Anything large enough and poorly run is the abode of mediocrity. Consider the TSA as the most obvious example.
Most things are mediocre by definition, and mediocrity is good enough for most things. In fact, for most things reliable mediocrity is better than attempts to excel which end up doing the opposite - and yes, the TSA is a good example of that too, with its ridiculously overblown security theater. HR and their absurd demands for applicants is another one. Current financial crisis would also qualify, seeing how it was caused by various financial institutions trying to push their profits beyond mediocre.
A 15% reduction will be hard, but far from impossible. TFA is wrong, BTW, there is not a 15% shortfall, it is a maximum 15% saving over normal summer peek demand when everyone has air conditioning going full blast. They managed it last summer, but the powerful nuclear industry is desperate not to be wiped out so is busy spreading FUD.
So, if you give up lighting, air conditioning, electrical trains and so on, you can save electricity. And I guess that if you buy a horse you can give up your car too.
You just solved the energy crisis: let's just turn everything off and sit in the dark! Brilliant! Or it would be if we could keep the lights on.
And when summer ends, as the days get cooler, the reverse occurs. Over the course of a full year, the average electric bill would stay the same.
Your original post said: "There's another way to fix the shortfall: simply raise the price of peak hour electricity until demand falls to the level of supply." Now you're saying this won't happen after all, since people can save money in winter and can thus keep on using electricity when they need it (peak hour). Either peak hour electricity use falls and people suffer or it doesn't and nuclear plants need to be restarted. Which one is it?
VCs don't themselves come up with startup ideas, or they'd be doing that startup instead of looking for startups to fund.
No, because funding startups means you can try several in parallel while starting them yourself limits you to one at a time. Most startups fail, so you need to go through a lot of them to get a succesful one.
And of course working yourself is a lot harder than just investing.
Actually, under libertarianism the parents would be responsible for what their kids take to school. If parents are neglecting their children, then they need to be punished.
Seeing how this would require the government to both have laws defining neglect and to monitor your family life in order to enforce these laws, it doesn't seem to be compatible with any definition of libertarianism I've ever heard of, and certainly not more so that just offering school lunches.
Just because the executives and management in the company might deserve it does not mean you should dishonor yourself to do it to them.
But if you don't, they get the benefits but not costs of their actions, which in turn gives them incentive to repeat them. By letting evil go unpunished you are letting the cancer to spread. Thus, it's not only your right but your duty to ensure that anyone who screws you over won't get away with it. True dishonor comes from avoiding this duty, since innocents will pay the price of whatever comfort you derive from that. That's another possible set of "strick personal ethic". Your assertion that paying a wrong back in kind brings "dishonour" is quite a bold claim, especially since most systems of honour in history were pretty much focused on vengeance.
Also, one could just as easily argue that "professionalism" in a field where one is regularly betrayed by one's employers (which would be all of them nowadays) would include being prepared to deal with such betrayals. Specifically, it might include acquiring and keeping a stash of sensitive information about your employer, to be used or destroyed based on how the relationship ended. In no case does it include being the perfect victim: one who simply takes it and doesn't seek retribution.
None of that is saying that you should take vengeance, of course; just that a blanket condemnation of those who do is rubbish.
Well... no. I didn't see his post, and didn't even notice it existed before seeing yours. So Slashdot moderation system is already doing a decent enough job of getting rid of his crap, without any need to "stop" him.
Looks like the fear and greed driven speculators are finally getting out of the market:)
But is that a good thing? Speculators give Bitcoin liquidity. There are still very few places where you can spend it, so such liquidity - being able to convert back and worth between Bitcoin and other currencies - is desperately needed.
Anyway, the real reason Bitcoin is doomed is simply because the ultimate coin supply is limited, and people will occasionally lose their access keys, so the amount of BC in circulation will eventually start receding. Combine this with the limited subdivisibility of a single coin, and you get a pretty serious design flaw.
Money evolved precisely because bartering does not scale well. You cannot build a large scale economy with such a system.
From the AJC article, it seems that we're actually talking about local small-scale monetary systems. You exchange your labour or stuff for coupons, then exchange them for goods or services.
Besides, it's hardly surprising that local currencies and bartering systems would start popping up as the situation deteriorates. People need to trade, so if the official currency is useless, alternatives will be developed.
No question about using the card online either - it has a specific, known value until it is used and then it has no value and can easily be confirmed that way.
You know what has more legitimacy than bitcoin? Zimbabwe Dollar!
Last I heard using neither was criminal, so I'd have to say that they're both equally legitimate. Perhaps you meant credibility? In which Bitcoin wins, since quite a few black markets accept it as payment, while even Zimbabweans don't use Zimbabwean Dollar any more.
In other cases, trolling is done by pathetic people who enjoy sucking the life out of beneficial dialogs. Meanings, its a sad, sad cry for attention. Usually the later are people who are seriously emotionally damaged and trolling is their primary source of social interaction.
Effective trolling requires understanding people and how your messages look to other people. People who have little social interaction are typically very bad at this. Thus, basement-dwellers make bad trolls.
Which basically means, those who believe trolling means someone disagrees or finds a post unpopular are themselves likely a troll.
More likely, they are taking the easy way out: since you are not only right, but obviously right, anyone who disagrees with you is either evil or stupid or both. So, if their message is typed coherently, they must be evil people who are disagreeing with your obvious truth just to be contrary - in other words, trolls.
The real trouble starts when people take this outside the Internet, and start assuming that anyone who disagrees with them on economy, sociology, morals or whatever is arguing in bad faith. It becomes impossible to reach any kind of compromise or even intelligent debate when both sides assume that the other is a card-carrying villain. The Anti-Life/Anti-Choice abortion debate is a classic example.
please expound on the inherent disadvantages and obstacles privileged white people must overcome.
I'm going to assume that the world "privileged" got to your post by accident rather than as an attempt of deliberately engaging in a tautology ("privileged people are privileged").
We get sunburn more easily than darker-skinned people. They, in turn, are worse at making vitamin-D at greater latitudes. These are pretty much the only inherent (dis)advantages a race grants to anyone.
As for non-inherent disadvantages, random assholes group "white people" together and pretend that a typical person of European descent is a British colonial lord or a Southern plantation owner living a life of luxury while slaves toil on their behalf, then use this ridiculous strawman to justify calling all white people privileged. For whatever reason, this seems to be especially fashionable amongst the people self-identifying as liberals, and ironically enough sometimes reaches the point of outright racism, when one starts talking about the inherent disadvantages of not being white.
Just out of curiosity, you do know what inherent means, right? Specifically, that how other people treat you is not inherent to you? And that claiming that one race is inherently advantaged or disadvantaged above or below another is pretty much the definition of racism?
Why tax corporate profits in the first place? Their taxed when they become someone's income.
Let's suppose that a person A owns stock in BigCorp. BigCorp doesn't pay dividend, but instead reinvests all its income to develop the corporation. That means that the value of person A's stock is growing geometrically, without him paying any taxes on that.
Now let's compare this to person B, who works and invests his pay to stocks. The value of his portfolio is also growing, but he's paying taxes on his income before he can invest the remainder.
Both A and B are investing in the stock market - A by not demanding a dividend and letting BigCorp use the money instead, B by raising money through his labour - but only B is paying a tax on it. That's not fair. And it's unfair in a way that favours the already-rich, who are more likely to both already own stock and not need income from them.
The problem for you is that you want to tax corporations for no other reason to raise revenue for government tyrants, who then benefit you with their blessings in the form of things you should be willing and have to work for.
I wholly agree with you in that people who don't work shouldn't get such a large share (if any) of the fruits of labour. This, however rises a question: why do you oppose corporate taxes? It's taxing money going to shareholders, who didn't lift a finger to earn it.
Government cannot create private sector jobs.
Of course it can. For example, in Finland the government pays for education up to and including university level, so the fact that Rovio was able to hire competent people is entirely due to public investment.
Period.
Saying "period" doesn't actually give your argument any extra weight.
They only thing government can do is take from the productive and give it to those that are not productive.
Well, I'd be happy to stop bailing out the banks over and over again, but then we'd need a heavily regulated institution for handling money transfers. Since the regulations would limit risk, they'd also limit profit potential, so the whole thing would probably need to be government-backed.
Anyone that has 20 years (or more) of elected office, cannot run or hold any elected office, ever. By eliminating career politicians, perhaps we might start looking at statesmen for public elected office.
Or, more likely, you'd end up with politicians even more beholden to corporations, since they'd know that their future depend on earning a retirement position.
Taxes are regressive, and politicians use them to curry favor and pay out benefits to keep getting elected.
Well yes, they are. Let's make them progressive instead.
You seem to be forgetting that the wolves are going to kill and eat the sheep. The sheep has every right to defend itself, even if that inconveniences the wolves (skipping a meal won't kill them).
Skipping enough meals will kill the wolves That's why the analogy sucks. It describes a situation where neither liberty nor freedom can possibly exist: the sheep can't trust the wolves, so it has little choice but to keep them helpless and unarmed. The sheep is privileged over the wolves and must keep itself that way in order to survive. It's not good enough for the sheep to just defend itself against, because if the two wolves are allowed to become equal (armed), they can overpower it through numbers. Consequently, the sheep must actively suppress the wolves.
So while the analogy pretends to describe liberty, it actually paints a dystopia where a minority elite oppresses the majority through threats of violence and justifies this with the fact that they'll be killed if they ever lose their grip on power. They are also entirely correct: the majority doesn't have any choice in the matter due to convoluted circumstances. Consequently, no negotiation or program of democratization is possible. The sheep either rule the wolves with an iron hoof or die.
That's why I oppose this particular analogy: not because of some bullshit notion that people should not be allowed to defend themselves, but because it's a very bad analogy.
I don't really care, if "peen" is what it takes to go to Mars. Seems good enough a reason for me.
It isn't. A dick-waving contest was enough to go to the Moon. When was the last time anyone went there? Where are the moonbases and space habitats?
The problem with dick-waving contests is that the goals tend to be symbolic gestures with little actual value. No, putting a man on the Moon wasn't a "giant step for mankind". It was a PR stunt. Perhaps if the moonflights would had been sustained... but they weren't, because once the contest was over, the interest - and funding - dried out. And the same will happen to any prestige-driven Mars mission.
Asking them to work 90 hours a week instead of 60, is also not good cause for the employee to quit on the spot,
Yes, it is. 60-hour workweeks will kill you in the long run, and even if you have armor-plated constitution will leave you no time for actually living. The employer asking you to extend them to 90 hours means that they aren't going away any time soon, but will instead get even longer. That in turn means that your employer is trying to kill you for profit, either through stupidity or in cold blood. Either is a good reason to leave.
Liberty is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner, and the sheep is armed with two guns (one for each wolf). There is a reason for the second amendment, and it has nothing to do with "hunting".
So... liberty is the majority starving to death for the sake of the army-controlling minority?
Maybe you should think up a better analogy. Assuming the implication "liberty kills" was not the point, of course.
No, you simply walk away from content creators whose practices you dislike.
And thus accept lobbyist-bought legislation as legitimate. It isn't. There's no moral obligation to obey laws brought by corruption. Copyright law has zero moral authority, which is why it's pretty much ignored.
The people who make Game Of Thrones weren't forced to go work with HBO. It's a choice. [...] You just want them to work for you for free, as your pet entertainment slaves.
Try to make up your mind.
You'll feel so much better if you just admit it: you want other people to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create stuff that you in turn want to rip off.
So... if the creators spend hundreds of millions to make a tv series which doesn't sell because the producer doesn't put it up for sale that's okay, but if people then watch bootleg copies they get ripped off?
Slashdot Mirror
Most things are mediocre by definition, and mediocrity is good enough for most things. In fact, for most things reliable mediocrity is better than attempts to excel which end up doing the opposite - and yes, the TSA is a good example of that too, with its ridiculously overblown security theater. HR and their absurd demands for applicants is another one. Current financial crisis would also qualify, seeing how it was caused by various financial institutions trying to push their profits beyond mediocre.
So, if you give up lighting, air conditioning, electrical trains and so on, you can save electricity. And I guess that if you buy a horse you can give up your car too.
You just solved the energy crisis: let's just turn everything off and sit in the dark! Brilliant! Or it would be if we could keep the lights on.
Your original post said: "There's another way to fix the shortfall: simply raise the price of peak hour electricity until demand falls to the level of supply." Now you're saying this won't happen after all, since people can save money in winter and can thus keep on using electricity when they need it (peak hour). Either peak hour electricity use falls and people suffer or it doesn't and nuclear plants need to be restarted. Which one is it?
No, because funding startups means you can try several in parallel while starting them yourself limits you to one at a time. Most startups fail, so you need to go through a lot of them to get a succesful one.
And of course working yourself is a lot harder than just investing.
Seeing how this would require the government to both have laws defining neglect and to monitor your family life in order to enforce these laws, it doesn't seem to be compatible with any definition of libertarianism I've ever heard of, and certainly not more so that just offering school lunches.
But if you don't, they get the benefits but not costs of their actions, which in turn gives them incentive to repeat them. By letting evil go unpunished you are letting the cancer to spread. Thus, it's not only your right but your duty to ensure that anyone who screws you over won't get away with it. True dishonor comes from avoiding this duty, since innocents will pay the price of whatever comfort you derive from that. That's another possible set of "strick personal ethic". Your assertion that paying a wrong back in kind brings "dishonour" is quite a bold claim, especially since most systems of honour in history were pretty much focused on vengeance.
Also, one could just as easily argue that "professionalism" in a field where one is regularly betrayed by one's employers (which would be all of them nowadays) would include being prepared to deal with such betrayals. Specifically, it might include acquiring and keeping a stash of sensitive information about your employer, to be used or destroyed based on how the relationship ended. In no case does it include being the perfect victim: one who simply takes it and doesn't seek retribution.
None of that is saying that you should take vengeance, of course; just that a blanket condemnation of those who do is rubbish.
Well... no. I didn't see his post, and didn't even notice it existed before seeing yours. So Slashdot moderation system is already doing a decent enough job of getting rid of his crap, without any need to "stop" him.
But is that a good thing? Speculators give Bitcoin liquidity. There are still very few places where you can spend it, so such liquidity - being able to convert back and worth between Bitcoin and other currencies - is desperately needed.
Anyway, the real reason Bitcoin is doomed is simply because the ultimate coin supply is limited, and people will occasionally lose their access keys, so the amount of BC in circulation will eventually start receding. Combine this with the limited subdivisibility of a single coin, and you get a pretty serious design flaw.
From the AJC article, it seems that we're actually talking about local small-scale monetary systems. You exchange your labour or stuff for coupons, then exchange them for goods or services.
Besides, it's hardly surprising that local currencies and bartering systems would start popping up as the situation deteriorates. People need to trade, so if the official currency is useless, alternatives will be developed.
How can it be confirmed used? That's not a minor detail, it's the main problem each and every online payment system tries to solve: how do you keep people from spending the same money more than once?
Last I heard using neither was criminal, so I'd have to say that they're both equally legitimate. Perhaps you meant credibility? In which Bitcoin wins, since quite a few black markets accept it as payment, while even Zimbabweans don't use Zimbabwean Dollar any more.
Unless the invasiva species talked about in the article were the Godzilla, they can't be that radioactive, seeing how they're still alive.
Effective trolling requires understanding people and how your messages look to other people. People who have little social interaction are typically very bad at this. Thus, basement-dwellers make bad trolls.
More likely, they are taking the easy way out: since you are not only right, but obviously right, anyone who disagrees with you is either evil or stupid or both. So, if their message is typed coherently, they must be evil people who are disagreeing with your obvious truth just to be contrary - in other words, trolls.
The real trouble starts when people take this outside the Internet, and start assuming that anyone who disagrees with them on economy, sociology, morals or whatever is arguing in bad faith. It becomes impossible to reach any kind of compromise or even intelligent debate when both sides assume that the other is a card-carrying villain. The Anti-Life/Anti-Choice abortion debate is a classic example.
I'm going to assume that the world "privileged" got to your post by accident rather than as an attempt of deliberately engaging in a tautology ("privileged people are privileged").
We get sunburn more easily than darker-skinned people. They, in turn, are worse at making vitamin-D at greater latitudes. These are pretty much the only inherent (dis)advantages a race grants to anyone.
As for non-inherent disadvantages, random assholes group "white people" together and pretend that a typical person of European descent is a British colonial lord or a Southern plantation owner living a life of luxury while slaves toil on their behalf, then use this ridiculous strawman to justify calling all white people privileged. For whatever reason, this seems to be especially fashionable amongst the people self-identifying as liberals, and ironically enough sometimes reaches the point of outright racism, when one starts talking about the inherent disadvantages of not being white.
Just out of curiosity, you do know what inherent means, right? Specifically, that how other people treat you is not inherent to you? And that claiming that one race is inherently advantaged or disadvantaged above or below another is pretty much the definition of racism?
And do you think being forced to live a lie is dignified?
Bad example. WBC are jerks to a ridiculous degree, but their demonstrations don't threaten anyone's life, except perhaps theirs.
It paid for the education of Rovio founders and employees. Education in Finland is free up to and including university level.
Oh well, the country doesn't fall from a few leeches showing their true colours.
Let's suppose that a person A owns stock in BigCorp. BigCorp doesn't pay dividend, but instead reinvests all its income to develop the corporation. That means that the value of person A's stock is growing geometrically, without him paying any taxes on that.
Now let's compare this to person B, who works and invests his pay to stocks. The value of his portfolio is also growing, but he's paying taxes on his income before he can invest the remainder.
Both A and B are investing in the stock market - A by not demanding a dividend and letting BigCorp use the money instead, B by raising money through his labour - but only B is paying a tax on it. That's not fair. And it's unfair in a way that favours the already-rich, who are more likely to both already own stock and not need income from them.
I wholly agree with you in that people who don't work shouldn't get such a large share (if any) of the fruits of labour. This, however rises a question: why do you oppose corporate taxes? It's taxing money going to shareholders, who didn't lift a finger to earn it.
Of course it can. For example, in Finland the government pays for education up to and including university level, so the fact that Rovio was able to hire competent people is entirely due to public investment.
Saying "period" doesn't actually give your argument any extra weight.
Well, I'd be happy to stop bailing out the banks over and over again, but then we'd need a heavily regulated institution for handling money transfers. Since the regulations would limit risk, they'd also limit profit potential, so the whole thing would probably need to be government-backed.
Or, more likely, you'd end up with politicians even more beholden to corporations, since they'd know that their future depend on earning a retirement position.
Well yes, they are. Let's make them progressive instead.
Skipping enough meals will kill the wolves That's why the analogy sucks. It describes a situation where neither liberty nor freedom can possibly exist: the sheep can't trust the wolves, so it has little choice but to keep them helpless and unarmed. The sheep is privileged over the wolves and must keep itself that way in order to survive. It's not good enough for the sheep to just defend itself against, because if the two wolves are allowed to become equal (armed), they can overpower it through numbers. Consequently, the sheep must actively suppress the wolves.
So while the analogy pretends to describe liberty, it actually paints a dystopia where a minority elite oppresses the majority through threats of violence and justifies this with the fact that they'll be killed if they ever lose their grip on power. They are also entirely correct: the majority doesn't have any choice in the matter due to convoluted circumstances. Consequently, no negotiation or program of democratization is possible. The sheep either rule the wolves with an iron hoof or die.
That's why I oppose this particular analogy: not because of some bullshit notion that people should not be allowed to defend themselves, but because it's a very bad analogy.
Didn't those switch to globally distributed clouds years ago? Ones composed mostly of unpatched Windows machines, if I understood correctly.
It isn't. A dick-waving contest was enough to go to the Moon. When was the last time anyone went there? Where are the moonbases and space habitats?
The problem with dick-waving contests is that the goals tend to be symbolic gestures with little actual value. No, putting a man on the Moon wasn't a "giant step for mankind". It was a PR stunt. Perhaps if the moonflights would had been sustained... but they weren't, because once the contest was over, the interest - and funding - dried out. And the same will happen to any prestige-driven Mars mission.
Yes, it is. 60-hour workweeks will kill you in the long run, and even if you have armor-plated constitution will leave you no time for actually living. The employer asking you to extend them to 90 hours means that they aren't going away any time soon, but will instead get even longer. That in turn means that your employer is trying to kill you for profit, either through stupidity or in cold blood. Either is a good reason to leave.
So... liberty is the majority starving to death for the sake of the army-controlling minority?
Maybe you should think up a better analogy. Assuming the implication "liberty kills" was not the point, of course.
Can you give me a legitimate reason why any law-abiding person would need to justify themselves to either you or the police?
Damn control freaks.
And thus accept lobbyist-bought legislation as legitimate. It isn't. There's no moral obligation to obey laws brought by corruption. Copyright law has zero moral authority, which is why it's pretty much ignored.
Try to make up your mind.
So... if the creators spend hundreds of millions to make a tv series which doesn't sell because the producer doesn't put it up for sale that's okay, but if people then watch bootleg copies they get ripped off?