I think you missed his point. I think he's saying that, in the way nothing is 'outside' thermodynamics, no country is 'outside' economics and free to just do arbitrary things.
That is just sophistry. Everything is "inside" of some kind of concept or definition, be it thermodynamics, physics, biology, chemistry or the Universe in general. He keeps claiming that "every single thing" (direct quote) is subject to the rules of thermodynamics (a patent falsehood - information for example is not) and then goes onto claiming that the case is the same with the rules of the marketplace (even more ridiculous claim since economics covers only a small fraction of human activities and there are many economic schemes not based on free market). And to top it off he then claimed that economy is "not a closed system" followed one sentence later by "the system is closed by" etc. In short he has no clue what he is saying and then you butt in with the old canard of "But... but... you didn't read the ox entrails and chicken bones he spilled right! You misunderstood his psychic waves!".
I responded to what he wrote and what he wrote is utter nonsense.
He doesn't seem to be against regulation, like the HK money example, just against popular but useless policies.
Apparently I failed to tune into his "sympathetic brain waves", no? Is that what you mean by "seem to"? He claimed (direct quote, emphasis mine) that: "Any deviation from a self-balancing equation of economics will lead to an eventual collapse of some sort. Economies balance themselves out, our attempts at interfering by government or any other forces will always fail in the long term (a period of time comparable to a long life span)."
It can't get any more unambiguous than that. But yet you insist that we fail to detect what he really meant by it... In fact you sound like one of those desperate apologists for some religious nut, it is not that the nut spouts incomprehensible, self-contradictory crap, it is we who "fail to understand" his "deeper truths".
When I think of ranting I tend to think of something more like you're doing, where you've got a preconceived notion (in your case, what he means) and you're doing your best to tell him what he thinks.
As I pointed out above and in my other posts, I respond to what he wrote and not to what you claim was supposedly in his head when he did so. And what he wrote is self-contradictory and nonsensical. It is you in fact who attempts to parse and interpret his drivel in a favorable light because of your preconceived notions which apparently enable you to "understand" sentences that negate each other.
I don't understand. Assuming the consumer has various choices, why couldn't the consumer decide which hospital they would go to before becoming ill? Obviously distance is an enormous factor when facing life threatening situations. However if one lives within equal distance of multiple hospitals / areas of care, why couldn't the consumer make an informed decision beforehand? Presumably the person would take various factors into account: reputable doctors, level of care provided, cost, etc.
Because it is utterly impractical. The hospital staff changes frequently, the amount of information available before hand to the potential patient is very limited and the information that is available is not very useful (it requires in-depth medical knowledge) and the statistical "results" are highly dependent on demographics, age groups etc and so on. Also, unlike any normal purchase, there is no "trying" the product, its do-or-die (literally) and so there is no way to move to a different vendor after being dis-satisfied (i.e. 6 feet under).
The "free market" model works well for spuds, eggs and bread where the ability for a consumer to be informed is near total, but as the complexity of products, the amount of necessary knowledge required to make an informed choice and the number of external factors increases, so decreases the applicability of that model. Medical care is an extreme case where all of these factors conspire to essentially demolish the model completely.
Other than stating that this is "not possible", you fail to give any reason why this could not happen.
I already did so in many ways.
How is this any different under a total government run medical industry? Presumably the consumer is incapable of determining the usefulness of the drugs because that consumer isn't a doctor. If the consumer knew which drugs were useful and could buy them without a prescription, why go to a doctor?
It is no different at all but we were talking about the applicability of the "free market" model which clearly breaks in this case. The government does not operate under the same model as private enterprise and its model of operation is more compatible with providing medical care, assuming that the government is functional, which sadly cannot be said of the US of A - hence all of these problems that do not exist in such great number elsewhere. The Canadian system (where I live) although not perfect by any means is running circles around the US in pretty much any societal category that matters, including cost per capita. Which of course leads quickly to all sorts of desperate attempts to discredit it, like the ridiculous whining about wait times for elective surgeries, ignoring of course the fact that the wait times for an average patient (i.e. an under-insured sucker) in the USA are comparable if not longer, never you mind that many options are closed to him.
Why couldn't a consumer make the "informed purchase" before becoming unconscious or in excruciating pain?
Because that is simply not possible. The doctor or hospital to which the patient is being rushed is determined not by any purchasing criteria the poor sucker could possibly get out of a glossy brochure before hand but by the simple logistics and necessities of medical treatment, i.e. the nearest hospital capable of the type of care needed, regardless of who is running it. The whole idea of "making an informed purchase" before hand is simply not applicable no matter how one tries to twist the facts. Insurance is at best removed by at least one level from the actual purchase and thus cannot be thought of as the purchase itself, especially that insurance is reactive, i.e. limited refunds are delivered after the fact.
Similarly, drugs are being bought because the doctors prescribe them, thus removing any practical consumer choice from the patient, not to mention the fact that the patient is usually incapable of determination of the usefulness of the drugs.
Which of course is the point, that without outside "interference" the "free markets" tend to run completely amok, mostly due to the fact that their very limited model fails miserably outside a very narrow small-scale domain due to a huge number of real-world factors messing up the simplistic 18th century idea in ways innumerable. Without government "interference" the whole thing would rapidly devolve into some kind of a bizarre modern version of the feudal order. Not that it is not happening anyway, although in slow motion, with governments steadily losing power to multi-mega-billion-pan-national businesses many of whom wield more power and resources then 30 or so smallest nations put together. In recent years the wealth of the top 1% increased rapidly while the wealth of the bottom 90% declined. Given the current pace, the top 1% percent will own over 90% percent of all wealth on the planet within a few decades. All but a very few governments are powerful enough to stand up to that kind of plutocratic order.
The belief in universal, one-size-fits-all power of the "free market" is a religious one, no scientific model of any kind, be it in physics, chemistry, mathematics etc is applicable to everything. All have their very specific domains, outside of which their tenets are simply not applicable. The same is true for the "free market", which indeed works in a clever way to take advantage of mental illness from which many people suffer called "greed" to try to harness it to construct a workable society which is would not self-destruct in an instant. Only a religious zealot would claim that his model, a.k.a religion, is universal and applicable to "everything". Scientific model of the "free market" works only under certain idealized conditions, such as unlimited availability of information about products, capability of purchasers to evaluate the goods being bought, a large number of competing vendors of similar size, inability to construct artificial (technological, geographical, cultural etc) barriers to entry for competitors, etc etc. Conditions that simply do not exist in a huge number of areas of human interaction and exchange of labor and goods.
Because asking for equivalence of some artificial units is in the same ballpark as government being able to print the dollars
It still constitutes "interference" in the oh-so-holy and untouchable by the dirty paws of the electorate, your pure and pristine sanctum of the "free market". Or are you really unaware that we can still see all your ranting, raving and disgorging copious amounts of spittle over this very idea in all these posts right above?
As to 'official paper currency', look at Hong Kong. There is no such thing there as ONE official paper currency, there are separate HK dollars printed issued by separate banks, and there is also a dollar released by the state and these money are in competition. There is no need for any one 'official' currency, especially not for one that is issued by a non-producer, such as a government. Any money that is issued must be backed up by either some commodity or production capacity so that it's not just paper.
Yea, look at that, make sure you ignore the fact that the HK government ensures that all these banknotes are mutually equivalent and freely exchangeable and also persecutes forgeries, because if they did not, then you could also look also at the other fine free-market idea of corporate-issued money to go hand-in-hand with this profit-generating concept.
The thermodynamic laws work fine, the economy is not a closed system, new inventions for example, new discoveries or improvements create new economic niches. The system is closed by the boundaries of accessible world, and it is bigger than this planet.
Right, so which is it, "the economy is not a closed system" or "the system is closed by the boundaries of accessible world"? You can't even keep your lunatic claims from being self-contradictory.
The important law to understand is that if a system A is in balance with system C and system B is in balance with system C then system A and B are in balance with each other.
Which of course has nothing whatsoever to do with thermodynamics, never you mind nebulous terms like "being in balance". In "balance" respective to what property?
Think before you type.
Something that you clearly avoid at all costs and at all times.
That's just stupid. The only time in which your analogy could be even close to accurate is in a situation where there absolutely zero interference in the marketplace by the government. This would mean no official paper currency, no bank regulations, no consumer protections, no anti-trust laws, no zoning laws, etc.
It's even more stupid than that. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy in a closed system is constant, i.e. it can only be transfered but cannot be created or destroyed, while pretty much every priest of the the "free market" religion claims that the markets are not a "zero-sum game" and that wealth (which in the pretense to thermodynamics is supposed to substitute for energy) is continuously created. QED. The "thermodynamics governs markets" is just one example of the depths these religious loons are willing to descend to try to justify their all-consuming greed and sociopathic urges.
Unlike you, I, lacking your spectacularly over-sized ego, have no trouble getting through doors. Try again.
Every single thing is a subject to the rules of the marketplace
Right, particularly theoretical math or love affairs. You are a religious zealot who, as religious zealots usually do, tries to ignore all the inconvenient facts in a desperate attempt to make the world fit your religion. Thus in your - like all other "free market" converts - view, everything must revolve around greed. Any human activity not motivated by an insane avarice is therefore to be denied, because, you know, "every single thing is a subject to the rules of the marketplace".
Nothing at all exists in this world that is not subject to the simple rules of thermodynamics, and economics is fundamentally the same thing.
There is no relationship whatsoever between thermodynamics and markets. You have to be a particularly deluded religious lunatic of the "free market" religion to believe such nonsense. There is some vague, very large scale, resemblance between all high-order chaotic systems, due to the general rules of chaotic systems, but these remote similarities disappear upon any closer examination.
Right, it is only you who is smart, all around you are stupid and mis-informed. That is probably why you can't fit through most doors, something about your ego being too wide.
None of what you said addresses my point in the slightest. The fact that at one time or another some (usually very basic, limited by expense-caps and co-pays) forms of healthcare were affordable to some of the US citizens still does not change the fundamental fact that healtcare in general is not subject to the rules of the marketplace, no more than fire-fighting or traffic lights.
No no, a real commie/liberal bastard would have come there and stuffed a single-payer system down everybody's throat, the kind that I hated in Canada (remember, I am not a liberal, my leanings are all practical, I despise governments for distorting the market.)
While I agree with the rest of your rant, I must point out that healthcare lacks the necessary pre-conditions for a market activity and as such cannot be left to the tender mercies of the capitalist "free market". One of the fundamental problems is the lack of any possibility whatsoever of consumer making an "informed purchase" from competing vendors, particularly while unconscious in an ambulance or in excruciating pain. And it just goes downhill from here.
Therefore it logically follows that healthcare has to be dealt with in a completely different framework, very much the same way as other essential societal infrastructure, like the justice system or roads.
Can you explain, generally, why people should feel bad about not doing things that you admit aren't worth doing?
It is rather simple: "worth" can be calculated in many different ways, while the "free market" is capable of only one type of calculation, i.e. monetary. That is its key failing. That is why all the "free marketers" must (for their model to work) ignore all human motivations other then greed. They must ignore for example the possibility of people pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake, artists creating art out of a desire to share their emotions, etc and so on. None of these fit the "model" and, worse, they fuck it up severely and so must be denied.
The same is true of pollution. The cost of pollution does not fit the "free market" model because the "cost" is inflicted, usually, on someone else other then the polluter. And so the greed-centered, aka. "enlightened self-interest", model breaks completely. Subsequently outside intervention is required, to artificially create costs for the polluters proportional to the toxicity of their pollution, which of course starts the free-market piggies squealing to high heaven in an instant.
The electricity your PC used when making your angry screed caused pollution. According to the EPA, the CO2 that you exhaled while composing your response is a pollutant.
Presumably, you feel that your post is so important that the pollution it creates -- pollution i have no choice but to contend with and accept, uncompensated -- was worth the tremendous insight you are offering.
Not really. Electricity here is generated nearly 100% with hydro-power and the remainder with solar and wind (and one nuclear plant that is near decommissioning and the waste of which is highly localized and already stored safely at great expense). While there are many other places where massive pollution occurs here, electricity isn't it (unlike USA which uses mostly fossil fuels).
On the other hand, the people dumping garbage in rathole countries for money are at least compensating those countries.
No they are not. The whole point of sending garbage to impoverished areas is that they are willing to accept their own future destruction in exchange for fleeting relief from immediate hunger, not to mention that many of the workers in these dumps are not even aware of the consequences to their health, until is too late.
Your real beef is with the governments in these places -- who think so little of their own people that they satisfy garbage-storage obligations by dumping them on their own people, who, in those countries, have NO choice in the matter.
Again, the countries of choice are the ones without functional governments (Africa) or governments dominated completely by the "free marketers" (China - which vies for the crown of irony for calling itself "communist").
While we should be quick to lay the appropriate amount of evil at greedy bastards who would love nothing more than to pollute you and I to the moon to shave a cent of their own expenses, an honest assessment of the facts will reveal that by far, the worst polluters in the world, in terms of environmental impact, but also in terms of how many humans are harmed without recourse, are governments.
I really wish that idiots like you could experience their Utopian life without governments, for the whole two weeks it would take for some rich asshole to organize himself a mercenary army and to chain your greedy ass to some cart in his new mine to work you to death. Your visceral hate of governments would quickly evaporate then, most likely even before your malnourished corpse would be recycled in the warlord's kennels. Oh, but you expected yourself to be the warlord? Too bad.
But if you were in China, you'd have no choice at all.
This is a fine example of the government fucking with the free market where the electronics would probably just be traded via garage sales and thrift stores for a few decades until technology improves to easily recycle them.
People so ignorant and so determined to foist their "me, me, me, I, myself, mine, all mine, fuck you!" world-view onto everyone else should be exhibits in some sort of "museum of insanity" where researchers into mental disorders could at least get some use out of you.
I mean, you really suppose that people would "trade via garage sales" all that junk which they actually pay money for to be hauled away into massive, monumental, all-consuming land fills that keep growing year after year around any major city in the developed world? Really?
The natural state of affairs in the consumer distopia is to, get this, consume without any regard to the consequences. People buy plastic crap, they use it until it breaks (a period usually measured in months) and then they promptly throw it out, followed by a new purchase of cheap disposable crap. And this model is a pivotal element of all the so-called "industrialized economies". Recycling occurs in the fucked-up model of "free market" only if some material in the waste is somehow worth extracting, at a minimum effort possible, which is precisely why it is shipped to China and Africa where children can have the privilege of wallowing in toxic shit to extract traces of raw materials. That is an unregulated "free market" at work. It works as long as the children are disposable and dying of toxic exposure tomorrow beats dying of hunger today. "Freedom" of choice in the "free market", as long as it isn't spoiled by all these "evil communist gubmint" types trying to do meddle doing evil things like trying to stop impoverished kids from inhaling toxic fumes and mountains of toxic crap from growing. The glorious "freedom" to pollute as long as it is somewhere else then you, cause "you got yours and the rest should go get theirs", you mendacious fuck, no?
BTW the DR-DOS issue was Windows 3.1 refusing to run on anything but Microsoft DOS. This was a short lived problem for DR-DOS and had nothing to do with a competing GUI. Don't let the facts ruin your rant.
Your mendacious trollery finally got the better of you. While I point out that Microsoft engaged in an active campaign to destroy any innovation and to control the pace of introduction of concepts developed elsewhere into the Microsoft product ecosystem, for which reams of court verified evidence exist and for which they lost multi-hundred million dollar lawsuits, you whine about which particular flavour of their anti-innovative techniques they applied where (and wrongly to boot, since Microsoft Word for DOS also refused to run on DR-DOS, long before Windows became popular).
Ummm no. Apple made Apple branded printers which worked great with the Mac. And yes their software also worked well with epson compatible machines, but the best results always came from an Apple branded printer.
You are an ignorant moron. So even if Apple did exactly what you claimed was such a great "innovation" at Microsoft (and which is pretty much a basic requirement of any consumer-grade OS) now you claim that it is somehow not so because "best results" were achieved with Apple printers? Never you mind that the EPSON ESC/P language was widely emulated in a lot of printers, all capable of working with a Mac and none "branded" by Apple (the only dot-matrix so branded were the ImageWriter series made by C. Itoh, all of which used the QuickDraw lanugage). The PostScript (the language used by actual LaserWriter Apple printers) was supported by HP and many other printer makers right from the beginning. In fact most Apple laser printer users ended up eventually with an HP laser printer which resulted in discontinuation of all printer efforts at Apple. Last Apple printer was produced in 1999.
In short Apple Mac OS did exactly what Windows later did, and which it had to as it is a basic requirement of a consumer-grade OS. Microsoft "innovation" my ass.
Also where was the expansion slot? How do I upgrade my graphics card? Oh yea I can't. But at least in the 80's everything looked good in black and white.
That depended on which Apple product you are referring to. Many had the capability for upgrades. A whole market for Apple add-ons existed as it did for the Wintel platform. You being too ignorant to know it, does not change the fact that it did. Even before McIntosh, Apple II had expansion slots (long before Windows was around). Original McIntosh was designed specifically as an "all-in-one" machine from the point of view of graphics because most of its target audience wished to be so at the time but its OS was fully capable of expansion via (then revolutionary) SCSI interfaces. McIntosh II, released shortly after the original (and with the same OS), had an ability to have video cards replaced and what not.
This of course is just focusing in Apple. Amiga OS was even more capable at the time, running circles around Windows with its true preemptive multi-tasking and 3rd party hardware support, making it the staple of video editing studios for more then a decade.
Microsoft did not "innovate" neither support for 3rd party hardware nor GUIs nor multi-tasking. Microsoft has always been a follower, not a leader and its main focus has always been on squashing innovative competitors and then appropriating their ideas.
Oh and when did Xerox ever sell a home computer?
Trollish sophistry. The discussion was about "innovation", not about who sold how many cookie-cutter products. If you went by that kind of logic, the greatest "innovators" ever would be the oil companies, whose product was created by geologic processes and hasn't changed from day one of their operation and yet who sell untold billions of it. Xerox labs (along with many universi
The credibility of patents is eroded day by day, diluted into pure paperwork used for litigation fodder.
That is a design feature, a direct consequence of a society run by lawyers for the benefit of lawyers and as an afterthought also sometimes their most wealthy clients.
Did I mention multi-user? or multi-tasking? No I did not. Nor did I mention BASIC. I did notice that you couldn't answer the question. Maybe you didn't want to admit that the answer was Microsoft Windows?
I was talking about the earlier time-frame of the early DOS days which were the foundation of later Microsoft "successes" as a de-facto monopoly (yes, students wrote multi-user OS kernels for assignments back then even). You were not specific. Furthermore, your question about Windows is utterly irrelevant as at the time Windows appeared on the scene, Microsoft had near total contractual strangle-hold on all PC makers and near total technological user lock-in. No other OS could be shipped at the factory with PCs, a subject of later (politically butchered and neutered) legal proceedings against Microsoft. Some DOS variants (the lock-in to the abomination that was DOS was already too strong to break) were shipped earlier and were ruthlessly eradicated by means like alteration in Microsoft products to break when running on them. See also DR-DOS lawsuit. So it is like asking someone "who is your favourite supplier" while one of the suppliers in question is holding a gun to the interviewee's head. The answer is bound to be somewhat biased. By the time any attempts at competition became feasible (due to the breakup of Microsoft/IBM abused spouse relationship) it was far too late because no other OS could win irrespective of its features or price due to a huge entrenchment of Microsoft ecosystem and would require near total emulation of all Windows functions as a backwards compatibility feature. Which is what killed OS/2.
One has to admit a certain amount of conniving cleverness at thievery and thuggish acumen to Bill Gates in this regard, pretty much the same way one has to offer grudging respect to Al Capone. But these tactics were "innovated" somewhere in the Ancient Phoenicia, right after they invented this thing called "money".
To further my point made in my original comment - Microsoft created and marketed an OS that worked with a multitude of hardware. Windows was the first consumer operating system that handled all the different hardware available and freed the application writer from having to worry about printer codes, video codecs, or graphics acceleration. Gone were the days that a home user had to pick up the printer manual and enter the codes for bold and underline into their word processor. The consumer no longer had to limit their hardware choices to a single computer manufacturer. For example a home user was free to buy any printer they could afford and as long as it said that it worked with Windows on the box the user was pretty sure that it would work when they got it home.
You've described Apple McIntosh, which came out long before Windows did. And all of these concepts were innovated at places like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (where both Apple and Microsoft got their ideas). Even the mouse was invented there.
Computer manufacturers loved Windows.
They loved money. Their "love" of Windows was instilled into them by means of blackmail, legal thuggery and de-facto monopoly status.
They had a user-friendly OS that allowed them to make PC clones and picked the components that fit their intended price/performance. Dell, Compaq, Gateway, Acer, E-Machines, and the huge selection of beige boxes would not have existed without Windows. The only thing the manufacturer had to promise was that it was made for Windows. The large number of computer suppliers drove the price of a home computer down from over $2000 to a much more affordable around $1000 or less. Not to mention the growing number of home computer hobbyists that were able to pick up a Computer Shopper and build a Windows compatible machine.
You've described pretty much any consumer-grade product be it an OS, stereo components or car accessories.
First you chose to pick a "tear jerker" segment of the entitlement program and suggest that the parent is asking them to starve to death. Completely ignoring the huge amount of dollars wasted on different agencies who have overlapping responsibilities that dispense these entitlements.
The original poster did not differentiate between legitimate causes, fraud or bureaucracy. He simply, being probably an Alissa Zhinovievna's follower, communicated his general disdain for all things altruistic and community building along with his unshakable admiration for insane greed.
Like how many operating systems during the 80's and early 90's operated on a "IBM" personal computer running a multitude of different hardware configurations? I think thats pretty f'ing innovative.
Oh quit with the bullshit. While Gates was busy buying a boot-loader and reselling it as an "operating system", every Computer Science University course worth its salt was handing out student assignments that involved writing a multi-tasking, multi-user OS for micro-processor architectures. Gates would have flunked (with a good reason as history amply shows). His earlier "innovation" of a BASIC interpreter was at the time an obvious choice and common-place amongst pretty much all home "computer" vendors.
Bill is the kind of "innovator" who "innovated" use of rubber bands and duct tape to "reinvent" a bicycle and declared himself a "visionary" and "discoverer of the most efficient propulsion system known to man"! If it weren't for IBM's grave lapses of reason and the utterly abysmal gullibility of the general public when it came to computing, he would be delivering pizza for a living.
I question your source that Microsoft paid $0 dollars in US Taxes, and you didn't consider the amount of income taxes paid by the employees of Microsoft Corporation.
Nice try. The income taxes paid by employees are of no import, as they would have been paid irrespective if they work for Microsoft, making won-tons in a Chinese restaurant or digging ditches in rural Montana. True, the amount of taxes would have been slightly less in a non-monopoly thievery scenario, but given that a vast majority of the loot made its way to Gates and a few other cronies, the difference would have been negligible.
On top of that, you completely disregard the existence of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that funds immunizations in underdeveloped countries.
Just like I disregard other "charities" set up by notorious thieves and murderous thugs, such as Carnegie or Rockefeller for example. Looting a lot of wealth out of a lot of people and then giving some of it back out of a guilty conscience, to pet projects and with full tax deductions, is not going to rehabilitate Gates any more then it those others before him.
That's right! We should allow our enemies to build up their forces and position them where they can cause maximum damage to us, our armed forces, and our interests abroad before we do anything. After all, if you see a suspicious-looking guy prowling around your home, checking the doors and windows to see if they're locked, all while armed to to the teeth, you damned sure shouldn't call the cops until after he's broken in, raped your wife, killed your kids, and started carrying your belongings out the front door.
You are a moron. I mean, have you ever heard of diplomacy? Defensive preparations? Defensive pacts? Alliances? That wee thing called NATO? What, I mean what bleeping nation-state with an ounce of self-preservation would attack any of the NATO members and expect to win? Even the Soviets, with all their industry and thousands of nuke tipped-ICBMs, considered the proposition logistically laughable and focused on their own defense instead.
All this freaking out about shadowy, cartoon-villain-managed "enemies" ready to spring a Red Dawn on the poor hapless US of A would be a laughable lunacy if it were not a ticket to multi-trillion dollar looting of treasury, a way to chip-away at personal liberties and a license to strut around the globe murdering anyone who dares to look up.
Funny you should mention Poland and Japan in your post. In both cases, the U.S. didn't pre-emptively strike, largely due to isolationist politics like what you're suggesting. The result was a World War where more than 60 million people were killed. How many might've been saved if Hitler had been stopped when he first violated the Treaty of Versailles? How many might've been saved if Japan's imperialist intentions -- blatantly displayed in China prior to 1941 -- had been curbed before their navy had built up its ability to hit Pearl Harbor? But no. We sat and watched as our enemies prepared. We listened to them preach world domination on the radio and did nothing. We let them get away with larger and larger violations while we gave bigger and bigger chunks of appeasement. Churchill said it best after the war when he stated "at one point, a memo would've stopped Hitler."
Should US strike first, the WWII would still have erupted except the US would have been on the losing side, having been the reviled aggressor and facing a German-Japanese-Soviet (and possibly many other nations) alliance of convenience. Given that in Europe 9 out of 10 German soldiers killed were killed on the Eastern front and that Germany deployed 200 divisions there while all the other Allies combined faced mere 50 on the Western front, even without any Soviet support a German-Japanese alliance would have presented a force capable of overwhelming a lone-wolf, self-righteous US. Apparently you did not consider that. It figures.
But you are one of those who refuses to learn from history. It's a good thing you aren't making policy because your ignorance of it would make the rest of us relive it.
As I already said, you are a moron. Your "lessons" from history are limited to "US always right. US big. US strong. US bash first!".
Well, the problem the "defenders of the troops" like yourself run into is that the US troops operate under a very questionable set of Rules Of Engagement, which they happily follow. Add to this a very low value of lives they place on non-troops, particularly local civilians, and you get a package which makes "defense of the troops" an exercise in futility. The troops, guided by a set of truly "home-grown American values", it turns out, are their own worst enemies.
Now all of this would have been a non-starter if the troops were on their own home turf defending against an invader. But even while pursuing the said invader the US (and other Allies in WWII) were known to go overboard quite easily, committing an impressive number of outright war crimes, to which they later applied Hitler's own adage of "the victor writes the history" in the time-tested tradition of truly vile double-standards that very few victorious groups in history did not ply.
In short, your stance is roughly equivalent to that of some mis-guided charity activist in early 1940s Germany who rallies "support for the troops" because, you know, they are nearly all hapless draftees, God-fearing sons, brothers and husbands, freezing their butts on the outskirts of Stalingrad and one should not blame them for the decisions of the politicians... except for that little bit of rather.. err... enthusiastic following and support for these decisions by the very said troops - until things went pear-shaped, that is.
As I said, a punitive expedition to punish them for supporting Al Queda would have had us in, the Taliban bloodied, and the population upset, and our troops safely at home, all within a year. Actually, six months should have been long enough. The population would have lost faith in that Taliban, and created new parties and powers when we withdrew. The only interest we should have shown the world as we withdrew, was to warn the OTHER local powers that we wouldn't tolerate any of them invading after we left.
While I agree that Afghanistan war is a lost cause for the US, what you propose is sheer lunacy. If you had bothered to read even a cursory summary of recent Afghan history you would know that Taliban was essentially unassailable. It overpowered (very violently) the communist government and all the other violent bands of warlords, bandits and thieving locals and proceeded to murder anyone even remotely capable of resisting it, which it has done for nearly a decade years. Faith of the people in it was not even a remote factor in this equation. In 2001 there was no viable political force capable of replacing it, nor there is one now, because to oppose a bunch of crazed, totalitarian, fanatical, religious medievalists one needs an ideologically united opposition group with common appeal - a task impossible when vast majority of the locals are themselves illiterate medievalists with a generous sprinkling of religious nuts.
Afghanistan will change, eventually, but its road to modernity and any semblance of a stable political system will be a very long one, many decades in the making and no amount of foreign military intervention is going to change that.
The best policy in 2001 was a special ops extraction of top Al-Queda leaders (preferably for a trial in Hague which would have legitimized the US operation in the long view of history) followed by an uncompromising containment of the Islamist nuts within their own pot, very much like one seals a highly contagious and incurable deadly disease.
Absolutely! Particularly enslaved are those unable to work due to, say, debilitating diseases! If only you could convince them to die of starvation quietly, they would truly cast off their yokes of slavery and croak totally free! No?
And then there are those poor over taxed "innovators" like, say, Bill Gates, who wouldn't know innovation if he tripped over it, fell down the stairs pulling it behind him and if it landed on his face with a bone crunching impact. Poor tax molested Billy and his bunch of jolly henchmen! I mean just think how many more poorly thought-out rehashes of technologies and ideas invented in 1960s could we have if he paid less then zero in taxes (since near $0 is what Microsoft and many other pan-national conglomerates already manage quite handsomely as it is)! The mind boggles!
Wars are a different matter, you gotta fight wars.
Only if they are defensive wars against other nation states who attacked you. The problem with the US policy is that it attacks others "preemptively" (the very same official reason given by Hitler when he attacked Poland and by Japan when it struck at Pearl Harbor) or attacks nations in pursuit of amorphous non-state entities and on other, flimsiest of excuses all the while pursuing a thinly-veiled strategy of global domination.
In this context "gotta" apparently is a result of a supremacist attitude and total disregard for anything but greed and thirst for power, very like that of a typical citizen of Ancient Rome who too would believe that the Empire just "gotta" expand into those "barbarian" lands to bring "civilization" in exchange for a slight payment of loot and slaves.
In modern times the US exacts a different kind of payment for exporting of its "civilization" but on the altar of its self-declared superiority, the dead just keep piling up all the same.
but sidebar is very good. it saves the 2-3 extra clicks required to do an advanced search.
Well, yes and no. "More shopping"? That is far better achieved simply by clicking at the "Results from shopping" in-line result sampleand thus changing the whole view to "Shopping" (or using the top menu bar for the same effect). And excluding results by, say, a set date range is actually far inferior to sorting them by date (newest first) while within limit, which is not easily accessible from the bar in a click. The nearest you can get is the Timeline view that is in the wrong
order. And even if there was something actually so useful as to be needed with one click, the bar is simply located at the wrong place: i.e. the side of the screen, particularly since Google violates HTML design principles and restricts their whole page to a particular pixel width (which leaves nearly half of my screen blank along its width).
So as far as I can tell the side bar is just more eye useless candy that takes place of the actual search results due to the reduced by it screen space (and it fades in and scrolls and nearly does back-flips...) that brings very little to the table, especially that access to different search areas is still available at the top where it has always been and where it is far less intrusive.
I was just about to reply when I realized that I have violated my long standing policy of never replying to ACs, ACs who want it both ways, to use their real accounts to down-mod my replies and then still spew their froth at me. Oops, free ride has ended.
Oh and one more thing, these "usability" studies just surely, I mean positively, fingers-crossed and all, showed that users are even more productive with full fucking screen fade-ins of random high resolution images - much, much worse then fucking Bing!
Which, as if to underline the level of stupidity in your water carrying for Google, they introduced today! I have been receiving phone calls all morning already. Fuck, fucketey, fuck Google, with a rusty steel brush covered in pepper spray! Shit, looks like I am putting Google home page into the list of banned web pages at the web filter....
Slashdot Mirror
That is just sophistry. Everything is "inside" of some kind of concept or definition, be it thermodynamics, physics, biology, chemistry or the Universe in general. He keeps claiming that "every single thing" (direct quote) is subject to the rules of thermodynamics (a patent falsehood - information for example is not) and then goes onto claiming that the case is the same with the rules of the marketplace (even more ridiculous claim since economics covers only a small fraction of human activities and there are many economic schemes not based on free market). And to top it off he then claimed that economy is "not a closed system" followed one sentence later by "the system is closed by" etc. In short he has no clue what he is saying and then you butt in with the old canard of "But ... but ... you didn't read the ox entrails and chicken bones he spilled right! You misunderstood his psychic waves!".
I responded to what he wrote and what he wrote is utter nonsense.
Apparently I failed to tune into his "sympathetic brain waves", no? Is that what you mean by "seem to"? He claimed (direct quote, emphasis mine) that: "Any deviation from a self-balancing equation of economics will lead to an eventual collapse of some sort. Economies balance themselves out, our attempts at interfering by government or any other forces will always fail in the long term (a period of time comparable to a long life span)."
It can't get any more unambiguous than that. But yet you insist that we fail to detect what he really meant by it ... In fact you sound like one of those desperate apologists for some religious nut, it is not that the nut spouts incomprehensible, self-contradictory crap, it is we who "fail to understand" his "deeper truths".
As I pointed out above and in my other posts, I respond to what he wrote and not to what you claim was supposedly in his head when he did so. And what he wrote is self-contradictory and nonsensical. It is you in fact who attempts to parse and interpret his drivel in a favorable light because of your preconceived notions which apparently enable you to "understand" sentences that negate each other.
Because it is utterly impractical. The hospital staff changes frequently, the amount of information available before hand to the potential patient is very limited and the information that is available is not very useful (it requires in-depth medical knowledge) and the statistical "results" are highly dependent on demographics, age groups etc and so on. Also, unlike any normal purchase, there is no "trying" the product, its do-or-die (literally) and so there is no way to move to a different vendor after being dis-satisfied (i.e. 6 feet under).
The "free market" model works well for spuds, eggs and bread where the ability for a consumer to be informed is near total, but as the complexity of products, the amount of necessary knowledge required to make an informed choice and the number of external factors increases, so decreases the applicability of that model. Medical care is an extreme case where all of these factors conspire to essentially demolish the model completely.
I already did so in many ways.
It is no different at all but we were talking about the applicability of the "free market" model which clearly breaks in this case. The government does not operate under the same model as private enterprise and its model of operation is more compatible with providing medical care, assuming that the government is functional, which sadly cannot be said of the US of A - hence all of these problems that do not exist in such great number elsewhere. The Canadian system (where I live) although not perfect by any means is running circles around the US in pretty much any societal category that matters, including cost per capita. Which of course leads quickly to all sorts of desperate attempts to discredit it, like the ridiculous whining about wait times for elective surgeries, ignoring of course the fact that the wait times for an average patient (i.e. an under-insured sucker) in the USA are comparable if not longer, never you mind that many options are closed to him.
Because that is simply not possible. The doctor or hospital to which the patient is being rushed is determined not by any purchasing criteria the poor sucker could possibly get out of a glossy brochure before hand but by the simple logistics and necessities of medical treatment, i.e. the nearest hospital capable of the type of care needed, regardless of who is running it. The whole idea of "making an informed purchase" before hand is simply not applicable no matter how one tries to twist the facts. Insurance is at best removed by at least one level from the actual purchase and thus cannot be thought of as the purchase itself, especially that insurance is reactive, i.e. limited refunds are delivered after the fact.
Similarly, drugs are being bought because the doctors prescribe them, thus removing any practical consumer choice from the patient, not to mention the fact that the patient is usually incapable of determination of the usefulness of the drugs.
And so on. The examples just pile up.
Which of course is the point, that without outside "interference" the "free markets" tend to run completely amok, mostly due to the fact that their very limited model fails miserably outside a very narrow small-scale domain due to a huge number of real-world factors messing up the simplistic 18th century idea in ways innumerable. Without government "interference" the whole thing would rapidly devolve into some kind of a bizarre modern version of the feudal order. Not that it is not happening anyway, although in slow motion, with governments steadily losing power to multi-mega-billion-pan-national businesses many of whom wield more power and resources then 30 or so smallest nations put together. In recent years the wealth of the top 1% increased rapidly while the wealth of the bottom 90% declined. Given the current pace, the top 1% percent will own over 90% percent of all wealth on the planet within a few decades. All but a very few governments are powerful enough to stand up to that kind of plutocratic order.
The belief in universal, one-size-fits-all power of the "free market" is a religious one, no scientific model of any kind, be it in physics, chemistry, mathematics etc is applicable to everything. All have their very specific domains, outside of which their tenets are simply not applicable. The same is true for the "free market", which indeed works in a clever way to take advantage of mental illness from which many people suffer called "greed" to try to harness it to construct a workable society which is would not self-destruct in an instant. Only a religious zealot would claim that his model, a.k.a religion, is universal and applicable to "everything". Scientific model of the "free market" works only under certain idealized conditions, such as unlimited availability of information about products, capability of purchasers to evaluate the goods being bought, a large number of competing vendors of similar size, inability to construct artificial (technological, geographical, cultural etc) barriers to entry for competitors, etc etc. Conditions that simply do not exist in a huge number of areas of human interaction and exchange of labor and goods.
It still constitutes "interference" in the oh-so-holy and untouchable by the dirty paws of the electorate, your pure and pristine sanctum of the "free market". Or are you really unaware that we can still see all your ranting, raving and disgorging copious amounts of spittle over this very idea in all these posts right above?
Yea, look at that, make sure you ignore the fact that the HK government ensures that all these banknotes are mutually equivalent and freely exchangeable and also persecutes forgeries, because if they did not, then you could also look also at the other fine free-market idea of corporate-issued money to go hand-in-hand with this profit-generating concept.
Right, so which is it, "the economy is not a closed system" or "the system is closed by the boundaries of accessible world"? You can't even keep your lunatic claims from being self-contradictory.
Which of course has nothing whatsoever to do with thermodynamics, never you mind nebulous terms like "being in balance". In "balance" respective to what property?
Something that you clearly avoid at all costs and at all times.
It's even more stupid than that. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy in a closed system is constant, i.e. it can only be transfered but cannot be created or destroyed, while pretty much every priest of the the "free market" religion claims that the markets are not a "zero-sum game" and that wealth (which in the pretense to thermodynamics is supposed to substitute for energy) is continuously created. QED. The "thermodynamics governs markets" is just one example of the depths these religious loons are willing to descend to try to justify their all-consuming greed and sociopathic urges.
Unlike you, I, lacking your spectacularly over-sized ego, have no trouble getting through doors. Try again.
Right, particularly theoretical math or love affairs. You are a religious zealot who, as religious zealots usually do, tries to ignore all the inconvenient facts in a desperate attempt to make the world fit your religion. Thus in your - like all other "free market" converts - view, everything must revolve around greed. Any human activity not motivated by an insane avarice is therefore to be denied, because, you know, "every single thing is a subject to the rules of the marketplace".
There is no relationship whatsoever between thermodynamics and markets. You have to be a particularly deluded religious lunatic of the "free market" religion to believe such nonsense. There is some vague, very large scale, resemblance between all high-order chaotic systems, due to the general rules of chaotic systems, but these remote similarities disappear upon any closer examination.
Right, it is only you who is smart, all around you are stupid and mis-informed. That is probably why you can't fit through most doors, something about your ego being too wide.
None of what you said addresses my point in the slightest. The fact that at one time or another some (usually very basic, limited by expense-caps and co-pays) forms of healthcare were affordable to some of the US citizens still does not change the fundamental fact that healtcare in general is not subject to the rules of the marketplace, no more than fire-fighting or traffic lights.
While I agree with the rest of your rant, I must point out that healthcare lacks the necessary pre-conditions for a market activity and as such cannot be left to the tender mercies of the capitalist "free market". One of the fundamental problems is the lack of any possibility whatsoever of consumer making an "informed purchase" from competing vendors, particularly while unconscious in an ambulance or in excruciating pain. And it just goes downhill from here.
Therefore it logically follows that healthcare has to be dealt with in a completely different framework, very much the same way as other essential societal infrastructure, like the justice system or roads.
It is rather simple: "worth" can be calculated in many different ways, while the "free market" is capable of only one type of calculation, i.e. monetary. That is its key failing. That is why all the "free marketers" must (for their model to work) ignore all human motivations other then greed. They must ignore for example the possibility of people pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake, artists creating art out of a desire to share their emotions, etc and so on. None of these fit the "model" and, worse, they fuck it up severely and so must be denied.
The same is true of pollution. The cost of pollution does not fit the "free market" model because the "cost" is inflicted, usually, on someone else other then the polluter. And so the greed-centered, aka. "enlightened self-interest", model breaks completely. Subsequently outside intervention is required, to artificially create costs for the polluters proportional to the toxicity of their pollution, which of course starts the free-market piggies squealing to high heaven in an instant.
Not really. Electricity here is generated nearly 100% with hydro-power and the remainder with solar and wind (and one nuclear plant that is near decommissioning and the waste of which is highly localized and already stored safely at great expense). While there are many other places where massive pollution occurs here, electricity isn't it (unlike USA which uses mostly fossil fuels).
No they are not. The whole point of sending garbage to impoverished areas is that they are willing to accept their own future destruction in exchange for fleeting relief from immediate hunger, not to mention that many of the workers in these dumps are not even aware of the consequences to their health, until is too late.
Again, the countries of choice are the ones without functional governments (Africa) or governments dominated completely by the "free marketers" (China - which vies for the crown of irony for calling itself "communist").
I really wish that idiots like you could experience their Utopian life without governments, for the whole two weeks it would take for some rich asshole to organize himself a mercenary army and to chain your greedy ass to some cart in his new mine to work you to death. Your visceral hate of governments would quickly evaporate then, most likely even before your malnourished corpse would be recycled in the warlord's kennels. Oh, but you expected yourself to be the warlord? Too bad.
On the contrar
People so ignorant and so determined to foist their "me, me, me, I, myself, mine, all mine, fuck you!" world-view onto everyone else should be exhibits in some sort of "museum of insanity" where researchers into mental disorders could at least get some use out of you.
I mean, you really suppose that people would "trade via garage sales" all that junk which they actually pay money for to be hauled away into massive, monumental, all-consuming land fills that keep growing year after year around any major city in the developed world? Really?
The natural state of affairs in the consumer distopia is to, get this, consume without any regard to the consequences. People buy plastic crap, they use it until it breaks (a period usually measured in months) and then they promptly throw it out, followed by a new purchase of cheap disposable crap. And this model is a pivotal element of all the so-called "industrialized economies". Recycling occurs in the fucked-up model of "free market" only if some material in the waste is somehow worth extracting, at a minimum effort possible, which is precisely why it is shipped to China and Africa where children can have the privilege of wallowing in toxic shit to extract traces of raw materials. That is an unregulated "free market" at work. It works as long as the children are disposable and dying of toxic exposure tomorrow beats dying of hunger today. "Freedom" of choice in the "free market", as long as it isn't spoiled by all these "evil communist gubmint" types trying to do meddle doing evil things like trying to stop impoverished kids from inhaling toxic fumes and mountains of toxic crap from growing. The glorious "freedom" to pollute as long as it is somewhere else then you, cause "you got yours and the rest should go get theirs", you mendacious fuck, no?
Your mendacious trollery finally got the better of you. While I point out that Microsoft engaged in an active campaign to destroy any innovation and to control the pace of introduction of concepts developed elsewhere into the Microsoft product ecosystem, for which reams of court verified evidence exist and for which they lost multi-hundred million dollar lawsuits, you whine about which particular flavour of their anti-innovative techniques they applied where (and wrongly to boot, since Microsoft Word for DOS also refused to run on DR-DOS, long before Windows became popular).
You are an ignorant moron. So even if Apple did exactly what you claimed was such a great "innovation" at Microsoft (and which is pretty much a basic requirement of any consumer-grade OS) now you claim that it is somehow not so because "best results" were achieved with Apple printers? Never you mind that the EPSON ESC/P language was widely emulated in a lot of printers, all capable of working with a Mac and none "branded" by Apple (the only dot-matrix so branded were the ImageWriter series made by C. Itoh, all of which used the QuickDraw lanugage). The PostScript (the language used by actual LaserWriter Apple printers) was supported by HP and many other printer makers right from the beginning. In fact most Apple laser printer users ended up eventually with an HP laser printer which resulted in discontinuation of all printer efforts at Apple. Last Apple printer was produced in 1999.
In short Apple Mac OS did exactly what Windows later did, and which it had to as it is a basic requirement of a consumer-grade OS. Microsoft "innovation" my ass.
That depended on which Apple product you are referring to. Many had the capability for upgrades. A whole market for Apple add-ons existed as it did for the Wintel platform. You being too ignorant to know it, does not change the fact that it did. Even before McIntosh, Apple II had expansion slots (long before Windows was around). Original McIntosh was designed specifically as an "all-in-one" machine from the point of view of graphics because most of its target audience wished to be so at the time but its OS was fully capable of expansion via (then revolutionary) SCSI interfaces. McIntosh II, released shortly after the original (and with the same OS), had an ability to have video cards replaced and what not.
This of course is just focusing in Apple. Amiga OS was even more capable at the time, running circles around Windows with its true preemptive multi-tasking and 3rd party hardware support, making it the staple of video editing studios for more then a decade.
Microsoft did not "innovate" neither support for 3rd party hardware nor GUIs nor multi-tasking. Microsoft has always been a follower, not a leader and its main focus has always been on squashing innovative competitors and then appropriating their ideas.
Trollish sophistry. The discussion was about "innovation", not about who sold how many cookie-cutter products. If you went by that kind of logic, the greatest "innovators" ever would be the oil companies, whose product was created by geologic processes and hasn't changed from day one of their operation and yet who sell untold billions of it. Xerox labs (along with many universi
That is a design feature, a direct consequence of a society run by lawyers for the benefit of lawyers and as an afterthought also sometimes their most wealthy clients.
I was talking about the earlier time-frame of the early DOS days which were the foundation of later Microsoft "successes" as a de-facto monopoly (yes, students wrote multi-user OS kernels for assignments back then even). You were not specific. Furthermore, your question about Windows is utterly irrelevant as at the time Windows appeared on the scene, Microsoft had near total contractual strangle-hold on all PC makers and near total technological user lock-in. No other OS could be shipped at the factory with PCs, a subject of later (politically butchered and neutered) legal proceedings against Microsoft. Some DOS variants (the lock-in to the abomination that was DOS was already too strong to break) were shipped earlier and were ruthlessly eradicated by means like alteration in Microsoft products to break when running on them. See also DR-DOS lawsuit. So it is like asking someone "who is your favourite supplier" while one of the suppliers in question is holding a gun to the interviewee's head. The answer is bound to be somewhat biased. By the time any attempts at competition became feasible (due to the breakup of Microsoft/IBM abused spouse relationship) it was far too late because no other OS could win irrespective of its features or price due to a huge entrenchment of Microsoft ecosystem and would require near total emulation of all Windows functions as a backwards compatibility feature. Which is what killed OS/2.
One has to admit a certain amount of conniving cleverness at thievery and thuggish acumen to Bill Gates in this regard, pretty much the same way one has to offer grudging respect to Al Capone. But these tactics were "innovated" somewhere in the Ancient Phoenicia, right after they invented this thing called "money".
You've described Apple McIntosh, which came out long before Windows did. And all of these concepts were innovated at places like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (where both Apple and Microsoft got their ideas). Even the mouse was invented there.
They loved money. Their "love" of Windows was instilled into them by means of blackmail, legal thuggery and de-facto monopoly status.
You've described pretty much any consumer-grade product be it an OS, stereo components or car accessories.
The original poster did not differentiate between legitimate causes, fraud or bureaucracy. He simply, being probably an Alissa Zhinovievna's follower, communicated his general disdain for all things altruistic and community building along with his unshakable admiration for insane greed.
Oh quit with the bullshit. While Gates was busy buying a boot-loader and reselling it as an "operating system", every Computer Science University course worth its salt was handing out student assignments that involved writing a multi-tasking, multi-user OS for micro-processor architectures. Gates would have flunked (with a good reason as history amply shows). His earlier "innovation" of a BASIC interpreter was at the time an obvious choice and common-place amongst pretty much all home "computer" vendors.
Bill is the kind of "innovator" who "innovated" use of rubber bands and duct tape to "reinvent" a bicycle and declared himself a "visionary" and "discoverer of the most efficient propulsion system known to man"! If it weren't for IBM's grave lapses of reason and the utterly abysmal gullibility of the general public when it came to computing, he would be delivering pizza for a living.
Nice try. The income taxes paid by employees are of no import, as they would have been paid irrespective if they work for Microsoft, making won-tons in a Chinese restaurant or digging ditches in rural Montana. True, the amount of taxes would have been slightly less in a non-monopoly thievery scenario, but given that a vast majority of the loot made its way to Gates and a few other cronies, the difference would have been negligible.
Just like I disregard other "charities" set up by notorious thieves and murderous thugs, such as Carnegie or Rockefeller for example. Looting a lot of wealth out of a lot of people and then giving some of it back out of a guilty conscience, to pet projects and with full tax deductions, is not going to rehabilitate Gates any more then it those others before him.
You are a moron. I mean, have you ever heard of diplomacy? Defensive preparations? Defensive pacts? Alliances? That wee thing called NATO? What, I mean what bleeping nation-state with an ounce of self-preservation would attack any of the NATO members and expect to win? Even the Soviets, with all their industry and thousands of nuke tipped-ICBMs, considered the proposition logistically laughable and focused on their own defense instead.
All this freaking out about shadowy, cartoon-villain-managed "enemies" ready to spring a Red Dawn on the poor hapless US of A would be a laughable lunacy if it were not a ticket to multi-trillion dollar looting of treasury, a way to chip-away at personal liberties and a license to strut around the globe murdering anyone who dares to look up.
Should US strike first, the WWII would still have erupted except the US would have been on the losing side, having been the reviled aggressor and facing a German-Japanese-Soviet (and possibly many other nations) alliance of convenience. Given that in Europe 9 out of 10 German soldiers killed were killed on the Eastern front and that Germany deployed 200 divisions there while all the other Allies combined faced mere 50 on the Western front, even without any Soviet support a German-Japanese alliance would have presented a force capable of overwhelming a lone-wolf, self-righteous US. Apparently you did not consider that. It figures.
As I already said, you are a moron. Your "lessons" from history are limited to "US always right. US big. US strong. US bash first!".
Well, the problem the "defenders of the troops" like yourself run into is that the US troops operate under a very questionable set of Rules Of Engagement, which they happily follow. Add to this a very low value of lives they place on non-troops, particularly local civilians, and you get a package which makes "defense of the troops" an exercise in futility. The troops, guided by a set of truly "home-grown American values", it turns out, are their own worst enemies.
Now all of this would have been a non-starter if the troops were on their own home turf defending against an invader. But even while pursuing the said invader the US (and other Allies in WWII) were known to go overboard quite easily, committing an impressive number of outright war crimes, to which they later applied Hitler's own adage of "the victor writes the history" in the time-tested tradition of truly vile double-standards that very few victorious groups in history did not ply.
In short, your stance is roughly equivalent to that of some mis-guided charity activist in early 1940s Germany who rallies "support for the troops" because, you know, they are nearly all hapless draftees, God-fearing sons, brothers and husbands, freezing their butts on the outskirts of Stalingrad and one should not blame them for the decisions of the politicians ... except for that little bit of rather .. err ... enthusiastic following and support for these decisions by the very said troops - until things went pear-shaped, that is.
While I agree that Afghanistan war is a lost cause for the US, what you propose is sheer lunacy. If you had bothered to read even a cursory summary of recent Afghan history you would know that Taliban was essentially unassailable. It overpowered (very violently) the communist government and all the other violent bands of warlords, bandits and thieving locals and proceeded to murder anyone even remotely capable of resisting it, which it has done for nearly a decade years. Faith of the people in it was not even a remote factor in this equation. In 2001 there was no viable political force capable of replacing it, nor there is one now, because to oppose a bunch of crazed, totalitarian, fanatical, religious medievalists one needs an ideologically united opposition group with common appeal - a task impossible when vast majority of the locals are themselves illiterate medievalists with a generous sprinkling of religious nuts.
Afghanistan will change, eventually, but its road to modernity and any semblance of a stable political system will be a very long one, many decades in the making and no amount of foreign military intervention is going to change that.
The best policy in 2001 was a special ops extraction of top Al-Queda leaders (preferably for a trial in Hague which would have legitimized the US operation in the long view of history) followed by an uncompromising containment of the Islamist nuts within their own pot, very much like one seals a highly contagious and incurable deadly disease.
Absolutely! Particularly enslaved are those unable to work due to, say, debilitating diseases! If only you could convince them to die of starvation quietly, they would truly cast off their yokes of slavery and croak totally free! No?
And then there are those poor over taxed "innovators" like, say, Bill Gates, who wouldn't know innovation if he tripped over it, fell down the stairs pulling it behind him and if it landed on his face with a bone crunching impact. Poor tax molested Billy and his bunch of jolly henchmen! I mean just think how many more poorly thought-out rehashes of technologies and ideas invented in 1960s could we have if he paid less then zero in taxes (since near $0 is what Microsoft and many other pan-national conglomerates already manage quite handsomely as it is)! The mind boggles!
Only if they are defensive wars against other nation states who attacked you. The problem with the US policy is that it attacks others "preemptively" (the very same official reason given by Hitler when he attacked Poland and by Japan when it struck at Pearl Harbor) or attacks nations in pursuit of amorphous non-state entities and on other, flimsiest of excuses all the while pursuing a thinly-veiled strategy of global domination.
In this context "gotta" apparently is a result of a supremacist attitude and total disregard for anything but greed and thirst for power, very like that of a typical citizen of Ancient Rome who too would believe that the Empire just "gotta" expand into those "barbarian" lands to bring "civilization" in exchange for a slight payment of loot and slaves.
In modern times the US exacts a different kind of payment for exporting of its "civilization" but on the altar of its self-declared superiority, the dead just keep piling up all the same.
Well, yes and no. "More shopping"? That is far better achieved simply by clicking at the "Results from shopping" in-line result sampleand thus changing the whole view to "Shopping" (or using the top menu bar for the same effect). And excluding results by, say, a set date range is actually far inferior to sorting them by date (newest first) while within limit, which is not easily accessible from the bar in a click. The nearest you can get is the Timeline view that is in the wrong order. And even if there was something actually so useful as to be needed with one click, the bar is simply located at the wrong place: i.e. the side of the screen, particularly since Google violates HTML design principles and restricts their whole page to a particular pixel width (which leaves nearly half of my screen blank along its width).
So as far as I can tell the side bar is just more eye useless candy that takes place of the actual search results due to the reduced by it screen space (and it fades in and scrolls and nearly does back-flips ...) that brings very little to the table, especially that access to different search areas is still available at the top where it has always been and where it is far less intrusive.
I was just about to reply when I realized that I have violated my long standing policy of never replying to ACs, ACs who want it both ways, to use their real accounts to down-mod my replies and then still spew their froth at me. Oops, free ride has ended.
Oh and one more thing, these "usability" studies just surely, I mean positively, fingers-crossed and all, showed that users are even more productive with full fucking screen fade-ins of random high resolution images - much, much worse then fucking Bing!
Which, as if to underline the level of stupidity in your water carrying for Google, they introduced today! I have been receiving phone calls all morning already. Fuck, fucketey, fuck Google, with a rusty steel brush covered in pepper spray! Shit, looks like I am putting Google home page into the list of banned web pages at the web filter ....