Smith made the same mistake Marx did. He assumed people WOULDN'T be greedy, selfish, self-absorbed bastards only concerned with elevating themselves and fuck everybody else.
Actually, that's exactly what he assumes. The free market (usually) works precisely because people are greedy, selfish, self-absorbed bastards only concerned with elevating themselves and f*ck everybody else. It just so happens that in most cases, having individuals act that way results in the best possible outcome not just for the individual for everyone overall, so long as everyone is acting that way.
Where the free market fails is in a subset of cases where this isn't true - where individuals acting in their own best interests doesn't result in the best possible outcome for the whole. Cases like the prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons. Like most things in life, there are times when free market philosophy works, and times when it doesn't. Too many people see a few successes and assume it always works, or see a few failures and assume it never works. The more discerning individual will try to distinguish between the cases where it does and doesn't work, so as to better predict such cases in the future. That way you can regulate the cases where it doesn't work to avoid it being exploited, while leaving cases where it does work regulation-free to derive the full benefit from it.
Why is the focus on Wikileaks and it's leader? This is a great case of shooting the messenger. Bradley Manning was the solider who stole the information. How he disseminated it is not the point. Granted: Wikileaks posted the information, but if Wikileaks didn't exist they would have just posted it elsewhere.
Why is the focus on Willy the fence? Brad was the thief who stole the items. How he disseminated them is not the point. Granted, Willy bought the goods, but if Willy hadn't been there, Brad would have just sold it elsewhere.
Note: I actually agree that an entity that does stuff like Wikileaks is doing can be a good thing. I'm just not convinced by your reasoning that the recipient of stolen property is automatically absolved of any responsibility and is completely free to do whatever they wish with it. In fact, for theft of secret information, I'd say the publisher of said information is more culpable than a fence for stolen merchandise. In the case of stolen merchandise, the damage is sustained upon the items being stolen. What happens to the items after the theft doesn't really matter to the original owner - he is still out the items. But in a case of information theft, the theft itself doesn't harm the original owner - they still have copies of the information. The harm comes from the publication and distribution of info the original owner was trying to keep secret.
If we do accept your premise that recipients of the info are free to do whatever they want with it, then you've effectively created an info-laundering system. Some contractor working in your home finds homemade porn of you and your wife. He gives them to me thus laundering them, and I'm free to publish and sell said videos. According to your reasoning, there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop me because I'm not the one who stole the videos.
Somewhere, a judgment call has to be made whether the world is better off knowing or not knowing certain secrets, or if the entity keeping the secret deserves to have it returned to them. If you decide to skip that judgment call and just claim that the world is better off knowing all secrets, then you've just advocated anarchy. Even Wikileaks does not subscribe to that viewpoint since they keep some of their operating details (as well as Assange's location) secret.
Stopping Julian Assange isn't going to solve the problem. Better idea: infiltrate Wikileaks and corrupt the information before it arrives. Let them post garbage. Ruin their reputation.
That's my prediction too. There are going to be (secret!) government agencies which pay people to do nothing but make up plausible crap, which they then "leak" to sites like Wikileaks, thus lowering the credibility of anything posted there.
If this becomes the norm we might as well start actually stealing from stores, since the penalty is so much smaller.
If you steal a music CD from a store, and then make a bunch of copies and start distributing them, expect the same penalty. The girl is not charged with theft, she's charged with distribution of a copyrighted work.
This argument keeps coming up despite it being wrong. There are two possible types of crime here. One in which an individual steals copies of music they want. Another in which one individual mass-produces copies of songs for others. Common sense dictates that this case is one of the former. You are arguing that it is the latter. Let's see what happens when we carry your argument through.
Say she shared a song with 3 people. By your argument, she is responsible for making 2 copies. But what about the other two people? They also shared the song, so by your argument they are also responsible for making 2 copies. 3 people * 2 copies = 6 copies. Your argument leads to the illogical conclusion that there are 6 illegal copies which need to be prosecuted, although only 2 copies were added to the universe.
Now what if we make each person who downloads a song illegally responsible for their single download? Then she is in the clear for sharing the song, and each of the 2 other people are responsible for 1 copy each. 2 people * 1 copy = 2 copies. Total new copies in the universe = 2. Hey, we have a winner.
The logic you're using (which was the original logic for the enormous penalties for commercial copyright infringement) was for cases where someone burned a thousand illegal copies of a CD and sold them. In that case, the people buying the illegal CDs weren't seen as committing a crime. They paid for their copy, so morally they did nothing wrong. The entire penalty for the crime thus felt on the person burning the thousand CDs. 1000 illegal copies burned, 1000 illegal copies added to the universe, and the one person was completely and solely responsible for every one of them.
What the RIAA is doing (and what you've fallen for) is a perversion of that logic, applying commercial copyright penalties to what is clearly a case of individual infringement. I'm willing to accept slightly higher penalties than shoplifting due to the way these illegal copies grow and spread like cancer once they're on the net. But the penalty per person needs to be set much closer to shoplifting than to commercial copyright infringement like it is now.
If all I have purchased from the record companies is a license to the music, then isn't all that matters is that the person accessing the cloud has a license? Doesn't that license entitle me to certain listening rights.
That's why this thing is so screwed up. Hardware manufacturers sell a product. Software manufacturers sell a license. The RIAA/MPAA have deluded themselves (and gotten a bunch of laws passed supporting them) that they are selling something which isn't quite a product and isn't quite a license. By their terms, in any case where it being a product would benefit you (able to play it at parties, make backups of it, etc), they want to treat it like a license. But any case where it being a license would benefit you (discounted format upgrades, free replacement for destroyed media, making copies for your home stereo, MP3 player, computer, and car, etc), they want to treat it like a product.
Aside from things that are designed not to last, things wear out - regardless of their quality.
Another problem is that when it comes to tech gear, quality is undesirable. At the rate technology improves, most stuff will be obsolete in 3-5 years. I have a Sony Clie I bought in 2004. When I whipped it out at work in 2007, people were laughing at me. It's only 6 years old and my cell phone now does everything the Clie did plus a whole lot more. Heck, my cell phone's specs pretty much match the specs of my laptop from 2004.
If you buy a quality piece of tech designed to last years and years, you're wasting money on useless lifespan. You are better off buying something cheap and crappy and replacing it in 2-3 years, than you are paying extra to buy a quality product which will last you 5, much less the rest of your life. The only thing that's going to change that is for the pace of technological improvements to slow down, which I'm not so sure would be a good thing.
When you attempt to train a cat, attitude comes into play. The cat doesn't care what you tell it to do, because it's a cat. Bribary doesn't work...you have to train a cat the way a mother cat would train her kittens. If you can read their body language (and learn how to physically communicate without the use of a tail), you can communicate with them on a fairly deep level.
That's not training your cat. Your cat has trained you.
But if the US, EU, AU, and Asian communities enacted a 1 child per family policy like China has done, their respective populations would drop to 1/10th present levels by 2110. i.e. From ~3 billion to 300 million. That alone would solve our pollution problem, and yes it would be humane (no need to kill anybody).
The thing is, nearly all the world's population growth is happening in undeveloped countries. The developed nations are experiencing slow or even negative population growth. So paradoxically, the way to slow down global population growth seems to be by quickening the rate at which countries are developing.
I would rather get radiation from the flight than radiation from the flight AND the backscatter. Remember radiation exposure is cumulative and I would rather avoid any I can if given an alternative
The dose is cumulative, but mostly limited to your outer layer of skin cells which will slough off in a few days or weeks anyway. The radiation you get from flying at altitude ranges from the same as the scanners to stuff which will go completely through your body wreaking a path of molecular destruction. The flight is much, much worse for you than the scanners if you're that worried about your radiation exposure.
That's something I noticed when bringing this point up too. Even though I'm against the scans (for 4th amendment reasons), I point out that the radiation does is negligible compared to what you're exposing yourself to during the flight, and suddenly I'm accused of being a fascist who wants to see nude pictures of air travelers.
I think what happens is people pigeonhole things into "good" and "bad" categories. If something is "good", then anything they read about it being bad must be false. If something is "bad", then anything they read about it being bad must be true. It's an intellectual shortcut akin to hopping on the bandwagon and dogpiling. Works most of the time, but when it fails it makes people do really stupid things like mark factually correct points as a troll.
On a per TRIP basis, cars, trains, and buses are all safer than airplanes.
Actually, they have about the same fatality rate per trip. But that's entirely an artifact of trips on cars, trains, and buses typically being shorter than trips on planes. On a per-hour basis, yes all transportation modes have about the same fatality rate. But you're completely ignoring the fact that it takes a lot more hours to drive to grandma's house for Thanksgiving than it takes to fly.
For a trip to the same destination, flying is much safer. What you're saying impacts discretionary travel, like vacations. People can simply choose to vacation someplace that's a 5 hour drive away, instead of a 5 hour flight away, thus keeping the level of risk the same. But for business trips, visiting relatives, and vacationing at a specific destination (e.g. Disneyworld), flying is safer.
The people who bought the tickets represented a fictitious identity while entering into a contract. This is a crime of fraud
What I don't understand is that the ticket vendors seem to be so concerned that the ticket purchaser is a real person who won't resell the ticket. But that's a problem that has already been solved by the airline industry. Security requirements dictate that airline tickets be non-transferrable - they're assigned to a specific individual at the time of purchase. You buy your airline tickets, and when you get to the airport you have to prove you're the person whose name is on the ticket. A driver's license or passport is the most common ID, but you can use the credit card used to buy the ticket as well.
If the ticket vendors really want to stop scalping, why don't they just attach a name to it at the time of sale? Then when a ticket holder tries to enter the venue, they can just cross-check the name associated with the ticket in the database with the ID proffered by the ticket holder. If you wish to buy a ticket as a gift, just make sure you use the recipient's name on the ticket. For people who suddenly can't attend the event, they can implement a buy-back system which credits the original purchaser with (say) 50% the ticket price. They can then sell that ticket to people waiting in a "standby" line the day of the event.
The Senate does not actually carry out actual filibusters anymore, where people get up and talk for hours, and the Republican party has voted in virtual lockstep in the past decade or so, ensuring they always have the votes if it comes down to it (Democrats tend to be in constant disarray, cf. Joe Lieberman.)
I agree the Republicans have been using filibusters much more than they were historically used. But it's simply untrue that the Republican party has voted in virtual lockstep the past decade. That's just political spin by one side trying to blame things on the other side. The Washington Post actually tracks how often Senators vote with their party, and there's been no real pattern other than members of the party in power tending to vote with their party more often.
107th Senate 88.4% Dem (50), 86.0% Rep (53)
108th Senate 84.9% Dem (48), 91.8% Rep (51)
109th Senate 85.1% Dem (45), 87.2% Rep (55)
110th Senate 87.5% Dem (49), 77.8% Rep (51)
111st Senate 90.1% Dem (63), 85.3% Rep (43)
10 year average: 87.2% Dem, 85.6% Rep
So you can see, during the last 4 years that the Democrats have been in control of the Senate, the Democrats have actually voted more in lock-step than the Republicans. (The Dems + 2 Independents controlled the 110th Senate, the 51 Republicans reflect 49 seats with 2 members replaced during the term.) You can go back further if you wish. Statistically, aside from increased filibusters, there hasn't been much difference in the voting patterns of the two parties in the last four years of the Senate than in previous years.
That supports OP's bigger point though - that oil fields can replenish themselves. An abiotic process is creating hydrocarbons which (theoretically) become oil. There's so much of this stuff that bacteria are intercepting part of it and using it to sustain their own lives.
The bigger point to take away from all this IMHO though is that, if true, it means the assumption of carbon neutrality used in many models is wrong. Up to now we've pretty much assumed that carbon isn't destroyed or lost, it's either locked up in hydrocarbons and biological matter, or it's floating around in the air as CO2, and the total amount of it in the system is relatively constant. But this paper seems to imply that hydrogen and carbon from inside the earth are percolating up to the surface all the time. So where is the excess carbon going? Is it being removed from the system somehow? Or is the amount of carbon in the system constantly increasing?
Even if the source is from bacteria instead of peat moss (not dinosaurs), that still doesn't address the rate problem. So far as we know, oil is basically stable at the levels we drill for it, it doesn't decompose into something else over time. If that's true, that means that the deposits that we have access to took millions and millions of years to become as large as they are; in other words, oil still isn't a renewing resource
It isn't static. It seeps out naturally. The La Brea Tar Pits are probably the best-known to Americans. The oil fields under the Gulf of Mexico are estimated to seep out about 1 million barrels of oil per year (the Exxon Valdez spill was 250,000 barrels). And there are also methane seeps which provide enough energy to sustain their own ecosystem without sunlight.
It's still small potatoes compared to the rate we're burning oil (20 million barrels per day for the U.S. alone). But it's not static, so (if it does come from bacteria) it would indeed be a renewing resource, and the equilibrium state is not "burn no oil."
GM didn't get the law repealed. They were the ones in the best position to benefit from the law. GM caught a lot of flak for how it behaved after the law was repealed (destroying all EV1s), but they weren't the root cause despite what popular documentaries say.
In 1990, California passed a law mandating that by a certain year (2000 I think), all manufacturers who wished to sell gasoline-powered cars in California also had to offer at least one ZEV (zero emissions vehicle). The only technology which fit the bill was electric. Most automakers complained, but GM went out and actually built the thing.
As the deadline approached, the other auto manufacturers started to panic. They lobbied California asking for the deadline to be delayed. It was for a few years. Then they successfully lobbied California to drop the ZEV requirement, arguing that hybrid vehicles (powered by gas but with batteries to sustain them at idle and to enable regenerative braking) would provide sufficiently improved fuel efficiency at a low enough price point to be widely adopted. (Contrary to today, environmentalists originally hated hybrids - they derived all their energy from gasoline, none from the wall socket. So they weren't seen as really addressing the oil consumption problem.)
GM, which stood to make $billions licensing their technology from the EV1 to other auto manufacturers so they could comply with California law, basically had the rug pulled out from under them. They'd sunk $billions in R&D into the EV1 to comply with California's law, then they got screwed over when California basically said "never mind", and dropped the law without giving GM a chance to recoup their sunk costs. GM then essentially went on a temper tantrum, recalling and destroying all EV1s. Not altogether unjustified either - if California wants to encourage new technologies by drafting legal requirements, then pulls a double-cross by dropping the requirements before companies can recoup the money spent creating those new technologies, why should the companies be obligated to let California benefit from said technologies?
All the conspiracy theories about GM blocking the electric vehicle hinge on one assumption - that an electric vehicle is cost-competitive with gasoline vehicles right now. As Tesla Motors is finding out, they are not. They need the government incentives (or $5+ gas prices) to be cost-competitive. If the government requires the vehicles and promises those incentives, then changes its mind, lots of business decisions based on those requirements and promises get nullified and a whole bunch of people trying to do exactly what the government told them to do lose a whole lot of money. That is not the way to spur free-market innovation, and trying to blame it on the companies afterwards is a great way you seed mistrust of the government.
What if it's conditional consent? Some mysterious guy tells you he's a secret agent, helping to spy on some of the most powerful corrupt organizations and governments in the world, always hiding and on the run lest the bad guys catch up to him. You're so taken in that you agree to sleep with him. Then you find out later that he's just some computer nerd who runs a website...
Not saying that that's what happened, but I do think there needs to be some exception or alternative recourse in your definition of consent if the consent was obtained via deception or misrepresentation.
The computing hardware built into the ISS is not really something you want to be "upgrading" every few years. The "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" principle applies here: The hardware is running multiple systems critical to life. If it works fine now, don't mess with it and expose yourself to the possibility of the new system having bugs which could kill people.
Less critical functions can be run on a portable computing device like a laptop. These can be upgraded more frequently since they don't have to be tested as thoroughly as the mission-critical systems are. Due to the fast pace at which computing technology improves, this frequently results in situations where the portable computing device is more powerful than the built-in systems. On many early shuttle flights, the most powerful computer on board was the HP-41 calculator.
You're a publisher. You are in business. You publish a magazine. Thus you have a legal responsibility to understand copyright. You still don't get that taking something EVEN WITH THE AUTHOR'S NAME INTACT is copyright infringement,
I think you've hit upon the root cause of the problem. Increasingly, our copyright laws are being subverted for the benefit of publishers instead of authors. So it's not so surprising that a publisher would think that copyright exists to support her, and not the author.
If the relation to China goes sour, it won't be like the Cold War. Then it was US industry versus Soviet industry. It'll be Chinese industry versus no industry. IP agreements depend on enforced contracts, the day China says here are the letters F and U they'll still have all the means to produce, while the US will have nothing.
Keep in mind China got most of their manufacturing contracts by underbidding the competition (and keeping its currency artificially low). While I'm no fan of the wholesale exporting of manufacturing jobs the U.S. has been doing, if they hadn't gone to China, they would've gone to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.
Currently U.S.-China trade makes up a smaller fraction of the U.S. economy than China's. If China were to give the U.S. a big FU, their economy would slip into a recession or depression from the loss of all those manufacturing contracts, while the U.S. would simply award those contracts to a multitude of other countries willing to provide cheap labor and its economy would continue to chug on with a small hiccup. Despite the rhetoric, the supply of cheap labor is still much greater than the supply of companies looking to hire manufacturers.
The SD slot is intended to be used by the carrier to upgrade device internal memory. That's why there's a big old sticker over it saying it will void your warranty of you install it. There's really nothing wrong with this, IMO. It's more flexible than baking in the flash memory and having to go back to Foxconn for new orders of 64GB models.
If flexibility is your goal, why not just make it a regular SD slot. That way the carrier or the phone owner could upgrade the device's internal memory. That's what makes this wrong - if they want to use removable flash for internal storage instead of something soldered on, fine. Lots of devices do that. But if they're going to the trouble of putting in an SD card slot, why take the additional and unnecessary step of preventing the end-user from using it as removable storage?
This is why a split government is so great. My party can take credit for all the good stuff that happens, while blaming the other party for all the bad stuff that happens.
It's only become an issue because some people are still in denial about whether they manufacture hardware or software. The main culprit is the RIAA and MPAA, but the publishing industry is complicit too. For decades their software (songs, movies) was tied to hardware (records, videotapes, CDs, DVDs). They mistakenly thought they were selling hardware when in fact they were selling software, and so built their business model and protections around hardware.
When tools for cheap or even free software replication were developed, suddenly they were hit with the full realization that they were in fact purveyors of software, not hardware. They've responded with all sorts of inane laws trying to put the genie back in the bottle and once again tie software to hardware, so they can continue with the hallucination that their business model is built upon - that they are selling hardware.
3D printing is the same thing. The stuff you print is hardware, but the designs for what you can print are software. The people holding those designs don't want to become software sellers, they want to remain hardware sellers. They want their designs to only be manufactured using less efficient and more costly methods, but methods which allow them to retain full control of their designs. A 3D printer is thus a threat to their outdated business model, and they will do whatever they can to stop it.
Meanwhile, the real software industry chugs along just fine (all software, not just computer software). Sure there's piracy, but there are plenty of honest people and workable business models in the new paradigm (wedding photographers used to shoot weddings for free and charge for the prints, now they charge for the shoot and give prints for free) to allow plenty of profit to be made. Thus providing ample counterargument to their claims that they need more protection or their industry will die.
You and I know where this is all headed. The only question is how much aimless and futile legal wandering the content industry will engage in before they accept the inevitability of it all. Are they going to hold back mankind for 10 years? 25 years? 100 years? Are we going to have Star Trek type replicators in the future which could fulfill everyone's wants and needs for almost free, but be unable to use them because the content industry insists they need to be paid for the designs of everything which is replicated?
Paid as much is if it were manufactured with a hammer and anvil? I mean if CDs were cheaper than tapes, and MP3s were cheaper yet, I could at least buy the argument that they were using these intermediate platforms to transition their business to an all-software model, and thus still needed protection during this transition. But no, they insist on trying to charge more when their costs have decreased. They themselves are walking further and further out on a limb you, I, and probably they know is destined to break.
You left out the "wall" part, but that's important because it's the reason the phrase doesn't appear. It's a metaphor, and has no place in a legal document such as a constitution. Thomas Jefferson used it later to explain his understanding of the 1st Amendment.
That's actually a really good point too for another reason. Jefferson was also a strong advocate for states' rights and a minimal Federal government. He was the one who came up with the idea that the Federal government has no powers except those explicitly granted to it by the states (which in turn have their powers granted to them by the people). When he said the thing about a wall separating Church and State, he was envisioning the State doing a few limited things and being totally orthogonal to what churches do.
If he were alive to see the Federal government we have today, consuming over 20% of the country's GDP (nearly 40% if you include state spending), and involved in all sorts of things which cross paths with churches such as education and funding social welfare programs, he would probably be aghast and reconsider the metaphor since the situation he was applying it to clearly no longer exists today. Context matters.
The problem is that you can't cut taxes and have an out of control military budget. You get one or the other, not both.
Please do some research before parroting things you hear. Military spending is actually one of the few parts of the budget which has been decreasing over the last 50 years (up until 9/11 when it started picking up again).
What's breaking the budget is growth in mandatory spending, primarily medicare and medicaid. At current growth rates, you could drop military spending to zero and all the savings from that would be consumed by growth in medicare and medicaid within about 20 years.
Here's another graph which shows the relative size and growth of all the major budget components so you can see and compare what's been going on with each historically. It's from the Urban Institute if you want to read more (the CBO budget outlooks are good too). You'll note that military spending is the component which is shrinking the most, while medicare/medicaid is the component which is growing the most.
So his argument is that consumption taxes encourage saving money. But that makes it even more unfair to the poor who don't have money to save. Rephrasing his argument: people who can afford to save money can gain more with a consumption tax than with an income tax. In other word, it's a gift to rich people.
The easy way to prevent this with a sales tax is to not tax essentials such as food and clothing under a certain price threshold. That way truly poor people who are spending most of their disposable income on such necessities are not impacted (or less impacted) by the sales tax. I believe Washington exempts food, not sure about clothing. I know Massachusetts exempted food and clothing when I lived there. And California exempts groceries, but not dining out.
This isn't a completely less-income-loses, more-income-wins thing as you seem to be trying to make it out to be. A properly structured sales tax can be progressive, and have a minimal impact on poor people unless they engage in vices like smoking or drinking, while having the positive effect of encouraging saving over spending by people who do have the extra money.
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Actually, that's exactly what he assumes. The free market (usually) works precisely because people are greedy, selfish, self-absorbed bastards only concerned with elevating themselves and f*ck everybody else. It just so happens that in most cases, having individuals act that way results in the best possible outcome not just for the individual for everyone overall, so long as everyone is acting that way.
Where the free market fails is in a subset of cases where this isn't true - where individuals acting in their own best interests doesn't result in the best possible outcome for the whole. Cases like the prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons. Like most things in life, there are times when free market philosophy works, and times when it doesn't. Too many people see a few successes and assume it always works, or see a few failures and assume it never works. The more discerning individual will try to distinguish between the cases where it does and doesn't work, so as to better predict such cases in the future. That way you can regulate the cases where it doesn't work to avoid it being exploited, while leaving cases where it does work regulation-free to derive the full benefit from it.
Why is the focus on Willy the fence? Brad was the thief who stole the items. How he disseminated them is not the point. Granted, Willy bought the goods, but if Willy hadn't been there, Brad would have just sold it elsewhere.
Note: I actually agree that an entity that does stuff like Wikileaks is doing can be a good thing. I'm just not convinced by your reasoning that the recipient of stolen property is automatically absolved of any responsibility and is completely free to do whatever they wish with it. In fact, for theft of secret information, I'd say the publisher of said information is more culpable than a fence for stolen merchandise. In the case of stolen merchandise, the damage is sustained upon the items being stolen. What happens to the items after the theft doesn't really matter to the original owner - he is still out the items. But in a case of information theft, the theft itself doesn't harm the original owner - they still have copies of the information. The harm comes from the publication and distribution of info the original owner was trying to keep secret.
If we do accept your premise that recipients of the info are free to do whatever they want with it, then you've effectively created an info-laundering system. Some contractor working in your home finds homemade porn of you and your wife. He gives them to me thus laundering them, and I'm free to publish and sell said videos. According to your reasoning, there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop me because I'm not the one who stole the videos.
Somewhere, a judgment call has to be made whether the world is better off knowing or not knowing certain secrets, or if the entity keeping the secret deserves to have it returned to them. If you decide to skip that judgment call and just claim that the world is better off knowing all secrets, then you've just advocated anarchy. Even Wikileaks does not subscribe to that viewpoint since they keep some of their operating details (as well as Assange's location) secret.
That's my prediction too. There are going to be (secret!) government agencies which pay people to do nothing but make up plausible crap, which they then "leak" to sites like Wikileaks, thus lowering the credibility of anything posted there.
This argument keeps coming up despite it being wrong. There are two possible types of crime here. One in which an individual steals copies of music they want. Another in which one individual mass-produces copies of songs for others. Common sense dictates that this case is one of the former. You are arguing that it is the latter. Let's see what happens when we carry your argument through.
Say she shared a song with 3 people. By your argument, she is responsible for making 2 copies. But what about the other two people? They also shared the song, so by your argument they are also responsible for making 2 copies. 3 people * 2 copies = 6 copies. Your argument leads to the illogical conclusion that there are 6 illegal copies which need to be prosecuted, although only 2 copies were added to the universe.
Now what if we make each person who downloads a song illegally responsible for their single download? Then she is in the clear for sharing the song, and each of the 2 other people are responsible for 1 copy each. 2 people * 1 copy = 2 copies. Total new copies in the universe = 2. Hey, we have a winner.
The logic you're using (which was the original logic for the enormous penalties for commercial copyright infringement) was for cases where someone burned a thousand illegal copies of a CD and sold them. In that case, the people buying the illegal CDs weren't seen as committing a crime. They paid for their copy, so morally they did nothing wrong. The entire penalty for the crime thus felt on the person burning the thousand CDs. 1000 illegal copies burned, 1000 illegal copies added to the universe, and the one person was completely and solely responsible for every one of them.
What the RIAA is doing (and what you've fallen for) is a perversion of that logic, applying commercial copyright penalties to what is clearly a case of individual infringement. I'm willing to accept slightly higher penalties than shoplifting due to the way these illegal copies grow and spread like cancer once they're on the net. But the penalty per person needs to be set much closer to shoplifting than to commercial copyright infringement like it is now.
That's why this thing is so screwed up. Hardware manufacturers sell a product. Software manufacturers sell a license. The RIAA/MPAA have deluded themselves (and gotten a bunch of laws passed supporting them) that they are selling something which isn't quite a product and isn't quite a license. By their terms, in any case where it being a product would benefit you (able to play it at parties, make backups of it, etc), they want to treat it like a license. But any case where it being a license would benefit you (discounted format upgrades, free replacement for destroyed media, making copies for your home stereo, MP3 player, computer, and car, etc), they want to treat it like a product.
Another problem is that when it comes to tech gear, quality is undesirable. At the rate technology improves, most stuff will be obsolete in 3-5 years. I have a Sony Clie I bought in 2004. When I whipped it out at work in 2007, people were laughing at me. It's only 6 years old and my cell phone now does everything the Clie did plus a whole lot more. Heck, my cell phone's specs pretty much match the specs of my laptop from 2004.
If you buy a quality piece of tech designed to last years and years, you're wasting money on useless lifespan. You are better off buying something cheap and crappy and replacing it in 2-3 years, than you are paying extra to buy a quality product which will last you 5, much less the rest of your life. The only thing that's going to change that is for the pace of technological improvements to slow down, which I'm not so sure would be a good thing.
That's not training your cat. Your cat has trained you.
The thing is, nearly all the world's population growth is happening in undeveloped countries. The developed nations are experiencing slow or even negative population growth. So paradoxically, the way to slow down global population growth seems to be by quickening the rate at which countries are developing.
The dose is cumulative, but mostly limited to your outer layer of skin cells which will slough off in a few days or weeks anyway. The radiation you get from flying at altitude ranges from the same as the scanners to stuff which will go completely through your body wreaking a path of molecular destruction. The flight is much, much worse for you than the scanners if you're that worried about your radiation exposure.
That's something I noticed when bringing this point up too. Even though I'm against the scans (for 4th amendment reasons), I point out that the radiation does is negligible compared to what you're exposing yourself to during the flight, and suddenly I'm accused of being a fascist who wants to see nude pictures of air travelers.
I think what happens is people pigeonhole things into "good" and "bad" categories. If something is "good", then anything they read about it being bad must be false. If something is "bad", then anything they read about it being bad must be true. It's an intellectual shortcut akin to hopping on the bandwagon and dogpiling. Works most of the time, but when it fails it makes people do really stupid things like mark factually correct points as a troll.
Actually, they have about the same fatality rate per trip. But that's entirely an artifact of trips on cars, trains, and buses typically being shorter than trips on planes. On a per-hour basis, yes all transportation modes have about the same fatality rate. But you're completely ignoring the fact that it takes a lot more hours to drive to grandma's house for Thanksgiving than it takes to fly.
For a trip to the same destination, flying is much safer. What you're saying impacts discretionary travel, like vacations. People can simply choose to vacation someplace that's a 5 hour drive away, instead of a 5 hour flight away, thus keeping the level of risk the same. But for business trips, visiting relatives, and vacationing at a specific destination (e.g. Disneyworld), flying is safer.
What I don't understand is that the ticket vendors seem to be so concerned that the ticket purchaser is a real person who won't resell the ticket. But that's a problem that has already been solved by the airline industry. Security requirements dictate that airline tickets be non-transferrable - they're assigned to a specific individual at the time of purchase. You buy your airline tickets, and when you get to the airport you have to prove you're the person whose name is on the ticket. A driver's license or passport is the most common ID, but you can use the credit card used to buy the ticket as well.
If the ticket vendors really want to stop scalping, why don't they just attach a name to it at the time of sale? Then when a ticket holder tries to enter the venue, they can just cross-check the name associated with the ticket in the database with the ID proffered by the ticket holder. If you wish to buy a ticket as a gift, just make sure you use the recipient's name on the ticket. For people who suddenly can't attend the event, they can implement a buy-back system which credits the original purchaser with (say) 50% the ticket price. They can then sell that ticket to people waiting in a "standby" line the day of the event.
I agree the Republicans have been using filibusters much more than they were historically used. But it's simply untrue that the Republican party has voted in virtual lockstep the past decade. That's just political spin by one side trying to blame things on the other side. The Washington Post actually tracks how often Senators vote with their party, and there's been no real pattern other than members of the party in power tending to vote with their party more often.
107th Senate 88.4% Dem (50), 86.0% Rep (53)
108th Senate 84.9% Dem (48), 91.8% Rep (51)
109th Senate 85.1% Dem (45), 87.2% Rep (55)
110th Senate 87.5% Dem (49), 77.8% Rep (51)
111st Senate 90.1% Dem (63), 85.3% Rep (43)
10 year average: 87.2% Dem, 85.6% Rep
So you can see, during the last 4 years that the Democrats have been in control of the Senate, the Democrats have actually voted more in lock-step than the Republicans. (The Dems + 2 Independents controlled the 110th Senate, the 51 Republicans reflect 49 seats with 2 members replaced during the term.) You can go back further if you wish. Statistically, aside from increased filibusters, there hasn't been much difference in the voting patterns of the two parties in the last four years of the Senate than in previous years.
That supports OP's bigger point though - that oil fields can replenish themselves. An abiotic process is creating hydrocarbons which (theoretically) become oil. There's so much of this stuff that bacteria are intercepting part of it and using it to sustain their own lives.
The bigger point to take away from all this IMHO though is that, if true, it means the assumption of carbon neutrality used in many models is wrong. Up to now we've pretty much assumed that carbon isn't destroyed or lost, it's either locked up in hydrocarbons and biological matter, or it's floating around in the air as CO2, and the total amount of it in the system is relatively constant. But this paper seems to imply that hydrogen and carbon from inside the earth are percolating up to the surface all the time. So where is the excess carbon going? Is it being removed from the system somehow? Or is the amount of carbon in the system constantly increasing?
It isn't static. It seeps out naturally. The La Brea Tar Pits are probably the best-known to Americans. The oil fields under the Gulf of Mexico are estimated to seep out about 1 million barrels of oil per year (the Exxon Valdez spill was 250,000 barrels). And there are also methane seeps which provide enough energy to sustain their own ecosystem without sunlight.
It's still small potatoes compared to the rate we're burning oil (20 million barrels per day for the U.S. alone). But it's not static, so (if it does come from bacteria) it would indeed be a renewing resource, and the equilibrium state is not "burn no oil."
GM didn't get the law repealed. They were the ones in the best position to benefit from the law. GM caught a lot of flak for how it behaved after the law was repealed (destroying all EV1s), but they weren't the root cause despite what popular documentaries say.
In 1990, California passed a law mandating that by a certain year (2000 I think), all manufacturers who wished to sell gasoline-powered cars in California also had to offer at least one ZEV (zero emissions vehicle). The only technology which fit the bill was electric. Most automakers complained, but GM went out and actually built the thing.
As the deadline approached, the other auto manufacturers started to panic. They lobbied California asking for the deadline to be delayed. It was for a few years. Then they successfully lobbied California to drop the ZEV requirement, arguing that hybrid vehicles (powered by gas but with batteries to sustain them at idle and to enable regenerative braking) would provide sufficiently improved fuel efficiency at a low enough price point to be widely adopted. (Contrary to today, environmentalists originally hated hybrids - they derived all their energy from gasoline, none from the wall socket. So they weren't seen as really addressing the oil consumption problem.)
GM, which stood to make $billions licensing their technology from the EV1 to other auto manufacturers so they could comply with California law, basically had the rug pulled out from under them. They'd sunk $billions in R&D into the EV1 to comply with California's law, then they got screwed over when California basically said "never mind", and dropped the law without giving GM a chance to recoup their sunk costs. GM then essentially went on a temper tantrum, recalling and destroying all EV1s. Not altogether unjustified either - if California wants to encourage new technologies by drafting legal requirements, then pulls a double-cross by dropping the requirements before companies can recoup the money spent creating those new technologies, why should the companies be obligated to let California benefit from said technologies?
All the conspiracy theories about GM blocking the electric vehicle hinge on one assumption - that an electric vehicle is cost-competitive with gasoline vehicles right now. As Tesla Motors is finding out, they are not. They need the government incentives (or $5+ gas prices) to be cost-competitive. If the government requires the vehicles and promises those incentives, then changes its mind, lots of business decisions based on those requirements and promises get nullified and a whole bunch of people trying to do exactly what the government told them to do lose a whole lot of money. That is not the way to spur free-market innovation, and trying to blame it on the companies afterwards is a great way you seed mistrust of the government.
What if it's conditional consent? Some mysterious guy tells you he's a secret agent, helping to spy on some of the most powerful corrupt organizations and governments in the world, always hiding and on the run lest the bad guys catch up to him. You're so taken in that you agree to sleep with him. Then you find out later that he's just some computer nerd who runs a website...
Not saying that that's what happened, but I do think there needs to be some exception or alternative recourse in your definition of consent if the consent was obtained via deception or misrepresentation.
The computing hardware built into the ISS is not really something you want to be "upgrading" every few years. The "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" principle applies here: The hardware is running multiple systems critical to life. If it works fine now, don't mess with it and expose yourself to the possibility of the new system having bugs which could kill people.
Less critical functions can be run on a portable computing device like a laptop. These can be upgraded more frequently since they don't have to be tested as thoroughly as the mission-critical systems are. Due to the fast pace at which computing technology improves, this frequently results in situations where the portable computing device is more powerful than the built-in systems. On many early shuttle flights, the most powerful computer on board was the HP-41 calculator.
I think you've hit upon the root cause of the problem. Increasingly, our copyright laws are being subverted for the benefit of publishers instead of authors. So it's not so surprising that a publisher would think that copyright exists to support her, and not the author.
Keep in mind China got most of their manufacturing contracts by underbidding the competition (and keeping its currency artificially low). While I'm no fan of the wholesale exporting of manufacturing jobs the U.S. has been doing, if they hadn't gone to China, they would've gone to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.
Currently U.S.-China trade makes up a smaller fraction of the U.S. economy than China's. If China were to give the U.S. a big FU, their economy would slip into a recession or depression from the loss of all those manufacturing contracts, while the U.S. would simply award those contracts to a multitude of other countries willing to provide cheap labor and its economy would continue to chug on with a small hiccup. Despite the rhetoric, the supply of cheap labor is still much greater than the supply of companies looking to hire manufacturers.
If flexibility is your goal, why not just make it a regular SD slot. That way the carrier or the phone owner could upgrade the device's internal memory. That's what makes this wrong - if they want to use removable flash for internal storage instead of something soldered on, fine. Lots of devices do that. But if they're going to the trouble of putting in an SD card slot, why take the additional and unnecessary step of preventing the end-user from using it as removable storage?
This is why a split government is so great. My party can take credit for all the good stuff that happens, while blaming the other party for all the bad stuff that happens.
It's only become an issue because some people are still in denial about whether they manufacture hardware or software. The main culprit is the RIAA and MPAA, but the publishing industry is complicit too. For decades their software (songs, movies) was tied to hardware (records, videotapes, CDs, DVDs). They mistakenly thought they were selling hardware when in fact they were selling software, and so built their business model and protections around hardware.
When tools for cheap or even free software replication were developed, suddenly they were hit with the full realization that they were in fact purveyors of software, not hardware. They've responded with all sorts of inane laws trying to put the genie back in the bottle and once again tie software to hardware, so they can continue with the hallucination that their business model is built upon - that they are selling hardware.
3D printing is the same thing. The stuff you print is hardware, but the designs for what you can print are software. The people holding those designs don't want to become software sellers, they want to remain hardware sellers. They want their designs to only be manufactured using less efficient and more costly methods, but methods which allow them to retain full control of their designs. A 3D printer is thus a threat to their outdated business model, and they will do whatever they can to stop it.
Meanwhile, the real software industry chugs along just fine (all software, not just computer software). Sure there's piracy, but there are plenty of honest people and workable business models in the new paradigm (wedding photographers used to shoot weddings for free and charge for the prints, now they charge for the shoot and give prints for free) to allow plenty of profit to be made. Thus providing ample counterargument to their claims that they need more protection or their industry will die.
You and I know where this is all headed. The only question is how much aimless and futile legal wandering the content industry will engage in before they accept the inevitability of it all. Are they going to hold back mankind for 10 years? 25 years? 100 years? Are we going to have Star Trek type replicators in the future which could fulfill everyone's wants and needs for almost free, but be unable to use them because the content industry insists they need to be paid for the designs of everything which is replicated?
Paid as much is if it were manufactured with a hammer and anvil? I mean if CDs were cheaper than tapes, and MP3s were cheaper yet, I could at least buy the argument that they were using these intermediate platforms to transition their business to an all-software model, and thus still needed protection during this transition. But no, they insist on trying to charge more when their costs have decreased. They themselves are walking further and further out on a limb you, I, and probably they know is destined to break.
That's actually a really good point too for another reason. Jefferson was also a strong advocate for states' rights and a minimal Federal government. He was the one who came up with the idea that the Federal government has no powers except those explicitly granted to it by the states (which in turn have their powers granted to them by the people). When he said the thing about a wall separating Church and State, he was envisioning the State doing a few limited things and being totally orthogonal to what churches do.
If he were alive to see the Federal government we have today, consuming over 20% of the country's GDP (nearly 40% if you include state spending), and involved in all sorts of things which cross paths with churches such as education and funding social welfare programs, he would probably be aghast and reconsider the metaphor since the situation he was applying it to clearly no longer exists today. Context matters.
Please do some research before parroting things you hear. Military spending is actually one of the few parts of the budget which has been decreasing over the last 50 years (up until 9/11 when it started picking up again).
What's breaking the budget is growth in mandatory spending, primarily medicare and medicaid. At current growth rates, you could drop military spending to zero and all the savings from that would be consumed by growth in medicare and medicaid within about 20 years.
Here's another graph which shows the relative size and growth of all the major budget components so you can see and compare what's been going on with each historically. It's from the Urban Institute if you want to read more (the CBO budget outlooks are good too). You'll note that military spending is the component which is shrinking the most, while medicare/medicaid is the component which is growing the most.
The easy way to prevent this with a sales tax is to not tax essentials such as food and clothing under a certain price threshold. That way truly poor people who are spending most of their disposable income on such necessities are not impacted (or less impacted) by the sales tax. I believe Washington exempts food, not sure about clothing. I know Massachusetts exempted food and clothing when I lived there. And California exempts groceries, but not dining out.
This isn't a completely less-income-loses, more-income-wins thing as you seem to be trying to make it out to be. A properly structured sales tax can be progressive, and have a minimal impact on poor people unless they engage in vices like smoking or drinking, while having the positive effect of encouraging saving over spending by people who do have the extra money.