Where are people getting these crazy conspiracy theory notions of what Net Neutrality is?
Probably because every news article and politician has a different definition of what "net neutrality" means. I'm not sure if it's a genuine lack of understanding, an attempt to consider potential consequences, or even an attempt to muddy the waters for the public.
The devil's really in the details here - if the regulations are not written very carefully they could be dangerous.
I think what we want is for ISPs not to block or degrade content they disagree with, such as from their competitors or critics, or content like controversial political expression.
But what if a content provider wanted to pay the ISP to provide the ISP's customers faster access to its websites? I.e. have the ISP provide Akamai-like services? There's nothing illegitimate aboiut media distribution services like this, but you could easily argue that it is "degrading" the service of those content providers that don't pay for the faster service.
That question gets even trickier when you have some ISPs being both content providers and ISPs.
What about QoS? If an ISP wants to ensure good VOIP or teleconferencing or even gaming services on its network, if it prioritizes certain latency-sensitive traffic then is that "degrading" ordinary Web traffic? In a way it is, and it's doing so on the basis of the content type. But it's not clear we should ban this sort of thing - there are some real-life legitimate reasons to do this.
It would be very easy for lawyer-regulators to take a good principle and make it into a counter-productive regulation. Especially under lobbying from vested interests that would love the rules to impede their competition, and in a technological environment that is still rapidly evolving.
That may explain some of the skepticism in Congress about the FCC's plans. They look at the Internet as a near-miraculous accomplishment and think "if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it".
It would indeed be such an insult, except that I'm not suggesting that the government (or anyone else) deny folks who own a piece a land the freedom to build what they want on it. They can do whatever they please.
I'm just suggesting that asserting their rights to build in this particular location will inflame the passions of many 9/11 victims' families, and thus may not be the most neighborly thing to do, nor necessarily in their own long-term interest of having productive relationships with the larger community.
Allow me to suggest that what we have here is a conflation of two very different things: what one has a right to do, and what one SHOULD do. There is a difference between behavior we tolerate and behavior we condone.
It seems to me you are talking about what we condone while the others are talking about what we tolerate.
I have a right to say (almost) anything. I can insult my neighbors and generally be a jerk in all kinds of ways. Legally we tolerate this, because we as a society made the decision that the ability to share ideas is so vital that the government should not be able to decide which ideas are valuable and which are not, or which are too "offensive" to exist.
But that doesn't mean people won't think I'm a jerk for gratutitously insulting them, nor that they can't criticize me for such behavior.
Building a mosque near where Islamic zealots murdered thousands of people, or a Japanese temple near Pearl Harbor, fall into the categories of things that may be legally tolerated, but are needlessly inflammatory to folks who have been through a lot. It can be done, but doesn't mean it should be.
Re:United States Government Accountability Office?
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Top Secret America
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As the American experience has shown in regard to the free press, there's a difference between being subsidized by the government and being operated by the government.
There is a certainly a difference. But that doesn't mean government funding is a cure for the ills of journalism.
If the complaint is that journalists are too favorable to business for fear of losing advertising revenue, why would journalists not similarly fear being critical of government for fear of losing their taxpayer subsidy?
The US Congress has a long history of using its power of the purse to tame the independence of those it subsidizes. Even the states, sovereign under the Constitution, were coerced into adoping a maximum speed limit on the roads, through the threat of losing federal highway dollars. Universities are being required to act as copyright cops under recent legislation, lest they lose federal research funds. I suspect more examples can be found if you look.
To me, the problem with journalism is less about its revenue source than about its quality. Critical thinking has become a rarity, especially on TV news. It's become a 24-hour emotion machine, rather than a facts machine. When's the last time you saw a popular US news program really challenge your assumptions through in-depth reporting? Much of the media today has settled for parroting whatever the politicians on each "side" tell them. They think they're "independent" when they have a loon from each extreme on their show. But question whether the historical record accurately reflects what the politician claims? That gets skipped unless the claim is so plainly absurd everyone already knows it (Hillary Clinton's claims of dodging sniper fire in Bosnia, for example).
It makes me wonder if maybe the real problem is insufficient education of many journalists. How can they report on the economy if they don't grasp basic economics? A politician can feed them a load of empirically false but pleasant-sounding nonsense and they wouldn't know it. Ditto for the reporting on science or technology - if you don't have a general understanding of the field you can't tell the snake oil salesmen from the real deal.
This is one of many reasons I think schools should teach emotional skills starting at an early age. It's a bigger predictor of success in life than IQ. It's the way to be happy - if you don't understand yourself, how can you pick the right path in life? It's a way to make all your relationships in life better - if you can understand others' emotions, you have less conflict.
Yet it's something few of us ever get taught explicitly. Is it any wonder we have so much social conflict and such pathetic politics?
I wish I'd had that sort of instruction as a little kid. I think it would've done wonders for my social life. And if such teaching were widespread, it'd do wonders for society.
Why must climate change be explained either exclusively in terms of human influence or exclusively in terms of non-human factors? It doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense because human beings don't make sense. It's in our nature to take disagreements personally and emotionally. So when someone suggests our opinion (which naturally we hold strongly and believe to be based on solid evidence and smart thinking) may, in fact, be misinformed, we take it as an insult to our intelligence, judgment, or conscientiousness. Thus we instinctively reject what might very well be a valid critique of our position, rather than identifying areas where our critic might have a point and adapting our opinions accordingly.
Thus do fair concerns about climate change morph into a fanaticism that we are destroying the world and all hell will break loose if we don't immediately and drastically reduce our emissions. That the change is purely due to human wrongdoing. And that assumes those who disagree must be either shills for corporate interests or ignorant peasants.
Thus do fair concerns about the economic impacts of addressing climate change morph into a fanaticism that denies the change might exist, that human activity might play a role, and that believers in climate change are motivated purely by self-interest or anti-capitalist politics.
IMO 95% of the whole debate has become about which "tribe" someone emotionally connects with more, and not about a calm, rational evaluation of the degree of and effects of changing climate and what a reasonable course of action might be.
Is that insightful? I think most scientists are acutely aware that their perspectives are not universal. I don't know what you expect them to do about it. Lower their standards?
Perhaps they could stop assuming that different viewpoints imply "lower standards". While members of the public are often wrong.... so too are scientists. Both are, after all, human. A little humility goes a long way.
They could also keep in mind that being a scientist does not make one an expert on public policy (and even policy experts often disagree).
Actually it's the folks on the Gulf coast who are most concerned about the moratorium, because they're the folks who make their living supplying the rigs that were put under the moratorium. A moratorium could put them, their friends, and their neighbors out of work.
All at a time when lots of people (fishermen etc) are already out of work from the spill, and when the unemployment rate before the spill was already high.
This isn't a case of people who don't care. They do, because it's their homeland getting polluted with oil. But they're worried about supporting their families too.
My experience is that we have a lot of mediocre doctors NOW. A small supply doesn't guarantee that supply is high quality.
Worse, it's really hard to know in advance which providers are good. So you're stuck trying their service, finding out they're not good, and hoping you'll find a better one next time.
To me, it's not so much an issue of increasing the supply, as finding a way to identify / weed out low-quality docs.
In an discussion of US health care problems the first step is to admit that the problem has been solved, in many different ways, in many places.
I guess that depends on what you think "the problem" is. If you think "the problem" is guaranteeing everyone a minimum level of care, maybe that's true. But if you see the exploding costs of medicine as the problem, both because it's made high-quality care unaffordable for many now, and because it's making it unaffordable for everyone in the long term, then the problem has NOT been solved.
Nations around the world, whether government-run or privately insured, are suffering from the same exploding costs. While many countries have lower absolute costs per-procedure than the US, they suffer the same growth curve problems.
Fundamentally we need a better way to align the cost of care with its value to the patient. We don't have a good way to do that right now. Both our current socialized and privatized models suffer from a command-and-control approach in which a small number of bureaucrats attempt to determine the value of each treatment for everyone in their insurance pool, regardless of whether some people would think it's worth the cost to them or not.
We have seen in history command-and-control economies fail every time at determining value and allocating goods to those who need them. We've seen it failing again in modern health care, as costs run out of control and there is nowhere in the system an incentive to be cost-effective. This means we don't get the quality of care we could, and it costs more than it could.
If you want a good read on the subject, check out this.
This is the United States of America! Every man is created equal!
True enough.
My desire to have a good time is equal to your desire to learn about storms and prevent deaths in the future!
More like, this is a democracy (republic really) and if you want special privileges on public property, you need to convince your fellow citizens or elected representatives to grant you those privileges. Not get up on your high horse about how your chosen way to spend your time is so morally superior to everyone else's ways of spending time.
The kind of driver that thinks "fuck the scientists" may also think "fuck the ambulance, that must be just a scientist that got hurt".
I don't know what kind of people you know, but the ones I know consider saving someone's life quite a bit more important than helping scientists avoid inconvenience.
Slashdot is very much pro-science. Many of us are professionals in science and engineering fields.
But realize that many of us were amateurs with a curiosity about nature, much like the storm chasers, well before we became credentialed scientists or engineers. In many cases that curiosity is WHY we went to work in science.
So we can sympathize with both the inconveniences the scientists are encountering, as well as the curiosity and adventurousness of the storm chasers. We don't think curiosity and a bit of risk-taking to investigate natural phenomenon is "moronic".
The amateurs aren't scientists, and they're hampering legitimate research because they want to be "omg storm chasers."
Denigrating people's desire to see nature in action as "omg storm chasers" and "dumbasses" does the public a disservice.
As a society we have long valued the beauty of nature. We create parks around nice waterfalls, forests, canyons, and other natural phenomenon because we recognize that marveling at the wonders of nature is a fundamental human experience to be encouraged and protected.
Unfortunately you can't create tornado parks. Tornadoes don't appear or stay in one place. Public lands and roads are the only feasible way for people to see them in real life.
Do people watching the storms sometimes inconvenience the researchers? I'm sure. I'm sure the researchers' "armada" of 40 vehicles probably inconveniences some storm watchers too. I'm all for a debate over whether to give researchers some special privileges in this case (it may be warranted), but let's realize that this is a case of 2 competing public goods and how to balance them.
Protection of freedom requires more than just an armed force, it requires regulations to protect against economic coercion.
I guess I would have said it requires regulation to protect against fraud or breach of contract. But I'm not sure what you mean by "economic coercion". What did you have in mind?
Pretty much any good and valuable principle can be taken to bad extremes. Which is why even our most treasured rights, like the First Amendment or free enterprise, have a degree of restrictions upon them.
Many libertarians support government enforcing contracts and prosecuting fraud, because without those things freedom descends into anarchy. Thus such basically regulated markets are still considered "free".
It is when the state goes beyond requiring honest dealing, and starts mandating rules on what citizens must or must not buy, what prices must be paid, etc. that libertarians would generally object that such markets are no longer free.
Have you ever heard of the concept of "let the punishment fit the crime"? It used to be illegal under pain of execution to urinate on Westminster bridge. Do you think that is reasonable (just don't pee on the bridge then) or completely moonbat insane?
Execution for public urination would be insane, I agree. Execution should be reserved for crimes that killed other people.
Though if it was me, and I knew pissing on the bridge would result in execution, I'd have only myself to blame if I went and pissed on the bridge 97 times until I got caught.
I think it's ridiculous how some folks on Slashdot have been making this guy out to be some sort of innocent victim. He broke into 97 different computer systems, and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in investigatory and cleanup costs to his victims.
These are not accidents. They're not just a case of making one dumb mistake. They're a pattern of criminal activity over a long period of time.
He knew that what he was doing was illegal. He knew it was wrong. He knew it would cost the victims a lot, and the legal consequences he could face if caught. And he did it anyway, over and over again. I just don't see why we should have sympathy for a guy like that.
It's more like reaching a hand across the border and taking someone's $100 bill from a table where it was left with nobody nearby
That is nothing like hacking a computer. Finding a bill with nobody around is something innocent. Hacking into a computer is a deliberate action taken in full knowledge that such an action is illegal. Not to mention wrong.
Regardless of one's position on whether hacking laws institute punishments appropriate to the magnitude of the crime, this guy knew the chances he was taking when he chose to break into a foreign government's computer systems. He knew he was breaking the law, and that getting caught could lead to him being removed from his friends and family.
He did it anyway, and now he is bearing the consequences. If he was so worried about it, maybe he shouldn't have committed the crime.
That's a false dichotomy, nobody said the government had to have a monopoly
It doesn't have to have a monopoly. I was just saying that the reason that government runs the police is not a reason for the government to run news.
I disagree. My neighbors vote - and being informed is one of the prerequisites for a well thought-out vote
Buying a news product is not the only way to stay informed. Perhaps the person gets their news by talking with well-educated friends. Or online. Or by listening to the (advertising-supported) radio news.
A government-run news organization is not necessary for a well-informed populace.
Besides, even if the government provides free news, that doesn't make the population educated. The folks who don't care to follow the news when provided by a private entity probably aren't going to follow it when provided by the government either.
The thing that bothers me about folks on both sides of the issue is an extreme lack of tolerance of each other's beliefs.
If before a football game, the school wanted to have a prayer for the players' safety, it seems like they should be able to pick some impartial method to pick among volunteers to give the prayer. Perhaps a lottery, or a round-robin rotation of all volunteers.
So yeah, sometimes it'd be a Muslim, sometimes a Christian, sometimes maybe even a Scientologist. Maybe an atheist would even deliver some secular remarks about how the community valued the players and hoped for their safety.
As long as the main topic was something universal - like player safety - I don't think anyone's ears would melt. In fact, I think everyone would find some unity in sharing a common wish, even if through different faiths (or no faith at all).
But instead of that, we've been making Constitutional law based on the extreme cases of certain people abusing their authority. Extreme cases tend to make bad law, and treating everyone as if they were abusive is no way to run a society. If we do that, the end result will be to force everyone to pretend they have no religion during school. That's not really "free exercise of religion".
But at the same time, the school and community would have use some judgment and tolerance:
"Please {Lord,Allah,AlienOverlord} keep our players safe in today's game". Nice!
"Please {Lord,Allah,AlienOverlord} keep our players safe so the unconverted among them don't suffer eternally". Not nice!
The thing is you can't legislate this stuff without creating inevitable unfairness. You need to people to be decent human beings, and put some effort into being considerate of those around them with other beliefs. That doesn't mean pretending you don't have a given belief, but it does mean some consideration for your neighbors' feelings before you decide to say something.
And occasionally someone will slip up. Maybe that means they have to apologize, or don't get to speak at future events. But it seems to me letting people be themselves is the only way you're going to build a community, and not just a set of acquaintances.
I think the GP was suggesting that since taxes are imposed upon threat of force/imprisonment, that we should limit taxes to those things that only government can or should do. Not that we should be able to individually opt in or out.
There are some things that government needs to do:
For example, police, courts, and the military are government-run because protecting people from each other is the minimal purpose of government. Or if that definition is too circular for your taste, there is also the practical problem that you need each jurisdiction to have one set of rules and enforcement thereof. For example, if the same jurisdiction had two sets of laws, how would you know which to follow? What if following one required breaking the other? It wouldn't work.
Roads we generally accept need to be public only because there is such a limited amount of earth available to pave that market competition is infeasible. There is nothing saying you couldn't have a market for road maintenance services though.
Fire departments are usually public because fires threaten the houses around you too. So if you don't buy fire protection you would either cause your neighbors damage, or end up freeloading off of their fire coverage. Forcing people to buy coverage via their taxes is thus the only feasible mechanism to prevent the classic tragedy of the commons situation.
"Public servants" are by definition employees of the government, so also by definition they need to be taxpayer-funded.
However, news meets none of these conditions. There is no reason why the news need be a monopoly like the police - in fact multiple sources of news provide diversity of opinion, and competition benefits. We don't lack the space to print or transmit news, so there is no need for a monopoly like roads. And if your neighbor chooses not to buy a newspaper or a cable TV subscription, it's no harm to his neighbors.
Verizon is based in New York. Verizon is also on OpenSecret's heavy hitters list at the above link. Verizon's CEO unsurprisingly donated to Schumer.
Boost (Sprint) is based in Kansas.
Boost/Sprint has been the most aggressive in moving into prepaid phones, which often have lower costs than contract services. This threatens the incumbents: AT&T and Verizon each have about double Sprint's subscriber base, and thus have the most to lose from a shift towards prepaid.
Increased surveillance rules remove prepaid's privacy benefits. And they impose record-keeping costs on prepaid services like Boost, making them less competitive with AT&T and Verizon's lucrative contract businesses.
I doubt it's going to hurt anyone to wait a few days to pick up a new gun
Unless they're buying it to protect themselves from a violent ex-husband or other threats to their safety. Then it might be the difference between being killed tonight or protecting yourself.
It's not just attackers looking to buy firearms. if anything, I suspect violent people are probably more like to have a gun to begin with, whereas the victims may be more likely to be first-time buyers. In that case, waiting periods could actually have the opposite effect from what was intended.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are people getting these crazy conspiracy theory notions of what Net Neutrality is?
Probably because every news article and politician has a different definition of what "net neutrality" means. I'm not sure if it's a genuine lack of understanding, an attempt to consider potential consequences, or even an attempt to muddy the waters for the public.
The devil's really in the details here - if the regulations are not written very carefully they could be dangerous.
I think what we want is for ISPs not to block or degrade content they disagree with, such as from their competitors or critics, or content like controversial political expression.
But what if a content provider wanted to pay the ISP to provide the ISP's customers faster access to its websites? I.e. have the ISP provide Akamai-like services? There's nothing illegitimate aboiut media distribution services like this, but you could easily argue that it is "degrading" the service of those content providers that don't pay for the faster service.
That question gets even trickier when you have some ISPs being both content providers and ISPs.
What about QoS? If an ISP wants to ensure good VOIP or teleconferencing or even gaming services on its network, if it prioritizes certain latency-sensitive traffic then is that "degrading" ordinary Web traffic? In a way it is, and it's doing so on the basis of the content type. But it's not clear we should ban this sort of thing - there are some real-life legitimate reasons to do this.
It would be very easy for lawyer-regulators to take a good principle and make it into a counter-productive regulation. Especially under lobbying from vested interests that would love the rules to impede their competition, and in a technological environment that is still rapidly evolving.
That may explain some of the skepticism in Congress about the FCC's plans. They look at the Internet as a near-miraculous accomplishment and think "if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it".
It would indeed be such an insult, except that I'm not suggesting that the government (or anyone else) deny folks who own a piece a land the freedom to build what they want on it. They can do whatever they please.
I'm just suggesting that asserting their rights to build in this particular location will inflame the passions of many 9/11 victims' families, and thus may not be the most neighborly thing to do, nor necessarily in their own long-term interest of having productive relationships with the larger community.
Allow me to suggest that what we have here is a conflation of two very different things: what one has a right to do, and what one SHOULD do. There is a difference between behavior we tolerate and behavior we condone.
It seems to me you are talking about what we condone while the others are talking about what we tolerate.
I have a right to say (almost) anything. I can insult my neighbors and generally be a jerk in all kinds of ways. Legally we tolerate this, because we as a society made the decision that the ability to share ideas is so vital that the government should not be able to decide which ideas are valuable and which are not, or which are too "offensive" to exist.
But that doesn't mean people won't think I'm a jerk for gratutitously insulting them, nor that they can't criticize me for such behavior.
Building a mosque near where Islamic zealots murdered thousands of people, or a Japanese temple near Pearl Harbor, fall into the categories of things that may be legally tolerated, but are needlessly inflammatory to folks who have been through a lot. It can be done, but doesn't mean it should be.
As the American experience has shown in regard to the free press, there's a difference between being subsidized by the government and being operated by the government.
There is a certainly a difference. But that doesn't mean government funding is a cure for the ills of journalism.
If the complaint is that journalists are too favorable to business for fear of losing advertising revenue, why would journalists not similarly fear being critical of government for fear of losing their taxpayer subsidy?
The US Congress has a long history of using its power of the purse to tame the independence of those it subsidizes. Even the states, sovereign under the Constitution, were coerced into adoping a maximum speed limit on the roads, through the threat of losing federal highway dollars. Universities are being required to act as copyright cops under recent legislation, lest they lose federal research funds. I suspect more examples can be found if you look.
To me, the problem with journalism is less about its revenue source than about its quality. Critical thinking has become a rarity, especially on TV news. It's become a 24-hour emotion machine, rather than a facts machine. When's the last time you saw a popular US news program really challenge your assumptions through in-depth reporting? Much of the media today has settled for parroting whatever the politicians on each "side" tell them. They think they're "independent" when they have a loon from each extreme on their show. But question whether the historical record accurately reflects what the politician claims? That gets skipped unless the claim is so plainly absurd everyone already knows it (Hillary Clinton's claims of dodging sniper fire in Bosnia, for example).
It makes me wonder if maybe the real problem is insufficient education of many journalists. How can they report on the economy if they don't grasp basic economics? A politician can feed them a load of empirically false but pleasant-sounding nonsense and they wouldn't know it. Ditto for the reporting on science or technology - if you don't have a general understanding of the field you can't tell the snake oil salesmen from the real deal.
You are exactly right.
This is one of many reasons I think schools should teach emotional skills starting at an early age. It's a bigger predictor of success in life than IQ. It's the way to be happy - if you don't understand yourself, how can you pick the right path in life? It's a way to make all your relationships in life better - if you can understand others' emotions, you have less conflict.
Yet it's something few of us ever get taught explicitly. Is it any wonder we have so much social conflict and such pathetic politics?
I wish I'd had that sort of instruction as a little kid. I think it would've done wonders for my social life. And if such teaching were widespread, it'd do wonders for society.
Why must climate change be explained either exclusively in terms of human influence or exclusively in terms of non-human factors? It doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense because human beings don't make sense. It's in our nature to take disagreements personally and emotionally. So when someone suggests our opinion (which naturally we hold strongly and believe to be based on solid evidence and smart thinking) may, in fact, be misinformed, we take it as an insult to our intelligence, judgment, or conscientiousness. Thus we instinctively reject what might very well be a valid critique of our position, rather than identifying areas where our critic might have a point and adapting our opinions accordingly.
Thus do fair concerns about climate change morph into a fanaticism that we are destroying the world and all hell will break loose if we don't immediately and drastically reduce our emissions. That the change is purely due to human wrongdoing. And that assumes those who disagree must be either shills for corporate interests or ignorant peasants.
Thus do fair concerns about the economic impacts of addressing climate change morph into a fanaticism that denies the change might exist, that human activity might play a role, and that believers in climate change are motivated purely by self-interest or anti-capitalist politics.
IMO 95% of the whole debate has become about which "tribe" someone emotionally connects with more, and not about a calm, rational evaluation of the degree of and effects of changing climate and what a reasonable course of action might be.
Is that insightful? I think most scientists are acutely aware that their perspectives are not universal. I don't know what you expect them to do about it. Lower their standards?
Perhaps they could stop assuming that different viewpoints imply "lower standards". While members of the public are often wrong.... so too are scientists. Both are, after all, human. A little humility goes a long way.
They could also keep in mind that being a scientist does not make one an expert on public policy (and even policy experts often disagree).
A lot can change between now and 2012.
Actually it's the folks on the Gulf coast who are most concerned about the moratorium, because they're the folks who make their living supplying the rigs that were put under the moratorium. A moratorium could put them, their friends, and their neighbors out of work.
All at a time when lots of people (fishermen etc) are already out of work from the spill, and when the unemployment rate before the spill was already high.
This isn't a case of people who don't care. They do, because it's their homeland getting polluted with oil. But they're worried about supporting their families too.
My experience is that we have a lot of mediocre doctors NOW. A small supply doesn't guarantee that supply is high quality.
Worse, it's really hard to know in advance which providers are good. So you're stuck trying their service, finding out they're not good, and hoping you'll find a better one next time.
To me, it's not so much an issue of increasing the supply, as finding a way to identify / weed out low-quality docs.
In an discussion of US health care problems the first step is to admit that the problem has been solved, in many different ways, in many places.
I guess that depends on what you think "the problem" is. If you think "the problem" is guaranteeing everyone a minimum level of care, maybe that's true. But if you see the exploding costs of medicine as the problem, both because it's made high-quality care unaffordable for many now, and because it's making it unaffordable for everyone in the long term, then the problem has NOT been solved.
Nations around the world, whether government-run or privately insured, are suffering from the same exploding costs. While many countries have lower absolute costs per-procedure than the US, they suffer the same growth curve problems.
Fundamentally we need a better way to align the cost of care with its value to the patient. We don't have a good way to do that right now. Both our current socialized and privatized models suffer from a command-and-control approach in which a small number of bureaucrats attempt to determine the value of each treatment for everyone in their insurance pool, regardless of whether some people would think it's worth the cost to them or not.
We have seen in history command-and-control economies fail every time at determining value and allocating goods to those who need them. We've seen it failing again in modern health care, as costs run out of control and there is nowhere in the system an incentive to be cost-effective. This means we don't get the quality of care we could, and it costs more than it could.
If you want a good read on the subject, check out this.
If I had mod points I'd mod this up. These are exactly the points many on this thread have been missing.
Thanks.
This is the United States of America! Every man is created equal!
True enough.
My desire to have a good time is equal to your desire to learn about storms and prevent deaths in the future!
More like, this is a democracy (republic really) and if you want special privileges on public property, you need to convince your fellow citizens or elected representatives to grant you those privileges. Not get up on your high horse about how your chosen way to spend your time is so morally superior to everyone else's ways of spending time.
The kind of driver that thinks "fuck the scientists" may also think "fuck the ambulance, that must be just a scientist that got hurt".
I don't know what kind of people you know, but the ones I know consider saving someone's life quite a bit more important than helping scientists avoid inconvenience.
Slashdot is very much pro-science. Many of us are professionals in science and engineering fields.
But realize that many of us were amateurs with a curiosity about nature, much like the storm chasers, well before we became credentialed scientists or engineers. In many cases that curiosity is WHY we went to work in science.
So we can sympathize with both the inconveniences the scientists are encountering, as well as the curiosity and adventurousness of the storm chasers. We don't think curiosity and a bit of risk-taking to investigate natural phenomenon is "moronic".
The amateurs aren't scientists, and they're hampering legitimate research because they want to be "omg storm chasers."
Denigrating people's desire to see nature in action as "omg storm chasers" and "dumbasses" does the public a disservice.
As a society we have long valued the beauty of nature. We create parks around nice waterfalls, forests, canyons, and other natural phenomenon because we recognize that marveling at the wonders of nature is a fundamental human experience to be encouraged and protected.
Unfortunately you can't create tornado parks. Tornadoes don't appear or stay in one place. Public lands and roads are the only feasible way for people to see them in real life.
Do people watching the storms sometimes inconvenience the researchers? I'm sure. I'm sure the researchers' "armada" of 40 vehicles probably inconveniences some storm watchers too. I'm all for a debate over whether to give researchers some special privileges in this case (it may be warranted), but let's realize that this is a case of 2 competing public goods and how to balance them.
Protection of freedom requires more than just an armed force, it requires regulations to protect against economic coercion.
I guess I would have said it requires regulation to protect against fraud or breach of contract. But I'm not sure what you mean by "economic coercion". What did you have in mind?
What's the matter, you don't like the "free market"?
This is like asking people "what's the matter, you don't like 'free speech'"? when they complain about defamation or incitement of imminent violence.
Pretty much any good and valuable principle can be taken to bad extremes. Which is why even our most treasured rights, like the First Amendment or free enterprise, have a degree of restrictions upon them.
Many libertarians support government enforcing contracts and prosecuting fraud, because without those things freedom descends into anarchy. Thus such basically regulated markets are still considered "free".
It is when the state goes beyond requiring honest dealing, and starts mandating rules on what citizens must or must not buy, what prices must be paid, etc. that libertarians would generally object that such markets are no longer free.
Have you ever heard of the concept of "let the punishment fit the crime"? It used to be illegal under pain of execution to urinate on Westminster bridge. Do you think that is reasonable (just don't pee on the bridge then) or completely moonbat insane?
Execution for public urination would be insane, I agree. Execution should be reserved for crimes that killed other people.
Though if it was me, and I knew pissing on the bridge would result in execution, I'd have only myself to blame if I went and pissed on the bridge 97 times until I got caught.
I think it's ridiculous how some folks on Slashdot have been making this guy out to be some sort of innocent victim. He broke into 97 different computer systems, and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in investigatory and cleanup costs to his victims.
These are not accidents. They're not just a case of making one dumb mistake. They're a pattern of criminal activity over a long period of time.
He knew that what he was doing was illegal. He knew it was wrong. He knew it would cost the victims a lot, and the legal consequences he could face if caught. And he did it anyway, over and over again. I just don't see why we should have sympathy for a guy like that.
It's more like reaching a hand across the border and taking someone's $100 bill from a table where it was left with nobody nearby
That is nothing like hacking a computer. Finding a bill with nobody around is something innocent. Hacking into a computer is a deliberate action taken in full knowledge that such an action is illegal. Not to mention wrong.
Regardless of one's position on whether hacking laws institute punishments appropriate to the magnitude of the crime, this guy knew the chances he was taking when he chose to break into a foreign government's computer systems. He knew he was breaking the law, and that getting caught could lead to him being removed from his friends and family.
He did it anyway, and now he is bearing the consequences. If he was so worried about it, maybe he shouldn't have committed the crime.
That's a false dichotomy, nobody said the government had to have a monopoly
It doesn't have to have a monopoly. I was just saying that the reason that government runs the police is not a reason for the government to run news.
I disagree. My neighbors vote - and being informed is one of the prerequisites for a well thought-out vote
Buying a news product is not the only way to stay informed. Perhaps the person gets their news by talking with well-educated friends. Or online. Or by listening to the (advertising-supported) radio news.
A government-run news organization is not necessary for a well-informed populace.
Besides, even if the government provides free news, that doesn't make the population educated. The folks who don't care to follow the news when provided by a private entity probably aren't going to follow it when provided by the government either.
The thing that bothers me about folks on both sides of the issue is an extreme lack of tolerance of each other's beliefs.
If before a football game, the school wanted to have a prayer for the players' safety, it seems like they should be able to pick some impartial method to pick among volunteers to give the prayer. Perhaps a lottery, or a round-robin rotation of all volunteers.
So yeah, sometimes it'd be a Muslim, sometimes a Christian, sometimes maybe even a Scientologist. Maybe an atheist would even deliver some secular remarks about how the community valued the players and hoped for their safety.
As long as the main topic was something universal - like player safety - I don't think anyone's ears would melt. In fact, I think everyone would find some unity in sharing a common wish, even if through different faiths (or no faith at all).
But instead of that, we've been making Constitutional law based on the extreme cases of certain people abusing their authority. Extreme cases tend to make bad law, and treating everyone as if they were abusive is no way to run a society. If we do that, the end result will be to force everyone to pretend they have no religion during school. That's not really "free exercise of religion".
But at the same time, the school and community would have use some judgment and tolerance:
"Please {Lord,Allah,AlienOverlord} keep our players safe in today's game". Nice!
"Please {Lord,Allah,AlienOverlord} keep our players safe so the unconverted among them don't suffer eternally". Not nice!
The thing is you can't legislate this stuff without creating inevitable unfairness. You need to people to be decent human beings, and put some effort into being considerate of those around them with other beliefs. That doesn't mean pretending you don't have a given belief, but it does mean some consideration for your neighbors' feelings before you decide to say something.
And occasionally someone will slip up. Maybe that means they have to apologize, or don't get to speak at future events. But it seems to me letting people be themselves is the only way you're going to build a community, and not just a set of acquaintances.
I think the GP was suggesting that since taxes are imposed upon threat of force/imprisonment, that we should limit taxes to those things that only government can or should do. Not that we should be able to individually opt in or out.
There are some things that government needs to do:
For example, police, courts, and the military are government-run because protecting people from each other is the minimal purpose of government. Or if that definition is too circular for your taste, there is also the practical problem that you need each jurisdiction to have one set of rules and enforcement thereof. For example, if the same jurisdiction had two sets of laws, how would you know which to follow? What if following one required breaking the other? It wouldn't work.
Roads we generally accept need to be public only because there is such a limited amount of earth available to pave that market competition is infeasible. There is nothing saying you couldn't have a market for road maintenance services though.
Fire departments are usually public because fires threaten the houses around you too. So if you don't buy fire protection you would either cause your neighbors damage, or end up freeloading off of their fire coverage. Forcing people to buy coverage via their taxes is thus the only feasible mechanism to prevent the classic tragedy of the commons situation.
"Public servants" are by definition employees of the government, so also by definition they need to be taxpayer-funded.
However, news meets none of these conditions. There is no reason why the news need be a monopoly like the police - in fact multiple sources of news provide diversity of opinion, and competition benefits. We don't lack the space to print or transmit news, so there is no need for a monopoly like roads. And if your neighbor chooses not to buy a newspaper or a cable TV subscription, it's no harm to his neighbors.
This looks to me like just another case of politicians trying to protect their big contributors. Consider:
The legislation's sponsors are from Texas (Cornyn) and New York (Schumer).
AT&T is based in Texas. AT&T has given more political contributions than any other company. Its current COO, and its former CEO, both donated to Cornyn.
Verizon is based in New York. Verizon is also on OpenSecret's heavy hitters list at the above link. Verizon's CEO unsurprisingly donated to Schumer.
Boost (Sprint) is based in Kansas.
Boost/Sprint has been the most aggressive in moving into prepaid phones, which often have lower costs than contract services. This threatens the incumbents: AT&T and Verizon each have about double Sprint's subscriber base, and thus have the most to lose from a shift towards prepaid.
Increased surveillance rules remove prepaid's privacy benefits. And they impose record-keeping costs on prepaid services like Boost, making them less competitive with AT&T and Verizon's lucrative contract businesses.
I doubt it's going to hurt anyone to wait a few days to pick up a new gun
Unless they're buying it to protect themselves from a violent ex-husband or other threats to their safety. Then it might be the difference between being killed tonight or protecting yourself.
It's not just attackers looking to buy firearms. if anything, I suspect violent people are probably more like to have a gun to begin with, whereas the victims may be more likely to be first-time buyers. In that case, waiting periods could actually have the opposite effect from what was intended.