If that was the motive, they could have just planted a dirty bomb, poisoned all the oil in Iraq for the next thousand years, and be raking the profits off of a reduced supply! They could even have claimed that Saddam did it! Why have a complex conspiracy when you can have a simple one?
p.s. Of course, higher prices on a supply does not translate into higher profits for resellers, but why let economics interfer with a nice conspiracy...
If you March anyway you WILL be arrested for trying to exercise your free speech.
You won't be arrested for your free speech, you will be arrested for blocking traffic, and/or blocking access to buldings. You're free to peacefully march along public access pedestrian sidewalks and in public access parks, so long as you don't restrict others rights to do the same, and don't violate any loitering ordinances.
In short, you may need permits for certain deeds, but never for words.
My God! I can't believe he said that! His statement was so outrageous I had to look it up! Of course, it could have been worse. He could have said "Hymietown"...
Nice in theory, but in reality China, India and Vietnam are getting the oil before the US does. It's almost as if... as if... the invasion wasn't about oil after all!
Attempting for the first time in our history to amend our constitution for the sole purpose of discriminating against a group of people based solely upon how they were born out of ignorant religious based hatred *is* pure religious extremism.
Sorry, I'm completely missing your reference here. I didn't know Presidents could amend the consitution, but that aside, what are you talking about?
Ahhh, the old tired "but Clinton" whine. You lose.
That is the whole POINT of this thread! You claim that it is impossible to cannot compare the parties, so I am showing you how they are essentially the same. To paraphrase Michael Palin, an argument isn't the automatic gainsaying of what the other guy says. You can't automatically ignore counter arguments just because they don't validate your postulates. That's silly.
Followed up with an idiotic lie
Oooh! A link war! Let me play too! How about this? Or this?
The fact that you can't pull your head out of your partisan hackery...
I did not vote for Bush. Either Bush. The last Republican I voted for was Reagan in his first term. I apologize for that, but it was my first election, and the giddiness of the moment overwhelmed me.
I'm only trying to point out that Democrats aren't the sacred angelic beings you pretend they are. I would not have even bothered responding, except for your stupid signature about murdering people.
I'm not now, nor have I ever been a member or supporter of any major political party.
They have totally rejected any sort of moral standing in favor of pure greed...
Are you sure it's "pure" greed? Maybe it's "pure unaldulterated" instead....and religious extremism...
What extremism? I think Bush's "faith based" programs may be wrong, but they're not "extreme". Or do you just think that anyone who is religious is "extreme"?
"They have fucked our reputation irreparably,..
Nonsense! We still have the essentially same reputation we had in the 90s. Those nations and newspapers who liked us before still like us now, those who hated us before still hate us now. No difference....fucked our future by spending our income for years to come...
A bit of hyperbole, but it is true that Bush is a major spendthrift. Of course, so was Clinton. The only reason Clinton managed to eek out a year with no deficit is because a Republican congress wouldn't give him his budget. Every President for the past three quarters of a centry has grown the size of government and the debt. Bush is hardly unique in this regard....and demonstrated a vicious hatred of honesty...
Sounds like Clinton. He didn't get the nickname "Slick Willy" because he was a choirboy, he got it because he was unable to smile his pearly whites without lying through them.
Was the claim of WMDs a lie? Or just the result of mistaken intelligence? Since every other world leader was certain Saddam he had them, I lean towards the latter....discussion...
Huh? Bush has always discussed stuff. He's always been extremely bi-partisan. Very gracious to the other party. He lets Dick Gregory and the rest of the press walk all over him at press conferences. Etc, etc....liberty, and worked for the destruction of the constitution....
Every President since Washington has taken away some of our liberty. Bush has been no different. He's no worse than Clinton in this regard. The constitution hasn't been worth the paper it's been written on for fifty years now. The only difference between the parties is which bill they trample on the most. Bush doesn't seem to like the fourth, but Clinton didn't like the first (Waco) and second. Neither of them much like the ninth and tenth.
"Be a patriot: Murder a Republican."
I truly fear the day when your party gets back in power.
"RIAA is the most hated "corporation" in America, having beaten out Halliburton and Wal-Mart for the honor"
That makes sense. As you go down the list you get smaller sets of people you reactively hate them. The RIAA is hated by both the left and the right, Halliburton is generally hated only by the left, and Wal-Mart is generally hated only by the affluent left.
p.s. I once asked someone at a party who was venting about Halliburton, what it was that Halliburton was in the business of doing. They didn't know, but they did assure me it was the biggest corporation in the world.
Whether or not it's okay with me is immaterial. The point is that this is truly a minor thing. It's the presidential equivalent of jaywalking. You don't do full scale congressional investigations over jaywalking.
As for my opinion, I think it's okay. Yes I do. Those attorneys were appointed by the president, they served at his pleasure, and no reason needs to be given for their firing. This is different than my opinion on the emails, btw.
I hope we can at least agree that Congress should be able to investigate such things.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I can't agree even there. Congress does not have evidence that a crime was committed. The whole point of the investigation is to find evidence. That's going too far. This isnt' an investigation, it's political gamesmanship. If they want to impeach the president, then they need to grow a pair and actually impeach him. But this endless fishing expedition is nuts.
Why has no one remarked on the absurdity of this clause in the GPLv3? It's demanding the enforcement of patents! Next thing you know RMS will be claiming black is white.
If I have a patent, but deliberately choose not to enforce it, and give you a document stating I will not enforce it, the GPL says YOU are the Evil Man. As I've stated before, I can easily understand why Microsoft is on the bad end of the stick here, but I still cannot fathom why Novell is the child of Satan. Microsoft promises not to sue Novell, and the whole GPL community decides to shit on Novell for it.
Yes, it's the bungling that did it. Bush should have come right out and said "Yes, I fired them! I fired them because I didn't like their hair style!" (Or whatever the reason was). It would all have been over.
This little molehill has become so mountainous, that it must be the Incredible Hulk-o-Mole himself that lives inside it! This is truly bottom-of-the-barrel stuff here. With all the shrillness over the last six years, you would think there's something else they could nail the President with.
No, it is simply an area where the "free market" system frequently calls for more, not less, government intervention than alternatives.
How so? How does enforcement of property rights and contracts result in more government than the alternatives? In a modern economy, that is. History has a few examples of primitive societies without property or formal agreements, but only the most rabid enviro-socialists consider those societies to be viable alternatives.
Enforcing property rights and contracts is nothing more than having laws against theft and fraud. That's not big government, just minimal government.
Sidenote: This is Slashdot, so I guess I need to clarify that I'm not talking about patents and shrink-wrap EULAs. Those are artificial properties and contracts pulled out of the government's ass. They create a market, but there's plenty of room to debate the free-ness of it.
This both implies a rather odd definition of system and requires a rather odd definition of "economy"; while it may be true in that context, I'm not sure its useful to distort the language until the things you'd like to be able to say are true-by-definition; usually, that's mostly useful for misleading by implicit equivocation.
"System" is the wrong word, and it's confusing things. What I am trying to say is that a free market does not require any formalism or state involvement beyond what is necessary for any government.
That you think that even this level is unecessarily coercive, and elsewhere that property rights and contracts are wrong, I can only conclude that you must be an anarcho-socialist of some kind. Since we have a complete lack of any common ground on which to discuss matters, I'll stop now and stop wasting your time.
It's also a case of "ignorance makes bliss". As a long time Unix user, when I go to Windows or Mac, I feel very constrained by the configuration dialogs. If I want to do something outside of the Redmond/Cupertino boxes, I have to start tweaking obscure registry settings, download buggy and untrustworthy utilities, etc. Windows and OSX users think their dialogs let them do everything, simply because they don't know anything else exists outside of the dialog's border.
What a coincidence! Speaking of market inefficiencies, I just stumbled across this interview with Robert Fogel. He made a somewhat infamous name for himself with a study that showed the South's antebellum slavery to be *more* efficient than the North's economy!
I would rather have freedom than slavery, even if it means less efficiency. I would rather be poor and free than rich and enslaved.
I say "free" market, so as to distinguish it from unfree or managed markets. Your example of the US health care system is a good one. It is not a free market despite the fact that it still operates according to market principles. (Whether the benefits of government intervention into the health care market are worth the costs of the inefficiencies is a separate discussion).
It's like a free society. Somewhere along the curve from totalitarianism to anarchy there is a fuzzy line where we can say "on this side are free societies". Surely there is room for freedom in non-anarchist societies?
That is not an example of matching money and brains. How do you know that a better standard couldn't have been imposed? How do you know you've found all the brains and correctly matched them? How do you know that there isn't some telephony genius languishing as a third rate rocket scientist because some bureaucrat misfiled his aptitude profile?
But I guess my initial post led you astray. Free markets are not about efficiency, they are about freedom. Even if an omnisicient economic czar was able to command an economy with perfect efficiency, I would still want a free market simply because I want to be free. Fortunately, free markets are much more efficient than command economies, so I get the best of both worlds. Freedom AND prosperity!
I said "relative lack of government", not complete anarchy. Pretending that the free market is anarcho-capitalism is as silly as pretending that a progressive tax is totalitarian communism.
it is a system with a very particular kind of government intervention and control, to wit, strong enforcement of "property" and "contract"
First, I said a free market was a relative lack of government intervention, not complete anarchy. Save your arguments over anarcho-capitalism for when a real anarchist shows up. Second, enforcement of contracts and property rights is fairly minimal, and not limited to free markets. Arguing that free markets don't work because they aren't true anarchies is specious and silly. You seem to think that there are only two choices: complete anarchy of rigid authoritarianism. There is a middle ground.
When I say that free markets are not a system, I mean that there is no need for government to manage facets of the economy. The economy is the game, not the playing field. Governments can certainly ensure level playing fields without resorting to heavy handed economic czars and bureaucratic regulatory machines. Simply put, laws against theft (property protection) and fraud (contract enforcement) are not the definition of an economic system.
A "system" without a government control of distribution of goods and services is anarchy, not a free market.
I can easily think of hundreds of examples of non-anarchies where the state does not control economic transactions. It's quite easy to imagine a laissez faire society that has a government (ei. not an anarchy) yet does not control the distribution of goods and services.
Let me clarify a bit. The problem most people have with the free market is that they think it is a system. It is not a system, it is the lack (or relative lack) of a system. The free market is merely an economy with a relative lack of government interventions and controls. Every other "system" requires the hand of government. Planning committees, bureaucratic trade agreement agencies, and various sorts of economic czars and their police enforcement arms.
Every non free-market solution requires the hand of government. Are you that trustworthy of government to hand them the reins of the economy? Some of you think George Bush is the stupidest person ever to be born, yet you want his government to control livelihood. Others of you think Nancy Pelosi is an utter idiot, yet you want her government to be in charge of your money. What gives Kerry or Thompson or Edwards or Obama or Romney or Clinton any special insight into your lives that you feel they are capable of running it better than you can yourself.
Any "system" other than the free market is a system that gives control of your life to vain and muddleheaded politicians.
Slashdot Mirror
Go on, mod me a troll. Prove my point.
You should know better. On Slashdot if you dare someone to mod you down, you will instead be modded up. That's the way it works.
If that was the motive, they could have just planted a dirty bomb, poisoned all the oil in Iraq for the next thousand years, and be raking the profits off of a reduced supply! They could even have claimed that Saddam did it! Why have a complex conspiracy when you can have a simple one?
p.s. Of course, higher prices on a supply does not translate into higher profits for resellers, but why let economics interfer with a nice conspiracy...
If you March anyway you WILL be arrested for trying to exercise your free speech.
You won't be arrested for your free speech, you will be arrested for blocking traffic, and/or blocking access to buldings. You're free to peacefully march along public access pedestrian sidewalks and in public access parks, so long as you don't restrict others rights to do the same, and don't violate any loitering ordinances.
In short, you may need permits for certain deeds, but never for words.
Reality to the Reality-Based Community: You don't get arrested in the US for peacefully marching against Bush.
Imus isn't conservative.
My God! I can't believe he said that! His statement was so outrageous I had to look it up! Of course, it could have been worse. He could have said "Hymietown"...
Damn the men, spare the oilfields!
Nice in theory, but in reality China, India and Vietnam are getting the oil before the US does. It's almost as if... as if... the invasion wasn't about oil after all!
Attempting for the first time in our history to amend our constitution for the sole purpose of discriminating against a group of people based solely upon how they were born out of ignorant religious based hatred *is* pure religious extremism.
Sorry, I'm completely missing your reference here. I didn't know Presidents could amend the consitution, but that aside, what are you talking about?
Ahhh, the old tired "but Clinton" whine. You lose.
That is the whole POINT of this thread! You claim that it is impossible to cannot compare the parties, so I am showing you how they are essentially the same. To paraphrase Michael Palin, an argument isn't the automatic gainsaying of what the other guy says. You can't automatically ignore counter arguments just because they don't validate your postulates. That's silly.
Followed up with an idiotic lie
Oooh! A link war! Let me play too! How about this? Or this?
The fact that you can't pull your head out of your partisan hackery...
I did not vote for Bush. Either Bush. The last Republican I voted for was Reagan in his first term. I apologize for that, but it was my first election, and the giddiness of the moment overwhelmed me.
I'm only trying to point out that Democrats aren't the sacred angelic beings you pretend they are. I would not have even bothered responding, except for your stupid signature about murdering people.
I'm not now, nor have I ever been a member or supporter of any major political party.
Let me guess... you voted for Kerry?
They have totally rejected any sort of moral standing in favor of pure greed...
...and religious extremism...
...fucked our future by spending our income for years to come...
...and demonstrated a vicious hatred of honesty...
...discussion...
...liberty, and worked for the destruction of the constitution....
Are you sure it's "pure" greed? Maybe it's "pure unaldulterated" instead.
What extremism? I think Bush's "faith based" programs may be wrong, but they're not "extreme". Or do you just think that anyone who is religious is "extreme"?
"They have fucked our reputation irreparably,..
Nonsense! We still have the essentially same reputation we had in the 90s. Those nations and newspapers who liked us before still like us now, those who hated us before still hate us now. No difference.
A bit of hyperbole, but it is true that Bush is a major spendthrift. Of course, so was Clinton. The only reason Clinton managed to eek out a year with no deficit is because a Republican congress wouldn't give him his budget. Every President for the past three quarters of a centry has grown the size of government and the debt. Bush is hardly unique in this regard.
Sounds like Clinton. He didn't get the nickname "Slick Willy" because he was a choirboy, he got it because he was unable to smile his pearly whites without lying through them.
Was the claim of WMDs a lie? Or just the result of mistaken intelligence? Since every other world leader was certain Saddam he had them, I lean towards the latter.
Huh? Bush has always discussed stuff. He's always been extremely bi-partisan. Very gracious to the other party. He lets Dick Gregory and the rest of the press walk all over him at press conferences. Etc, etc.
Every President since Washington has taken away some of our liberty. Bush has been no different. He's no worse than Clinton in this regard. The constitution hasn't been worth the paper it's been written on for fifty years now. The only difference between the parties is which bill they trample on the most. Bush doesn't seem to like the fourth, but Clinton didn't like the first (Waco) and second. Neither of them much like the ninth and tenth.
"Be a patriot: Murder a Republican."
I truly fear the day when your party gets back in power.
It's the most hated company by geeks, rippers, and bloggers, but the general public doesn't have the faintest idea who they are.
Better yet, when I'm asked to fix a bug at work, it would be nice to just roll over and hit the snooze.
What's the problem. I do this all the time!
"RIAA is the most hated "corporation" in America, having beaten out Halliburton and Wal-Mart for the honor"
That makes sense. As you go down the list you get smaller sets of people you reactively hate them. The RIAA is hated by both the left and the right, Halliburton is generally hated only by the left, and Wal-Mart is generally hated only by the affluent left.
p.s. I once asked someone at a party who was venting about Halliburton, what it was that Halliburton was in the business of doing. They didn't know, but they did assure me it was the biggest corporation in the world.
Is that okay with you?
Whether or not it's okay with me is immaterial. The point is that this is truly a minor thing. It's the presidential equivalent of jaywalking. You don't do full scale congressional investigations over jaywalking.
As for my opinion, I think it's okay. Yes I do. Those attorneys were appointed by the president, they served at his pleasure, and no reason needs to be given for their firing. This is different than my opinion on the emails, btw.
I hope we can at least agree that Congress should be able to investigate such things.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I can't agree even there. Congress does not have evidence that a crime was committed. The whole point of the investigation is to find evidence. That's going too far. This isnt' an investigation, it's political gamesmanship. If they want to impeach the president, then they need to grow a pair and actually impeach him. But this endless fishing expedition is nuts.
Kudos to Steve for doing what journalists should do - find out the facts and present them clearly.
Because of this, he'll never be able to work in the journalism business ever again. Think of his starving children, donate now...
Why has no one remarked on the absurdity of this clause in the GPLv3? It's demanding the enforcement of patents! Next thing you know RMS will be claiming black is white.
If I have a patent, but deliberately choose not to enforce it, and give you a document stating I will not enforce it, the GPL says YOU are the Evil Man. As I've stated before, I can easily understand why Microsoft is on the bad end of the stick here, but I still cannot fathom why Novell is the child of Satan. Microsoft promises not to sue Novell, and the whole GPL community decides to shit on Novell for it.
Yes, it's the bungling that did it. Bush should have come right out and said "Yes, I fired them! I fired them because I didn't like their hair style!" (Or whatever the reason was). It would all have been over.
This little molehill has become so mountainous, that it must be the Incredible Hulk-o-Mole himself that lives inside it! This is truly bottom-of-the-barrel stuff here. With all the shrillness over the last six years, you would think there's something else they could nail the President with.
You forgot: ...
8: Steals your children's lunch money
9: Rapes cute little bunny rabbit
10: Etc.
No, it is simply an area where the "free market" system frequently calls for more, not less, government intervention than alternatives.
How so? How does enforcement of property rights and contracts result in more government than the alternatives? In a modern economy, that is. History has a few examples of primitive societies without property or formal agreements, but only the most rabid enviro-socialists consider those societies to be viable alternatives.
Enforcing property rights and contracts is nothing more than having laws against theft and fraud. That's not big government, just minimal government.
Sidenote: This is Slashdot, so I guess I need to clarify that I'm not talking about patents and shrink-wrap EULAs. Those are artificial properties and contracts pulled out of the government's ass. They create a market, but there's plenty of room to debate the free-ness of it.
This both implies a rather odd definition of system and requires a rather odd definition of "economy"; while it may be true in that context, I'm not sure its useful to distort the language until the things you'd like to be able to say are true-by-definition; usually, that's mostly useful for misleading by implicit equivocation.
"System" is the wrong word, and it's confusing things. What I am trying to say is that a free market does not require any formalism or state involvement beyond what is necessary for any government.
That you think that even this level is unecessarily coercive, and elsewhere that property rights and contracts are wrong, I can only conclude that you must be an anarcho-socialist of some kind. Since we have a complete lack of any common ground on which to discuss matters, I'll stop now and stop wasting your time.
It's also a case of "ignorance makes bliss". As a long time Unix user, when I go to Windows or Mac, I feel very constrained by the configuration dialogs. If I want to do something outside of the Redmond/Cupertino boxes, I have to start tweaking obscure registry settings, download buggy and untrustworthy utilities, etc. Windows and OSX users think their dialogs let them do everything, simply because they don't know anything else exists outside of the dialog's border.
What a coincidence! Speaking of market inefficiencies, I just stumbled across this interview with Robert Fogel. He made a somewhat infamous name for himself with a study that showed the South's antebellum slavery to be *more* efficient than the North's economy!
I would rather have freedom than slavery, even if it means less efficiency. I would rather be poor and free than rich and enslaved.
I say "free" market, so as to distinguish it from unfree or managed markets. Your example of the US health care system is a good one. It is not a free market despite the fact that it still operates according to market principles. (Whether the benefits of government intervention into the health care market are worth the costs of the inefficiencies is a separate discussion).
It's like a free society. Somewhere along the curve from totalitarianism to anarchy there is a fuzzy line where we can say "on this side are free societies". Surely there is room for freedom in non-anarchist societies?
That is not an example of matching money and brains. How do you know that a better standard couldn't have been imposed? How do you know you've found all the brains and correctly matched them? How do you know that there isn't some telephony genius languishing as a third rate rocket scientist because some bureaucrat misfiled his aptitude profile?
But I guess my initial post led you astray. Free markets are not about efficiency, they are about freedom. Even if an omnisicient economic czar was able to command an economy with perfect efficiency, I would still want a free market simply because I want to be free. Fortunately, free markets are much more efficient than command economies, so I get the best of both worlds. Freedom AND prosperity!
I said "relative lack of government", not complete anarchy. Pretending that the free market is anarcho-capitalism is as silly as pretending that a progressive tax is totalitarian communism.
it is a system with a very particular kind of government intervention and control, to wit, strong enforcement of "property" and "contract"
First, I said a free market was a relative lack of government intervention, not complete anarchy. Save your arguments over anarcho-capitalism for when a real anarchist shows up. Second, enforcement of contracts and property rights is fairly minimal, and not limited to free markets. Arguing that free markets don't work because they aren't true anarchies is specious and silly. You seem to think that there are only two choices: complete anarchy of rigid authoritarianism. There is a middle ground.
When I say that free markets are not a system, I mean that there is no need for government to manage facets of the economy. The economy is the game, not the playing field. Governments can certainly ensure level playing fields without resorting to heavy handed economic czars and bureaucratic regulatory machines. Simply put, laws against theft (property protection) and fraud (contract enforcement) are not the definition of an economic system.
A "system" without a government control of distribution of goods and services is anarchy, not a free market.
I can easily think of hundreds of examples of non-anarchies where the state does not control economic transactions. It's quite easy to imagine a laissez faire society that has a government (ei. not an anarchy) yet does not control the distribution of goods and services.
Let me clarify a bit. The problem most people have with the free market is that they think it is a system. It is not a system, it is the lack (or relative lack) of a system. The free market is merely an economy with a relative lack of government interventions and controls. Every other "system" requires the hand of government. Planning committees, bureaucratic trade agreement agencies, and various sorts of economic czars and their police enforcement arms.
Every non free-market solution requires the hand of government. Are you that trustworthy of government to hand them the reins of the economy? Some of you think George Bush is the stupidest person ever to be born, yet you want his government to control livelihood. Others of you think Nancy Pelosi is an utter idiot, yet you want her government to be in charge of your money. What gives Kerry or Thompson or Edwards or Obama or Romney or Clinton any special insight into your lives that you feel they are capable of running it better than you can yourself.
Any "system" other than the free market is a system that gives control of your life to vain and muddleheaded politicians.