Some of the history worst attrocities and murderous rampages of savage persecution and butchery of anyone not conforming to their twisted dark vision of the world were done by these Christian men. It was the Christian men who persecuted science and who propped up the feudal order. George Bush, a bona-fide war criminal, fancies himeslf a "born again" Christian. Adolf Hitler called himself a Christian and his armies sported "Gott mit Uns" on their belt-buckles.
Suuure, it was religion... not the thievery, corruption, kick-backs, lies, the NAFTA sellout, Meech Lake etc and so on?
Nooooo. Religion!
For your reference, since your ex-Canadian status seems precluding you from getting news apparently, just the latest in the never-ending stream of filth coming from the direction of that "values" man: Mulroney is on the hook for $400k of bribe money he took in brown envelopes to facilitate "trade arrangements" while being Prime Minister. And the investigations are still rolling.
Well what the hell does that mean? Did it work BAD? Where did it work BAD? I don't understand these one sentece responses.
That was called "sarcasm". You didn't get it because your kind actually believes that George is a "good" human being, full of religious "values" you share with him, and thus could not possibly be the mass-murdering, thieving war-criminal fuck everyone else sees, who is to go down in history right next to the likes of Pinochet (also a religious "values" man). And this alone says much more about your nature then a million of "values" you can spout out from some moth-eathen religious gobledey-gook nonsense.
For your reference: George's religious "values" were played up during both of his elections. And "bad" does not even begin to describe the outcome.
Pierre a commie? I just love how you so transparently expose your greedy little anti-social authoritarian "mind" by labelling all the things you dislike using the most frightful to you thing you can come up with: "Red Commies!!! Booo!!".
I have news for you: you wouldn't know a commie if he were to kick you down and set up a farming collective on top of your ass. Here is a hint: Lenin was a commie. Chairman Mao was a commie. Trudeau was a socialist-leaning politician in one of the worlds most advanced industrial democracies.
And then there are these things about religious people having "values"...
What "values" would those be? The "values" of all those Catholic priests when they had their ways with all them fine young boys? Or those of that pastor down in the States found self-tied up, clad in two scuba rubber suits complete with flippers and a dildo up his ass? How about the "values" of all those TV "evangelists" scamming old ladies so they can afford their palaces, drugs and hookers? Would it be those "values" which cause these "pious" people to blow up abortion clinics? Or would it be those "values" which cause them start religious wars, all over the world, with frightening regularity, since times immemorial? Would it be the "values" of the oh-so-religious Spanish Inqisition of old, or the oh-so-religious Al Queda of today? Which of those vaunted "values" are you talking about?
It maybe time Canada tried to elect a leader that has some values and a party that is less RED.
Sure, because Harper's chanting the Communist Manifesto up in the Parliment every day is getting so tiresome, that and his insistence on collectivisation of all industry, surely?
(Note for non-Canadians: the present government of Canada is by all definitions centre-right "conservative" and our current prime minister, Steven Harper, is just about as "red" as John McCain or Mitt Romney down in the US. His ability to execute his personal conservative agenda is however tampered by the fact that Canada has a multi-party Parlimentary system and most Canadians do not find his policies very appealing, favouring centrist, or center-left approach - which the parent poster would probbaly describe as something along the lines of: "Soviets!!! Marxists!!! The commisars are comming!!! The commisars are comming!! Waaaah!!!" )
But of course none of what you said was really meant to make any sense, because that entire rant was all about one thing: you want a Dominionist religious fuck to be elected, who would promptly proceed to convert Canada into a theocracy where your kind would become dominant and be in a position to force your brain-rotting "values" on us all.
Now go bang your head on your Bible (or whatever "holy" book of nonsense managed to disable your cognitive circuitry) for a while until all of this registers.
I thought we were discussing the statement wherein he talked about the "hatred of Western Civilization" and the like, which is what I was ridiculing with that over-the-top post. That was the tell-tale indicator of his true convictions, which I was focusing on. Now you are bringing up his previous post, one which could not by itself be used as indicative of his supremacist tendencies as he was then still attempting to maintain some pretenses, and only his general hostility towards all things communal or cooperative could be sensed, as well as his seething paranoia about some sort of boogeymen closing in on him from all sides, presumably to get all his oh-so-hard-earned stuff.
Apples and oranges.
Desire to form militias is in itself a sad indicator of societal collapse, for any sane person would readily concur that any situations requiring bakers, car salesmen and barmaids manning barricades with semi-automatic weapons are, to say the least, less then indicative of anything approaching social cohesion, the thing which makes, well, the society being... sociable.
But no, the wholly counter-productive desire to arm yourselves to the teeth in order to "improve" the society around you makes you only sadly misguided but not a supremacist.
This being said, you should be aware that the opposite relationship is pretty much always true, all the Supremacist and Christian Dominionist movements consider possesion of as much firepower as possible as one of their core principles.
If you were to state that major population centers in Canada (of all places) 'hate western civilization, and take every chance to defend savagery and barbarism in the name of "tolerance"', like he did, I would have no choice but to suspect that you gravitate towards those who exclusively use such rethoric: i.e. White Supremacists or some other throgloditic throwbacks to times best forgotten.
Or to turn the question back to you, give me one context in which such statement, that, say, Torontonians or denizens of Vancouver "hate western civilization" was used outside of some such deranged White Supremacist or Christianist Surpemacist gathering?
I am sure your neighbours just love you. Has your "militia" scored any lynchings yet?
And you are, without a doubt, one of the most most ignorant and insane zealots I've run into so far.
Just add some white supremacist bigotry into the mix and you got my opinion of you, exactly.
We're done here. You're dismissed.
You are in no position to be dismissing anybody. But hey, what is yet another vain, self-aggrandising delusion on top of that already towering heap you so diligently accumulated...
An epithaph for a "society" of hopeless, brainless cavemen.
Oh and you did forget the "I love the smell of Napalm in the morning... it smells like... Victory!"
May all the self-appointed "defenders" in search of a foe to "defend" themselves from choke on their own self-aggrandising, counter-productive "logic" and croak promptly. The world would be a much better place for it. For should an actual, legitimate defense of our lives become a neccessity there will be no need for retarded authoritarian jerks to make speeches as to how they "do not give a fuck about what anyone thinks" and how you better do what they tell you or they kill you, thus putting into question as to who the actual enemy of ours was in the first place. In such times the cause is obvious and unambiguous and practical necessities swiftly take precedence to any phillosophical discussions. Last such time being WWII where no one had to explain to anyone why the foe was deadly and the threat imminnent and entire nations abandoned all their ordinary pursuits to convert their entire economies to war production. Never you mind the all-encompassing draft.
That is the key fallacy of these squeaking chicken-hawk "defenders" of ours these days: they have been reduced to manufacturing their own patheric "doomsday" boogeymen out of their terrible fear of perishing in obscurity and not in power or in positions of authority.
And so to our would-be Col. Jessep wannabe I say: "Sir, Fuck You Sir up your ass with the butt of your own rifle, Sir!". And no do not come back whining for "emergency expandnded defense budget ammendment for 'defense' operations suppressing the unruly natives around them gold mines in Congo", or some such 'defense' you witless dorks have been all about for the last 50 years.
Well that wasn't really an "argument" but a (succesful) attempt to flush the bigot out.
Yes, in strict terms I did put words into his mouth, but ones that hit far too close to home for his comfort, and so he promptly run away.
The truth of the matter is that a large proportion (as gathered from my rather extensive Internet interactions with them) of these Albertan "self-made", "ruggedly individualistic", etc. "defenders" of "Western culture" are in fact white supremacists who define the said "Western culture" as "White Anglo-Saxon" and see anyone not fitting into the narrow confines of their particular circle of bigots as "barbaric". I hope you did pay attention to the expressions he used to describe the large Eastern cities in Canada, did you? How he bemoaned how they no longer tow the line of his kind of "culture", which can only be logically construed as him objecting to these cities allowing "dirty negroes" and Arabs and China-men and what not into his beloved, ideal "Canada" of white settlers of yester-year? And so I can sense that he is terrified of these encroachments and expects, sometime very soon, to be fighting vast masses of brown-skinned zombies clawing at his Ford F150 truck from all directions with him standing on top like in that cover picture of game Doom, dispensing "civilization" out of machine guns in both his hands, "until the ammo runs out".
Is it a certainty that he is such a loser? No, but it is a high probability based on my experience with the species combined with the very telling signs in his posts here. And so I stand by my "strawman". One is entitled to burn some straw once in a while for a dramatic effect.
You mention several times about "the primitive heritage of our reptilian mind", but you seem to overlook the fact that it wouldn't have evolved that way if it didn't work. "Taking advantage of other people" is a successful strategy in some cases, and even a colony of perfectly logical, individualistic robots would have a few that would take advantage of the others.
So was wacking your chosen "mate" over the head with your club and dragging her to your cave also a "successful" strategy for reproduction. As long as you did not club too hard.
Could you explain however what does this have to do with a society of beings capable of unleashing the energy of atomic bonds and travelling into space?
Your assumption is that if something "worked" for the primordial slime, therefore it is a valid and fully justifiable strategy for sentient beings purporting to have developed concepts such as "morality" or "science". I contend that the notion is absurd, and at some point of time humans must face the music and detach themselves from these knuckle-headed animalistic instincts or make themselves extinct in one of a miriad of a very creative, painful and gory ends. Either this or some progeny of humanity, be it biological or bio-mechanical will decide that their troglodyte "parents" are just too stupid to be allowed to keep anything more meaningful then plastic forks (which at present is sadly true) and will solve that problem for us.
You also strike me as the sort of person who, when being mugged, would willing give up rather than defend oneself in even the slightest way, thus ironically making mugging people a profitable occupation.
This of course is nonsense. The fact that I do not see getting a sniper rifle and organizing some ridiculous "militia" as something a sane person should be doing in one of the most advanced countries in the 21st century does not mean that I would not put up (a reasonable) fight when someone tries to mug me.
Remember however that the entire point of this sub-thread, started by my original post was about "hope" and "future", not about some wacky notions of cape-clad vigilante "militiamen" swooping to the rescue of the distressed damsels of the "western" (as in White Anglo-Saxon, Christian, upper-middle-class) society from the clutches of unpure (Middle-Eastern, African or Asiatic) dstardly (most likely "illigal alien") muggers. Which is what that nut from Alberta in the other posting was really all about.
An accidentally insightful typo? Come to think of it, it even sounds somewhat messianic!
"And I say onto you verily, it was then as Righteous Mountain Militia-men in their Holy fox-holes brought forth their canons, praise be upon them, and opened them up upon their enemies... and all of Creation shook... and Heathens and Academics and Scientists and purveyors of demonic 'tolerance' in the Sinful Land of Toronto wailed and covered their ears with their hands and fingers and stuffed small fishies in them..."
I'm sorry. I hope that your hippie-wonderland lasts at least long enough for you to live out your life in peace. Nobody deserves to suffer just for being a hopeless idealist.
Oh, it will, provided that violent wacko "militias" do not end up going at each other's throats anywhere near to this place and that "rugged individualists" like you do not manage subvert the entire machinery of a democracy in this country into the service of their own unlimited greed and bloated egos.
In short, the greatest danger to my living out my life in peace are sociopathic maniacs like you.
I am an Albertan "cowboy", one of those "self-made men" who thanks to my own great wit and fortitude with my Winchester managed to arrange for a great pile of crude oil to appear under the Albertan sands. And wouldn't you believe?! Those thieves, those do-nothing, good-for-nothing lazies in them Toronto and Vancouver, they want a piece of MY, MY I SAY! oil!!! The audacity!! The hutzpa!! Who do they think they are?! Sure, when Alberta was in financial shit for most its history, those turkeys paid up, but that does not count!. Becase they, unlike me, are not true, red-blooded, raw-meat eating, self-made men like me! So there!
Or and they are not part of that Western culture thing. They are like Arab and Chinese and Russian or some such, why what was the last time anyone like spoke the God's own language, English in Toronto?!
Hamas Terrorists. All of them!
And as soon as my Free Alberta Militia membership count exceeds 3 (well two, not counting my cousin) we will like stage an armed revolt and be joined by all them millions of Albertans on our way to Freedom! As the 51st state of the True And Only Country, the God-chosen USofA.
And then onto wars of Freedom, everywhere! Bomb them heathens in Afghanistan, level Iraq (to liberate them), blow up Iran (to emancipate them) and then onto France for being the "surrender monkeys".
And then the world will see us for what we are, lovers of Western virtues and abhorers of barbarism!
... I am sure they will excuse us of that "collateral damage" and a that wee bit of "waterboarding" - it was all in a "good" cause of our own self-absorbed dick wagging after all, no? Everyone in "western civilization" would surely excuse that! No? Its not like some depraved "tolerance" thing or some horrid such! Why who ever Righteously Smited anyone with "tolerance"?! Even once?! Just once!!!
Oh and did I mention that those insidious Pinko-commie-islamo-nisto-femi-nazi Torontonians are in the depths of their depravity conspiring to pollute our precious bodily fluids?! I bet you did not...
His hope springs from the fact that there are others in this world who are aware that the only way to keep tyranny at bay is to be prepared to fight it. "Si vis Pacem? Parabellum!".
Wolves at each other's throats, forever then! Would-be tyrants clawing their way to the top to replace the ones being "kept at bay" via bullet holes in their skulls by "patriots" sporting portable tactical nuclear missiles, then anti-matter, than some kind of planet-busting time-space continuum weapons, until the end of time! (or the premature end of the unfortunate planet Earth having given birth to such a hopeless flock of pathetic trogloditic morons)
Your Orwellian rant is the speech of a man who expects always to be in the majority, and expects others to protect him if he's not.
Huh? Wha? Orwellian? In minority? Protect?!! Do you have any clue what Orwell's distopia was actually about?
While your attitude may serve you in a pluralist democracy, it hinges on the existence of the men whom you despise - men who understand that vigilance is not just a necessary evil, but a way of life.
Nice try. But no cigar. These supposed vigilant "defenders" exist solely because of those of their own kind ON THE OTHER SIDE. If it weren't for macho, gonad-thinking, greedy, power-hungry, religious lunacy infested and heavily armed imbeciles elsewhere, enlightened societies would not need to tolerate their own pet zoos of macho, gonad-thinking, greedy, power-hungry, religious lunacy infested or other kinds of armed imbeciles as a counter-measure to unleash on the other idiots if needed.
And that is the fact so very uncomfortable to all these would-be "defenders" of our "freedoms" (who usually congregate in some sort of new True-blue Patriotic Neighbourhood, Homeland or Motherland Security organizations, usually complete with demands for everyone else to "temporarily" relinquishing their freedoms so that they could be "vigilanty" defended).
All of this shit is pure base animal "logic". The stuff that fills reptile brains. Kill or be killed! Eat or be eaten! Rat-think. Far below what the so-called "technologically advanced" and "civilized" society should strive for. The very fact that so many here cannot seem to raise above the level of thought processes of a snake, is a sad testimony indeed as to how far humanity is from any sort of hopeful future.
They DO mean keeping informed of the world around you, being ready to defend yourself and others, and seeking to cultivate similar attitudes in those around you.
Indeed! Informed out of the pages of Der-Sturmer, being ready do defend yourself from the taxman (or the mailman) and to cultivate similar attitudes in those around in your Montana "militia", while on patrol for them "illigul immigrunts", around the still.
It can be as simple as starting a neighbourhood watch, or as complex as organizing an armed neighbourhood militia to defend your streets, as some of your fellow citizens had to do recently in Louisiana.
The moment the citizens if my country need an "armed militia" "defending the streets", the country would be done for. There indeed would not need to be a point to a such a country anymore as it would have by then devolved to an anarchy of roaming bands of self-appointed thuggish banditry calling themselves "militias" and final rule by the barrel of a gun. Usually at first by the upper-class trigger happy "militiamen" "defending" their God-given hoards of stuff against them "unwashed thieving lazies", only, given enough time, to be followed by a swift reversal when the "unwashed ones" figure out that they have 10:1 numerical advantage.
Ask yourself, how well could you provide for your family tomorrow if a New Orleans scale disaster hit your city?
There is a world of a difference between living in a c
That was one of the saddest and depressing posts ever, bereft of any hope for humankind's future whatsoever!
What are the basic implications of his stance? That there shall be always majorities voting to kill minorities? That the way to go forward is a landscape of bunkers with deranged, rabid, paranoid occupants eyeing each other's "neighbours" through squinted eyes and the sights of the ever bigger guns in their formidable arsenals while looking for a slightest sign of "aggression" so that they can open up with their canons, rockets, nukes and what not on each other, "until they run out of ammo"? That the societal structure be based on the size of one's armory?
And this is hope?! Me thinks you should look under the heading of "nightmare" in the dictionary and you will find the definition much more fitting.
The sad, pathetic and wholly uninspiring assumption of that post is that humans will never be able to dis-entangle themselves from their evolutionary reptilian brain baggage and will forever remain snarling, greedy, short-sighted, delusional, unreasoning and completely despicable creatures they are now, forever clawing each other eyes out over some pathetic plastic trinkets or incomprehensible ramblings of long-dead senile imbeciles enshrined in some "holy" book.
And what is even more depressing, is that some here seem to gleefully and impatiently look towards their dream of some sort of apocalyptic shootout coming true, where the last man standing with the biggest gun and the longest dick swinging "wins".
Aye, whether free markets work or not, it just shows poor argumentation skills to bash free market economics simply because of how the US markets work. US markets are not in any way, shape, or form "free markets."
Most of the current people in charge of the USA are great believers in "free markets" and their actions were aimed precisely at removing governments from influence over them, starting at untaxing the billionaires and deregulation of many industries, followed by privatization of many governmental functions, all the way to hiring private mercenaries in war zones.
The "neo-cons" are all great disciples of Milton Freedman and hold "free markets" dear in their hearts, so dear in fact that they will blindly follow the dogma no matter how perverse the results.
Also, speaking historically, USA had implemented some of the most lax economic policies ever tried, which at the beginning of the 20th century finally resulted in more then 50% of the national wealth to be owned by less then 1% of the population and, amongst other factors, resulted in the 1929 crash and the Great Depression that followed.
In fact your objection that we do not judge the "free markets" by their history in the USA, the very nation which tried to apply the dogma most feverishly, because things blew up and became twisted and unworkable, is on the same level as of those who cry that we should not judge Marxism because the Soviet Union did not follow its principles "correctly" just as the USA supposedly somehow did not follow the "free market" dogma "correctly".
The truth is of course very inconvenient: just like the fundamental flaws of the Marxist dogma led, inevietably, to an abomination that was Soviet Union, so does the unrestricted "free market" dogma lead to neo-feudalism or fascism.
Although the fascist tendencies of the present day USA are quite apparent, true, your attribution of the causes of the problem is incorrect. Fascism is but one end result of the unbridled "free market" religion, one of its final stages of decay. And the people responsible for its emergence are the same very people who sing hymns and accolades to "individualism" and supremacy of private enterprise, all self-proclaimed "free market" ideologues. It is no coincidence that most of the people presently in charge of these disastrous economic policies are the very followers of Milton Freedman and the like.
Contrary to the religious dogma, the "free markets" when employed with no constraints in real life (as opposed to make-believe fairy tales) inevietably result in runaway consolidation of certain sectors of industry upto a point where an oligarchic elite forms with resources rivalling that of the government and exceeding many times those of other nation-states. This is because, contary to the dogma, many natural mechanisms exist, wholly independent of politics and legislation, which aid creation of oligopolies and monopolies and prevent their breakup after they form. And it is for that reason that libertarian religious scripture is in practice synonymous with what can only be described as "neo-feudalism".
In the case of the USA, the political and economic equivalents of today's "libertarians" (i.e. people who believe the government should of the size to be suitable to be "drowned in the bathtub" and everything else should be left to "free markets") were in charge of the USA in the late 18th and early 20th century and presided over something which historians today call the "Gilded Age", excesses of which finally culminated in the rather spectacular blowup known as the "Great Depression", despite the USA being at the most privileged and advantageous position of all nations at that time. During that "Gilded Age" joyful happenings such as employment of labourers at the ripe age of 8 or "motivational" techniques involving payment in private currency called the "company scrit", which could only be reedemed at the company store, amongst many other such "innovations" went on, while the wealth distribution in the country kept becoming more and more lopsided until at its peek, in 1929, less then 1% owned more then 50% of the economy. Curiously, this situation has not reapeated itself until... 2007, after the "free market" believers reduced taxes on the wealthy to the point that their accumulation of wealth, like the government debt, went out of control (the reason these people are actually attempting to increase government debt is because they believe that government has to be bankrupted as to be destroyed and removed "out of the way" of the "free market" - they in fact think as you do).
There are many other examples of such "free market" rule throughout history (mostly on much smaller scale), all ending ignominously. So no, "free markets" wherever they were practiced as close to the dogma as feasible, always resulted in some disaster or another, because the model is fundamentally flawed: its applicability is very limited to a very specific, idealized, set of circumstances, which are present in the real life only in a small subset of economic activities. For example, "free markets" require that the consumer is able to choose, based on an acurate knowledge, from a large number (the number of choices is directly related to efficiency of the competition) of competing products and that no substantial "barriers to entry" exist for new competitiors in that domain, be it natural or legislative/political. Thus "free market" worked at some time for, say, potato farmers in the absence of artificial fertilizers (existence of which allowed their suppliers to displace farmers as the controllers of the industry and eventually bankrupted most of them). In most industries such "barriers to entry" form naturally and their height increases rapidly with the consolidation of the marke
I've read several articles about socialized systems in Europe being severely in debt.
You have to stop reading propaganda. The "severe debt" is usually a misrepresentation of an overall governmental debt which has been shrinking throughout Europe ever since most governments adopted "balanced budget" policies back in the 1980s. Many European governments routinely end up with budgetary surpluses which leads to a lively debate on how to spend them, with some advocating rapid debt reduction while others investment in other things. The same applies to Canada, which also sports socialized medicare and which has been running budgetary surpluses for almost a decade now.
As a matter of fact, the most debt inducing and downright ruinous economic policy is practiced by none other then the "free market knows best", "conservative" goofuses running the USA, where the government debt is spiralling completely out of control, with most of the money going to gigantic military contractors and mercenaries with no conceivable return on that investment to the average taxpayer other then piles of dead foreign people and rapidly increasing general global hostility, not to mention othe wee things such as the devastating trade imbalances.
If that's the case
It isn't, although some greed-monkeys, like our "small medical businessman" GP, do oh-so-dearly want it to be true.
even if its a good idea and works short term, its not sustainable.
See above. Most EU governments project declining debts, while the US debt is increasing astronomically, despite of the ever more obvious and heavy-handed attempts by the US elites to instill a vicious dog-eat-dog "society" in there, with clear-cut stratification of the economic royalty and the de-facto indentured slaves underneath.
I neither play chess, nor worship sports heros. However to compare one to the other shows true ignorance on your part...
How so? Competetive sports involve people performing otherwise useless activities, such as throwing a pig-skin clad item around or chasing a piece of plastic around on ice, while chess players waste brain power on moving silly pieces around 64 squares on a little board, neither having any useful real life consequences from any perspective other then "entertainment". If anything, sports at least have the supposed side-effect of encouraging healthy life-styles by promoting physical fittness. Playing chess on the other has not been linked in any way to improvement of any other cognitive skills or brain functions, and this very example of a chess "genius" is proof positive that it has even nothing whatsoever to do with common sense!
So, logically, activities such as, say, competetive spitting is just as "useful" as chess... or checkers... or Black Jack... etc and so on.
This of course makes no sense (as usual with the ISPs) because the much saner (and cheaper for everyone) method would be of course to upgrade the routing hardware on existing fiber, which is my whole point: the ISPs do not give a flying fuck about investing in infrastructure, with the possible exception of creating "their own" links, for which they expect to gouge everyone else, as Telstra is doing. Once the link is in place, Telstra will happilly sit on it, without any upgrades for as long as it is conceivably possible, just short of its customers getting pitchforks and torches (or electing hostile, regulation-prone politicians), which is apparently its "successful" overall strategy in Australia so far.
In short: ISPs are an example of some of the worst cases of anti-competetive, consumer-gounging "businesses" around, probably because their family tree is rooted in the telecommunication industry, historically a veritable hive of thievery, villany and general scum.
If the overseas connection fees were in fact the real, unsurmountable technical problem, you would see the same scenarios develop which once developed in the telephone industry: long distance fees. That is the data rates would be different for traffic accross the overseas uplinks versus the "local" ones within the ISPs area or perheaps a group of local ISPs. But of course the "we pay an arm and a leg for overseas" is just an excuse. In fact those fiber connections are nowhere near saturation and the cost of their being laid down has long since been recovered already and the actual bulk rates that ISPs pay themselves are a fraction of what they charge consumers on the other end.
The ISPs are simply in a position to gouge the consumers (and sometimes each other) and competition is non-existant in practice.
All fine and dandy, except that $1.50/GB amounts to highway robbery, given the current state of technology and the costs of transmission for the ISP. The actual "fair" market price, if the thing called "competition" was anything but a sad joke, would be somewhere below $0.10. Remember, other then electricity and mutual agreements with fellow ISP sharks, there is no cost other then the initial investment and some insignificant (in relation to the size of the system) maintenance.
And which brings us to the issue which is really at the core of the thing: the unwillingness of the ISPs to invest into robust infrastructure and their desire to milk whatever marginally performing systems they have, pretty much indefinitely.
But it didn't lead to the rate of progress that we've had since it became a one (and a half) horse race.
What "progress" do you speak of? Clock speed? Number of transistors per core? These do not strike me as anything but small incremental improvements. And thanks to the "one and a half horse race" we lost truly radical consumer possibilities such as massive paralellization, evolution of RISC systems, transputers etc and so on, as none of them fit the narrowly defined criteria of the Wintel parade. Many of which render all the "progress" in the increasingly convoluted and inefficient x86 architectures moot.
In the main the lack of innovation in the x86 market has been because it is more cost effective to push clock rates than attempt to design exotic architectures. Now that the easy gains in clock rates have been played out the marketplace is going to become a lot more interesting, the companies involved are going to have to innovate in harder areas to get ahead of each other.
See above. Having wasted decades of reasearch and innovative ideas, the Wintel crowd has painted itself into a corner. They cannot truly innovate without dumping the whole Wintel system and doing so would instantly put them at a disadvantage by forcing actual competition between many innovative companies. I expect to see decades of pathetic attempts at avoiding the issue, the final outcome wholly dependant on the ability of the Wintel alliance to maintain their de-facto monopolistic grip. Only if this giant dies, the innovation will resume.
Which was my whole point, that competition and innovation are in reverse proportion to the size of the companies involved, even if the cost per unit gets lower with the size of the production runs.
Unfortunately, your selection of examples proves the exact opposite of your tirade. It is the profoundly ignorant view of democrats and communists that civilization was built on slavery. Quite the opposite was true. The natural world is vicious and barbaric and anarchy was the rule. Cheops did build his monuments with slaves. The reality is large numbers of humans were more than willing to leave behind their barbaric ways and choose freely to enter the cities that provide safety, security, and order.
You are purposefuly trying to misrepresent what I said. No, civilization was not built exclusively on slavery, but various forms of small groups dominating the much larger ones was always a key element of any larger human society. The only thing that has chanegd over time was the identity of the lords. That is an irrefutable fact, easily verified in any history book. In short: true, societies formed as protection against the vagaries of nature... but as soon as they formed a caste of "elite" parasites begun to prey on them, and are still doing so today. The excuses have changed, complex religious "justifications" gave way to complex economic voodoo "justifications", but the underlying desires to control, dominate and be "superior" at any cost remain unchanged.
The lowly workers lacked the vision and means to organize a civilization of their own, and thus were forced to join another. The entire world was ripe for the taking at that time, but what did people do? They joined Cheops. They did not flee him.
That gave me a good laugh! People "joined" the Egyptian empire?! Did not "flee" him!? Dude your understanding of the dynamics of that time is pathetic. Hint: it took several months of hardship for an average person to travel from one end of the Egyptian empire to another. Impoverished family under the foot of the Empire would have never made it alive. This of course assuming that they had a clue that any land actually existed outside of Egypt in the first place! Most were born, lived and died within a radius of a few miles, never seeing anyting beyond the hills on the horizon! And then of course was the wee little fact that all the neighbouring lands were ruled by equally nasty and idiotic "meritorious" parasites.
The reality is the entirety of the world is too complex for any one group to have the means to decide which laws or best or who should lead. You make the democrat's error that the only options are tyranny or democracy. That is a false dichotomy.
I never said anything of the sort. I merely object to personality cults, glorification of wealth, attempts to form mindless equivalence between money and "merit" and some people's desire to re-establish the feudal order based on these inane assumptions.
We can renew the authority of the republican system by reorganizing the electorate along the very trades you discuss. Instead of people from a given territory electing a representative, we can have all the doctors in the country elect a representative just for them. The same is true for every other trade.
This very sysytem was attempted in Italy. The respective groups, such as "workers", "businessmen", "doctors" etc were each called a "corpus". The systems chief proponent, one Benito Mussolini, called this "corporatism", and later renamed it "fascism" after the word "fascio", meaning "bundle", which represented the collection of these groups ruling together. I hope your undestanding of history is good enought to figure out what went on next.
The problem however is your view has no historical proof. Everywhere where your views have been implemented has resulted in total societal breakdown. Marxist views today are wholly obsolete. Once again, you prove your ignorance of history.
No, it is you who prove your pre-conceived biases clouding your vision. I am no Marxist, but the fact
Slashdot Mirror
You gotta be kidding!
Some of the history worst attrocities and murderous rampages of savage persecution and butchery of anyone not conforming to their twisted dark vision of the world were done by these Christian men. It was the Christian men who persecuted science and who propped up the feudal order. George Bush, a bona-fide war criminal, fancies himeslf a "born again" Christian. Adolf Hitler called himself a Christian and his armies sported "Gott mit Uns" on their belt-buckles.
Muahahahahaha!
Mulroney!? Disliked because of religion?!!!
That is just precious.
Suuure, it was religion ... not the thievery, corruption, kick-backs, lies, the NAFTA sellout, Meech Lake etc and so on?
Nooooo. Religion!
For your reference, since your ex-Canadian status seems precluding you from getting news apparently, just the latest in the never-ending stream of filth coming from the direction of that "values" man: Mulroney is on the hook for $400k of bribe money he took in brown envelopes to facilitate "trade arrangements" while being Prime Minister. And the investigations are still rolling.
Aren't religious "values" grand, eh?
That was called "sarcasm". You didn't get it because your kind actually believes that George is a "good" human being, full of religious "values" you share with him, and thus could not possibly be the mass-murdering, thieving war-criminal fuck everyone else sees, who is to go down in history right next to the likes of Pinochet (also a religious "values" man). And this alone says much more about your nature then a million of "values" you can spout out from some moth-eathen religious gobledey-gook nonsense.
For your reference: George's religious "values" were played up during both of his elections. And "bad" does not even begin to describe the outcome.
Pierre a commie? I just love how you so transparently expose your greedy little anti-social authoritarian "mind" by labelling all the things you dislike using the most frightful to you thing you can come up with: "Red Commies!!! Booo!!".
I have news for you: you wouldn't know a commie if he were to kick you down and set up a farming collective on top of your ass. Here is a hint: Lenin was a commie. Chairman Mao was a commie. Trudeau was a socialist-leaning politician in one of the worlds most advanced industrial democracies.
And then there are these things about religious people having "values"...
What "values" would those be? The "values" of all those Catholic priests when they had their ways with all them fine young boys? Or those of that pastor down in the States found self-tied up, clad in two scuba rubber suits complete with flippers and a dildo up his ass? How about the "values" of all those TV "evangelists" scamming old ladies so they can afford their palaces, drugs and hookers? Would it be those "values" which cause these "pious" people to blow up abortion clinics? Or would it be those "values" which cause them start religious wars, all over the world, with frightening regularity, since times immemorial? Would it be the "values" of the oh-so-religious Spanish Inqisition of old, or the oh-so-religious Al Queda of today? Which of those vaunted "values" are you talking about?
Sure, because Harper's chanting the Communist Manifesto up in the Parliment every day is getting so tiresome, that and his insistence on collectivisation of all industry, surely?
(Note for non-Canadians: the present government of Canada is by all definitions centre-right "conservative" and our current prime minister, Steven Harper, is just about as "red" as John McCain or Mitt Romney down in the US. His ability to execute his personal conservative agenda is however tampered by the fact that Canada has a multi-party Parlimentary system and most Canadians do not find his policies very appealing, favouring centrist, or center-left approach - which the parent poster would probbaly describe as something along the lines of: "Soviets!!! Marxists!!! The commisars are comming!!! The commisars are comming!! Waaaah!!!" )
But of course none of what you said was really meant to make any sense, because that entire rant was all about one thing: you want a Dominionist religious fuck to be elected, who would promptly proceed to convert Canada into a theocracy where your kind would become dominant and be in a position to force your brain-rotting "values" on us all.
Now go bang your head on your Bible (or whatever "holy" book of nonsense managed to disable your cognitive circuitry) for a while until all of this registers.
You've lost me.
I thought we were discussing the statement wherein he talked about the "hatred of Western Civilization" and the like, which is what I was ridiculing with that over-the-top post. That was the tell-tale indicator of his true convictions, which I was focusing on. Now you are bringing up his previous post, one which could not by itself be used as indicative of his supremacist tendencies as he was then still attempting to maintain some pretenses, and only his general hostility towards all things communal or cooperative could be sensed, as well as his seething paranoia about some sort of boogeymen closing in on him from all sides, presumably to get all his oh-so-hard-earned stuff.
Apples and oranges.
Desire to form militias is in itself a sad indicator of societal collapse, for any sane person would readily concur that any situations requiring bakers, car salesmen and barmaids manning barricades with semi-automatic weapons are, to say the least, less then indicative of anything approaching social cohesion, the thing which makes, well, the society being ... sociable.
But no, the wholly counter-productive desire to arm yourselves to the teeth in order to "improve" the society around you makes you only sadly misguided but not a supremacist.
This being said, you should be aware that the opposite relationship is pretty much always true, all the Supremacist and Christian Dominionist movements consider possesion of as much firepower as possible as one of their core principles.
I hope this clarifies things.
If you were to state that major population centers in Canada (of all places) 'hate western civilization, and take every chance to defend savagery and barbarism in the name of "tolerance"', like he did, I would have no choice but to suspect that you gravitate towards those who exclusively use such rethoric: i.e. White Supremacists or some other throgloditic throwbacks to times best forgotten.
Or to turn the question back to you, give me one context in which such statement, that, say, Torontonians or denizens of Vancouver "hate western civilization" was used outside of some such deranged White Supremacist or Christianist Surpemacist gathering?
I am sure your neighbours just love you. Has your "militia" scored any lynchings yet?
Just add some white supremacist bigotry into the mix and you got my opinion of you, exactly.
You are in no position to be dismissing anybody. But hey, what is yet another vain, self-aggrandising delusion on top of that already towering heap you so diligently accumulated ...
An epithaph for a "society" of hopeless, brainless cavemen.
Oh and you did forget the "I love the smell of Napalm in the morning ... it smells like ... Victory!"
May all the self-appointed "defenders" in search of a foe to "defend" themselves from choke on their own self-aggrandising, counter-productive "logic" and croak promptly. The world would be a much better place for it. For should an actual, legitimate defense of our lives become a neccessity there will be no need for retarded authoritarian jerks to make speeches as to how they "do not give a fuck about what anyone thinks" and how you better do what they tell you or they kill you, thus putting into question as to who the actual enemy of ours was in the first place. In such times the cause is obvious and unambiguous and practical necessities swiftly take precedence to any phillosophical discussions. Last such time being WWII where no one had to explain to anyone why the foe was deadly and the threat imminnent and entire nations abandoned all their ordinary pursuits to convert their entire economies to war production. Never you mind the all-encompassing draft.
That is the key fallacy of these squeaking chicken-hawk "defenders" of ours these days: they have been reduced to manufacturing their own patheric "doomsday" boogeymen out of their terrible fear of perishing in obscurity and not in power or in positions of authority.
And so to our would-be Col. Jessep wannabe I say: "Sir, Fuck You Sir up your ass with the butt of your own rifle, Sir!". And no do not come back whining for "emergency expandnded defense budget ammendment for 'defense' operations suppressing the unruly natives around them gold mines in Congo", or some such 'defense' you witless dorks have been all about for the last 50 years.
Well that wasn't really an "argument" but a (succesful) attempt to flush the bigot out.
Yes, in strict terms I did put words into his mouth, but ones that hit far too close to home for his comfort, and so he promptly run away.
The truth of the matter is that a large proportion (as gathered from my rather extensive Internet interactions with them) of these Albertan "self-made", "ruggedly individualistic", etc. "defenders" of "Western culture" are in fact white supremacists who define the said "Western culture" as "White Anglo-Saxon" and see anyone not fitting into the narrow confines of their particular circle of bigots as "barbaric". I hope you did pay attention to the expressions he used to describe the large Eastern cities in Canada, did you? How he bemoaned how they no longer tow the line of his kind of "culture", which can only be logically construed as him objecting to these cities allowing "dirty negroes" and Arabs and China-men and what not into his beloved, ideal "Canada" of white settlers of yester-year? And so I can sense that he is terrified of these encroachments and expects, sometime very soon, to be fighting vast masses of brown-skinned zombies clawing at his Ford F150 truck from all directions with him standing on top like in that cover picture of game Doom, dispensing "civilization" out of machine guns in both his hands, "until the ammo runs out".
Is it a certainty that he is such a loser? No, but it is a high probability based on my experience with the species combined with the very telling signs in his posts here. And so I stand by my "strawman". One is entitled to burn some straw once in a while for a dramatic effect.
So was wacking your chosen "mate" over the head with your club and dragging her to your cave also a "successful" strategy for reproduction. As long as you did not club too hard.
Could you explain however what does this have to do with a society of beings capable of unleashing the energy of atomic bonds and travelling into space?
Your assumption is that if something "worked" for the primordial slime, therefore it is a valid and fully justifiable strategy for sentient beings purporting to have developed concepts such as "morality" or "science". I contend that the notion is absurd, and at some point of time humans must face the music and detach themselves from these knuckle-headed animalistic instincts or make themselves extinct in one of a miriad of a very creative, painful and gory ends. Either this or some progeny of humanity, be it biological or bio-mechanical will decide that their troglodyte "parents" are just too stupid to be allowed to keep anything more meaningful then plastic forks (which at present is sadly true) and will solve that problem for us.
This of course is nonsense. The fact that I do not see getting a sniper rifle and organizing some ridiculous "militia" as something a sane person should be doing in one of the most advanced countries in the 21st century does not mean that I would not put up (a reasonable) fight when someone tries to mug me.
Remember however that the entire point of this sub-thread, started by my original post was about "hope" and "future", not about some wacky notions of cape-clad vigilante "militiamen" swooping to the rescue of the distressed damsels of the "western" (as in White Anglo-Saxon, Christian, upper-middle-class) society from the clutches of unpure (Middle-Eastern, African or Asiatic) dstardly (most likely "illigal alien") muggers. Which is what that nut from Alberta in the other posting was really all about.
This is simply changing the topics.
An accidentally insightful typo? Come to think of it, it even sounds somewhat messianic!
"And I say onto you verily, it was then as Righteous Mountain Militia-men in their Holy fox-holes brought forth their canons, praise be upon them, and opened them up upon their enemies ... and all of Creation shook ... and Heathens and Academics and Scientists and purveyors of demonic 'tolerance' in the Sinful Land of Toronto wailed and covered their ears with their hands and fingers and stuffed small fishies in them ..."
Oh, it will, provided that violent wacko "militias" do not end up going at each other's throats anywhere near to this place and that "rugged individualists" like you do not manage subvert the entire machinery of a democracy in this country into the service of their own unlimited greed and bloated egos.
In short, the greatest danger to my living out my life in peace are sociopathic maniacs like you.
What c6gunner really meant was:
Wolves at each other's throats, forever then! Would-be tyrants clawing their way to the top to replace the ones being "kept at bay" via bullet holes in their skulls by "patriots" sporting portable tactical nuclear missiles, then anti-matter, than some kind of planet-busting time-space continuum weapons, until the end of time! (or the premature end of the unfortunate planet Earth having given birth to such a hopeless flock of pathetic trogloditic morons)
Huh? Wha? Orwellian? In minority? Protect?!! Do you have any clue what Orwell's distopia was actually about?
Nice try. But no cigar. These supposed vigilant "defenders" exist solely because of those of their own kind ON THE OTHER SIDE. If it weren't for macho, gonad-thinking, greedy, power-hungry, religious lunacy infested and heavily armed imbeciles elsewhere, enlightened societies would not need to tolerate their own pet zoos of macho, gonad-thinking, greedy, power-hungry, religious lunacy infested or other kinds of armed imbeciles as a counter-measure to unleash on the other idiots if needed.
And that is the fact so very uncomfortable to all these would-be "defenders" of our "freedoms" (who usually congregate in some sort of new True-blue Patriotic Neighbourhood, Homeland or Motherland Security organizations, usually complete with demands for everyone else to "temporarily" relinquishing their freedoms so that they could be "vigilanty" defended).
All of this shit is pure base animal "logic". The stuff that fills reptile brains. Kill or be killed! Eat or be eaten! Rat-think. Far below what the so-called "technologically advanced" and "civilized" society should strive for. The very fact that so many here cannot seem to raise above the level of thought processes of a snake, is a sad testimony indeed as to how far humanity is from any sort of hopeful future.
Indeed! Informed out of the pages of Der-Sturmer, being ready do defend yourself from the taxman (or the mailman) and to cultivate similar attitudes in those around in your Montana "militia", while on patrol for them "illigul immigrunts", around the still.
The moment the citizens if my country need an "armed militia" "defending the streets", the country would be done for. There indeed would not need to be a point to a such a country anymore as it would have by then devolved to an anarchy of roaming bands of self-appointed thuggish banditry calling themselves "militias" and final rule by the barrel of a gun. Usually at first by the upper-class trigger happy "militiamen" "defending" their God-given hoards of stuff against them "unwashed thieving lazies", only, given enough time, to be followed by a swift reversal when the "unwashed ones" figure out that they have 10:1 numerical advantage.
There is a world of a difference between living in a c
Hope!?
That was one of the saddest and depressing posts ever, bereft of any hope for humankind's future whatsoever!
What are the basic implications of his stance? That there shall be always majorities voting to kill minorities? That the way to go forward is a landscape of bunkers with deranged, rabid, paranoid occupants eyeing each other's "neighbours" through squinted eyes and the sights of the ever bigger guns in their formidable arsenals while looking for a slightest sign of "aggression" so that they can open up with their canons, rockets, nukes and what not on each other, "until they run out of ammo"? That the societal structure be based on the size of one's armory?
And this is hope?! Me thinks you should look under the heading of "nightmare" in the dictionary and you will find the definition much more fitting.
The sad, pathetic and wholly uninspiring assumption of that post is that humans will never be able to dis-entangle themselves from their evolutionary reptilian brain baggage and will forever remain snarling, greedy, short-sighted, delusional, unreasoning and completely despicable creatures they are now, forever clawing each other eyes out over some pathetic plastic trinkets or incomprehensible ramblings of long-dead senile imbeciles enshrined in some "holy" book.
And what is even more depressing, is that some here seem to gleefully and impatiently look towards their dream of some sort of apocalyptic shootout coming true, where the last man standing with the biggest gun and the longest dick swinging "wins".
"Hope" he says...
Most of the current people in charge of the USA are great believers in "free markets" and their actions were aimed precisely at removing governments from influence over them, starting at untaxing the billionaires and deregulation of many industries, followed by privatization of many governmental functions, all the way to hiring private mercenaries in war zones.
The "neo-cons" are all great disciples of Milton Freedman and hold "free markets" dear in their hearts, so dear in fact that they will blindly follow the dogma no matter how perverse the results.
Also, speaking historically, USA had implemented some of the most lax economic policies ever tried, which at the beginning of the 20th century finally resulted in more then 50% of the national wealth to be owned by less then 1% of the population and, amongst other factors, resulted in the 1929 crash and the Great Depression that followed.
In fact your objection that we do not judge the "free markets" by their history in the USA, the very nation which tried to apply the dogma most feverishly, because things blew up and became twisted and unworkable, is on the same level as of those who cry that we should not judge Marxism because the Soviet Union did not follow its principles "correctly" just as the USA supposedly somehow did not follow the "free market" dogma "correctly".
The truth is of course very inconvenient: just like the fundamental flaws of the Marxist dogma led, inevietably, to an abomination that was Soviet Union, so does the unrestricted "free market" dogma lead to neo-feudalism or fascism.
A fact you seem unprepared to face.
Although the fascist tendencies of the present day USA are quite apparent, true, your attribution of the causes of the problem is incorrect. Fascism is but one end result of the unbridled "free market" religion, one of its final stages of decay. And the people responsible for its emergence are the same very people who sing hymns and accolades to "individualism" and supremacy of private enterprise, all self-proclaimed "free market" ideologues. It is no coincidence that most of the people presently in charge of these disastrous economic policies are the very followers of Milton Freedman and the like.
Contrary to the religious dogma, the "free markets" when employed with no constraints in real life (as opposed to make-believe fairy tales) inevietably result in runaway consolidation of certain sectors of industry upto a point where an oligarchic elite forms with resources rivalling that of the government and exceeding many times those of other nation-states. This is because, contary to the dogma, many natural mechanisms exist, wholly independent of politics and legislation, which aid creation of oligopolies and monopolies and prevent their breakup after they form. And it is for that reason that libertarian religious scripture is in practice synonymous with what can only be described as "neo-feudalism".
In the case of the USA, the political and economic equivalents of today's "libertarians" (i.e. people who believe the government should of the size to be suitable to be "drowned in the bathtub" and everything else should be left to "free markets") were in charge of the USA in the late 18th and early 20th century and presided over something which historians today call the "Gilded Age", excesses of which finally culminated in the rather spectacular blowup known as the "Great Depression", despite the USA being at the most privileged and advantageous position of all nations at that time. During that "Gilded Age" joyful happenings such as employment of labourers at the ripe age of 8 or "motivational" techniques involving payment in private currency called the "company scrit", which could only be reedemed at the company store, amongst many other such "innovations" went on, while the wealth distribution in the country kept becoming more and more lopsided until at its peek, in 1929, less then 1% owned more then 50% of the economy. Curiously, this situation has not reapeated itself until ... 2007, after the "free market" believers reduced taxes on the wealthy to the point that their accumulation of wealth, like the government debt, went out of control (the reason these people are actually attempting to increase government debt is because they believe that government has to be bankrupted as to be destroyed and removed "out of the way" of the "free market" - they in fact think as you do).
There are many other examples of such "free market" rule throughout history (mostly on much smaller scale), all ending ignominously. So no, "free markets" wherever they were practiced as close to the dogma as feasible, always resulted in some disaster or another, because the model is fundamentally flawed: its applicability is very limited to a very specific, idealized, set of circumstances, which are present in the real life only in a small subset of economic activities. For example, "free markets" require that the consumer is able to choose, based on an acurate knowledge, from a large number (the number of choices is directly related to efficiency of the competition) of competing products and that no substantial "barriers to entry" exist for new competitiors in that domain, be it natural or legislative/political. Thus "free market" worked at some time for, say, potato farmers in the absence of artificial fertilizers (existence of which allowed their suppliers to displace farmers as the controllers of the industry and eventually bankrupted most of them). In most industries such "barriers to entry" form naturally and their height increases rapidly with the consolidation of the marke
You have to stop reading propaganda. The "severe debt" is usually a misrepresentation of an overall governmental debt which has been shrinking throughout Europe ever since most governments adopted "balanced budget" policies back in the 1980s. Many European governments routinely end up with budgetary surpluses which leads to a lively debate on how to spend them, with some advocating rapid debt reduction while others investment in other things. The same applies to Canada, which also sports socialized medicare and which has been running budgetary surpluses for almost a decade now.
As a matter of fact, the most debt inducing and downright ruinous economic policy is practiced by none other then the "free market knows best", "conservative" goofuses running the USA, where the government debt is spiralling completely out of control, with most of the money going to gigantic military contractors and mercenaries with no conceivable return on that investment to the average taxpayer other then piles of dead foreign people and rapidly increasing general global hostility, not to mention othe wee things such as the devastating trade imbalances.
It isn't, although some greed-monkeys, like our "small medical businessman" GP, do oh-so-dearly want it to be true.
See above. Most EU governments project declining debts, while the US debt is increasing astronomically, despite of the ever more obvious and heavy-handed attempts by the US elites to instill a vicious dog-eat-dog "society" in there, with clear-cut stratification of the economic royalty and the de-facto indentured slaves underneath.
How so? Competetive sports involve people performing otherwise useless activities, such as throwing a pig-skin clad item around or chasing a piece of plastic around on ice, while chess players waste brain power on moving silly pieces around 64 squares on a little board, neither having any useful real life consequences from any perspective other then "entertainment". If anything, sports at least have the supposed side-effect of encouraging healthy life-styles by promoting physical fittness. Playing chess on the other has not been linked in any way to improvement of any other cognitive skills or brain functions, and this very example of a chess "genius" is proof positive that it has even nothing whatsoever to do with common sense!
So, logically, activities such as, say, competetive spitting is just as "useful" as chess ... or checkers ... or Black Jack ... etc and so on.
This of course makes no sense (as usual with the ISPs) because the much saner (and cheaper for everyone) method would be of course to upgrade the routing hardware on existing fiber, which is my whole point: the ISPs do not give a flying fuck about investing in infrastructure, with the possible exception of creating "their own" links, for which they expect to gouge everyone else, as Telstra is doing. Once the link is in place, Telstra will happilly sit on it, without any upgrades for as long as it is conceivably possible, just short of its customers getting pitchforks and torches (or electing hostile, regulation-prone politicians), which is apparently its "successful" overall strategy in Australia so far.
In short: ISPs are an example of some of the worst cases of anti-competetive, consumer-gounging "businesses" around, probably because their family tree is rooted in the telecommunication industry, historically a veritable hive of thievery, villany and general scum.
If the overseas connection fees were in fact the real, unsurmountable technical problem, you would see the same scenarios develop which once developed in the telephone industry: long distance fees. That is the data rates would be different for traffic accross the overseas uplinks versus the "local" ones within the ISPs area or perheaps a group of local ISPs. But of course the "we pay an arm and a leg for overseas" is just an excuse. In fact those fiber connections are nowhere near saturation and the cost of their being laid down has long since been recovered already and the actual bulk rates that ISPs pay themselves are a fraction of what they charge consumers on the other end.
The ISPs are simply in a position to gouge the consumers (and sometimes each other) and competition is non-existant in practice.
All fine and dandy, except that $1.50/GB amounts to highway robbery, given the current state of technology and the costs of transmission for the ISP. The actual "fair" market price, if the thing called "competition" was anything but a sad joke, would be somewhere below $0.10. Remember, other then electricity and mutual agreements with fellow ISP sharks, there is no cost other then the initial investment and some insignificant (in relation to the size of the system) maintenance.
And which brings us to the issue which is really at the core of the thing: the unwillingness of the ISPs to invest into robust infrastructure and their desire to milk whatever marginally performing systems they have, pretty much indefinitely.
Nah, it was the mole who called the cops!
Do not most things involving social dynamics?
What "progress" do you speak of? Clock speed? Number of transistors per core? These do not strike me as anything but small incremental improvements. And thanks to the "one and a half horse race" we lost truly radical consumer possibilities such as massive paralellization, evolution of RISC systems, transputers etc and so on, as none of them fit the narrowly defined criteria of the Wintel parade. Many of which render all the "progress" in the increasingly convoluted and inefficient x86 architectures moot.
See above. Having wasted decades of reasearch and innovative ideas, the Wintel crowd has painted itself into a corner. They cannot truly innovate without dumping the whole Wintel system and doing so would instantly put them at a disadvantage by forcing actual competition between many innovative companies. I expect to see decades of pathetic attempts at avoiding the issue, the final outcome wholly dependant on the ability of the Wintel alliance to maintain their de-facto monopolistic grip. Only if this giant dies, the innovation will resume.
Which was my whole point, that competition and innovation are in reverse proportion to the size of the companies involved, even if the cost per unit gets lower with the size of the production runs.
You are purposefuly trying to misrepresent what I said. No, civilization was not built exclusively on slavery, but various forms of small groups dominating the much larger ones was always a key element of any larger human society. The only thing that has chanegd over time was the identity of the lords. That is an irrefutable fact, easily verified in any history book. In short: true, societies formed as protection against the vagaries of nature ... but as soon as they formed a caste of "elite" parasites begun to prey on them, and are still doing so today. The excuses have changed, complex religious "justifications" gave way to complex economic voodoo "justifications", but the underlying desires to control, dominate and be "superior" at any cost remain unchanged.
That gave me a good laugh! People "joined" the Egyptian empire?! Did not "flee" him!? Dude your understanding of the dynamics of that time is pathetic. Hint: it took several months of hardship for an average person to travel from one end of the Egyptian empire to another. Impoverished family under the foot of the Empire would have never made it alive. This of course assuming that they had a clue that any land actually existed outside of Egypt in the first place! Most were born, lived and died within a radius of a few miles, never seeing anyting beyond the hills on the horizon! And then of course was the wee little fact that all the neighbouring lands were ruled by equally nasty and idiotic "meritorious" parasites.
I never said anything of the sort. I merely object to personality cults, glorification of wealth, attempts to form mindless equivalence between money and "merit" and some people's desire to re-establish the feudal order based on these inane assumptions.
This very sysytem was attempted in Italy. The respective groups, such as "workers", "businessmen", "doctors" etc were each called a "corpus". The systems chief proponent, one Benito Mussolini, called this "corporatism", and later renamed it "fascism" after the word "fascio", meaning "bundle", which represented the collection of these groups ruling together. I hope your undestanding of history is good enought to figure out what went on next.
No, it is you who prove your pre-conceived biases clouding your vision. I am no Marxist, but the fact