Not only that, but keeping lines short for, say, an 80x25 display doesn't really make sense nowadays. Most computers can fit much, much more text on the screen - and people who are using older computers can use pretty printers. And now that we've largely left the era of 6-character identifiers behind us and have moved into the era of legible function and variable names, keeping your lines that short is making the code less readable, not more.
I like to have multiple source files visible side-by side, or to have an API's reference documentation up alongside the code. Or having an interface mock-up open alongside the code. Or having the design docs up alongside the code. Or having a file format spec open alongside the code. Heck, having Slashdot open alongside the code. whatever.
I can't think of a single task I do that involves having as many open windows as software development.
Interesting, because I feel quite the opposite. I have a 15" laptop, and I would love to have a 12" one. I think the 15"er takes up too much space and is an awkward thing to put in a backpack and carry around all day. The screen isn't MUCH smaller than a regular laptop and once you're used to the size it's not so bad; and at home I can plug it into my 19" monitor.
Different strokes, I guess. I have a feeling that we aren't going to see a massive shift in what laptops folks are selling, I'm more inclined to guess that the PC market will follow Apple's suit and have size be the primary selling point on their laptops.
If something is impossible I would argue that trying to legislate and force people to do it is kinda, well, stupid since it can not be done. But I suppose to some that might be OK, though I can not see how. Nor did I ever say or imply "not try" - you are making a straw man argument at the last part. More "Since it can not be perfect do not try and force perfection".
You're putting words in my mouth there.
So, if it's single celled you can kill and torture all you want, what about 10 cells, 15, 100 - where are you going to draw the line? And is it logical or just arbitrary? If arbitrary why do you want to force it on me (and, if so, do you complain about other people trying to enforce arbitrary ideas)?
So you won't argue me eating plants, but as soon as I bring up single-celled life you jump on me? And since when is the distinction between animal and non-animal life arbitrary? Pardon my confusion but I've totally lost you here. You were putting up such a good argument before, but with these first two responses it's like you decided to smoke a bowl before drafting this particular post.
But, again, you make excuses for when you (or in this case PETA - I do not know if you are a member) do things that you protest others doing. Again, putting words (or actions) into my mouth. I am not and have never been a member of PETA. Heck, I don't even like PETA - I have my own complaints about them. I'm just defending them because for whatever reason PETA directly represents every vegan and vegetarian on the planet, so the FUD you're spreading about PETA might as well be FUD you spread about vegetarianism in general. When you've said things about PETA that are true or which I also dislike (such as the less-than-savory way they handle their animal shelters), I haven't been arguing about them.
Sure you do. Not only do you have the internet but I bet there is at least a junior college near you that has one. True, I could schlep myself out to a college and do some research. (last I checked, most journal indexing services aren't freely available over the internet. It would be odd if they did, considering the enormous licensing fees libraries pay for them.) But googling hasn't turned up any leads that make me think it would be worth my while. Besides, you're the one who mentioned "every major study," so I figure the burden of proof should be on you - at least give me one researcher's name so I can get started more easily.
Plus it doesn't take a genious to figure out that a CARNIVORE doesn't do so well on a vegan diet. 1. Humans (and all of the other great apes) are omnivores. It's different. 2. I'm doing great on my vegan diet. Most recent blood work shows I'm getting excellent nutrition, cholesterol and blood pressure are crazy good. A bit too much iron, but a little bit less of the spinach and stuff should fix that. No vitamin deficiencies that the doctors could find. Heck, my hair (which I had been slowly losing) started growing in thicker after I went vegan. Seriously.
here, here is the settlement.
I gotta say, if you're going to bitch about PETA distorting the truth, you should distort the truth in the same breath by claiming that they were convicted of doing it when the case really ended in a settlement. Also, I fail to see how becoming an employee in order to infiltrate an animal testing facility constitutes faking cases of animal cruelty when none exist. Yes, I'll agree that the settlement implies that a PETA member did indeed commit fraud in order to get some inside information on Covance's research projects, but I also support the tactic. It's not like PETA did anything particularly exceptional - undercover work is a standard component of law enforcement, investigative reporting, advertising, etc.
Problem is, pollution and its effects aren't necessarily going to stay in those countries for the long term. Atmospheric currents, water motion, ecosystem-climate feedback effects, damage to biodiversity, and all that rot. Push it off to the folks who live in those 3rd world countries today, and your descendants sometime in the future. Besides, we're not really sure what the end result of all this pollution is going to be. Given how bad things could get if the consequences don't come out on the "not so bad" end of things, not knowing is a really good argument for why we should be exercising extreme caution.
In general, more pollution but in a different place isn't a good idea so much as an excellent real-world application of "out of sight, out of mind." Whistling in the dark just isn't an effective way to make cancer rates stop rising.
True, but only if you're in the kind of application domain where there are cheap off-the-shelf hardware-based options.
If you're a relatively small company making embedded products that aren't designed for the consumer market, chances are designing and fabricating all of that custom hardware is going to be much, much, much, much more expensive than simply slapping in a fast CPU and doing most the work in software. MAYBE an FPGA or two might be useful for some of the tasks that are easier to implement in hardware.
Also, the TiVO does use hardware video encoding/decoding.
It actually reminds me of two SiliconGraphics Indigo2s (the teal ones) that we had at work. One had the the 2D graphics accelerator, and the other had the low-end 3D accelerator.
While the one with the 3D acceleration was super-fast for wireframe work, rendering any 3D graphics with a fill was noticeably faster on the computer with the 2D card. The problem was that there was no 2D acceleration on the 3D card. Any speedup you gained on the 3D coordinate transforms was more than lost when the time came to draw all those pixels.
You can't live without exploiting animals. A classic argument. "I can't be perfect, so I might as well not even try to be better." I've never been a fan of it, personally.
For instance, vitamin b-12 is from an animal product - it can not be synthesized and the amounts found in some vegatables are not abosrbable by your body. True - mostly. There are no plant sources of B12. Luckily, you can get it from fungi and bacteria. Beer is a pretty decent source.
PETA runs kill animal shelters. True, yes. Sad, yes. I'm not aware of them lying about it. Fact of the matter is, the idea of a "no-kill" animal shelter is a bit of a myth. If an animal spends too much time at a no-kill shelter, and the shelter is running out of money or other animals are coming in and they are full, the ones that have been there the longest will be moved to a shelter that does euthanize. There's only so much you can do with limited space and limited financial resources and a seemingly unlimited stream of strays.
Check out PETA's campaign to make Dogs and Cats into vegans, then look at any scientific study on the planet about it. This one I'll admit sounds fishy to me, but I've met vegan dogs that seem healthy enough, so I'm still considering the jury to be out on it. Cats, I'm not so sure. As far as the scientific studies, I don't have any access to veterinary research journals or journal indexes, so I really can't do much looking into the scientific studies, and Google has always failed to provide me with anything by anybody who quotes sources. If you could point me toward a list of some research, I'd be very interested in reading it.
They have been caught, prosecuted, and convicted several times being the people abusing the animals in the industry they are doing an "expose" on because they can't find people who are cruel. I've googled for this, too, and I'll keep googling, but I'm turning up a blank.
Hmm. I'll certainly agree that the driving force behind most government agencies is people wanting to defend their territory. I have some experience working with government beauraucracies, and it's worse than a lot of people even realize.
But I don't think it's a natural feature of government; mostly it seems like a by-product of the spoils system. The head of any agency ends up being appointed by whoever just run the election. The previous head gets fired, and the choice of who replaces him/her has as much to do with mutual backscratching as it does anything else - meaning that promotion from within is out of the question. To the guys at the top tier are given absolutely no incentive to excel. Instead, they have absolutely every reason to do as little as possible. You often don't have any more than four years between boss changes.
Long-term projects are out of the question; within four years some new yahoo who doesn't know sticks from flowers about what's going on is going to come in and twiddle them beyond recognition. Shorter-term projects are a bad idea, too, because making changes involves taking risks. You may not have a prayer of getting promoted based on merit, but you sure as hell can get fired for one screw-up, even if that was your first mistake in an otherwise stellar career.
Anyway, I've babbled enough, so suffice it to say I think that though this effect is most obvious at the top tiers, it does trickle down through the entire beauraucracy. All because of the spoils system.
There are some jobs that just should not be on a 4-year cycle.
Hmm, I'm not so sure about that. There are problems with providing public safety and health stuff through private companies. In the case of insurance companies, it's pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention that market forces are not keeping prices down; in many segments of the insurance industry insurance prices have been going up much much faster than the bottom line.
But that's a digression. There are plenty of reasons why privatized fire protection is a bad idea. For one, a company's primary motive is to make money, not to provide quality or cheap service - those are side effects that pop up under certain circumstances. Now, there are two ways to make a lot of money - you can increase profits by increasing revenue, or by decreasing costs. Increasing revenue in this situation could only come from raising prices. It would be insane to allow people to go without fire protection, as you have to keep fires from spreading from building to building. This means that the number of customers will be fixed, so there's no option to attract new customers by dropping prices or anything like that. Decreasing costs can come from increasing efficiency, but that can only take you so far - to get further than that, you have to start cutting services (or making previously packaged services cost extra, or something like that), or reducing the quality of existing services, stuff like that.
Of course, the immediate response is that we can limit these things by regulating the industry. That might work in the short run, but if you look at any other industry that is dominated by local monopolies - cable TV, local phone services, electricity, etc., it's pretty obvious that all of these industries have enough lobbying power to have quite a lot of control over their own regulations. Has regulation kept the US from having internet access that is massively more expensive than parts of the world where access is provided as a public utility or by competetive markets? Nope. They often get massively more bandwidth, too. Or take a look at California's energy crisis from a few years back.
Now, I've been talking about this as if there aren't any market forces affecting this theoretical fire protection company. The reason is that there would be no market forces affecting the fire protection company. We've already established that everyone would have to buy their product. It's also true that this company would have no competitors. It wouldn't make sense to have every other house on a block be protected by a different company; that situation is what led us to making fire protection a public service in the first place. So you'd have to have local monopolies. At that point, the fire company you use is based on your street address, meaning that even if there is more than one company in town, they aren't in direct competition with each other, and since they have absolutely no reason to worry about some new start-up trying to take over their business, they have plenty of reason to set up a cartel so that they don't have to worry about competing with each other at all. Bingo, market failure.
So yeah, in short, the problem with a lot of privatization strategies is that the market doesn't work when there is no market.
Nah, I think you'll be fine. Almost all of the current wi-fi hotspots in the downtown area (coffee shops, mostly) get most of their business from students at the University. All of the students I know are way too bandwidth-obsessed to be content with municipal wireless, and since they tend to crowd 4 or 5 people into an apartment, a 3Mbit cable/DSL connection isn't particularly expensive to them. Assuming that the municipal wi-fi will be billed per user or per computer rather than per household, it really wouldn't be much cheaper than what they're already getting from the cable or phone companies.
In fact, I'm really not entirely convinced that Madison's municipal wi-fi program will be successful. I'm pretty sure they did almost no marketing research before starting the program (The city's motto, as far as I can tell, is "Ready, Fire, Aim.") Most of the area they are covering is just too saturated with free hotspots and people whose unprotected networks are named 'linksys.' As someone who lives outside the coverage area, I certainly wouldn't pay for it. I'm already getting pretty much exactly the same service for free, though I'll grant I'm not getting it from anyone in particular.
If they want that so badly, why can't they finance this out of their "contribution" fund?
Because corporations will externalize any cost they can. The bill for getting lobbyists to convince Congress to approve a $3,000,000,000 TV subsidy out of the government's (read: the American people's) pockets probably comes out to a lot less than $3,000,000,000.
A few anecdotes really don't mean much. Of course the really bad farms aren't going to let you in. Still, the overall treatment of dairy cows can't be that great - in the US, their average lifespan is only four years.
Is it that they can't see the shades of grey, or that their moral values are just a little bit out of tune with yours? Let me elucidate the thought process PETA (and other vegans, but I'll stick with PETA since the omnivore world seems to think that PETA is the direct representative of every vegan on the planet).
PETA's values include the idea that mistreating an animal for the sake of your taste buds - i.e., for pleasure - is cruel. PETA, being a bunch of vegans, knows full well that eating animal products is not necessary to live a healthy life (heck, most vegans will happily go on for days about a vegan diet being healthier), so the only reason to consume them is for your taste buds - for pleasure. PETA, being mostly a bunch of animal-lovers, considers "mistreating an animal" to be anything from ghastly abuses at feedlots all the way down to simply kicking puppies.
Now, there's not a single dairy farm out there (not counting maybe ma and pa and their pet cow on the hobby farm they set up in their retirement) that doesn't kill cows as part of their operation - either killing useless male calves or killing useless cows that aren't producing anymore. Killing a cow is definitely somewhere between ghastly abuses and puppy-kicking. So by buying milk from these farms, you are supporting animal cruelty, which is immoral.
Considering that most of us don't think that puppy-kicking for recreation is morally defensible, we're not about to think that mistreating cows for the sake of some cheese (which you don't need - pleasure) is morally defensible.
There really are shades of gray in the vegan moral universe - lots of them. You don't see it in the talk about dairy because the dairy industry way past the point where you're going to see any shades of gray - they only happen in the border regions between moral and immoral. To us, the dairy industry is really somewhere on the border between immoral and inhumane, a quite different place altogether.
The little bit of cows milk lost is MUCH more than made up in living, breathing, healthy, cows producing milk.
Only girl cows produce milk. They are kept, but the boy cows go off to the veal pens.
"Although these animals would naturally make only enough milk to meet the needs of their calves (around 16 pounds a day), genetic manipulation, antibiotics, and hormones are used to force each cow to produce more than 18,000 pounds of milk a year (an average of 50 pounds a day)."
> Cows were bred to do this long ago I saw the word genetic manipulation in the paragraph to which you were replying, don'tcha know?
> you can purchase organic milk that is made in nearly those quantities that do not use them.
Right. I did some looking around, and this article (warning: PDF Link) says you can expect about 18,700 pounds of milk from a conventionally farmed cow, and only 15,500 pounds per cow if it's organic. (It's coming from the organic dairy industry, so I'm going to guess that these numbers, if they are exaggerated, are exagerrated in favor of higher relative production for the organic cows.) Does nearly 20% less yield really count as "nearly those quantities?"
Not any longer, illegal in most industrialised countries since tha mad cow disease was discovered in the early to mid 90's.
The US government still allows animal parts in feed. The original 1997 animal feed ban was weak, very very weak. So weak that they didn't ban ground up pieces of downer cow from the feed supply until early last year, after mad cow was found in the US. The recent revision to that ban is still pretty weak - no feeding cows to cows (for the most part - there are loopholes), you can put birds in there, but you can't put their poop in the feed anymore. Stuff like that.
Maybe folks outside the US are smarter about things, but you can't blame PETA for not talking about European animal feed regulations - it's an American organisation that lobbies the US government.
Also, you keep talking about local dairy farms, and it's true, these generally aren't quite so bad. But they are also the minority, and since they usually have less than a couple hundred head of cattle, they're producing a very small percentage of the US milk supply compared to the 2,000 cow (or more) factory farms. And it's a shrinking amount, since these factory farms are depressing milk prices and slowly forcing the farms you're talking about out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but keeping lines short for, say, an 80x25 display doesn't really make sense nowadays. Most computers can fit much, much more text on the screen - and people who are using older computers can use pretty printers. And now that we've largely left the era of 6-character identifiers behind us and have moved into the era of legible function and variable names, keeping your lines that short is making the code less readable, not more.
I like to have multiple source files visible side-by side, or to have an API's reference documentation up alongside the code. Or having an interface mock-up open alongside the code. Or having the design docs up alongside the code. Or having a file format spec open alongside the code. Heck, having Slashdot open alongside the code. whatever.
I can't think of a single task I do that involves having as many open windows as software development.
Screen size is what allows you to have higher resolution.
Try working with 1600x1200 on that 15" monitor and see how sane you stay.
Interesting, because I feel quite the opposite. I have a 15" laptop, and I would love to have a 12" one. I think the 15"er takes up too much space and is an awkward thing to put in a backpack and carry around all day. The screen isn't MUCH smaller than a regular laptop and once you're used to the size it's not so bad; and at home I can plug it into my 19" monitor.
Different strokes, I guess. I have a feeling that we aren't going to see a massive shift in what laptops folks are selling, I'm more inclined to guess that the PC market will follow Apple's suit and have size be the primary selling point on their laptops.
I'm just defending them because for whatever reason PETA directly represents every vegan and vegetarian on the planet
Really, directly represents every vegan and vegetarian on the planet in the eyes of most meat eaters.
If something is impossible I would argue that trying to legislate and force people to do it is kinda, well, stupid since it can not be done. But I suppose to some that might be OK, though I can not see how. Nor did I ever say or imply "not try" - you are making a straw man argument at the last part. More "Since it can not be perfect do not try and force perfection".
You're putting words in my mouth there.
So, if it's single celled you can kill and torture all you want, what about 10 cells, 15, 100 - where are you going to draw the line? And is it logical or just arbitrary? If arbitrary why do you want to force it on me (and, if so, do you complain about other people trying to enforce arbitrary ideas)?
So you won't argue me eating plants, but as soon as I bring up single-celled life you jump on me? And since when is the distinction between animal and non-animal life arbitrary? Pardon my confusion but I've totally lost you here. You were putting up such a good argument before, but with these first two responses it's like you decided to smoke a bowl before drafting this particular post.
But, again, you make excuses for when you (or in this case PETA - I do not know if you are a member) do things that you protest others doing.
Again, putting words (or actions) into my mouth. I am not and have never been a member of PETA. Heck, I don't even like PETA - I have my own complaints about them. I'm just defending them because for whatever reason PETA directly represents every vegan and vegetarian on the planet, so the FUD you're spreading about PETA might as well be FUD you spread about vegetarianism in general. When you've said things about PETA that are true or which I also dislike (such as the less-than-savory way they handle their animal shelters), I haven't been arguing about them.
Sure you do. Not only do you have the internet but I bet there is at least a junior college near you that has one.
True, I could schlep myself out to a college and do some research. (last I checked, most journal indexing services aren't freely available over the internet. It would be odd if they did, considering the enormous licensing fees libraries pay for them.) But googling hasn't turned up any leads that make me think it would be worth my while. Besides, you're the one who mentioned "every major study," so I figure the burden of proof should be on you - at least give me one researcher's name so I can get started more easily.
Plus it doesn't take a genious to figure out that a CARNIVORE doesn't do so well on a vegan diet.
1. Humans (and all of the other great apes) are omnivores. It's different.
2. I'm doing great on my vegan diet. Most recent blood work shows I'm getting excellent nutrition, cholesterol and blood pressure are crazy good. A bit too much iron, but a little bit less of the spinach and stuff should fix that. No vitamin deficiencies that the doctors could find. Heck, my hair (which I had been slowly losing) started growing in thicker after I went vegan. Seriously.
here, here is the settlement.
I gotta say, if you're going to bitch about PETA distorting the truth, you should distort the truth in the same breath by claiming that they were convicted of doing it when the case really ended in a settlement. Also, I fail to see how becoming an employee in order to infiltrate an animal testing facility constitutes faking cases of animal cruelty when none exist. Yes, I'll agree that the settlement implies that a PETA member did indeed commit fraud in order to get some inside information on Covance's research projects, but I also support the tactic. It's not like PETA did anything particularly exceptional - undercover work is a standard component of law enforcement, investigative reporting, advertising, etc.
Problem is, pollution and its effects aren't necessarily going to stay in those countries for the long term. Atmospheric currents, water motion, ecosystem-climate feedback effects, damage to biodiversity, and all that rot. Push it off to the folks who live in those 3rd world countries today, and your descendants sometime in the future. Besides, we're not really sure what the end result of all this pollution is going to be. Given how bad things could get if the consequences don't come out on the "not so bad" end of things, not knowing is a really good argument for why we should be exercising extreme caution.
In general, more pollution but in a different place isn't a good idea so much as an excellent real-world application of "out of sight, out of mind." Whistling in the dark just isn't an effective way to make cancer rates stop rising.
True, but only if you're in the kind of application domain where there are cheap off-the-shelf hardware-based options.
If you're a relatively small company making embedded products that aren't designed for the consumer market, chances are designing and fabricating all of that custom hardware is going to be much, much, much, much more expensive than simply slapping in a fast CPU and doing most the work in software. MAYBE an FPGA or two might be useful for some of the tasks that are easier to implement in hardware.
Also, the TiVO does use hardware video encoding/decoding.
It actually reminds me of two SiliconGraphics Indigo2s (the teal ones) that we had at work. One had the the 2D graphics accelerator, and the other had the low-end 3D accelerator.
While the one with the 3D acceleration was super-fast for wireframe work, rendering any 3D graphics with a fill was noticeably faster on the computer with the 2D card. The problem was that there was no 2D acceleration on the 3D card. Any speedup you gained on the 3D coordinate transforms was more than lost when the time came to draw all those pixels.
Hmm. If I were NASA, I would have written the following somewhere in the rules:
"Designs which cannot work in a vacuum or microgravity environment are nto eligible."
They're planning on covering the whole city. This is meant to be how you get your internet at home.
You can't live without exploiting animals.
A classic argument. "I can't be perfect, so I might as well not even try to be better." I've never been a fan of it, personally.
For instance, vitamin b-12 is from an animal product - it can not be synthesized and the amounts found in some vegatables are not abosrbable by your body.
True - mostly. There are no plant sources of B12. Luckily, you can get it from fungi and bacteria. Beer is a pretty decent source.
PETA runs kill animal shelters.
True, yes. Sad, yes. I'm not aware of them lying about it. Fact of the matter is, the idea of a "no-kill" animal shelter is a bit of a myth. If an animal spends too much time at a no-kill shelter, and the shelter is running out of money or other animals are coming in and they are full, the ones that have been there the longest will be moved to a shelter that does euthanize. There's only so much you can do with limited space and limited financial resources and a seemingly unlimited stream of strays.
Check out PETA's campaign to make Dogs and Cats into vegans, then look at any scientific study on the planet about it.
This one I'll admit sounds fishy to me, but I've met vegan dogs that seem healthy enough, so I'm still considering the jury to be out on it. Cats, I'm not so sure. As far as the scientific studies, I don't have any access to veterinary research journals or journal indexes, so I really can't do much looking into the scientific studies, and Google has always failed to provide me with anything by anybody who quotes sources. If you could point me toward a list of some research, I'd be very interested in reading it.
They have been caught, prosecuted, and convicted several times being the people abusing the animals in the industry they are doing an "expose" on because they can't find people who are cruel.
I've googled for this, too, and I'll keep googling, but I'm turning up a blank.
Hmm. I'll certainly agree that the driving force behind most government agencies is people wanting to defend their territory. I have some experience working with government beauraucracies, and it's worse than a lot of people even realize.
But I don't think it's a natural feature of government; mostly it seems like a by-product of the spoils system. The head of any agency ends up being appointed by whoever just run the election. The previous head gets fired, and the choice of who replaces him/her has as much to do with mutual backscratching as it does anything else - meaning that promotion from within is out of the question. To the guys at the top tier are given absolutely no incentive to excel. Instead, they have absolutely every reason to do as little as possible. You often don't have any more than four years between boss changes.
Long-term projects are out of the question; within four years some new yahoo who doesn't know sticks from flowers about what's going on is going to come in and twiddle them beyond recognition. Shorter-term projects are a bad idea, too, because making changes involves taking risks. You may not have a prayer of getting promoted based on merit, but you sure as hell can get fired for one screw-up, even if that was your first mistake in an otherwise stellar career.
Anyway, I've babbled enough, so suffice it to say I think that though this effect is most obvious at the top tiers, it does trickle down through the entire beauraucracy. All because of the spoils system.
There are some jobs that just should not be on a 4-year cycle.
Hmm, I'm not so sure about that. There are problems with providing public safety and health stuff through private companies. In the case of insurance companies, it's pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention that market forces are not keeping prices down; in many segments of the insurance industry insurance prices have been going up much much faster than the bottom line.
But that's a digression. There are plenty of reasons why privatized fire protection is a bad idea. For one, a company's primary motive is to make money, not to provide quality or cheap service - those are side effects that pop up under certain circumstances. Now, there are two ways to make a lot of money - you can increase profits by increasing revenue, or by decreasing costs.
Increasing revenue in this situation could only come from raising prices. It would be insane to allow people to go without fire protection, as you have to keep fires from spreading from building to building. This means that the number of customers will be fixed, so there's no option to attract new customers by dropping prices or anything like that.
Decreasing costs can come from increasing efficiency, but that can only take you so far - to get further than that, you have to start cutting services (or making previously packaged services cost extra, or something like that), or reducing the quality of existing services, stuff like that.
Of course, the immediate response is that we can limit these things by regulating the industry. That might work in the short run, but if you look at any other industry that is dominated by local monopolies - cable TV, local phone services, electricity, etc., it's pretty obvious that all of these industries have enough lobbying power to have quite a lot of control over their own regulations. Has regulation kept the US from having internet access that is massively more expensive than parts of the world where access is provided as a public utility or by competetive markets? Nope. They often get massively more bandwidth, too. Or take a look at California's energy crisis from a few years back.
Now, I've been talking about this as if there aren't any market forces affecting this theoretical fire protection company. The reason is that there would be no market forces affecting the fire protection company. We've already established that everyone would have to buy their product. It's also true that this company would have no competitors. It wouldn't make sense to have every other house on a block be protected by a different company; that situation is what led us to making fire protection a public service in the first place. So you'd have to have local monopolies. At that point, the fire company you use is based on your street address, meaning that even if there is more than one company in town, they aren't in direct competition with each other, and since they have absolutely no reason to worry about some new start-up trying to take over their business, they have plenty of reason to set up a cartel so that they don't have to worry about competing with each other at all. Bingo, market failure.
So yeah, in short, the problem with a lot of privatization strategies is that the market doesn't work when there is no market.
Nobody really knows. The city government and the company they contracted are being very tight-lipped about the whole deal.
Nah, I think you'll be fine. Almost all of the current wi-fi hotspots in the downtown area (coffee shops, mostly) get most of their business from students at the University. All of the students I know are way too bandwidth-obsessed to be content with municipal wireless, and since they tend to crowd 4 or 5 people into an apartment, a 3Mbit cable/DSL connection isn't particularly expensive to them. Assuming that the municipal wi-fi will be billed per user or per computer rather than per household, it really wouldn't be much cheaper than what they're already getting from the cable or phone companies.
In fact, I'm really not entirely convinced that Madison's municipal wi-fi program will be successful. I'm pretty sure they did almost no marketing research before starting the program (The city's motto, as far as I can tell, is "Ready, Fire, Aim.") Most of the area they are covering is just too saturated with free hotspots and people whose unprotected networks are named 'linksys.' As someone who lives outside the coverage area, I certainly wouldn't pay for it. I'm already getting pretty much exactly the same service for free, though I'll grant I'm not getting it from anyone in particular.
If I remember right, service will cost $5/mo.
So what are these lies, specifically?
If they want that so badly, why can't they finance this out of their "contribution" fund?
Because corporations will externalize any cost they can. The bill for getting lobbyists to convince Congress to approve a $3,000,000,000 TV subsidy out of the government's (read: the American people's) pockets probably comes out to a lot less than $3,000,000,000.
A few anecdotes really don't mean much. Of course the really bad farms aren't going to let you in. Still, the overall treatment of dairy cows can't be that great - in the US, their average lifespan is only four years.
That or a student who lives somewhere near University Ave.
No, but I certainly do pay for the cleanup bill, necessary police presence, and damage to public property, if any.
Is it that they can't see the shades of grey, or that their moral values are just a little bit out of tune with yours? Let me elucidate the thought process PETA (and other vegans, but I'll stick with PETA since the omnivore world seems to think that PETA is the direct representative of every vegan on the planet).
PETA's values include the idea that mistreating an animal for the sake of your taste buds - i.e., for pleasure - is cruel. PETA, being a bunch of vegans, knows full well that eating animal products is not necessary to live a healthy life (heck, most vegans will happily go on for days about a vegan diet being healthier), so the only reason to consume them is for your taste buds - for pleasure. PETA, being mostly a bunch of animal-lovers, considers "mistreating an animal" to be anything from ghastly abuses at feedlots all the way down to simply kicking puppies.
Now, there's not a single dairy farm out there (not counting maybe ma and pa and their pet cow on the hobby farm they set up in their retirement) that doesn't kill cows as part of their operation - either killing useless male calves or killing useless cows that aren't producing anymore. Killing a cow is definitely somewhere between ghastly abuses and puppy-kicking. So by buying milk from these farms, you are supporting animal cruelty, which is immoral.
Considering that most of us don't think that puppy-kicking for recreation is morally defensible, we're not about to think that mistreating cows for the sake of some cheese (which you don't need - pleasure) is morally defensible.
There really are shades of gray in the vegan moral universe - lots of them. You don't see it in the talk about dairy because the dairy industry way past the point where you're going to see any shades of gray - they only happen in the border regions between moral and immoral. To us, the dairy industry is really somewhere on the border between immoral and inhumane, a quite different place altogether.
The little bit of cows milk lost is MUCH more than made up in living, breathing, healthy, cows producing milk.
Only girl cows produce milk. They are kept, but the boy cows go off to the veal pens.
"Although these animals would naturally make only enough milk to meet the needs of their calves (around 16 pounds a day), genetic manipulation, antibiotics, and hormones are used to force each cow to produce more than 18,000 pounds of milk a year (an average of 50 pounds a day)."
> Cows were bred to do this long ago
I saw the word genetic manipulation in the paragraph to which you were replying, don'tcha know?
> you can purchase organic milk that is made in nearly those quantities that do not use them.
Right. I did some looking around, and this article (warning: PDF Link) says you can expect about 18,700 pounds of milk from a conventionally farmed cow, and only 15,500 pounds per cow if it's organic. (It's coming from the organic dairy industry, so I'm going to guess that these numbers, if they are exaggerated, are exagerrated in favor of higher relative production for the organic cows.) Does nearly 20% less yield really count as "nearly those quantities?"
Not any longer, illegal in most industrialised countries since tha mad cow disease was discovered in the early to mid 90's.
The US government still allows animal parts in feed. The original 1997 animal feed ban was weak, very very weak. So weak that they didn't ban ground up pieces of downer cow from the feed supply until early last year, after mad cow was found in the US. The recent revision to that ban is still pretty weak - no feeding cows to cows (for the most part - there are loopholes), you can put birds in there, but you can't put their poop in the feed anymore. Stuff like that.
Maybe folks outside the US are smarter about things, but you can't blame PETA for not talking about European animal feed regulations - it's an American organisation that lobbies the US government.
Also, you keep talking about local dairy farms, and it's true, these generally aren't quite so bad. But they are also the minority, and since they usually have less than a couple hundred head of cattle, they're producing a very small percentage of the US milk supply compared to the 2,000 cow (or more) factory farms. And it's a shrinking amount, since these factory farms are depressing milk prices and slowly forcing the farms you're talking about out of business.
There's a special mode for that. Haven't you ever wondered where we get non-dairy creamer?