civil war will be won by whomever starts out controlling the resource, certainly if they can keep buying superior weapons.
Hitler's treatment of the jews would have made a better case, but we can be pretty sure that nobody would have gone to war on Germany just to save Germany's jews. Even today nobody would (think Darfur, Ruanda). There is a difference between liberating a country that was already stable before from a foreign oppressor, and interfering on behalf of the underdog in inherently unstable ones. In the first case you can immediately leave after you are finished throwing out the invader.
I think the problem I have with international diplomacy is that most of the principles were invented long before the era of mass democracy. Then, at least by modern standards, very few governments were representative. So in the absence of democratic legitimacy territorial control is a reasonable principle. But times have changed, and it is quite possible for a thoroughly barbarous and hostile government to take over countries by sheer ruthlessness. But ruthlessness should not confer legitimacy, quite the reverse in fact.
What difference does democracy make? Also in the past there were more and less ruthless governments, and governments that considered themselves more legitimate than their neighbours. The kingdom of France felt morally justified to attack the Dutch republic because it was clearly a misfit in the natural order of things. Protestant and Muslim polities were fair game for Catholic ones for the same reason. Prussia, Austria, and Russia divided the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between them in the interest of civilization (everbody knew that Poles couldn't govern themselves and rampant Polish banditry made normal economic relations impossible). Piracy, human sacrifices, headhunting, etc. have been considered valid reasons for colonial powers to conquer backward native kingdoms.
Look at the chronological list of NATO countries recognizing Kosovo's independence. Are the first ones the freest and most democratic? I don't think so. They are the *biggest* among the free and democratic. Many of the smaller ones have serious misgivings about this NATO-orchestrated violation of free and democratic Serbia's territorial integrity for the simple reason that they don't like the precedent it sets. The US ignores the rules of international diplomacy at times because it thinks it can get away with it, not because the rules have lost applicability for some reason.
Back the less ruthless underdog generously, with no strings attached except that they must move towards full democracy over a decade or so if they do not already have it.
Less ruthless and underdog don't necessarily go hand in hand. Take the Palestinians as an example: clearly the underdog, but capable of great ruthlessness.
Cuba is only unique in that the destruction caused by communism is so apparent everywhere. The crumbling buildings. The antiquated automobiles. The authoritarian presence. The warning to tourists to stay in designated tourist zones. The many desperate women offering their daughters as prostitutes.
Unique? Is neighbour Haiti any better off? It has half the GDP per capita, even though it has been ruled by the US and capitalism-friendly dictators since 1915.
Is communism the sine qua non cause of Cuba being poor? What about decades of economic blockade, the collapse of sponsor the Soviet Union, scarce natural resources, etc.
When Cuba was still a fairly wealthy colony sugar was a very expensive commodity. 21st century Cuba cannot run on sugar and tobacco.
However, the original document also refers to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which obviously is an EU document, albeit without any formal status (the Convention is a treaty).
Some EU member states do accept EU treaties as formal law with direct vertical application (i.e. government-citizen relations), and besides that, the European Court of Justice, the highest court in the European Union, has competence to rule on the application of EU treaties by member states. My Dutch law collection contains it in the constitutional law section.
Problem is it's far cheaper to let the people use the pump themselves.
Pumps in then Netherlands are generally speaking self service, and increasingly you pay with your bank card directly at the pump before you use it. The idea is that just one pump in major gas stations is robotic as a service for invalids, and for less courageous people during the night, mainly. At least that's how it was presented in the Dutch news. The next step is obviously completely unmanned larger (> 12 pumps) gas stations along highways. The smaller local ones are often already unmanned.
Lots of folks I know can slaughter a cow, at least pretend to fix a microwave, certainly fix an internal combustion engine, use a complex piece of electronic equipment (and I'm not talking about an iPod), shoot a gun, etc.
Surely someone who can shoot a gun doesn't necessarily 'know' more than someone who can shoot a bow. As I understand it guns replaced bows because they require less skill. The replacement of simple tools by complicated machines is usually intended to make tasks less knowledge-intensive. The machine embodies the knowledge its user doesn't have. Calculators don't make people better at arithmetic, etc. Just because you can meaningfully interact with complicated devices doesn't mean you know a lot about them. Even being able to repair them doesn't mean you know a lot about them if they were specifically designed for exchangeability and easy replacement of standard components and then mass produced.
Programmers should intuitively know this: making a foolproof tool is harder than making a professional tool.
Let's not get all excited by this "royal we" concept. Some of us can slaughter a cow - you need not be a medieval peasant, just someone who grew up or has worked on a farm or ranch.
In the middle ages 95% of the population consisted of peasants, and in the absence of a money economy for peasants they didn't bring cows to slaughterhouses but did the work themselves. Today's butcher is a specialist. Today's (European or American) equivalent of the peasant, who lives in an urban environment, cannot slaughter a cow: he has few skills that qualitatively set him apart from that peasant, even though the skills he does have are the skills needed in a more advanced society. Transported back into time, his best bet for making a living is probably his skill in reading and writing, and even that skill would not be good enough to be a decent literatim copier.
The well educated among us are a different story, but intellectual conceits like the flat earth myth are not intended for them.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Well, let's see. I can't set bones and butcher hogs, but this shouldn't be too hard to learn. As a father I am an expert diaper changer. If I understand conning a ship correctly (I am not a native English speaker), I can control sloops and schooners. I am a good hand-to-hand and sword fighter by today's standards, and a decent lancer (I have some experience with traditional ring jousting), but I have no experience with ranged weapons other than bow and air rifle (guns prohibited here and we have no conscription). Except for the dying gallantly part which is definitely the last thing I want to do, I have at least some experience with the other ones as a scientist and owner of a house I regularly modify, but only computer game and outdoor play experience in the case of planning invasions.
Did you learn how to cut carcasses especially to meet Heinlein's standards?
TFA appears to be biased somewhat towards technological dead ends.
One thing that for instance popped up in my mind thinking of a pre-20th century gadget is the early 17th century gearbox of the mechanical fireplace spit fork in a castle near Amsterdam. At that time it was inhabited by a friend of scientist Christiaan Huygens (who invented a number of things involving the principle of transmission, including of course the pendulum clock). I have no idea whether it is unique or just rare for that era, and whether Huygens was personally involved, but I can imagine it was definitely considered an unusually clever piece of technology in those times. Differential transmissions only became a mainstream technology during the industrial revolution in the late 18th century.
The mechanical calculator and the computer are basically a development from location-based calculi that were mainstream in the middle ages but later, in educated circles, replaced by pen reckoning with arabic numerals which is completely different. The historical importance of jeton-based arithmetic to modern computer science is unfortunately underappreciated. On a logical level the operation of a computer is probably more obvious to a medieval clerk who was used to mechanically moving jetons around all day than to the modern computer illiterate person. On the other hand the mechanics of the calculator were obviously much more amazing then than now.
So true. When in the 19th century the literary fiction of the medieval flat Earth was invented, I imagine this was to be able to illustrate how Enlightenment scholars revolutionized cosmological views without directly confronting the readers with their own ignorance of those cosmological innovations made centuries earlier.
People like to think they individually know substantially more than their ancestors, while in reality they just know different things. Medieval peasants knew how to slaughter a cow: we don't. We know how to operate a microwave: they didn't. Only collectively we clearly know more.
Here and here. Cuba is going to be connected to Venezuela in 2009. So apparently Cuba does want to be connected, despite the political risks involved in a 1000 fold increase in Internet traffic. The major problem for Cuba, I can imagine, is the US telecomms blockade, and the Helms-Burton act, which penalizes foreign companies doing business in the US for doing business with Cuba. European and Asian engineering companies are not going to defy the US over one minor cable to Cuba from a nearby island, and the Cuban government obviously doesn't have the equipment and cannot financially justify acquiring it.
Well, the US has a lot bigger job than the Netherlands. A LOT of the world's communication goes through our networks, whereas you've only really got your country to worry about.
Definitely not: US imports and exports are for instance less than three times larger than those of the Netherlands, with twenty times the population, so the US has the smaller proportional burden watching what crosses its borders.
We host the biggest internet exchange point of the world, and redistribute a large share of Europe's imports and exports by sea (deriving more than two-thirds of GDP from trade), in a small country with completely open borders to its neighbours. Sure the US is important as a transit route for Internet between Europe and Asia as long as Central Asia remains poor, unstable, and undemocratic, but this is peanuts compared to US internal traffic, just like US international trade is peanuts compared to the size of the US's internal economy.
The real question is how you divide your attention between monitoring foreigner's business and your own citizens, which is a matter of attitude.
Your scale argument makes more sense if you turn it around: the US's preoccupation with what enters or wants to enter the US, as opposed to what happens inside the US, is maybe explained better by the relative isolation of the US from rest of the world, both geographically and economically, than by its connectedness.
Sheer size also matters in another way, which is what I was aiming at. There is simply a difference in attitude towards the rest of the world between a superpower and a more modest power, and elected leaders will be more circumspect with the rights of their voters than with the rights of others if they get away with it. Hence the tendency of the US to attack its societal problems (drugs, terrorism) "at the source", i.e. abroad, instead of antagonizing its own citizens by limiting their rights like more modest powers will do. US citizens get a good deal.
My first reaction to this article was: I smell a spin doctor. The 'news' the audit reveals is the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations, which raises serious issues. This anecdote makes it seem harmless. Late payment is perfectly normal even in the most anal retentive organizations that *do* check how every penny is spent. More interesting is how money that went missing was used, and whether there are incentives to be 'lax'. If you want to get away with being lax, it is good to behave incompetently once in a while.
I live in the Netherlands, the world's wiretapping paradise. The number of taps per capita doesn't really bother me, as long as there is proper accountability for use of that power (which, for the record, leaves much to be desired here).
The US in comparison is pretty amateurish when it comes to collecting information about its own citizens, which is pretty remarkable for a country that pretends to be policing, and eavesdropping on, the whole world. It is also pretty unique in granting itself greater investigative powers over the rest of the world population than over its own population, so US citizens shouldn't complain until they have rectified that.
Then again, the fact that the Army was able to outrun its communications equipment is equally a credit upon its operations
More likely the impotence of the enemy. This is reminiscent of the 'failure' without negative consequences of the German army around half May 1940 to keep up with the tanks of Rommel and Guderian.
There is nothing new in asymmetry of means and, therefore, asymmetry of tactics. The successful weaker side picks the form, time and place of battle, and often innovates. Defending interior lines (Frederick the Great), using space to draw the enemy away from his supplies (Russians against French and Germans), depending on city walls, fortifications, or inundations (Flemish against the French, Dutch against the Spanish), picking narrow battlefields with protected flanks to overcome bigger quality armies (Greeks against Persians, Flemish against the French, Crusader armies), change of weapon technology to neutralize the enemy's main weapon (pikes, cavalry, longbows, etc).
One familiar pattern keep repeating itself: the way to get a battle on your conditions is to refuse battle to the stronger side until they are ready for battle on your conditions, and refusing battle always involves civilian sacrifices on your side (and not necessarily voluntarily). The French didn't offer battle to the Flemish pikemen behind a ditch in 1302 just because they were stupid and arrogant, but mainly because their field army was incredibly expensive to keep on the field, and this was the first battle on the open field that the Flemish offered them.
That's just selective attention. The Nazis also taught us a lot about counter insurgency warfare. I know that in the Netherlands Dutch former Germanic SS soldiers were appointed as officers of counter insurgency units in the Netherlands Indies in the late 40s, because of their valuable counter insurgency experience in Russia.