Exactly. This is a prime example of creative destruction ridding the world of what look like monopolies but are temporary in scope.
My very first thought was that if there is enough wireless capacity right now to disrupt landlines, the carriers must have excess capacity sitting idle, and that some upstart, or some small carrier (T-Mobile or Sprint in the US) who is desperate to differentiate themselves will soon ditch landlines, make a big advertising push about it, make a lot of money, and discombobulate the major carriers who will resist until the last moment as all dinosaurs do. This is how industries are overturned almost overnight, without the government stepping in to save us. Within five years all the carriers will be scrambling to build more wireless capacity to get on the bandwagon they tried to hide for so long.
P.S. Still waiting for you to totally fail to answer the other two parts - who interprets it & who enforces it.
There's your problem -- you assume only the government can interpret and enforce the law. You depend on government prosecution to take care of people.
You ought to believe in individuals. The government should run the courts and not much else, especially it should not decide who to prosecute, but leave that to people. That way the government is not an attractive target for corruption. Individual judges might be, but there again, stop depending on the government to do the prosecutions, leave it to individuals. People who find a fault have the most incentive to prosecute it, whether it's a broken refund policy or broken contracts or bribing judges.
When you put the government in charge of prosecutions, you make corruption a much more effective corporate policy than doing the right thing. Far easier to get the government to regulate you and rescue you from your competitors than get punished by them for all the evils you have done. Much better to have government establish fig leaf regulations after years and years of pointless study than have citizens sue you when you pollute their rivers and air and back yards.
Stop thinking of it as government vs business. It is individuals vs oligarchs.
What happens one one company becomes more powerful than others?
Nothing if the government wouldn't back them up. AT&T begged the government to regulate them once the companies they had been robbing started fighting back and making progress. You ought to read up on them some time.
You make the same mistake of so many other blindfolded victims make. You refuse to believe in individuals, in yourself and every other one of us. The problem is a huge central government and the big businesses, all controlled by the same people, who sneer at individuals. The solution is not to make one half bigger than the other; it is as much folly as thinking you can give free food to a dictator which will not be used for military or repressive purposes. Government power is as easily redistributed as food. The solution is to give individuals the power of the rule of law over both big government and big business.
It's not just that people have been brainwashed into thinking that government and business are separate and in conflict. Worse, they have been brainwashed into thinking that only government or business can control the other, that government must lead, that individuals are ignorant and incapable of thinking.
The only solution is for people to prosecute both sides, companies and government, to get away from this paternalistic insult that people are too dumb to take care of themselves, that have have to depend on government prosecutors to take care of them. Government's role is to enforce the rule of law, and little else.
One of the worst unspoken aspects of a huge government sticking its fingers into so many pies and in bed with so many big businesses is that it loses all impartiality. People love to bring up Standard Oil and AT&T as examples of the government shining knight coming to the rescue. Did you know that Standard Oil had already peaked and had been losing market share for a few years when the government stepped in? Did you know that AT&T did its worst and was starting to be successfully fought by its competitors when it begged the government to regulate it to protect it from all those lawsuits? On and on, government has consistently done almost nothing useful in that regard, a day late and a dollar short so many times that Oscar Wilde comes to mind: losing one anti-trust battle may be misfortune, but all of them begins to seem like less of a coincidence. But they make so much noise to cover it up that everyone thinks they are useful.
You need to wake up and believe in yourself and all other individuals. You don't need a government to take care of you. You need to take care of your government, and I don't mean by pathetic votes every two or four years for one sorry choice of two lousy career liars. I mean by prosecuting Big Business for all its inconsistent policies, its pollution, its coverups, all those things that their government buddies ignore as long as possible, until the stench gets so bad that they have to pretend to do something, and if they can get away with it, bail them out with deficit dollars.
That's another aspect of what's wrong with a huge government with its fingers in so many pies -- you don't get to vote for how well any individual aspect of government ios handled -- wars, transportation, welfare, industrial policy -- all subsumed into one fuzzy vague vote for one of two bad choices. How can you possible imagine that tells the politicians anything useful, when 99% of incumbents get re-elected?
Wake up! You are the one who should be telling Big Brother what to do, all the time, with daily prosecutions of lies and dishonesty and power grabbing, not one vague fuzzy vote every couple of years which imparts no useful feedback and is ignored anyway.
I'd have to say that money has more power than guns ever will. When Facebook moved their HQ to Dublin so they could get better tax breaks, who were they telling to FO ?
Merchant power would be useless if the guys with guns didn't have their back. Failing to recognize that government and corporates are run by the same people is a basic misunderstanding of reality.
Thank you for some sanity amidst the sea of knee jerk reactionaries.
There's a trend people like to hide from: The 1898 war was a milestone in starting an empire, the first time we started a war purely to show off, and that was only 10 years after we started rebuilding the navy beyond what was needed to defend from European invasion (which was impossible but a handy excuse). All wars before that were to grab land to turn into states; now we had colonies, bragging points, like the Europeans. I think it is no coincidence that the income tax and Federal Reserve both began just 15 years later; something had to pay for the expanding navy to protect that empire. All that easy income made it possible to join the European war just 4 years later, because the bankers had loaned so much to France and Britain and were too big to let fail by Germany winning. The 1920 post-war recession was almost as bad as the 1929 recession which turned into the Great Depression, but there was a huge difference in the government's reaction. Harding balanced the budget and cut spending, and in 18 months the economy was back on track. The response to the 1929 recession was just the opposite: Hoover almost doubled federal spending, Roosevelt, after bashing Hoover for his policies during the election campaign, continued and expanded them, and 12 years later, the economy still stank, and was only pulled out of the doldrums by WW II.
Now we have yet another President who bashed the previous one for his policies, then continued and expanded them once in office. He too spends like he's got wheelbarrows full of it, and here it is, 4 or 5 years later, and it ain't over yet. He lectures the Supreme Court for adverse decisions concerning his expansion of government which passed only on very close partisan lines. He starts wars for fun, seemingly, Libya first, now itching for Syria and Iran next, meanwhile making noise about the Chinese being a threat. What's he trying to do, emulate FDR's next move and get an Asian country to attack us?
Government has no core purpose beyond the rule of law. You can easily make arguments for city streets and utilities, but those are local government, not federal. You can make easy arguments for federal defensive military, but not this empire building offensive thing we seem to be stuck with. You can make easy arguments for pollution controls, many other things which have no easy borders. But 99% of the federal government has no rational purpose other than satisfying the urge for empire, both domestic and foreign. It either belongs in a freed market full of competition and bankruptcy and citizen prosecution for stepping out of bounds, or in local governments where there is at least some semblance of popular control and realistic budgeting. The federal government is merely an empire building exercise at this point.
I am a short term pessimist and a long term optimist. The historical trend is a pairing of expanding information access and decentralizing government. Governments are certainly trying to control the Internet, but not even China, North Korea, the Arab dictatorships, the African tinpots, or Putin the Great can do that in any regular fashion. Beyond all reason, I believe the trend continues, but it is sure exasperating seeing all the mess today, especially all the OWS types who have such promise in seeing the evils of corporatism, but are so naive as to think that the very government which enables those corporate monstrosities is going to come galloping to the rescue. They can't understand the concept even when explained to them; they just yell fascist and think they are intelligent.
Libertarians are not the enemy of anyone except Big Brother. Their whole mantra is to leave people to their own devices.
You seem to think Big Business and Big Government are enemies of each other. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They are the same, differing only in tiny squabbles which distract voters. The last thing either wants is for people to actually run their own lives and take the corporations to task.
If you actually think the coercive monopoly is going to use their guns to help people battle merchants, you are living in some weird alternate dream world. The only merchants who get in trouble are the few who don't go along with the other merchants and their government buddies.
That's the weirdest thing about Occupy Wall Street. They identify half the problem, corporations out of control, but then they refuse to see the other half, which is Big Brother actively assisting them. They are one and the same, and the government will never do anything to the 1% just because a few 99% rabble camp out in parks and shout for the government to come rescue them. Only individuals taking charge and upsetting BOTH Big Government and Big Business will solve anything.
Whether they are corporatists or socialists, what they have in common is not just a distrust of people thinking for themselves, but a fear of it. They are paternalistic as hell, thinking only they know what is good for everybody. Big business and big government just recycle executives. They squabble about the details, but the essence is the same: Big Brother, victimless morality laws, and endless wars.
The solution is individual power. Of course, statists will say that is laissez-faire to the max, but they are wrong; the so-called laissez-faire which is reputed to have existed is nothing more than big business and big government helping each other maintain the status quo.
Instead of the government controlling every step of the justice system, let victims prosecute, of course with penalties for bogus prosecutions, but in particular, let them prosecute companies for sloppy, inconsistent, or arbitrarily enforced policies, and eliminate all victimless crimes which let busybody Little Brothers ape Big Brother. That will keep monopolies in check, and keep the government from choosing what crimes to investigate and what criminals (both people and companies) to prosecute.
Anything of that sort scares the statists half to death. Only they have the wisdom and experience and farsightedness to guide the masses. That is why they prosecute morality, especially victimless crimes, and why they start wars and build empires -- it provides a distracting excuse for their heavy hand. The last thing they want is a society of free people.
the monopoly is accountable to you through your vote. it is an extension of your will, not an imposition of an alien will on you
Pull the other one.
in fact, if you were to remove the monopoly, there would be no absence of monopoly, the merchant would merely fill the power vacuum, and he isn't accountable to you. he's accountable to the quest for more profits, at any cost, including the raping of your freedom. then he buys the guns and points them at you:
Right. The FBI can never go bankrupt, and the monopolistic coercive government of which it is a part can certainly destroy the merchant at any time. See Lehman Bros and the old AT&T for just a few of many examples.
Go ahead. Pull the other one. You haven't made any sense yet.
I get reconnectability (which I already have, either by using a VPN or by using screen on the server), but now it's built-in.
But now it's automatic.
I get local echo so I have no clue whether my connection has been dropped -- but OTOH, this is great if you have the brain of a goldfish and so can't remember what you just typed for a couple seconds till it gets echoed back. I presume this is optional, so non-goldfish-brains can tell it to 'degrade' to be as useful as ssh.
It also is automatic and shows what hasn't been echoed. Further, typing while lagging by a character or two is incredibly frustrating to almost all brains in existence. It's like listening to headphones which have a half second delay in what you said. Your brain simply freezes.
I get better unicode support -- well, that one's cool, anyway.
And it needs ssh for login, but also needs a mosh server -- so I can ssh into every server, but only mosh into a few.
Am I missing some really great thing about it? It seems like a major hassle for a minor improvement.
I rejoice in finding that someone rejects me for my race, religion, or any other irrelevant aspect, because that kind of sorry-ass judgement carries over into how they run their business too, and I'd rather work for people who care only about running a successful business. I don't have their business talent, they don't have my programming talent, and that's ow deal are made.
Artificially restraining these kinds of inept attitudes only hides them behind official forms. It does not correct the sloppy brain which makes bad decisions. I want to know about those bad decision makers as soon as possible so I can avoid them.
That's the problem with do-gooders and statists. They seem to think that just passing a law eliminates the problem. Usually it only buries it and makes it harder to recognize. Of course, when the problem remains, they take that as an excuse for yet another layer of bureaucracy, making the problem yet harder to recognize, distorting relationships and reducing efficiency, and never solving a single actual problem, only burying it so much that you can't recognize it, and instead think the distorted problem is a new problem requiring new bureaucracy.
No, these policies are meant to salve the conscious of those who think everyone should have an ideal life at somebody else's expense. You apparently fit that bill.
I have had quite a few changes in my life because I accept reality and deal with it. You apparently are afraid of change and want me to finance your fears.
Turning down a job offer DOES NOT cancel unemployment benefits. Not searching does, sometimes.
The economy is not so bad that everybody gets just one job offer. There are always alternatives. If someone sets such strict criteria that they can find only one even remotely possible available job, then they deserve whatever special job hell they have created for themselves. Otherwise learn a new skill, downgrade your hopes, take on roommates, live with your parents, or try an unlimited number of alternatives to the job offer that sucks.
People like you who can't see these alternatives are the quickest to scream that you need my tax support for your ideals. Go pound sand. I have had to change my plans many times, to make lemonade from the lemons life hands out, and everyone else has that same opportunity.
Everything implies everything. It also implies the sun was still working, that I am a human, that dogs can't chat on the Internet, and that you are a human if you could read it and respond.
Anyone can reject any interview or job offer. Even the Mafia understand that, and resort to horse's heads as a last resort.
In this case, it also means what it says, that I would rather find out during the interview that I don't want to work there, instead of finding out a week later. I have several times turned down jobs I really needed because I would have been looking again within a week.
Le Pen is a loonie that few people actually take serious, Haider is dead and Berlusconi... well, it seems at least the Italians are able to learn from their mistakes.
What's your excuse after Nixon, Bush and Bush?
Father Le Pen got enough votes to make it to the finals, did he not? Santorum hasn't made it that far and probably won't.
Daughter Le Pen is scaring the crap out of the "real" politicians enough that they are all sliding right. She just might copy her father's results.
Haider won the office and scared so many people that Austria became an international pariah. Nixon is dead too, but never made countries downgrade diplomatic status.
Berlusconi was one of the most corrupt politicians anywhere in the world, and to say the Italians learned from their mistakes slides over the fact that he was elected more than once, in separate terms, which has not happened in the US since the 1880s. He only finally left office when the economy stank enough, not for his scandals and corruption and megalomania, and memory says it wasn't even a general election, just a parliamentary maneuver.
Bush I was never the imbecile that Bush II was nor the danger that Nixon was.
You picked a really sorry set of counter examples.
I wish interviewers would ask the questions they want and ignore those guidelines. I want to know as much about the company and its practices before I take a job, and if they stick to bland questions, I lose a lot of information. If they think my race or religion or political views are important, then I want to give them smartass upsetting blasphemous answers before I walk out of the interview, not after I have had the job for a few days.
I really REALLY wish the government would stop trying to help me with its one-size-fits-all-politically-correct-thinking policies. I have a direct stake in the outcome of my decisions, and where I make mistakes, I learn for the future, unlike government bureaucrats.
Well, it's a fun joke, but too many people take it seriously, as evidenced by some posts here.
I don't believe the basic article. Wingnuts of all stripes distrust science when it conflicts with their faith. With the right wing nuts, that's global warming, pollution, and evolution. With the left wing nuts, that's genetically modified food, anything less than full-on panic over global warming and pollution, and any slur on the incredibly inefficient alternative fuels or Keynes. To conclude that only conservatives distrust science is silly.
Exactly. Do-gooders who would shut down child labor in dirt-poor countries are applying first world solutions to third world problems. The alternative to kids in shoe factories is not kids in school; it is kids hustling the streets or kids stuck on the family farm, which probably doesn't actually belong to the family in the first place.
Shorter work weeks and days, and other improvements in living conditions, arise naturally from a better economy. If you try to force shorter working hours, all you will do is cripple the economy and keep everybody poor forever. If outsiders would just go away and leave the insiders to bring about their own improvements at their own pace, the workers would get their better conditions as a natural course of improvement.
Do-gooders make me puke, how they think they know everything about foreign societies they have never even visited, and everybody over there is too stupid to work out their own problems.
If do-gooders worked on fixing their own problems, great, but they'd rather fix problems they know nothing of, just as astrologers pretend that using reference tables and calculators and computer programs makes them scientific. Bleaagh.
Public education: People have to send their kids to the school chosen for them by the school district, unless they want to pay twice, once in taxes for a school they won't use, and again in fees for the school they do use. Whether it's because they are religious nuts who object to science or have gifted kids who can do better, it's a pretty dismal choice. If they do use the public schools, they get almost no say in curriculum, staffing, hours, anything. Voting for the school board is faux-democracy, as the choices make no practical difference.
The road system: Not quite as restrictive since there isn't much variety to roads, but the carpool lanes are a good example. Even when they are empty, you can't use them, so everybody else crowds into the remaining lanes, slowing down and polluting more than if traffic could use all lanes. The hours are rigid, regardless of asymmetry of crowding morning vs evening, regardless of holidays. All these rules are not dictated by local conditions, but by self-serving politicians who know better than the locals what is good for them.
Public libraries: People again get little practical say in anything. Libraries are one of the favorite targets of politicians who run out of money, and most of the time it is the first thing cut, not the last, because they know a few people will write letters and make phone calls, which they can use as an excuse to raise taxes instead of cutting the waste.
Public parks: Same as public libraries. Who chooses them? Who sets the rules for them? A bunch of bureaucrats answerable to almost nobody, especially people who use them. The entrance fees and hours are usually set at the state or national level regardless of facilities or popularity. Very few people have any say on where parks are. And they are just as popular as libraries for budget cutting politicians.
Assistance for the disabled: I fail to see how that is socialism, but it does have the usual bureaucratic failings. There are the ADA lawyer mills which love to find stores whose counter is one inch too high, sue them for thousands. Instead of having an on-demand fleet of taxis for the disabled, every single bus in a city bus system had to be modified at great expense to kneel or have lifts, which none of the wheel chair users I know thought was a better tradeoff. There's the current flap about commercial swimming pools requiring permanent lifts which need expensive building modifications, instead of cheaper portable lifts. They are all the typical bureaucratic response to a problem which describes a solution in excruciating detail rather than the problem alone.
Assembly line means rigid thinking, inflexible, incapable of allowing for the unexpected, and that certainly implies less freedom. All of these programs illustrate that.
Every single word in every single language has been invented. None came with the Big Bang. Since you and everyone else did understand what I meant, the rest is just posturing.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. This is a prime example of creative destruction ridding the world of what look like monopolies but are temporary in scope.
My very first thought was that if there is enough wireless capacity right now to disrupt landlines, the carriers must have excess capacity sitting idle, and that some upstart, or some small carrier (T-Mobile or Sprint in the US) who is desperate to differentiate themselves will soon ditch landlines, make a big advertising push about it, make a lot of money, and discombobulate the major carriers who will resist until the last moment as all dinosaurs do. This is how industries are overturned almost overnight, without the government stepping in to save us. Within five years all the carriers will be scrambling to build more wireless capacity to get on the bandwagon they tried to hide for so long.
P.S. Still waiting for you to totally fail to answer the other two parts - who interprets it & who enforces it.
There's your problem -- you assume only the government can interpret and enforce the law. You depend on government prosecution to take care of people.
You ought to believe in individuals. The government should run the courts and not much else, especially it should not decide who to prosecute, but leave that to people. That way the government is not an attractive target for corruption. Individual judges might be, but there again, stop depending on the government to do the prosecutions, leave it to individuals. People who find a fault have the most incentive to prosecute it, whether it's a broken refund policy or broken contracts or bribing judges.
When you put the government in charge of prosecutions, you make corruption a much more effective corporate policy than doing the right thing. Far easier to get the government to regulate you and rescue you from your competitors than get punished by them for all the evils you have done. Much better to have government establish fig leaf regulations after years and years of pointless study than have citizens sue you when you pollute their rivers and air and back yards.
Stop thinking of it as government vs business. It is individuals vs oligarchs.
What happens one one company becomes more powerful than others?
Nothing if the government wouldn't back them up. AT&T begged the government to regulate them once the companies they had been robbing started fighting back and making progress. You ought to read up on them some time.
You make the same mistake of so many other blindfolded victims make. You refuse to believe in individuals, in yourself and every other one of us. The problem is a huge central government and the big businesses, all controlled by the same people, who sneer at individuals. The solution is not to make one half bigger than the other; it is as much folly as thinking you can give free food to a dictator which will not be used for military or repressive purposes. Government power is as easily redistributed as food. The solution is to give individuals the power of the rule of law over both big government and big business.
It's not just that people have been brainwashed into thinking that government and business are separate and in conflict. Worse, they have been brainwashed into thinking that only government or business can control the other, that government must lead, that individuals are ignorant and incapable of thinking.
The only solution is for people to prosecute both sides, companies and government, to get away from this paternalistic insult that people are too dumb to take care of themselves, that have have to depend on government prosecutors to take care of them. Government's role is to enforce the rule of law, and little else.
One of the worst unspoken aspects of a huge government sticking its fingers into so many pies and in bed with so many big businesses is that it loses all impartiality. People love to bring up Standard Oil and AT&T as examples of the government shining knight coming to the rescue. Did you know that Standard Oil had already peaked and had been losing market share for a few years when the government stepped in? Did you know that AT&T did its worst and was starting to be successfully fought by its competitors when it begged the government to regulate it to protect it from all those lawsuits? On and on, government has consistently done almost nothing useful in that regard, a day late and a dollar short so many times that Oscar Wilde comes to mind: losing one anti-trust battle may be misfortune, but all of them begins to seem like less of a coincidence. But they make so much noise to cover it up that everyone thinks they are useful.
You need to wake up and believe in yourself and all other individuals. You don't need a government to take care of you. You need to take care of your government, and I don't mean by pathetic votes every two or four years for one sorry choice of two lousy career liars. I mean by prosecuting Big Business for all its inconsistent policies, its pollution, its coverups, all those things that their government buddies ignore as long as possible, until the stench gets so bad that they have to pretend to do something, and if they can get away with it, bail them out with deficit dollars.
That's another aspect of what's wrong with a huge government with its fingers in so many pies -- you don't get to vote for how well any individual aspect of government ios handled -- wars, transportation, welfare, industrial policy -- all subsumed into one fuzzy vague vote for one of two bad choices. How can you possible imagine that tells the politicians anything useful, when 99% of incumbents get re-elected?
Wake up! You are the one who should be telling Big Brother what to do, all the time, with daily prosecutions of lies and dishonesty and power grabbing, not one vague fuzzy vote every couple of years which imparts no useful feedback and is ignored anyway.
I'd have to say that money has more power than guns ever will. When Facebook moved their HQ to Dublin so they could get better tax breaks, who were they telling to FO ?
Merchant power would be useless if the guys with guns didn't have their back. Failing to recognize that government and corporates are run by the same people is a basic misunderstanding of reality.
Thank you for some sanity amidst the sea of knee jerk reactionaries.
There's a trend people like to hide from: The 1898 war was a milestone in starting an empire, the first time we started a war purely to show off, and that was only 10 years after we started rebuilding the navy beyond what was needed to defend from European invasion (which was impossible but a handy excuse). All wars before that were to grab land to turn into states; now we had colonies, bragging points, like the Europeans. I think it is no coincidence that the income tax and Federal Reserve both began just 15 years later; something had to pay for the expanding navy to protect that empire. All that easy income made it possible to join the European war just 4 years later, because the bankers had loaned so much to France and Britain and were too big to let fail by Germany winning. The 1920 post-war recession was almost as bad as the 1929 recession which turned into the Great Depression, but there was a huge difference in the government's reaction. Harding balanced the budget and cut spending, and in 18 months the economy was back on track. The response to the 1929 recession was just the opposite: Hoover almost doubled federal spending, Roosevelt, after bashing Hoover for his policies during the election campaign, continued and expanded them, and 12 years later, the economy still stank, and was only pulled out of the doldrums by WW II.
Now we have yet another President who bashed the previous one for his policies, then continued and expanded them once in office. He too spends like he's got wheelbarrows full of it, and here it is, 4 or 5 years later, and it ain't over yet. He lectures the Supreme Court for adverse decisions concerning his expansion of government which passed only on very close partisan lines. He starts wars for fun, seemingly, Libya first, now itching for Syria and Iran next, meanwhile making noise about the Chinese being a threat. What's he trying to do, emulate FDR's next move and get an Asian country to attack us?
Government has no core purpose beyond the rule of law. You can easily make arguments for city streets and utilities, but those are local government, not federal. You can make easy arguments for federal defensive military, but not this empire building offensive thing we seem to be stuck with. You can make easy arguments for pollution controls, many other things which have no easy borders. But 99% of the federal government has no rational purpose other than satisfying the urge for empire, both domestic and foreign. It either belongs in a freed market full of competition and bankruptcy and citizen prosecution for stepping out of bounds, or in local governments where there is at least some semblance of popular control and realistic budgeting. The federal government is merely an empire building exercise at this point.
I am a short term pessimist and a long term optimist. The historical trend is a pairing of expanding information access and decentralizing government. Governments are certainly trying to control the Internet, but not even China, North Korea, the Arab dictatorships, the African tinpots, or Putin the Great can do that in any regular fashion. Beyond all reason, I believe the trend continues, but it is sure exasperating seeing all the mess today, especially all the OWS types who have such promise in seeing the evils of corporatism, but are so naive as to think that the very government which enables those corporate monstrosities is going to come galloping to the rescue. They can't understand the concept even when explained to them; they just yell fascist and think they are intelligent.
Libertarians are not the enemy of anyone except Big Brother. Their whole mantra is to leave people to their own devices.
You seem to think Big Business and Big Government are enemies of each other. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They are the same, differing only in tiny squabbles which distract voters. The last thing either wants is for people to actually run their own lives and take the corporations to task.
If you actually think the coercive monopoly is going to use their guns to help people battle merchants, you are living in some weird alternate dream world. The only merchants who get in trouble are the few who don't go along with the other merchants and their government buddies.
That's the weirdest thing about Occupy Wall Street. They identify half the problem, corporations out of control, but then they refuse to see the other half, which is Big Brother actively assisting them. They are one and the same, and the government will never do anything to the 1% just because a few 99% rabble camp out in parks and shout for the government to come rescue them. Only individuals taking charge and upsetting BOTH Big Government and Big Business will solve anything.
Whether they are corporatists or socialists, what they have in common is not just a distrust of people thinking for themselves, but a fear of it. They are paternalistic as hell, thinking only they know what is good for everybody. Big business and big government just recycle executives. They squabble about the details, but the essence is the same: Big Brother, victimless morality laws, and endless wars.
The solution is individual power. Of course, statists will say that is laissez-faire to the max, but they are wrong; the so-called laissez-faire which is reputed to have existed is nothing more than big business and big government helping each other maintain the status quo.
Instead of the government controlling every step of the justice system, let victims prosecute, of course with penalties for bogus prosecutions, but in particular, let them prosecute companies for sloppy, inconsistent, or arbitrarily enforced policies, and eliminate all victimless crimes which let busybody Little Brothers ape Big Brother. That will keep monopolies in check, and keep the government from choosing what crimes to investigate and what criminals (both people and companies) to prosecute.
Anything of that sort scares the statists half to death. Only they have the wisdom and experience and farsightedness to guide the masses. That is why they prosecute morality, especially victimless crimes, and why they start wars and build empires -- it provides a distracting excuse for their heavy hand. The last thing they want is a society of free people.
the monopoly is accountable to you through your vote. it is an extension of your will, not an imposition of an alien will on you
Pull the other one.
in fact, if you were to remove the monopoly, there would be no absence of monopoly, the merchant would merely fill the power vacuum, and he isn't accountable to you. he's accountable to the quest for more profits, at any cost, including the raping of your freedom. then he buys the guns and points them at you:
Right. The FBI can never go bankrupt, and the monopolistic coercive government of which it is a part can certainly destroy the merchant at any time. See Lehman Bros and the old AT&T for just a few of many examples.
Go ahead. Pull the other one. You haven't made any sense yet.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but a coercive monopoly with guns is far worse than a mere merchant with a huge market share.
Let's see...
I get reconnectability (which I already have, either by using a VPN or by using screen on the server), but now it's built-in.
But now it's automatic.
I get local echo so I have no clue whether my connection has been dropped -- but OTOH, this is great if you have the brain of a goldfish and so can't remember what you just typed for a couple seconds till it gets echoed back. I presume this is optional, so non-goldfish-brains can tell it to 'degrade' to be as useful as ssh.
It also is automatic and shows what hasn't been echoed. Further, typing while lagging by a character or two is incredibly frustrating to almost all brains in existence. It's like listening to headphones which have a half second delay in what you said. Your brain simply freezes.
I get better unicode support -- well, that one's cool, anyway.
And it needs ssh for login, but also needs a mosh server -- so I can ssh into every server, but only mosh into a few.
Am I missing some really great thing about it? It seems like a major hassle for a minor improvement.
What a pessimist.
Wow you're dull and unimaginative. Imagine a cell phone constantly keeping in touch, and WiFi is faster than cell.
Imagine any number of things which are unimaginable. Stretch that brain!
I rejoice in finding that someone rejects me for my race, religion, or any other irrelevant aspect, because that kind of sorry-ass judgement carries over into how they run their business too, and I'd rather work for people who care only about running a successful business. I don't have their business talent, they don't have my programming talent, and that's ow deal are made.
Artificially restraining these kinds of inept attitudes only hides them behind official forms. It does not correct the sloppy brain which makes bad decisions. I want to know about those bad decision makers as soon as possible so I can avoid them.
That's the problem with do-gooders and statists. They seem to think that just passing a law eliminates the problem. Usually it only buries it and makes it harder to recognize. Of course, when the problem remains, they take that as an excuse for yet another layer of bureaucracy, making the problem yet harder to recognize, distorting relationships and reducing efficiency, and never solving a single actual problem, only burying it so much that you can't recognize it, and instead think the distorted problem is a new problem requiring new bureaucracy.
No, these policies are meant to salve the conscious of those who think everyone should have an ideal life at somebody else's expense. You apparently fit that bill.
I have had quite a few changes in my life because I accept reality and deal with it. You apparently are afraid of change and want me to finance your fears.
Turning down a job offer DOES NOT cancel unemployment benefits. Not searching does, sometimes.
The economy is not so bad that everybody gets just one job offer. There are always alternatives. If someone sets such strict criteria that they can find only one even remotely possible available job, then they deserve whatever special job hell they have created for themselves. Otherwise learn a new skill, downgrade your hopes, take on roommates, live with your parents, or try an unlimited number of alternatives to the job offer that sucks.
People like you who can't see these alternatives are the quickest to scream that you need my tax support for your ideals. Go pound sand. I have had to change my plans many times, to make lemonade from the lemons life hands out, and everyone else has that same opportunity.
Everything implies everything. It also implies the sun was still working, that I am a human, that dogs can't chat on the Internet, and that you are a human if you could read it and respond.
Anyone can reject any interview or job offer. Even the Mafia understand that, and resort to horse's heads as a last resort.
In this case, it also means what it says, that I would rather find out during the interview that I don't want to work there, instead of finding out a week later. I have several times turned down jobs I really needed because I would have been looking again within a week.
Some people actually do mean what they say.
Le Pen is a loonie that few people actually take serious, Haider is dead and Berlusconi ... well, it seems at least the Italians are able to learn from their mistakes.
What's your excuse after Nixon, Bush and Bush?
Father Le Pen got enough votes to make it to the finals, did he not? Santorum hasn't made it that far and probably won't.
Daughter Le Pen is scaring the crap out of the "real" politicians enough that they are all sliding right. She just might copy her father's results.
Haider won the office and scared so many people that Austria became an international pariah. Nixon is dead too, but never made countries downgrade diplomatic status.
Berlusconi was one of the most corrupt politicians anywhere in the world, and to say the Italians learned from their mistakes slides over the fact that he was elected more than once, in separate terms, which has not happened in the US since the 1880s. He only finally left office when the economy stank enough, not for his scandals and corruption and megalomania, and memory says it wasn't even a general election, just a parliamentary maneuver.
Bush I was never the imbecile that Bush II was nor the danger that Nixon was.
You picked a really sorry set of counter examples.
Some countries have a Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Some countries have a Jörg Haider.
Some countries have a Silvio Berlusconi.
I wish interviewers would ask the questions they want and ignore those guidelines. I want to know as much about the company and its practices before I take a job, and if they stick to bland questions, I lose a lot of information. If they think my race or religion or political views are important, then I want to give them smartass upsetting blasphemous answers before I walk out of the interview, not after I have had the job for a few days.
I really REALLY wish the government would stop trying to help me with its one-size-fits-all-politically-correct-thinking policies. I have a direct stake in the outcome of my decisions, and where I make mistakes, I learn for the future, unlike government bureaucrats.
Well, it's a fun joke, but too many people take it seriously, as evidenced by some posts here.
I don't believe the basic article. Wingnuts of all stripes distrust science when it conflicts with their faith. With the right wing nuts, that's global warming, pollution, and evolution. With the left wing nuts, that's genetically modified food, anything less than full-on panic over global warming and pollution, and any slur on the incredibly inefficient alternative fuels or Keynes. To conclude that only conservatives distrust science is silly.
The only reason I recognize typos is because I make so many of them myself ...
Sounds more like they dug it up and fired it into the sun.
No, just drove another steak through it's heart and doused out with holy water again.
Some garlic sauce added, I presume? Or maybe it was frozen in the shape of a stake.
Exactly. Do-gooders who would shut down child labor in dirt-poor countries are applying first world solutions to third world problems. The alternative to kids in shoe factories is not kids in school; it is kids hustling the streets or kids stuck on the family farm, which probably doesn't actually belong to the family in the first place.
Shorter work weeks and days, and other improvements in living conditions, arise naturally from a better economy. If you try to force shorter working hours, all you will do is cripple the economy and keep everybody poor forever. If outsiders would just go away and leave the insiders to bring about their own improvements at their own pace, the workers would get their better conditions as a natural course of improvement.
Do-gooders make me puke, how they think they know everything about foreign societies they have never even visited, and everybody over there is too stupid to work out their own problems.
If do-gooders worked on fixing their own problems, great, but they'd rather fix problems they know nothing of, just as astrologers pretend that using reference tables and calculators and computer programs makes them scientific. Bleaagh.
Public education: People have to send their kids to the school chosen for them by the school district, unless they want to pay twice, once in taxes for a school they won't use, and again in fees for the school they do use. Whether it's because they are religious nuts who object to science or have gifted kids who can do better, it's a pretty dismal choice. If they do use the public schools, they get almost no say in curriculum, staffing, hours, anything. Voting for the school board is faux-democracy, as the choices make no practical difference.
The road system: Not quite as restrictive since there isn't much variety to roads, but the carpool lanes are a good example. Even when they are empty, you can't use them, so everybody else crowds into the remaining lanes, slowing down and polluting more than if traffic could use all lanes. The hours are rigid, regardless of asymmetry of crowding morning vs evening, regardless of holidays. All these rules are not dictated by local conditions, but by self-serving politicians who know better than the locals what is good for them.
Public libraries: People again get little practical say in anything. Libraries are one of the favorite targets of politicians who run out of money, and most of the time it is the first thing cut, not the last, because they know a few people will write letters and make phone calls, which they can use as an excuse to raise taxes instead of cutting the waste.
Public parks: Same as public libraries. Who chooses them? Who sets the rules for them? A bunch of bureaucrats answerable to almost nobody, especially people who use them. The entrance fees and hours are usually set at the state or national level regardless of facilities or popularity. Very few people have any say on where parks are. And they are just as popular as libraries for budget cutting politicians.
Assistance for the disabled: I fail to see how that is socialism, but it does have the usual bureaucratic failings. There are the ADA lawyer mills which love to find stores whose counter is one inch too high, sue them for thousands. Instead of having an on-demand fleet of taxis for the disabled, every single bus in a city bus system had to be modified at great expense to kneel or have lifts, which none of the wheel chair users I know thought was a better tradeoff. There's the current flap about commercial swimming pools requiring permanent lifts which need expensive building modifications, instead of cheaper portable lifts. They are all the typical bureaucratic response to a problem which describes a solution in excruciating detail rather than the problem alone.
Assembly line means rigid thinking, inflexible, incapable of allowing for the unexpected, and that certainly implies less freedom. All of these programs illustrate that.
Every single word in every single language has been invented. None came with the Big Bang. Since you and everyone else did understand what I meant, the rest is just posturing.