I think the reason we don't do heavy tariffs anymore is because it's already known that they only serve to damage the local economy. Sure you might save the sock salesman's job, but it'll have a much greater cost elsewhere in the economy that isn't immediately obvious.
Say we put that nickel tariff on socks, does that make Canada (or any country for that matter) find our socks more attractive than China's? Nope, in fact they're now less attractive because they cost more here. In Canada the sock prices will go down, but ours will be more likely to remain higher (That's the whole point right? Otherwise why bother with this tariff?) Everybody needs socks though, so we all pay more for socks here than Canada might pay (because they don't have said tariff.) Since Canada now pays less for socks, they also now have more money to spend on other things than we do. So in the end, we've crippled our own economy relative to theirs by sticking that tariff on there.
Historically this holds true - imports and domestic production rise and fall with one another. If you add that tariff to slow those imports, you're guaranteed to not only reduce exports, but you're also going to kill local jobs.
Go have a look at the effect of the Smoot-Hawley tariff act. That was the cause of the great depression. It is the ultimate lesson to be learned about tariffs and why mercantilism is flat out wrong on so many levels.
Personally I think we should get rid of all tariffs. Corporations love tariffs by the way - and so do unions. They want tariffs so that they can protect themselves against competition and raise prices instead of competing proper. They do this at the expense of somebody else's job somewhere else, not really giving a fuck about them.
That's true, your first glance of the outside world comes from below the vulva, and after that you have your mom's titty mashed in your face for a year after you're born, and suddenly after that the mere sight of a titty or a vulva is supposedly so damaging to your mind that it'll cause you to torture cats and dogs and then grow up to become an axe murderer pedophile rapist.
At one point, law enforcement agencies sometimes hired psychic detectives to solve crimes. The government sometimes (oftentimes) takes idiotic courses of action; what else is new?
If you think that's bad, go look up the Army's remote viewing program. Talk about a waste of taxpayer money. Still though, the crackpots use its mere existence as "proof" that their little ideas are real, even though the program was discontinued because it turned out to be worthless.
Even if Google wanted to tell you that the NSA has access to their servers, knowing full well it would kill their bottom line (assuming it would), they'd be forbidden from telling you the truth anyways.
I don't think it's for hardware either. I think what they're trying to do is normalize Linux in such a way that makes it more friendly towards game development.
The current problem with linux is that it varies so heavily from distro to distro that some things might break for some games. Varying kernels, varying window managers, varying this and that...however if you establish a good baseline, that makes things much easier from a support perspective.
This is an interesting model to adopt by the way. Traditionally if you want a living room gaming platform, you have to create your own hardware and software from scratch, and mass produce it as a loss leader, taking a big initial investment and big risk (one which still hasn't paid off for MS, and Sony has joined the loss club recently as well.) But with this method, you just take an already existing OS and make a relatively small investment to turn it into your platform, and then let hardware manufacturers make hardware that works with it. They'll also pay for their own marketing, which in the process helps promote your platform. This worked for Windows and it worked for Android. I see no reason why it wouldn't work for Steam either.
The customers could see a benefit over existing consoles because as time passes, buying new hardware for better games doesn't mean throwing out all of your old games (a benefit that traditionally only PC's and smartphones/tablets have enjoyed.)
I think DARE might be an indication of why this program might just backfire.
Honestly, has DARE even succeeded in any of its goals? The younger generations just seem to use drugs even more. I remember as a teenager it was generally just cool to do things just because you were told not to. So you're told not to pirate, and not pirating would be the goodie goodie thing to do...so, lets pirate!
One of those videos is full of shit though; it paints a narrative of somebody's mom being laid off because too many people pirated her game. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever been laid off due to piracy, especially game developers. It's always because of other issues like their title sucks or its release was botched (came out way late and over budget, buggy as hell, etc.)
That's Hollywood for you though. Got to admit they're pretty effective at what they do, I mean they practically own the current president, and they already have a sneaky little plan to get their way on SOPA.
Well they also need to be competent, which NK is not. I mean look how badly they botched that weather satellite (or whatever it was.) If they tried to launch a nuke, they'd probably just accidentally nuke themselves.
Unlike NK, Iran may very well have the capability of actually attacking somebody with nuclear weapons without hurting themselves in the process.
I think what he's getting at is that particular website may just be more popular among ipad users.
Looking at user agent statistics really is a bad way of measuring device market share in general as it can't possibly tabulate a reliable sample of users. I guarantee you for example that bing.com would report far more windows phone users than android users, whereas google.com would probably report the opposite, and I don't think it really necessitates explaining why that is.
People buy digital goods....netflix, itunes, amazon...all sell digital goods. Not just a little, but a lot, and that is an understatement.
I think what would end up happening is developing countries might suffer and the shipping industry might suffer. E.g. Amazon could sell yet another copy of an mp3 file without needing to have somebody in China assemble it, and there's no need for a UPS guy to deliver it. In the end the customer just saves money on both assembly on shipping, and the only four people who profit are Amazon, whoever designed it, whoever sells you the filament, and the payment processor.
The later could be eliminated with bitcoins.
This is all a good thing, by the way. One constant that has always repeated throughout history is that the cheaper anything becomes, the wealthier the poor become (remember not to confuse wealth with money.)
That doesn't make any sense. How does playing games on a computer jeopardize your work? That isn't much different from saying that I should have one tablet for games and one tablet for work. One tablet for both saves time and money.
While your post is a bit trollish, there is a ring of truth.
Obama was supposedly going to be this guy who would mend relations with foreign entities (frankly I felt embarrassed for America when he does those stupid bows to foreign leaders) and really the only thing he has done to improve America's image is just get elected in the first place due entirely to the fact that most people just assume he's going to do something good for them. Hence he gets the first "Nobel Peace Prize for Absolutely Nothing At All"(tm).
Other than doing nothing more than simply winning the election, he's actually rather made things worse.
I'm not talking about climate scientists at all. I'm talking about people who set public policy - that is, politicians, and by extension those who prop them up to where they are - political pundits, activists, and fundraisers. Al Gore is among them for sure. He is NOT a climate scientist.
If you want to know who to blame, blame the groups that try to use climate science to push their pet agendas like vegetarianism, socialism, organic, or whatever "new age" philosophies they think are mankinds next answer when they have almost nothing to do with the issue at hand.
(By the way I'm not speaking about whether vegetarianism or socialism or good or bad, just that they don't belong in this discussion and only serve to complicate things.)
I'm a big skeptic of the global warming movement, but emissions standards are fine in my book so long as they target actual pollutants (e.g. soot, etc). Even if we cause global warming, I don't believe it will hurt us. However we can cause ourselves grief by polluting the ground, air, or water with toxic chemicals. Let's keep those two separate and not let the issue of global warming distract from the issue of pollution.
If you need proof of why we need emissions standards, go have a walk around Beijing.
Other than that, absolutely we have wasted an obscene amount of time and debate on global warming, which is a non-issue in my book.
Well if these were truly big concerns, then why didn't they wipe out all life on earth 65 million years ago? 65 million years ago we had a few things: Large macroscale life like Dinosaurs and giant mosquitos, a large supercontinent named pangea, no ice caps, and CO2 levels ten times as high as they are right now. The ocean at this time was acidic beyond even the worst doomsday predictions of Al Gore. The planet was also "greener" (more plantlife) than at any point in history.
The US doesn't extradite anybody for any action which is protected here by the US constitution. So for example, if I were to post Nazi propaganda on a German server somewhere, Germany wouldn't have any luck getting me extradited since it is protected by the first amendment.
I'm not sure how far down that extends to regular laws though, but I do know that it does. If these agents were acting within US laws (i.e. everything was done by the book,) France would have an extremely difficult time seeking extradition.
The problems I have with the climate change movement in general (ignoring Al Gore types) is a few things:
- Empirical Science isn't a democracy. The majority consensus doesn't dictate the right answer, and I'm tired of the AGW movement trying to paint it that way. Somebody once created a pamphlet called 100 Authors Against Einstein, where they wanted to gather enough opinions to discredit Einstein. Einstein simply said "If I were wrong, one would be enough."
- Patrick Moore left greenpeace (which he helped create) because it bothered him that the entire movement was basically hijacked by socialists. I don't care what your views on socialism vs capitalism are, using shaky claims (e.g. hockey stick graph) to try to push unrelated issues or social causes only serves to undermine the value of empirical science, which is a real shame.
- Many of these models (such as CO2 PPM, temperature) are being based around data that we haven't verified to be accurate because we weren't actually there to measure it proper thousands or millions of years ago (wherever the data points come from.) Ice cores in particular, because ice cores can actually lose data during hot periods (the ice can sublimate.) This means we could have periods just like the ones we are in now where there's a sudden heat spike, followed by cooling, and what we're seeing now may even be something that happens all the time. And on the subject of ice, there's been a lot of alarmism about major glaciers and whatnot melting away, but how many times has this happened in the past, and they end up returning just like this, but nobody was there to actually record it?
- Besides all of that, we already have well known periods where the earth was so much hotter than it is now and had a CO2 PPM ten times what we have now, and very large scale life thrived pretty damn well. In fact, quite possibly the "greenest" period in history: the age of dinosaurs was also the age of Pangaea, and that continental configuration made high temperatures very much obligatory. Some day we will actually inevitably return to that same configuration, see "pangaea ultima". For this reason, I don't think it matters if we see global warming, regardless of whether or not we are the cause. We'll adapt, life will adapt, just as it always has. No matter what we do, we won't end up in a situation like Venus, the physics just won't work due to our location. Just avoid contaminating the ground and air with pollutants (CO2 isn't a pollutant) and we'll be fine.
Eventually you have to draw the line somewhere with regard to where you stop trusting. If the Linux kernel sources themselves contained a backdoor, I would be none the wiser, and neither would most of the world. Some of us have very little interest in coding, let alone picking through millions of lines of it to look for that kind of thing. And then of course there's syntactic ways of hiding backdoors that even somebody looking for one might miss.
Trayvon was a bully actually. He was bragging in a facebook post about how he slapped a bus driver for something to the effect of looking at him wrong. When caught red handed painting graffiti, he was found with burglary tools and women's jewelry in his backpack by a school staff. Also, apparently the stuff he bought at the convenience store just before his death were for the purposes of making "Purple Drank".
Yeah, and this is the guy they want to name an asteroid after.
Slashdot Mirror
Either that or somebody else may have said something on the matter that I already agreed with, and I didn't feel the need to add anything about it.
Just maybe.
I think the reason we don't do heavy tariffs anymore is because it's already known that they only serve to damage the local economy. Sure you might save the sock salesman's job, but it'll have a much greater cost elsewhere in the economy that isn't immediately obvious.
Say we put that nickel tariff on socks, does that make Canada (or any country for that matter) find our socks more attractive than China's? Nope, in fact they're now less attractive because they cost more here. In Canada the sock prices will go down, but ours will be more likely to remain higher (That's the whole point right? Otherwise why bother with this tariff?) Everybody needs socks though, so we all pay more for socks here than Canada might pay (because they don't have said tariff.) Since Canada now pays less for socks, they also now have more money to spend on other things than we do. So in the end, we've crippled our own economy relative to theirs by sticking that tariff on there.
Historically this holds true - imports and domestic production rise and fall with one another. If you add that tariff to slow those imports, you're guaranteed to not only reduce exports, but you're also going to kill local jobs.
Go have a look at the effect of the Smoot-Hawley tariff act. That was the cause of the great depression. It is the ultimate lesson to be learned about tariffs and why mercantilism is flat out wrong on so many levels.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQQon4tjlSA
Personally I think we should get rid of all tariffs. Corporations love tariffs by the way - and so do unions. They want tariffs so that they can protect themselves against competition and raise prices instead of competing proper. They do this at the expense of somebody else's job somewhere else, not really giving a fuck about them.
That's true, your first glance of the outside world comes from below the vulva, and after that you have your mom's titty mashed in your face for a year after you're born, and suddenly after that the mere sight of a titty or a vulva is supposedly so damaging to your mind that it'll cause you to torture cats and dogs and then grow up to become an axe murderer pedophile rapist.
At one point, law enforcement agencies sometimes hired psychic detectives to solve crimes. The government sometimes (oftentimes) takes idiotic courses of action; what else is new?
If you think that's bad, go look up the Army's remote viewing program. Talk about a waste of taxpayer money. Still though, the crackpots use its mere existence as "proof" that their little ideas are real, even though the program was discontinued because it turned out to be worthless.
Even if Google wanted to tell you that the NSA has access to their servers, knowing full well it would kill their bottom line (assuming it would), they'd be forbidden from telling you the truth anyways.
That's actually the scariest thing.
I don't think it's for hardware either. I think what they're trying to do is normalize Linux in such a way that makes it more friendly towards game development.
The current problem with linux is that it varies so heavily from distro to distro that some things might break for some games. Varying kernels, varying window managers, varying this and that...however if you establish a good baseline, that makes things much easier from a support perspective.
This is an interesting model to adopt by the way. Traditionally if you want a living room gaming platform, you have to create your own hardware and software from scratch, and mass produce it as a loss leader, taking a big initial investment and big risk (one which still hasn't paid off for MS, and Sony has joined the loss club recently as well.) But with this method, you just take an already existing OS and make a relatively small investment to turn it into your platform, and then let hardware manufacturers make hardware that works with it. They'll also pay for their own marketing, which in the process helps promote your platform. This worked for Windows and it worked for Android. I see no reason why it wouldn't work for Steam either.
The customers could see a benefit over existing consoles because as time passes, buying new hardware for better games doesn't mean throwing out all of your old games (a benefit that traditionally only PC's and smartphones/tablets have enjoyed.)
Hmm...I never noticed I had a clone on slashdot.
Neat!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kw_d3d0XAo
Now which one of us is the original copy? We'll always be left guessing.
I think DARE might be an indication of why this program might just backfire.
Honestly, has DARE even succeeded in any of its goals? The younger generations just seem to use drugs even more. I remember as a teenager it was generally just cool to do things just because you were told not to. So you're told not to pirate, and not pirating would be the goodie goodie thing to do...so, lets pirate!
One of those videos is full of shit though; it paints a narrative of somebody's mom being laid off because too many people pirated her game. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever been laid off due to piracy, especially game developers. It's always because of other issues like their title sucks or its release was botched (came out way late and over budget, buggy as hell, etc.)
That's Hollywood for you though. Got to admit they're pretty effective at what they do, I mean they practically own the current president, and they already have a sneaky little plan to get their way on SOPA.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/04/06/chris-dodd-confident-obama-administration-working-on-next-sopa/
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/19/exclusive-hollywood-lobbyist-threatens-to-cut-off-obama-2012-money-over-anti/
France has been enacting policies that discourage employment and economic growth for years, what makes you think they're going to stop any time soon?
Well they also need to be competent, which NK is not. I mean look how badly they botched that weather satellite (or whatever it was.) If they tried to launch a nuke, they'd probably just accidentally nuke themselves.
Unlike NK, Iran may very well have the capability of actually attacking somebody with nuclear weapons without hurting themselves in the process.
I think what he's getting at is that particular website may just be more popular among ipad users.
Looking at user agent statistics really is a bad way of measuring device market share in general as it can't possibly tabulate a reliable sample of users. I guarantee you for example that bing.com would report far more windows phone users than android users, whereas google.com would probably report the opposite, and I don't think it really necessitates explaining why that is.
The reapers hide in intergalactic space, so we're probably not safe there.
People buy digital goods....netflix, itunes, amazon...all sell digital goods. Not just a little, but a lot, and that is an understatement.
I think what would end up happening is developing countries might suffer and the shipping industry might suffer. E.g. Amazon could sell yet another copy of an mp3 file without needing to have somebody in China assemble it, and there's no need for a UPS guy to deliver it. In the end the customer just saves money on both assembly on shipping, and the only four people who profit are Amazon, whoever designed it, whoever sells you the filament, and the payment processor.
The later could be eliminated with bitcoins.
This is all a good thing, by the way. One constant that has always repeated throughout history is that the cheaper anything becomes, the wealthier the poor become (remember not to confuse wealth with money.)
That doesn't make any sense. How does playing games on a computer jeopardize your work? That isn't much different from saying that I should have one tablet for games and one tablet for work. One tablet for both saves time and money.
While your post is a bit trollish, there is a ring of truth.
Obama was supposedly going to be this guy who would mend relations with foreign entities (frankly I felt embarrassed for America when he does those stupid bows to foreign leaders) and really the only thing he has done to improve America's image is just get elected in the first place due entirely to the fact that most people just assume he's going to do something good for them. Hence he gets the first "Nobel Peace Prize for Absolutely Nothing At All"(tm).
Other than doing nothing more than simply winning the election, he's actually rather made things worse.
I'm not talking about climate scientists at all. I'm talking about people who set public policy - that is, politicians, and by extension those who prop them up to where they are - political pundits, activists, and fundraisers. Al Gore is among them for sure. He is NOT a climate scientist.
Never before seen? Ever? What about during the Cambrian period? CO2 levels 18 times as high as they are today.
In fact - this may come as a shock to you - we are currently at one of the low points for CO2 levels in Earths history. Not just low, but VERY low.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
If you want to know who to blame, blame the groups that try to use climate science to push their pet agendas like vegetarianism, socialism, organic, or whatever "new age" philosophies they think are mankinds next answer when they have almost nothing to do with the issue at hand.
(By the way I'm not speaking about whether vegetarianism or socialism or good or bad, just that they don't belong in this discussion and only serve to complicate things.)
I'm a big skeptic of the global warming movement, but emissions standards are fine in my book so long as they target actual pollutants (e.g. soot, etc). Even if we cause global warming, I don't believe it will hurt us. However we can cause ourselves grief by polluting the ground, air, or water with toxic chemicals. Let's keep those two separate and not let the issue of global warming distract from the issue of pollution.
If you need proof of why we need emissions standards, go have a walk around Beijing.
Other than that, absolutely we have wasted an obscene amount of time and debate on global warming, which is a non-issue in my book.
Well if these were truly big concerns, then why didn't they wipe out all life on earth 65 million years ago? 65 million years ago we had a few things: Large macroscale life like Dinosaurs and giant mosquitos, a large supercontinent named pangea, no ice caps, and CO2 levels ten times as high as they are right now. The ocean at this time was acidic beyond even the worst doomsday predictions of Al Gore. The planet was also "greener" (more plantlife) than at any point in history.
Nobody ever made that claim about 640k by the way. Not Bill Gates, or anybody else.
The US doesn't extradite anybody for any action which is protected here by the US constitution. So for example, if I were to post Nazi propaganda on a German server somewhere, Germany wouldn't have any luck getting me extradited since it is protected by the first amendment.
I'm not sure how far down that extends to regular laws though, but I do know that it does. If these agents were acting within US laws (i.e. everything was done by the book,) France would have an extremely difficult time seeking extradition.
The problems I have with the climate change movement in general (ignoring Al Gore types) is a few things:
- Empirical Science isn't a democracy. The majority consensus doesn't dictate the right answer, and I'm tired of the AGW movement trying to paint it that way. Somebody once created a pamphlet called 100 Authors Against Einstein, where they wanted to gather enough opinions to discredit Einstein. Einstein simply said "If I were wrong, one would be enough."
- Patrick Moore left greenpeace (which he helped create) because it bothered him that the entire movement was basically hijacked by socialists. I don't care what your views on socialism vs capitalism are, using shaky claims (e.g. hockey stick graph) to try to push unrelated issues or social causes only serves to undermine the value of empirical science, which is a real shame.
- Many of these models (such as CO2 PPM, temperature) are being based around data that we haven't verified to be accurate because we weren't actually there to measure it proper thousands or millions of years ago (wherever the data points come from.) Ice cores in particular, because ice cores can actually lose data during hot periods (the ice can sublimate.) This means we could have periods just like the ones we are in now where there's a sudden heat spike, followed by cooling, and what we're seeing now may even be something that happens all the time. And on the subject of ice, there's been a lot of alarmism about major glaciers and whatnot melting away, but how many times has this happened in the past, and they end up returning just like this, but nobody was there to actually record it?
- Besides all of that, we already have well known periods where the earth was so much hotter than it is now and had a CO2 PPM ten times what we have now, and very large scale life thrived pretty damn well. In fact, quite possibly the "greenest" period in history: the age of dinosaurs was also the age of Pangaea, and that continental configuration made high temperatures very much obligatory. Some day we will actually inevitably return to that same configuration, see "pangaea ultima". For this reason, I don't think it matters if we see global warming, regardless of whether or not we are the cause. We'll adapt, life will adapt, just as it always has. No matter what we do, we won't end up in a situation like Venus, the physics just won't work due to our location. Just avoid contaminating the ground and air with pollutants (CO2 isn't a pollutant) and we'll be fine.
Eventually you have to draw the line somewhere with regard to where you stop trusting. If the Linux kernel sources themselves contained a backdoor, I would be none the wiser, and neither would most of the world. Some of us have very little interest in coding, let alone picking through millions of lines of it to look for that kind of thing. And then of course there's syntactic ways of hiding backdoors that even somebody looking for one might miss.
Trayvon was a bully actually. He was bragging in a facebook post about how he slapped a bus driver for something to the effect of looking at him wrong. When caught red handed painting graffiti, he was found with burglary tools and women's jewelry in his backpack by a school staff. Also, apparently the stuff he bought at the convenience store just before his death were for the purposes of making "Purple Drank".
Yeah, and this is the guy they want to name an asteroid after.