More like they have no interest in a ponzi scheme started by an anomomous coward, which has seen its value drop like a rock on severa occasions already.
If you don't like something and it's related to money, it's a ponzi scheme. If it's related to politics, it's fascism. If it's related to both, it's communism.
And it's not like Satoshi Nakamoto is any more or less anonymous than you, LurkerXXX, unless your parents had a weird sense of humour.
So you made actual money, without doing any actual work in order to generate that "wealth" other than running a program on your computer for an extended amount of time. You created wealth without creating value.
Actually, he did generate value: the processing power he contributed meant that the blocks involved were found sooner, which drove up the difficulty, which made it harder for an attacker to remove transactions from the Bitcoin history (to double-spend bitcoins).
Remember, whoever controls the most computing power decides which blockchain is the correct one. Every honest mining node helps safeguard the integrity of Bitcoin against attacks. They contribute value in the same way vault door in a bank does.
Explain how this isn't a massive fiduciary jerk-off again? Sounds a lot like the much-maligned speculators of the futures markets to me.
Well, except that there's no futures involved in Bitcoin mining. Nor speculation. Nor market.
However, I find it quite interesting that every Bitcoin story draws hordes of people who apparently hate the very idea of a decentralized currency. Why?
The point of Bitcoin is to be a peer to peer decentralized currency that has limited and slowly decreasing inflation.
It fails, then. The number of bitcoins in existence will hit a ceiling and then slowly decrease due to hard driver crashes and such, while the Bitcoin economy will grow geometrically (assuming the system takes off, of course). What'll you get is deflation (which may or may not be a bad thing), and then technical problems once the value of one coin has grown to the point where the fixed-point arithmetic can't subdivide it enough anymore.
There needs to be some way to either tie the generation of new bitcoins into the amount of transactions rather than just taper off at a set point, or a way to change the fixing point when needed. The former might allow currency manipulation, and the latter might allow DOS attacks and will make the blockchain database harder to maintain (since it might contain transactions with varying exponents) but is closer to the original design specs - it's just a bugfix to the software and network data format rather than a change to the basic idea. Nonetheless, one way or another. the problem needs to be solved now when the network is still small enough that changes can be pushed through.
Finally you can trade your services to each other directly in meatspace with the simple swipe of a card.
Please don't bundle the hookers with the rest of those, for they are service workers who involve nobody but themselves and their willing customers in their transactions. Also, please don't bundle the drug dealers, who are mere black market resellers, with extortionists and assassins.
Hookers are completely legit service providers, whether they happen to offend your personal morality or not. Drug dealers may or may not be legit, depending on their business practices. The Mafia, Russian or otherwise, is just a bunch of parasites which often preys on the first two groups. There's no other connection here.
if it happened no one would think of it that way, at least not any more than we currently think about driving cars around at some fraction of light years per second.
Hmm...
Lightyear is c*t. Lightyears per second is c*t/t. So why not simply measure speed as some fraction of speed of light? For example, 60 miles per hour is 8.94698959 Ã-- 10^-8*c, or 89 nanoc. And 88 miles per hour, the speed requried to break space-time -continuum, is 131 nanoc.
Who the fuck would be crazy/stupid/naive enough to still be clinging to shares of SCOX? It's not like it's worth anything (it currently trades at $0.02, FFS)
If they're not anything, you can't get anything by selling them, and can as well just keep them. You're only risking losing $0.02 per share, after all, which is hardly a "crazy" risk.
Some drugs are more problematic than others. I really don't want someone who's been doing steroids for 3 years to stand in front of my house and ingest PCP.
Well, one side effect of decriminalizing drugs would be that we could require that the more dangerous ones could only be administered by licensed drug dens on-site, and that said dens would then be responsible for the user until the effect wears off. So the steroid-user wouldn't be taking PCP in front of your or anyone else's house; he would be enjoying (?) the effects in a padded cell under the monitoring of medical and security staff.
When trying to combine Europe, Japan and the US in a single concall, one has to bite the bullet.
This rises the question of just what these concalls are trying to acccomplish? Tired people talking with a host of foreigners with accents over what's unlikely to be hifi-level audio equipment doesn't seem exactly productive to me. What's wrong with sending e-mails back and worth - or even installing an NNTP server and using a newsgroup to conduct the conference? You get automatic logging, can read new messages when you're actually awake, multiple topics can be discussed simultaneously in different threads and discussion easily resumed if new insights occur, and the nature of the system will keep it all neatly organized.
Do the calculations to find out how many hundreds of thousands of tons of the most radioactive coal on the planet you would have to stand next to before you would be exposed to a "banana dose".
Zero, since the coal plants spew all that radiactive material into the atmosphere where it will reach you no matter where you are. But that's okay, since they don't have "nuclear" in plant name, and thus are non-scary, just deadly.
The relative price for attacker and defender is the same, so restricting doesn't make anything worse, it just reduces the total number of weapons in the system.
It reduces them on the defenders side. The attacker can obtain weapons before the attack, whereas the defender can't unless they know they're going to be attacked. Since the defender can't get weapons once the attack begins and its ability to fight is thus crippled, the attackers investment is effectively multiplied unless everyone maintains a huge stockpile all of the time. This system encourages warlordism: if you don't maintain a large stockpile of weapons you become an easy target, and if you do maintain one anyone who doesn't becomes an easy target for looting.
A cheap arms race is still an arms race, so if attacker is buying $X of guns the defender still has to match $X if your argument holds. The attacker will spend $X (because that's what the attack is worth to them) regardless of the precise bang for buck (for realistic values), so how will the defender avoid maintaining an equivalent stockpile?
You don't need to maintain a large stockpile of weapons if you can buy them quickly once the fighting starts. You only need a large enough stockpile to fight for however long it takes to get the rest. Compare this with how most countries have far larger wartime armies than peacetime active personnel.
There are only two cases in which your line of reasoning predicts a difference in this dynamic. Weapons are just too damn expensive, no one can afford any or weapons are close enough to free to be able to arm all your men to the teeth and have a huge reserve at hand for less than $X. Of course all that the latter acomplish is to have mercenaries hired for $X - cheap_guns. Come to think of it though, I've never heard the "an armed society is a polite society" folks advocating weapons drops to put a rifle in everyone's hands. Maybe they do understand the economics of violance better than they like to admit.
I'm not saying that an armed society is a polite society. I'm saying that a society that can't get arms when it needs them has little choice but to keep itself armed to the teeth all the time just in case. Which, of course, leads to the problem with cheap mercenaries you mentioned, and thus warlords and violence.
Also, you shouldn't confuse society, where the state puts down any outbreak of violence quickly with overwhelming violence, with international society, where forceful suppression of violence only rarely occurs and then after a long debate. They aren't even remotely similar situations. In the latter case, the "economics of violence" boil down to how much loot someone has versus how big a stick they have or can get in a short order. Unless and until we get an international police army that deals with any outbreak of violence quickly and automatically without China, Russia or any other country being able to veto the action, that's the way it's going to stay. Just because the laws of the jungle don't hold in a city doesn't mean that they won't hold in a jungle.
If you run a 60watt laptop all day but then ride your bike to work you'll be using far less energy than someone who commutes 60 miles and never touches a computer.
It's also not hypocritical to be resentful of your only good options. If the people in power only are willing to offer you a bad option then you can simultaneously use that *bad* option while also resenting them.
If you run a 60 watt laptop all day that's a choice you made. You have the option of not running it, or installing solar batteries or paying a premium on wind power or whatever. But if you make a decision to run a 60 watt laptop and buy the power needed to do so from your local coal/nuclear/kitten-burning power plant, please don't pretend that it was the power company's fault rather than your own decision to put your entertainment above whatever negative consequences producing that power had..
And someone who commutes 60 miles probably does so because they have to, unless you're claiming that they like to waste their time and money.
There is a natural monopoly in energy. It's a monopoly formed by the billions and trillions of dollars necessary to compete. If it was an area I could do something about I would definitely put my money into a 'good' and ecologically sound option--but the option isn't available to everyone. I actually can pay a premium to my energy company and get 100% carbon free energy. I'm sure the electrons reaching me are from natural gas but I'm paying for the higher cost wind turbines and solar elsewhere.
So energy is a natural monopoly, except that it isn't. And the people in power are only willing to offer you a bad option except that they're more than happy to offer you better option provided you're willing to pay cost difference of providing them.
But even assuming that the local power company executives of Jeremiah Cornelius and kelemvor4 are card carrying mustache-twirling villains adamnt of providing only power generated by burning kittens, those two still had the option of not buying such ghastly elecricity for the sole purpose of posting on Slashdot how much they hate the people they bought it from and how it's others, not them, who should choose to forego luxuries - such as posting on Slashdot - when there are no "green" ways to do so. Jeremiah could had chosen not to deal with the people he apparently wants dead just to tell a bunch of strangers that he wants those people dead. Kelemvor4 could had chosen to conserve energy by not posting a message telling these same strangers how he can't be expected to go without these luxuries but conservation is desirable so presumably others should give up theirs. Both chose differently.
Or to put it blunter: people who visit brothels shouldn't condemn prostitutes.
We'll switch over to alternative fuels long before we run out of Fossil Fuels, simply because they'll be cheaper to produce. A gallon of bio-diesel be cheaper per gallon than petrol diesel at some point, Solar will be cheaper per KWh than burning coal at some point. When that happens, the entire economy will flock over to these alternatives because of price benefits.
Unfortunately, no. Such a switch requires massive amounts of energy to build the necessary infrastructure. With the economy already being limited by energy supply(which caused the rising price in the first place), there will be a further massive spike, reflecting the need to build infrastructure fighting for energy against the need to get food to stores. The end result is that the economy won't switch to anything but simply collapses. And this time it won't be a financial collapse where numbers get moved around in a spreadsheet, but rather a physical collapse where there simply isn't enough fuel to do everything necessary to keep people alive.
We either switch long before we reach the point where it's the physical supply limit that's driving up the price, or our civilization collapses. Which is why the price of fossil fuels needs to be driven higher artificially, for example through taxation. Good luck getting that passed, seeing how it will make the current economic crisis far worse (and there's always some kind crisis going on).
It's classic supply and demand.
Classic supply and demand model works fine for luxury resources where the consumers merely want the resource, but lacking it won't cause any consequences. It's a very poor fit for a situation where failing to consume a sufficient amount of the resource causes consumers to die, said consumers are not abstract economic actors but actual living beings who will resort to force to stay alive, and bringing additional supplies online requires use of already-online supplies. The latter will almost certainly turn into a Mad Max scenario if left on its own, because by the time it becomes economically viable to bring those additional supplies online it's already too late.
...and they could have chosen to buy which "green" product in place of the one they have? Oh I get your logic now, since in some areas of life you can't get green products, you might as well throw conservation completely out the window. Perhaps we could all just start burning extra piles of coal in the backyard just for a little extra oomph in protest. Brilliant!
So it's okay to use energy for your comfort and convenience as long as you demand that other people conserve it, since clearly you can't be expected to go without if you can't get a "green" device (which still uses energy that needs to be generated, but that's okay - just condemn the power companies for generating it after you've bought it)?
Got it.
Hey, you could extend that logic over to the obesity problem too! If someone is having a problem losing weight they should just go ahead and eat as much little debbie as they can get their hands on!
Your logic would be more like demanding that others eat less while you continue stuffing your face. And great-grandparen'ts solution would be to go and kill the farmers - which, admittedly, would solve obesity pretty fast.
Even if it goes to areas of war. This does nothing to address the root causes of the conflicts, and the wars won't become less barbaric if there is no influx of money. People gut each other just as horribly with spears.
Arguably, restricting trade - especially weapons trade - with conflicted areas makes things worse. After all, the attacker knows he's going to attack, so he can stockpile weapons beforehand; the defender doesn't necessarily know he'll be attacked, so he either maintains a huge stockpile all the time at the expense of investing in infrastructure and welfare, or he'll make himself a helpless target since he can't buy weapons once the war starts. The third alternative is get lots of weapons and put them to use by looting your neighbours; in other words, becoming a warlord.
The problem is that humans actually have very little understanding of how the body works and should not meddle in genetics on a large scale.
No, the problem is that moral busybodies or other authorities start dictating what character traits must to be culled "for the children" or "for society", such as the short list Professor Savulescu outlined. After all, it's a moral obligation.
But even if every tyrant's wet dream was somehow averted, let's do a thought experiment: suppose this hypothethical technology had been available at your parents time. Consequently, every character trait you have that your parents disagree with is eliminated, and every character trait you lack that they wish you had gets added. Are you comfortable with this thought? And if you are, feel free to extrapolate this further back in time, right through capitalists and communists and anarchists and monarchists and atheists and fundamentalist right back to the first living creature in your line; along the way you're bound to find someone you disagree with. Should that person be allowed to decide the content of your character?
You'd think an "expert in practical ethics" would think of the obvious practical consequences of his ethical recommendations, but I guess his flawed character can't resist the temptation of playing god.
Russia didn't become some nice delightful place governed by law abiding men just because the USSR collapsed.
Which rises some questions about whether said collapse said something about the viability of Communism after all, instead of merely of the nature of the place it was tried on. And that, in turn, leads to some questions about whether our current love affair with free-market Capitalism as the only "realistic" choice despite the corruption it has led to is really such a good idea.
Where are the mainstream influential investigative journalists?
They don't exist. Media is concentrated into large cartels these days, and the people who run them have every incentive to side with other rich and powerful people.
That's the real reason why newspapers are dying: you can get news faster from the Net, and getting to read propaganda is not worth paying for.
The original person who laid the charges has now dropped them and will not co-operate with the prosecution. She laid the charges in the first place after discovering that Assange was sleeping with another woman. She had previously written a lengthy blog on "How to get back at your ex-boyfriend".
So the real lesson here is "don't date evil people".
The UK couldn't raid the Libyan embassy when they literally shot a policewoman dead (and at protestors, too), but they can go in for Assange?
The UK won't raid an embassy to protect its people, but of course it will do so to suck US's cock. Why? What did you expect? We all know who's the bitch in that relationship.
And what distinguishes a sociopath from a normal human? The primary characteristic seems to be opportunity.
In the same way as what distinguishes pyromaniacs from normal people is that pyromaniacs happen to have flammable substances available?
Sociopaths take the opportunities to behave sociopathically, normal humans don't. Obviously nobody can behave sociopathically (or any other way for that matter) if there's no opportunity to do so, by definition of "opportunity". What you're saying is that everyone is a sociopath, which seems a bit unlikely.
Sure, until wealthy people get tired of it and decide to take their money, and the jobs it creates, with them to somewhere else.
Money doesn't create jobs, it's just a logistics tool. Infrastructure creates jobs by allowing economic activity, but infrastructure needs to be paid for. So either whatever jobs you supposedly created stay right where they are so you can keep receiving their profit (in which case what does it matter where your physical person is, and besides why would anyplace want a useless parasite?), or you take them with you (in which case your new home will need to tax you just as much, so what's the point?), or you deprive yourself of income for the sake of principle - specifically, the principle that you should get all the benefits of a civilization without having to pay for it.
I used to live in the northeast and I moved. You know why? I got tired of paying $12,000 a year in property taxes.
So now somebody else owns your properties there and pays those $12,000. Or did you burn them as you left?
As a side note, it's kinda hard to sympathise with someone who's basically complaining that his share of the pie is so big that the maintenance costs alone are half a minimum wage earners yearly income.
Politicians will spend every dime they get and when they run out they will borrow the rest.
Yet this unchangable law of nature is apparently different where you now live in.
The only way to reign in the deficit is to control BOTH spending and revenue and both have to be done in a way the spreads it out evenly.
The problem is that what gets cut is maintenance, since the harm there takes a while to become visible, and often in ways difficult to associate with the source of the problem. For example, cut funds to education and it may take a decade before the quality of workforce begins to suffer; cut funds to road maintenance and it'll take a few years for them to degrade; cut funds to social programs and it takes a few years for the unrest to build to the level where there's open riots. And at that point it's someone else's problem.
The main difference between the US and China is that the US has better infrastructure, both social and physical. However, China's is improving and US's is degrading, and any spending cuts will only accelerate the latter trend. It's basically the same problem Greek is facing: if they cut spending, they enter an economical death spiral; if they don't balance their budget, they go bankrupt; and trying to get the population to pay more taxes is nigh impossible.
Nah. Your history was no more barbaric than that of all the other continents. Asia, India...all home to atrocities. America escaped most of that history purely because it went from a stone age culture to post-Renaissance in one generation.
And almost the entire native population got slaughtered in the process. Not that said native population shied away from atrocities themselves either - the Aztec empire, for example, gave the term "death tax" a whole new meaning. And once it was dead the land left behind needed workers, which leads us to slave trade and all the horrors associated with it, the last of which still linger in your society.
Coming to think of it, that might explain why elevating US Founding Fathers to demigod status and advocating the nastier forms of Social Darwinism seem to have such a strong correlation in the US: an industrial superpower should still be governed exactly like when it was 13 agricultural colonies, and that means the strong should kill or enslave the weak, and in fact the weak should be kept from getting an education least they rise against their masters. Yeah, that explains a lot.
So Gates is putting up the money, and Myrhvold is running around trying to take all the credit for being this great philanthropist.
In other breaking news: local alcoholic seen drinking wine, researchers shocked. "We never expected this might happen", commented Dr. N. S. Sherlock. "People behaving according to their nature completely revolutionizes our view of the nature of reality."
Some future experiments suggested by this amazing discovery include testing the long-ridiculed hypotheses that things get wet when left in the rain and burn when put in fire. "Imagine a future where you can predict how someone or something will behave based on how it's behaved in the past", continued Dr. Sherlock. "It's almost like the world had recognizable patterns, like it was governed by some sort of... laws of nature, for a lack of better term. It's eerie."
Slashdot Mirror
Don't all major distros come with a built-in app store? Sure, everything is free, but still...
If you don't like something and it's related to money, it's a ponzi scheme. If it's related to politics, it's fascism. If it's related to both, it's communism.
And it's not like Satoshi Nakamoto is any more or less anonymous than you, LurkerXXX, unless your parents had a weird sense of humour.
Actually, he did generate value: the processing power he contributed meant that the blocks involved were found sooner, which drove up the difficulty, which made it harder for an attacker to remove transactions from the Bitcoin history (to double-spend bitcoins).
Remember, whoever controls the most computing power decides which blockchain is the correct one. Every honest mining node helps safeguard the integrity of Bitcoin against attacks. They contribute value in the same way vault door in a bank does.
Well, except that there's no futures involved in Bitcoin mining. Nor speculation. Nor market.
However, I find it quite interesting that every Bitcoin story draws hordes of people who apparently hate the very idea of a decentralized currency. Why?
It fails, then. The number of bitcoins in existence will hit a ceiling and then slowly decrease due to hard driver crashes and such, while the Bitcoin economy will grow geometrically (assuming the system takes off, of course). What'll you get is deflation (which may or may not be a bad thing), and then technical problems once the value of one coin has grown to the point where the fixed-point arithmetic can't subdivide it enough anymore.
There needs to be some way to either tie the generation of new bitcoins into the amount of transactions rather than just taper off at a set point, or a way to change the fixing point when needed. The former might allow currency manipulation, and the latter might allow DOS attacks and will make the blockchain database harder to maintain (since it might contain transactions with varying exponents) but is closer to the original design specs - it's just a bugfix to the software and network data format rather than a change to the basic idea. Nonetheless, one way or another. the problem needs to be solved now when the network is still small enough that changes can be pushed through.
Please don't bundle the hookers with the rest of those, for they are service workers who involve nobody but themselves and their willing customers in their transactions. Also, please don't bundle the drug dealers, who are mere black market resellers, with extortionists and assassins.
Hookers are completely legit service providers, whether they happen to offend your personal morality or not. Drug dealers may or may not be legit, depending on their business practices. The Mafia, Russian or otherwise, is just a bunch of parasites which often preys on the first two groups. There's no other connection here.
Hmm...
Lightyear is c*t. Lightyears per second is c*t/t. So why not simply measure speed as some fraction of speed of light? For example, 60 miles per hour is 8.94698959 Ã-- 10^-8*c, or 89 nanoc. And 88 miles per hour, the speed requried to break space-time -continuum, is 131 nanoc.
If they're not anything, you can't get anything by selling them, and can as well just keep them. You're only risking losing $0.02 per share, after all, which is hardly a "crazy" risk.
Well, one side effect of decriminalizing drugs would be that we could require that the more dangerous ones could only be administered by licensed drug dens on-site, and that said dens would then be responsible for the user until the effect wears off. So the steroid-user wouldn't be taking PCP in front of your or anyone else's house; he would be enjoying (?) the effects in a padded cell under the monitoring of medical and security staff.
Sturdy padded walls beat tasers anytime :).
This rises the question of just what these concalls are trying to acccomplish? Tired people talking with a host of foreigners with accents over what's unlikely to be hifi-level audio equipment doesn't seem exactly productive to me. What's wrong with sending e-mails back and worth - or even installing an NNTP server and using a newsgroup to conduct the conference? You get automatic logging, can read new messages when you're actually awake, multiple topics can be discussed simultaneously in different threads and discussion easily resumed if new insights occur, and the nature of the system will keep it all neatly organized.
Zero, since the coal plants spew all that radiactive material into the atmosphere where it will reach you no matter where you are. But that's okay, since they don't have "nuclear" in plant name, and thus are non-scary, just deadly.
It reduces them on the defenders side. The attacker can obtain weapons before the attack, whereas the defender can't unless they know they're going to be attacked. Since the defender can't get weapons once the attack begins and its ability to fight is thus crippled, the attackers investment is effectively multiplied unless everyone maintains a huge stockpile all of the time. This system encourages warlordism: if you don't maintain a large stockpile of weapons you become an easy target, and if you do maintain one anyone who doesn't becomes an easy target for looting.
You don't need to maintain a large stockpile of weapons if you can buy them quickly once the fighting starts. You only need a large enough stockpile to fight for however long it takes to get the rest. Compare this with how most countries have far larger wartime armies than peacetime active personnel.
I'm not saying that an armed society is a polite society. I'm saying that a society that can't get arms when it needs them has little choice but to keep itself armed to the teeth all the time just in case. Which, of course, leads to the problem with cheap mercenaries you mentioned, and thus warlords and violence.
Also, you shouldn't confuse society, where the state puts down any outbreak of violence quickly with overwhelming violence, with international society, where forceful suppression of violence only rarely occurs and then after a long debate. They aren't even remotely similar situations. In the latter case, the "economics of violence" boil down to how much loot someone has versus how big a stick they have or can get in a short order. Unless and until we get an international police army that deals with any outbreak of violence quickly and automatically without China, Russia or any other country being able to veto the action, that's the way it's going to stay. Just because the laws of the jungle don't hold in a city doesn't mean that they won't hold in a jungle.
If you run a 60 watt laptop all day that's a choice you made. You have the option of not running it, or installing solar batteries or paying a premium on wind power or whatever. But if you make a decision to run a 60 watt laptop and buy the power needed to do so from your local coal/nuclear/kitten-burning power plant, please don't pretend that it was the power company's fault rather than your own decision to put your entertainment above whatever negative consequences producing that power had..
And someone who commutes 60 miles probably does so because they have to, unless you're claiming that they like to waste their time and money.
So energy is a natural monopoly, except that it isn't. And the people in power are only willing to offer you a bad option except that they're more than happy to offer you better option provided you're willing to pay cost difference of providing them.
But even assuming that the local power company executives of Jeremiah Cornelius and kelemvor4 are card carrying mustache-twirling villains adamnt of providing only power generated by burning kittens, those two still had the option of not buying such ghastly elecricity for the sole purpose of posting on Slashdot how much they hate the people they bought it from and how it's others, not them, who should choose to forego luxuries - such as posting on Slashdot - when there are no "green" ways to do so. Jeremiah could had chosen not to deal with the people he apparently wants dead just to tell a bunch of strangers that he wants those people dead. Kelemvor4 could had chosen to conserve energy by not posting a message telling these same strangers how he can't be expected to go without these luxuries but conservation is desirable so presumably others should give up theirs. Both chose differently.
Or to put it blunter: people who visit brothels shouldn't condemn prostitutes.
Unfortunately, no. Such a switch requires massive amounts of energy to build the necessary infrastructure. With the economy already being limited by energy supply(which caused the rising price in the first place), there will be a further massive spike, reflecting the need to build infrastructure fighting for energy against the need to get food to stores. The end result is that the economy won't switch to anything but simply collapses. And this time it won't be a financial collapse where numbers get moved around in a spreadsheet, but rather a physical collapse where there simply isn't enough fuel to do everything necessary to keep people alive.
We either switch long before we reach the point where it's the physical supply limit that's driving up the price, or our civilization collapses. Which is why the price of fossil fuels needs to be driven higher artificially, for example through taxation. Good luck getting that passed, seeing how it will make the current economic crisis far worse (and there's always some kind crisis going on).
Classic supply and demand model works fine for luxury resources where the consumers merely want the resource, but lacking it won't cause any consequences. It's a very poor fit for a situation where failing to consume a sufficient amount of the resource causes consumers to die, said consumers are not abstract economic actors but actual living beings who will resort to force to stay alive, and bringing additional supplies online requires use of already-online supplies. The latter will almost certainly turn into a Mad Max scenario if left on its own, because by the time it becomes economically viable to bring those additional supplies online it's already too late.
So it's okay to use energy for your comfort and convenience as long as you demand that other people conserve it, since clearly you can't be expected to go without if you can't get a "green" device (which still uses energy that needs to be generated, but that's okay - just condemn the power companies for generating it after you've bought it)?
Got it.
Your logic would be more like demanding that others eat less while you continue stuffing your face. And great-grandparen'ts solution would be to go and kill the farmers - which, admittedly, would solve obesity pretty fast.
Arguably, restricting trade - especially weapons trade - with conflicted areas makes things worse. After all, the attacker knows he's going to attack, so he can stockpile weapons beforehand; the defender doesn't necessarily know he'll be attacked, so he either maintains a huge stockpile all the time at the expense of investing in infrastructure and welfare, or he'll make himself a helpless target since he can't buy weapons once the war starts. The third alternative is get lots of weapons and put them to use by looting your neighbours; in other words, becoming a warlord.
No, the problem is that moral busybodies or other authorities start dictating what character traits must to be culled "for the children" or "for society", such as the short list Professor Savulescu outlined. After all, it's a moral obligation.
But even if every tyrant's wet dream was somehow averted, let's do a thought experiment: suppose this hypothethical technology had been available at your parents time. Consequently, every character trait you have that your parents disagree with is eliminated, and every character trait you lack that they wish you had gets added. Are you comfortable with this thought? And if you are, feel free to extrapolate this further back in time, right through capitalists and communists and anarchists and monarchists and atheists and fundamentalist right back to the first living creature in your line; along the way you're bound to find someone you disagree with. Should that person be allowed to decide the content of your character?
You'd think an "expert in practical ethics" would think of the obvious practical consequences of his ethical recommendations, but I guess his flawed character can't resist the temptation of playing god.
Which rises some questions about whether said collapse said something about the viability of Communism after all, instead of merely of the nature of the place it was tried on. And that, in turn, leads to some questions about whether our current love affair with free-market Capitalism as the only "realistic" choice despite the corruption it has led to is really such a good idea.
They don't exist. Media is concentrated into large cartels these days, and the people who run them have every incentive to side with other rich and powerful people.
That's the real reason why newspapers are dying: you can get news faster from the Net, and getting to read propaganda is not worth paying for.
So the real lesson here is "don't date evil people".
The UK won't raid an embassy to protect its people, but of course it will do so to suck US's cock. Why? What did you expect? We all know who's the bitch in that relationship.
In the same way as what distinguishes pyromaniacs from normal people is that pyromaniacs happen to have flammable substances available?
Sociopaths take the opportunities to behave sociopathically, normal humans don't. Obviously nobody can behave sociopathically (or any other way for that matter) if there's no opportunity to do so, by definition of "opportunity". What you're saying is that everyone is a sociopath, which seems a bit unlikely.
Money doesn't create jobs, it's just a logistics tool. Infrastructure creates jobs by allowing economic activity, but infrastructure needs to be paid for. So either whatever jobs you supposedly created stay right where they are so you can keep receiving their profit (in which case what does it matter where your physical person is, and besides why would anyplace want a useless parasite?), or you take them with you (in which case your new home will need to tax you just as much, so what's the point?), or you deprive yourself of income for the sake of principle - specifically, the principle that you should get all the benefits of a civilization without having to pay for it.
So now somebody else owns your properties there and pays those $12,000. Or did you burn them as you left?
As a side note, it's kinda hard to sympathise with someone who's basically complaining that his share of the pie is so big that the maintenance costs alone are half a minimum wage earners yearly income.
Yet this unchangable law of nature is apparently different where you now live in.
The problem is that what gets cut is maintenance, since the harm there takes a while to become visible, and often in ways difficult to associate with the source of the problem. For example, cut funds to education and it may take a decade before the quality of workforce begins to suffer; cut funds to road maintenance and it'll take a few years for them to degrade; cut funds to social programs and it takes a few years for the unrest to build to the level where there's open riots. And at that point it's someone else's problem.
The main difference between the US and China is that the US has better infrastructure, both social and physical. However, China's is improving and US's is degrading, and any spending cuts will only accelerate the latter trend. It's basically the same problem Greek is facing: if they cut spending, they enter an economical death spiral; if they don't balance their budget, they go bankrupt; and trying to get the population to pay more taxes is nigh impossible.
And almost the entire native population got slaughtered in the process. Not that said native population shied away from atrocities themselves either - the Aztec empire, for example, gave the term "death tax" a whole new meaning. And once it was dead the land left behind needed workers, which leads us to slave trade and all the horrors associated with it, the last of which still linger in your society.
Coming to think of it, that might explain why elevating US Founding Fathers to demigod status and advocating the nastier forms of Social Darwinism seem to have such a strong correlation in the US: an industrial superpower should still be governed exactly like when it was 13 agricultural colonies, and that means the strong should kill or enslave the weak, and in fact the weak should be kept from getting an education least they rise against their masters. Yeah, that explains a lot.
How large a portion of total income are they getting? Because unless it's a lot less than 70%, there's a lot left to squeeze.
In other breaking news: local alcoholic seen drinking wine, researchers shocked. "We never expected this might happen", commented Dr. N. S. Sherlock. "People behaving according to their nature completely revolutionizes our view of the nature of reality."
Some future experiments suggested by this amazing discovery include testing the long-ridiculed hypotheses that things get wet when left in the rain and burn when put in fire. "Imagine a future where you can predict how someone or something will behave based on how it's behaved in the past", continued Dr. Sherlock. "It's almost like the world had recognizable patterns, like it was governed by some sort of... laws of nature, for a lack of better term. It's eerie."