Halo effects and other statistical anomolies can explain transient or one time oddball events. Media bias towards the left has been documented over the course of decades. "The Suicidal Corporation" has been around for many years as well.
In my opinion, corporations are funding their enemies far too often to explain it as a string of one time effects
Obviously you haven't been around recently in Giuliani's NYC. I would never have crossed Central Park at night during the Dinkin's administration when there were 2000+ murders per year but with Giuliani dropping that total to ~600 and taking aggressive steps to get rid of the street criminals and eliminate aggressive panhandling (which is a cross between traditional begging and a mugging) I felt safe doing it twice while I was wooing my wife to be 3 yrs ago...
Ugh! ya got me. I omitted the use of the word "modern". It does sort of make sense. Clinton employed many of the corrupt practices of a century ago but weren't Democrat reformers the ones who pushed through civil service to get rid of this kind of spoils system BS?
Fine, don't use RICO, just put Bill G and Steve B et al in jail for massive multi-year fraud against their ISV community. Chinese wall my ass, they sold thousands to tens of thousands of those partnership kits every year for 3k a pop plus the goodies from running cert tests and supplying materials and a significant number of people believed them when they swore up and down that MS app developers did not get additional dev tools and API calls to access Windows.
It was that ISV dominance that helped establish their OS monopoly in the first place. Why no fraud prosecution?
Big business support for Republicans is grossly overstated. Take a look at corporate giving patterns (CATO puts out a book on the subject called "The Suicidal Corporation") and you find that corporate giving is remarkably left wing. A large segment gives to both parties so their interests will always be represented and until the anti-trust folks got on them, Microsoft was famously giving much more to Democrats than to Republicans.
Now that we've disposed of that hoary straw man, you might just want to examine the fact that the working journalists routinely vote 90%+ for the Democrat. Organizations like the Animal Liberation Front have been on the terrorist group list for years and you don't hear about their acts except once in a blue moon.
He resigned before the Florida case. He wanted to go into private practice and make the big bucks.
Now GWB did *not* do what the Clinton administration did. When Clinton came in he abandoned the tradition of letting holdovers stay until their replacements were confirmed. Clinton gutted the US' machinery of justice because he wanted those Republican nominees out, out, out, and damn the country.
I think that the Republicans are right to oppose anti-trust. I'd much rather see a pattern of criminal fraud established and MS put under the RICO statutes. MUCH more appropriate IMO.
When the port to Mac OS X is done, it should be able to take advantage of Aqua and its superior font handling capabilities. Anti-aliasing is a system service so I can't imagine that it won't use that as well. There, problem solved but only if you have an OS that cares about presentation and looks...
"To be honest I am not sure how relevant it is. If you imagine a dictatorship for instance, is an environment where the dictatorship is deposed regularly necessarily better than a single long standing dictatorship. Surely it is the dictatorship itself that is bad, not the particular incumbent. I feel pretty much the same about governments and corporations. The fact the decisions affecting the many are in the hands of the few is what is wrong. Which few is a subsidiary issue to me anyway."
You are mistaken because it is during the changeovers which give the opportunity for freedom to grow. The german free towns all grew up around cracks and no-mans lands between feudal jurisdictions. When a dictatorship is stable over a long period of time (think USSR) it does much more damage to the ability to be free than when it is overthrown relatively quickly (Nazi Germany). Libertarians, if you get them on the subject, are quite against corporate welfare because it stabilizes corrupt and powerful incumbents against their more efficient upstart consumers.
Very few successful businesses start out being evil and corrupt, they sort of grow into that. Making bad corporate behavior translate into a fall in share and bankruptcy is a proper wall against such and quite libertarian.
""All I can say is have fun at the supermarket. Almost every good you buy was hauled via truck and the extra gas costs are being passed on in higher prices."
Fine I really don't mind that much. I realize that some people will hike up their prices but most will not. Look at the midwest or the west where gasoline is significantly higher then on the east cost. They are not paying more for food or toilet paper. Most companies will absorb the cost no big deal."
Man, you *don't* shop for yourself do you? Everything is priced higher nowadays. The days of absorbing price hikes because you're price competing to get marketshare are over for now.
Two things, there are oil fired powerplants around (not a lot in the west, true but they do exist) and second, you may have noticed that gasoline is a separate price shock that Bush is simultaneously trying to fix. ANWAR and offshore drilling will keep us away from $4 gas and higher grocery bills due to food having higher shipping costs.
I believe that the Clinton ambassador to France was a huge Dem. fundraiser and party leader. That kind of thing isn't just legal, it's centuries old American political tradition.
"*Everything* should be vector (UI, but SVG should be used as much as possible on web sites and browsers soon too)."
Well, you should love OS X where everything *is* vector. This is an Apple/NeXT innovation that others will probably be imitating in the next 3-4 years.
The last 'rightish' democrat to hold the presidency was Carter. He certainly wasn't demonized in any way like Clinton was. He was made to look a hapless fool but that was the cardigan sweaters bit and maybe the killer rabbit thing. I'd suggest that you're the one doing the demonizing... of Republicans.
You cannot be a tax-exempt charity without being a corporation. The FSF is a corporation. It just happens to be a corporation with a specialized charter (non-profit, tax-exempt) that changes its accounting statement. In any case, I would expect that the FSF has shareholders and that the will of these owners guides the policy of the FSF.
I think that when a company sells its assets and merges with another company, especially when it changes its name and management, that company ceases to exist. You seem to be of a different opinion. If a company is badly managed, screws its customers, and gets bought by the number one firm in that market, I would say that the former customers who had been burned by the old entity should give the new company a fair shot at winning their business.
The reason that states are more stable than companies is that they keep large numbers of armed men around for when there is a threat to that stability and then shoot those who want to eliminate the state. Corporations do not have this power (violence is generally reserved as a monopoly of the state) in the normal course of events and that is what makes them less stable and, from a libertarian perspective, less threatening.
All I can say is have fun at the supermarket. Almost every good you buy was hauled via truck and the extra gas costs are being passed on in higher prices. It might not make you suffer since you talk like you make a bunch of money but it certainly makes the average family suffer.
As for ANWAR, I doubt that the oil companies are going to shoot their political influence to hell just over a lousy few months of oil. It doesn't make sense for them to spend so much on Bush and waste that influence over such a small prize. If what you say were true (which I don't buy) they would have made a better use of their bribe money getting us to influence the Caucuses states to run their massive oil pools through US oil companies instead of LUKOIL and the Iranians. Since instead they've picked ANWAR as a major goal of theirs, I would guess that there's a lot of oil there.
Haven't you been following the weather reports? There's not enough water to go through the dams up in the NW. Supply didn't stay static because no new plants were built, it dropped. Lower supply means higher prices. There is also this nasty thing called wear and tear. When you run a plant hard, like during last years electricity crisis, you get more of it. More wear and tear means more maintenance, another cause of reduced supply which CA has suffered due to bad infrastructure planning.
Lowered costs of entry means more entries. When you take the govt. imposed costs out, you are going to have more companies come in whenever the incumbent players start taking too much in profit or leave niches unserved. When the incumbents can buy govt. protection of their cartel, new entrants don't do their job and bust up these abortions like the MPAA.
Hey, he'd only be following in Clinton's wake, nominating a flaming homosexual to an overwhelmingly Catholic country (Hormel was nominated to Luxembourg).
In reality, the State department has language classes for ambassadors. How many potential ambassadors speak Hindi, Latvian, Persian, Hutu, or Urdu? Not many right off the bat but they usually learn a bit of the native language as time goes on. It's never really been a problem before, why the double standard for Bush now?
So why do conservatives pucker up to Charles Stenholm, the leader of the conservative Democrats in the House? Stenholm's been around a lot longer than Clinton and never came in for the vitriol and opposition that Clinton generated in a much shorter time on the scene.
There was a plea agreement signed on the day that Clinton left office. It is quite likely that if he had not signed the agreement which closed the book on the perjury issues, he would have been tried and most likely convicted. This would have put a tremendous distraction in front of Bush and the nation. To clear it, Bush would have probably had to pardon Clinton in order to get on with his agenda for the country.
Read the plea agreement and you will find that President Clinton admitted giving materially false testimony in front of the Grand Jury and agreed to be sanctioned for that. In exchange, Clinton extracted the concession that they wouldn't *call* it perjury and after 5 years, he could get his law license back (he lost it due to this 'nonperjury' material false testimony offense).
Bush got a clear deck for his presidency, this long national nightmare was over, and Clinton gets to have defenders say he never committed perjury.
Libertarians have always advocated small government in part as a method to reign in corporations. Take a look at Bush I when a consortium of high tech companies came to the govt. hat in hand asking for millions to develop a rapid catch up plan because the japanese were going to dominate television through this 20 year long program to develop HDTV. Mosssbacher who headed Commerce at the time just told them to use their own wallets because that kind of thing was not the government's job. They did, they came up with a digital HDTV system and the Japanese chucked 20 years of investment down the drain and are going to use the US system, so are the Europeans. That's a great example of libertarian principles being applied to government-corporate interactions.
If government is small, citizens can more easily find and stop corporate machinations to change the laws. When every day means hundreds of pages of new law and regulation being churned out by local (zoning for example), state (UCITA), federal (encryption restrictions), and international (ICC) bodies things are just beyond the ability of mere mortals to exercise our civic duty and reign in the dishonest yahoos that are trying to twist government to benefit themselves at our own expense.
The party that Hitler came to power in was called German National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi for short). Their economic program was private ownership on paper of industry but government control of industry. The only major economic difference between communism and national socialism is that instead of shooting the factory owners they paid them well to keep their mouths shut and only shot the ones who wouldn't be bought off.
Rule by corporations is called corporatism (which is dumb as well).
"And if I can't afford to buy the stock, or can't afford the fancy ass lawyer it takes to bring a successful lawsuit to bear I can just get screwed, neh?"
Most stocks are under $200 (Berkshire Hathaway being a very rare exception). If you can't afford that, you aren't very pissed off about whatever it is that offends you.
As for the lawsuit, if it's something that affects only you then, yeah, you're screwed. But if the government was only screwing you individually, you'd be screwed anyway so no difference. The number of people who need to band together to initiate a class action lawsuit on contingency fee is actually much smaller than the organization you have to put together to affect national policy in a government dominated system.
"I can not understand the gleeful joy which libertarians show when they tell us why a corporate oligarchy is so much better than a democracy."
Maybe because corporations have a natural lifecycle that is shorter than most polities. If a corporation is good, efficient, reasonable, and doesn't tick anybody off, it *might* have a shot at getting up to 150 years of age. Most companies are born, grow, mature, go horribly wrong and are dissolved long before that.
The methods of unseating bad corporations are well known and are exercised every day by all of the corporations competitors (including new entrants and indirect competitors). When you go out of whack, you get hurt. The FSF's attack on Microsoft's business model using the GPL is just one variant of standard corporate warfare. Microsoft is just extremely pissed off that Stallman's doing to them what MS did to Netscape and a hundred other competitors.
I would rather start a business and bury an abusive corporation in red ink than research how to make ANFO and blow up a government building. And *that* is why libertarians tend to be more anti-government than anti-corporate.
Slashdot Mirror
Halo effects and other statistical anomolies can explain transient or one time oddball events. Media bias towards the left has been documented over the course of decades. "The Suicidal Corporation" has been around for many years as well.
In my opinion, corporations are funding their enemies far too often to explain it as a string of one time effects
DB
Obviously you haven't been around recently in Giuliani's NYC. I would never have crossed Central Park at night during the Dinkin's administration when there were 2000+ murders per year but with Giuliani dropping that total to ~600 and taking aggressive steps to get rid of the street criminals and eliminate aggressive panhandling (which is a cross between traditional begging and a mugging) I felt safe doing it twice while I was wooing my wife to be 3 yrs ago...
DB
Ugh! ya got me. I omitted the use of the word "modern". It does sort of make sense. Clinton employed many of the corrupt practices of a century ago but weren't Democrat reformers the ones who pushed through civil service to get rid of this kind of spoils system BS?
Fine, don't use RICO, just put Bill G and Steve B et al in jail for massive multi-year fraud against their ISV community. Chinese wall my ass, they sold thousands to tens of thousands of those partnership kits every year for 3k a pop plus the goodies from running cert tests and supplying materials and a significant number of people believed them when they swore up and down that MS app developers did not get additional dev tools and API calls to access Windows.
It was that ISV dominance that helped establish their OS monopoly in the first place. Why no fraud prosecution?
Big business support for Republicans is grossly overstated. Take a look at corporate giving patterns (CATO puts out a book on the subject called "The Suicidal Corporation") and you find that corporate giving is remarkably left wing. A large segment gives to both parties so their interests will always be represented and until the anti-trust folks got on them, Microsoft was famously giving much more to Democrats than to Republicans.
Now that we've disposed of that hoary straw man, you might just want to examine the fact that the working journalists routinely vote 90%+ for the Democrat. Organizations like the Animal Liberation Front have been on the terrorist group list for years and you don't hear about their acts except once in a blue moon.
Most presidents don't submit last minute nominees in deference to their successors. Another example of a US political tradition that Clinton spat on.
DB
He resigned before the Florida case. He wanted to go into private practice and make the big bucks.
Now GWB did *not* do what the Clinton administration did. When Clinton came in he abandoned the tradition of letting holdovers stay until their replacements were confirmed. Clinton gutted the US' machinery of justice because he wanted those Republican nominees out, out, out, and damn the country.
I think that the Republicans are right to oppose anti-trust. I'd much rather see a pattern of criminal fraud established and MS put under the RICO statutes. MUCH more appropriate IMO.
DB
When the port to Mac OS X is done, it should be able to take advantage of Aqua and its superior font handling capabilities. Anti-aliasing is a system service so I can't imagine that it won't use that as well. There, problem solved but only if you have an OS that cares about presentation and looks...
"To be honest I am not sure how relevant it is. If you imagine a dictatorship for instance, is an environment where the dictatorship is deposed regularly necessarily better than a single long standing dictatorship. Surely it is the dictatorship itself that is bad, not the particular incumbent. I feel pretty much the same about governments and corporations. The fact the decisions affecting the many are in the hands of the few is what is wrong. Which few is a subsidiary issue to me anyway."
You are mistaken because it is during the changeovers which give the opportunity for freedom to grow. The german free towns all grew up around cracks and no-mans lands between feudal jurisdictions. When a dictatorship is stable over a long period of time (think USSR) it does much more damage to the ability to be free than when it is overthrown relatively quickly (Nazi Germany). Libertarians, if you get them on the subject, are quite against corporate welfare because it stabilizes corrupt and powerful incumbents against their more efficient upstart consumers.
Very few successful businesses start out being evil and corrupt, they sort of grow into that. Making bad corporate behavior translate into a fall in share and bankruptcy is a proper wall against such and quite libertarian.
DB
""All I can say is have fun at the supermarket. Almost every good you buy was hauled via truck and the extra gas costs are being passed on in higher prices."
Fine I really don't mind that much. I realize that some people will hike up their prices but most will not. Look at the midwest or the west where gasoline is significantly higher then on the east cost. They are not paying more for food or toilet paper. Most companies will absorb the cost no big deal."
Man, you *don't* shop for yourself do you? Everything is priced higher nowadays. The days of absorbing price hikes because you're price competing to get marketshare are over for now.
DB
Two things, there are oil fired powerplants around (not a lot in the west, true but they do exist) and second, you may have noticed that gasoline is a separate price shock that Bush is simultaneously trying to fix. ANWAR and offshore drilling will keep us away from $4 gas and higher grocery bills due to food having higher shipping costs.
DB
I believe that the Clinton ambassador to France was a huge Dem. fundraiser and party leader. That kind of thing isn't just legal, it's centuries old American political tradition.
DB
"*Everything* should be vector (UI, but SVG should be used as much as possible on web sites and browsers soon too)."
Well, you should love OS X where everything *is* vector. This is an Apple/NeXT innovation that others will probably be imitating in the next 3-4 years.
DB
The last 'rightish' democrat to hold the presidency was Carter. He certainly wasn't demonized in any way like Clinton was. He was made to look a hapless fool but that was the cardigan sweaters bit and maybe the killer rabbit thing. I'd suggest that you're the one doing the demonizing... of Republicans.
DB
You cannot be a tax-exempt charity without being a corporation. The FSF is a corporation. It just happens to be a corporation with a specialized charter (non-profit, tax-exempt) that changes its accounting statement. In any case, I would expect that the FSF has shareholders and that the will of these owners guides the policy of the FSF.
I think that when a company sells its assets and merges with another company, especially when it changes its name and management, that company ceases to exist. You seem to be of a different opinion. If a company is badly managed, screws its customers, and gets bought by the number one firm in that market, I would say that the former customers who had been burned by the old entity should give the new company a fair shot at winning their business.
The reason that states are more stable than companies is that they keep large numbers of armed men around for when there is a threat to that stability and then shoot those who want to eliminate the state. Corporations do not have this power (violence is generally reserved as a monopoly of the state) in the normal course of events and that is what makes them less stable and, from a libertarian perspective, less threatening.
DB
All I can say is have fun at the supermarket. Almost every good you buy was hauled via truck and the extra gas costs are being passed on in higher prices. It might not make you suffer since you talk like you make a bunch of money but it certainly makes the average family suffer.
As for ANWAR, I doubt that the oil companies are going to shoot their political influence to hell just over a lousy few months of oil. It doesn't make sense for them to spend so much on Bush and waste that influence over such a small prize. If what you say were true (which I don't buy) they would have made a better use of their bribe money getting us to influence the Caucuses states to run their massive oil pools through US oil companies instead of LUKOIL and the Iranians. Since instead they've picked ANWAR as a major goal of theirs, I would guess that there's a lot of oil there.
DB
Haven't you been following the weather reports? There's not enough water to go through the dams up in the NW. Supply didn't stay static because no new plants were built, it dropped. Lower supply means higher prices. There is also this nasty thing called wear and tear. When you run a plant hard, like during last years electricity crisis, you get more of it. More wear and tear means more maintenance, another cause of reduced supply which CA has suffered due to bad infrastructure planning.
DB
Lowered costs of entry means more entries. When you take the govt. imposed costs out, you are going to have more companies come in whenever the incumbent players start taking too much in profit or leave niches unserved. When the incumbents can buy govt. protection of their cartel, new entrants don't do their job and bust up these abortions like the MPAA.
DB
Hey, he'd only be following in Clinton's wake, nominating a flaming homosexual to an overwhelmingly Catholic country (Hormel was nominated to Luxembourg).
In reality, the State department has language classes for ambassadors. How many potential ambassadors speak Hindi, Latvian, Persian, Hutu, or Urdu? Not many right off the bat but they usually learn a bit of the native language as time goes on. It's never really been a problem before, why the double standard for Bush now?
DB
So why do conservatives pucker up to Charles Stenholm, the leader of the conservative Democrats in the House? Stenholm's been around a lot longer than Clinton and never came in for the vitriol and opposition that Clinton generated in a much shorter time on the scene.
DB
There was a plea agreement signed on the day that Clinton left office. It is quite likely that if he had not signed the agreement which closed the book on the perjury issues, he would have been tried and most likely convicted. This would have put a tremendous distraction in front of Bush and the nation. To clear it, Bush would have probably had to pardon Clinton in order to get on with his agenda for the country.
Read the plea agreement and you will find that President Clinton admitted giving materially false testimony in front of the Grand Jury and agreed to be sanctioned for that. In exchange, Clinton extracted the concession that they wouldn't *call* it perjury and after 5 years, he could get his law license back (he lost it due to this 'nonperjury' material false testimony offense).
Bush got a clear deck for his presidency, this long national nightmare was over, and Clinton gets to have defenders say he never committed perjury.
Whatever.
DB
Libertarians have always advocated small government in part as a method to reign in corporations. Take a look at Bush I when a consortium of high tech companies came to the govt. hat in hand asking for millions to develop a rapid catch up plan because the japanese were going to dominate television through this 20 year long program to develop HDTV. Mosssbacher who headed Commerce at the time just told them to use their own wallets because that kind of thing was not the government's job. They did, they came up with a digital HDTV system and the Japanese chucked 20 years of investment down the drain and are going to use the US system, so are the Europeans. That's a great example of libertarian principles being applied to government-corporate interactions.
If government is small, citizens can more easily find and stop corporate machinations to change the laws. When every day means hundreds of pages of new law and regulation being churned out by local (zoning for example), state (UCITA), federal (encryption restrictions), and international (ICC) bodies things are just beyond the ability of mere mortals to exercise our civic duty and reign in the dishonest yahoos that are trying to twist government to benefit themselves at our own expense.
DB
The party that Hitler came to power in was called German National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi for short). Their economic program was private ownership on paper of industry but government control of industry. The only major economic difference between communism and national socialism is that instead of shooting the factory owners they paid them well to keep their mouths shut and only shot the ones who wouldn't be bought off.
Rule by corporations is called corporatism (which is dumb as well).
DB
"And if I can't afford to buy the stock, or can't afford the fancy ass lawyer it takes to bring a successful lawsuit to bear I can just get screwed, neh?"
Most stocks are under $200 (Berkshire Hathaway being a very rare exception). If you can't afford that, you aren't very pissed off about whatever it is that offends you.
As for the lawsuit, if it's something that affects only you then, yeah, you're screwed. But if the government was only screwing you individually, you'd be screwed anyway so no difference. The number of people who need to band together to initiate a class action lawsuit on contingency fee is actually much smaller than the organization you have to put together to affect national policy in a government dominated system.
DB
"I can not understand the gleeful joy which libertarians show when they tell us why a corporate oligarchy is so much better than a democracy."
Maybe because corporations have a natural lifecycle that is shorter than most polities. If a corporation is good, efficient, reasonable, and doesn't tick anybody off, it *might* have a shot at getting up to 150 years of age. Most companies are born, grow, mature, go horribly wrong and are dissolved long before that.
The methods of unseating bad corporations are well known and are exercised every day by all of the corporations competitors (including new entrants and indirect competitors). When you go out of whack, you get hurt. The FSF's attack on Microsoft's business model using the GPL is just one variant of standard corporate warfare. Microsoft is just extremely pissed off that Stallman's doing to them what MS did to Netscape and a hundred other competitors.
I would rather start a business and bury an abusive corporation in red ink than research how to make ANFO and blow up a government building. And *that* is why libertarians tend to be more anti-government than anti-corporate.
DB