No - we'd just tell you it isn't your right to use the goverment's monopoly on the use of force to mandate that someone else's company spend millions because you don't feel like moving.
Which of course would be the usual strawman burning so beloved by Libertarians, since no one even suggested for governments to force anybody into providing service. Merely that the government should look after the overall competetiveness of the marketplace, ensuring a large number of competitors by busting monopolies, cartels, oligopolies and the like, and as a result of that there would be enough companies, some of them specializing in providing access to remote areas, to serve these people.
But then again, Libertarians being deceitful is like water being wet. They just can't help themselves.
As has been mentioned before, many states, and up here in Canada, only one of the two parties on a phone call need to be aware of the fact that the call is being recorded.
That cannot be true. If it were true, there would be absolutely no point in notifying anyone that the call is being recorded, ever, since one party (the recording one) always knows. The point is to notify the potential victim, i.e. the party that is not recording (although I am sure that it would be diffrent for law enforcement officers with a warrant). That is why all those warnings you hear when you call telephone support centres about "your call may be recorded or monitored for... purposes". If what you say were true, these warnings would not exist, as the call centre, being a party to the call, most certainly knows that it is recording the call.
Your interpretation would make absolutely no sense, whatsoever.
They are not keeping logs? Don't make me laugh. How would they even keep statistics of what is going on with their ad system?! How would they prove to their customers, the ad buyers, that they are actually popping them in context, instead of simply cheating and doing it at random?!
You've confused corporate-speak with reality.
In real life, in order to do voice recognition function, it has to be tuned on real data. In order to tune it, you have to collect samples, listen to them yourself and then compare the results to the automated recognition system. That is what they, by necessity, must do. Furthermore, the very process requires that your conversation is recorded, in some stages of the process, in digital form, even if that recording is supposed to be discarded further on. It is tivial for the employees or an unscrupulous business person to take advantage of that. And I guarantee you that in the fine, fine print of your "free service" agreement you agree to not hold them responsible should your conversations find their way to the "stupidest phone calls evah!" web site or some such.
In short, when you sign for this shit, you are as good as recorded for any and all uses the corporate crooks can think of today or will think of tommorrow.
Sure, they got an opt-in of the caller but do they have opt-in from the recipient?! So some imbecile calls you on that thing, and without warning you are being monitored/recorded by some inane corporate NSA-wannabe operation, with no idea by whom and where your call is being listened to, and retained for purposes you can't predict.
The only way I can see this being even remotely legal in many places is if you get a message in the vain of "The party calling you has opted for recording of this call for undetermined purposes by any and all corporate afilliates of afilliates of the NSA-wannabies who paid the sheep in question for his call, Press 1 to accept the incoming call, Baaaaah, Press 2 to indicate that you still have a brain..." or some such.
I'm not going to get into everything you say as its just absurd and a waste of my time anyhow as you believe what you do and nobody is going to change your mind.. but I will make some comments.
... I thought it was amusing to throw that first rule of the Bill O'Reilly School of Debate back at you.
You have plenty of choices in beverages and transportation, and just because you (and others) choose the most appealing choice, it does not mean you are forced to make it. The government is the only one that can legally force you to do something.
Libertarians just kill me with this laughable distinction of "being forced" vs "free choice", with the first one, of course, always being an exclusive domain of governments, and the other of the glorious, basked in a divine ray of light, feature of the Holy Free Markets of His Lordship Greed. It never crosses their mind that "offering an alternative" to someone of driving around for half an hour to buy a non-Pepsi or non-Coke drink for one's sadwitch constitutes just as effective means of "forcing" him to buy one of the two oligopoly products as simply ordering him to for all practical purposes, with a bonus feature of creating an illusion of "choice". This, or offering the "competing" product of tap-water. But that is not truly "forcing", according to them, it is merely "suggesting with no other practical alternatives" or "gently persuading via time and distance" etc. Similarly, one can start a farm and grow his own chicken as an "alternative" to some food manufacturing monopoly in the only convenience store in town as a fully "practical" and completely "free choice" alternative! No one is "forcing" you to eat the General Mills stuff! "Just" grown your own corn! Or "just" drive 30 miles! Its a "free enterprise" kind of world!
And then there is always grass and tree bark! A world full of "free choices" as opposed to all that nasty government-induced "force"!
For those historically inclined, I should point out some more creative "freedoms" and "choices", as envisioned by the Libertarians of old.
Alan Greenspan was on it a few days ago and flat out said we do not have a "free market" in any way shape or form.
Of course. The old jerk is simply saying, now that his conscience is starting to bother him at the end of his life, the patently obvious: Free Markets do not exist in practice.
One can try to approximate the theory in some areas of commerce, with careful monitoring and rapid intervention to remove self-forming deformities, but one will never achieve truly "free" marketplace. There are just far too many real-life obstacles for the theory to be ever fully applicable. Fundamental, insurmountable obstacles.
You believe this current system we have sucks, I agree with you! Where we disagree is what we call this system and how to fix it.
True.
I call our current system a Mercantile or Corporatist system, where the government plays a protectionist role in the economy for the sake of our investors and corporations.
True again, that is because the very functions of governance have been corrupted beyond recognition by the powerful and rich people (and those who seek to become powerful and rich).
I believe that can be fixed by eliminating the ability to incorporate at all (thus denying the special legal protection to shady business men, as thats all a corporation really is.)
I would agree to a degree. The corproate charter was originally a mechanism for a group of smaller businesses to reduce a risk for themselves when banding together to construct a project beyond the
Um, no. A libertarian wouldn't suggest that's a realistic option, because they're not morons.
At the risk of the usual karma loss from a coordinated downmod assault via multuple accounts (a favourite tactic of "liberty" loving Libertarians of late) I must point out that placing "realistic" and Libertarian (or Objectivist) in a sentence to each other is the very definition of an oxymoron. I would not go as far as to call them all "morons", for some are very intelligent, but "... deluded, blinded by greed, destructive, anti-social (or in many cases sociopathic) selfish jerks, fantasy-land dwellers convinced of their imminent captainhood of industry and wealth beyond measure, and thus useful willing tools for the powerful and rich... " should approximate some of their major features.
But if the conversation moved to discussion over whether government should help out, they're note that no one has an inherent right to decent internet access, and question why government should get involved.
This, of course, would be a typical Libertarian goal-post-moving, which, you are quite right, would be only expected of one of them. The issue is not "right to internet access" (although any sane government would see that it is a great competetive advantage for the nation it governs to facilitate access to the wealth of data Internet offers for its citizens, just as it was with public libraries in older days) but rather that of ensuring the continued operation of the marketplace in the face of assault of natural monopolistic forces. Contrary to what any random Libertarian would tell you, markets are not miraculously self-curing operations, even though some very selectively chosen aspects of them can be so in theory (if sufficently dumbed-down that is). In real life, the operation of the market is very far from the optimal, theoretical conditions. Subsequently, due to an ability of companies to create "barriers to entry" for their competitors (be it via abuse of governmental functions - which is the only thing Libertatians ever see with their blinds on, or geograpghy, natural resources, social structures, cultural and national taboos and what not) produces conditions for creation of monopolies or, in most cases, oligopolies (or trusts or cartels) which quickly establish an iron grip on their corner of the marketplace, a situation which can last for generations.
The purpose of government in this case is to break that stranglehold and allow for reduction of these barriers to the point that smaller enterprises can enter the fray. From the perspective of commerce, the role of the government should be to ensure maximum competition in the marketplace. Government has many other crucial roles, such as ensuring that fostering of that vicious competition between businesses (as it should be) does not translate into a dog-eat-dog, brutal "lifestyle" of the workers (and their families) of those companies. That is why pan-national, independent from commerce or individual industries, safety nets and assistance programs are absolutely necessary to prevent the most negative of effects of ruthless competition from spreading where they do not belong: families of workers.
This of course goes to the fundamental disagreement about the purpose of the society as a whole. I (as most sane people) believe that this purpose is to foster well being of all members of that society, even if it means "unjsutly depriving" some of them from their 20th billion-dollar bonus in exchange for a few million children not dying from cholera. Libertarians, apparently, believe that the purpose of the society is to propel their asses into individual wealth and power (and who gives a fuck about the rest of us! If we can be used to step on to get there, all the better! Besides, if everyone was well off, how would one get servants?!).
They'd probably concede you're shit out of luck, and leave it at
You are modded "funny", but that is precisely what a Libertarian (or better yet Objectivist) convert would tell you, with a straight face, probably thinking that he/she is giving you a life-changing, priceless advice. That or suggest you "start one" in your basement to "compete" with an existing one (usually some multi-billion per year in revenue, monopolistic affair with several hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure accumulated over 150 years, or so, with half of the local financial nobility on the board of its directors).
I seem to recall seeing this very "prediction" about the ability of those silly, impoverished Russians to defend themselves somewhere else before.... first made by a short little dude from France, and then by another one with a funny moustache and a cow-lick hairdo from Germany.... you wouldn't know how it went for the both of them, per chance, would you?
One has to wonder though -- why do merchant vessels have to be crewed at all?
My understanding is that the crews are mostly needed during the preparations for docking, loading/unloading and for maintenance (of which the rustbuckets otherwise known as "shipping vessels" need extraordinary amounts). Also it is apparently much cheaper to haul very underpaid crews on their ships into places where unionized long-shoremen would have to take their place if the ships were automated...
And then of course is the problem of reliability of remote controls and automation, liability for ships going off course and colliding, say, with a cruise liner, etc and so on.
Among others, such as terrorists getting hold of the fuel to make "dirty bombs" and what not.
because wildlife seem pretty resilient to radioactivity as seen at Chernobyl, where owls or wolves, local species of wild horses, prosper since the radiations have kicked out humans. I'm not at all a PETA kind of people though I like animals, still I'm not sure to understand how radiations could be worse for the environment than the constant spills, which unlike the radiations give no chance to the wildlife.
The thing with radiation is persistence. Oil decomposes in sea water much, much quicker then even the half-life of typical nuclear fuel. As to Chernobyl wild-life, what you neglect to mention is the fact that most of it is very short lived and thus able to recover from such setbacks by simply evolving all sorts of immunities simply be the force of numbers, but at the expense of massive mortalities and deformities in the few initial generations after the accident. The cancer rates amongst Chernobyl area animals are still orders of magnitude higher then elsewhere. But because the humans left, the animal's numbers increase rapidly despite of the mutations and cancers, because the human presence is far more destructive to wild-life then nuclear radiation. And there is something rather sad in that realization.
Having said that, nuclear fuel sunk in oceans is less likely to cause wide-spread disasters because water acts as a shielding factor for most of the radiation types and so the range of the damage is severely limited to very localized areas.
Err, who was saying anything about "millionaires"? Most VPs and CEOs live very, very successfully on other people's money, thank you very much. In fact this is the whole point! They spend like mad on their luxuries and their "savings" are eventually realized from excess loot, usually towards the end of their "careers" when they retire on their golden parachutes.
You need to understand that Coke and Pepsi compeet with Starbucks
Riiight. And they also "compete" with tap-water...
AMD started very small and was able to succeed against Intel without government help thus offering people a choice.
That occured before the fabrication plants costs were into tens of billions of dollars, i.e. during the time when many other companies could try to compete with Intel. That is no longer the case and has been that way for a decade.
If AMD would have believed that nonsense in 1986, they wouldn't exist today.. but they did challenge Intel now Intel chips are based on AMD's designs.
See above. The barriers change as the technology changes. The important part is that for prolonged stretches of time, sometimes lasting generations, they are too steep for viable competitors to emerge in many many cases.
There are many other microprocessors out there as well you can "choose" if you so like.
None of which are viable competitors in the main arena we are discussing. This is equivalent to proposing that one can "choose" rain water instead of one of the products owned by the Pepsi/Coke duo-poly. Or just like one can "choose" to walk as a "competition" to owning a car. Or eating grass as an "alternative" to General Mills merchandise.
If Intel and AMD teamed up and jacked their prices up to a point where it made people extremely unhappy with the sale, we would eventually see a Windows port to IBM's PPC or Cell's.
And you conclude your non-argument with a nice demonstration of your having no clue as to what effects monopolies and cartels have on the market. Here is a free clue: they do not have to jack prices up to the point of a consumer revolt. Anywhere above the prices of an actual functioning market is quite fine, thank you very much. There is a huge gray area between "properly functioning market" and "consumer revolt". That does not however foster any competition and thus breaks all of the fundamental mechanisms of the market. At which point capitalism becomes a kleptocracy.
It kills me that the likes of you always whine about "free market" and at the same time have no objections whatsoever to having competition reduced to two or even one global supplier by the naturally occuring flaws of the marketplace. Somehow the reverse relationship between efficiency of the marketplace and the number of competitors, about which Adam Smith was so concerned, is unable to jolt you out of your greed-motivated ideological stupor. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Barrier to market my ass.
Apparently, you would not recognize one if it impacted up your ass, at high velocity, edge-wise.
The monopoly and lock in can't exist without government allowing it to exist.
Was this a call for the government to become an impartial monitor of the marketplace and an increased government control of the rules of the game to prevent abuse by large businesses and priviledged individuals? Somehow I do not think so....
Libertarians repeat this like a prayer, and like a prayer they hope it somehow, magically, becomes true.
But it is not, and it won't.
The truth is that monopolies and oligopolies are created via barriers to entry to the marketplace, and abuse of governmental regulation is only one of many method of creating such barriers, others being technological, geographical, social, cultural etc and so on.
For example, no one mandated the (for all the practical purposes) duopoly of Coca-cola and Pepsi. Neither was Intel and AMD somehow made the only major players in the PC CPU arena via making their competitors illegal. Etc and so on. I could go on like this through the thousands of persistent (as in lasting through generations) global, national and local monopolies which have nothing whatsoever to do with government or regulation and yet are devastating to consumer choice and highly parasitic in nature.
In short, blaming the government for all inherent flaws of the real-life (as opposed to inane "theoretical" oversimplifications used by propagandists) marketplace serves only one purpose: to free some very unscrupulous and ill-meaning individuals from any last remaining vestiges of anything resembling oversight. And that marginal oversight is the very last thing standing between them and their dream of becoming the new Kings, Lords and Nobles and the rest of us their indentured slaves and outright owned peons.
That is why Libertarians frighten me to no end, they are like the goofuses who honestly thought that the new "Worker's and Peasant's Party" will, in a few more red-flag-waving rallies, bring them freedom, justice and prosperity, just as that fellow Lenin promised! Different phillosophy but the same naivette and a very similar species of wool-clad wolves leading their "rugged indvidualist" sheep to slaughter at the altar of greed and power.
Either he's an idiot or a "double agent", let's see if the p2p forum offers him a job to decide:)
Having seen the contents of his email, already prolifically available all over the internet, I must point out that the evidence is, so far, overwhelmingly in favour of the former. And by "overwhelming" I mean in the same vain as evidence for the idea that the Sun raises in the East or that the water tends to be wet.
The track record of being "centered around local products and services" is continuation of poverty. Almost all 20-21st century examples of countries leaving massive poverty has been driven by export-lead growth.
The reason for that is, of course, that the supposed "helpers", which "helped" these nations to "grow" their economies, were in fact parasitic predators whose objectives were the exact opposite. So the only remaining game plan available to those countries was to play the predator's game, and to try out-predator the parasites at their own shtick, consequences to society and environment be damned. Some succeeded at this, some did not.
It's too bad for Ignoramus, though, that in the real world "steal," "stolen" and "theft" are used by everyone that matter. But of course according to slashdotters they are all wrong.
Some time ago, "everyone that mattered" kept calling themselves "nobility" and all others "peons" and conidered the said "peons" as disposable items which belonged to whichever Lord happened to... well... lord over them. And so it was written in the laws made by "everyone that mattered".
Some, not so distant, time ago, "everyone that mattered" kept referring to dark-skinned individuals from Africa as "property" and so it was written in the laws made by "everyone that mattered".
Similarly, some shorter time ago, "everyone that mattered" in the country of Germany used to refer to a certain non-germanic social group as "sub-human" and so it was written in the laws made by "everyone that mattered".
Even shorter time ago in the USSR...
But then again, I am getting an impression that your kind will never get it. In your view whatever those in power say, is automatically, by definition, correct, sacrosanct and divinely makes all the sense in the world. I say that you should grow a brain and attempt the trick of letting loose some independent thought in it, and then come back to talk about "Pavlovian reflexes". For a bonus excercise lookup the terms "Authoritarianism" and its red-headed bastard child, "Fascism".
As time goes on there will be gradual changes in China and the rest of the world, and eventually the disparity we feel now will tend to balance itself out, in no small part because of the exploitation of the current discrepancy; invisible hand of the market and all that.
Sure it will "balance" itself. The problem is the human cost of that transition and the out of control nature of it. What the "invisible-hand's-fist-up-your-ass" method of society managment proponents always neglect is the human cost of their activities. If it is not on a Wall Street ticker, it doesn't exist to them. Imagine two steam-filled boilers, one at very high pressure, representing the accumulated and continuously generated wealth of the industrialized West and one at very low, representing the, mostly poor, rest of the world. There are several methods to "equalize" the pressure in those tanks: to try to heat the low pressure one while adding water (which is the sane approach), to let steam escape through a controllable valve (not so smart - but suppose that unlike in real life the ability of the empty boiler to generate steam also increases with this transfer, so it has some merit) and the last one, the "invisible-hand-smashing-you-in-the-face" approach is to blow a big hole in the big tank with a grenade and use a bicycle pump to try to catch steam as it escapes and pump it into the empty one. The "lost" steam which escapes the pump (i.e. most of it) into the air is called "profit". The end result is that the empty tank's preasure increase is negligeable and the big one is simply busted and would need to be repaired by someone other then the "invisible-hand-of-fuckups" people.
The whole local products and services argument won't cut it: specialization is more efficient then subsistence, and specialization encourages/requires lively trade. Eventually, the world will act as a single economy, with wage equality and whatnot, and at that point "sustainable economies, centered around local products and services" will be unlikely unless you consider the entirety of human civilization "local".
This is utter bullshit, I am sorry to say. What applies to individuals (sustinence vs. specialization) and to some degree to companies (accuracy of which decreases with the size of the operation - most Asian conglomerates make everything from diapers to oil-tankers) does not apply to countries and continents!! The scale changes the nature of things! Grains of sand are moved by different processes then boulders and mountains!
But ignoring this for a moment, in order for your "single economy" to work, these things would have to occur: global corporations (the only ones with the reach) would have to replace all kinds of other businesses. Since their power would then exceed that of all nations and local governments (as it already does for many) they would become the defacto rulers of the world. Since corporations are feudal entities at core, this would by necessity mean that your new globalization utopia is, by its very nature, a feudal structure comprised of corporate kingdoms and their vassals.
The energy requirements (and the types of energy) required to make this nonsense work are simply unsustainable. The present scam operates only because the fossil fuels, accumulated over the course of hundreds of millions of years, are insanely undervalued, and can be blown in seconds out of our collective asses to make disposable plastic chairs and throw-away packaging, which then can be transported all over the world for next to nothing. Not to mention driving veritable battle tanks around to and fro our urban spawl McMansions. As soon as the fossilized remains of trees and animals run out, this traveling circus of utter, short-sighted stupidity is going to hit a brick wall at a rather high velocity. The other types of energy are orders of magnitude more expensive and nowhere near as flexible as fossil fuels. In short
Well that sounds good in theory, but it is not true in practice.
What actually happens is that as the living standards of the "target" of the products are very rapidly lowered (attendant with creation of astronomical and unsecured debt) and the living standards of the source are slowly (as slowly as one can manage as a matter of fact, as this reduces profits) raised. When that fails, the "source" is moved to yet another poor country, and the previous one simply abandoned. Ask those border-factory Mexicans, who were such gold makers for the corps in the 1980s, how they are doing to today...
Since there are very many potential "sources", the process can be repeated for several generations yet. Its bonus feature is an ability to destroy any worker's protections in the "target" countries, by beating the working class over their heads with demands to be more "flexible" and "competerive" with their "competiton" who gets paid $2 a week and has no rights or benefits. Since those protections took centuries to acquire, they will take centuries to regain once lost.
Also, there are very few types of products which cannot be made everywhere, and very few types of ores which do not occur on every continent in quantity. It makes more sense to transport the extracted and purified raw materials then the goods since it requires much less volume and fuel waste for that process.
Which brings on another point: globalization is not sustainable, simply due to the amounts of energy (and types of thereof) required to transport the goods all over the world. We are used to extremely cheap (even at $80 a barrel) energy which is the result of millions of years of slow accumulation and which we are blowing from out asses in mere historical seconds. When that runs out... globalization will be a word one uses a punchline of a sad joke.
*OR* the hypothetical nuclear fleet would have better hiring and maintenance practices, you dumb fuck.
Am an in awe of your grasp of the situation, specially when highlighted with such creative epithets. Now, do please explain how does this hypothetical fleet has its maintenance and hiring practices improved, given that vast majority of it is registered in, say, that bastion of high standards of regulation: Antigua, and owned by companies registered in, say, Dubai. For a bonus question: explain away your method of forcing the merchants to use the astronomically expensive (in relation to everything else) nuclear reactors followed by your gracing us with your enlightening views on the methods of securing the nuclear fuel and the ships themselves from falling into the hands of some bearded and beturbaned individuals with somewhat antisocial attitudes.
Seriously, you just blindly grafted on an aspect of reality onto a hypothetical alternative. How pig shit stupid can you get?
I am reeling under the assault of your great wit, so cleverly based upon words of "shit" and "pig". As to being blindly "grafted" on an aspect of reality, I am afraid I got you beat there, since your entire rant consists of "hypothetical" hot air, which does not even withstand most cursory of "hypothetical" searches for traces of common sense.
I'm not sure if you're intentionally parodying those who blame all of the world's woes on this supposed elite that nobody can name or place, but you're doing a great job of it. If you're not then your worldview is incredibly warped and I prescribe one dose of leaving the basement and seeing the real world.
Real world? Basement? These goofuses are actually my long-time customers and I deal with them daily. That is how my worldview got "warped" as a result of what I know first-hand. And that is how you do not know, apparently. Not only can I place them and name them, I can even name their boats. And that is why I post here under a handle. If they knew that I know many of them for what they are, they would no doubt try to retaliate and that would be rather inconvenient. I can fix the overpaid stuckup buffoons' mistakes for top dollar when they believe all their screwups are the wisest moves ever and only need "little touchups", but it is impossible to do so when they know that I know what those turds of their making really are. It bruises their fragile egos and makes them very uncomfortable. I like to call this: "Customer Relations". The way the world works, kid. Smile and shovel. Your reward is laughing all the way to the bank.
And if you are one of those MBAs - keep in mind that this grinning consultant on whom you offload all your real work and who says "That would be no problem!" or "I can work within the framework of your plan!" and the like, might be someone like me and hold the same opinion of you as I do. You can tell by how skillfully he actually does what he needed to do to make it work, as opposed to what you told him to do, even though he agreed and nodded his head all the way. That and the fact that his bills keep going up the more your fuckups pile up, even though you did your darnest to hide them. But he never stops smiling and being nice to you, does he? It is so fortunate that you cannot read his mind. You would spend the rest of your days under your bed shivering.
PS - Nobody even plays golf anymore. Try adventure sports. That's where you'll find today's executives.
Muahahahahahaha! Hahahahaah! Ehrm.
"Adventure sports" would require these farts to actually exert themselves. Although some few do that, there are very good reasons why golf (followed by far distant second: squash) is king, which you do not seem to grasp: 1) one can do this in an exclusive, exorbitantly-priced, invitation memebership only, bar-equipped course right in or very near the city, which also provides an opportunity to flaunt one's wealth to all the peons 2) most execs are lazy farts who talk a storm about "sports" but usually restrict themselves to swinging clubs and copiously drinking and 3) one can discuss business deals in comfort while golfing, which is rather hard when, say, hand-gliding and what not. "Adventure sports" are what most of them would, without batting an ayelid, label a posh trip to, say, Africa or some other poor but picturescue place, where they ride around in well guarded and very luxurious RVs, once every decade or so.
I get cold sweat when I think on my days of youth, when I actually believed the same sanitized, propagandistic crap you seem to believe. But I don't blame you for your naivette. Unless you were born into this rarefied socialite club or are grudgingly admitted to it via marriage or some astronomically unlikely random coincidence (which you will prompty ascribe to your own infallable iron wit of which the mere peons are bereft of, as is the prevailing custom in those circles), you will learn eventually.
Actually, having the Chinese, as well as all other nations, being well off frightens only the proponents of "globalization" (who are usually some variants of "conservative" these days - although any greed blinded individual will do) which hypocritically, depends on vast inequalities which can be exploited for profit.
Wealth and responsibility are not mutually exclusive.
The answer of course is to enable other nations to grow sustainable economies, centered around local products and services.
"Globalization" as it is envisioned and conducted at present is the bastard child resulting from an orgy of greed and colossal waste, orgy conducted with gleeful, utter abandon and contempt for the future generations.
It is the crowning achievement of the "I got mine, so Fuck You All!" world-view
To be fair, your point has one valid element: the Western working class is just as guilty of in this very attitude as the Western business elites, and so, by extension, also complicit in this. Only now do they realize the true implications of their short-sighted political apathy.
It's not that they haven't yet been indoctrinated, it's that they haven't yet created anything worthy of being stolen.
Your assertion will ring more true as soon as you explain how one does "steal" information. After providing your coherent, logically consistent and proveable answer, just seeing me humbled will be a mere icing on the cake, of course, after your having received your Nobel prize and world-wide fame for the successful subversion of the empirically demonstrable, natural laws of the Universe.
I tremble in anticipation of your devastating and awe-inspiring demonstration! A demonstration which will provide the definitive way to end all arguments on the matter, surely?
Slashdot Mirror
Which of course would be the usual strawman burning so beloved by Libertarians, since no one even suggested for governments to force anybody into providing service. Merely that the government should look after the overall competetiveness of the marketplace, ensuring a large number of competitors by busting monopolies, cartels, oligopolies and the like, and as a result of that there would be enough companies, some of them specializing in providing access to remote areas, to serve these people.
But then again, Libertarians being deceitful is like water being wet. They just can't help themselves.
That cannot be true. If it were true, there would be absolutely no point in notifying anyone that the call is being recorded, ever, since one party (the recording one) always knows. The point is to notify the potential victim, i.e. the party that is not recording (although I am sure that it would be diffrent for law enforcement officers with a warrant). That is why all those warnings you hear when you call telephone support centres about "your call may be recorded or monitored for ... purposes". If what you say were true, these warnings would not exist, as the call centre, being a party to the call, most certainly knows that it is recording the call.
Your interpretation would make absolutely no sense, whatsoever.
They are not keeping logs? Don't make me laugh. How would they even keep statistics of what is going on with their ad system?! How would they prove to their customers, the ad buyers, that they are actually popping them in context, instead of simply cheating and doing it at random?!
You've confused corporate-speak with reality.
In real life, in order to do voice recognition function, it has to be tuned on real data. In order to tune it, you have to collect samples, listen to them yourself and then compare the results to the automated recognition system. That is what they, by necessity, must do. Furthermore, the very process requires that your conversation is recorded, in some stages of the process, in digital form, even if that recording is supposed to be discarded further on. It is tivial for the employees or an unscrupulous business person to take advantage of that. And I guarantee you that in the fine, fine print of your "free service" agreement you agree to not hold them responsible should your conversations find their way to the "stupidest phone calls evah!" web site or some such.
In short, when you sign for this shit, you are as good as recorded for any and all uses the corporate crooks can think of today or will think of tommorrow.
Really? Is it for the recipient of the call? How does he/she know that the call is being recorded?
Except that this is a legal morass in the making.
Sure, they got an opt-in of the caller but do they have opt-in from the recipient?! So some imbecile calls you on that thing, and without warning you are being monitored/recorded by some inane corporate NSA-wannabe operation, with no idea by whom and where your call is being listened to, and retained for purposes you can't predict.
The only way I can see this being even remotely legal in many places is if you get a message in the vain of "The party calling you has opted for recording of this call for undetermined purposes by any and all corporate afilliates of afilliates of the NSA-wannabies who paid the sheep in question for his call, Press 1 to accept the incoming call, Baaaaah, Press 2 to indicate that you still have a brain..." or some such.
I'm not going to get into everything you say as its just absurd and a waste of my time anyhow as you believe what you do and nobody is going to change your mind.. but I will make some comments.
... I thought it was amusing to throw that first rule of the Bill O'Reilly School of Debate back at you.
Libertarians just kill me with this laughable distinction of "being forced" vs "free choice", with the first one, of course, always being an exclusive domain of governments, and the other of the glorious, basked in a divine ray of light, feature of the Holy Free Markets of His Lordship Greed. It never crosses their mind that "offering an alternative" to someone of driving around for half an hour to buy a non-Pepsi or non-Coke drink for one's sadwitch constitutes just as effective means of "forcing" him to buy one of the two oligopoly products as simply ordering him to for all practical purposes, with a bonus feature of creating an illusion of "choice". This, or offering the "competing" product of tap-water. But that is not truly "forcing", according to them, it is merely "suggesting with no other practical alternatives" or "gently persuading via time and distance" etc. Similarly, one can start a farm and grow his own chicken as an "alternative" to some food manufacturing monopoly in the only convenience store in town as a fully "practical" and completely "free choice" alternative! No one is "forcing" you to eat the General Mills stuff! "Just" grown your own corn! Or "just" drive 30 miles! Its a "free enterprise" kind of world!
And then there is always grass and tree bark! A world full of "free choices" as opposed to all that nasty government-induced "force"!
For those historically inclined, I should point out some more creative "freedoms" and "choices", as envisioned by the Libertarians of old.
Of course. The old jerk is simply saying, now that his conscience is starting to bother him at the end of his life, the patently obvious: Free Markets do not exist in practice.
One can try to approximate the theory in some areas of commerce, with careful monitoring and rapid intervention to remove self-forming deformities, but one will never achieve truly "free" marketplace. There are just far too many real-life obstacles for the theory to be ever fully applicable. Fundamental, insurmountable obstacles.
True.
True again, that is because the very functions of governance have been corrupted beyond recognition by the powerful and rich people (and those who seek to become powerful and rich).
I would agree to a degree. The corproate charter was originally a mechanism for a group of smaller businesses to reduce a risk for themselves when banding together to construct a project beyond the
At the risk of the usual karma loss from a coordinated downmod assault via multuple accounts (a favourite tactic of "liberty" loving Libertarians of late) I must point out that placing "realistic" and Libertarian (or Objectivist) in a sentence to each other is the very definition of an oxymoron. I would not go as far as to call them all "morons", for some are very intelligent, but "... deluded, blinded by greed, destructive, anti-social (or in many cases sociopathic) selfish jerks, fantasy-land dwellers convinced of their imminent captainhood of industry and wealth beyond measure, and thus useful willing tools for the powerful and rich ... " should approximate some of their major features.
This, of course, would be a typical Libertarian goal-post-moving, which, you are quite right, would be only expected of one of them. The issue is not "right to internet access" (although any sane government would see that it is a great competetive advantage for the nation it governs to facilitate access to the wealth of data Internet offers for its citizens, just as it was with public libraries in older days) but rather that of ensuring the continued operation of the marketplace in the face of assault of natural monopolistic forces. Contrary to what any random Libertarian would tell you, markets are not miraculously self-curing operations, even though some very selectively chosen aspects of them can be so in theory (if sufficently dumbed-down that is). In real life, the operation of the market is very far from the optimal, theoretical conditions. Subsequently, due to an ability of companies to create "barriers to entry" for their competitors (be it via abuse of governmental functions - which is the only thing Libertatians ever see with their blinds on, or geograpghy, natural resources, social structures, cultural and national taboos and what not) produces conditions for creation of monopolies or, in most cases, oligopolies (or trusts or cartels) which quickly establish an iron grip on their corner of the marketplace, a situation which can last for generations.
The purpose of government in this case is to break that stranglehold and allow for reduction of these barriers to the point that smaller enterprises can enter the fray. From the perspective of commerce, the role of the government should be to ensure maximum competition in the marketplace. Government has many other crucial roles, such as ensuring that fostering of that vicious competition between businesses (as it should be) does not translate into a dog-eat-dog, brutal "lifestyle" of the workers (and their families) of those companies. That is why pan-national, independent from commerce or individual industries, safety nets and assistance programs are absolutely necessary to prevent the most negative of effects of ruthless competition from spreading where they do not belong: families of workers.
This of course goes to the fundamental disagreement about the purpose of the society as a whole. I (as most sane people) believe that this purpose is to foster well being of all members of that society, even if it means "unjsutly depriving" some of them from their 20th billion-dollar bonus in exchange for a few million children not dying from cholera. Libertarians, apparently, believe that the purpose of the society is to propel their asses into individual wealth and power (and who gives a fuck about the rest of us! If we can be used to step on to get there, all the better! Besides, if everyone was well off, how would one get servants?!).
You are modded "funny", but that is precisely what a Libertarian (or better yet Objectivist) convert would tell you, with a straight face, probably thinking that he/she is giving you a life-changing, priceless advice. That or suggest you "start one" in your basement to "compete" with an existing one (usually some multi-billion per year in revenue, monopolistic affair with several hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure accumulated over 150 years, or so, with half of the local financial nobility on the board of its directors).
I seem to recall seeing this very "prediction" about the ability of those silly, impoverished Russians to defend themselves somewhere else before .... first made by a short little dude from France, and then by another one with a funny moustache and a cow-lick hairdo from Germany .... you wouldn't know how it went for the both of them, per chance, would you?
My understanding is that the crews are mostly needed during the preparations for docking, loading/unloading and for maintenance (of which the rustbuckets otherwise known as "shipping vessels" need extraordinary amounts). Also it is apparently much cheaper to haul very underpaid crews on their ships into places where unionized long-shoremen would have to take their place if the ships were automated ...
And then of course is the problem of reliability of remote controls and automation, liability for ships going off course and colliding, say, with a cruise liner, etc and so on.
Among others, such as terrorists getting hold of the fuel to make "dirty bombs" and what not.
The thing with radiation is persistence. Oil decomposes in sea water much, much quicker then even the half-life of typical nuclear fuel. As to Chernobyl wild-life, what you neglect to mention is the fact that most of it is very short lived and thus able to recover from such setbacks by simply evolving all sorts of immunities simply be the force of numbers, but at the expense of massive mortalities and deformities in the few initial generations after the accident. The cancer rates amongst Chernobyl area animals are still orders of magnitude higher then elsewhere. But because the humans left, the animal's numbers increase rapidly despite of the mutations and cancers, because the human presence is far more destructive to wild-life then nuclear radiation. And there is something rather sad in that realization.
Having said that, nuclear fuel sunk in oceans is less likely to cause wide-spread disasters because water acts as a shielding factor for most of the radiation types and so the range of the damage is severely limited to very localized areas.
Err, who was saying anything about "millionaires"? Most VPs and CEOs live very, very successfully on other people's money, thank you very much. In fact this is the whole point! They spend like mad on their luxuries and their "savings" are eventually realized from excess loot, usually towards the end of their "careers" when they retire on their golden parachutes.
Riiight. And they also "compete" with tap-water...
That occured before the fabrication plants costs were into tens of billions of dollars, i.e. during the time when many other companies could try to compete with Intel. That is no longer the case and has been that way for a decade.
See above. The barriers change as the technology changes. The important part is that for prolonged stretches of time, sometimes lasting generations, they are too steep for viable competitors to emerge in many many cases.
None of which are viable competitors in the main arena we are discussing. This is equivalent to proposing that one can "choose" rain water instead of one of the products owned by the Pepsi/Coke duo-poly. Or just like one can "choose" to walk as a "competition" to owning a car. Or eating grass as an "alternative" to General Mills merchandise.
And you conclude your non-argument with a nice demonstration of your having no clue as to what effects monopolies and cartels have on the market. Here is a free clue: they do not have to jack prices up to the point of a consumer revolt. Anywhere above the prices of an actual functioning market is quite fine, thank you very much. There is a huge gray area between "properly functioning market" and "consumer revolt". That does not however foster any competition and thus breaks all of the fundamental mechanisms of the market. At which point capitalism becomes a kleptocracy.
It kills me that the likes of you always whine about "free market" and at the same time have no objections whatsoever to having competition reduced to two or even one global supplier by the naturally occuring flaws of the marketplace. Somehow the reverse relationship between efficiency of the marketplace and the number of competitors, about which Adam Smith was so concerned, is unable to jolt you out of your greed-motivated ideological stupor. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Apparently, you would not recognize one if it impacted up your ass, at high velocity, edge-wise.
Was this a call for the government to become an impartial monitor of the marketplace and an increased government control of the rules of the game to prevent abuse by large businesses and priviledged individuals? Somehow I do not think so....
Libertarians repeat this like a prayer, and like a prayer they hope it somehow, magically, becomes true.
But it is not, and it won't.
The truth is that monopolies and oligopolies are created via barriers to entry to the marketplace, and abuse of governmental regulation is only one of many method of creating such barriers, others being technological, geographical, social, cultural etc and so on.
For example, no one mandated the (for all the practical purposes) duopoly of Coca-cola and Pepsi. Neither was Intel and AMD somehow made the only major players in the PC CPU arena via making their competitors illegal. Etc and so on. I could go on like this through the thousands of persistent (as in lasting through generations) global, national and local monopolies which have nothing whatsoever to do with government or regulation and yet are devastating to consumer choice and highly parasitic in nature.
In short, blaming the government for all inherent flaws of the real-life (as opposed to inane "theoretical" oversimplifications used by propagandists) marketplace serves only one purpose: to free some very unscrupulous and ill-meaning individuals from any last remaining vestiges of anything resembling oversight. And that marginal oversight is the very last thing standing between them and their dream of becoming the new Kings, Lords and Nobles and the rest of us their indentured slaves and outright owned peons.
That is why Libertarians frighten me to no end, they are like the goofuses who honestly thought that the new "Worker's and Peasant's Party" will, in a few more red-flag-waving rallies, bring them freedom, justice and prosperity, just as that fellow Lenin promised! Different phillosophy but the same naivette and a very similar species of wool-clad wolves leading their "rugged indvidualist" sheep to slaughter at the altar of greed and power.
Having seen the contents of his email, already prolifically available all over the internet, I must point out that the evidence is, so far, overwhelmingly in favour of the former. And by "overwhelming" I mean in the same vain as evidence for the idea that the Sun raises in the East or that the water tends to be wet.
The reason for that is, of course, that the supposed "helpers", which "helped" these nations to "grow" their economies, were in fact parasitic predators whose objectives were the exact opposite. So the only remaining game plan available to those countries was to play the predator's game, and to try out-predator the parasites at their own shtick, consequences to society and environment be damned. Some succeeded at this, some did not.
Some time ago, "everyone that mattered" kept calling themselves "nobility" and all others "peons" and conidered the said "peons" as disposable items which belonged to whichever Lord happened to ... well ... lord over them. And so it was written in the laws made by "everyone that mattered".
Some, not so distant, time ago, "everyone that mattered" kept referring to dark-skinned individuals from Africa as "property" and so it was written in the laws made by "everyone that mattered".
Similarly, some shorter time ago, "everyone that mattered" in the country of Germany used to refer to a certain non-germanic social group as "sub-human" and so it was written in the laws made by "everyone that mattered".
Even shorter time ago in the USSR ...
But then again, I am getting an impression that your kind will never get it. In your view whatever those in power say, is automatically, by definition, correct, sacrosanct and divinely makes all the sense in the world. I say that you should grow a brain and attempt the trick of letting loose some independent thought in it, and then come back to talk about "Pavlovian reflexes". For a bonus excercise lookup the terms "Authoritarianism" and its red-headed bastard child, "Fascism".
No demonstration then?
How unexpectedly disappointing...
Sure it will "balance" itself. The problem is the human cost of that transition and the out of control nature of it. What the "invisible-hand's-fist-up-your-ass" method of society managment proponents always neglect is the human cost of their activities. If it is not on a Wall Street ticker, it doesn't exist to them. Imagine two steam-filled boilers, one at very high pressure, representing the accumulated and continuously generated wealth of the industrialized West and one at very low, representing the, mostly poor, rest of the world. There are several methods to "equalize" the pressure in those tanks: to try to heat the low pressure one while adding water (which is the sane approach), to let steam escape through a controllable valve (not so smart - but suppose that unlike in real life the ability of the empty boiler to generate steam also increases with this transfer, so it has some merit) and the last one, the "invisible-hand-smashing-you-in-the-face" approach is to blow a big hole in the big tank with a grenade and use a bicycle pump to try to catch steam as it escapes and pump it into the empty one. The "lost" steam which escapes the pump (i.e. most of it) into the air is called "profit". The end result is that the empty tank's preasure increase is negligeable and the big one is simply busted and would need to be repaired by someone other then the "invisible-hand-of-fuckups" people.
This is utter bullshit, I am sorry to say. What applies to individuals (sustinence vs. specialization) and to some degree to companies (accuracy of which decreases with the size of the operation - most Asian conglomerates make everything from diapers to oil-tankers) does not apply to countries and continents!! The scale changes the nature of things! Grains of sand are moved by different processes then boulders and mountains!
But ignoring this for a moment, in order for your "single economy" to work, these things would have to occur: global corporations (the only ones with the reach) would have to replace all kinds of other businesses. Since their power would then exceed that of all nations and local governments (as it already does for many) they would become the defacto rulers of the world. Since corporations are feudal entities at core, this would by necessity mean that your new globalization utopia is, by its very nature, a feudal structure comprised of corporate kingdoms and their vassals.
The energy requirements (and the types of energy) required to make this nonsense work are simply unsustainable. The present scam operates only because the fossil fuels, accumulated over the course of hundreds of millions of years, are insanely undervalued, and can be blown in seconds out of our collective asses to make disposable plastic chairs and throw-away packaging, which then can be transported all over the world for next to nothing. Not to mention driving veritable battle tanks around to and fro our urban spawl McMansions. As soon as the fossilized remains of trees and animals run out, this traveling circus of utter, short-sighted stupidity is going to hit a brick wall at a rather high velocity. The other types of energy are orders of magnitude more expensive and nowhere near as flexible as fossil fuels. In short
Well that sounds good in theory, but it is not true in practice.
What actually happens is that as the living standards of the "target" of the products are very rapidly lowered (attendant with creation of astronomical and unsecured debt) and the living standards of the source are slowly (as slowly as one can manage as a matter of fact, as this reduces profits) raised. When that fails, the "source" is moved to yet another poor country, and the previous one simply abandoned. Ask those border-factory Mexicans, who were such gold makers for the corps in the 1980s, how they are doing to today...
Since there are very many potential "sources", the process can be repeated for several generations yet. Its bonus feature is an ability to destroy any worker's protections in the "target" countries, by beating the working class over their heads with demands to be more "flexible" and "competerive" with their "competiton" who gets paid $2 a week and has no rights or benefits. Since those protections took centuries to acquire, they will take centuries to regain once lost.
Also, there are very few types of products which cannot be made everywhere, and very few types of ores which do not occur on every continent in quantity. It makes more sense to transport the extracted and purified raw materials then the goods since it requires much less volume and fuel waste for that process.
Which brings on another point: globalization is not sustainable, simply due to the amounts of energy (and types of thereof) required to transport the goods all over the world. We are used to extremely cheap (even at $80 a barrel) energy which is the result of millions of years of slow accumulation and which we are blowing from out asses in mere historical seconds. When that runs out ... globalization will be a word one uses a punchline of a sad joke.
I swear /. does some weird things to my posts sometimes after I hit Submit! That was supposed to read "I am". Oh well.
Am an in awe of your grasp of the situation, specially when highlighted with such creative epithets. Now, do please explain how does this hypothetical fleet has its maintenance and hiring practices improved, given that vast majority of it is registered in, say, that bastion of high standards of regulation: Antigua, and owned by companies registered in, say, Dubai. For a bonus question: explain away your method of forcing the merchants to use the astronomically expensive (in relation to everything else) nuclear reactors followed by your gracing us with your enlightening views on the methods of securing the nuclear fuel and the ships themselves from falling into the hands of some bearded and beturbaned individuals with somewhat antisocial attitudes.
I am reeling under the assault of your great wit, so cleverly based upon words of "shit" and "pig". As to being blindly "grafted" on an aspect of reality, I am afraid I got you beat there, since your entire rant consists of "hypothetical" hot air, which does not even withstand most cursory of "hypothetical" searches for traces of common sense.
Real world? Basement? These goofuses are actually my long-time customers and I deal with them daily. That is how my worldview got "warped" as a result of what I know first-hand. And that is how you do not know, apparently. Not only can I place them and name them, I can even name their boats. And that is why I post here under a handle. If they knew that I know many of them for what they are, they would no doubt try to retaliate and that would be rather inconvenient. I can fix the overpaid stuckup buffoons' mistakes for top dollar when they believe all their screwups are the wisest moves ever and only need "little touchups", but it is impossible to do so when they know that I know what those turds of their making really are. It bruises their fragile egos and makes them very uncomfortable. I like to call this: "Customer Relations". The way the world works, kid. Smile and shovel. Your reward is laughing all the way to the bank.
And if you are one of those MBAs - keep in mind that this grinning consultant on whom you offload all your real work and who says "That would be no problem!" or "I can work within the framework of your plan!" and the like, might be someone like me and hold the same opinion of you as I do. You can tell by how skillfully he actually does what he needed to do to make it work, as opposed to what you told him to do, even though he agreed and nodded his head all the way. That and the fact that his bills keep going up the more your fuckups pile up, even though you did your darnest to hide them. But he never stops smiling and being nice to you, does he? It is so fortunate that you cannot read his mind. You would spend the rest of your days under your bed shivering.
Muahahahahahaha! Hahahahaah! Ehrm.
"Adventure sports" would require these farts to actually exert themselves. Although some few do that, there are very good reasons why golf (followed by far distant second: squash) is king, which you do not seem to grasp: 1) one can do this in an exclusive, exorbitantly-priced, invitation memebership only, bar-equipped course right in or very near the city, which also provides an opportunity to flaunt one's wealth to all the peons 2) most execs are lazy farts who talk a storm about "sports" but usually restrict themselves to swinging clubs and copiously drinking and 3) one can discuss business deals in comfort while golfing, which is rather hard when, say, hand-gliding and what not. "Adventure sports" are what most of them would, without batting an ayelid, label a posh trip to, say, Africa or some other poor but picturescue place, where they ride around in well guarded and very luxurious RVs, once every decade or so.
I get cold sweat when I think on my days of youth, when I actually believed the same sanitized, propagandistic crap you seem to believe. But I don't blame you for your naivette. Unless you were born into this rarefied socialite club or are grudgingly admitted to it via marriage or some astronomically unlikely random coincidence (which you will prompty ascribe to your own infallable iron wit of which the mere peons are bereft of, as is the prevailing custom in those circles), you will learn eventually.
Actually, having the Chinese, as well as all other nations, being well off frightens only the proponents of "globalization" (who are usually some variants of "conservative" these days - although any greed blinded individual will do) which hypocritically, depends on vast inequalities which can be exploited for profit.
Wealth and responsibility are not mutually exclusive.
The answer of course is to enable other nations to grow sustainable economies, centered around local products and services.
"Globalization" as it is envisioned and conducted at present is the bastard child resulting from an orgy of greed and colossal waste, orgy conducted with gleeful, utter abandon and contempt for the future generations.
It is the crowning achievement of the "I got mine, so Fuck You All!" world-view
To be fair, your point has one valid element: the Western working class is just as guilty of in this very attitude as the Western business elites, and so, by extension, also complicit in this. Only now do they realize the true implications of their short-sighted political apathy.
Your assertion will ring more true as soon as you explain how one does "steal" information. After providing your coherent, logically consistent and proveable answer, just seeing me humbled will be a mere icing on the cake, of course, after your having received your Nobel prize and world-wide fame for the successful subversion of the empirically demonstrable, natural laws of the Universe.
I tremble in anticipation of your devastating and awe-inspiring demonstration! A demonstration which will provide the definitive way to end all arguments on the matter, surely?