Yeah it's annoying to read. TFS made it sound like that link was the EFF blog link, and as I started reading I was thinking to myself how I really hope this isn't written by an actual lawyer.
Though Lee was not required, by the law, to remove the logo he removed it.
There was heavy criticism of Canonical from the press and the Open Source community which supposedly forced the company to publicly apologize for the missteps.
While we believed the dust had settled, it did not. The entire episode raised some very serious issues over how companies can abuse the trademark laws to silence critics (though in this case it doesn’t look like Canonical had any malice.)
Lee who was backed by EFF so he had resources to fight back with Canonical and tell them that law is on his side.
I don't think this person knows where comma's are supposed to go, it's as if he's just randomly throwing them around because he hasn't seen an article without comma's before so he figures they've gotta go somewhere. And I wonder who this Law fellow is, because it sounds like it is good to have him on your side.
The rank and file workers may implement and therefore play a role, however they don't engineer new designs that make production more efficient.
I see what you're getting at by saying that, e.g. the CEO isn't the only engineer. But the Henry Fords, Bill Gates, Elon Musks, and Larry Paiges of the world are the ones who really set things into motion. And then there are the Wozniaks of the world. Sure, Woz didn't run the company, but he's one of the 1% that the occupy movement is so eager to declare war on - yet without him, there never would have been an Apple to have invented that ipad that they made a big deal about when another occupier stole it.
I personally don't have any plans to ever strike it rich, rather I tire of people always looking for some nameless face to blame all of life's problems on. If I don't speak up, who will? They can't for the same reason that I can't speak out about why as a white guy I'm not the cause of all of black America's problems. Same shit, different crowd, so many people refuse to take responsibility for themselves its pathetic.
How is the US planned? Last I checked, there aren't any government mandates on the number of employees in given industries. The closest to that I can think of is Oregon and Maine requiring gas attendants at the pump (personally I think it is much more dangerous to let people drive their own cars than to pump their own gas, but somehow Oregonians can't trust themselves to pump their own gas.)
There is *sort of* a privatized labor planning in the form of labor unions, but in just over half of the states they don't have any power over who can work or how much they can work. However none of them answer to a central planner.
A slave has no choice but to do as they're told, and they can't leave.
In corporate America if you don't like your job or your boss, working somewhere else is always an option, or even changing your career field should you choose it.
Planned economies always falter precisely because there's no entreprenuerism.
I personally hate Facebook, but try finding another country that is more hospitable to a company like them to spring up. In a planned economy, some derp would say "we don't need social networks, rather we need more plumbers, so you'll be a plumber." This is why planned economies fail - they invariably lack vision and flexibility.
Even semi-planned economies pale in comparison.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, HP, Intel, Nvidia, Skype, Youtube, and Netflix even...why is it that tech companies of this scale always show up in the US instead of the EU? In Europe the government tried to create Quaero as an alternative to Google, spent millions on it, and it failed miserably. South Korea and Japan have a similar economic philosophy as the US, so it's no wonder why companies like Samsung and Sony will show up there. Europe had Nokia, but not even that anymore, which is why it takes more than double the population to get a GDP comparable to ours.
Planned economies eventually falter, and once they falter you get the Berlin Wall. It happens every single time.
I think a better thing to do would be to simply allow the stores to sell it at whatever price they'd like, and then do away with the official exchange rate. That official exchange rate is a perfect example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions - they want to forcibly give their citizens more purchasing power on the global economy. Sounds nice, but in the end nobody is going to deliberately give themselves the shitty end of the stick.
On this note, it's pretty hard to argue that any country is more free market capitalist than the US (some are, but not many) yet we've already reached and passed a condition where the government thinks some places are selling TV's for too cheap. How's that for irony?
It seems pretty straightforward to me though, if you generally stick to the RDA levels then those numbers generally stay where they should, and then if they are low or high then I simply make dietary adjustments until they go where they should go. Your body is usually pretty good at making sure of it anyways (liver, kidneys, and other organs strictly regulate these from what I gather.)
I had to do this to find out that I myself cannot safely consume 2,400mg of sodium per day - I actually need between 3g-3.5g per day for my sodium serum to stay normal. I found this out after being told by a doctor to try the Dash diet after reaching stage 4 kidney failure (Dash is from Mayo Clinic, who recommends 1.6g-2.3g,) only to become nauseous, and after reading my own blood work I noticed my sodium level was so low that it fell below the reference range. Eating a large bag of doritos fixed the nausea surprisingly fast (I was scheduled for blood work the next day after I noticed it, and for once my sodium level was perfectly normal after consuming 4g of sodium over a 6 hour period 8 hours prior to the blood being drawn.) The doctor didn't tell me to do that, but after I explained to him what happened he said sticking to 3g per day would be fine.
Salt is 40% sodium, and it tastes horrible plain, so I'd figure it only natural that it wouldn't be your first choice.
By exactly the same "reasoning", I could point out that only "fatcats" enjoyed US rural electric services until the government drove rural electrification, or that only "fatcats" enjoyed private, expedient interstate travel until the federal government instituted the interstate highway system.
Could be, but is it only fatcats that live in rural areas, or only fatcats that traveled between states using roads? As I recall, the first transcontinental railroad was a private effort that everybody benefited from. Also I know many people in Washington state who would never drive a car to Arizona, instead they opt for the smaller airports that can run as cheap as $50 for a round trip flight - all privately run - compared to using your government built interstate highway system costs much more than that in fuel alone (also forgetting the whole time is money thing, maintenance, and the food needed along the trip.)
I could also point out how US broadband and wireless services, and especially their pricing, remain embarrassingly inferior to those offered in more "socialized" economies.
I think that depends on where you live. For example, I pay $32 a month for 50/10 in Arizona for cable internet. My phone service with t-mobile is $23 a month for completely unlimited everything - or rather, $115 a month after all taxes and fees for 5 lines. Try finding better prices than those in other countries. Canada I already know is much worse. Japan, Australia, and the UK also being more expensive.
Also google fiber is difficult to top, though I don't have that myself.
Let me tell you a little secret about ISP costs: The Telecommunications Workers Union wants to keep them high, and so do local governments (the higher they are, the more tax revenue they get.) In areas where these aren't a factor, broadband prices are cheaper.
One thing to keep in mind is that as things have been progressing, usually in America we replace things before they're actually beyond their useful life. For example, I just got rid of a 55" bottom up projection TV I had from 14 years ago. It still works fine and even works as intended by design - I just didn't want it anymore. People do this all the time with their computers as well.
In cases like this, you can safely measure it in terms of how much you paid for it over how long you actually used it. When things like that are cheap, then your purchasing power is high. That is what we currently have in terms of homes in most areas, actually, whether you rent or own. Areas like New York are expensive, but they've always been expensive because so many people actually want to live there. People there live paycheck to paycheck not because they are forced to, but because they choose to. If you want to live that lifestyle, it's going to cost you.
If you think the prices for rent are oppressive there, just go somewhere else where you can live within your means. I'd like to live in Florida myself, and you can buy real estate cheap there. I'm actually wanting to move to Australia myself, but the purchasing power there isn't very good. Sure, they have a $15 an hour minimum wage, but stuff is so expensive there as a result of that wage that it is hard for even those of higher wages to afford stuff, and likewise it can even be hard to import luxury goods there. Case in point: (read the comments from those who actually live there)
I think it's much easier to live on $7 minimum wage in the US than $15 minimum wage in Oz. They are a perfect example of why wage floors don't accomplish their goals and instead make things worse. Though so long as I land a good enough job prior to arrival it won't bother me as I try not to let politics influence my decision on where I live.
Actually I was more impressed by pregnancy without a vagina. I didn't know there was a condition where they would be vaginaless yet fertile prior to reading that story, I assumed that implied a guaranteed non-functional placenta previously (which apparently is usually the case with that condition, even though the ovaries and eggs are fine.)
I'm probably the last person you'd ever see advocate abstinence though. I've made it pretty clear in the past that I think prostitution should be legalized - Germany seems to be doing fine with it.
We know which jar contains a cyanide pill don't we? So we isolate it from the rest, test each bean in that jar for significant cyanide contamination, throw out the pill, eat jelly beans.
On the other hand, saying "oh my god, there's a cyanide pill" doesn't accomplish anything.
You also have to ask what percentage of people even got infected to begin with (hint: not many.) My post was mainly a snark against the overstatement of the media needlessly inciting panic in some people.
But it isn't exactly airborne hepatitis C or anything. If you notice, my comment was mainly taking a whack at the overreaction of the media, ("only 97%") putting some people in a panic over nothing.
If you get sick, yeah then you and people around you should probably take proactive measures, and chances are you'll come out of it fine, and at the worst maybe one or two of those 500 people you mention even get exposed to the disease, possibly infected, and extremely unlikely actually die from it.
If you aren't sick and nobody around you is sick either then there's no point even thinking about it, and having the news media go around overstating the situation doesn't help.
This and the ctrl+f window disappearing upon navigation are why I still use firefox. Otherwise chrome is nice due to how fast it renders pages like the guides on lolking.net compared to firefox.
You'll be quite happy for them to spend ten minutes accessing a website over a slow dialup line because you've got yours and you don't care. Ok. Hey, they've got nothing else to do with their evenings once the cows have been milked and the pigs slopped, right? They can pay the bills by candlelight.
I don't think you realize just how much dialup ISP's have modernized. Most of them offer services (which you can turn on or off) where they strip out a lot of unneeded content and/or downsample images prior to delivery. It doesn't take 10 minutes to load webpages on dialup. A lot of people in the US still use dialup, even when they have access to broadband.
Why yes, people who live in rural areas have nothing better to do with their time than take long bike rides so they can get their mail. Phones and bikes are the solution to all rural communications problems.
I never suggested they did.
Let's see. Ten miles in ten mintues. A mile a minute average. 60MPH.
Yeah, because many rural roads are highways with little traffic. And even then, it's pretty common to go 70 unless the local law enforcement are very anal. I did it all the time.
And now we've hit the poorly defined buzzword "sustainable." You win, you've got all the right buzzwords.
It's not a buzzword, it's a fact. I'm not an eco geek if that's what you are thinking, I'm speaking purely in terms of monetary cost. For example, if your monthly expenses were $1,500 a month and you only brought in $1,000, then your lifestyle isn't sustainable. This is the reality of the post office. What, are you the buzzword police? What else do you want me to say? Does "can't be continued long term" meet your ordinance? But I like shorter words better than phrases, so kindly take your ordinance and cram it. Unsustainable it shall remain.
As for BFE, it is no surprise you'd use that to refer to the rural areas you think don't deserve to get local mail service.
Rather it's just a term I've had thrown at where I live. I don't mind it, I think it's funny, sometimes when people ask where I live I say I live in BFE. Even on web boards that demand your location, I indicate to them that I'm in some Egyptian desert, (which is half true, because I do live in a desert) and if they ask for the city I put BFE, Egypt. It's also funny because I've cracked jokes with racial overtones only to have people on these boards crack Egyptian jokes in response:D
His D levels were pretty low from what I noticed on the blood chart that they showed on the video (they were hand written, which was kind of odd) so I am a bit doubtful that it is a sunlight issue (I paused it and frame stepped as it quickly panned over it.) Lack of sunlight alone isn't generally enough to cause that to such a degree. It may explain his depressive symptoms though.
I'd say it's possible that his kidneys aren't doing everything correctly as they have direct influence of the D levels in your blood stream, but that is unlikely because his phosphorus, BUN, CO2, and creatinine levels looked normal (this is also a number that varies based on race, with blacks usually having significantly higher creatinine levels - note in the chart how they list eGFR separately for african americans.)
Another concern though is his Uric Acid, which came in at 7.9 which is a little high but not dangerous (8.0 is top for reference range) which could indicate that this Soylent stuff might cause gout in his particular case. It's difficult to say without carrying on the study for longer than 30 days and seeing if that number changes or stays the same. Going up means change the recipe for sure.
I might sound like I'm in the medical field (I've even had doctors tell me that I know some stuff that other doctors do not) but I'm not so take what I say with a grain of salt and not actual advice. I just know these things because managing my own health properly necessitates it, and being able to read my own blood work makes managing my own diet much easier. (It also helps that they print the reference ranges right on the chart; I'm not sure why they say these things are hard to understand as it seems like even an idiot could.)
Only thing is it's not getting more unequal. Income maybe, but income doesn't equal wealth. Wealth has actually been spreading in the US, but not thanks to any government, rather thanks to capitalism. Government has actually been slowing that down in the form of tariffs, wage floors, and price controls.
- Tariffs increase the cost of goods and reduce domestic production (imports and domestic production rise and fall with one another - this has been empirically proven numerous times.) - Wage floors increase unemployment and reduce purchasing power of the poor by making goods they buy more expensive. (A poor person is more likely to balk at a tomato rising in price from $.60 to $1 in order to make up for increased labor costs than Bill Gates would, and the poor person is also now less likely to be able to find a job. See the lump of labor.) - Price controls restrict supply and artificially create scarcity of wealth (lines at the gas pump in the 70's.)
I like to make a comparison of a poor person today with a rich person of the 80's. In the 80's, you were one fatcat if you owned any combination of a car phone, a big screen TV, and a personal computer. Today even the poorest own laptops, big flat screen TV's, and cell phones, and the ones they own are of much better quality than those that were owned by the 80's fatcat.
Government didn't make that happen, actually the very rich did. The rich got there by figuring out innovative ways of making things simultaneously cheaper and better so that you'd buy from them instead of some other rich guy.
Anyways, we'll see the result of what happens in Venezuela. I think what's going to happen is they are creating a very bad situation of the first and third item I described that governments can do to reduce the distribution of wealth: Since shops in Venezuela are required to sell at prices well below their worth in the actual exchange rate, they'll be effectively forbidden from importing goods. The result will be fewer material goods in the country, which means that as these goods break and depreciate, the poor will become even less wealthy.
If things turn out the way I'm pretty sure they are (their bonds have already collapsed as a direct result of this, by the way) then I'd hope you'll see why your war against the 1% is a pretty bad idea. Sure, they'll lose their wealth, but you'll lose a lot more than that. You'll get to declare that you won a war, but you'll be permanently much worse off than when you started it.
In theory yes, however Venezuela lacks the infrastructure needed to make fridges and TV's, even crappy ones. Even if they manage to crank out crappy ones, chances are their infrastructure won't permit them to do so at a lower price than some other country who has a better comparative advantage. Their only real option is to import. It's going to be pretty hard to import when you the buyer are forced by law to pay less than what the seller is willing to sell for.
These items are sold at very slim profit margins in the US, often times with retailers even selling at below cost. The retailers depend on one of two things (or both) to make up for this: Moving very large quantities (which seems to be Amazon's model) or pushing attachments along with them like cables and warranties that carry very high profit margins (Best Buy's model.)
There will always be some businesses willing to operate in high-risk environments, as long as they're rewarded appropriately. Instead of all importers pulling out of the market, it's more likely that the ones still operating will simply increase their prices to cover their risk. (If they aren't allowed to increase their prices at all -- that's another story.)
Assuming they can import at all (the government may be effectively banning imports here by making it so that no merchants can afford to buy with their bolivars,) it would be necessary to operate entirely on the black market, with all of the collateral crime that goes with black markets. Probably not a good way to collect tax revenue either, which I imagine a government like theirs is highly dependent upon (unless they just subsidize everything with oil, which they've nationalized.)
When you look at what is happening here, the prices aren't really that expensive. They're expensive if you buy them based on the official exchange rate, but if you buy on the actual (but illegal) exchange rate then the price is actually pretty fair. The Venezuelan government has gone as far as to ban websites that keep track of the black market exchange rate, which is nine times the official exchange rate.
TFA isn't clear on that, but it indicates that all shops of three separate national chains were affected in all cities that they operate in. Consider how small Venezuela is (roughly one tenth our geographic size and population,) and then consider how many big box retail stores you could fit there. In the last decade we've seen most of our big name electronics retailers collapse (Circuit City, Ultimate Electronics, and CompUSA just to name the major ones) and we're mainly down to just one (Best Buy) with several regional chains such as Microcenter, Vann's, Fry's Electronics, Curry's, and HHGregg.
I think three major chains in Venezuela is probably a pretty big deal. And here's the result:
That already tells you that foreign investment into Venezuela is going to be in the shitter really soon.
But that's not enough to qualify GP's statement. Rather this is:
the president, Nicolás Maduro, warned that his policy to stem rising prices would extend to shops selling shoes, clothes and other goods.
"We can't just close the businesses; the owners have to go to jail," Maduro said in a televised speech.
So yeah, I'd say that it's not safe. Only an idiot would exchange dollars for bolivars at the official rate, which is what the retailers are apparently now required to do (they didn't prior to this, apparently, even though the law required it.) If they do, they'll never be able to import anything (nobody outside of that country would sell them anything at effectively below cost) and if they don't, they're likely to end up in jail.
So why on earth would anybody start a business there? You're basically guaranteed to either be a charity or just flat out lose your ass.
What's funny is the ones who say communism is a good idea that just hasn't been done right never really pay attention to the times it has been done exactly according to plan and still failed anyways.
I like to cite the example of the Icarians in Nauvoo, IL. They had a whole town - facilities and all - literally just handed to them free and clear, and even got to cherry pick who would live there in their commune (picking only those who had a known good work ethic) and had a democratic policy making process. Things were going ok at first, but over time their productivity was on a steady decline. It soon got to the point where workers had to be forced to work harder (policies like no talking while on the job were enacted) and the once idealistic leaders became douches hell bent on seeing their commune succeed at any cost. In the end, people just got miserable and went their separate ways. Had it continued longer and that option not been available, an autocracy would have to have taken over to force people to go to work whether they liked it or not. This is what later happened in Russia, Korea, Vietnam, China, and others when communism was tried on a national scale.
In the early days, Russia even had a system in place where they even wanted to get rid of laws and codes and remove lawyers from trials...it failed miserably as without laws, going "against the betterment of the people" was so selectively enforced, so they discovered the hard way why rules are critical.
Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam originally wanted democracy, even having read the US declaration of independence and parts of the constitution in front of his followers as if that were ideal, only with communism for their economy. That too failed, requiring them to resort to indoctrination camps and effective slavery.
Capitalism sort of happens own (even currency does - in the absence of one, people tend to create one on their own - after the fall of the soviet union, Russian denizens replaced the ruble with cigarettes and vodka as their currency until a new official one came about.) Communism, however, requires force to implement. That fact alone should tell you why communism will never work, and this "not exactly communism" that Venezuela is doing is likely to result in the same (indeed, they are sending the owners of these electronics shops to jail.)
We already had a case of that in the US in the 70's when the government put price controls on fuel because the average Joe felt that it was so high that it was oppressive.
The resulting scarcity of fuel was much worse than the high prices. That is what I'm fairly certain is going to happen in Venezuela, and is also what I'm fairly sure going to happen with US health care post ObamaCare.
As a washer-dryer was wheeled out of the storeroom for a buyer, the crowd of consumers chanted, "Sí se puede!" ("Yes we can!").
I hope they enjoy whatever goods are currently physically in their country as it is unlikely they'll be able to import any more unless the government itself begins buying them and selling for cheaper than what they bought them for (effectively buying them with oil and giving them away - a practice which can only last for so long.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah it's annoying to read. TFS made it sound like that link was the EFF blog link, and as I started reading I was thinking to myself how I really hope this isn't written by an actual lawyer.
Though Lee was not required, by the law, to remove the logo he removed it.
There was heavy criticism of Canonical from the press and the Open Source community which supposedly forced the company to publicly apologize for the missteps.
While we believed the dust had settled, it did not. The entire episode raised some very serious issues over how companies can abuse the trademark laws to silence critics (though in this case it doesn’t look like Canonical had any malice.)
Lee who was backed by EFF so he had resources to fight back with Canonical and tell them that law is on his side.
I don't think this person knows where comma's are supposed to go, it's as if he's just randomly throwing them around because he hasn't seen an article without comma's before so he figures they've gotta go somewhere. And I wonder who this Law fellow is, because it sounds like it is good to have him on your side.
The rank and file workers may implement and therefore play a role, however they don't engineer new designs that make production more efficient.
I see what you're getting at by saying that, e.g. the CEO isn't the only engineer. But the Henry Fords, Bill Gates, Elon Musks, and Larry Paiges of the world are the ones who really set things into motion. And then there are the Wozniaks of the world. Sure, Woz didn't run the company, but he's one of the 1% that the occupy movement is so eager to declare war on - yet without him, there never would have been an Apple to have invented that ipad that they made a big deal about when another occupier stole it.
I personally don't have any plans to ever strike it rich, rather I tire of people always looking for some nameless face to blame all of life's problems on. If I don't speak up, who will? They can't for the same reason that I can't speak out about why as a white guy I'm not the cause of all of black America's problems. Same shit, different crowd, so many people refuse to take responsibility for themselves its pathetic.
How is the US planned? Last I checked, there aren't any government mandates on the number of employees in given industries. The closest to that I can think of is Oregon and Maine requiring gas attendants at the pump (personally I think it is much more dangerous to let people drive their own cars than to pump their own gas, but somehow Oregonians can't trust themselves to pump their own gas.)
There is *sort of* a privatized labor planning in the form of labor unions, but in just over half of the states they don't have any power over who can work or how much they can work. However none of them answer to a central planner.
A slave has no choice but to do as they're told, and they can't leave.
In corporate America if you don't like your job or your boss, working somewhere else is always an option, or even changing your career field should you choose it.
Planned economies always falter precisely because there's no entreprenuerism.
I personally hate Facebook, but try finding another country that is more hospitable to a company like them to spring up. In a planned economy, some derp would say "we don't need social networks, rather we need more plumbers, so you'll be a plumber." This is why planned economies fail - they invariably lack vision and flexibility.
Even semi-planned economies pale in comparison.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, HP, Intel, Nvidia, Skype, Youtube, and Netflix even...why is it that tech companies of this scale always show up in the US instead of the EU? In Europe the government tried to create Quaero as an alternative to Google, spent millions on it, and it failed miserably. South Korea and Japan have a similar economic philosophy as the US, so it's no wonder why companies like Samsung and Sony will show up there. Europe had Nokia, but not even that anymore, which is why it takes more than double the population to get a GDP comparable to ours.
Planned economies eventually falter, and once they falter you get the Berlin Wall. It happens every single time.
I think a better thing to do would be to simply allow the stores to sell it at whatever price they'd like, and then do away with the official exchange rate. That official exchange rate is a perfect example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions - they want to forcibly give their citizens more purchasing power on the global economy. Sounds nice, but in the end nobody is going to deliberately give themselves the shitty end of the stick.
On this note, it's pretty hard to argue that any country is more free market capitalist than the US (some are, but not many) yet we've already reached and passed a condition where the government thinks some places are selling TV's for too cheap. How's that for irony?
http://www.koamtv.com/story/20161570/oklahoma-law-limits-bargains-on-black-friday
Oklahoma enforced that law on black friday in 2012, and it angered people so much that it was repealed:
http://watchdog.org/89682/ok-black-friday-reform-signed-into-law-after-years-of-debate/
Yet another case of good intentions gone bad - I personally like walmart, and laws like this obviously didn't stop them.
It seems pretty straightforward to me though, if you generally stick to the RDA levels then those numbers generally stay where they should, and then if they are low or high then I simply make dietary adjustments until they go where they should go. Your body is usually pretty good at making sure of it anyways (liver, kidneys, and other organs strictly regulate these from what I gather.)
I had to do this to find out that I myself cannot safely consume 2,400mg of sodium per day - I actually need between 3g-3.5g per day for my sodium serum to stay normal. I found this out after being told by a doctor to try the Dash diet after reaching stage 4 kidney failure (Dash is from Mayo Clinic, who recommends 1.6g-2.3g,) only to become nauseous, and after reading my own blood work I noticed my sodium level was so low that it fell below the reference range. Eating a large bag of doritos fixed the nausea surprisingly fast (I was scheduled for blood work the next day after I noticed it, and for once my sodium level was perfectly normal after consuming 4g of sodium over a 6 hour period 8 hours prior to the blood being drawn.) The doctor didn't tell me to do that, but after I explained to him what happened he said sticking to 3g per day would be fine.
Salt is 40% sodium, and it tastes horrible plain, so I'd figure it only natural that it wouldn't be your first choice.
By exactly the same "reasoning", I could point out that only "fatcats" enjoyed US rural electric services until the government drove rural electrification, or that only "fatcats" enjoyed private, expedient interstate travel until the federal government instituted the interstate highway system.
Could be, but is it only fatcats that live in rural areas, or only fatcats that traveled between states using roads? As I recall, the first transcontinental railroad was a private effort that everybody benefited from. Also I know many people in Washington state who would never drive a car to Arizona, instead they opt for the smaller airports that can run as cheap as $50 for a round trip flight - all privately run - compared to using your government built interstate highway system costs much more than that in fuel alone (also forgetting the whole time is money thing, maintenance, and the food needed along the trip.)
I could also point out how US broadband and wireless services, and especially their pricing, remain embarrassingly inferior to those offered in more "socialized" economies.
I think that depends on where you live. For example, I pay $32 a month for 50/10 in Arizona for cable internet. My phone service with t-mobile is $23 a month for completely unlimited everything - or rather, $115 a month after all taxes and fees for 5 lines. Try finding better prices than those in other countries. Canada I already know is much worse. Japan, Australia, and the UK also being more expensive.
Also google fiber is difficult to top, though I don't have that myself.
Let me tell you a little secret about ISP costs: The Telecommunications Workers Union wants to keep them high, and so do local governments (the higher they are, the more tax revenue they get.) In areas where these aren't a factor, broadband prices are cheaper.
One thing to keep in mind is that as things have been progressing, usually in America we replace things before they're actually beyond their useful life. For example, I just got rid of a 55" bottom up projection TV I had from 14 years ago. It still works fine and even works as intended by design - I just didn't want it anymore. People do this all the time with their computers as well.
In cases like this, you can safely measure it in terms of how much you paid for it over how long you actually used it. When things like that are cheap, then your purchasing power is high. That is what we currently have in terms of homes in most areas, actually, whether you rent or own. Areas like New York are expensive, but they've always been expensive because so many people actually want to live there. People there live paycheck to paycheck not because they are forced to, but because they choose to. If you want to live that lifestyle, it's going to cost you.
If you think the prices for rent are oppressive there, just go somewhere else where you can live within your means. I'd like to live in Florida myself, and you can buy real estate cheap there. I'm actually wanting to move to Australia myself, but the purchasing power there isn't very good. Sure, they have a $15 an hour minimum wage, but stuff is so expensive there as a result of that wage that it is hard for even those of higher wages to afford stuff, and likewise it can even be hard to import luxury goods there. Case in point: (read the comments from those who actually live there)
http://slashdot.org/story/13/10/31/2153223/ask-slashdot-package-redirection-service-for-shipping-to-australia
I think it's much easier to live on $7 minimum wage in the US than $15 minimum wage in Oz. They are a perfect example of why wage floors don't accomplish their goals and instead make things worse. Though so long as I land a good enough job prior to arrival it won't bother me as I try not to let politics influence my decision on where I live.
You mean like Steve Jobs hiring Steve Wozniak? As I recall, both of them became rich.
Actually I was more impressed by pregnancy without a vagina. I didn't know there was a condition where they would be vaginaless yet fertile prior to reading that story, I assumed that implied a guaranteed non-functional placenta previously (which apparently is usually the case with that condition, even though the ovaries and eggs are fine.)
I'm probably the last person you'd ever see advocate abstinence though. I've made it pretty clear in the past that I think prostitution should be legalized - Germany seems to be doing fine with it.
Sure.
We know which jar contains a cyanide pill don't we? So we isolate it from the rest, test each bean in that jar for significant cyanide contamination, throw out the pill, eat jelly beans.
On the other hand, saying "oh my god, there's a cyanide pill" doesn't accomplish anything.
You also have to ask what percentage of people even got infected to begin with (hint: not many.) My post was mainly a snark against the overstatement of the media needlessly inciting panic in some people.
But it isn't exactly airborne hepatitis C or anything. If you notice, my comment was mainly taking a whack at the overreaction of the media, ("only 97%") putting some people in a panic over nothing.
If you get sick, yeah then you and people around you should probably take proactive measures, and chances are you'll come out of it fine, and at the worst maybe one or two of those 500 people you mention even get exposed to the disease, possibly infected, and extremely unlikely actually die from it.
If you aren't sick and nobody around you is sick either then there's no point even thinking about it, and having the news media go around overstating the situation doesn't help.
That disease everybody was so panicked over because you had only a 97% chance of survival.
This and the ctrl+f window disappearing upon navigation are why I still use firefox. Otherwise chrome is nice due to how fast it renders pages like the guides on lolking.net compared to firefox.
Yes, and oral sex pregnancies are possible too.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/teen-girl-vagina-pregnant-sperm-survival-oral-sex/story?id=9732562
You'll be quite happy for them to spend ten minutes accessing a website over a slow dialup line because you've got yours and you don't care. Ok. Hey, they've got nothing else to do with their evenings once the cows have been milked and the pigs slopped, right? They can pay the bills by candlelight.
I don't think you realize just how much dialup ISP's have modernized. Most of them offer services (which you can turn on or off) where they strip out a lot of unneeded content and/or downsample images prior to delivery. It doesn't take 10 minutes to load webpages on dialup. A lot of people in the US still use dialup, even when they have access to broadband.
Why yes, people who live in rural areas have nothing better to do with their time than take long bike rides so they can get their mail. Phones and bikes are the solution to all rural communications problems.
I never suggested they did.
Let's see. Ten miles in ten mintues. A mile a minute average. 60MPH.
Yeah, because many rural roads are highways with little traffic. And even then, it's pretty common to go 70 unless the local law enforcement are very anal. I did it all the time.
And now we've hit the poorly defined buzzword "sustainable." You win, you've got all the right buzzwords.
It's not a buzzword, it's a fact. I'm not an eco geek if that's what you are thinking, I'm speaking purely in terms of monetary cost. For example, if your monthly expenses were $1,500 a month and you only brought in $1,000, then your lifestyle isn't sustainable. This is the reality of the post office. What, are you the buzzword police? What else do you want me to say? Does "can't be continued long term" meet your ordinance? But I like shorter words better than phrases, so kindly take your ordinance and cram it. Unsustainable it shall remain.
As for BFE, it is no surprise you'd use that to refer to the rural areas you think don't deserve to get local mail service.
Rather it's just a term I've had thrown at where I live. I don't mind it, I think it's funny, sometimes when people ask where I live I say I live in BFE. Even on web boards that demand your location, I indicate to them that I'm in some Egyptian desert, (which is half true, because I do live in a desert) and if they ask for the city I put BFE, Egypt. It's also funny because I've cracked jokes with racial overtones only to have people on these boards crack Egyptian jokes in response :D
His D levels were pretty low from what I noticed on the blood chart that they showed on the video (they were hand written, which was kind of odd) so I am a bit doubtful that it is a sunlight issue (I paused it and frame stepped as it quickly panned over it.) Lack of sunlight alone isn't generally enough to cause that to such a degree. It may explain his depressive symptoms though.
I'd say it's possible that his kidneys aren't doing everything correctly as they have direct influence of the D levels in your blood stream, but that is unlikely because his phosphorus, BUN, CO2, and creatinine levels looked normal (this is also a number that varies based on race, with blacks usually having significantly higher creatinine levels - note in the chart how they list eGFR separately for african americans.)
Another concern though is his Uric Acid, which came in at 7.9 which is a little high but not dangerous (8.0 is top for reference range) which could indicate that this Soylent stuff might cause gout in his particular case. It's difficult to say without carrying on the study for longer than 30 days and seeing if that number changes or stays the same. Going up means change the recipe for sure.
I might sound like I'm in the medical field (I've even had doctors tell me that I know some stuff that other doctors do not) but I'm not so take what I say with a grain of salt and not actual advice. I just know these things because managing my own health properly necessitates it, and being able to read my own blood work makes managing my own diet much easier. (It also helps that they print the reference ranges right on the chart; I'm not sure why they say these things are hard to understand as it seems like even an idiot could.)
Only thing is it's not getting more unequal. Income maybe, but income doesn't equal wealth. Wealth has actually been spreading in the US, but not thanks to any government, rather thanks to capitalism. Government has actually been slowing that down in the form of tariffs, wage floors, and price controls.
- Tariffs increase the cost of goods and reduce domestic production (imports and domestic production rise and fall with one another - this has been empirically proven numerous times.)
- Wage floors increase unemployment and reduce purchasing power of the poor by making goods they buy more expensive. (A poor person is more likely to balk at a tomato rising in price from $.60 to $1 in order to make up for increased labor costs than Bill Gates would, and the poor person is also now less likely to be able to find a job. See the lump of labor.)
- Price controls restrict supply and artificially create scarcity of wealth (lines at the gas pump in the 70's.)
I like to make a comparison of a poor person today with a rich person of the 80's. In the 80's, you were one fatcat if you owned any combination of a car phone, a big screen TV, and a personal computer. Today even the poorest own laptops, big flat screen TV's, and cell phones, and the ones they own are of much better quality than those that were owned by the 80's fatcat.
Government didn't make that happen, actually the very rich did. The rich got there by figuring out innovative ways of making things simultaneously cheaper and better so that you'd buy from them instead of some other rich guy.
Anyways, we'll see the result of what happens in Venezuela. I think what's going to happen is they are creating a very bad situation of the first and third item I described that governments can do to reduce the distribution of wealth: Since shops in Venezuela are required to sell at prices well below their worth in the actual exchange rate, they'll be effectively forbidden from importing goods. The result will be fewer material goods in the country, which means that as these goods break and depreciate, the poor will become even less wealthy.
If things turn out the way I'm pretty sure they are (their bonds have already collapsed as a direct result of this, by the way) then I'd hope you'll see why your war against the 1% is a pretty bad idea. Sure, they'll lose their wealth, but you'll lose a lot more than that. You'll get to declare that you won a war, but you'll be permanently much worse off than when you started it.
If I'm wrong, well then, viva la revolucion.
In theory yes, however Venezuela lacks the infrastructure needed to make fridges and TV's, even crappy ones. Even if they manage to crank out crappy ones, chances are their infrastructure won't permit them to do so at a lower price than some other country who has a better comparative advantage. Their only real option is to import. It's going to be pretty hard to import when you the buyer are forced by law to pay less than what the seller is willing to sell for.
These items are sold at very slim profit margins in the US, often times with retailers even selling at below cost. The retailers depend on one of two things (or both) to make up for this: Moving very large quantities (which seems to be Amazon's model) or pushing attachments along with them like cables and warranties that carry very high profit margins (Best Buy's model.)
There will always be some businesses willing to operate in high-risk environments, as long as they're rewarded appropriately. Instead of all importers pulling out of the market, it's more likely that the ones still operating will simply increase their prices to cover their risk. (If they aren't allowed to increase their prices at all -- that's another story.)
Assuming they can import at all (the government may be effectively banning imports here by making it so that no merchants can afford to buy with their bolivars,) it would be necessary to operate entirely on the black market, with all of the collateral crime that goes with black markets. Probably not a good way to collect tax revenue either, which I imagine a government like theirs is highly dependent upon (unless they just subsidize everything with oil, which they've nationalized.)
When you look at what is happening here, the prices aren't really that expensive. They're expensive if you buy them based on the official exchange rate, but if you buy on the actual (but illegal) exchange rate then the price is actually pretty fair. The Venezuelan government has gone as far as to ban websites that keep track of the black market exchange rate, which is nine times the official exchange rate.
TFA isn't clear on that, but it indicates that all shops of three separate national chains were affected in all cities that they operate in. Consider how small Venezuela is (roughly one tenth our geographic size and population,) and then consider how many big box retail stores you could fit there. In the last decade we've seen most of our big name electronics retailers collapse (Circuit City, Ultimate Electronics, and CompUSA just to name the major ones) and we're mainly down to just one (Best Buy) with several regional chains such as Microcenter, Vann's, Fry's Electronics, Curry's, and HHGregg.
I think three major chains in Venezuela is probably a pretty big deal. And here's the result:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/12/us-venezuela-economy-idUSBRE9AB11120131112
That already tells you that foreign investment into Venezuela is going to be in the shitter really soon.
But that's not enough to qualify GP's statement. Rather this is:
the president, Nicolás Maduro, warned that his policy to stem rising prices would extend to shops selling shoes, clothes and other goods.
"We can't just close the businesses; the owners have to go to jail," Maduro said in a televised speech.
So yeah, I'd say that it's not safe. Only an idiot would exchange dollars for bolivars at the official rate, which is what the retailers are apparently now required to do (they didn't prior to this, apparently, even though the law required it.) If they do, they'll never be able to import anything (nobody outside of that country would sell them anything at effectively below cost) and if they don't, they're likely to end up in jail.
So why on earth would anybody start a business there? You're basically guaranteed to either be a charity or just flat out lose your ass.
What's funny is the ones who say communism is a good idea that just hasn't been done right never really pay attention to the times it has been done exactly according to plan and still failed anyways.
I like to cite the example of the Icarians in Nauvoo, IL. They had a whole town - facilities and all - literally just handed to them free and clear, and even got to cherry pick who would live there in their commune (picking only those who had a known good work ethic) and had a democratic policy making process. Things were going ok at first, but over time their productivity was on a steady decline. It soon got to the point where workers had to be forced to work harder (policies like no talking while on the job were enacted) and the once idealistic leaders became douches hell bent on seeing their commune succeed at any cost. In the end, people just got miserable and went their separate ways. Had it continued longer and that option not been available, an autocracy would have to have taken over to force people to go to work whether they liked it or not. This is what later happened in Russia, Korea, Vietnam, China, and others when communism was tried on a national scale.
In the early days, Russia even had a system in place where they even wanted to get rid of laws and codes and remove lawyers from trials...it failed miserably as without laws, going "against the betterment of the people" was so selectively enforced, so they discovered the hard way why rules are critical.
Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam originally wanted democracy, even having read the US declaration of independence and parts of the constitution in front of his followers as if that were ideal, only with communism for their economy. That too failed, requiring them to resort to indoctrination camps and effective slavery.
Capitalism sort of happens own (even currency does - in the absence of one, people tend to create one on their own - after the fall of the soviet union, Russian denizens replaced the ruble with cigarettes and vodka as their currency until a new official one came about.) Communism, however, requires force to implement. That fact alone should tell you why communism will never work, and this "not exactly communism" that Venezuela is doing is likely to result in the same (indeed, they are sending the owners of these electronics shops to jail.)
We already had a case of that in the US in the 70's when the government put price controls on fuel because the average Joe felt that it was so high that it was oppressive.
The resulting scarcity of fuel was much worse than the high prices. That is what I'm fairly certain is going to happen in Venezuela, and is also what I'm fairly sure going to happen with US health care post ObamaCare.
From TFA:
As a washer-dryer was wheeled out of the storeroom for a buyer, the crowd of consumers chanted, "Sí se puede!" ("Yes we can!").
I hope they enjoy whatever goods are currently physically in their country as it is unlikely they'll be able to import any more unless the government itself begins buying them and selling for cheaper than what they bought them for (effectively buying them with oil and giving them away - a practice which can only last for so long.)