Global standards don't matter worth a damn. The only standards that matter are the ones within a polity and any heavily armed nearby polities that might invade and overrun an electorate if they choose wrong. Lots of poorly defended countries have to worry about the second kind of standards but nobody likes it. One of the reasons that the US has such a large military is so we don't have to pay attention to global standards of what is socialism or not. That allows us to march to our own drummer more than most and can be a competitive advantage.
As for the current bailouts, I look forward to the sale/privatizations of them all, hopefully for a good profit, and hopefully they'll be able to actually fund our pensions with something more than an IOU for a change.
Actually, the source in this case is a public press release put out in 2001 to give cover for the Taliban's refusal to extradite him. If you actually download the packet and go to page 157 or so, it says its a release.
The US started things off by saying "mother may I" and pressing for extradition. Invasion, even in Afghanistan, was not foreordained. Look up the history of that time and you'll see us getting more and more belligerent about our demands for extradition and the Taliban sticking to the line that Bin Laden said he didn't do it and he'll remain their guest in Kabul.
To further the Taliban's line, Bin Laden put out a press release in Pakistan saying "wasn't me guv, you've got the wrong guy" and that press release was translated from arabic to pashto to english. That's what was actually in the package and nothing that we hadn't heard in 2001 already (ie no shocking relevation). What we didn't know was that we didn't just rely on the Pakistanis but also did our own translations to english.
I got the % out of my memory but your figures support the general statement. Even though the DRC has the majority of reserves, it is not the major producer of coltan, that's Australia. The world is behaving appropriately by turning away from the DRC for current production. Hopefully the DRC will get its act together and then make a mint off their mineral riches minus the blood.
The idea that it is insulting or implies anything about somebody's behavior when a camera is pointed at someone to record a law enforcement interaction is already a dead issue. Cops record you with their own video, they chemically test the air that emits from your car, and they have the authority to insist on a BAC test to verify that you are sufficiently sober to drive based on a randomly placed static checkpoint. If all that's fair game and no problem, why is a citizen camera anything but a safeguard against the tiny percentage of bad police who should have never been passed by the academy and no reflection on the good cops?
The essence of the difference in individual rights between a vehicle and your house is that there is no expectation of privacy in a traditional motor vehicle. There's pretty settled law on the issue but what if you were to change the physical features of the vehicle so at least some of that were no longer true. What if you made a privacy car that had built in cameras and microphones, an airlock for providing paperwork to officers, windows whose natural state was to be opaque to the outside when the car was off, etc. At that point, you have an entirely different interaction with law enforcement. That's not going to save you on the street, of course, but it might reclaim rights in the subsequent court case.
Congo sourced coltan is less than 1% of the world market which is currently dominated by Australian production. How much better control do you want than sourcing 99% elsewhere?
Here's a clue from the real world. Most business owners *not* in the accounting field just want to get this accounting business taken care of without a lot of fuss or muss. They don't care much about how it gets done and the difference between the price of QB and GNUCash = about 45 minutes thinking about it and switching to such a minority platform deserves a lot more than 45 minutes worth of consideration. So unless you have a bee in your bonnet over the philosophical principle of the whole thing (which describes just a tiny minority of business owners) Intuit wins, and GNUCash fanatics get to grind their teeth some more.
GNUCash has to do something positive that QB does not and that's very likely going to come from an up and coming innovative young turk accountant who wants to make a name for himself and finds unique value in GNUCash or some other Intuit competitor. As his accounting business grows, GNUCash starts to develop its own ecosystem of people who have used it and who want to use it in their next place of employment. If that hotshot accountant is really good, he'll start to attract his own blind followers and they'll latch on to GNUCash like they latch on to his shirt styles, unthinking but hopeful that all that imitation will make them a buck anyway.
Adoption in the mainstream for Free Software is going to often depend on identifying your proper market targets. You've yet to figure that out.
What SMBs really need is something their accountant can work with. That most often is Quickbooks. When you get an accountant who starts pushing gnucash, it'll start getting penetration in his client base. Get enough accountants and QB will have a real competitor on its hands.
If all you want is email, don't use Exchange. If what you want is a decent back-end for the Outlook clients that your corporate people are used to, Exchange isn't a bad solution.
I'd like to get a dead simple to administer OpenLDAP implementation that can operate in a heterogeneous environment of 39 different companies who collectively offer dental insurance under one mammoth brand. Right now what we're using is rather idiosyncratic.
A mac OS X server implementation might fit the bill.
Besides being banal, this isn't actually true. Al Queda, in practice, mostly succeeds in killing muslims that they feel insufficiently devout or of differing political or religious opinions. This is rather unpopular in the muslim world.
There's a difference between a threat we can't handle and a threat we don't handle. You're thinking about the former. I'm thinking about the latter. We could have prevented 9/11. We didn't and we ended up in the crazy situation we're in right now. We could have ended malaria. We didn't and now we have a malarial resurgence and millions dead thanks to Rachel Carson and her supporters.
Turning back to the mountain lion. You're looking at the wrong period. We took care of the problem and had a lifetime free of attacks in California. Now look at the record of the past decade and things are looking worse. I'm not checking under the bed for cougars but it's a sign. I grew up in the NYC metro area and they stole from the painting/maintenance funds for roads and bridges for decades. Nothing happened for a long time. Then the West Side Highway collapsed and they never rebuilt it. The accumulated neglect made a rebuild impractical and New Yorkers have been living with the consequences for decades and will for decades more. Everybody says "nobody could predict" this or that disaster.
Bullshit
The signs are there for an awful lot of them and our TFR rates are a clear problem whose ultimate nasty manifestation is still unclear. But the signs are there if you open your eyes.
The problem of wolves moving in and occasionally chomping on fifi or darling Dexter is a warning sign that certain things traditionally people take for granted (like the 'fact' that we and ours are on the top of the food chain) is no longer necessarily a constant but has, once again, become variable in the real world. These effects are poorly studied and will present unexpected challenges at a time when the tax base would be shrinking.
Germany did not plan to have wolves. They just emptied the East out and the wolf took advantage. What is the effect going to be over the long haul? That's something that may eventually be seriously studied but we just don't know right now.
I used wolves because it's not something you would associate with modern Germany, it's a surprise. If we had been talking about California, I'd have used mountain lions (which again had the greens claiming were no real problem but who turned out to be killers) as an example. I didn't want to dip into the sewers but there's a certain minimum flow below which pipes cease to become effective transporters and you have to reduce the pipe size otherwise you just get a pileup. You also start to have too low a tax base to maintain your roads and other important infrastructure. In poorer countries, houses just start to fall apart pretty quickly.
All this stuff is pretty obvious once you get out of the mindset that the only population problem one might have is overpopulation. The idea that too many people is what we're facing is very ingrained though.
Detroit anytime in the past 30+ years worries me. 1997 Romania worries me. These are two situations where I look at things and say "people can't be stupid enough to do x" and lo and behold they do it anyway (the details of what stupid things are happening in Detroit and what happened to the CDR government coalition in Romania are beyond the scope of discussion).
The relevant area where the wolves are is in eastern Brandenburg.
And, btw, the song about how these animals are not dangerous is an old one in the US. The end of this sad theater piece is when people start getting killed (usually an incautious tyke but sometimes a hiker) but long before then pets and agricultural animals disappear and a feeling of siege settles on the population as they become no longer comfortable with living a normal life and enjoying the outdoors. The FRG seems to be at the agricultural animals getting killed stage which is pretty early, maybe the beginning of act two in a three act play.
They probably have time to pull out of their delusions and treat the situation seriously before somebody gets scarred for life or dies but they're already gambling on the statistical probabilities when an animal overcomes its fear of humans and sees "tasty treat" when a small child gets loose. I find that sort of playing with somebody else's lives outrageous.
The US is just below replacement rate (2.09) with a bit of immigration, we're not doing too badly. France is somewhat lower at 1.98, shrinking but not disastrously so (unless you're worried about ethnic balance at which point one needs to dig deeper). But look at the graphic. The economic movers and shaker have stopped growing while almost universally adopting social systems that assume a growing population (social democracy requires population *growth* not stability as it's a ponzi scheme). That's trouble waiting to happen.
Yes, systems can adjust. In fact, they very likely will adjust. The question is how much pain is going to happen along the way and are we (and our children) screwed. I'm not liking the answers.
Try counting up "where rates are still so high", the list is shorter than you might think and getting shorter by the year. Iran (Iran!) has collapsed below 2.0 and they're not even rich (corruption having eaten up most of their oil wealth). And there are campaigns all across Europe for more kids. Most of them are failures.
There's a lot of false signals being sent into the system that we're in a population bomb situation when the reality is that a population bust is probably the more immediate issue. Don't believe me, do the math, if you can find recent honest numbers (they're out there but not very widely distributed for some reason).
So we have these high profile superstars of indoctrination who are influential but have no lesser known followers who do the same stuff without all the hoopla. Do you know *anything* about social movements? Where there's a superstar that's getting public attention there are always lesser knowns who believe the same thing but don't get the press.
But this time is different!
Yeah, right, pull the other one. It's got bells on.
I guess you've never heard of project snowflake. There are religious groups recruiting women to rescue these embryos and bring them to term. For barren couples, it's an alternative to IVF with donor cells. There are people willing to go through with this and the numbers are growing.
Ok, news flash, Fred Phelps thinks that the vast majority of christians are fakes and shouldn't be listened to. He's not politically, financially, or socially vulnerable to our pressure (he also thinks we're a bunch of heretics). We try within the limits of the law to discourage their bad acts. Scientists, and correct me if I'm wrong, don't generally take atheists who claim that one cannot be a scientist and a religious believer to task for their manifestly false statements.
I'm curious as to your theology because up to now all the YECs I've conversed with had a very touchy opinion over what, exactly, constituted the miracle of the Bible's creation as well as the subject of exactly how God went about setting up the authority to determine the canon.
I saw the challenger explosion live on TV way back when, the pieces were still going up after the event. That didn't mean that things were OK.
The numbers *are* still going up but not by as much as was previously predicted and the number of countries where things are getting nasty due to a lack of population are growing faster than anybody serious thought possible a decade ago. Even the PRC is worried about a lack of people (they call it the 4-2-1 problem where 4 grandparents and 2 parents are supported by 1 adult worker) and they're currently undergoing a nasty bout of wage inflation that's worrying a lot of people.
If you've built your entire economy on the assumption of a rising population, you're going to have a nasty readjustment phase when that assumed constant turns out to be a variable.
The US and France have very different economies but right now I believe we're the top two on TFR in the 1st world. There's something strange going on and the economic determinists don't seem to have the answers IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Global standards don't matter worth a damn. The only standards that matter are the ones within a polity and any heavily armed nearby polities that might invade and overrun an electorate if they choose wrong. Lots of poorly defended countries have to worry about the second kind of standards but nobody likes it. One of the reasons that the US has such a large military is so we don't have to pay attention to global standards of what is socialism or not. That allows us to march to our own drummer more than most and can be a competitive advantage.
As for the current bailouts, I look forward to the sale/privatizations of them all, hopefully for a good profit, and hopefully they'll be able to actually fund our pensions with something more than an IOU for a change.
Actually, the source in this case is a public press release put out in 2001 to give cover for the Taliban's refusal to extradite him. If you actually download the packet and go to page 157 or so, it says its a release.
The US started things off by saying "mother may I" and pressing for extradition. Invasion, even in Afghanistan, was not foreordained. Look up the history of that time and you'll see us getting more and more belligerent about our demands for extradition and the Taliban sticking to the line that Bin Laden said he didn't do it and he'll remain their guest in Kabul.
To further the Taliban's line, Bin Laden put out a press release in Pakistan saying "wasn't me guv, you've got the wrong guy" and that press release was translated from arabic to pashto to english. That's what was actually in the package and nothing that we hadn't heard in 2001 already (ie no shocking relevation). What we didn't know was that we didn't just rely on the Pakistanis but also did our own translations to english.
I got the % out of my memory but your figures support the general statement. Even though the DRC has the majority of reserves, it is not the major producer of coltan, that's Australia. The world is behaving appropriately by turning away from the DRC for current production. Hopefully the DRC will get its act together and then make a mint off their mineral riches minus the blood.
The idea that it is insulting or implies anything about somebody's behavior when a camera is pointed at someone to record a law enforcement interaction is already a dead issue. Cops record you with their own video, they chemically test the air that emits from your car, and they have the authority to insist on a BAC test to verify that you are sufficiently sober to drive based on a randomly placed static checkpoint. If all that's fair game and no problem, why is a citizen camera anything but a safeguard against the tiny percentage of bad police who should have never been passed by the academy and no reflection on the good cops?
The essence of the difference in individual rights between a vehicle and your house is that there is no expectation of privacy in a traditional motor vehicle. There's pretty settled law on the issue but what if you were to change the physical features of the vehicle so at least some of that were no longer true. What if you made a privacy car that had built in cameras and microphones, an airlock for providing paperwork to officers, windows whose natural state was to be opaque to the outside when the car was off, etc. At that point, you have an entirely different interaction with law enforcement. That's not going to save you on the street, of course, but it might reclaim rights in the subsequent court case.
Congo sourced coltan is less than 1% of the world market which is currently dominated by Australian production. How much better control do you want than sourcing 99% elsewhere?
You would guess wrong, monkey boy.
Here's a clue from the real world. Most business owners *not* in the accounting field just want to get this accounting business taken care of without a lot of fuss or muss. They don't care much about how it gets done and the difference between the price of QB and GNUCash = about 45 minutes thinking about it and switching to such a minority platform deserves a lot more than 45 minutes worth of consideration. So unless you have a bee in your bonnet over the philosophical principle of the whole thing (which describes just a tiny minority of business owners) Intuit wins, and GNUCash fanatics get to grind their teeth some more.
GNUCash has to do something positive that QB does not and that's very likely going to come from an up and coming innovative young turk accountant who wants to make a name for himself and finds unique value in GNUCash or some other Intuit competitor. As his accounting business grows, GNUCash starts to develop its own ecosystem of people who have used it and who want to use it in their next place of employment. If that hotshot accountant is really good, he'll start to attract his own blind followers and they'll latch on to GNUCash like they latch on to his shirt styles, unthinking but hopeful that all that imitation will make them a buck anyway.
Adoption in the mainstream for Free Software is going to often depend on identifying your proper market targets. You've yet to figure that out.
What SMBs really need is something their accountant can work with. That most often is Quickbooks. When you get an accountant who starts pushing gnucash, it'll start getting penetration in his client base. Get enough accountants and QB will have a real competitor on its hands.
If all you want is email, don't use Exchange. If what you want is a decent back-end for the Outlook clients that your corporate people are used to, Exchange isn't a bad solution.
I'd like to get a dead simple to administer OpenLDAP implementation that can operate in a heterogeneous environment of 39 different companies who collectively offer dental insurance under one mammoth brand. Right now what we're using is rather idiosyncratic.
A mac OS X server implementation might fit the bill.
Besides being banal, this isn't actually true. Al Queda, in practice, mostly succeeds in killing muslims that they feel insufficiently devout or of differing political or religious opinions. This is rather unpopular in the muslim world.
There's a difference between a threat we can't handle and a threat we don't handle. You're thinking about the former. I'm thinking about the latter. We could have prevented 9/11. We didn't and we ended up in the crazy situation we're in right now. We could have ended malaria. We didn't and now we have a malarial resurgence and millions dead thanks to Rachel Carson and her supporters.
Turning back to the mountain lion. You're looking at the wrong period. We took care of the problem and had a lifetime free of attacks in California. Now look at the record of the past decade and things are looking worse. I'm not checking under the bed for cougars but it's a sign. I grew up in the NYC metro area and they stole from the painting/maintenance funds for roads and bridges for decades. Nothing happened for a long time. Then the West Side Highway collapsed and they never rebuilt it. The accumulated neglect made a rebuild impractical and New Yorkers have been living with the consequences for decades and will for decades more. Everybody says "nobody could predict" this or that disaster.
Bullshit
The signs are there for an awful lot of them and our TFR rates are a clear problem whose ultimate nasty manifestation is still unclear. But the signs are there if you open your eyes.
The problem of wolves moving in and occasionally chomping on fifi or darling Dexter is a warning sign that certain things traditionally people take for granted (like the 'fact' that we and ours are on the top of the food chain) is no longer necessarily a constant but has, once again, become variable in the real world. These effects are poorly studied and will present unexpected challenges at a time when the tax base would be shrinking.
Germany did not plan to have wolves. They just emptied the East out and the wolf took advantage. What is the effect going to be over the long haul? That's something that may eventually be seriously studied but we just don't know right now.
I used wolves because it's not something you would associate with modern Germany, it's a surprise. If we had been talking about California, I'd have used mountain lions (which again had the greens claiming were no real problem but who turned out to be killers) as an example. I didn't want to dip into the sewers but there's a certain minimum flow below which pipes cease to become effective transporters and you have to reduce the pipe size otherwise you just get a pileup. You also start to have too low a tax base to maintain your roads and other important infrastructure. In poorer countries, houses just start to fall apart pretty quickly.
All this stuff is pretty obvious once you get out of the mindset that the only population problem one might have is overpopulation. The idea that too many people is what we're facing is very ingrained though.
Detroit anytime in the past 30+ years worries me. 1997 Romania worries me. These are two situations where I look at things and say "people can't be stupid enough to do x" and lo and behold they do it anyway (the details of what stupid things are happening in Detroit and what happened to the CDR government coalition in Romania are beyond the scope of discussion).
Wolves have come back to Germany for the first time in a century and Spiegel's reaction is to adjust to the wolf. They don't examine at all the role of depopulation:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,467205,00.html
Here's a map
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Pop_density-lowestest.png
The relevant area where the wolves are is in eastern Brandenburg.
And, btw, the song about how these animals are not dangerous is an old one in the US. The end of this sad theater piece is when people start getting killed (usually an incautious tyke but sometimes a hiker) but long before then pets and agricultural animals disappear and a feeling of siege settles on the population as they become no longer comfortable with living a normal life and enjoying the outdoors. The FRG seems to be at the agricultural animals getting killed stage which is pretty early, maybe the beginning of act two in a three act play.
They probably have time to pull out of their delusions and treat the situation seriously before somebody gets scarred for life or dies but they're already gambling on the statistical probabilities when an animal overcomes its fear of humans and sees "tasty treat" when a small child gets loose. I find that sort of playing with somebody else's lives outrageous.
The US is an outlier, France is an outlier, I think it's best to look at the world. Here's two views,
A list of TFR:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate
and a picture showing the issue graphically:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fertility_rate_world_map_2.png
The US is just below replacement rate (2.09) with a bit of immigration, we're not doing too badly. France is somewhat lower at 1.98, shrinking but not disastrously so (unless you're worried about ethnic balance at which point one needs to dig deeper). But look at the graphic. The economic movers and shaker have stopped growing while almost universally adopting social systems that assume a growing population (social democracy requires population *growth* not stability as it's a ponzi scheme). That's trouble waiting to happen.
Yes, systems can adjust. In fact, they very likely will adjust. The question is how much pain is going to happen along the way and are we (and our children) screwed. I'm not liking the answers.
Try counting up "where rates are still so high", the list is shorter than you might think and getting shorter by the year. Iran (Iran!) has collapsed below 2.0 and they're not even rich (corruption having eaten up most of their oil wealth). And there are campaigns all across Europe for more kids. Most of them are failures.
There's a lot of false signals being sent into the system that we're in a population bomb situation when the reality is that a population bust is probably the more immediate issue. Don't believe me, do the math, if you can find recent honest numbers (they're out there but not very widely distributed for some reason).
So we have these high profile superstars of indoctrination who are influential but have no lesser known followers who do the same stuff without all the hoopla. Do you know *anything* about social movements? Where there's a superstar that's getting public attention there are always lesser knowns who believe the same thing but don't get the press.
But this time is different!
Yeah, right, pull the other one. It's got bells on.
I guess you've never heard of project snowflake. There are religious groups recruiting women to rescue these embryos and bring them to term. For barren couples, it's an alternative to IVF with donor cells. There are people willing to go through with this and the numbers are growing.
Ok, news flash, Fred Phelps thinks that the vast majority of christians are fakes and shouldn't be listened to. He's not politically, financially, or socially vulnerable to our pressure (he also thinks we're a bunch of heretics). We try within the limits of the law to discourage their bad acts. Scientists, and correct me if I'm wrong, don't generally take atheists who claim that one cannot be a scientist and a religious believer to task for their manifestly false statements.
Unless you've got an actual example, you're not moving the conversation forward. Who are you talking about?
As with a lot of things in religion, you work with the language you've got, not the language you wish you had. In other words, we agree.
I'm curious as to your theology because up to now all the YECs I've conversed with had a very touchy opinion over what, exactly, constituted the miracle of the Bible's creation as well as the subject of exactly how God went about setting up the authority to determine the canon.
I saw the challenger explosion live on TV way back when, the pieces were still going up after the event. That didn't mean that things were OK.
The numbers *are* still going up but not by as much as was previously predicted and the number of countries where things are getting nasty due to a lack of population are growing faster than anybody serious thought possible a decade ago. Even the PRC is worried about a lack of people (they call it the 4-2-1 problem where 4 grandparents and 2 parents are supported by 1 adult worker) and they're currently undergoing a nasty bout of wage inflation that's worrying a lot of people.
If you've built your entire economy on the assumption of a rising population, you're going to have a nasty readjustment phase when that assumed constant turns out to be a variable.
The US and France have very different economies but right now I believe we're the top two on TFR in the 1st world. There's something strange going on and the economic determinists don't seem to have the answers IMO.