The reason they have repressive birth control now is they failed to control it by gentler means for the previous century, through better education and promoting access to contraceptives. At this point they are closing the barn door after the horse is long gone. Their current brutual birth control regime, including government forced abortions, may reign in their explosive population growth in a few generations but but the world is going to see some extreme pain before then. I don't think India is really doing anything to solve their problem other than they have a cultural fondness for disposing of female fetuses.
Whatever its origins there is one plus to extreme overpopulation. You have a vast pool of cheap labor to exploit as long as you can keep them minimally fed and housed, and you have the capital to create jobs for them. Lucky for them Western multinationals have been pouring capital in there, to exploit that cheap labor, which insures they have jobs, or in fact jumpstarted their economy overnight at the expense of workers in the west. For example by boxing up machine tools and whole factories in the West and shipping them to China overnight again purely to exploit the cheap labor.
I hate to point this out but your post really sounds self contradictory. First you say:
"The fact that embrionic stem cell research isn't largely funded elsewhere in the world should be a big hint that the controversy isn't just religious."
Then you say:
"It's sad the $3 billion of tax payer funds won't go to adult stem cell research, where the results have been forthcoming. There's been/. posts of adult stem research reviving all types of nerve cells, and there's no ethical delimma involved."
So you are saying "results have been forthcoming" with adult stem cell research but somehow imply they aren't also forthcoming for embryonic stem cell research. Well I'm pretty sure embryonic stem cells have just as much potential if not more.
You suggest the controversy over embryonic research isn't just "religious" but then you tag embryonic research with an "ethical delimma". Well maybe "religious controversy" and "ethical delimna" aren't exactly same thing but they sure are close and I think the way you are using them they ARE the same thing.
Why don't you just say what you are tap dancing around. I suspect you oppose embryonic research on religious grounds so you are trying to do what all the religious types who oppose embryonic research do and try to con everyone in to thinking adult stem cell research is just hands down better in every regard when it really isn't, and anyone pursuing embryonic research is crazy.
The bottomline is a large number of government and private companies wont touch embryonic stem cell research with a 10 foot pool simply because they know they will get targeted by religious groups and that targeting will be especially harmful to politicians who want to get reelected and executives who need to raise capital, turn a profit and answer to shareholders.
"If you're okay with children starving in China, then it's fine to oppose this leveling."
I'm not exactly sure why, because India and China failed to control unsustainable population growth, that the rest of the world needs to destroy their economies and economic well being to insure they are well fed. Economics is in reality a form of warfare. Sometimes a rising tide raises all boats but most of the time there are economic winners and losers. The U.S. was the big winner in the 20th century. It is poised to be a big loser in this one, at least for the vast majority of its people, while its top 1% will probably continue to do very well. In this brand of warfare there really is no reason why U.S. workers should aid and abet their own destruction to insure the "Chinese" are well fad.
This isn't really about insuring China and India are well fed anyway.
The bottomline at work here is there is a global economic elite, less than 1% of the world populations who are rich and getting richer. In the last 30 years many powerful communist party members in China abandoned socialism, for Fascism, and are entering the ranks of this elite along side the long established rich in the U.S. and Europe.
This elite embraces and loves globalization. They have the capital and the ability to invest it anywhere in the world where it will yield the greatest return on their investment. By contrast working people have limited resource and they can't just invest in the new economic hotspot in the world like China. If their nations economy craters they get to starve.
Its a basic axiom of capitalism that labor cost is one of the basic factors in profitability. In the past trade and physical barriers allowed labor costs to diverge in different regions. The U.S., Japan and Western Europe could have high wage rates and a good standard of living because they weren't competing head to head with people making a few cents an hour in Asia. A key barrier that allowed this was that it was expensive to ship goods between nations both because of tarriffs and the cost of hand loading and unloading ships using longshoremen. The WTO has dismantled the tarriffs, at least in to the West, though they still seem to thrive in places like China blocking Western good going there. Shipping costs plunged thanks to container shipping. Communications costs disappeared thanks to fiber optics and computer networks.
What we see today and what Bush is really saying is, that multinational corporations, and wealthy capitalists embrace globalization. It is great for them. In particular its causing a dramatic drop in labor costs to them and capitalism thrives on low cost labor.
The thing they continually gloss over is that this means that in nations where labor costs are high, those workers are mostly doomed unless they have or can acquire skills that justify a premium salary. They will either hit unemployment or their will be constant downward pressure on their incomes. People now in the middle class will be pushed in to poverty. In fact this is already happening in the U.S. The number of people living below the poverty line is increasing dramatically in recent years. The U.S. economy still appears prosperous because most of its big companies are globalized so they are still making lots of money, so the DOW and Nasdaq do just fine, as they slowly dispose of their expensive U.S. work forces and reap big gains from low cost foreign labor. Unfortunately their U.S. work forces are being quietly destroyed in the process.
Its really easy to see where this ends. The U.S. is going to end up where it was at the beginning of the 20th century. There will be a small number of very wealthy people, doing very well, and a huge body of desperately poor workers, barely making enough to survive, working in dismal working conditions if they can get work at all.
The ruling elite which really is George W.'s only constituency will still be very comfortable and very happy. They have money and they can keep making money
You kind of gloss over a lot of basic problems here.
First off yes NASA is doing some wonderful work, especially out of places like JPL or on its great observatories. But these are a small part of NASA and not getting a lot of money. The manned space division is consuming the lion's share of NASA's resources and that division hasn't really accomplished anything noteworthy in the last 30 years.
You belittle private industry in space but private industry hasn't had 200-300 billion dollars to squander in the last 30 years, NASA's manned space program has.
Unfortunately that division completely lost its way in the wake of Apollo. Was it entirely NASA's fault, no. It had enormous help from a succession of Presidents and Congressman. But the fact is it did lose its way, and has been spending substantial quantities of money and has in fact been regressing, not progressing. It has regressed to the point that it is severely challenged now just to launch men in to low earth orbit.
NASA does have a permanently manned space station which I guess is something but it came at an enormous cost, NASA can't even support it properly thanks to the grounding of the shuttle, and the station is largely dependent on the Russians to keep it operating. And worst of all it has NO clear mission or reason to exist. The Russians have a far superior record in manned space stations, did it at a far lower cost for far longer.
"Really all that NASA and others require is a sound plan, a clear worthy goal that has some chance of succeeding."
Well I hope it is that simple but I really doubt it. Mike Griffin appears on the surface to be a vast improvement over previous administrators and maybe he will turn around NASA. But NASA's manned space divion and the corrupt contractors that leech off it, are a completely disfunctional bureaucracy at this point and once organizations go as bad as it has, its really hard to fix. It is mostly just a bunch of little risk averse fiefdoms seeking to preserve their budgets and their jobs programs, seeking to accomplish as little as possible with as large a budget as possible. It would take a small miracle to turn it in to a capable motivated organization accomplishing things like it did in the Apollo era.
Now could private industry do better. On its own probably not. Its unlikely a private venture could sink 8+$ billion into space every year the way NASA does thanks to taxpayer generosity. You need huge capital investment to make huge leaps in space and it is very high risk which means its not something likely to happen in the private sector, unless the funding comes from someone with a dream and billions of dollars to squander on it.
But I would suggest NASA's manned space program needs to be largely dissolved and a new organization formed from the ground up. It might draw people from NASA and its current contractors but it would have to be a completely redesigned organization with STRONG motivations and rewards for success and taking big risks, along with disincentives and penalties to prevent it from becoming a disfunctional bureaucracy bent more on self preservation than doing anything useful.
Kelly Johnson's skunkworks or Rutan's scaled composites are the correct model for a space program. It needs to be kept to the smallest size possible and still accomplish the goal. It needs to minimize overhead and paperwork to an extreme level. It needs to have visionary engineering leaders setting the goal and then doing whatever it takes to get there as quickly as possible. It needs to be designed to prevent political interference in year in year out operations. Once a goal is set and funding established politicians need to be largely cut out of the loop other than basic auditing to prevent fraud waste and abuse. A key problem with NASA today is they HAVE to keep the current bloated shuttle and ISS going because key senators and congressmen wont allow laying off all the dead weight at NASA because of the economic impact on their states. This alone turned NASA in to an ineffective jobs program and not a space program.
"By the way -- if you don't like our government, you're welcome not to move here. Leave the criticism to those who do."
Thats a pretty weak argument. If the U.S. government left the rest of the world alone maybe you would have a case. Of course if the U.S. government left the rest of the world alone people outside the U.S. probably wouldn't dislike it so much. But the U.S. doesn't.
For example with the U.S. rendition program the U.S. has taken upon itself the right to snatch citizens of other nations off the streets of other nations and fly them away to secret prisons to be tortured. It has been established they have done this on more than one occasion to innocent people, not terrorists. This is the most blatant violation of national sovereignty and basic civil liberties imaginable by the U.S. government. As a result citizens of those nations have a pretty legitimate reason to criticize the U.S. government. The fact that the U.S. government now sanctions torture of citizens of other nations is another.
Similarly the fact the U.S. routinely unilaterally takes upon itself to overthrow sovereign governments of other nations is likewise a legitimate reason for people outside the U.S. to have something less than positive to say about the U.S. government. You see the U.S. is a huge fan of sovereignty and democratic elections except when those sovereign governments aren't pro American and pro business at which point they are fair game for overthrow.
Probably true if you just taking an existing university, course material etc, leave it like it is and throw in a laptop to take notes.
On the other hand if you were to take all of the stale somewhat static course material and design them around the fact all students have a computer I could see great benefit. At the simplest level you could design interactive graphing programs for math concepts, or interactive movies describing physics and chemistry concepts. Rather than just playing a movie students could interact with variables in the animations and see what happens in "what if" scenarios.
Now it would take a lot of work to develop that kind of content but it might well lead to more effective learning if done well. Once you have an effective, computerized, interactive course worked out you could then distribute it online without forcing people to get in to, move to and pay for an expensive university.
If you've worked through some of the MIT online courses you can experience some of the pain and joy in trying to take courses online. Some have hand scribbled lecture notes, others have interactive aids. If all courses were designed to be computer friendly you could create a full university online so people could get educations in subjects of interest without the life disruption of getting in to and going to a university.
That said part of university life is interaction with instructors and other students. At this point networked communications come in to play. For example the pervasive ability to IM a TA from your dorm room, or to have study groups through video conferencing might be more efficient than hunting down TA's in their office or having to find a room for study group. It would be a pain for the TA with a lot of stupid questions at all hours but there would also be a lot more and faster interaction.
A good work of fiction on the concept of interactive computerized education is Stephenson's "The Diamond Age". Parts of it are predicated on the necessity for a computerized interactive learning device which allow people, especially children, to learn and grow without being shackled to an expensive classroom. When you have hundreds of millions of kids in places like India and China who need educations trying to warehousing them all in classrooms may not be the best solution. In many cases those classrooms are more about warehousing, socializing and crushing the souls of the kids in them and not about letting them learn interesting and important things in exciting ways.
The Negroponte $100 laptop is very much about trying to make these "Diamond Age" concepts a reality. Getting kids in rugged environments hardware and networks is the first challenge. The second harder challenge is developing compelling educational content, and making it interactive and networked.
Having read the replies so far to this thread there simply isn't anything worthy of being modded up, in particular there is a steady stream of predictable Beowulf comments, which just aren't funny or worth posting anymore.
At least for this thread, I'd say its not the moderation system failing, there just isn't anyone with anything intelligent to say posting anything.
Slashdot posters seem to be the thing cratering.
Articles on IBM throwing together another giant collection of CPU's for someone with money to burn really aren't very interesting anymore either. If it was an absolute record that would be something but this system is already behind similar IBM systems already in U.S. labs. If it was a revolutionary new architecture that would be something but this isn't.
Governments somehow seem to think they can garner prestige by assembling these white elephants that tend to be obsolete before a 5 year lease is up. Me personally I think they should be focusing more on developing new and interesting software that does useful things on somewhat smaller and more practical systems. Well done and useful software has a lot longer lifespan than thousands of CPU's that will be obsolete in a couple years.
I'm sure climate modelling, molecular modelling, CFD etc. might find a good home on this machine but the machines themselves just really aren't that newsworthy any more except to the IBM marketing department and the governments engaged in the penis size contest.
"Do you believe that the U.S. government has become so bad that people are willing to go to such extreme measures?"
Well it has become pretty bad but the dynamics are such that no, people aren't going to do anything about it. Just because people aren't able or willing to overthrow it doesn't mean it shouldn't be done away with and get a fresh start.
Part of the motivation of the revolution was that the colonies had no voice in the government that was taxing them in to the ground. Today unfortunately we do rubber stamp and endorse the government that is taxing us in to the ground, and eviscerating our civil liberties. A problem being we only have two viable parties and both now have uncontrollable desire to restrict liberties in name of security and lost the ability to control their desire to squander vast sums of money as they tax us and borrow at levels that would have been considered intolerable in the 18th century. Today people just hate it but don't do anything about it except cheat on their taxes as much as they can.
The U.S. is still relatively prosperous which works against rebellion, though if current trends continue that may not be true much longer. As long as people have a steady paycheck, cars, a roof over their head and plenty to eat they don't have much motivation to rebel over ideals. Things have to be pretty bad for people to be willing to lose everthing they have including their lives in a rebellion. Lots of able people have to be unemployed, starving and desperate. Things in the American colonies weren't terrible but they were a colony and all imperial powers milk their colonies just short of the breaking point to enrich the plutocracy at home, which is why colonies tend to always teeter on rebellion and required occupying armies to keep them in check.
In the 1700's rebellion was viable because there was a big ocean between them and their enemy and they had a major ally in France. How would you start a rebellion today without it being crushed by the world's most powerful military and increasingly powerful police state(with unprecedented communication and spying power thanks to computers and networks). The only way it would work is if people in the military and police state joined the rebellion. I wager there are a few that are ready after a few tours in Iraq but there is no critical mass there.
Regretably the U.S, U.K., Russia, Israel and China have all moved in to varying shades of Fascism. They all feature intrusive governments manipulating capitalist economies to enrich themselves and their respective plutocracies consisting of wealthy and loyal party members. With the possible exception of China they haven't reached the levels of oppression found in the '30's but they all feature governments who are trampling civil liberties of their peoples in order to maximize productivity and profit for their plutocracies. Its an unfortunate fact that big corporations always choose profitability over freedom, which is why they tend to favor repressive governments, and which is why they LOVE China so much today. The day China abandoned state ownership of capital, and opened the door to capitalist western corporation loved them though in fact nothing else about the place had changed. Pretty much every major American corporation was a willing and gleeful participant in the booming economy in Nazi Germany in the 1930's too. They could've caref less about their oppressive and violent politics as long as there was plenty of money to be made. George W's grandfather Prescott was the U.S. banker for the Thiessen family, one of Germany's richest, who also happened to bankroll and insure Hitler's rise to power.
Fascism is on a nearly unstoppable march to dominate the world today. World War II, supposedly to eradicate Fascism, was in fact but a brief respite and Fascism has come back to dominate the world because no one noticed or cared. You can't even hint that governments today are Fascist, China certainly is now, without people's eyes glazing over, invking God
"Plus, eventually we'll run out of room for people."
A somewhat simpler and better solution to this one is basic birth control. Trying to ship billions of people to other planets to alleviate overpopulation is an extreme solution when a simple one is available.
The problem we have is poverty, poor education and religious fundamentalism works against birth control and are helping create the overpopulation problem that may well ultimately destroy us, or at least lead to such a poor quality of life it may not be worth living.
I am all for putting people on Mars so we have a new and independent biosphere. It would probably lead to a lot of new innovation in both technology and sociology as well as give adventurers a new place to go as every corner of our planet is filled up. We are in an era for the first time where there aren't really any new frontiers to explore.
I just don't think it particularly viable to use other planets as a dumping ground for excess population.
China IS doing much the same thing as the rest of the world's governments, they are just a somewhat more repressive regime using somewhat more heavy handed tactics. All governments engage in propaganda, censorship is just one variant.
The Bush administration completely snowed our supposedly free press on Iraq so instead of questioning the validity of the case for the war they were instead gleefully riding along in the tanks, and were in fact part of the invasion and only carrying the message the military wanted them to carry and not the reality. Riding in tanks made for better visuals than questioning the validity of the case for war. I still remember Fox news days before the Iraq invasion broadcasting White House dished propaganda that the Iraqis had RPV's they were going to use to spray American cities with chemical and biological weapons.
American journalists did have some degree of independence and impartiality prior to that debacle, dating from the Vietnam and Watergate where they challenged the corrupt powers that be. Now thanks to embedding they are perceived as American combatants and targets which further impedes their ability to get the truth out about what goes on in Iraq.
So the Chinese try to engage in outright censorship, while the U.S. government much more skillfully manipulates a supposedly free press in to telling the vast majority of its people the bullshit they want them to hear. Sure if you are industrious you can find other points of view, especially on the Internet, they don't really stop you, but the vast majority of people don't. You also have that little twinge in the back of your mind that if you surf to Al Jazeera the NSA is flagging you for their special attention. George W. proposed bombing Al Jazeera and was talked out of it by Tony Blair. The translation is he is all for a free press as long as they freely choose to be pro American. If an American network were to openly and consistently challenge the Bush administration in serious issues they would get spanked much like Mapes and Rather were at CBS. They did screw up on authenticating evidence but the underlying fact is the story they carried on Bush's borderline criminal National Guard service was true, its just impossible to prove because Bush agents destroyed most of the evidence (a perk of being governor of Texas being full access to all the National Guard docs there).
End results most Americans get their view on the world form a handful of news outlets dominated by a handful of corporations who have no stomach for challenging the status quo. TV networks in particular have a stunning pro American bias, they have to tell news their corprate sponsors are comfortable with. Their nightly lead offs feature White House "correspondents" who are mostly just repeating the propaganda the White House wants to put out today with no research or journalism to question its validity. They seldom challenge it because if they do they get cut off from the juiciest scraps the White House throws to them. The White House press corp has reaquired some half shrivelled balls lately but its still mostly confined to fighting with Scott McClellan at press conferences the vast majority of American's never see and don't care about.
Its a sad fact but more and more governments are turning either Fascist or Socialist and both dish propaganda with abandon. Not sure if there are many truly free places to live any more. China, Russia, Israel the U.S. and Britain already are or leaning heavily to Fascism. Much of South America and Europe are going Socialist. Liberal democracies are a very much an endangered species.
The dirty little secret about Western governments are they are thoroughly comfortable with Fascism. It got a dirty rep in World War II so no one understands what it is or that it is alive and well and flourishing today. Fascism is repressive government coupled with capitalism where a plutocracy can get and hold great wealth as long as they are in good standing with their Fascist benefactors. China wa
True enough. I'm pretty sure the people in Al Qaeda have engaged in just this calculus. They are at war and when they fly airplanes in to skyscrapers or bomb subways they are making strategic decisions where they are trading off civilian deaths to achieve strategic objectives. Doesn't make it right, but fire bombing cities in World War II and free fire zones in Vietnam weren't right either. It is an unfortunate reality in our world and I can live with it. Our world is based on will to power and the greedy pursuit of wealth.
Only thing I can't live with are people who engage in such activities and are righteous about it, who contend God blesses them for it whether that god be Christian, Jewish or Muslim in persuasion, and who hold they are always in the right and the other side is always in the wrong when in fact both sides are operating at an equally bankrupt level.
"You are right, I don't watch much TV, but the more critical factor here is that I work in Asia, where direct to consumer marketing of ethical drugs is forbidden."
Well if you are ever in the U.S. again you will be shocked at the extent to which prescription drugs have taken over TV ads. They are marketed like soap except for a lengthy and scary rendition of possible side effects I assume the FDA mandates. Its also unnerving the extent to which many news channels are now beholden to drug companies for their revenue, and which likely skews there coverage of drug company profiteering and defective products.
Direct marketing prescription drugs is something that shouldn't be allowed but the U.S. drug industry is so large, rich and powerful now they can pretty much do what they please, and can buy any politicians necessary to get the laws they want.
I really fear we are headed for a THX-1138 world where people lives are controlled by daily doses of drugs doled out by excessively powerful companies in collusion with an excessively powerful government who want a docile, drug dependent population. The key point is the state sponsored drugs will be tailored to enhance worker productivity and submissiveness, versus illegal drugs which impair productivity and stoke rebellion.
"One wonders where to find the Muslim mobs shouting...Stop killing innocent people in the name of Islam"
I imagine you will find them the same place you will find Christian mobs shouting stop killing innocent people in the name of Christianity. There are a few but not many and they don't get much coverage.
And yes the America and British military have killed millions of innocent people over the last century with blessings from many pulpits and chaplains. The civilian deaths caused by terrorism are insignificant versus the civilian deaths caused by the American and British military over the last century, especially via strategic bombing.
It is the nature of both war and fanaticism to kill people and to self justify your actions on the basis that your cause is a righteous one so its OK and God blesses you for it. The allies fire bombed whole cities in Japan and Germany in World War II. They justified it by saying they were at war and those civilians were supporting the war effort of their enemy, it was us or them, so it was OK to incinerate them. In reality those people were mostly doing what they had to do to survive, to work and feed their families. They were innocent, they were killed, where is your indignation. There have certainly been a large number of innocent civilians killed by the U.S. and Britain in Iraq. Maybe there is somewhat less intent to kill civilians these days but its pretty clear that bombs are being dropped on building full of civilians, in the hopes there are some militants there too, and the collateral damage is deemed acceptable by the military. Or soldiers rightly nervous about car bombs are machine gunning cars full of women and children first and asking questions later.
Bottomline is its pretty easy to try to differentiate between the killing engaged in by Islamic extremists on one hand and of the U.S., British and Israeli military on the other. Fact is the Islamic extremist think their cause is just, and have self rationalized their actions, and so have the U.S., Britain and Israel.
Me personally, I think they are all in the wrong. There is very seldom a good reason to kill innocent civilians. When you do it you are in the wrong, you do your cause more harm than good and you just start a snowballing eye for an eye campaign, in which everyone ends up blinded by rage. Cloaking yourself in religious rationalization and self justification wont ever make it right.
I'm just not falling in to the self righteous trap where I say they are always in the wrong and we are always righteous. The U.S., Britain and Israel have in fact inflicted grievous harm on the Arab world over the last century and they do have real reasons to resent the Western Judeo-Christian world for it. Many Iranians rightly hate the west for subjecting them to decades of tyranny under the Shah. The Palestinians were driven out of their homes and homelands and most have been living in squalid refugee camps and walled ghettos, as largely stateless persons, for most of the last half century with little hope and in near complete desperation. Until the west comes to grips with that fact and and equitable resolution is found to their plight you are going to have a lot of angry people willing to become suicide bombers in retaliation.
"Much of a marketing budget is organizing events in order to get your message across to Dr's."
You must not watch much TV. The growth in direct advertising to consumers of prescription drugs is phenomenal. I would be overjoyed if drug companies did focus all their marketing resources on doctors, but in recent years they simply don't. Drug companies increasingly are providing consumers with howto guides on what to tell their doctor in order to acquire the drug they want to sell. Marketing of psychiatric drugs are especially bad, especially when targeted at problem children. You have a problem child, we have the fix for you, put them on an expensive psychiatric drug regimen for the rest of their childhood, some of which were known to have safety issues when given to children.
If you want to defend drug companies you should also not forget the half dozen or more drugs that were massively marketed to consumers, though they were known to have serious dangerous side effects, like Vioxx. They were pushed through the FDA due to an excessively cozy releationship between the drug companies and the FDA, where the FDA was more focused on insuring drug company profitability than on public safety.
The for profit drug industry has produced some great advancements, but lets not pretend the obsessive profit motive in drug development is really a good thing. It leads to:
- Focus on drugs with the best profit potential over drugs that would offer the most benefit. Viagra is going to get a lot more focus than vaccine development for example. Vaccine's are very poor on the profit front which is why we often have problems producing them. Viagra and Lipitor are a gift that keep on giving since once people start taking them they usually don't stop so they are a solid revenue stream for drug companies.
- When a drug company has a multibillion dollar investment in a drug they have a really strong incentive to conceal hazards or efficacy problems in the drug, in order to avoid a multibillion dollar writeoff
- The financial stakes in the drug industry has led to corruption of our government. The so called Medicare drug benefit was little more than a scam cooked up by drug companies in cahoots with corrupt congressman to transfer large sums of money from our tax dollars in to their pockets and the program they created is pathetic in nearly every respect.
- The drug obsession in the U.S. is causing serious financial issues because we are spending increasingly staggering sums on them.
Bottomline since so much of the basic research in drugs is government funded, I'd really almost prefer that all drug development was publicly funded. It would insure development is focused on need and not profitability. It would put greater focus on safety and discourage bringing questionable drugs to market just because they would be profitable. It would lead to drugs that are sold at reasonable prices that people could afford. The economic benefit of that alone would justify the tax dollars we invest in such a program.
"I am with you there. I can't understand why there is such a complaint about the estate tax system."
Well mostly because its been destroying family farms and businesses. The estate tax does need to have a fairly high ceiling so small farms and businesses can be passed on through generations. Farming is a lot of hard work and isn't a lucrative operation for most small farmers (at least the ones not milking farm subsidies for a free ride), so you need to refrain from putting barriers in front of children who want to continue a family tradition.
" but has no problem with money being handed to them regardless of need (inheritance)"
The Republican line is they don't want the government handing out money to the poor, inheritance is 100% in line with their thinking on the way things work. You work hard all your life and you should be able to pass it on to your children to give them a head start in life. I'm OK with that when its in the million dollar range, enough for some land a house and a good education. The multimillion dollar estate where a kid has a free ride all their lives is where the problem lies.
The hypocrisy in the Republican party today is they are constantly mounting about free markets and capitalism but they are the absolute worst lately for government programs to hand out large sums of money to big business and big agriculture. They've taken to constantly handing out money to their rich friends and interfering in markets. This really is the definition of Fascism in its economic sense and the hypocrisy is staggering. Government should confine its role to the essential outlined in the constitution and dismantle every program where it is handing out tax payer's money to their political backer.
"If you were actually interested in reducing their taxes, why not just eliminate the current regressive SS scale, and alter it to something more progressive?"
Uh cause you have a snowball's chance in hell of doing that with the people currently in power or maybe even at all. Most Americans frown on government mandates to pay their hard earned dollars to support others. That should be something left to personal charity preferences.
Social Security really is a government forced insurance and retirement plan. For the most part you get benefits out if you pay in. What you are proposing is income redistribution, taxing the affluent in to the ground to support the poor. That's not entirely a bad thing when you are supporting those with special needs and if you support people in a way that encourages them to better themselves and their circumstance. In practice there will be some of that and a whole lot of lazy freeloaders living off someone else's hard work.
Progressive taxation is also OK with me if it hammers the top 1% and prevents wealth concentration there but I doubt you could pull it off in today's climate and in practice the taxation would probably creep down and hammer ordinary people in middle and upper middle income brackets and they don't need any more tax burden.
Sorry you can argue all you want but this is an area where I basically want the government to get out of my life and get their hand out of my wallet. I'm a believer in personal responsibility, you get back out of life what you put in to it and you don't have easy outs where you can coast through life and someone else who works hard is going to support you. I am all for some taxes going to support the truly disabled I have zero confidence you can do that with out supporting an even larger army of con artists and freeloaders and they just flat don't deserve the free ride at my expense.
I am OK with tax burden on inherited wealth because in that case its a bunch of spoiled rich kids profiting off the hard work of their ancestors and there is no personal responsibility there either.
" People proved they were unable to take care of themselves."
My life experience indicates you are mistaken about disability. One person I know had a lump appear and it was thought to be cancer. This person worked a doctor friend in to declaring it a life threatening disability and got on SS disability. The lump was found later to be not cancer, not life threatening or disabling but the person will stay on disability until 65.
The other person I described previously has a single disability, being overweight and inactive and has acquired all the health problems that stem out of that, especially diabetes. The only disability there is self induced, and mostly grows out of being lazy, not taking care of oneself, or to put it simply lack of personal responsibility. Federal giveaways promote abandonment of personal responsibility while others get to pay the price tag.
There is a small army of people drawing disability due to back injuries most of which are not disabling or are outright shams.
Its just an unfortunate fact that if you create a program to hand out free money people are going to figure out ways to get some of it which is why most Federal handouts turn in to massive cases of fraud, waste and abuse we all get to pay for.
Medicare's critical flaw is it tends to be a free ride for seniors and again from personal experience you see seniors who run to the emergency room for things that should be handled with a visit to the doctor, or demand never ending batteries of tests looking for some problem though most of the problem is just old age. The waste in Medicare due to overuse is no doubt the single greatest contributor to its staggering price tag. Again there is no incentive for personal responsibility so it is free health care and people exploit it while everyone else gets to pay for it.
You act like Social Security and Medicare is some panacea for poverty. You forget that its 12.5% of the income of low incoming people disappearing out of their pay checks. It is in fact INDUCING poverty by bleeding low and middle income people of their income for 40+ years of their lives when they could be buying homes, sending their children to college etc. If you've looked at the number of people falling below the poverty line it is increasing, not decreasing.
I am extremely confident you could provide disability insurance for the truly disabled, or real emergency care for seniors, for a tiny fraction of this price tag without the fraud, waste and abuse. If you left most of the 12.5% in people pay checks they would have a greater ability to succeed. They could save it for retirement or invest it in a college education for their children which would pull a family out of poverty for good, or squander it. If they squander it personal responsibility indicates they should pay the price for it when they end up broke in retirement.
" Wall Street HATED the idea of being forced into managing accounts for a government program managing $1000-$5000 accounts."
Dude a lot of people pay more than that in to Social Security in a year. After 20 years most of these accounts would be over the $100K easy. Not like there is a lot of management to it either. Most of it would be computerized payroll deductions that just land there periodically and they probably wouldn't be moved around very much. It would be a large influx of money for investment companies to work with.
You sit there and rant about how the government can't invest these staggering sums without become Fascist, but then you seem to dismiss the impact this huge influx of money in to private accounts would have on the markets. The fact is there would be a huge pool of new capital flowing in to markets for businesses to borrow, sell stock to and pimp financial growth. It might well create an economic boom. It might also create a bubble and overheated markets that end in large losses for all the retirees funds.
You are "intentionally obfuscated the issue: too, sorry. The fact is the Republican's DO want to start dismantling the program by letting people opt out and put the money in to private accounts. Sure the initial proposal is modest but that is just in at attempt to crack the damn preventing any privatization and once they do they would over a couple decades dismantle the whole program if they could get away with it, which they probably can't.
I really would like to put all my money in to a private account, if I had control over it instead of having Congress dictate what I do with it. I really don't want Congress taxing me and mandating that I put the money in to certain investment vehicles they define and which will mostly benefit their wealthy benefactors on Wall Street.
The down side of their objective is this transition will eventually destroy the pyramid scheme that is Social Security and people who are half way to retirement are going to completely screwed. Current and soon to retire will make out like bandits, those just entering the work force would make out like bandits, but everyone in the middle will get screwed no matter what (unless the government just borrows staggering sums to give us a full return).
Sorry dude you are wrong. Most of the program is a forced retirement program, it is the government saying I'm going to make you save your money for your retirement. What you get out is based on what you pay in as far as the retirement program. The disability part of the program is insurance as you describe. It is a good thing when it helps the disabled. Unfortunately a large percentage of the people who get it are engaging in fraud. You get yourself declared disabled and its a free ride for life. Not a lot of money but a tidy sum while the fraudsters supplement it under the table because they aren't really disabled. Both of the people I know who are on it aren't even remotely disabled and have no right to get it, well one is but its because this person is lazy and lays around the house eating all day so this person is so overweight and out of shape this person can't do anything anymore.
Most people who read my slashdot posts label me a left wing loonie so its alway entertaining when someone calls me a right wing blowhard. I am left on a lot of things but I am pretty libertarian when it comes to personal responsibility and the belief that more government is usually bad government.
I do appreciate your clever defense of SS though. Think of all the blind, orphans and starving children, though this is a small part of the program. You completely gloss over the lion's share of this program is just the government seeking to control your life and your money often to your own detriment.
This probably wont be the most popular position but human DNA and embryo's are abundant to the point they have basically no value. You could buy, sell and destroy them with abandon and it is a trivial to make more. A woman can churn them out about once a month and a man can provide his component about once an hour. There is absolutely nothing sacred about it.
The sacred component comes from time and care invested. By the time a woman has invested nine months in a human embryo it has a lot of value in it. By the time a family and society has invested another eighteen years in the embryo it has skills, education, experience, friends, family and lovers. At that point it is an extremely valuable thing if properly developed, or in some cases it was a giant waste on a complete loser.
There is irony that the Republicans and the Christian fundamentalist zealots that support them are COMPLETELY obsessed with every aspect of an embryo that is of little intrinsic value. Most of the eggs a woman produces are destroyed as part of a natural process. The fact one is fertilized by a man's sperm adds only the slightest additional value. Sure there is potential there but thats all it is potential, and you can combine and egg and sperm with minimal effort to regain that potential.
Now I'm always left wondering how they justify this fanatical obsession with a one month old egg, while at the same time they seem to have gleefully sent 2,200+ young American's, and tens of thousands of Iraqi's to their deaths in a completely optional war. Those young American's had 18+ years invested in them in feeding, nurturing and education. They had friends and families and in most cases had a lot of both intrinsic value and potential. Why is it OK to get them killed and maimed while we obsess over destruction of an embryo that had a about a month of very little effort invested in it.
Not sure I want to see any Republican sponsored social security reform but it is a completely broken program and I would be overjoyed if tomorrow it went away and they just gave me a lump sum payment back of what I've paid in. Of course they can't since everything I've paid in has long since been squandered much of it on pork, fraud, waste and abuse and recently to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. Only way I get my money back is from more payroll taxes on workers younger than me.
I guess I'm saying the Dems are just as wrong in defending the status quo as the Republicans are in their "reform" programs which are scams in their own right.
Social Security as conceived by Roosevelt was kind of scam since very few people lived long enough to collect it and the tax rates could as a result be very low. Unfortunately most people live long past retirement age now and as of around 1980 the tax burden on working people went through the roof. Counting the hidden employer contribution payroll taxes are now an inescapable 12.5% of your wages. People say low and middle income people don't pay a lot of taxes, well they conveniently leave out this inescapable payroll tax.
What we have today is America's greatest generation, the World War II generation, who paid very little in payroll taxes and are now living to their 80's and 90's thanks to better medical care. They are making out like bandits, with a huge return on their investment. Baby boomers will also reap big windfalls though not as big a windfall. Where does this windfall come from, why off the backs of younger workers who are paying a STEEP percentage of their income to fund the program PLUS a big surplus that Congress and various Presidents are squandering on other programs. These younger workers may discover when they retire the program has been eviscerated and they get back less than they paid in if they are lucky. At present Social Security and Medicare are cannibalizing young workers to support seniors.
So can Social Security be reformed today? Not really because the greatest generation and the baby boomers are a powerful lobby and they wont let anyone touch their windfall. They vote in disproportionately high numbers while young people vote in low numbers. They are a powerful lobby.
The result is the only reform you will see will impact younger workers and end up cutting their benefits compared to today's seniors or end up costing them or younger generations even more in taxes. NO ONE IS TOUCHING THE WINDFALL TODAY'S SENIORS ARE REAPING OR BABY BOOMERS WILL SOON REAP and which will push the system in to the red in a decade or so.
What do the Republicans want to do. They want to force you to put payroll taxes in to private financial funds which they will strictly define and regulate. It kind of sounds like a good idea but it has a few problems:
- You still wont really have control of the money because they will tell you exactly what you can and can't do with it.
- The main thing they are trying to achieve is to take a mandatory payroll tax and put it under the control of giant private financial institutions who are huge contributors to the Republican party. They in turn will reap huge windfalls from manipulating this huge influx of money workers will have to give to them by law. Chances are it will cause a large bubble in the stock marker or wherever else it is invested. You can hope it goes in to stable investments that always appreciate but there is a fair chance it will land in investments where the workers actually end up losing money while Wall Street fat cats profit.
- When all this money disappears in to private funds there will be a huge shortfall in paying benefits to current seniors and SOME LUCKY TAX PAYER is going to get to pick up the tab, and it probably isn't going to be the rich, OR the government is going to borrow ever more staggering sums to cover the shortfall which will further destabilize the dollar and the U.S. economy.
Hate to break this to you but you just came off as being pompous and arrogant here, like the agency you claim to work for has become so famous for.
You also managed to be so vague that your post is pointless. Next time try to actually reply to and refute posts that you think are wrong and make a reasoned argument to support your case instead of just being a know it all pompous ass saying "you're all wrong" but I can't be bothered to actually say how, in what way or why.
You seem to think like a Wall Street broker. As long as staggering losses were written off last quarter its like it never happened. Sure, if they invest a few billion more in this dog maybe they will turn it around and make a profit in the future.
But sunk costs indicate are still vast sums of money the company has spent on something that will probably never turn a profit, and they will probably never recoup what they've invested in it or are about to invest in it. Even Intel isn't a bottomless pool of money. Money they've squandered on Itanium is money they don't have for R&D in areas that will reap benefits, its money they don't have to pay dividends, its money they don't have in the bank. If you keep pouring vast amounts of money in to products that will never turn a profit you are either bleeding successful products white to make up for it or you will eventually end in bankruptcy.
The core AMD has works very well for the markets they are targeting. It is very expensive and risky to develop all new core these days. If you have one works there is a school of thought you get more mileage out of refining it than throwing it away and starting over. Some bleeding edge customers want all new things and are willing to put up with defects and steep costs as the manufacture tries to recoup the sunk cost.
Most customers want something that is reliable, affordable, low power and cool. Churning out bleeding edge all new cores every year runs counter to what most people want, in particular its expensive.
AMD maybe needs a new core to go head to head with Centrino in laptops, or at least refine and better market Turino. They need a better strategy to target phones and settops. They don't need to design an all new core just to satisfy the bleeding edge types. The all new cores in Itanium are slowly destroying Intel in the desktop and server market.
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The reason they have repressive birth control now is they failed to control it by gentler means for the previous century, through better education and promoting access to contraceptives. At this point they are closing the barn door after the horse is long gone. Their current brutual birth control regime, including government forced abortions, may reign in their explosive population growth in a few generations but but the world is going to see some extreme pain before then. I don't think India is really doing anything to solve their problem other than they have a cultural fondness for disposing of female fetuses.
Whatever its origins there is one plus to extreme overpopulation. You have a vast pool of cheap labor to exploit as long as you can keep them minimally fed and housed, and you have the capital to create jobs for them. Lucky for them Western multinationals have been pouring capital in there, to exploit that cheap labor, which insures they have jobs, or in fact jumpstarted their economy overnight at the expense of workers in the west. For example by boxing up machine tools and whole factories in the West and shipping them to China overnight again purely to exploit the cheap labor.
I hate to point this out but your post really sounds self contradictory. First you say:
/. posts of adult stem research reviving all types of nerve cells, and there's no ethical delimma involved."
"The fact that embrionic stem cell research isn't largely funded elsewhere in the world should be a big hint that the controversy isn't just religious."
Then you say:
"It's sad the $3 billion of tax payer funds won't go to adult stem cell research, where the results have been forthcoming. There's been
So you are saying "results have been forthcoming" with adult stem cell research but somehow imply they aren't also forthcoming for embryonic stem cell research. Well I'm pretty sure embryonic stem cells have just as much potential if not more.
You suggest the controversy over embryonic research isn't just "religious" but then you tag embryonic research with an "ethical delimma". Well maybe "religious controversy" and "ethical delimna" aren't exactly same thing but they sure are close and I think the way you are using them they ARE the same thing.
Why don't you just say what you are tap dancing around. I suspect you oppose embryonic research on religious grounds so you are trying to do what all the religious types who oppose embryonic research do and try to con everyone in to thinking adult stem cell research is just hands down better in every regard when it really isn't, and anyone pursuing embryonic research is crazy.
The bottomline is a large number of government and private companies wont touch embryonic stem cell research with a 10 foot pool simply because they know they will get targeted by religious groups and that targeting will be especially harmful to politicians who want to get reelected and executives who need to raise capital, turn a profit and answer to shareholders.
"If you're okay with children starving in China, then it's fine to oppose this leveling."
I'm not exactly sure why, because India and China failed to control unsustainable population growth, that the rest of the world needs to destroy their economies and economic well being to insure they are well fed. Economics is in reality a form of warfare. Sometimes a rising tide raises all boats but most of the time there are economic winners and losers. The U.S. was the big winner in the 20th century. It is poised to be a big loser in this one, at least for the vast majority of its people, while its top 1% will probably continue to do very well. In this brand of warfare there really is no reason why U.S. workers should aid and abet their own destruction to insure the "Chinese" are well fad.
This isn't really about insuring China and India are well fed anyway.
The bottomline at work here is there is a global economic elite, less than 1% of the world populations who are rich and getting richer. In the last 30 years many powerful communist party members in China abandoned socialism, for Fascism, and are entering the ranks of this elite along side the long established rich in the U.S. and Europe.
This elite embraces and loves globalization. They have the capital and the ability to invest it anywhere in the world where it will yield the greatest return on their investment. By contrast working people have limited resource and they can't just invest in the new economic hotspot in the world like China. If their nations economy craters they get to starve.
Its a basic axiom of capitalism that labor cost is one of the basic factors in profitability. In the past trade and physical barriers allowed labor costs to diverge in different regions. The U.S., Japan and Western Europe could have high wage rates and a good standard of living because they weren't competing head to head with people making a few cents an hour in Asia. A key barrier that allowed this was that it was expensive to ship goods between nations both because of tarriffs and the cost of hand loading and unloading ships using longshoremen. The WTO has dismantled the tarriffs, at least in to the West, though they still seem to thrive in places like China blocking Western good going there. Shipping costs plunged thanks to container shipping. Communications costs disappeared thanks to fiber optics and computer networks.
What we see today and what Bush is really saying is, that multinational corporations, and wealthy capitalists embrace globalization. It is great for them. In particular its causing a dramatic drop in labor costs to them and capitalism thrives on low cost labor.
The thing they continually gloss over is that this means that in nations where labor costs are high, those workers are mostly doomed unless they have or can acquire skills that justify a premium salary. They will either hit unemployment or their will be constant downward pressure on their incomes. People now in the middle class will be pushed in to poverty. In fact this is already happening in the U.S. The number of people living below the poverty line is increasing dramatically in recent years. The U.S. economy still appears prosperous because most of its big companies are globalized so they are still making lots of money, so the DOW and Nasdaq do just fine, as they slowly dispose of their expensive U.S. work forces and reap big gains from low cost foreign labor. Unfortunately their U.S. work forces are being quietly destroyed in the process.
Its really easy to see where this ends. The U.S. is going to end up where it was at the beginning of the 20th century. There will be a small number of very wealthy people, doing very well, and a huge body of desperately poor workers, barely making enough to survive, working in dismal working conditions if they can get work at all.
The ruling elite which really is George W.'s only constituency will still be very comfortable and very happy. They have money and they can keep making money
You kind of gloss over a lot of basic problems here.
First off yes NASA is doing some wonderful work, especially out of places like JPL or on its great observatories. But these are a small part of NASA and not getting a lot of money. The manned space division is consuming the lion's share of NASA's resources and that division hasn't really accomplished anything noteworthy in the last 30 years.
You belittle private industry in space but private industry hasn't had 200-300 billion dollars to squander in the last 30 years, NASA's manned space program has.
Unfortunately that division completely lost its way in the wake of Apollo. Was it entirely NASA's fault, no. It had enormous help from a succession of Presidents and Congressman. But the fact is it did lose its way, and has been spending substantial quantities of money and has in fact been regressing, not progressing. It has regressed to the point that it is severely challenged now just to launch men in to low earth orbit.
NASA does have a permanently manned space station which I guess is something but it came at an enormous cost, NASA can't even support it properly thanks to the grounding of the shuttle, and the station is largely dependent on the Russians to keep it operating. And worst of all it has NO clear mission or reason to exist. The Russians have a far superior record in manned space stations, did it at a far lower cost for far longer.
"Really all that NASA and others require is a sound plan, a clear worthy goal that has some chance of succeeding."
Well I hope it is that simple but I really doubt it. Mike Griffin appears on the surface to be a vast improvement over previous administrators and maybe he will turn around NASA. But NASA's manned space divion and the corrupt contractors that leech off it, are a completely disfunctional bureaucracy at this point and once organizations go as bad as it has, its really hard to fix. It is mostly just a bunch of little risk averse fiefdoms seeking to preserve their budgets and their jobs programs, seeking to accomplish as little as possible with as large a budget as possible. It would take a small miracle to turn it in to a capable motivated organization accomplishing things like it did in the Apollo era.
Now could private industry do better. On its own probably not. Its unlikely a private venture could sink 8+$ billion into space every year the way NASA does thanks to taxpayer generosity. You need huge capital investment to make huge leaps in space and it is very high risk which means its not something likely to happen in the private sector, unless the funding comes from someone with a dream and billions of dollars to squander on it.
But I would suggest NASA's manned space program needs to be largely dissolved and a new organization formed from the ground up. It might draw people from NASA and its current contractors but it would have to be a completely redesigned organization with STRONG motivations and rewards for success and taking big risks, along with disincentives and penalties to prevent it from becoming a disfunctional bureaucracy bent more on self preservation than doing anything useful.
Kelly Johnson's skunkworks or Rutan's scaled composites are the correct model for a space program. It needs to be kept to the smallest size possible and still accomplish the goal. It needs to minimize overhead and paperwork to an extreme level. It needs to have visionary engineering leaders setting the goal and then doing whatever it takes to get there as quickly as possible. It needs to be designed to prevent political interference in year in year out operations. Once a goal is set and funding established politicians need to be largely cut out of the loop other than basic auditing to prevent fraud waste and abuse. A key problem with NASA today is they HAVE to keep the current bloated shuttle and ISS going because key senators and congressmen wont allow laying off all the dead weight at NASA because of the economic impact on their states. This alone turned NASA in to an ineffective jobs program and not a space program.
"By the way -- if you don't like our government, you're welcome not to move here. Leave the criticism to those who do."
Thats a pretty weak argument. If the U.S. government left the rest of the world alone maybe you would have a case. Of course if the U.S. government left the rest of the world alone people outside the U.S. probably wouldn't dislike it so much. But the U.S. doesn't.
For example with the U.S. rendition program the U.S. has taken upon itself the right to snatch citizens of other nations off the streets of other nations and fly them away to secret prisons to be tortured. It has been established they have done this on more than one occasion to innocent people, not terrorists. This is the most blatant violation of national sovereignty and basic civil liberties imaginable by the U.S. government. As a result citizens of those nations have a pretty legitimate reason to criticize the U.S. government. The fact that the U.S. government now sanctions torture of citizens of other nations is another.
Similarly the fact the U.S. routinely unilaterally takes upon itself to overthrow sovereign governments of other nations is likewise a legitimate reason for people outside the U.S. to have something less than positive to say about the U.S. government. You see the U.S. is a huge fan of sovereignty and democratic elections except when those sovereign governments aren't pro American and pro business at which point they are fair game for overthrow.
Probably true if you just taking an existing university, course material etc, leave it like it is and throw in a laptop to take notes.
On the other hand if you were to take all of the stale somewhat static course material and design them around the fact all students have a computer I could see great benefit. At the simplest level you could design interactive graphing programs for math concepts, or interactive movies describing physics and chemistry concepts. Rather than just playing a movie students could interact with variables in the animations and see what happens in "what if" scenarios.
Now it would take a lot of work to develop that kind of content but it might well lead to more effective learning if done well. Once you have an effective, computerized, interactive course worked out you could then distribute it online without forcing people to get in to, move to and pay for an expensive university.
If you've worked through some of the MIT online courses you can experience some of the pain and joy in trying to take courses online. Some have hand scribbled lecture notes, others have interactive aids. If all courses were designed to be computer friendly you could create a full university online so people could get educations in subjects of interest without the life disruption of getting in to and going to a university.
That said part of university life is interaction with instructors and other students. At this point networked communications come in to play. For example the pervasive ability to IM a TA from your dorm room, or to have study groups through video conferencing might be more efficient than hunting down TA's in their office or having to find a room for study group. It would be a pain for the TA with a lot of stupid questions at all hours but there would also be a lot more and faster interaction.
A good work of fiction on the concept of interactive computerized education is Stephenson's "The Diamond Age". Parts of it are predicated on the necessity for a computerized interactive learning device which allow people, especially children, to learn and grow without being shackled to an expensive classroom. When you have hundreds of millions of kids in places like India and China who need educations trying to warehousing them all in classrooms may not be the best solution. In many cases those classrooms are more about warehousing, socializing and crushing the souls of the kids in them and not about letting them learn interesting and important things in exciting ways.
The Negroponte $100 laptop is very much about trying to make these "Diamond Age" concepts a reality. Getting kids in rugged environments hardware and networks is the first challenge. The second harder challenge is developing compelling educational content, and making it interactive and networked.
Having read the replies so far to this thread there simply isn't anything worthy of being modded up, in particular there is a steady stream of predictable Beowulf comments, which just aren't funny or worth posting anymore.
At least for this thread, I'd say its not the moderation system failing, there just isn't anyone with anything intelligent to say posting anything.
Slashdot posters seem to be the thing cratering.
Articles on IBM throwing together another giant collection of CPU's for someone with money to burn really aren't very interesting anymore either. If it was an absolute record that would be something but this system is already behind similar IBM systems already in U.S. labs. If it was a revolutionary new architecture that would be something but this isn't.
Governments somehow seem to think they can garner prestige by assembling these white elephants that tend to be obsolete before a 5 year lease is up. Me personally I think they should be focusing more on developing new and interesting software that does useful things on somewhat smaller and more practical systems. Well done and useful software has a lot longer lifespan than thousands of CPU's that will be obsolete in a couple years.
I'm sure climate modelling, molecular modelling, CFD etc. might find a good home on this machine but the machines themselves just really aren't that newsworthy any more except to the IBM marketing department and the governments engaged in the penis size contest.
"Do you believe that the U.S. government has become so bad that people are willing to go to such extreme measures?"
Well it has become pretty bad but the dynamics are such that no, people aren't going to do anything about it. Just because people aren't able or willing to overthrow it doesn't mean it shouldn't be done away with and get a fresh start.
Part of the motivation of the revolution was that the colonies had no voice in the government that was taxing them in to the ground. Today unfortunately we do rubber stamp and endorse the government that is taxing us in to the ground, and eviscerating our civil liberties. A problem being we only have two viable parties and both now have uncontrollable desire to restrict liberties in name of security and lost the ability to control their desire to squander vast sums of money as they tax us and borrow at levels that would have been considered intolerable in the 18th century. Today people just hate it but don't do anything about it except cheat on their taxes as much as they can.
The U.S. is still relatively prosperous which works against rebellion, though if current trends continue that may not be true much longer. As long as people have a steady paycheck, cars, a roof over their head and plenty to eat they don't have much motivation to rebel over ideals. Things have to be pretty bad for people to be willing to lose everthing they have including their lives in a rebellion. Lots of able people have to be unemployed, starving and desperate. Things in the American colonies weren't terrible but they were a colony and all imperial powers milk their colonies just short of the breaking point to enrich the plutocracy at home, which is why colonies tend to always teeter on rebellion and required occupying armies to keep them in check.
In the 1700's rebellion was viable because there was a big ocean between them and their enemy and they had a major ally in France. How would you start a rebellion today without it being crushed by the world's most powerful military and increasingly powerful police state(with unprecedented communication and spying power thanks to computers and networks). The only way it would work is if people in the military and police state joined the rebellion. I wager there are a few that are ready after a few tours in Iraq but there is no critical mass there.
Regretably the U.S, U.K., Russia, Israel and China have all moved in to varying shades of Fascism. They all feature intrusive governments manipulating capitalist economies to enrich themselves and their respective plutocracies consisting of wealthy and loyal party members. With the possible exception of China they haven't reached the levels of oppression found in the '30's but they all feature governments who are trampling civil liberties of their peoples in order to maximize productivity and profit for their plutocracies. Its an unfortunate fact that big corporations always choose profitability over freedom, which is why they tend to favor repressive governments, and which is why they LOVE China so much today. The day China abandoned state ownership of capital, and opened the door to capitalist western corporation loved them though in fact nothing else about the place had changed. Pretty much every major American corporation was a willing and gleeful participant in the booming economy in Nazi Germany in the 1930's too. They could've caref less about their oppressive and violent politics as long as there was plenty of money to be made. George W's grandfather Prescott was the U.S. banker for the Thiessen family, one of Germany's richest, who also happened to bankroll and insure Hitler's rise to power.
Fascism is on a nearly unstoppable march to dominate the world today. World War II, supposedly to eradicate Fascism, was in fact but a brief respite and Fascism has come back to dominate the world because no one noticed or cared. You can't even hint that governments today are Fascist, China certainly is now, without people's eyes glazing over, invking God
"Plus, eventually we'll run out of room for people."
A somewhat simpler and better solution to this one is basic birth control. Trying to ship billions of people to other planets to alleviate overpopulation is an extreme solution when a simple one is available.
The problem we have is poverty, poor education and religious fundamentalism works against birth control and are helping create the overpopulation problem that may well ultimately destroy us, or at least lead to such a poor quality of life it may not be worth living.
I am all for putting people on Mars so we have a new and independent biosphere. It would probably lead to a lot of new innovation in both technology and sociology as well as give adventurers a new place to go as every corner of our planet is filled up. We are in an era for the first time where there aren't really any new frontiers to explore.
I just don't think it particularly viable to use other planets as a dumping ground for excess population.
China IS doing much the same thing as the rest of the world's governments, they are just a somewhat more repressive regime using somewhat more heavy handed tactics. All governments engage in propaganda, censorship is just one variant.
The Bush administration completely snowed our supposedly free press on Iraq so instead of questioning the validity of the case for the war they were instead gleefully riding along in the tanks, and were in fact part of the invasion and only carrying the message the military wanted them to carry and not the reality. Riding in tanks made for better visuals than questioning the validity of the case for war. I still remember Fox news days before the Iraq invasion broadcasting White House dished propaganda that the Iraqis had RPV's they were going to use to spray American cities with chemical and biological weapons.
American journalists did have some degree of independence and impartiality prior to that debacle, dating from the Vietnam and Watergate where they challenged the corrupt powers that be. Now thanks to embedding they are perceived as American combatants and targets which further impedes their ability to get the truth out about what goes on in Iraq.
So the Chinese try to engage in outright censorship, while the U.S. government much more skillfully manipulates a supposedly free press in to telling the vast majority of its people the bullshit they want them to hear. Sure if you are industrious you can find other points of view, especially on the Internet, they don't really stop you, but the vast majority of people don't. You also have that little twinge in the back of your mind that if you surf to Al Jazeera the NSA is flagging you for their special attention. George W. proposed bombing Al Jazeera and was talked out of it by Tony Blair. The translation is he is all for a free press as long as they freely choose to be pro American. If an American network were to openly and consistently challenge the Bush administration in serious issues they would get spanked much like Mapes and Rather were at CBS. They did screw up on authenticating evidence but the underlying fact is the story they carried on Bush's borderline criminal National Guard service was true, its just impossible to prove because Bush agents destroyed most of the evidence (a perk of being governor of Texas being full access to all the National Guard docs there).
End results most Americans get their view on the world form a handful of news outlets dominated by a handful of corporations who have no stomach for challenging the status quo. TV networks in particular have a stunning pro American bias, they have to tell news their corprate sponsors are comfortable with. Their nightly lead offs feature White House "correspondents" who are mostly just repeating the propaganda the White House wants to put out today with no research or journalism to question its validity. They seldom challenge it because if they do they get cut off from the juiciest scraps the White House throws to them. The White House press corp has reaquired some half shrivelled balls lately but its still mostly confined to fighting with Scott McClellan at press conferences the vast majority of American's never see and don't care about.
Its a sad fact but more and more governments are turning either Fascist or Socialist and both dish propaganda with abandon. Not sure if there are many truly free places to live any more. China, Russia, Israel the U.S. and Britain already are or leaning heavily to Fascism. Much of South America and Europe are going Socialist. Liberal democracies are a very much an endangered species.
The dirty little secret about Western governments are they are thoroughly comfortable with Fascism. It got a dirty rep in World War II so no one understands what it is or that it is alive and well and flourishing today. Fascism is repressive government coupled with capitalism where a plutocracy can get and hold great wealth as long as they are in good standing with their Fascist benefactors. China wa
True enough. I'm pretty sure the people in Al Qaeda have engaged in just this calculus. They are at war and when they fly airplanes in to skyscrapers or bomb subways they are making strategic decisions where they are trading off civilian deaths to achieve strategic objectives. Doesn't make it right, but fire bombing cities in World War II and free fire zones in Vietnam weren't right either. It is an unfortunate reality in our world and I can live with it. Our world is based on will to power and the greedy pursuit of wealth.
Only thing I can't live with are people who engage in such activities and are righteous about it, who contend God blesses them for it whether that god be Christian, Jewish or Muslim in persuasion, and who hold they are always in the right and the other side is always in the wrong when in fact both sides are operating at an equally bankrupt level.
"You are right, I don't watch much TV, but the more critical factor here is that I work in Asia, where direct to consumer marketing of ethical drugs is forbidden."
Well if you are ever in the U.S. again you will be shocked at the extent to which prescription drugs have taken over TV ads. They are marketed like soap except for a lengthy and scary rendition of possible side effects I assume the FDA mandates. Its also unnerving the extent to which many news channels are now beholden to drug companies for their revenue, and which likely skews there coverage of drug company profiteering and defective products.
Direct marketing prescription drugs is something that shouldn't be allowed but the U.S. drug industry is so large, rich and powerful now they can pretty much do what they please, and can buy any politicians necessary to get the laws they want.
I really fear we are headed for a THX-1138 world where people lives are controlled by daily doses of drugs doled out by excessively powerful companies in collusion with an excessively powerful government who want a docile, drug dependent population. The key point is the state sponsored drugs will be tailored to enhance worker productivity and submissiveness, versus illegal drugs which impair productivity and stoke rebellion.
"One wonders where to find the Muslim mobs shouting...Stop killing innocent people in the name of Islam"
I imagine you will find them the same place you will find Christian mobs shouting stop killing innocent people in the name of Christianity. There are a few but not many and they don't get much coverage.
And yes the America and British military have killed millions of innocent people over the last century with blessings from many pulpits and chaplains. The civilian deaths caused by terrorism are insignificant versus the civilian deaths caused by the American and British military over the last century, especially via strategic bombing.
It is the nature of both war and fanaticism to kill people and to self justify your actions on the basis that your cause is a righteous one so its OK and God blesses you for it. The allies fire bombed whole cities in Japan and Germany in World War II. They justified it by saying they were at war and those civilians were supporting the war effort of their enemy, it was us or them, so it was OK to incinerate them. In reality those people were mostly doing what they had to do to survive, to work and feed their families. They were innocent, they were killed, where is your indignation. There have certainly been a large number of innocent civilians killed by the U.S. and Britain in Iraq. Maybe there is somewhat less intent to kill civilians these days but its pretty clear that bombs are being dropped on building full of civilians, in the hopes there are some militants there too, and the collateral damage is deemed acceptable by the military. Or soldiers rightly nervous about car bombs are machine gunning cars full of women and children first and asking questions later.
Bottomline is its pretty easy to try to differentiate between the killing engaged in by Islamic extremists on one hand and of the U.S., British and Israeli military on the other. Fact is the Islamic extremist think their cause is just, and have self rationalized their actions, and so have the U.S., Britain and Israel.
Me personally, I think they are all in the wrong. There is very seldom a good reason to kill innocent civilians. When you do it you are in the wrong, you do your cause more harm than good and you just start a snowballing eye for an eye campaign, in which everyone ends up blinded by rage. Cloaking yourself in religious rationalization and self justification wont ever make it right.
I'm just not falling in to the self righteous trap where I say they are always in the wrong and we are always righteous. The U.S., Britain and Israel have in fact inflicted grievous harm on the Arab world over the last century and they do have real reasons to resent the Western Judeo-Christian world for it. Many Iranians rightly hate the west for subjecting them to decades of tyranny under the Shah. The Palestinians were driven out of their homes and homelands and most have been living in squalid refugee camps and walled ghettos, as largely stateless persons, for most of the last half century with little hope and in near complete desperation. Until the west comes to grips with that fact and and equitable resolution is found to their plight you are going to have a lot of angry people willing to become suicide bombers in retaliation.
"Much of a marketing budget is organizing events in order to get your message across to Dr's."
You must not watch much TV. The growth in direct advertising to consumers of prescription drugs is phenomenal. I would be overjoyed if drug companies did focus all their marketing resources on doctors, but in recent years they simply don't. Drug companies increasingly are providing consumers with howto guides on what to tell their doctor in order to acquire the drug they want to sell. Marketing of psychiatric drugs are especially bad, especially when targeted at problem children. You have a problem child, we have the fix for you, put them on an expensive psychiatric drug regimen for the rest of their childhood, some of which were known to have safety issues when given to children.
If you want to defend drug companies you should also not forget the half dozen or more drugs that were massively marketed to consumers, though they were known to have serious dangerous side effects, like Vioxx. They were pushed through the FDA due to an excessively cozy releationship between the drug companies and the FDA, where the FDA was more focused on insuring drug company profitability than on public safety.
The for profit drug industry has produced some great advancements, but lets not pretend the obsessive profit motive in drug development is really a good thing. It leads to:
- Focus on drugs with the best profit potential over drugs that would offer the most benefit. Viagra is going to get a lot more focus than vaccine development for example. Vaccine's are very poor on the profit front which is why we often have problems producing them. Viagra and Lipitor are a gift that keep on giving since once people start taking them they usually don't stop so they are a solid revenue stream for drug companies.
- When a drug company has a multibillion dollar investment in a drug they have a really strong incentive to conceal hazards or efficacy problems in the drug, in order to avoid a multibillion dollar writeoff
- The financial stakes in the drug industry has led to corruption of our government. The so called Medicare drug benefit was little more than a scam cooked up by drug companies in cahoots with corrupt congressman to transfer large sums of money from our tax dollars in to their pockets and the program they created is pathetic in nearly every respect.
- The drug obsession in the U.S. is causing serious financial issues because we are spending increasingly staggering sums on them.
Bottomline since so much of the basic research in drugs is government funded, I'd really almost prefer that all drug development was publicly funded. It would insure development is focused on need and not profitability. It would put greater focus on safety and discourage bringing questionable drugs to market just because they would be profitable. It would lead to drugs that are sold at reasonable prices that people could afford. The economic benefit of that alone would justify the tax dollars we invest in such a program.
"I am with you there. I can't understand why there is such a complaint about the estate tax system."
Well mostly because its been destroying family farms and businesses. The estate tax does need to have a fairly high ceiling so small farms and businesses can be passed on through generations. Farming is a lot of hard work and isn't a lucrative operation for most small farmers (at least the ones not milking farm subsidies for a free ride), so you need to refrain from putting barriers in front of children who want to continue a family tradition.
" but has no problem with money being handed to them regardless of need (inheritance)"
The Republican line is they don't want the government handing out money to the poor, inheritance is 100% in line with their thinking on the way things work. You work hard all your life and you should be able to pass it on to your children to give them a head start in life. I'm OK with that when its in the million dollar range, enough for some land a house and a good education. The multimillion dollar estate where a kid has a free ride all their lives is where the problem lies.
The hypocrisy in the Republican party today is they are constantly mounting about free markets and capitalism but they are the absolute worst lately for government programs to hand out large sums of money to big business and big agriculture. They've taken to constantly handing out money to their rich friends and interfering in markets. This really is the definition of Fascism in its economic sense and the hypocrisy is staggering. Government should confine its role to the essential outlined in the constitution and dismantle every program where it is handing out tax payer's money to their political backer.
"If you were actually interested in reducing their taxes, why not just eliminate the current regressive SS scale, and alter it to something more progressive?"
Uh cause you have a snowball's chance in hell of doing that with the people currently in power or maybe even at all. Most Americans frown on government mandates to pay their hard earned dollars to support others. That should be something left to personal charity preferences.
Social Security really is a government forced insurance and retirement plan. For the most part you get benefits out if you pay in. What you are proposing is income redistribution, taxing the affluent in to the ground to support the poor. That's not entirely a bad thing when you are supporting those with special needs and if you support people in a way that encourages them to better themselves and their circumstance. In practice there will be some of that and a whole lot of lazy freeloaders living off someone else's hard work.
Progressive taxation is also OK with me if it hammers the top 1% and prevents wealth concentration there but I doubt you could pull it off in today's climate and in practice the taxation would probably creep down and hammer ordinary people in middle and upper middle income brackets and they don't need any more tax burden.
Sorry you can argue all you want but this is an area where I basically want the government to get out of my life and get their hand out of my wallet. I'm a believer in personal responsibility, you get back out of life what you put in to it and you don't have easy outs where you can coast through life and someone else who works hard is going to support you. I am all for some taxes going to support the truly disabled I have zero confidence you can do that with out supporting an even larger army of con artists and freeloaders and they just flat don't deserve the free ride at my expense.
I am OK with tax burden on inherited wealth because in that case its a bunch of spoiled rich kids profiting off the hard work of their ancestors and there is no personal responsibility there either.
" People proved they were unable to take care of themselves."
My life experience indicates you are mistaken about disability. One person I know had a lump appear and it was thought to be cancer. This person worked a doctor friend in to declaring it a life threatening disability and got on SS disability. The lump was found later to be not cancer, not life threatening or disabling but the person will stay on disability until 65.
The other person I described previously has a single disability, being overweight and inactive and has acquired all the health problems that stem out of that, especially diabetes. The only disability there is self induced, and mostly grows out of being lazy, not taking care of oneself, or to put it simply lack of personal responsibility. Federal giveaways promote abandonment of personal responsibility while others get to pay the price tag.
There is a small army of people drawing disability due to back injuries most of which are not disabling or are outright shams.
Its just an unfortunate fact that if you create a program to hand out free money people are going to figure out ways to get some of it which is why most Federal handouts turn in to massive cases of fraud, waste and abuse we all get to pay for.
Medicare's critical flaw is it tends to be a free ride for seniors and again from personal experience you see seniors who run to the emergency room for things that should be handled with a visit to the doctor, or demand never ending batteries of tests looking for some problem though most of the problem is just old age. The waste in Medicare due to overuse is no doubt the single greatest contributor to its staggering price tag. Again there is no incentive for personal responsibility so it is free health care and people exploit it while everyone else gets to pay for it.
You act like Social Security and Medicare is some panacea for poverty. You forget that its 12.5% of the income of low incoming people disappearing out of their pay checks. It is in fact INDUCING poverty by bleeding low and middle income people of their income for 40+ years of their lives when they could be buying homes, sending their children to college etc. If you've looked at the number of people falling below the poverty line it is increasing, not decreasing.
I am extremely confident you could provide disability insurance for the truly disabled, or real emergency care for seniors, for a tiny fraction of this price tag without the fraud, waste and abuse. If you left most of the 12.5% in people pay checks they would have a greater ability to succeed. They could save it for retirement or invest it in a college education for their children which would pull a family out of poverty for good, or squander it. If they squander it personal responsibility indicates they should pay the price for it when they end up broke in retirement.
" Wall Street HATED the idea of being forced into managing accounts for a government program managing $1000-$5000 accounts."
Dude a lot of people pay more than that in to Social Security in a year. After 20 years most of these accounts would be over the $100K easy. Not like there is a lot of management to it either. Most of it would be computerized payroll deductions that just land there periodically and they probably wouldn't be moved around very much. It would be a large influx of money for investment companies to work with.
You sit there and rant about how the government can't invest these staggering sums without become Fascist, but then you seem to dismiss the impact this huge influx of money in to private accounts would have on the markets. The fact is there would be a huge pool of new capital flowing in to markets for businesses to borrow, sell stock to and pimp financial growth. It might well create an economic boom. It might also create a bubble and overheated markets that end in large losses for all the retirees funds.
You are "intentionally obfuscated the issue: too, sorry. The fact is the Republican's DO want to start dismantling the program by letting people opt out and put the money in to private accounts. Sure the initial proposal is modest but that is just in at attempt to crack the damn preventing any privatization and once they do they would over a couple decades dismantle the whole program if they could get away with it, which they probably can't.
I really would like to put all my money in to a private account, if I had control over it instead of having Congress dictate what I do with it. I really don't want Congress taxing me and mandating that I put the money in to certain investment vehicles they define and which will mostly benefit their wealthy benefactors on Wall Street.
The down side of their objective is this transition will eventually destroy the pyramid scheme that is Social Security and people who are half way to retirement are going to completely screwed. Current and soon to retire will make out like bandits, those just entering the work force would make out like bandits, but everyone in the middle will get screwed no matter what (unless the government just borrows staggering sums to give us a full return).
Sorry dude you are wrong. Most of the program is a forced retirement program, it is the government saying I'm going to make you save your money for your retirement. What you get out is based on what you pay in as far as the retirement program. The disability part of the program is insurance as you describe. It is a good thing when it helps the disabled. Unfortunately a large percentage of the people who get it are engaging in fraud. You get yourself declared disabled and its a free ride for life. Not a lot of money but a tidy sum while the fraudsters supplement it under the table because they aren't really disabled. Both of the people I know who are on it aren't even remotely disabled and have no right to get it, well one is but its because this person is lazy and lays around the house eating all day so this person is so overweight and out of shape this person can't do anything anymore.
Most people who read my slashdot posts label me a left wing loonie so its alway entertaining when someone calls me a right wing blowhard. I am left on a lot of things but I am pretty libertarian when it comes to personal responsibility and the belief that more government is usually bad government.
I do appreciate your clever defense of SS though. Think of all the blind, orphans and starving children, though this is a small part of the program. You completely gloss over the lion's share of this program is just the government seeking to control your life and your money often to your own detriment.
This probably wont be the most popular position but human DNA and embryo's are abundant to the point they have basically no value. You could buy, sell and destroy them with abandon and it is a trivial to make more. A woman can churn them out about once a month and a man can provide his component about once an hour. There is absolutely nothing sacred about it.
The sacred component comes from time and care invested. By the time a woman has invested nine months in a human embryo it has a lot of value in it. By the time a family and society has invested another eighteen years in the embryo it has skills, education, experience, friends, family and lovers. At that point it is an extremely valuable thing if properly developed, or in some cases it was a giant waste on a complete loser.
There is irony that the Republicans and the Christian fundamentalist zealots that support them are COMPLETELY obsessed with every aspect of an embryo that is of little intrinsic value. Most of the eggs a woman produces are destroyed as part of a natural process. The fact one is fertilized by a man's sperm adds only the slightest additional value. Sure there is potential there but thats all it is potential, and you can combine and egg and sperm with minimal effort to regain that potential.
Now I'm always left wondering how they justify this fanatical obsession with a one month old egg, while at the same time they seem to have gleefully sent 2,200+ young American's, and tens of thousands of Iraqi's to their deaths in a completely optional war. Those young American's had 18+ years invested in them in feeding, nurturing and education. They had friends and families and in most cases had a lot of both intrinsic value and potential. Why is it OK to get them killed and maimed while we obsess over destruction of an embryo that had a about a month of very little effort invested in it.
Not sure I want to see any Republican sponsored social security reform but it is a completely broken program and I would be overjoyed if tomorrow it went away and they just gave me a lump sum payment back of what I've paid in. Of course they can't since everything I've paid in has long since been squandered much of it on pork, fraud, waste and abuse and recently to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. Only way I get my money back is from more payroll taxes on workers younger than me.
I guess I'm saying the Dems are just as wrong in defending the status quo as the Republicans are in their "reform" programs which are scams in their own right.
Social Security as conceived by Roosevelt was kind of scam since very few people lived long enough to collect it and the tax rates could as a result be very low. Unfortunately most people live long past retirement age now and as of around 1980 the tax burden on working people went through the roof. Counting the hidden employer contribution payroll taxes are now an inescapable 12.5% of your wages. People say low and middle income people don't pay a lot of taxes, well they conveniently leave out this inescapable payroll tax.
What we have today is America's greatest generation, the World War II generation, who paid very little in payroll taxes and are now living to their 80's and 90's thanks to better medical care. They are making out like bandits, with a huge return on their investment. Baby boomers will also reap big windfalls though not as big a windfall. Where does this windfall come from, why off the backs of younger workers who are paying a STEEP percentage of their income to fund the program PLUS a big surplus that Congress and various Presidents are squandering on other programs. These younger workers may discover when they retire the program has been eviscerated and they get back less than they paid in if they are lucky. At present Social Security and Medicare are cannibalizing young workers to support seniors.
So can Social Security be reformed today? Not really because the greatest generation and the baby boomers are a powerful lobby and they wont let anyone touch their windfall. They vote in disproportionately high numbers while young people vote in low numbers. They are a powerful lobby.
The result is the only reform you will see will impact younger workers and end up cutting their benefits compared to today's seniors or end up costing them or younger generations even more in taxes. NO ONE IS TOUCHING THE WINDFALL TODAY'S SENIORS ARE REAPING OR BABY BOOMERS WILL SOON REAP and which will push the system in to the red in a decade or so.
What do the Republicans want to do. They want to force you to put payroll taxes in to private financial funds which they will strictly define and regulate. It kind of sounds like a good idea but it has a few problems:
- You still wont really have control of the money because they will tell you exactly what you can and can't do with it.
- The main thing they are trying to achieve is to take a mandatory payroll tax and put it under the control of giant private financial institutions who are huge contributors to the Republican party. They in turn will reap huge windfalls from manipulating this huge influx of money workers will have to give to them by law. Chances are it will cause a large bubble in the stock marker or wherever else it is invested. You can hope it goes in to stable investments that always appreciate but there is a fair chance it will land in investments where the workers actually end up losing money while Wall Street fat cats profit.
- When all this money disappears in to private funds there will be a huge shortfall in paying benefits to current seniors and SOME LUCKY TAX PAYER is going to get to pick up the tab, and it probably isn't going to be the rich, OR the government is going to borrow ever more staggering sums to cover the shortfall which will further destabilize the dollar and the U.S. economy.
The Republicans have made huge payoffs to their
Hate to break this to you but you just came off as being pompous and arrogant here, like the agency you claim to work for has become so famous for.
You also managed to be so vague that your post is pointless. Next time try to actually reply to and refute posts that you think are wrong and make a reasoned argument to support your case instead of just being a know it all pompous ass saying "you're all wrong" but I can't be bothered to actually say how, in what way or why.
You seem to think like a Wall Street broker. As long as staggering losses were written off last quarter its like it never happened. Sure, if they invest a few billion more in this dog maybe they will turn it around and make a profit in the future.
But sunk costs indicate are still vast sums of money the company has spent on something that will probably never turn a profit, and they will probably never recoup what they've invested in it or are about to invest in it. Even Intel isn't a bottomless pool of money. Money they've squandered on Itanium is money they don't have for R&D in areas that will reap benefits, its money they don't have to pay dividends, its money they don't have in the bank. If you keep pouring vast amounts of money in to products that will never turn a profit you are either bleeding successful products white to make up for it or you will eventually end in bankruptcy.
The core AMD has works very well for the markets they are targeting. It is very expensive and risky to develop all new core these days. If you have one works there is a school of thought you get more mileage out of refining it than throwing it away and starting over. Some bleeding edge customers want all new things and are willing to put up with defects and steep costs as the manufacture tries to recoup the sunk cost.
Most customers want something that is reliable, affordable, low power and cool. Churning out bleeding edge all new cores every year runs counter to what most people want, in particular its expensive.
AMD maybe needs a new core to go head to head with Centrino in laptops, or at least refine and better market Turino. They need a better strategy to target phones and settops. They don't need to design an all new core just to satisfy the bleeding edge types. The all new cores in Itanium are slowly destroying Intel in the desktop and server market.