To be honest I'm not really sure why they would really bother with arphids to track people. The way its going everyone is carrying cell phones and those are a lot easier to track and track remotely than arphids and people carry them all the time without even thinking about which isn't true for passports. arphids might be a bit easier for close proximity identification, but it doesn't seem very reliable to me.
Cory Doctorow's Create Commons book Little Brother is a not so fictional account of assorted abuses by the Department of Homeland Security. DHS tracking people with arphids in BART passes and toll passes in cars is one of the plot lines. It won this years Prometheus award(Libertarian Sci/Fi). Its not exactly a work of great literature. He ripped it out in a relatively short period of time and it could have used more work. But its kind of an entertaining read for geeks and a reminder how out of control the American government has been since 9/11. The book is also FREE. The ideas of XNet and Paranoid Linux are priceless. Adhoc WiFi may be the only way to have a free Internet where Big Brother isn't watching your every move.
One does have to wonder why the NSA is building giant new data centers in San Antonia and Utah and expanding the existing one in Maryland. They seem to be ramping up to eavesdrop on a LOT more of something. I'm also wondering what this secret program Cheney was running in the CIA was all about since it appears it wasn't the torture or the already leaked NSA domestic spying program. If you think the Democrats and Obama wont be just as bad about trampling our civil liberties as Bush/Cheney you are very naive.
Will computers liberate us or enslave us. Paradoxically, probably both at the same time.
"NASA was the only organization to put a man on the moon"
That was 40 years ago, completely different organization now. They for the most part don't even remember how they did it since all nearly all the Apollo veterans have retired.
"and a couple of rovers on Mars, fly by Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer planets"
These are more JPL than NASA. JPL manages to operate in a little cocoon that has prevented it from being infected by the pointless bureaucracy in the rest of NASA
"build and operate a space plane and a space station."
Soviet Union/Russia operated Mir long before ISS came along and they actually did it on a reasonable budget and actually did stuff on it. NASA has spent way over a $100 billion, 30 years on ISS and its still not doing much useful science or anything else. They mostly spend all their time repairing and maintaining it. They NASA time line has them pretty much abandoning it as soon as they finish building it. No one will even be able to get there without the Russian's and Soyuz if the the Shuttle retires next year.
Soviet Union did build and fly a space plane but only to keep up with the U.S. I think they quickly realized it wasn't reusable because it had to be practically rebuilt between every flight, was staggeringly expensive to fly, and was very unreliable. It was common sense on their part they killed it and stuck the affordable Soyuz which is basically what NASA is coming back to with Orion. ISS and Space Shuttle weren't really NASA's finest hour. They justified the space shuttle because they needed it for the ISS. They needed the ISS so the shuttle would have a place to go. It was a circular firing squad.
The fundamental problem with the manned spaced division in NASA is that since Apollo they have never really had a mission. They just create the barest minimum mission they can think of to keep themselves employed. They know the President and Congress will never fund them to do anything amazing like put a colony on Mars, so they ask for missions that they can get funds for but they are kind of stupid and pointless. ISS and space shuttle were just so they had something safe for astronauts do in LEO and then they squander large amounts of money doing next to nothing. It was mostly a jobs program and the return to the Moon isn't really any better. Bill Nelson, Senator from Florida in particular insures NASA keeps getting funded just so he keeps the jobs in Florida.
NASA either needs to figure out manned missions that are compelling and useful or they need to stop wasting money and fall back on robotic mission until they find a reason for men to work in space. They only manned mission I can really see at the moment is a colony on Mars, everything else seems better done with robots and it would be a lot cheaper.
Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon, wrote a piece a few weeks back about how silly it is for NASA to just repeat Apollo again forty years later. He proposed NASA partner with China, India, Russia and EU and let them lead the lunar mission because it would be new and exciting to them, while NASA focused on going to Mars and do something really exciting and with a point. He advocated my position is that Mars should be a one way trip for colonist and not another stunt like Apollo where we go, pick up rocks, and leave. I would be inclined to say the U.S. is too broke to do Mars but when you see us squander trillions of dollars on corrupt bankers, Iraq and a brain dead stimulas a colony on Mars almost seems pretty good by comparison.
He should ask himself, "Am I a dick"? if the answer is yes.... go management he is a natural. Chances are he will make a lot more money at it too, if he is a dick....
If you are a nice, level headed person who treats the people around you like... you know... people.... management is the last place for you. One of my least favorite managers way back referred to us all as her "assets", she didn't even really recognize us as people, we were just chits she was using to advance her career.
Not sure I would say that I "hate" publishers. I just don't like gatekeepers on information who take the lion's share of the profits because they have the keys to the gate. The only reason they had the keys to the gate was because typesetting and printing on dead trees was expensive and out of the reach of each author. In the ebook era there is really no reason traditional publishers should continue to exert the control they have.
I see no reason authors couldn't have an editor work over their book for them and either pay the editor or give them a cut of the proceeds, a much smaller cut than a publisher takes. There is no reason in the ebook era for traditional publishers to continue to exert the dictatorial control they currently have, just like there is no reason record companies should. I don't think book publishing is as bad as music publishing since there are a lot more niche players with good heart and soul. The music publishing business has pretty much proved to be a complete and utter failure and needs to die in the digital age. Me personally I'd kind of like to see a profusion of new and innovative authors spring up in the ebook age and I'd like to see all the good ones get rich for their efforts, and not the leech publishers.
I'll agree its kind of a fluff piece. What did you expect out of Rolling Stone:) A problem is I don't think you will get anyone in the financial press who will do a hatchet job on Goldman because they are too powerful and well connected. I saw one of the frontline pieces and it wasn't really much better. It just recounted pretty much the same sequence of events you would have heard on CNBC during the melt down. I'll watch the other, thanks for the pointer.
If you were looking for "specific evidence" I doubt you will find any unless there is a criminal investigation like Enron where their internal emails are acquired and I doubt A) anyone will touch them with an investifation, they are too powerful or B) they are dumb enough to keep any juicy emails. Only other way the truth will come out about what Goldman is doing is if a powerful insider rats them out and that is also unlikely because insiders make a lot of money there and would risk it all if they ratted out Goldman. It would be entertaining to analyze their trading software to see if it offers clues in to any potential manipulation of commodities markets in particular.
The whole problem with the shenanigans at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup is they have used their alumni in the White House and lobbyist control of Congress to completely eliminate transparency or accountability so no one really knows what they are doing, and we may never. They can't keep manipulating markets and creating bubbles to their benefit if there is transparency in the financial system, especially in commodities trading and credit default swaps.
One interesting part in the Rolling Stone piece I hadn't heard were the "secret" letters Goldman's commodity trader J Aron and a dozen others had gotten exempting them from the depression era regulations on speculating in commodities. It used to be producers of commodities were the only ones exempt from speculation rules because they actually produced the commodities. Someone how a bunch of pure speculators like Goldman and Citigroup's commodity traders were also exempted. Anyone have good pointers to more details on that?
I wish I remember where I saw it today but there was a piece on the NY Times or some place similar about the volatility in oil prices. The volatility we've had the last couple of years is unprecedented, it is completely decoupled from fundamentals and is probably entirely due to speculators either like Goldman and Citi commodity traders or day traders using ETF's in commodities. It is becoming clear if the speculation doesn't stop it will break big oil consumers like airlines. Airlines simply can't survive if their fuel prices continue to swing wildly. The only other culprit I've heard lately is maybe China went on a commodity buying binge in first half of 2009 as a way to dump the dollars they have too many of, which is why commodities have been rallying this time around.
The problem is some big companies with a stranglehold on our government have managed to constantly emasculate regulation and prevent all transparency, especially in commodity trading and credit default swaps. It is basically impossible right now for anyone to know what kind of BS Goldman and friends are pulling to manipulate markets to their benefit and to the devastation of everyone else. You simply can't let commodities speculation continue if you want a healthy economy. Speculators provide a little liquidity but otherwise they are pure vampires on essential commodities. All they do is drive up the price and they play no constructive role anywhere in the process. Their sole goal is buy low and sell high and they don't care if they drive gas to $4 a gallon for no reason, or cause starvation and food riots in the third world because the drive up wheat, corn and rice prices for no reason. All commodity speculators do is either take advantage of shortage, or even worse create shortages where none would exist to drive up prices so they can profit for no reason.
Pretty much everything you posted is because your mind is stuck in the previous publishing business model.
You don't need typesetting, cover design, etc. As long as the author delivers their work in readable form for the ebook no one really cares about the rest of that stuff. Final edit might be nice but authors can get people to proof their books for them without selling their soul and a big chunk of their profits to the devil.
The whole point of niche ebook publishing is it doesn't exactly matter if only 10 people want to read it. As long as the author wants to write and some people want to read it, it should be available. I doubt an ebook publisher is going go for a book with a target market of 10 but at least some should go for works with a market of thousands assuming their overhead has been shaved to a minimum, and the book is delivered in a ready to distribute form by the author. As best I recall niche authors publish their own books all the time on dead trees, and that is a LOT more expensive to do than it is in the ebook era. Pretty sure I remember some books were self published that eventually turned in to major successes. No publisher would take them, author self published, and as people read it and passed them around they eventually became raging successes.
Publishers have all the same bad motivations to kill books that they don't think will be popular as record companies have. Record companies increasingly produce horrible music and artists who pander to lowest common denominator. I can think of nothing better than if we get to a situation where there is an ebook company that will publish just about anything and devise a system where readers decide what is good and bad instead of publishers. Yes you do need to keep the signal to noise ration high but I have my doubts publishers are any more the right way to do that than record companies.
There is a pretty good expose up on Rolling Stone describing the nefarious behavior of Goldman Sachs. They are in general what you expect out of Wall Street types, greedy and unscrupulous but very good at what they do. Unfortunately what they are good at is creating devastation in their wake so they can take home multimillion dollar bonuses every year, and completely controlling our government so they can get away with it.
Good point but Goldman Sachs deserves to be loathed. They are behind some of the most malevolent behavior that has damaged our economy while they profit dating back to the Great Depression. They were probably a leading creator of the housing bubble and crash which has wiped out trillions of dollars of average peoples wealth. They are also leading commodity manipulators, they have a letter from the U.S. government exempting from commodity laws to prevent speculation. They may be partially responsible for the oil price spike above $140, and last years spike in food prices that caused food riots and starvation in the third world.
You do have to give them credit that they manage to cause catastrophic collapses when the bubbles they help create bursts, and still manage to walk away unscathed. During the house bubble they created mortgage backed securities they knew were garbage and then suckered AIG in to writing credit default swaps on them so they won when they sold the crap and then won again when it went to hell. At least ten billion dollars of your tax dollars went in one door at AIG and out the back door in to Goldman Sachs pocket as reward for creating garbage mortgages.
Rolling Stone has a good expose on them though the bootleg version has been pulled offline due to "copyright infringement". Its called "The Great American Bubble Machine".
They probably had all the same complaints about software until Apple proved them wrong with its app store. Why do all these arguments apply to books but not to apps for the iPhone?
Sure there are ebook publishers that wont tank works from an individual now but all that does is open up a market for a low overhead ebook publisher who will.
"Even less fathomable is why publishers are letting the ebook market degenerate into competing formats, proprietary readers and possible market dominance by Amazon."
Even less fathomable is why you need "publishers" once you fully reach the ebook era. The only necessary roll they play in the system is to publish books on dead trees. Good authors could easily start going direct to ebooks and completely cut publishers out of the system as long as they are willing to go without a dead tree version of their books.
Publishers play a roll in filtering out the crap but they also filter out stuff none of them like but at least a niche audience might find interesting. They play a roll in promotion which may still be necessary but in the Internet era probably isn't as importance as it once was.
Publishers are about as useful in the digital age as record companies.
If anyone is really worried about spiking oil and gasoline prices you should be a lot more worried about the role speculators are playing in the commodities markets than any effect cap and trade will have. Rolling Stone has an excellent exposé on the role Goldman Sachs in particular played in running oil prices up to $147 a barrel. Its a must read if you want to understand how Wall Street screws the rest of us to take home their multimillion dollar pay checks. This link is a scan, Rolling Stone doesn't have an online version. It is Rolling Stone so isn't exactly a pillar in the financial news industry, though the pillars probably wont rat out Goldman, and they are rats.
The reason for the recent oil spikes really has nothing to do with supply and demand or cap and trade. The real causes were:
A. Goldman Sachs and a dozen or so other big speculators got secret letters years ago exempting them from commodities regulations dating back to the 1930's which were designed to prevent speculators from driving up commodities prices.
B. Large amounts of money were fleeing the housing bubble bursh, and resulting stock market crash, also caused in large part by Goldman Sachs. Goldman was packaging a lot of the toxic mortgages and then buying credit default swaps shorting their own mortgage bundles because they knew they were garbage. Most were with AIG so when the mortgage bundles turned to crap AIG went bankrupt, U.S. taxpayer gave them a $130 billion dollars and much of it wen out the back door in to Goldman's pocket (like $10 billion). Most of this was engineered by Paulson and the new head of AIG, both former Goldman Sachs executives. It was... criminal.
C. Speculators poured in to oil and food futures with the help of entites like J Aron, Goldman's secretive commodity trader. Oil futures traded hands 20-30 times and were inflated beyond all reason, there was and still is a glut of oil was being parked all over the globe. They just moved the housing bubble to a commodities bubble. This bubble caused the oil price spike and food price spikes that caused $4 gas in the U.S. and food riots and starvation in the third world.
Goldman Sachs has acquired such massive control over our government and financial system thanks to alumni like Paulson and Rubin. They have completely gutted financial regulation and turned all global markets in to rigged casinos where they always win and the rest of us always lose. It appears Summers is the new White House insider protecting Goldman's interests. Rubin in particular defeated every attempt to regulate credit default swaps. Paulson as Goldman CEO talked the government in to removing caps on leverage that enabled the recent bubble. A host of characters gutted regulation of the commodities market making commodity bubbles the new norm.
A British Lord and financial type recently testified in front of an EU commission. His take was the big banks have managed to completely defang new attempts to regulate them in the wake of the recent crisis. They often threatened to just move off shore if the regulations got too onerous. He said they are RAPIDLY returning to business as usual prior to the recent collapse. They are returning to obscene compensation levels which is why they rushed to pay back all the TARP money. He predicted there will be another bubble and another major collapse in 10 to 15 years if it even takes that long.
Moral hazard is a critical element in a Capitalist system. If you gamble big and lose you HAVE to know you will fail. Since the U.S. and E.U. governments bailed out all the most of the gamblers and saved most of them from any consequences at all for their misdeeds they will just repeat the cycle. They will gamble, they will pocket big profits, and when the bubble bursts tax payers, workers and consumers the world over will get to pick up the tab for the losses.
Its open to debate how much "harm" climate change has caused. There is anecdotal evidence it is harming coral reefs, and stressing polar bears. Climate change and green house gases are probably causing harm and will probably cause more in the future but we are relatively ignorant about our climate or what the actual results will be in the long run. Last article I read on coral reef problems indicated they are extremely complex ecosystems and we really don't have a very good insight in to what is causing their plight.
The rate of change in our climate, which certainly might be green house gas related, is probably bad because when climate changes so fast it makes it hard for animal and plant life to adapt.
But.... no where is it written in stone that the climate we had before the industrial age is the climate we have to lock in, in perpetuity. The Earth's climate has always changed and changed dramatically. The climate we had was one that was from exiting a recent ice age. The fact that large swaths of the planet are cloaked in ice and largely uninhabitable is kind of clue maybe our climate was a little on the cold side.
It could be argued that by releasing CO2 trapped in vegetation from eras when the world was much warmer and more tropical we are just going to return a more normal climate from prior to the last ice age. People in cold northern and southern climes might actually LIKE the change. I recall Midwestern winters are some number of degrees warmer than they used to be thirty years ago and if you ever lived through a classic bone chilling Midwestern winter most Midwesterners would probably say that change is positive.
We certainly run the risk of more hurricanes and more violent weather, but I don't think its a given that any of the climate "simulations" being touted by climate change chicken littles are even close to being accurate. Predictions there are going to be massive droughts and desertification could ultimately prove to be completely wrong. As oceans warm they could just as easily lead to dramatic increases in precipitation and return deserts like the Sahara to being verdant and abundant with life. More CO2 in the air will almost certainly improve plant growth. I'm no expert but its my guess that when the Earth has had previous peak green house periods it probably adapted with lush tropical jungles which thrived on the CO2 and proceeded to trap it in coal beds, cooling the planet. Of course with man intervening in the natural cycles we might tip the cycle in to a run away green house effect and destroy all life on Earth.
I lean to the belief it is probably better if we reduce the rate at which we are dumping green house gases in to the atmosphere, because the rate of climate change will probably be too rapid for most life forms, especially the Homo Sapiens who foolishly have half their species located in low lying coastal areas often in habitats that can't easily be moved.
On the other hand I haven't got much use for all the people who claim to know exactly what is happening now, why it is happening and what will happen ten, fifty or a hundred years from now and claim to know that it is all BAD. Truth is we unfortunately have very little insight in to how our climate works or where it will be in five years, let alone a hundred. We should proceed with caution. Green house gas pollution is probably bad, but you should take the, sky is falling, Chicken Little crowd with a grain of salt. Even if you accept we must urgently prevent rapid climate change, you should also stop kidding yourself any legislation coming out of bodies as worthless as the EU or the U.S. Congress is going to solve the problem:
A. Both EU and U.S. cap and trade bills are full of holes. As this submission suggests they had to pander to so many special interests to get them passed they probably aren't going to be effective. The recent House cap and trade had to be gutted to get coal state and farm state congressmen to support it so it hands out so many offsets it debatable if it wil
The problem isn't really OpenOffice handling Word doc files. The problem is more if you produce a Word doc file in Open Office and send it to someone using Office it usually looks like crap to them. If you create the documeny, publish it as PDF and send it to someone on Windows, then you are fine. The problem arises if you actually have to share an editable.doc file with someone using MS Office. In that case Open Office is usually pretty much a fail, especially if the document is non trivial, with complex formatting, pictures or diagrams.
I don't necessarily fault the Open Office developers for this, I'm sure Microsoft makes it as hard on them as they possible can.
But, all of the open source fanboys who say OpenOffice has no problem interoperating with Word are simply wrong. Until and unless Open Office can interchange doc files with Word seamlessly its going to have serious problems gaining acceptance in the business world. Microsoft knows that, they know the network is working in their favor in holding their monopoly on office software. They sure aren't going to make it any easier on Open Office to send doc files to Word. I wouldn't be surprised if MS Office detects characteristics of Open Office produced doc files and intentionally mangles them.
"Since a large operation would have maybe 1000 head of cattle, it can be presumed that from the ear tags"
Ear tags are pretty fallible. Our cattle its pretty normal for a cow or two a year to rip them out. To be honest I think RFID tags would be a lot more reliable and a lot less misery to the animals than ear tags. If you could add some basic breeding, ownership history and health information to the tags they would have self contained documentation which would also be cheaper and more reliable than paper.
If you could replace branding with RFID that would save a LOT of expense, misery and health consequences to the animals. Branding is way worse punishment to the animals than an RFID tag would. If you let the cattle vote on this I'm pretty RFID tags would win:) Problem is I imagine rustlers would be able to remove or alter RFID tags unless you plant them deep, while brands are pretty hard to change.
To be honest if you can brand your cattle you can RFID tag them at the same time so I'm pretty skeptical about these complaints from ranchers. Its more likely they just hate the "gummint" and a bunch of new laws being laid on them. I can kind of empathize with that, but the weak arguments about how impossible and expensive are exactly that, weak.
"remember how the twitter design totally havoced the iranian attempts to block"
Its kind of hard to tell what exactly happened in Iran, but I've seen speculation that the protesters extensive use of Twitter and the Internet mostly just made it easier for the Iranian government to identify the trouble makers and where they lived so they could pay them a visit. Its possible the use of Twitter just made it easier to crush the protests more quickly. If you are advocating the overthrow of a government from within anonymity is relatively important.
When you are trying to topple an authoritarian regime using the Internet from anything other than an untraceable IP address seems extremely unwise to me especially when all of Iran's internet traffic is being funneled through monitored choke points.
It is likewise being somewhat optimistic at this point to think that any site that will enable widespread piracy is going to be impervious to tracing, warrants and shutdown notices. About the only way to do it is for the hub to be located in a pariah country that is indifferent to digital rights and which will ignore the complaints, and block any attempt to traces the IP addresses going in and out of the hub. Its pretty tough to be a rogue nation if the U.S. and E.U. use their governments to apply diplomatic and economic pressure. China seems to be one of the few countries mostly immune to western digital rights concerns.
They haven't decided where he is serving his sentence yet. If its a minimum security country club prison your assessment might be correct. If it a real federal penitentiary with violent criminals it might not be so safe or easy. There are also more than a few people who might wish him harm and people can be harmed in prison for a price.
All in all I really don't feel any sympathy for his victims. To me it was a greedy crook fleecing greedy people who were borderline themselves. It is more than a little unrealistic to expect 10-12% annual returns year after year with no risk. You can make a LOT of money compounding at that rate. Getting that kind of annual return pretty much always entails high risk. There is an old saying you should be very afraid when you are making a lot of money because its usually too good to be true and wont last, and you can make a lot of money when everyone else is afraid.
His victims were in a lot of ways just as greedy as he was. His feeder funds and victims must have suspected it was fishy, but went along as long as they got theirs out of it. They mostly seem to have thought they were special and privileged and deserved to get returns ordinary people couldn't. I feel no sympathy for people like that. They gambled in the casino Wall Street has turned in to and lost. Tough luck, nothing to see here and time to move on. Stop crying. Your own fault you put all your money in to an investment that was too good to be true.
About the only good thing that could come out of it is to compel meaningful reform and regulation of Wall Steet and and all indications are that isn't going to happen. Wall Street is rapidly going back to business as usual. Wall Street cost people like 14 trillion in wealth in the last collapse and most of it was due to criminal fraud and Ponzi schemes just as bad as Madoff and very few of those fat cats are going to jail. Obama and Geitner's proposed reforms are toothless.
I saw in passing a week or so some British lord and financial type was testifying in front of an EU commission. His take was the big banks and hedge funds were threatening regulators with blackmail. If the EU and the US go too far with regulation, they would move to Switzerland or the Caribbean and take their money with them. His take was the fat cats were racing to get back to were they were in 2006, demanding ridiculously high compensation, resuming the high risk investments, undermining reforms and he fully expects another bubble and collapse in 10 or 15 years. The tax payers and ordinary Joe's will be screwed again and the rich will just keep getting richer. It seems almost inevitable because the banks conned all their governments in to bailing them out. The essential concept of moral hazard has been completely undermined. The fat cats now know they can gamble and take all the winnings and when they lose taxpayers will take all the losses. If the banks were "too big to fail" before its even worse now because due to the forced mergers of the last year America three biggest banks are now bigger than ever. JP Morgan, B of A and Citibank are now the three largest banks in the world based on tier 1 capital due to mergers.
Google's nearest competitors in search are Microsoft and Yahoo and both have market shares in the low teens. It is a defacto monopoly. Only place they may not have one are in countries like China where local competitors are more competitive.
I agree in the long run China is in the catbird seat. But its naive to think that they could lose their major export markets to the U.S. and E.U. without their economy cratering. The massive slowdown in U.S. purchases during the recent slowdown highlighted that fact. Only reason China weathered it is it had huge reserves from its previous decade of running huge trade surpluses with the U.S. As I said previously China needs to maintain 7-8% growth just to keep their population employed and they wont do that without selling to the U.S. and E.U. It is the only leverage the west has to force them to rein in their out of control pollution which will destroy our planet no matter how many cap an trades schemes the west does.
The U.S. economy is going to eventually crater but it hasn't yet and it is still the dominant market for Chinese exports. It is most definitely still a mutual dependency.
"As for markets, they could trade internally and consume more of what they produce, rather than swapping it for IOUs."
Gross oversimplification and obvious bias. The U.S. still make half the worlds airliners, most of the major CPU's and graphics chips still originate in the U.S. So do the worlds two leading operating systems, iPhones, iTunes, heavy equipment(Caterpillar), leading weapons exporter, etc. The U.S. is still a leading manufacturer and the world's leading economy. The trajectory is definitely bad but the U.S. isn't exactly finished just yet. Even if it is finished economically it does still have an intimidating offensive military capability.
The problem with Google and competition is they have giant rivers of money coming in from their search/ad monopoly. I'm somewhat less concerned about their search business being a monopoly than the fact it gives them rivers of money that they can pour in to other markets, do things for free, and destroy everyone who can't afford to do the same thing for free. Its kind of like Microsoft leveraging its Windows monopoly to destroy Netscape by giving IE away for free.
Google can afford to do Google News and GMail for free only because their search business subsidizes them. Google News is a little insidious because it leeches all its news from news websites, and completely marginalizes and commoditizes them. The new sites pay to gather and publish the news, Google exploits it to build their traffic, and pays nothing for it. Taken to a future logicial conclusion it may wipe out existing newspapers and journalism and then there is a question who will gather the news for Google to leech. Though to be fair Craiglist did more to destroy newspapers than Google. Sure Google News drive traffic to news sites but its extremely transient traffic and its referrals probably seldom return until Google News sends them back again.
Android is kind of nice idea to dethrone the proprietary mobile OS's but the only reason Google can afford to do it is because their search monopoly subsidizes it. Its a conundrum, its nice to have an open source mobile OS and free services, but is it fair that Google uses its search monopoly to subsidize them which is an advantage most other companies don't have. They are effectively eliminating competition in a number of areas outside of search, which is the really big danger of monopolies, that they leverage their monopoly to seize new markets.
And the U.S. has China by the balls because without the U.S. buying their exports and sending them hundreds of billions in trade deficit their economy craters. Without western multinationals pumping capital, IP and jobs in to their economy it also craters. Their economy craters they risk revolution. The Chinese will only tolerate their corrupt one party rule if it gets them rich. If the U.S. and EU both slap cap and trade tariffs on them China is screwed.
China doesn't have the U.S. by the balls until their economy is self sustaining or they have markets in the rest of the world to make up for the huge one in the U.S. Most countries can't afford to maintain hundreds of billions in trade deficits. The U.S. economy is the Chinese economies crack....
""What part of the Constitutional gives you authority to do this?"
Amen baby!!! They might be able to get away with taxing us all to fund a public health care system since unfortunately the Federal income tax and payroll taxes for Medicare crept in to our system long ago though its open to debate if they are even constitutional. There is absolutely no way the Federal government can find a constitutional basis to compel me to spend money out of my pocket to buy health insurance.
You might cite the case of no fault auto insurance but that is A) Done by the states and B) if I don't drive I don't have to pay it so I can opt out. It can be required as an obligation for the privilege of driving on government built highways and I can accept that.
You might say that I have to pay for insurance so if I end up in an ER society doesn't have to pay. That is not true for me. I self insure and will pay my own way, and have, up to the point my own resources can't pay at which point I say no more medical care for me and I accept my fate. I don't want anyone else to have to pay a million dollars to save my skinny ass.
There is a fair chance if this health insurance mandate happens there will be NO way to opt out other than to be completely broke, in which case everyone else gets to pay for you. If you try they will probably do a Massachusetts and fine you so get to pay a fine and get no health insurance which is pretty much THEFT.
If they pass a mandate and the insurance lobby kills the public option, which is what I fully expect to happen, the insurance companies will be able to completely screw everyone because they will have a captive clientele.
The whole idea here is the government REALLY needs to force all the relatively healthy people in to the insurance system, especially YOUNG healthy people, to force them to pay for all the sick people. I can almost accept paying for health care for people who need care due to accident or illness that is no fault of there own. I absolutely can't accept forcing healthy people, and self insurers, who make good life style decisions, and are responsible, to pay for people who smoke, drink, don't exercise, eat garbage and end up overweight and diabetic with lung cancer, heart disease and needing liver transplants.
Since America is turning to a nation of people who make bad life style choices its getting urgent to force responsible healthy people to pay for the health care for all the irresponsible people. Insurance is much of the time a devious way to transfer wealth from one group of responsible people to irresponsible ones, and to shyster insurance companies and their share holders, who will given the slightest opening will either cancel your policy when you actually need it, or not cover the treatment you need after paying premiums for years.
I will self insure... thank you very much. LEAVE ME ALONE.
"That's the reason why you can't acknowledge that Obama is a much better president than Bush"
I'm pretty sure Obama is much more intelligent and is a vastly better speaker than Bush but that could just mean he will be more adept at manipulating the American people than Bush was. Bush/Cheney used blunt force to control the American people. Obama's team seems to me much better at deceit and making everyone one happy about being sold down the river. Take for example, all of these gimmicks to pretend like they are listening to the American people through the web. Listening through YouTube and Facebook is mostly designed in to suckering large numbers of Obama supporters, especially young people, in to thinking they are being heard when they really aren't. Congress and the White House still listen to lobbyists and corporations first, ordinary Joe's not at all, its going to take a seismic shift in our system for that to change, and its very unlikely to happen. Power just doesn't shift that radically without a major upheaval to force it, like a revolution.
You simply can't listen to a couple hundred million people randomly spouting off in YouTube, Facebook or on a web site. The Obama people are mostly just conning their supporters in to thinking if they say something on a website someone will actually listen. Chances are very slim of that happening, like winning the lottery slim.
I voted for Obama and I hated Bush/Cheney with a passion, but I am rapidly starting to agree with Bill Maher that in a lot of ways Obama really is Bush Lite. His popularity among Americans is about the same as Bush's at same point in their presidencies. Only thing Obama has is the rest of the world likes him while most of the world hated Bush from the get go.
Obama has continued SO many Bush policies unaltered he has mostly proved what everyone says, there isn't a dimes worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats any more. To name a few issues where there is no "Change":
- Warrantless spying on American citizens - Bush tax cuts for the rich continue - Tax cuts for middle class, are tiny, are going to get killed in a year or two and are a joke - Gitmo is still open and it appears it really hasn't changed much from where Bush/Cheney left it - Squandering money he doesn't have like a drunken sailor, just squandering it in slightly different directions - Iraq war strategy is essentially the way Bush left it - Afghan/Pakistan war strategy, escalation, and I wager its how Gates planned it under Bush - Insane claims to justify secrecy just like the Bush administartion - Multipage signing statements outlining all the parts of new laws from Congress he will ignore.... just like Bush. - Response to the economic crisis no different than Bush/Paulson other than the retarded $700 billion stimulus which squandered money to no good end, its was mostly Democratic pork. Bush/Paulson would have just handed out more money to Wall Street so it would have been Republican pork. - He maybe banned torture but I imagine the Bush administration had already been shamed in to stopping that, and Obama let all the people who enabled it at get away with violating U.S. and international law. Its criminal all the enlisted soldiers at Abu Graib did hard time for doing something that was White House mandated policy and happening at U.S. prisons around the globe. - Defense spending is at the same staggering levels where Bush left it
Only areas its clear Obama is diverging from Bush so far:
- Cap and trade bill which, if it even makes it through the Senate, wont solve anything other than kill more U.S. manufacturing jobs. For cap and trade to work it has to be global or polluters who can move, will move. They could have made a better bill by slapping tariffs on China and India until they join a global cap and trade system. China and India are going to add more pollution than the U.S. will ever cut under that bill.
- This health care bill. First strike against Obama he said "No Manda
Yes I'm 100% against a one nation cap and trade system. It isn't going to save the climate, its just a government scheme designed to make some expensive methods of energy production competitive when they really aren't. Chances are high China will just keep using the cheap method, burning coal and since they manufacture everything now anyway, what America does is increasingly irrelevant. Maybe there will be a modest reduction of coal fired power plants in the U.S. but China will more than offset that.
The surest way to reduce green house emissions in the U.S. is to just finish destroying the U.S. economy. It wont take much effort, there really isn't much left of it once you get outside of federal spending. When there are no factories, no computers, we are all unemployed and too broke to buy anything, drive or pay the utility bills our green house gas production will dramatically fall. The current recession/depression is already significantly reducing our fossil fuel consumption. Just look on it as a preview of greater things to come.
Newspapers can't compete with Craigslist or Google.
Craigslist took all the gravy out of the newspaper business... the classied ads and left the rest to rot... the reporting. A newspaper could compete with them.... if they fired all their journalists, got rid of all their overhead and did NOTHING but classified ads and stopped being a newspaper. In the old system classified ads were a key underpinning allowing newspapers to raise money to fund their news reporting. Craigslist did in fact dramatically improve how classified ads work, no argument. Its just an unintended consequence that they did it so well they wiped out the main source of funding for journalism.
Newspapers aren't going to compete against Google. Internet search wasn't something they were aware of until Google already owned it. Unfortunately internet search and the web has so dramatically altered the terrain the newspapers are in that through no real fault of their own their business is no longer viable. They can either let Google News continue to leech all their content for free and fail, or lock it up beind a subscription and fail.
You know at this point I don't care since no one else seems to. Its become pretty obvious over the last eight years especially that either Americans don't read or watch news, or if they do they don't understand it or just don't care what their government and corporations are doing to them. Its really OK with me if all the journalists get canned and all the newspapers fold, they mostly haven't been doing their job anyway.
We can all just sift through a million driveling bloggers to try to find our news, or trust our government to tell us what they want us to think, from now on. Let every corrupt politician and corporate executive rejoice, because there wont be any one left to rat them out unless some blogger gets lucky, someone reads his blog and anyone cares. I doubt anyone will care. Our banking system just managed to loot our country out of trillions of dollars, got away with it seems and we are too uninformed to really care.
"Ok, so you fight it when you think it's a good idea? That's seems silly."
Since you seem kind of dense let me repeat..... I'm 100% for it as long as you put tariffs on goods from countries who aren't implementing cap and trade so they have to pay the same tax whether they like it or not. If you don't to do that you are just making the U.S. more uncompetitive than it already is, and accelerating the migration of jobs and pollution to China. If you are cheering on cap and trade and think its going to really fix out climate and then continue to buy all your electronics and manufactured goods from China you are not very bright. You are cratering your own economy to save the climate, and China is still going to destroy the climate anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
"They are meant to be used to track people."
To be honest I'm not really sure why they would really bother with arphids to track people. The way its going everyone is carrying cell phones and those are a lot easier to track and track remotely than arphids and people carry them all the time without even thinking about which isn't true for passports. arphids might be a bit easier for close proximity identification, but it doesn't seem very reliable to me.
Cory Doctorow's Create Commons book Little Brother is a not so fictional account of assorted abuses by the Department of Homeland Security. DHS tracking people with arphids in BART passes and toll passes in cars is one of the plot lines. It won this years Prometheus award(Libertarian Sci/Fi). Its not exactly a work of great literature. He ripped it out in a relatively short period of time and it could have used more work. But its kind of an entertaining read for geeks and a reminder how out of control the American government has been since 9/11. The book is also FREE. The ideas of XNet and Paranoid Linux are priceless. Adhoc WiFi may be the only way to have a free Internet where Big Brother isn't watching your every move.
One does have to wonder why the NSA is building giant new data centers in San Antonia and Utah and expanding the existing one in Maryland. They seem to be ramping up to eavesdrop on a LOT more of something. I'm also wondering what this secret program Cheney was running in the CIA was all about since it appears it wasn't the torture or the already leaked NSA domestic spying program. If you think the Democrats and Obama wont be just as bad about trampling our civil liberties as Bush/Cheney you are very naive.
Will computers liberate us or enslave us. Paradoxically, probably both at the same time.
"NASA was the only organization to put a man on the moon"
That was 40 years ago, completely different organization now. They for the most part don't even remember how they did it since all nearly all the Apollo veterans have retired.
"and a couple of rovers on Mars, fly by Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer planets"
These are more JPL than NASA. JPL manages to operate in a little cocoon that has prevented it from being infected by the pointless bureaucracy in the rest of NASA
"build and operate a space plane and a space station."
Soviet Union/Russia operated Mir long before ISS came along and they actually did it on a reasonable budget and actually did stuff on it. NASA has spent way over a $100 billion, 30 years on ISS and its still not doing much useful science or anything else. They mostly spend all their time repairing and maintaining it. They NASA time line has them pretty much abandoning it as soon as they finish building it. No one will even be able to get there without the Russian's and Soyuz if the the Shuttle retires next year.
Soviet Union did build and fly a space plane but only to keep up with the U.S. I think they quickly realized it wasn't reusable because it had to be practically rebuilt between every flight, was staggeringly expensive to fly, and was very unreliable. It was common sense on their part they killed it and stuck the affordable Soyuz which is basically what NASA is coming back to with Orion. ISS and Space Shuttle weren't really NASA's finest hour. They justified the space shuttle because they needed it for the ISS. They needed the ISS so the shuttle would have a place to go. It was a circular firing squad.
The fundamental problem with the manned spaced division in NASA is that since Apollo they have never really had a mission. They just create the barest minimum mission they can think of to keep themselves employed. They know the President and Congress will never fund them to do anything amazing like put a colony on Mars, so they ask for missions that they can get funds for but they are kind of stupid and pointless. ISS and space shuttle were just so they had something safe for astronauts do in LEO and then they squander large amounts of money doing next to nothing. It was mostly a jobs program and the return to the Moon isn't really any better. Bill Nelson, Senator from Florida in particular insures NASA keeps getting funded just so he keeps the jobs in Florida.
NASA either needs to figure out manned missions that are compelling and useful or they need to stop wasting money and fall back on robotic mission until they find a reason for men to work in space. They only manned mission I can really see at the moment is a colony on Mars, everything else seems better done with robots and it would be a lot cheaper.
Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon, wrote a piece a few weeks back about how silly it is for NASA to just repeat Apollo again forty years later. He proposed NASA partner with China, India, Russia and EU and let them lead the lunar mission because it would be new and exciting to them, while NASA focused on going to Mars and do something really exciting and with a point. He advocated my position is that Mars should be a one way trip for colonist and not another stunt like Apollo where we go, pick up rocks, and leave. I would be inclined to say the U.S. is too broke to do Mars but when you see us squander trillions of dollars on corrupt bankers, Iraq and a brain dead stimulas a colony on Mars almost seems pretty good by comparison.
He should ask himself, "Am I a dick"? if the answer is yes.... go management he is a natural. Chances are he will make a lot more money at it too, if he is a dick....
If you are a nice, level headed person who treats the people around you like... you know... people.... management is the last place for you. One of my least favorite managers way back referred to us all as her "assets", she didn't even really recognize us as people, we were just chits she was using to advance her career.
Not sure I would say that I "hate" publishers. I just don't like gatekeepers on information who take the lion's share of the profits because they have the keys to the gate. The only reason they had the keys to the gate was because typesetting and printing on dead trees was expensive and out of the reach of each author. In the ebook era there is really no reason traditional publishers should continue to exert the control they have.
I see no reason authors couldn't have an editor work over their book for them and either pay the editor or give them a cut of the proceeds, a much smaller cut than a publisher takes. There is no reason in the ebook era for traditional publishers to continue to exert the dictatorial control they currently have, just like there is no reason record companies should. I don't think book publishing is as bad as music publishing since there are a lot more niche players with good heart and soul. The music publishing business has pretty much proved to be a complete and utter failure and needs to die in the digital age. Me personally I'd kind of like to see a profusion of new and innovative authors spring up in the ebook age and I'd like to see all the good ones get rich for their efforts, and not the leech publishers.
I'll agree its kind of a fluff piece. What did you expect out of Rolling Stone :) A problem is I don't think you will get anyone in the financial press who will do a hatchet job on Goldman because they are too powerful and well connected. I saw one of the frontline pieces and it wasn't really much better. It just recounted pretty much the same sequence of events you would have heard on CNBC during the melt down. I'll watch the other, thanks for the pointer.
If you were looking for "specific evidence" I doubt you will find any unless there is a criminal investigation like Enron where their internal emails are acquired and I doubt A) anyone will touch them with an investifation, they are too powerful or B) they are dumb enough to keep any juicy emails. Only other way the truth will come out about what Goldman is doing is if a powerful insider rats them out and that is also unlikely because insiders make a lot of money there and would risk it all if they ratted out Goldman. It would be entertaining to analyze their trading software to see if it offers clues in to any potential manipulation of commodities markets in particular.
The whole problem with the shenanigans at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup is they have used their alumni in the White House and lobbyist control of Congress to completely eliminate transparency or accountability so no one really knows what they are doing, and we may never. They can't keep manipulating markets and creating bubbles to their benefit if there is transparency in the financial system, especially in commodities trading and credit default swaps.
One interesting part in the Rolling Stone piece I hadn't heard were the "secret" letters Goldman's commodity trader J Aron and a dozen others had gotten exempting them from the depression era regulations on speculating in commodities. It used to be producers of commodities were the only ones exempt from speculation rules because they actually produced the commodities. Someone how a bunch of pure speculators like Goldman and Citigroup's commodity traders were also exempted. Anyone have good pointers to more details on that?
I wish I remember where I saw it today but there was a piece on the NY Times or some place similar about the volatility in oil prices. The volatility we've had the last couple of years is unprecedented, it is completely decoupled from fundamentals and is probably entirely due to speculators either like Goldman and Citi commodity traders or day traders using ETF's in commodities. It is becoming clear if the speculation doesn't stop it will break big oil consumers like airlines. Airlines simply can't survive if their fuel prices continue to swing wildly. The only other culprit I've heard lately is maybe China went on a commodity buying binge in first half of 2009 as a way to dump the dollars they have too many of, which is why commodities have been rallying this time around.
The problem is some big companies with a stranglehold on our government have managed to constantly emasculate regulation and prevent all transparency, especially in commodity trading and credit default swaps. It is basically impossible right now for anyone to know what kind of BS Goldman and friends are pulling to manipulate markets to their benefit and to the devastation of everyone else. You simply can't let commodities speculation continue if you want a healthy economy. Speculators provide a little liquidity but otherwise they are pure vampires on essential commodities. All they do is drive up the price and they play no constructive role anywhere in the process. Their sole goal is buy low and sell high and they don't care if they drive gas to $4 a gallon for no reason, or cause starvation and food riots in the third world because the drive up wheat, corn and rice prices for no reason. All commodity speculators do is either take advantage of shortage, or even worse create shortages where none would exist to drive up prices so they can profit for no reason.
Goldman and friends have fought
Pretty much everything you posted is because your mind is stuck in the previous publishing business model.
You don't need typesetting, cover design, etc. As long as the author delivers their work in readable form for the ebook no one really cares about the rest of that stuff. Final edit might be nice but authors can get people to proof their books for them without selling their soul and a big chunk of their profits to the devil.
The whole point of niche ebook publishing is it doesn't exactly matter if only 10 people want to read it. As long as the author wants to write and some people want to read it, it should be available. I doubt an ebook publisher is going go for a book with a target market of 10 but at least some should go for works with a market of thousands assuming their overhead has been shaved to a minimum, and the book is delivered in a ready to distribute form by the author. As best I recall niche authors publish their own books all the time on dead trees, and that is a LOT more expensive to do than it is in the ebook era. Pretty sure I remember some books were self published that eventually turned in to major successes. No publisher would take them, author self published, and as people read it and passed them around they eventually became raging successes.
Publishers have all the same bad motivations to kill books that they don't think will be popular as record companies have. Record companies increasingly produce horrible music and artists who pander to lowest common denominator. I can think of nothing better than if we get to a situation where there is an ebook company that will publish just about anything and devise a system where readers decide what is good and bad instead of publishers. Yes you do need to keep the signal to noise ration high but I have my doubts publishers are any more the right way to do that than record companies.
There is a pretty good expose up on Rolling Stone describing the nefarious behavior of Goldman Sachs. They are in general what you expect out of Wall Street types, greedy and unscrupulous but very good at what they do. Unfortunately what they are good at is creating devastation in their wake so they can take home multimillion dollar bonuses every year, and completely controlling our government so they can get away with it.
Good point but Goldman Sachs deserves to be loathed. They are behind some of the most malevolent behavior that has damaged our economy while they profit dating back to the Great Depression. They were probably a leading creator of the housing bubble and crash which has wiped out trillions of dollars of average peoples wealth. They are also leading commodity manipulators, they have a letter from the U.S. government exempting from commodity laws to prevent speculation. They may be partially responsible for the oil price spike above $140, and last years spike in food prices that caused food riots and starvation in the third world.
You do have to give them credit that they manage to cause catastrophic collapses when the bubbles they help create bursts, and still manage to walk away unscathed. During the house bubble they created mortgage backed securities they knew were garbage and then suckered AIG in to writing credit default swaps on them so they won when they sold the crap and then won again when it went to hell. At least ten billion dollars of your tax dollars went in one door at AIG and out the back door in to Goldman Sachs pocket as reward for creating garbage mortgages.
Rolling Stone has a good expose on them though the bootleg version has been pulled offline due to "copyright infringement". Its called "The Great American Bubble Machine".
They probably had all the same complaints about software until Apple proved them wrong with its app store. Why do all these arguments apply to books but not to apps for the iPhone?
Sure there are ebook publishers that wont tank works from an individual now but all that does is open up a market for a low overhead ebook publisher who will.
"Even less fathomable is why publishers are letting the ebook market degenerate into competing formats, proprietary readers and possible market dominance by Amazon."
Even less fathomable is why you need "publishers" once you fully reach the ebook era. The only necessary roll they play in the system is to publish books on dead trees. Good authors could easily start going direct to ebooks and completely cut publishers out of the system as long as they are willing to go without a dead tree version of their books.
Publishers play a roll in filtering out the crap but they also filter out stuff none of them like but at least a niche audience might find interesting. They play a roll in promotion which may still be necessary but in the Internet era probably isn't as importance as it once was.
Publishers are about as useful in the digital age as record companies.
If anyone is really worried about spiking oil and gasoline prices you should be a lot more worried about the role speculators are playing in the commodities markets than any effect cap and trade will have. Rolling Stone has an excellent exposé on the role Goldman Sachs in particular played in running oil prices up to $147 a barrel. Its a must read if you want to understand how Wall Street screws the rest of us to take home their multimillion dollar pay checks. This link is a scan, Rolling Stone doesn't have an online version. It is Rolling Stone so isn't exactly a pillar in the financial news industry, though the pillars probably wont rat out Goldman, and they are rats.
The reason for the recent oil spikes really has nothing to do with supply and demand or cap and trade. The real causes were:
A. Goldman Sachs and a dozen or so other big speculators got secret letters years ago exempting them from commodities regulations dating back to the 1930's which were designed to prevent speculators from driving up commodities prices.
B. Large amounts of money were fleeing the housing bubble bursh, and resulting stock market crash, also caused in large part by Goldman Sachs. Goldman was packaging a lot of the toxic mortgages and then buying credit default swaps shorting their own mortgage bundles because they knew they were garbage. Most were with AIG so when the mortgage bundles turned to crap AIG went bankrupt, U.S. taxpayer gave them a $130 billion dollars and much of it wen out the back door in to Goldman's pocket (like $10 billion). Most of this was engineered by Paulson and the new head of AIG, both former Goldman Sachs executives. It was... criminal.
C. Speculators poured in to oil and food futures with the help of entites like J Aron, Goldman's secretive commodity trader. Oil futures traded hands 20-30 times and were inflated beyond all reason, there was and still is a glut of oil was being parked all over the globe. They just moved the housing bubble to a commodities bubble. This bubble caused the oil price spike and food price spikes that caused $4 gas in the U.S. and food riots and starvation in the third world.
Goldman Sachs has acquired such massive control over our government and financial system thanks to alumni like Paulson and Rubin. They have completely gutted financial regulation and turned all global markets in to rigged casinos where they always win and the rest of us always lose. It appears Summers is the new White House insider protecting Goldman's interests. Rubin in particular defeated every attempt to regulate credit default swaps. Paulson as Goldman CEO talked the government in to removing caps on leverage that enabled the recent bubble. A host of characters gutted regulation of the commodities market making commodity bubbles the new norm.
A British Lord and financial type recently testified in front of an EU commission. His take was the big banks have managed to completely defang new attempts to regulate them in the wake of the recent crisis. They often threatened to just move off shore if the regulations got too onerous. He said they are RAPIDLY returning to business as usual prior to the recent collapse. They are returning to obscene compensation levels which is why they rushed to pay back all the TARP money. He predicted there will be another bubble and another major collapse in 10 to 15 years if it even takes that long.
Moral hazard is a critical element in a Capitalist system. If you gamble big and lose you HAVE to know you will fail. Since the U.S. and E.U. governments bailed out all the most of the gamblers and saved most of them from any consequences at all for their misdeeds they will just repeat the cycle. They will gamble, they will pocket big profits, and when the bubble bursts tax payers, workers and consumers the world over will get to pick up the tab for the losses.
Its open to debate how much "harm" climate change has caused. There is anecdotal evidence it is harming coral reefs, and stressing polar bears. Climate change and green house gases are probably causing harm and will probably cause more in the future but we are relatively ignorant about our climate or what the actual results will be in the long run. Last article I read on coral reef problems indicated they are extremely complex ecosystems and we really don't have a very good insight in to what is causing their plight.
The rate of change in our climate, which certainly might be green house gas related, is probably bad because when climate changes so fast it makes it hard for animal and plant life to adapt.
But.... no where is it written in stone that the climate we had before the industrial age is the climate we have to lock in, in perpetuity. The Earth's climate has always changed and changed dramatically. The climate we had was one that was from exiting a recent ice age. The fact that large swaths of the planet are cloaked in ice and largely uninhabitable is kind of clue maybe our climate was a little on the cold side.
It could be argued that by releasing CO2 trapped in vegetation from eras when the world was much warmer and more tropical we are just going to return a more normal climate from prior to the last ice age. People in cold northern and southern climes might actually LIKE the change. I recall Midwestern winters are some number of degrees warmer than they used to be thirty years ago and if you ever lived through a classic bone chilling Midwestern winter most Midwesterners would probably say that change is positive.
We certainly run the risk of more hurricanes and more violent weather, but I don't think its a given that any of the climate "simulations" being touted by climate change chicken littles are even close to being accurate. Predictions there are going to be massive droughts and desertification could ultimately prove to be completely wrong. As oceans warm they could just as easily lead to dramatic increases in precipitation and return deserts like the Sahara to being verdant and abundant with life. More CO2 in the air will almost certainly improve plant growth. I'm no expert but its my guess that when the Earth has had previous peak green house periods it probably adapted with lush tropical jungles which thrived on the CO2 and proceeded to trap it in coal beds, cooling the planet. Of course with man intervening in the natural cycles we might tip the cycle in to a run away green house effect and destroy all life on Earth.
I lean to the belief it is probably better if we reduce the rate at which we are dumping green house gases in to the atmosphere, because the rate of climate change will probably be too rapid for most life forms, especially the Homo Sapiens who foolishly have half their species located in low lying coastal areas often in habitats that can't easily be moved.
On the other hand I haven't got much use for all the people who claim to know exactly what is happening now, why it is happening and what will happen ten, fifty or a hundred years from now and claim to know that it is all BAD. Truth is we unfortunately have very little insight in to how our climate works or where it will be in five years, let alone a hundred. We should proceed with caution. Green house gas pollution is probably bad, but you should take the, sky is falling, Chicken Little crowd with a grain of salt. Even if you accept we must urgently prevent rapid climate change, you should also stop kidding yourself any legislation coming out of bodies as worthless as the EU or the U.S. Congress is going to solve the problem:
A. Both EU and U.S. cap and trade bills are full of holes. As this submission suggests they had to pander to so many special interests to get them passed they probably aren't going to be effective. The recent House cap and trade had to be gutted to get coal state and farm state congressmen to support it so it hands out so many offsets it debatable if it wil
The problem isn't really OpenOffice handling Word doc files. The problem is more if you produce a Word doc file in Open Office and send it to someone using Office it usually looks like crap to them. If you create the documeny, publish it as PDF and send it to someone on Windows, then you are fine. The problem arises if you actually have to share an editable .doc file with someone using MS Office. In that case Open Office is usually pretty much a fail, especially if the document is non trivial, with complex formatting, pictures or diagrams.
I don't necessarily fault the Open Office developers for this, I'm sure Microsoft makes it as hard on them as they possible can.
But, all of the open source fanboys who say OpenOffice has no problem interoperating with Word are simply wrong. Until and unless Open Office can interchange doc files with Word seamlessly its going to have serious problems gaining acceptance in the business world. Microsoft knows that, they know the network is working in their favor in holding their monopoly on office software. They sure aren't going to make it any easier on Open Office to send doc files to Word. I wouldn't be surprised if MS Office detects characteristics of Open Office produced doc files and intentionally mangles them.
"Since a large operation would have maybe 1000 head of cattle, it can be presumed that from the ear tags"
Ear tags are pretty fallible. Our cattle its pretty normal for a cow or two a year to rip them out. To be honest I think RFID tags would be a lot more reliable and a lot less misery to the animals than ear tags. If you could add some basic breeding, ownership history and health information to the tags they would have self contained documentation which would also be cheaper and more reliable than paper.
If you could replace branding with RFID that would save a LOT of expense, misery and health consequences to the animals. Branding is way worse punishment to the animals than an RFID tag would. If you let the cattle vote on this I'm pretty RFID tags would win :) Problem is I imagine rustlers would be able to remove or alter RFID tags unless you plant them deep, while brands are pretty hard to change.
To be honest if you can brand your cattle you can RFID tag them at the same time so I'm pretty skeptical about these complaints from ranchers. Its more likely they just hate the "gummint" and a bunch of new laws being laid on them. I can kind of empathize with that, but the weak arguments about how impossible and expensive are exactly that, weak.
"remember how the twitter design totally havoced the iranian attempts to block"
Its kind of hard to tell what exactly happened in Iran, but I've seen speculation that the protesters extensive use of Twitter and the Internet mostly just made it easier for the Iranian government to identify the trouble makers and where they lived so they could pay them a visit. Its possible the use of Twitter just made it easier to crush the protests more quickly. If you are advocating the overthrow of a government from within anonymity is relatively important.
When you are trying to topple an authoritarian regime using the Internet from anything other than an untraceable IP address seems extremely unwise to me especially when all of Iran's internet traffic is being funneled through monitored choke points.
It is likewise being somewhat optimistic at this point to think that any site that will enable widespread piracy is going to be impervious to tracing, warrants and shutdown notices. About the only way to do it is for the hub to be located in a pariah country that is indifferent to digital rights and which will ignore the complaints, and block any attempt to traces the IP addresses going in and out of the hub. Its pretty tough to be a rogue nation if the U.S. and E.U. use their governments to apply diplomatic and economic pressure. China seems to be one of the few countries mostly immune to western digital rights concerns.
"read and relax where he is safe"
They haven't decided where he is serving his sentence yet. If its a minimum security country club prison your assessment might be correct. If it a real federal penitentiary with violent criminals it might not be so safe or easy. There are also more than a few people who might wish him harm and people can be harmed in prison for a price.
All in all I really don't feel any sympathy for his victims. To me it was a greedy crook fleecing greedy people who were borderline themselves. It is more than a little unrealistic to expect 10-12% annual returns year after year with no risk. You can make a LOT of money compounding at that rate. Getting that kind of annual return pretty much always entails high risk. There is an old saying you should be very afraid when you are making a lot of money because its usually too good to be true and wont last, and you can make a lot of money when everyone else is afraid.
His victims were in a lot of ways just as greedy as he was. His feeder funds and victims must have suspected it was fishy, but went along as long as they got theirs out of it. They mostly seem to have thought they were special and privileged and deserved to get returns ordinary people couldn't. I feel no sympathy for people like that. They gambled in the casino Wall Street has turned in to and lost. Tough luck, nothing to see here and time to move on. Stop crying. Your own fault you put all your money in to an investment that was too good to be true.
About the only good thing that could come out of it is to compel meaningful reform and regulation of Wall Steet and and all indications are that isn't going to happen. Wall Street is rapidly going back to business as usual. Wall Street cost people like 14 trillion in wealth in the last collapse and most of it was due to criminal fraud and Ponzi schemes just as bad as Madoff and very few of those fat cats are going to jail. Obama and Geitner's proposed reforms are toothless.
I saw in passing a week or so some British lord and financial type was testifying in front of an EU commission. His take was the big banks and hedge funds were threatening regulators with blackmail. If the EU and the US go too far with regulation, they would move to Switzerland or the Caribbean and take their money with them. His take was the fat cats were racing to get back to were they were in 2006, demanding ridiculously high compensation, resuming the high risk investments, undermining reforms and he fully expects another bubble and collapse in 10 or 15 years. The tax payers and ordinary Joe's will be screwed again and the rich will just keep getting richer. It seems almost inevitable because the banks conned all their governments in to bailing them out. The essential concept of moral hazard has been completely undermined. The fat cats now know they can gamble and take all the winnings and when they lose taxpayers will take all the losses. If the banks were "too big to fail" before its even worse now because due to the forced mergers of the last year America three biggest banks are now bigger than ever. JP Morgan, B of A and Citibank are now the three largest banks in the world based on tier 1 capital due to mergers.
Google's nearest competitors in search are Microsoft and Yahoo and both have market shares in the low teens. It is a defacto monopoly. Only place they may not have one are in countries like China where local competitors are more competitive.
I agree in the long run China is in the catbird seat. But its naive to think that they could lose their major export markets to the U.S. and E.U. without their economy cratering. The massive slowdown in U.S. purchases during the recent slowdown highlighted that fact. Only reason China weathered it is it had huge reserves from its previous decade of running huge trade surpluses with the U.S. As I said previously China needs to maintain 7-8% growth just to keep their population employed and they wont do that without selling to the U.S. and E.U. It is the only leverage the west has to force them to rein in their out of control pollution which will destroy our planet no matter how many cap an trades schemes the west does.
The U.S. economy is going to eventually crater but it hasn't yet and it is still the dominant market for Chinese exports. It is most definitely still a mutual dependency.
"As for markets, they could trade internally and consume more of what they produce, rather than swapping it for IOUs."
Gross oversimplification and obvious bias. The U.S. still make half the worlds airliners, most of the major CPU's and graphics chips still originate in the U.S. So do the worlds two leading operating systems, iPhones, iTunes, heavy equipment(Caterpillar), leading weapons exporter, etc. The U.S. is still a leading manufacturer and the world's leading economy. The trajectory is definitely bad but the U.S. isn't exactly finished just yet. Even if it is finished economically it does still have an intimidating offensive military capability.
The problem with Google and competition is they have giant rivers of money coming in from their search/ad monopoly. I'm somewhat less concerned about their search business being a monopoly than the fact it gives them rivers of money that they can pour in to other markets, do things for free, and destroy everyone who can't afford to do the same thing for free. Its kind of like Microsoft leveraging its Windows monopoly to destroy Netscape by giving IE away for free.
Google can afford to do Google News and GMail for free only because their search business subsidizes them. Google News is a little insidious because it leeches all its news from news websites, and completely marginalizes and commoditizes them. The new sites pay to gather and publish the news, Google exploits it to build their traffic, and pays nothing for it. Taken to a future logicial conclusion it may wipe out existing newspapers and journalism and then there is a question who will gather the news for Google to leech. Though to be fair Craiglist did more to destroy newspapers than Google. Sure Google News drive traffic to news sites but its extremely transient traffic and its referrals probably seldom return until Google News sends them back again.
Android is kind of nice idea to dethrone the proprietary mobile OS's but the only reason Google can afford to do it is because their search monopoly subsidizes it. Its a conundrum, its nice to have an open source mobile OS and free services, but is it fair that Google uses its search monopoly to subsidize them which is an advantage most other companies don't have. They are effectively eliminating competition in a number of areas outside of search, which is the really big danger of monopolies, that they leverage their monopoly to seize new markets.
"China has the US by the balls."
And the U.S. has China by the balls because without the U.S. buying their exports and sending them hundreds of billions in trade deficit their economy craters. Without western multinationals pumping capital, IP and jobs in to their economy it also craters. Their economy craters they risk revolution. The Chinese will only tolerate their corrupt one party rule if it gets them rich. If the U.S. and EU both slap cap and trade tariffs on them China is screwed.
China doesn't have the U.S. by the balls until their economy is self sustaining or they have markets in the rest of the world to make up for the huge one in the U.S. Most countries can't afford to maintain hundreds of billions in trade deficits. The U.S. economy is the Chinese economies crack....
""What part of the Constitutional gives you authority to do this?"
Amen baby!!! They might be able to get away with taxing us all to fund a public health care system since unfortunately the Federal income tax and payroll taxes for Medicare crept in to our system long ago though its open to debate if they are even constitutional. There is absolutely no way the Federal government can find a constitutional basis to compel me to spend money out of my pocket to buy health insurance.
You might cite the case of no fault auto insurance but that is A) Done by the states and B) if I don't drive I don't have to pay it so I can opt out. It can be required as an obligation for the privilege of driving on government built highways and I can accept that.
You might say that I have to pay for insurance so if I end up in an ER society doesn't have to pay. That is not true for me. I self insure and will pay my own way, and have, up to the point my own resources can't pay at which point I say no more medical care for me and I accept my fate. I don't want anyone else to have to pay a million dollars to save my skinny ass.
There is a fair chance if this health insurance mandate happens there will be NO way to opt out other than to be completely broke, in which case everyone else gets to pay for you. If you try they will probably do a Massachusetts and fine you so get to pay a fine and get no health insurance which is pretty much THEFT.
If they pass a mandate and the insurance lobby kills the public option, which is what I fully expect to happen, the insurance companies will be able to completely screw everyone because they will have a captive clientele.
The whole idea here is the government REALLY needs to force all the relatively healthy people in to the insurance system, especially YOUNG healthy people, to force them to pay for all the sick people. I can almost accept paying for health care for people who need care due to accident or illness that is no fault of there own. I absolutely can't accept forcing healthy people, and self insurers, who make good life style decisions, and are responsible, to pay for people who smoke, drink, don't exercise, eat garbage and end up overweight and diabetic with lung cancer, heart disease and needing liver transplants.
Since America is turning to a nation of people who make bad life style choices its getting urgent to force responsible healthy people to pay for the health care for all the irresponsible people. Insurance is much of the time a devious way to transfer wealth from one group of responsible people to irresponsible ones, and to shyster insurance companies and their share holders, who will given the slightest opening will either cancel your policy when you actually need it, or not cover the treatment you need after paying premiums for years.
I will self insure... thank you very much. LEAVE ME ALONE.
"That's the reason why you can't acknowledge that Obama is a much better president than Bush"
I'm pretty sure Obama is much more intelligent and is a vastly better speaker than Bush but that could just mean he will be more adept at manipulating the American people than Bush was. Bush/Cheney used blunt force to control the American people. Obama's team seems to me much better at deceit and making everyone one happy about being sold down the river. Take for example, all of these gimmicks to pretend like they are listening to the American people through the web. Listening through YouTube and Facebook is mostly designed in to suckering large numbers of Obama supporters, especially young people, in to thinking they are being heard when they really aren't. Congress and the White House still listen to lobbyists and corporations first, ordinary Joe's not at all, its going to take a seismic shift in our system for that to change, and its very unlikely to happen. Power just doesn't shift that radically without a major upheaval to force it, like a revolution.
You simply can't listen to a couple hundred million people randomly spouting off in YouTube, Facebook or on a web site. The Obama people are mostly just conning their supporters in to thinking if they say something on a website someone will actually listen. Chances are very slim of that happening, like winning the lottery slim.
I voted for Obama and I hated Bush/Cheney with a passion, but I am rapidly starting to agree with Bill Maher that in a lot of ways Obama really is Bush Lite. His popularity among Americans is about the same as Bush's at same point in their presidencies. Only thing Obama has is the rest of the world likes him while most of the world hated Bush from the get go.
Obama has continued SO many Bush policies unaltered he has mostly proved what everyone says, there isn't a dimes worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats any more. To name a few issues where there is no "Change":
- Warrantless spying on American citizens
- Bush tax cuts for the rich continue
- Tax cuts for middle class, are tiny, are going to get killed in a year or two and are a joke
- Gitmo is still open and it appears it really hasn't changed much from where Bush/Cheney left it
- Squandering money he doesn't have like a drunken sailor, just squandering it in slightly different directions
- Iraq war strategy is essentially the way Bush left it
- Afghan/Pakistan war strategy, escalation, and I wager its how Gates planned it under Bush
- Insane claims to justify secrecy just like the Bush administartion
- Multipage signing statements outlining all the parts of new laws from Congress he will ignore.... just like Bush.
- Response to the economic crisis no different than Bush/Paulson other than the retarded $700 billion stimulus which squandered money to no good end, its was mostly Democratic pork. Bush/Paulson would have just handed out more money to Wall Street so it would have been Republican pork.
- He maybe banned torture but I imagine the Bush administration had already been shamed in to stopping that, and Obama let all the people who enabled it at get away with violating U.S. and international law. Its criminal all the enlisted soldiers at Abu Graib did hard time for doing something that was White House mandated policy and happening at U.S. prisons around the globe.
- Defense spending is at the same staggering levels where Bush left it
Only areas its clear Obama is diverging from Bush so far:
- Cap and trade bill which, if it even makes it through the Senate, wont solve anything other than kill more U.S. manufacturing jobs. For cap and trade to work it has to be global or polluters who can move, will move. They could have made a better bill by slapping tariffs on China and India until they join a global cap and trade system. China and India are going to add more pollution than the U.S. will ever cut under that bill.
- This health care bill. First strike against Obama he said "No Manda
Yes I'm 100% against a one nation cap and trade system. It isn't going to save the climate, its just a government scheme designed to make some expensive methods of energy production competitive when they really aren't. Chances are high China will just keep using the cheap method, burning coal and since they manufacture everything now anyway, what America does is increasingly irrelevant. Maybe there will be a modest reduction of coal fired power plants in the U.S. but China will more than offset that.
The surest way to reduce green house emissions in the U.S. is to just finish destroying the U.S. economy. It wont take much effort, there really isn't much left of it once you get outside of federal spending. When there are no factories, no computers, we are all unemployed and too broke to buy anything, drive or pay the utility bills our green house gas production will dramatically fall. The current recession/depression is already significantly reducing our fossil fuel consumption. Just look on it as a preview of greater things to come.
Newspapers can't compete with Craigslist or Google.
Craigslist took all the gravy out of the newspaper business... the classied ads and left the rest to rot... the reporting. A newspaper could compete with them.... if they fired all their journalists, got rid of all their overhead and did NOTHING but classified ads and stopped being a newspaper. In the old system classified ads were a key underpinning allowing newspapers to raise money to fund their news reporting. Craigslist did in fact dramatically improve how classified ads work, no argument. Its just an unintended consequence that they did it so well they wiped out the main source of funding for journalism.
Newspapers aren't going to compete against Google. Internet search wasn't something they were aware of until Google already owned it. Unfortunately internet search and the web has so dramatically altered the terrain the newspapers are in that through no real fault of their own their business is no longer viable. They can either let Google News continue to leech all their content for free and fail, or lock it up beind a subscription and fail.
You know at this point I don't care since no one else seems to. Its become pretty obvious over the last eight years especially that either Americans don't read or watch news, or if they do they don't understand it or just don't care what their government and corporations are doing to them. Its really OK with me if all the journalists get canned and all the newspapers fold, they mostly haven't been doing their job anyway.
We can all just sift through a million driveling bloggers to try to find our news, or trust our government to tell us what they want us to think, from now on. Let every corrupt politician and corporate executive rejoice, because there wont be any one left to rat them out unless some blogger gets lucky, someone reads his blog and anyone cares. I doubt anyone will care. Our banking system just managed to loot our country out of trillions of dollars, got away with it seems and we are too uninformed to really care.
"Ok, so you fight it when you think it's a good idea? That's seems silly."
Since you seem kind of dense let me repeat..... I'm 100% for it as long as you put tariffs on goods from countries who aren't implementing cap and trade so they have to pay the same tax whether they like it or not. If you don't to do that you are just making the U.S. more uncompetitive than it already is, and accelerating the migration of jobs and pollution to China. If you are cheering on cap and trade and think its going to really fix out climate and then continue to buy all your electronics and manufactured goods from China you are not very bright. You are cratering your own economy to save the climate, and China is still going to destroy the climate anyway.