Having plans like this public and running these drills hopefully means we never have to find out.
And destroying without a shadow of a doubt North Korea's ability to hit us with another Nuke probably means such overkill with nuclear bombardment of the possible silo locations that almost nobody in North Korea would survive.
I never want to find out just how far we would go in that scenario, but I imagine it's far.
Ok, here's my quote about an idealized capitalist society. Now I didn't say that was my ideal society, I could have been a communist and have written what I wrote. All I did was point out what the two idealized societies are. But anyway, but here's what I wrote:
So in a ideal capitalist society, a person would be encouraged to save everyone a million man-hours because if he made something that useful he'd become rich.
In this world, this man is not compensated for the millions of man hours he saved, but he is able to get rich from his invention by selling what he made because it's so useful (and presumably since it's an invention and not just a skill, rare). Useful + rarity could be considered supply and demand here.
So in a ideal capitalist society, a person would be encouraged to save everyone a million man-hours because if he made something that useful he'd become rich.
In an idealized communist society, it's to each according to need and from each according to ability, so that person would be encouraged to save everyone a million man hours for no reward, but just because he has the ability.
In your idealized society, you think he should be paid based on... how many hours he worked? Your hybrid economic system removes both the altruistic motive of communism and the reward motive of capitalism.
So you've invented the worst economic system possible. Congrats!
This is a fantastic comment, but it leaves something important out. I've also been very impressed with BPs actions after the accident, they've been trying everything anyone can think of and aren't skimping. Before the accident, it's another story.
They acted absolutely appallingly which allowed this to happen in the first place. Always putting speed above safety and a culture of shifting blame is the real cause of this. Watching the 60 minutes episode on this, it's absolutely disgusting how they acted. I hope they're hurt badly enough that they never recover.
In the book "Before the Dawn" it says that the idea that we reproduced with neanderthals is effectively ruled out due to genetic distance. Neanderthals were encountered by modern humans in Europe, and so Europeans should have more genetic distance from other peoples if we had bred with them.
Shouldn't it be just as much of a problem for fathers?
Only if you think that mothers and fathers are the same and interchangeable.
I think most of us think they're not, and there's biology to support that (hormones, pheremones, breast feeding, etc). Of the people I know who think mothers and fathers are interchangable, none of them have raised kids.
Right - a independent, successful woman who has plenty of options decides - makes the conscious choice - to stay home and raise her kids, and that's still an issue of sexism?
Stop telling people what to think. Women, and everyone else, have the right to self determination. Oh but she made a choice you don't approve of, so clearly we can't take her decision seriously as being her decision, after all, she made the wrong one. Did I get that right?
If someone wants to stay home and raise their kids, you have no business telling them what to do. Why don't you look at it as sacrificing her career in order to make sure her kids are raised well? Can't you respect her decision enough to not view her as a victim but look at her as someone who did something noble? And it was noble, so have a little respect.
Valuable in the sense I'm using it means the amount of compensation you can get for it. I don't mean moral value, or value to society, or any other meaning of value, just the amount you get paid. The amount you get paid is dictated entirely by how much you're worth to an employer (demand) and how easy that position is to fill (supply), which has no moral judgments in it.
I'm not saying people shouldn't do selfless things, or accept lower paying jobs that help people.
Also, jobs that have a high social benefit, their salaries are also regulated by the same forces and are not always low. Doctors get paid a lot because it takes a smart person ten years to become a doctor, and they are very much needed and provide a great benefit to society. An engineer who can design a new hybrid car is the same.
There are no moral judgments involved, you're simply selling your services on an open market.
You don't get paid based on how much you or anyone else thinks you deserve. You get paid based on what salary you can command, which is regulated by supply and demand.
It's not an outrage at all that one kind of job doesn't get the same salary as another. If you want more money do something more valuable, which will be something there is a lower supply and/or a higher demand for.
Well, the production of things like LCD screens are naturally resistant to being driven by market economies.
You need hundreds of millions of dollars in investment before you can make a single screen, so naturally there are only going to be one or a small number of companies capable of making them. I think this is a trend we're going to see more of with different products, as producing high tech things isn't conducive to having a large number of small manufacturers. Who in the world can make the an intel chip?
Since this trend is natural and basically unavoidable, we have to step up antitrust investigation and prosecution. Markets don't always occur naturally, sometimes monopolies occur naturally, and then you need government intervention to turn the monopolies or trusts either into competitive markets or into into regulated monopolies if that's impossible.
They're regarded as they are because the freedoms in the constitution weren't exactly meant as a means to an end. Freedom and rights aren't a means to achieve a prosperous and safe society, they're ends unto themselves. So if free speech is dangerous to prosperity and safety, it's not enough of a reason to restrict it. The same with the right to bear arms.
Although it is all a matter of gray areas, since although the founding fathers referred to the US as an experiment (there were much safer ways to have a government), they also said the constitution isn't a suicide pact.
But if it seems like we care about preserving the constitution even when certain parts seem to be harmful, it's because we believe in carrying on this experiment. I agree that the founding fathers have no place in a debate about what the optimal permitted level of gun ownership is, but they do have a place in the argument about whether or not it's a right- something like speech that shouldn't be restricted for the sake of safety.
They were also political geniuses, especially the likes of Jefferson. It turned out that result of their grand experiment was the most prosperous nation on earth, which ended up having a natural aversion to communism, monarchy, theocracy and fascism, all of which are now relegated to the garbage can of history. So speaking on a practical level, that now even if the experiment is over and proven it may be advisable to allow their foresight to guide us a while longer.
I likewise loathe and despise conspiracy theory of all sort. I immediately distrust the judgment of anyone who thinks something like this could have been engineered. There just isn't that sort of control over the world, and anybody who thinks otherwise has the brain worms. The more reasonable people think certain actors in this are just opportunists, that'd be the "con" theory, except that these con men apparently got tons of economists to go along with them, so we'd be back to conspiracy.
But yeah. Hopefully we all learned a lesson about bubbles. Anything that everyone says cannot fail or has never gone down is guaranteed to if enough people believe it can't. The market cannot properly evaluate something that people are buying in droves solely as an investment.
And I agree with you completely about debt. It's a bad thing that should be avoided, and that fact really should be so obvious it shouldn't need to be pointed out.
Generally, it's someones own responsibility to determine whether or not they're investing in a bubble. It's actually really simple to determine.
If you're investing in something that everyone thinks cannot go down/ has never gone down, you're investing in a bubble. As soon as people start buying something solely as an investment the market value is no longer the item's real value. I'm looking at you next, gold.
It's a bit cruel since they were taking the advice of basically everyone and trying to be responsible with their money, but they did take loans they should have been able to tell that they couldn't afford.
Hey I didn't say I lost all faith, just a lot of faith. I was a lot more libertarian a year ago. I still understand the importance of market economics, I just don't trust their self-regulating properties as much.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Yes, the CEOs, but everyone else too.
First, all the people that thought houses were investments whose price could never go down. Wrong.
Second, all those people bought houses they couldn't afford at ludicrous interest rates, based on the idea that a bank would never give them a loan they couldn't afford. Wrong.
Third, the banks that gave these ludicrous loans in the first place. Stupid.
Fourth, the unscrupulous assholes who raced to find people to give these loans so they could sell the loans as investments.
Fifth, the federal reserve for keeping the interest rates so low that the global pool of money had to find themselves an investment other than government bonds.
Sixth, the global pool of money for investing in these loans without carefully looking at what they were buying.
Seventh, all the wall street banks that also invested in all these things heavily and not seeing that they weren't worth their price, and their CEOs.
Eighth, the government for not seeing this happening earlier and stopping it before it was too late.
Ninth, the previous government (Clinton, sorry) for trying to let every American own a home. Heart was in the right place, should have asked an economist first though.
How many times did you hear in the last ten years that property was a great investment that couldn't fail and that everyone should buy some as soon as possible? That was bad advice, every one of those people were wrong.
Basically we all did this for not looking more skeptically at what we were investing in, and living beyond our means. But the economy is not the financial industry, the financial industry is just the fiendishly complicated mechanism that loans the rest of the economy money so it can function. Letting the entire economy fail to teach Wall Street a lesson sounds stupid to me.
I lived within my means, I don't have any debt, and I'm pissed at everyone for screwing this all up so badly. But I want the economy keep going so that the means which I am capable of living within can continue coming, and here we are. Put me down for my share of the bailout, and do me a favor, keep wall street on a tighter leash. I lost a lot of faith in the free market over the last year, it was the market's mindless lemming me-too-ism that completely screwed the pooch here.
1. Apple has the market share for MP3 players, namely the ipod. 2. That makes it impossible to sell music that won't play on the ipod. 3. Apple refuses to use any DRM scheme but its own, and refuses to let other people use that. 4. It's impossible for anyone else to sell DRMed music.
I think that's a good thing. I think Apple has, ironically, killed DRM on music forever.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right! But why!?!?
Why would it turn off checking revocation by default! Is there any possible reason that this is anything but grossly irresponsible?
In this particular case it isn't terrorism at all regardless of who does it.
Having plans like this public and running these drills hopefully means we never have to find out.
And destroying without a shadow of a doubt North Korea's ability to hit us with another Nuke probably means such overkill with nuclear bombardment of the possible silo locations that almost nobody in North Korea would survive.
I never want to find out just how far we would go in that scenario, but I imagine it's far.
Ok, here's my quote about an idealized capitalist society. Now I didn't say that was my ideal society, I could have been a communist and have written what I wrote. All I did was point out what the two idealized societies are. But anyway, but here's what I wrote:
In this world, this man is not compensated for the millions of man hours he saved, but he is able to get rich from his invention by selling what he made because it's so useful (and presumably since it's an invention and not just a skill, rare). Useful + rarity could be considered supply and demand here.
So in a ideal capitalist society, a person would be encouraged to save everyone a million man-hours because if he made something that useful he'd become rich.
In an idealized communist society, it's to each according to need and from each according to ability, so that person would be encouraged to save everyone a million man hours for no reward, but just because he has the ability.
In your idealized society, you think he should be paid based on... how many hours he worked? Your hybrid economic system removes both the altruistic motive of communism and the reward motive of capitalism.
So you've invented the worst economic system possible. Congrats!
This is a fantastic comment, but it leaves something important out. I've also been very impressed with BPs actions after the accident, they've been trying everything anyone can think of and aren't skimping. Before the accident, it's another story.
They acted absolutely appallingly which allowed this to happen in the first place. Always putting speed above safety and a culture of shifting blame is the real cause of this. Watching the 60 minutes episode on this, it's absolutely disgusting how they acted. I hope they're hurt badly enough that they never recover.
In the book "Before the Dawn" it says that the idea that we reproduced with neanderthals is effectively ruled out due to genetic distance. Neanderthals were encountered by modern humans in Europe, and so Europeans should have more genetic distance from other peoples if we had bred with them.
It's funny because free markets encourage monopolistic behavior, and any kind of antitrust activity is regulation of the otherwise free market.
Shouldn't it be just as much of a problem for fathers?
Only if you think that mothers and fathers are the same and interchangeable.
I think most of us think they're not, and there's biology to support that (hormones, pheremones, breast feeding, etc). Of the people I know who think mothers and fathers are interchangable, none of them have raised kids.
Right - a independent, successful woman who has plenty of options decides - makes the conscious choice - to stay home and raise her kids, and that's still an issue of sexism?
Stop telling people what to think. Women, and everyone else, have the right to self determination. Oh but she made a choice you don't approve of, so clearly we can't take her decision seriously as being her decision, after all, she made the wrong one. Did I get that right?
If someone wants to stay home and raise their kids, you have no business telling them what to do. Why don't you look at it as sacrificing her career in order to make sure her kids are raised well? Can't you respect her decision enough to not view her as a victim but look at her as someone who did something noble? And it was noble, so have a little respect.
Valuable in the sense I'm using it means the amount of compensation you can get for it. I don't mean moral value, or value to society, or any other meaning of value, just the amount you get paid. The amount you get paid is dictated entirely by how much you're worth to an employer (demand) and how easy that position is to fill (supply), which has no moral judgments in it.
I'm not saying people shouldn't do selfless things, or accept lower paying jobs that help people.
Also, jobs that have a high social benefit, their salaries are also regulated by the same forces and are not always low. Doctors get paid a lot because it takes a smart person ten years to become a doctor, and they are very much needed and provide a great benefit to society. An engineer who can design a new hybrid car is the same.
There are no moral judgments involved, you're simply selling your services on an open market.
Exactly. In your example supply for the (level of) service you provide would be extremely low.
You don't get paid based on how much you or anyone else thinks you deserve. You get paid based on what salary you can command, which is regulated by supply and demand.
It's not an outrage at all that one kind of job doesn't get the same salary as another. If you want more money do something more valuable, which will be something there is a lower supply and/or a higher demand for.
Well, the production of things like LCD screens are naturally resistant to being driven by market economies.
You need hundreds of millions of dollars in investment before you can make a single screen, so naturally there are only going to be one or a small number of companies capable of making them. I think this is a trend we're going to see more of with different products, as producing high tech things isn't conducive to having a large number of small manufacturers. Who in the world can make the an intel chip?
Since this trend is natural and basically unavoidable, we have to step up antitrust investigation and prosecution. Markets don't always occur naturally, sometimes monopolies occur naturally, and then you need government intervention to turn the monopolies or trusts either into competitive markets or into into regulated monopolies if that's impossible.
Why isn't there an automatic "-1, paranoid delusional mental midget" moderation for when any link is posted that has any association with Alex Jones?
They're regarded as they are because the freedoms in the constitution weren't exactly meant as a means to an end. Freedom and rights aren't a means to achieve a prosperous and safe society, they're ends unto themselves. So if free speech is dangerous to prosperity and safety, it's not enough of a reason to restrict it. The same with the right to bear arms.
Although it is all a matter of gray areas, since although the founding fathers referred to the US as an experiment (there were much safer ways to have a government), they also said the constitution isn't a suicide pact.
But if it seems like we care about preserving the constitution even when certain parts seem to be harmful, it's because we believe in carrying on this experiment. I agree that the founding fathers have no place in a debate about what the optimal permitted level of gun ownership is, but they do have a place in the argument about whether or not it's a right- something like speech that shouldn't be restricted for the sake of safety.
They were also political geniuses, especially the likes of Jefferson. It turned out that result of their grand experiment was the most prosperous nation on earth, which ended up having a natural aversion to communism, monarchy, theocracy and fascism, all of which are now relegated to the garbage can of history. So speaking on a practical level, that now even if the experiment is over and proven it may be advisable to allow their foresight to guide us a while longer.
I likewise loathe and despise conspiracy theory of all sort. I immediately distrust the judgment of anyone who thinks something like this could have been engineered. There just isn't that sort of control over the world, and anybody who thinks otherwise has the brain worms. The more reasonable people think certain actors in this are just opportunists, that'd be the "con" theory, except that these con men apparently got tons of economists to go along with them, so we'd be back to conspiracy.
But yeah. Hopefully we all learned a lesson about bubbles. Anything that everyone says cannot fail or has never gone down is guaranteed to if enough people believe it can't. The market cannot properly evaluate something that people are buying in droves solely as an investment.
And I agree with you completely about debt. It's a bad thing that should be avoided, and that fact really should be so obvious it shouldn't need to be pointed out.
Generally, it's someones own responsibility to determine whether or not they're investing in a bubble. It's actually really simple to determine.
If you're investing in something that everyone thinks cannot go down/ has never gone down, you're investing in a bubble. As soon as people start buying something solely as an investment the market value is no longer the item's real value. I'm looking at you next, gold.
It's a bit cruel since they were taking the advice of basically everyone and trying to be responsible with their money, but they did take loans they should have been able to tell that they couldn't afford.
Hey I didn't say I lost all faith, just a lot of faith. I was a lot more libertarian a year ago. I still understand the importance of market economics, I just don't trust their self-regulating properties as much.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Yes, the CEOs, but everyone else too.
First, all the people that thought houses were investments whose price could never go down. Wrong.
Second, all those people bought houses they couldn't afford at ludicrous interest rates, based on the idea that a bank would never give them a loan they couldn't afford. Wrong.
Third, the banks that gave these ludicrous loans in the first place. Stupid.
Fourth, the unscrupulous assholes who raced to find people to give these loans so they could sell the loans as investments.
Fifth, the federal reserve for keeping the interest rates so low that the global pool of money had to find themselves an investment other than government bonds.
Sixth, the global pool of money for investing in these loans without carefully looking at what they were buying.
Seventh, all the wall street banks that also invested in all these things heavily and not seeing that they weren't worth their price, and their CEOs.
Eighth, the government for not seeing this happening earlier and stopping it before it was too late.
Ninth, the previous government (Clinton, sorry) for trying to let every American own a home. Heart was in the right place, should have asked an economist first though.
How many times did you hear in the last ten years that property was a great investment that couldn't fail and that everyone should buy some as soon as possible? That was bad advice, every one of those people were wrong.
Basically we all did this for not looking more skeptically at what we were investing in, and living beyond our means. But the economy is not the financial industry, the financial industry is just the fiendishly complicated mechanism that loans the rest of the economy money so it can function. Letting the entire economy fail to teach Wall Street a lesson sounds stupid to me.
I lived within my means, I don't have any debt, and I'm pissed at everyone for screwing this all up so badly. But I want the economy keep going so that the means which I am capable of living within can continue coming, and here we are. Put me down for my share of the bailout, and do me a favor, keep wall street on a tighter leash. I lost a lot of faith in the free market over the last year, it was the market's mindless lemming me-too-ism that completely screwed the pooch here.
This guy is a miniature drug company, and just as bad. Putting money (or a livelyhood) before the general welfare of his countrymen.
Sorry, it's much too late to correct this. Since like 2006. It even has a scientific definition now.
We're just not going to start describing giant waves Taiyounamis or Ra-tasms, the word Tsunami is here to say.
I agree. Here's how it goes:
1. Apple has the market share for MP3 players, namely the ipod.
2. That makes it impossible to sell music that won't play on the ipod.
3. Apple refuses to use any DRM scheme but its own, and refuses to let other people use that.
4. It's impossible for anyone else to sell DRMed music.
I think that's a good thing. I think Apple has, ironically, killed DRM on music forever.
Did you need an explaination that a warning being required for emergencyporn.com was a joke? :D
You could have warned us the link was NSFW you ass