No, no that's the PLA run factories that are a slavers dream. They use prisoner labor. At least these ROC run factories pay above average wages and start to climb the PRC up the long road to capitalist wealth.
Business done for a long-term return is done quite differently from a smash and grab, always have a suitcase packed and an escape route planned business. The political climate ensures that those who know the PRC best (and these ROC entrepreneurs qualify) will practice smash and grab business. Westerners who don't understand that are likely to get burned.
The political climate is part of the business climate and relevant, especially in an article that explicitly brings it up.
1.5M total population is the maximum for a state to be selected, the actual pop will likely be lower.
Now let's realistically whittle down the total population to the voting population.
Out of a national population of 275M, 80M are too young, felons, non-citizens or otherwise ineligible to vote. That's approximately 29% [issues2000.org]
29% of 1.5M is 435,000 ineligible voters leaving us with 1.06M eligible voters.
Out of that 1.06M eligible voters, not all will be registered, in fact nationally only 62% are. That takes our number of registered voters down to 660,000. Out of the registered voters, 52% voted in 2000. In non-presidential election years, that number drops considerably but let's be fair and use the national numbers because of the interloper effect. That takes us to just shy of 345,000. So we have an actual likely electorate of 345,000. Perhaps 1 in 10 voters are activists. That takes us to an activist population of 34,000. Of that activist populations approximately 25% are going to be ideological libertarians. That gives us the final relevant breakdown of 8,500 pro-freedom activists with 25,500 non-freedom activists.
Now we inject our 20k pro-freedom activists into the mix. We end up with 28,500 pro-freedom activists and 25,500 non-freedom activists. It's a radical change on this level, no?
So when candidates are recruiting campaign troops, hunting for donations, and looking to form their organizations, it's in this universe of 55,000 people. Here the FSP and local allies will form the majority and the campaign platforms will be tailored to that because it's here that ideology matters most.
The FSP depends on there being significant local minorities that already support anything on their agenda for their 20k activists to make a difference. It's implicit in the structure. So what happens is that they make up a list of potential issues to push, come up with libertarian solutions to all of them and poll test the solutions for popularity, making the most popular the first in line, 2nd most popular, 2nd, etc. They don't have to be big or small issues but making the early experience one of win, win, win is important to develop momentum and poliical capital as it will draw into your coalition opportunists and technocrats who aren't pro-liberty per se but like to go with a winner. That gets you into the 2nd phase where you push forward harder and harder issues and establish your current societal culture stalemate line. When you find that line, you're winning as much as you're losing and the next phase is to educate people and shift the cultural line. This is where things get very hard and you have teh maximum chance for splits and dissolution of the project.
But OTOH look what's been accomplished, genuinely popular things have happened, the state has probably significantly moved in a libertarian direction, we might actually have a non-republicrat state delegation to the federal govt. (and getting an FSP proponent or two in the Senate would be absolutely revolutionary), and the 20k has likely pulled in more freedom lovers along the way. Assuming for the moment that libertarian solutions produce superior societies, you also have people streaming there from all over the world to study and immitate this governing miracle whether they understand it or not.
The current system costs a great deal and provides sub-par results. The question isn't whether a new system would be perfect (after all this isn't utopia we're discussing) but would either provide the same results for less money or better results for the same money. A system that introduces competition into education, endows adequate scholarships for the poor, tapers off, then eliminates govt. funding, and provides standards so that schools can't hide poor performance from their customers is likely to do both and be much more freedom oriented to boot.
Work hard, put aside money and fund a scholarship. That's a very good way to give back to society so that the next generation of people in your spot gets a better shot at making it.
I won't touch the police issue any more than to highly recommend Vernor Vinge but the fire department issue is something I know a bit more. Let's take two real jurisdictions, the Village of Mamaroneck and the Town of Mamaroneck, both in Westchester county, NY. The village has a volunteer fire department and the town has a 'professional' fire department. In the well over a decade I lived there I couldn't see any difference between the two as far as fire fighting and life saving went. The Village dept's largest single expense was water, the Town's largest expense was salaries. Fire protection was about 1/3 more expensive in the Town than in the Village.
As I understand it, in the Midwest there are some true commercial fire departments. You can either pay a yearly fee for coverage or you better grab your checkbook on your way out of the house because the fire department will come, make sure no lives are in danger, and let your home burn until you pay a hefty fee. Frankly, I could live with that sort of private arrangement.
Actually, for private law enforcement I can't say I've seen a better treatment than Vernor Vinge. There essentially was competitive law enforcement. In case you didn't get it, Robocop was anti-privatization.
There are wide variety of libertarians. Let's proceed to the sectarian strife *after* we've cut the 50-70% of govt that we all pretty much agree needs to go.
There are libertarians who are actively anti-charity, religious or secular. To my experience they are exclusively atheists as pretty much every major religion around today believes in private charity. There are atheists who believe in charity but no faithful christian, muslim, or jew who does not. I'm willing to be challanged on Hinduism, Buddhism, or Shintoism but AFAIK they believe in charity as well to varying degrees.
In my experience, there are militant atheists out there who simply don't like charity. Many of them claim to be libertarian but they actively attack private charity, something that I find false to the libertarian ethos.
I obviously lumped the Lions Club, the Rotarians, and the rest of the non-religous charities under "other organizations" in my original post. Well, maybe I wasn't that obvious. I hope this clears things up.
Btw: from a constitutional point of view it certainly is a respectable opinion that religion may be generally supported as long as no one religion is supported above any other. If the government is going to give money out to private charities in order to more efficiently use social welfare dollars, it makes little sense to me that some of the most efficient, effective charities around don't get funded merely because of who runs them. Until we get to the world where the govt. gets out of the charity business, I wouldn't make religious charities 2nd class organizations based on their faith.
Seriously, you have a point with today's PDAs but it's quite likely that this situation isn't going to last. The PDA makers are going to have the exact same incentives to ramp up CPU power. In their case, they actually need to. My point on your original assertion regarding desktops still stands though as does my rule, unencrypted e-mail = postcards and anything that would deserve an envelope deserves encryption.
Perhaps the parent meant required as in 'we will need them'. The truth is that if the FSP gets off the ground they're only going to succeed by forming the cadre for a political movement that would gain majority voter support if it were given a fair shot at running things. All this apocalyptic stuff isn't going to fly with the voters so it's not going to work and likely won't even be tried. What would work is adopting a 10 or 20 or 30 point program that increases freedom, increases jobs, improves the ability of individuals to make their own neighborhoods in the image that they would like to see, and generally cleans out the special interests who have been keeping good ideas bottled up in the state legislature.
Now *that* would be something that 20k committed advocates might be able to pull off in a small >1.5m population state. It's hardly utopian but it would certainly be a big improvement.
As the improvements start coming in real ways, I don't think those 20k activists would have to wait very long for others to come and support them in the next round.
That's ok, most of the 3rd world doesn't blink at having their paper mail opened so why not their e-mail? >:)
Generally, if you're earning so little that $200 USD seems like a lot, you're likely buying components and assembling it yourself, that drops it to $100 and if that's too much then you have such a low money:time value ratio that it doesn't much matter if you're sitting an extra 15 seconds encrypting your mail.
Summary
1st world, you can afford the computing power to encrypt most of your internet traffic 2nd world, you can still afford it. 3rd world, if you're on the net and you have crappy equipment, you're earning so little per hour that it's no big deal to wait a few extra seconds while your traffic encrypts. 4th world, you're making less then a buck a day, so you're just not on the net. It's a nonissue
Read the FAQ, it's not utopian but ameliorative. They don't think they can make heaven on earth, merely hold a spot that won't slide into hell this generation.
This is *not* about MS being evil (though it is). Outlook is designed to be a front end for Exchange. The way you're arguing things is that Microsoft designed this great email and PIM program with all these great features as differentiated from their other client, Outlook Express, and then decided to make that Exchange Server thingy to connect Outlook clients together for corporate use as a bolt on endeavor.
That's just not the way it is and the two client strategy makes no sense from a business perspective. Microsoft Mail (from which Outlook grew up) always had a central post office, which eventually became Exchange Server and Outlook client. The good part of Outlook that differentiates it from OE is those features that were made as the front end for server features.
With Walmart selling computers for $199 that are plenty capable of handling encrypted e-mail how big is the demographic of people who can get on the internet but can't afford a computer good enough to handle email? Do they also use postcards to save the price of a 1st class letter?
The local society will still pay, much as they do today. What will be different is that the money will be privately collected, subject to competitive service offerings, and with a much lower level of waste, fraud, and abuse. Libertarian societies, from a basic services point of view, end up looking a lot like most other functioning societies. It's just that libertarian solutions tend to be more efficient.
Aside from the atheists who cloak their atheism in libertarian argument, libertarians don't have a problem with private charity. There's nothing stopping churches and other institutions from organizing and providing charity or mutual aid assistance.
If a pregnant woman thinks she can't support her child to be and is considering an abortion on those grounds, the Archdiocese of NY (and several other dioceses I believe) has an open policy that she can knock on their doors for help. They guarantee that any woman who comes to them in real need will get enough to live and support her child so there is no monetary need for an abortion.
Charity isn't anti-libertarian, only coercively funded, state sponsored charity is against the libertarian program.
Mostly because they're closer and can't isolate themselves from their constituents as well as federal legislators. The smaller the tyranny, the easier it is to topple is the principle.
The carnage on the highways was on a long, secular downhill slope before the 55MPH speed limit nonsense was started. Afterwards, we pretty much had the same slow downward slope on highway fatalities, but now it came attached with a bunch of idiots chirping regularly about how 55MPH saved lives.
The 55MPH speed limit was (look up the debates) put in for gas conservation reasons back in the '70s when we were dead scared of more oil shocks. The problem is once you swallow the principle, you have to ask what's the optimum speed to maximize on gas savings. It turns out it's somewhere betwee 30-35MPH depending on the aerodynamics of the vehicle in question.
You're not much of a libertarian if you haven't caught on that invasions of liberty feed on each other. Why is it you have to pay for some idiot who splashes his skull contents over the highway? Well, that's government mandated medical expenditures at work. So the solution to this and most other likely "freedom from" questions is a choice, either get rid of both govt. intrusions or have both. The intermediate case is always uncomfortable at the border between freedom and coercion.
Frankly, I believe in society, solidarity, brotherly love, and the rest of the communitarian principles. I just think that the state/government is a piss poor way of accomplishing it and thus find myself a practical libertarian.
Log out of your computer's outlook, go to somebody else's machine and log in to exchange. Do you see your calendar, tasks, and notes? Well, that's Exchange, not Outlook. Yes, Outlook keeps a local copy and you can even run a bastardized version without Exchange but the real power of Outlook is as the Exchange front end and I suspect that that's the real developer perspective. Did the Outlook program ever exist without a server?
As a rule of thumb anything that I wouldn't be comfortable shipping out snail mail using a postcard should really be encrypted in an e-mail context. That SOP makes the vast majority of mail encrypted.
Btw: what kind of processor are you running that it doesn't have enough cycles to burn to encrypt/decrypt mail?
Exchange can function just fine as a Usenet news server. The newsgroups come out looking like public folders as far as Outlook is concerned. It's actually not that hard to set up.
Outlook Express is not Outlook's newsreader when Outlook is used in conjunction with Exchange. Exchange can suck down newsgroups and they pop up as public folders. You post to the public folder and Exchange posts your contribution to the newsgroup.
Slashdot Mirror
No, no that's the PLA run factories that are a slavers dream. They use prisoner labor. At least these ROC run factories pay above average wages and start to climb the PRC up the long road to capitalist wealth.
Business done for a long-term return is done quite differently from a smash and grab, always have a suitcase packed and an escape route planned business. The political climate ensures that those who know the PRC best (and these ROC entrepreneurs qualify) will practice smash and grab business. Westerners who don't understand that are likely to get burned.
The political climate is part of the business climate and relevant, especially in an article that explicitly brings it up.
1.5M total population is the maximum for a state to be selected, the actual pop will likely be lower.
Now let's realistically whittle down the total population to the voting population.
Out of a national population of 275M, 80M are too young, felons, non-citizens or otherwise ineligible to vote. That's approximately 29% [issues2000.org]
29% of 1.5M is 435,000 ineligible voters leaving us with 1.06M eligible voters.
Out of that 1.06M eligible voters, not all will be registered, in fact nationally only 62% are. That takes our number of registered voters down to 660,000. Out of the registered voters, 52% voted in 2000. In non-presidential election years, that number drops considerably but let's be fair and use the national numbers because of the interloper effect. That takes us to just shy of 345,000. So we have an actual likely electorate of 345,000. Perhaps 1 in 10 voters are activists. That takes us to an activist population of 34,000. Of that activist populations approximately 25% are going to be ideological libertarians. That gives us the final relevant breakdown of 8,500 pro-freedom activists with 25,500 non-freedom activists.
Now we inject our 20k pro-freedom activists into the mix. We end up with 28,500 pro-freedom activists and 25,500 non-freedom activists. It's a radical change on this level, no?
So when candidates are recruiting campaign troops, hunting for donations, and looking to form their organizations, it's in this universe of 55,000 people. Here the FSP and local allies will form the majority and the campaign platforms will be tailored to that because it's here that ideology matters most.
Actually New Hampshire's on the list of 1st rank candidate states.
The FSP depends on there being significant local minorities that already support anything on their agenda for their 20k activists to make a difference. It's implicit in the structure. So what happens is that they make up a list of potential issues to push, come up with libertarian solutions to all of them and poll test the solutions for popularity, making the most popular the first in line, 2nd most popular, 2nd, etc. They don't have to be big or small issues but making the early experience one of win, win, win is important to develop momentum and poliical capital as it will draw into your coalition opportunists and technocrats who aren't pro-liberty per se but like to go with a winner. That gets you into the 2nd phase where you push forward harder and harder issues and establish your current societal culture stalemate line. When you find that line, you're winning as much as you're losing and the next phase is to educate people and shift the cultural line. This is where things get very hard and you have teh maximum chance for splits and dissolution of the project.
But OTOH look what's been accomplished, genuinely popular things have happened, the state has probably significantly moved in a libertarian direction, we might actually have a non-republicrat state delegation to the federal govt. (and getting an FSP proponent or two in the Senate would be absolutely revolutionary), and the 20k has likely pulled in more freedom lovers along the way. Assuming for the moment that libertarian solutions produce superior societies, you also have people streaming there from all over the world to study and immitate this governing miracle whether they understand it or not.
The current system costs a great deal and provides sub-par results. The question isn't whether a new system would be perfect (after all this isn't utopia we're discussing) but would either provide the same results for less money or better results for the same money. A system that introduces competition into education, endows adequate scholarships for the poor, tapers off, then eliminates govt. funding, and provides standards so that schools can't hide poor performance from their customers is likely to do both and be much more freedom oriented to boot.
Work hard, put aside money and fund a scholarship. That's a very good way to give back to society so that the next generation of people in your spot gets a better shot at making it.
I won't touch the police issue any more than to highly recommend Vernor Vinge but the fire department issue is something I know a bit more. Let's take two real jurisdictions, the Village of Mamaroneck and the Town of Mamaroneck, both in Westchester county, NY. The village has a volunteer fire department and the town has a 'professional' fire department. In the well over a decade I lived there I couldn't see any difference between the two as far as fire fighting and life saving went. The Village dept's largest single expense was water, the Town's largest expense was salaries. Fire protection was about 1/3 more expensive in the Town than in the Village.
As I understand it, in the Midwest there are some true commercial fire departments. You can either pay a yearly fee for coverage or you better grab your checkbook on your way out of the house because the fire department will come, make sure no lives are in danger, and let your home burn until you pay a hefty fee. Frankly, I could live with that sort of private arrangement.
Actually, for private law enforcement I can't say I've seen a better treatment than Vernor Vinge. There essentially was competitive law enforcement. In case you didn't get it, Robocop was anti-privatization.
There are wide variety of libertarians. Let's proceed to the sectarian strife *after* we've cut the 50-70% of govt that we all pretty much agree needs to go.
There are libertarians who are actively anti-charity, religious or secular. To my experience they are exclusively atheists as pretty much every major religion around today believes in private charity. There are atheists who believe in charity but no faithful christian, muslim, or jew who does not. I'm willing to be challanged on Hinduism, Buddhism, or Shintoism but AFAIK they believe in charity as well to varying degrees.
In my experience, there are militant atheists out there who simply don't like charity. Many of them claim to be libertarian but they actively attack private charity, something that I find false to the libertarian ethos.
I obviously lumped the Lions Club, the Rotarians, and the rest of the non-religous charities under "other organizations" in my original post. Well, maybe I wasn't that obvious. I hope this clears things up.
Btw: from a constitutional point of view it certainly is a respectable opinion that religion may be generally supported as long as no one religion is supported above any other. If the government is going to give money out to private charities in order to more efficiently use social welfare dollars, it makes little sense to me that some of the most efficient, effective charities around don't get funded merely because of who runs them. Until we get to the world where the govt. gets out of the charity business, I wouldn't make religious charities 2nd class organizations based on their faith.
Hey! Way to change the subject!
Seriously, you have a point with today's PDAs but it's quite likely that this situation isn't going to last. The PDA makers are going to have the exact same incentives to ramp up CPU power. In their case, they actually need to. My point on your original assertion regarding desktops still stands though as does my rule, unencrypted e-mail = postcards and anything that would deserve an envelope deserves encryption.
Perhaps the parent meant required as in 'we will need them'. The truth is that if the FSP gets off the ground they're only going to succeed by forming the cadre for a political movement that would gain majority voter support if it were given a fair shot at running things. All this apocalyptic stuff isn't going to fly with the voters so it's not going to work and likely won't even be tried. What would work is adopting a 10 or 20 or 30 point program that increases freedom, increases jobs, improves the ability of individuals to make their own neighborhoods in the image that they would like to see, and generally cleans out the special interests who have been keeping good ideas bottled up in the state legislature.
Now *that* would be something that 20k committed advocates might be able to pull off in a small >1.5m population state. It's hardly utopian but it would certainly be a big improvement.
As the improvements start coming in real ways, I don't think those 20k activists would have to wait very long for others to come and support them in the next round.
That's ok, most of the 3rd world doesn't blink at having their paper mail opened so why not their e-mail? >:)
Generally, if you're earning so little that $200 USD seems like a lot, you're likely buying components and assembling it yourself, that drops it to $100 and if that's too much then you have such a low money:time value ratio that it doesn't much matter if you're sitting an extra 15 seconds encrypting your mail.
Summary
1st world, you can afford the computing power to encrypt most of your internet traffic
2nd world, you can still afford it.
3rd world, if you're on the net and you have crappy equipment, you're earning so little per hour that it's no big deal to wait a few extra seconds while your traffic encrypts.
4th world, you're making less then a buck a day, so you're just not on the net. It's a nonissue
Read the FAQ, it's not utopian but ameliorative. They don't think they can make heaven on earth, merely hold a spot that won't slide into hell this generation.
This is *not* about MS being evil (though it is). Outlook is designed to be a front end for Exchange. The way you're arguing things is that Microsoft designed this great email and PIM program with all these great features as differentiated from their other client, Outlook Express, and then decided to make that Exchange Server thingy to connect Outlook clients together for corporate use as a bolt on endeavor.
That's just not the way it is and the two client strategy makes no sense from a business perspective. Microsoft Mail (from which Outlook grew up) always had a central post office, which eventually became Exchange Server and Outlook client. The good part of Outlook that differentiates it from OE is those features that were made as the front end for server features.
With Walmart selling computers for $199 that are plenty capable of handling encrypted e-mail how big is the demographic of people who can get on the internet but can't afford a computer good enough to handle email? Do they also use postcards to save the price of a 1st class letter?
The local society will still pay, much as they do today. What will be different is that the money will be privately collected, subject to competitive service offerings, and with a much lower level of waste, fraud, and abuse. Libertarian societies, from a basic services point of view, end up looking a lot like most other functioning societies. It's just that libertarian solutions tend to be more efficient.
Aside from the atheists who cloak their atheism in libertarian argument, libertarians don't have a problem with private charity. There's nothing stopping churches and other institutions from organizing and providing charity or mutual aid assistance.
If a pregnant woman thinks she can't support her child to be and is considering an abortion on those grounds, the Archdiocese of NY (and several other dioceses I believe) has an open policy that she can knock on their doors for help. They guarantee that any woman who comes to them in real need will get enough to live and support her child so there is no monetary need for an abortion.
Charity isn't anti-libertarian, only coercively funded, state sponsored charity is against the libertarian program.
Mostly because they're closer and can't isolate themselves from their constituents as well as federal legislators. The smaller the tyranny, the easier it is to topple is the principle.
The carnage on the highways was on a long, secular downhill slope before the 55MPH speed limit nonsense was started. Afterwards, we pretty much had the same slow downward slope on highway fatalities, but now it came attached with a bunch of idiots chirping regularly about how 55MPH saved lives.
The 55MPH speed limit was (look up the debates) put in for gas conservation reasons back in the '70s when we were dead scared of more oil shocks. The problem is once you swallow the principle, you have to ask what's the optimum speed to maximize on gas savings. It turns out it's somewhere betwee 30-35MPH depending on the aerodynamics of the vehicle in question.
You're not much of a libertarian if you haven't caught on that invasions of liberty feed on each other. Why is it you have to pay for some idiot who splashes his skull contents over the highway? Well, that's government mandated medical expenditures at work. So the solution to this and most other likely "freedom from" questions is a choice, either get rid of both govt. intrusions or have both. The intermediate case is always uncomfortable at the border between freedom and coercion.
Frankly, I believe in society, solidarity, brotherly love, and the rest of the communitarian principles. I just think that the state/government is a piss poor way of accomplishing it and thus find myself a practical libertarian.
Log out of your computer's outlook, go to somebody else's machine and log in to exchange. Do you see your calendar, tasks, and notes? Well, that's Exchange, not Outlook. Yes, Outlook keeps a local copy and you can even run a bastardized version without Exchange but the real power of Outlook is as the Exchange front end and I suspect that that's the real developer perspective. Did the Outlook program ever exist without a server?
As a rule of thumb anything that I wouldn't be comfortable shipping out snail mail using a postcard should really be encrypted in an e-mail context. That SOP makes the vast majority of mail encrypted.
Btw: what kind of processor are you running that it doesn't have enough cycles to burn to encrypt/decrypt mail?
Exchange can function just fine as a Usenet news server. The newsgroups come out looking like public folders as far as Outlook is concerned. It's actually not that hard to set up.
Outlook Express is not Outlook's newsreader when Outlook is used in conjunction with Exchange. Exchange can suck down newsgroups and they pop up as public folders. You post to the public folder and Exchange posts your contribution to the newsgroup.
No, no, there is no Outlook without Exchange. What does Outlook have that Outlook Express doesn't and isn't really just the client end of Exchange?