The problem is how to avoid free-riding in the system.
One option is the libertarian approach - ensure everyone has the opportunity to obtain affordable insurance, and otherwise be hands-off. If you then refuse to buy insurance, end up getting ill, and can't pay - too bad. You played Russian roulette with your health and have to pay the consequences. Requiring people to take responsibility for themselves, or risk the consequences, is perfectly valid.
The problem with this approach is that society isn't willing to go all the way with it. Few people are willing to say to the guy who just broke his leg, "Sorry pal, you don't have any money or insurance so I'm not going to heal you up". We feel sympathy for the guy (even if he could have afforded insurance!), and thus the public foots the bill anyway. We're simply not willing to deny care.
And of course there are many people who will exploit that. For example, if (as many are discussing) we require insurance companies to accept pre-existing conditions, folks will wait until they're sick to buy "insurance" (thus defeating the whole premise of insurance, which is to pay premiums while you're well so to cover the risk of getting sick). Given that we're not willing to deny care, the only way you can prevent that kind of abuse is to mandate that everyone buy insurance.
Re: Congress's authority - they have the authority to tax. With that comes the authority to reduce taxes for favored populations (the poor pay lower rates; homeowners get mortgage interest deductions; etc) or favored activities (donating to charity, buying a hybrid car, etc). So all they have to do is say "OK, people who buy health insurance get a tax break; the rest of you don't since the public will end up paying for your care anyway". And maybe the overall rate happens to go up, such that those with insurance have no change in taxes (after accounting for the tax break) but those without are paying more.
That is functionally equivalent to a fine for not buying insurance, is clearly within Congressional authority, and unlike a fine doesn't have any need to find you guilty of any criminal or civil offense. Given that finding this to be unconstitutional would likely invalidate every tax law on the books, I don't expect you'd have much luck in the courts fighting that battle.
I disagree. Amazon is looking out for their customers in the state (which BTW are the same people as "the community"). Of course this benefits Amazon as well, but they are not the only beneficiary.
Second of all... online retailers are not leeching off anyone via tax evasion. They have followed the law and paid the taxes that they are legally obligated to pay. That's called "complying with the law", not "tax evasion". There is no requirement, moral or otherwise, that anyone pay more than the law says you have to.
Third.... Many states exempt basic groceries from sales taxes, in part to help the less fortunate afford to eat. The government's decision to do so does not turn your local grocery store into a "leech". They're a business providing value to the community (few people want a community without a decent grocery store). Similarly, regardless of how the NC Legislature decides to raise money, Amazon is a business providing value to their customers (easier search and wider selection than a brick-and-mortar store).
But this isn't even about taxing NC residents' purchases. The fairness argument you make about local versus online businesses is about whether or not to tax NC resident's online purchases. But the article indicates that the Legislature is attempting more than that. It's trying to tax a transaction between customers and businesses who are both outside the state, simply because a NC resident referred those customers to the businesses. That's just the Legislature getting greedy (if they wanted to tax the referral fee itself, they could, and in fact do via the income tax... but they're trying to tax a sales transaction which itself is operating completely outside the state).
Online (match.com) worked for me. We're getting married next spring. A few observations for the OP about online dating, and dating in general:
1. A big advantage of online dating is it's a lot more time-efficient way to find dates. It doesn't take long to read some profiles, email a few chicks, and see who responds. Compare that with a bar or club where the selection is more limited and the environment is not well-suited to most "geeks". (It's hard to show off smarts or a sense of humor in a place where nobody can hear each other).
2. Another big advantage is that you start communication by email. Starting communication in-person is more difficult because you don't know anything about them yet. Most people tend to put enough stuff in their profile you can find some sort of a hook to start a conversation with (and you can read between the lines to get a feel for their personality too). You also have some time to choose your words. This way you can be a little more relaxed (and thus probably come off more confident and funny) in your email approach than you would trying to hit on them on-the-spot and in-person. Then once you do meet, you can be more confident because you've already passed that first hurdle of getting the date.
3. While you have some preferences already, there are probably some things you don't know about yourself yet. You won't until you've dated someone with that quirk and decided it's either really endearing or incredibly aggravating. Dating is partially about finding the right person, partially about avoiding the wrong person, but also in large part a discovery process of what "the right person" really means for you. So don't stress too much about it - just try to get dates with attractive people you would enjoy talking with and see where it goes from there.
4. #3 is also a reason not to narrow your dating options artificially. Finding a gaming group is fine. But so is a coed volleyball team. Or online. Give yourself opportunities to meet people outside your usual comfort zone. You may find to your surprise that a non-geek girl can be good for you too (I did).
Regarding the parent post's thing about honesty... in my experience (and also what I've heard from my fiancee about her experiences online) most people are mostly honest. Now a profile is essentially an advertisement, so some may engage in what they view as white lies or omissions about some things. Women might exaggerate their fitness level. Guys might exaggerate their height. Some might not admit online that they smoke. But the common thread to these things is that if/when you meet the person, the truth becomes apparent either immediately or a few dates later, and you can decide at that point whether you're still interested. Little harm is thus done, and you get some dating practice and some entertainment out of it regardless. And most people are being honest so it probably won't even be an issue.
Sure... but the difficulty is in knowing whether the attacker is the foreign government, or the foreign criminal. Unlike in the physical world, correct attribution of cyber attacks is much more challenging.
I agree with you that this whole "proportionality" idea makes no sense in war. Wars are not a game of tit-for-tat, they're a serious conflict with serious consequences. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the US didn't say "oh, well I guess I'll bomb one of their naval bases, and then we'll be even". We fought them with all our might until they surrendered.
I think you're right about the stress. I've noticed I tend to gain weight when stressed out (I tend to eat more junk in those times). That's another reason to promote exercise - a good workout really helps relieve stress.
Sleep helps too - if you're exhausted they say you tend to eat more (not sure why your body craves more calories when sleep-deprived) and it's awfully hard to work out when you haven't slept right.
Newton's laws of gravity are not really right either. They didn't know about relativity back then. But Newton's laws are are good enough approximations for things ordinary people are doing in their day.
Same thing goes for how to lose weight or avoid being fat. Eating fewer calories and burning more calories by exercising isn't the complete picture. Some folks have genetic predispositions for either high or low metabolisms. Some build muscle easier than others. And now we find out that some folks have different microbial components that can influence this.
But none of that changes the basic advice you should give people, which is if you want to be fit (or at least not fat), then eat right and exercise regularly.
This isn't "hating on the fatties". If you let people incorrectly believe that "my genes made me fat", while it may make some folks feel less guilty, it also undermines their confidence in their own ability to get healthy. It's in nobody's interest to make fat people feel like being fat is just their lot in life, rather than an obstacle they could overcome with hard work and persistence.
Had we seen daily pictures of dead soldiers on TV for seven years, the public acceptance would have been far lower and diminished far faster than it did.
The return of our soldier's bodies should be handled in a solemn and respectful way. Part of what bothered many folks, and a reason why it's taken until now to allow reporters in (and even now only IF the families agree), is that a lot of the push for this access was purely for the reason you just described - sensationalism and anti-war advocacy/propaganda.
The country was fully aware of the human cost of the war. The cumulative numbers of the slain were on TV practically every night. Every setback we ran into was the latest news story. There were stories about the burdens on military families back home, stories about what it was like for soldiers in Iraq, stories about Iraqis' suffering, stories about supposed futility of keeping the Sunnis and Shiites from killing one another. There were stories about the huge dollar cost of the war, and stories about its many human costs. The country knew what was going on.
But the support for the war effort didn't drop as fast as some would like, so they wanted the press to publish lots of pictures of flag-draped coffins. Not because they thought the press wasn't already informing the public, but because they thought that the public should be bombarded with emotional imagery until everyone turned against the war.
That sort of frenzy I suspect is exactly why the DoD waited until now to allow reporters access. It means the slain soldiers can come home to the solemn environment they deserve, rather be used as pawns in a political war.
A fake cell would indeed be the smart approach. The gotcha, however, is to ensure that the fake cell tower does not trap calls from phones that are outside prison grounds. RF has a way of propagating without regard to property lines. Trapping an emergency call from outside the prison, for example, would not be acceptable.
One possible solution would be to team with the telcos, such that the fake cell would pass along calls to the real carriers, but once it had determined the location of the cell to be inside the prison grounds, would either terminate or record the transmission.
But I do not think the spam problem is really about SMTP, or any other technical limitation. It's a social and economic problem, which is that it is profitable for spammers to deluge millions of people with junk because a tiny minority of recipients will give the spammer money.
While spam is illegal to send in some jurisdictions, that is not the case world-wide, and the Internet is a world-wide medium. Spammers will set up shop in favorable jurisdictions. So even if we had a mail protocol that could properly authenticate the sender to be "John R. Smith" or "Cheap Meds Inc.", there will still be spams, and there will still be some recipients who will buy stuff the spammers are hawking.
Solutions must tackle the economic aspects. One way could be to reduce the number of people who fall for spam, as TFA attempts to do. I suspect this will be ineffective on the whole, simply because so few suckers are required for a spammer to turn a profit. Another approach would be to create adequate anti-spam laws worldwide, effectively raising the cost of spam very high (fines/imprisonment). This is unlikely to succeed due to the sheer number of parties that would need to act together. Another economically-driven approach I've seen is requiring the sender to perform some computational task for an email to be sent, thus raising the cost of spam. This has some potential, but would have to be kept "calibrated" over time to adjust for Moore's Law and the price of cloud computing services.
OTOH, things like phishing emails (which I would call a subset of spam) could probably be helped quite a bit by a better technical solution for mail authentication.
I agree you need an understand of how the human body/mind perceives sight and sound to work on perceptual encoding schemes.
However, I disagree that you need to understand "the history and aesthetics of film, video, and audio production". You need those things to create certain audio/video content. You don't need them to engineer what is essentially a transmission medium.
The designers of FM radio didn't need to be versed in music theory or be able to compare and contrast the styles of Beethoven and Chopin. Neither do the developers of video codecs need to appreciate the finer points of storytelling. Basically, you don't need to know how the signal was produced, or whether the signal is fine art, you just need to know how to efficiently represent the signal in a way that humans can't notice the difference from the original source.
To be sure, the knowledge required is cross-disciplinary. Designing a video codec at a minimum will use knowledge from signal processing, computer programming, biology, etc. But that doesn't mean you need a small army, just the right textbooks and research papers.
Where you DO need folks like broadcasters and content creators is when you are trying to put your codec into an application for their use. But that application first requires that you have a working technology under the hood.
After all, if we do electronic transactions online with nothing more than the card number, expiration date, and CVV number; surely you could just have a simple app on the phone in which you can enter/store that info, and it will transmit it to the reader when you want. That doesn't require complicated coordinations between all these different businesses.
However, since most people get their phones through their carrier, the carriers are probably using their power as gatekeeper to take a cut of these transactions. Carriers such as Verizon have used this power before to cripple phone capabilities that allowed users to do for free those things that the carriers wanted to charge for (e.g. certain Bluetooth profiles). Manufacturers that don't comply don't get their phones sold by that carrier. My guess is they're pulling the same stunt here - the carriers win, and consumers lose.
I don't think it's as simple of a moral issue as you imply it is.
Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose you, as a lawyer, know that your client committed some heinous crime.
You, as his lawyer, devote yourself to getting the guy off, via technicality or by attempting to confuse the jury about the truth of what happened when the crime occurred. Is that the moral thing to do? You know that if you succeed, an injustice will have occurred. Yet, if he doesn't have full legal representation to ensure a fair trial, an injustice will also have occurred.
Ensuring a fair trial is unobjectionable. But there comes a point at which representing a client's interests to the best of your ability can result in an unjust result. That's the nature of an adversarial system of law. From a system design perspective, one can see the necessity of having talented and devoted people performing such roles. But it takes a special kind of person to choose to take on that role, knowing that they will often be devoting their full energy to preventing the legal system from punishing the guilty, and that those that go free may use that freedom to hurt someone again.
So you ask yourself, what motivates someone to defend the guilty? Are they that inspired by the big-picture necessity of it, that it can override their repugnance for their clients' actions? Or do they care more about the money they make, than the issues of justice? I think this ambiguity is at the heart of a lot of the lawyer stereotypes.
Then you add to the mix that lawyers choose which group(s) of clients to work for, and it just adds to the questions. What motivates someone to work for various corporations, or the RIAA, or murder defendants? What made them choose defending those particular people as their life's work?
If a lawyer spends their career working for a cause you believe in, it's easy to support them, because you don't see a potential moral conflict. But if they spend their career defending actions or groups you believe to be immoral, it's difficult to know what to make of them. A natural caution or suspicion sets in, at least until you get to know the lawyer in question.
In short, I don't think it's always so cut-and-dried as "he's just their lawyer". Representing someone says something about the lawyer too - the hard part is figuring out what exactly that is.
Obama originally wanted John Brennan, who IS qualified by virtue of his experience at the CIA. But rumors of his appointment pissed off the left-wingers. Apparently having worked at the CIA at any time during the Bush administration is considered a disqualifier by the extremes of the party. Obama was unwilling to stick up for his desired choice against his base, so he picked Panetta instead.
There are a couple of ways to look at it. One is that Obama wimped out, or that he's politicizing intelligence after criticizing Bush for doing exactly that.
The more Obama-friendly view is that he's picking his battles, and that intelligence experience is not required for agency heads. There was a story on NPR the other day that noted that previous heads of the CIA, widely regarded as successful, also had no intelligence experience upon starting the job. For example, Bush 41.
It is a public resource and history has taught us that public resources must be managed, regulated, rationed, and controlled.
History has not taught us that such things must be controlled. It has taught us that there are always people who want to seize control, and that inevitably those people seek out government as a way to do the controlling.
But witness what the lack of government regulation has done
It has created one of the most wondrous public infrastructures ever created, spanning the globe and fueling a productivity boom in numerous businesses. It's changed the way people do their shopping, the way US Presidents get nominated and elected, and the way we get our news. It's changed how we keep in touch with loved ones far away, and how many of us met their future wives and husbands. It's enabled widespread access to information inconceivable a few decades ago.
If lack of regulation brings us more innovations like the Internet, sign me up for that. Some bickering over DNS is a small price to pay for such a wonder.
We were so scared of the government that we let corporations come in and seize control of the infrastructure. Now the future of the internet is a question of economics, not idealism, and corporations are battling and lobbying to become the largest and most powerful
History has taught us such battles are exactly what would have happened if we let government control things. Corporations would be lobbying government to gain control and special favors. The difference would be that the winners of those battles would be whoever had the better lobbyists, not who had the better products for consumers.
No arguments with what you have said, but here's another angle:
The ideology around the free market is simply the flip side of a similarly bizarre ideology. Namely the strange element of faith that a bunch of politicians or bureaucrats in DC know the workings of the real world better than those actually involved in it day to day. Or that somehow the politicians can solve every problem.
A professional politician usually does not know much about many of the things they need to decide upon. At least part of this is just the reality that there are too many topics handled by Congress for any one person to be an expert on many of them. And of course if you're spending your days legislating, you're not spending them involved in the activities you're regulating, thus the longer you've been in Congress the less likely you are to really be in touch with reality.
There is also a certain amount of arrogance or narcissism required to run for office. So if you can't admit you don't know things, you're unlikely to seek out enough differing opinions to make a reasonable choice. It's that pesky human nature again.
In the end, there will always need to be some rules of the road. But we need to be careful to make sure the scope of rulemaking is commensurate with the knowledge and competence of the rulemakers. Unfortunately, that is not often the case.
Thanks for the link - a very interesting read. It poses an interesting dilemma - if you can solve the problem and thus reduce the burden on society, but need an unfair policy to do it, what is the right choice?
There I would be curious to see what choice tends to be favored by conservatives versus liberals.
I don't think the stories we hear about are necessarily representative. By definition, stories get told if they're interesting. Someone who just worked harder and smarter than the competition, slowly building a strong business, is not necessarily an exciting story. Someone who drops out of school, gets some incredible stroke of luck and ends up a millionaire - that's a story.
I also think much of that kind of financial success is not just a skill but a mindset - a willingness to work your butt off as well as to take a lot of risk. Working harder and taking risks enable you to increase the number of opportunities that come your way, and skill helps you take advantage of the ones that do.
That approach is not for everyone, especially because it's not stable. Many entrepreneurs fail multiple times before they succeed, and living on a shoestring or going bankrupt while trying to feed your kids is not an acceptable risk for many people, even if they otherwise have the necessary skills.
So while there's always going to be some element of luck in life, I don't see it being the predominant factor in folks who have built up their own wealth.
This is much of why I have been upset with Bush. He and his followers have made no pretense of being traditional small-government or libertarian conservatives. They're just the self-righteous types who don't mind any amount of government power, as long as it's in their hands.
As far as your point about folks who advocate one principle when it's convenient to justify their opinion, and advocate the opposite principle when that's convenient, I agree. I've argued with those sorts of people and it's aggravating. They're either stupid, or think we are. But I have to note that this behavior is not limited to "conservatives" - watch many of our illustrious Senators talk and you'll see conservatives and liberals alike playing that game.
No generalization is universal. Even talking about "Europe" is a generalization, as the Western European nations have very different policies and economies than do the Eastern ones.
And I didn't claim that the US was better on every possible measure of well-being. No bubbles here;-)
But that is not to say that all systems are created equal, either. America does stand out in certain ways, namely:
1. Integration of minorities. For all of our genuine and well-noted problems with racism and the like, compared to the vast majority of nations (even much of Europe) we do a much better job of treating minorities/immigrants well and integrating them into our society.
2. Economics. We have much lower unemployment than many other developed nations, and are known as an innovative and highly productive economy. We also have a significant degree of economic mobility.
3. Freedom of speech and religion. Few offer stronger protections.
4. Health-care innovation. We are the source of many of the world's new treatments. And we don't have the waiting times of many countries with more socialized systems.
None of this means we're perfect. Health care is a good example of this. While very innovative, our health care system has a lot of issues - we don't have a good mechanism to restrain costs nor deal with the resulting set of uninsured people. We don't have a good incentive structure to promote preventive medicine. And some measures such as infant mortality are shamefully worse than many European countries.
So are we "the best"? Much like the decision on what automobile is "best", that depends on what features you value most. For myself and many Americans, there's no place we'd rather live.
So what? What does that have to do with whether social security should be maintaining your social circle after you retire? When you say ss shouldn't be progressive, you are saying it should be there to maintain the same social status you had before retiring.
I took no position on whether SS contributions should be based on a flat rate or a progressively increasing rate. What I'm saying is that before we make a decision either way, we should examine the source of the cost growth, and consider whether we should try to constrain the cost before raising what people are required to contribute.
actually, the majority of the rich in the US got there by working for it.
Of the Forbes 400 list of the really wealthy, 270 are entirely self-made, while only 74 inherited their whole fortune.
Or to look at it another way, of those who have 5 million dollars or more, only 10% inherited it. The rest worked for it.
Now, that may not be true in other countries, whose economic and cultural systems are different. But in the modern US, wealth is generally a by-product of people working hard and being willing to take risks that others don't. Take a look at the Smart Money article.
Obama's politics aren't even very liberal. If you look globally to other modern democratic nations in europe and elsewhere the democratic party looks like other countries conservative party
Sure, Obama is not as liberal as many Europeans. Or so we can hope.
But just because the Europeans have made these sorts of mistakes much more extravagantly, doesn't mean we should make them too. Better to learn from others' mistakes than to learn the hard way. We can do without 10% unemployment, rigid employment laws that inhibit hiring, etc.
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The problem is how to avoid free-riding in the system.
One option is the libertarian approach - ensure everyone has the opportunity to obtain affordable insurance, and otherwise be hands-off. If you then refuse to buy insurance, end up getting ill, and can't pay - too bad. You played Russian roulette with your health and have to pay the consequences. Requiring people to take responsibility for themselves, or risk the consequences, is perfectly valid.
The problem with this approach is that society isn't willing to go all the way with it. Few people are willing to say to the guy who just broke his leg, "Sorry pal, you don't have any money or insurance so I'm not going to heal you up". We feel sympathy for the guy (even if he could have afforded insurance!), and thus the public foots the bill anyway. We're simply not willing to deny care.
And of course there are many people who will exploit that. For example, if (as many are discussing) we require insurance companies to accept pre-existing conditions, folks will wait until they're sick to buy "insurance" (thus defeating the whole premise of insurance, which is to pay premiums while you're well so to cover the risk of getting sick). Given that we're not willing to deny care, the only way you can prevent that kind of abuse is to mandate that everyone buy insurance.
Re: Congress's authority - they have the authority to tax. With that comes the authority to reduce taxes for favored populations (the poor pay lower rates; homeowners get mortgage interest deductions; etc) or favored activities (donating to charity, buying a hybrid car, etc). So all they have to do is say "OK, people who buy health insurance get a tax break; the rest of you don't since the public will end up paying for your care anyway". And maybe the overall rate happens to go up, such that those with insurance have no change in taxes (after accounting for the tax break) but those without are paying more.
That is functionally equivalent to a fine for not buying insurance, is clearly within Congressional authority, and unlike a fine doesn't have any need to find you guilty of any criminal or civil offense. Given that finding this to be unconstitutional would likely invalidate every tax law on the books, I don't expect you'd have much luck in the courts fighting that battle.
I disagree. Amazon is looking out for their customers in the state (which BTW are the same people as "the community"). Of course this benefits Amazon as well, but they are not the only beneficiary.
Second of all... online retailers are not leeching off anyone via tax evasion. They have followed the law and paid the taxes that they are legally obligated to pay. That's called "complying with the law", not "tax evasion". There is no requirement, moral or otherwise, that anyone pay more than the law says you have to.
Third.... Many states exempt basic groceries from sales taxes, in part to help the less fortunate afford to eat. The government's decision to do so does not turn your local grocery store into a "leech". They're a business providing value to the community (few people want a community without a decent grocery store). Similarly, regardless of how the NC Legislature decides to raise money, Amazon is a business providing value to their customers (easier search and wider selection than a brick-and-mortar store).
But this isn't even about taxing NC residents' purchases. The fairness argument you make about local versus online businesses is about whether or not to tax NC resident's online purchases. But the article indicates that the Legislature is attempting more than that. It's trying to tax a transaction between customers and businesses who are both outside the state, simply because a NC resident referred those customers to the businesses. That's just the Legislature getting greedy (if they wanted to tax the referral fee itself, they could, and in fact do via the income tax... but they're trying to tax a sales transaction which itself is operating completely outside the state).
Online (match.com) worked for me. We're getting married next spring. A few observations for the OP about online dating, and dating in general:
1. A big advantage of online dating is it's a lot more time-efficient way to find dates. It doesn't take long to read some profiles, email a few chicks, and see who responds. Compare that with a bar or club where the selection is more limited and the environment is not well-suited to most "geeks". (It's hard to show off smarts or a sense of humor in a place where nobody can hear each other).
2. Another big advantage is that you start communication by email. Starting communication in-person is more difficult because you don't know anything about them yet. Most people tend to put enough stuff in their profile you can find some sort of a hook to start a conversation with (and you can read between the lines to get a feel for their personality too). You also have some time to choose your words. This way you can be a little more relaxed (and thus probably come off more confident and funny) in your email approach than you would trying to hit on them on-the-spot and in-person. Then once you do meet, you can be more confident because you've already passed that first hurdle of getting the date.
3. While you have some preferences already, there are probably some things you don't know about yourself yet. You won't until you've dated someone with that quirk and decided it's either really endearing or incredibly aggravating. Dating is partially about finding the right person, partially about avoiding the wrong person, but also in large part a discovery process of what "the right person" really means for you. So don't stress too much about it - just try to get dates with attractive people you would enjoy talking with and see where it goes from there.
4. #3 is also a reason not to narrow your dating options artificially. Finding a gaming group is fine. But so is a coed volleyball team. Or online. Give yourself opportunities to meet people outside your usual comfort zone. You may find to your surprise that a non-geek girl can be good for you too (I did).
Regarding the parent post's thing about honesty... in my experience (and also what I've heard from my fiancee about her experiences online) most people are mostly honest. Now a profile is essentially an advertisement, so some may engage in what they view as white lies or omissions about some things. Women might exaggerate their fitness level. Guys might exaggerate their height. Some might not admit online that they smoke. But the common thread to these things is that if/when you meet the person, the truth becomes apparent either immediately or a few dates later, and you can decide at that point whether you're still interested. Little harm is thus done, and you get some dating practice and some entertainment out of it regardless. And most people are being honest so it probably won't even be an issue.
Sure... but the difficulty is in knowing whether the attacker is the foreign government, or the foreign criminal. Unlike in the physical world, correct attribution of cyber attacks is much more challenging.
I agree with you that this whole "proportionality" idea makes no sense in war. Wars are not a game of tit-for-tat, they're a serious conflict with serious consequences. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the US didn't say "oh, well I guess I'll bomb one of their naval bases, and then we'll be even". We fought them with all our might until they surrendered.
I think you're right about the stress. I've noticed I tend to gain weight when stressed out (I tend to eat more junk in those times). That's another reason to promote exercise - a good workout really helps relieve stress.
Sleep helps too - if you're exhausted they say you tend to eat more (not sure why your body craves more calories when sleep-deprived) and it's awfully hard to work out when you haven't slept right.
Newton's laws of gravity are not really right either. They didn't know about relativity back then. But Newton's laws are are good enough approximations for things ordinary people are doing in their day.
Same thing goes for how to lose weight or avoid being fat. Eating fewer calories and burning more calories by exercising isn't the complete picture. Some folks have genetic predispositions for either high or low metabolisms. Some build muscle easier than others. And now we find out that some folks have different microbial components that can influence this.
But none of that changes the basic advice you should give people, which is if you want to be fit (or at least not fat), then eat right and exercise regularly.
This isn't "hating on the fatties". If you let people incorrectly believe that "my genes made me fat", while it may make some folks feel less guilty, it also undermines their confidence in their own ability to get healthy. It's in nobody's interest to make fat people feel like being fat is just their lot in life, rather than an obstacle they could overcome with hard work and persistence.
Had we seen daily pictures of dead soldiers on TV for seven years, the public acceptance would have been far lower and diminished far faster than it did.
The return of our soldier's bodies should be handled in a solemn and respectful way. Part of what bothered many folks, and a reason why it's taken until now to allow reporters in (and even now only IF the families agree), is that a lot of the push for this access was purely for the reason you just described - sensationalism and anti-war advocacy/propaganda.
The country was fully aware of the human cost of the war. The cumulative numbers of the slain were on TV practically every night. Every setback we ran into was the latest news story. There were stories about the burdens on military families back home, stories about what it was like for soldiers in Iraq, stories about Iraqis' suffering, stories about supposed futility of keeping the Sunnis and Shiites from killing one another. There were stories about the huge dollar cost of the war, and stories about its many human costs. The country knew what was going on.
But the support for the war effort didn't drop as fast as some would like, so they wanted the press to publish lots of pictures of flag-draped coffins. Not because they thought the press wasn't already informing the public, but because they thought that the public should be bombarded with emotional imagery until everyone turned against the war.
That sort of frenzy I suspect is exactly why the DoD waited until now to allow reporters access. It means the slain soldiers can come home to the solemn environment they deserve, rather be used as pawns in a political war.
A fake cell would indeed be the smart approach. The gotcha, however, is to ensure that the fake cell tower does not trap calls from phones that are outside prison grounds. RF has a way of propagating without regard to property lines. Trapping an emergency call from outside the prison, for example, would not be acceptable.
One possible solution would be to team with the telcos, such that the fake cell would pass along calls to the real carriers, but once it had determined the location of the cell to be inside the prison grounds, would either terminate or record the transmission.
SMTP no doubt could be improved.
But I do not think the spam problem is really about SMTP, or any other technical limitation. It's a social and economic problem, which is that it is profitable for spammers to deluge millions of people with junk because a tiny minority of recipients will give the spammer money.
While spam is illegal to send in some jurisdictions, that is not the case world-wide, and the Internet is a world-wide medium. Spammers will set up shop in favorable jurisdictions. So even if we had a mail protocol that could properly authenticate the sender to be "John R. Smith" or "Cheap Meds Inc.", there will still be spams, and there will still be some recipients who will buy stuff the spammers are hawking.
Solutions must tackle the economic aspects. One way could be to reduce the number of people who fall for spam, as TFA attempts to do. I suspect this will be ineffective on the whole, simply because so few suckers are required for a spammer to turn a profit. Another approach would be to create adequate anti-spam laws worldwide, effectively raising the cost of spam very high (fines/imprisonment). This is unlikely to succeed due to the sheer number of parties that would need to act together. Another economically-driven approach I've seen is requiring the sender to perform some computational task for an email to be sent, thus raising the cost of spam. This has some potential, but would have to be kept "calibrated" over time to adjust for Moore's Law and the price of cloud computing services.
OTOH, things like phishing emails (which I would call a subset of spam) could probably be helped quite a bit by a better technical solution for mail authentication.
I agree you need an understand of how the human body/mind perceives sight and sound to work on perceptual encoding schemes.
However, I disagree that you need to understand "the history and aesthetics of film, video, and audio production". You need those things to create certain audio/video content. You don't need them to engineer what is essentially a transmission medium.
The designers of FM radio didn't need to be versed in music theory or be able to compare and contrast the styles of Beethoven and Chopin. Neither do the developers of video codecs need to appreciate the finer points of storytelling. Basically, you don't need to know how the signal was produced, or whether the signal is fine art, you just need to know how to efficiently represent the signal in a way that humans can't notice the difference from the original source.
To be sure, the knowledge required is cross-disciplinary. Designing a video codec at a minimum will use knowledge from signal processing, computer programming, biology, etc. But that doesn't mean you need a small army, just the right textbooks and research papers.
Where you DO need folks like broadcasters and content creators is when you are trying to put your codec into an application for their use. But that application first requires that you have a working technology under the hood.
That was my first thought too.
After all, if we do electronic transactions online with nothing more than the card number, expiration date, and CVV number; surely you could just have a simple app on the phone in which you can enter/store that info, and it will transmit it to the reader when you want. That doesn't require complicated coordinations between all these different businesses.
However, since most people get their phones through their carrier, the carriers are probably using their power as gatekeeper to take a cut of these transactions. Carriers such as Verizon have used this power before to cripple phone capabilities that allowed users to do for free those things that the carriers wanted to charge for (e.g. certain Bluetooth profiles). Manufacturers that don't comply don't get their phones sold by that carrier. My guess is they're pulling the same stunt here - the carriers win, and consumers lose.
I don't think it's as simple of a moral issue as you imply it is.
Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose you, as a lawyer, know that your client committed some heinous crime.
You, as his lawyer, devote yourself to getting the guy off, via technicality or by attempting to confuse the jury about the truth of what happened when the crime occurred. Is that the moral thing to do? You know that if you succeed, an injustice will have occurred. Yet, if he doesn't have full legal representation to ensure a fair trial, an injustice will also have occurred.
Ensuring a fair trial is unobjectionable. But there comes a point at which representing a client's interests to the best of your ability can result in an unjust result. That's the nature of an adversarial system of law. From a system design perspective, one can see the necessity of having talented and devoted people performing such roles. But it takes a special kind of person to choose to take on that role, knowing that they will often be devoting their full energy to preventing the legal system from punishing the guilty, and that those that go free may use that freedom to hurt someone again.
So you ask yourself, what motivates someone to defend the guilty? Are they that inspired by the big-picture necessity of it, that it can override their repugnance for their clients' actions? Or do they care more about the money they make, than the issues of justice? I think this ambiguity is at the heart of a lot of the lawyer stereotypes.
Then you add to the mix that lawyers choose which group(s) of clients to work for, and it just adds to the questions. What motivates someone to work for various corporations, or the RIAA, or murder defendants? What made them choose defending those particular people as their life's work?
If a lawyer spends their career working for a cause you believe in, it's easy to support them, because you don't see a potential moral conflict. But if they spend their career defending actions or groups you believe to be immoral, it's difficult to know what to make of them. A natural caution or suspicion sets in, at least until you get to know the lawyer in question.
In short, I don't think it's always so cut-and-dried as "he's just their lawyer". Representing someone says something about the lawyer too - the hard part is figuring out what exactly that is.
Obama originally wanted John Brennan, who IS qualified by virtue of his experience at the CIA. But rumors of his appointment pissed off the left-wingers. Apparently having worked at the CIA at any time during the Bush administration is considered a disqualifier by the extremes of the party. Obama was unwilling to stick up for his desired choice against his base, so he picked Panetta instead.
There are a couple of ways to look at it. One is that Obama wimped out, or that he's politicizing intelligence after criticizing Bush for doing exactly that.
The more Obama-friendly view is that he's picking his battles, and that intelligence experience is not required for agency heads. There was a story on NPR the other day that noted that previous heads of the CIA, widely regarded as successful, also had no intelligence experience upon starting the job. For example, Bush 41.
Pick your poison :-)
It is a public resource and history has taught us that public resources must be managed, regulated, rationed, and controlled.
History has not taught us that such things must be controlled. It has taught us that there are always people who want to seize control, and that inevitably those people seek out government as a way to do the controlling.
But witness what the lack of government regulation has done
It has created one of the most wondrous public infrastructures ever created, spanning the globe and fueling a productivity boom in numerous businesses. It's changed the way people do their shopping, the way US Presidents get nominated and elected, and the way we get our news. It's changed how we keep in touch with loved ones far away, and how many of us met their future wives and husbands. It's enabled widespread access to information inconceivable a few decades ago.
If lack of regulation brings us more innovations like the Internet, sign me up for that. Some bickering over DNS is a small price to pay for such a wonder.
We were so scared of the government that we let corporations come in and seize control of the infrastructure. Now the future of the internet is a question of economics, not idealism, and corporations are battling and lobbying to become the largest and most powerful
History has taught us such battles are exactly what would have happened if we let government control things. Corporations would be lobbying government to gain control and special favors. The difference would be that the winners of those battles would be whoever had the better lobbyists, not who had the better products for consumers.
No arguments with what you have said, but here's another angle:
The ideology around the free market is simply the flip side of a similarly bizarre ideology. Namely the strange element of faith that a bunch of politicians or bureaucrats in DC know the workings of the real world better than those actually involved in it day to day. Or that somehow the politicians can solve every problem.
A professional politician usually does not know much about many of the things they need to decide upon. At least part of this is just the reality that there are too many topics handled by Congress for any one person to be an expert on many of them. And of course if you're spending your days legislating, you're not spending them involved in the activities you're regulating, thus the longer you've been in Congress the less likely you are to really be in touch with reality.
There is also a certain amount of arrogance or narcissism required to run for office. So if you can't admit you don't know things, you're unlikely to seek out enough differing opinions to make a reasonable choice. It's that pesky human nature again.
In the end, there will always need to be some rules of the road. But we need to be careful to make sure the scope of rulemaking is commensurate with the knowledge and competence of the rulemakers. Unfortunately, that is not often the case.
Thanks for the link - a very interesting read. It poses an interesting dilemma - if you can solve the problem and thus reduce the burden on society, but need an unfair policy to do it, what is the right choice?
There I would be curious to see what choice tends to be favored by conservatives versus liberals.
I don't think the stories we hear about are necessarily representative. By definition, stories get told if they're interesting. Someone who just worked harder and smarter than the competition, slowly building a strong business, is not necessarily an exciting story. Someone who drops out of school, gets some incredible stroke of luck and ends up a millionaire - that's a story.
I also think much of that kind of financial success is not just a skill but a mindset - a willingness to work your butt off as well as to take a lot of risk. Working harder and taking risks enable you to increase the number of opportunities that come your way, and skill helps you take advantage of the ones that do.
That approach is not for everyone, especially because it's not stable. Many entrepreneurs fail multiple times before they succeed, and living on a shoestring or going bankrupt while trying to feed your kids is not an acceptable risk for many people, even if they otherwise have the necessary skills.
So while there's always going to be some element of luck in life, I don't see it being the predominant factor in folks who have built up their own wealth.
This is much of why I have been upset with Bush. He and his followers have made no pretense of being traditional small-government or libertarian conservatives. They're just the self-righteous types who don't mind any amount of government power, as long as it's in their hands.
As far as your point about folks who advocate one principle when it's convenient to justify their opinion, and advocate the opposite principle when that's convenient, I agree. I've argued with those sorts of people and it's aggravating. They're either stupid, or think we are. But I have to note that this behavior is not limited to "conservatives" - watch many of our illustrious Senators talk and you'll see conservatives and liberals alike playing that game.
No generalization is universal. Even talking about "Europe" is a generalization, as the Western European nations have very different policies and economies than do the Eastern ones.
And I didn't claim that the US was better on every possible measure of well-being. No bubbles here ;-)
But that is not to say that all systems are created equal, either. America does stand out in certain ways, namely:
1. Integration of minorities. For all of our genuine and well-noted problems with racism and the like, compared to the vast majority of nations (even much of Europe) we do a much better job of treating minorities/immigrants well and integrating them into our society.
2. Economics. We have much lower unemployment than many other developed nations, and are known as an innovative and highly productive economy. We also have a significant degree of economic mobility.
3. Freedom of speech and religion. Few offer stronger protections.
4. Health-care innovation. We are the source of many of the world's new treatments. And we don't have the waiting times of many countries with more socialized systems.
None of this means we're perfect. Health care is a good example of this. While very innovative, our health care system has a lot of issues - we don't have a good mechanism to restrain costs nor deal with the resulting set of uninsured people. We don't have a good incentive structure to promote preventive medicine. And some measures such as infant mortality are shamefully worse than many European countries.
So are we "the best"? Much like the decision on what automobile is "best", that depends on what features you value most. For myself and many Americans, there's no place we'd rather live.
This is not exhaustive, but try this.
The relationship held even when adjusted for income.
So what? What does that have to do with whether social security should be maintaining your social circle after you retire? When you say ss shouldn't be progressive, you are saying it should be there to maintain the same social status you had before retiring.
I took no position on whether SS contributions should be based on a flat rate or a progressively increasing rate. What I'm saying is that before we make a decision either way, we should examine the source of the cost growth, and consider whether we should try to constrain the cost before raising what people are required to contribute.
actually, the majority of the rich in the US got there by working for it.
Of the Forbes 400 list of the really wealthy, 270 are entirely self-made, while only 74 inherited their whole fortune.
Or to look at it another way, of those who have 5 million dollars or more, only 10% inherited it. The rest worked for it.
Now, that may not be true in other countries, whose economic and cultural systems are different. But in the modern US, wealth is generally a by-product of people working hard and being willing to take risks that others don't. Take a look at the Smart Money article.
There are multiple types of conservatives.
There are fiscal conservatives who care about small government.
There are social conservatives who would oppose medical marijuana and funding of stem cell research.
The two groups, while often allied in the Republican party, are not the same. Some folks are both, but many are not.
Thus, they are not liars, they're just different sets of people.
Obama's politics aren't even very liberal. If you look globally to other modern democratic nations in europe and elsewhere the democratic party looks like other countries conservative party
Sure, Obama is not as liberal as many Europeans. Or so we can hope.
But just because the Europeans have made these sorts of mistakes much more extravagantly, doesn't mean we should make them too. Better to learn from others' mistakes than to learn the hard way. We can do without 10% unemployment, rigid employment laws that inhibit hiring, etc.
Yeah, maybe it wasn't the greatest idea for us to elect a former heavy drinker and cocaine user, the now-infamous George W. Bush.
I'm so glad we don't have a candidate who's done that running this year...
Except we do. And according to many of the polls, that seems to be the new road to the White House.