I'm assuming you do not come from a background of similar experience. It gives a person a somewhat unique perspective on such things
A perspective that should be known, but that is so focussed on one side of the issue that it cannot be the basis for deciding on punishment on its own.
In short, judgement should be without bias, your perspective however has a huge amount of (understandable) bias.
100% certainty of being caught together with low punishments is A LOT more likely to stop people then stiff punishments with an extremely good chance to get away..
The problem with your 'simple' approach is that it is so simple that it does not take into account some extremely relevant issues, like for example the one I just mentioned.
Someone else said that "laws don't convince because they threaten"..
The spirit in which pornography is created and viewed promotes immorality. This garbage has no place sharing the same fiber as other, more intellectually engaging content. I hope net neutrality doesn't pass in any form through congress so that this rubbish gets shafted with slower transfer of packets. I am probably dreaming now that the Democrats have majority in the house.
Ah, I see, we should leave polarizing the issue to you, nice case of do as I say not as I do eh?
I thought if you used the words God + Evolution side by side, then it would cause a massive implosion of the universe...
If that were the case, the pope would have caused such an implosion already decades ago.
Just keep in mind that the large majority of people who believe in christ don't want to have anything to do with creationalism or anything related to it, regardless of what some extremely noisy fundamentalists would like you to believe.
You known if you light up a joint or get yourself drunk or ram yourself full of heroin that it is going to have certain effects on you, potentially including addiction and death.
You know that when you cross the streat, it is going to have some effect, most likely, you getting to the opposite side of the street, but potentially you'll get hit by a car or trip over something or what not.
Even if it doesn't go that far, there WILL be some effect. If these negative effects mess up your life,
You somehow jump from 'some effect' to 'negative effects' without ever trying to show that all those effects are negative.
There are people who use marijuana for medical reasons who can live a less painfull, and probably more productive life due to that. All negative effects you say?
Please replace fear for the unknown by observation and logic, you'll find it works a lot better.
But then for every law, there's probably still someone somewhere who thinks it unjust in some way. You're welcome to consider child-porn laws unjust.
For one, there can be some discussion about what constitutes child porn. It seems to me that in all cases it concerns everything that has an 'underage' person involved in any kind of sexually related activities, but what is underage? 21 in the USA, 18 where I live, and in one of our neighboring countries (UK) it used to be 16, but for what I know its 18 now.
This makes for a lot of material that I could legally buy or sell here, which could get me jailed for child pornography in the USA.
With regards to 'adult porn', in the USA there is an additional measure, community standards, so what might be ok in one location could be considered obscene in another, within the same country.
At any rate, knowing those things, if I want to stay out of jail, I won't run the risk, but following the 'unjust laws' reasoning, both would constitute censorship from my point of view.
And last time I checked, sales and use are two completely different things, especially when talking about something that can be used and distributed freely.
An outright "No Software Patents" stance would say that any company could then duplicate the oil company's unique software, leaving them no protection for their massive investment and intellectual property. Why would software be any different than a machine here?
Your software implementation is protected by copyright, unlike your physical machine, so your competition can't just take your software and use it. They can try to re-implement the same idea, but that will require a substantial investment since correct implementation of an idea is what makes writing software quite difficult, and quite different from going from a design to a physical machine.
Re:If the review is accurate, the book is revision
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In Search of Stupidity
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· Score: 1
I believe this has something to do with a thing called mindshare.
Re:Chicago was vaporware for years, true
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In Search of Stupidity
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The people at Boca Raton seem to have thought that they could prevent some of the perceived flaws of Unix, and wanted to provide some level of familiarity to developers comming from DOS.
When I was involved with OS/2 and its development, AIX, and Unix in general were considered outdated and flawed, esp. with regards to scheduling and priority management. Considering how systems like OS/2 and BeOS perform under heavy load, and seeing how esp. the schedulers of modern Unix systems look little like what was there in the mid 80s, I still believe they may have had a point.
If I say that whatever everyone else calls blue is in fact called red, then I made a definition. The fact that noone other then me might use it doesn't change that. While the usefullness of a definition often depends on how well accepted it is within the target audience, definitions themselves do not depend on that.
Some feel the United States is the dominant deciding factor on the definition but the IAU has not turned to democratizing the definition yet."
Lets see now.. democratically deciding a definition? hmm...
At any rate, the USA being the dominant deciding factor might make some sense seeing how they also invest a lot into the actual science part of this, but if the IAU did turn to democratize the decision, then the USA can't be the deciding factor seeing how they are a mere 4% of the world population....
Yes - when I say I am discussing a specific topic, that means I am discussing that topic, not something else. The quotes and urls tend to point in that direction. Your argument that my article is not relevant to this discussion is very weak for two reasons; one, you have given every indication that you didn't understand the article in question; two, your actions here indicate you can't follow a line of reasoning. So - let's try again.
When you post into a specific thread, your posts will be read in the context of that thread, what is so difficult to understand about that? Whatever your name is is really irrelevant for that.
For the rest, that I don't understand your article is what you claim, but I rather think you failed to communicate whatever the point of your article was properly. Don't blame the listener for your own failure to communicate properly.
That said, I disagree, I understand your article perfectly fine, but I don't agree with parts of it.
Sweden is a lousy example of a nation 'doing better than America' because they aren't.
Which would be fine, because they do a lot better by any kind of measurement then many 'capitalist' countries, while the point under discussion was that the more capitalist, the more prosperous a country is. Regardless of if Sweden specifically does better or worse then the USA is pretty much irrelevant for that.
Most 'standard of living' surveys don't lower the ranking od Sweden for things like lousy housing or porr access to services, but give them higher scores for things like all-day pre-school, whether it is good for kids or not.
Lousy housing? you obviously have never been there. Poor access to services? please qualify your statements.
If you look at just their unemployment levels and personal GDP shares honestly, you see that if you give them every possible benefit of the doubt and lean in their direction as far as you can, they still come up about 12% short as far as PPP income per person compared to America. They are facing manpower shortages in virtually every high-education field except for education, mainly due to a brain drain of talent and a disastrously low birth rate. Honest thrid-party analysis of their economy shows that the percentage of Swedes living in poverty and in near-poverty is just as high as in the US, but they have a fraction of our wealthy, showing that Socialist tax programs have done little more than eliminate the wealthy.
This my friend is all opinion, and as I have pointed otu a lot earlier in this discussion, including references, is that many disagree. You can just dismiss that, but you'll have to do a much better job at providing an argument then you did, else I'll indeed accuse you of ignoring whatever does not agree with your conclusions.
Let me ask you, does 'honest' mean 'agrees with me' ?
I *did* say this, and I point to my blog article, linked above, for the independent resources that I used for my analysis. Statements about 'cherry picking' and 'bias' from you will be ignored unless acoompanied by statistics. Steve Kanga's "Oh, I love Scandinavia" statements are no better than yours, many of your listed resources (so far) are simply quoting each other or using the same source data, and a fair amount of the stuff you have linked is simply wrong.
I look forward to it.
Cherry picking: I point at northern Europe, Scandinavia in particular, and claim they do relatiovely well despite their socialist tendencies.
You argue about Sweden having to do better then the USA to counter that? It is a small part of northern EUrope. Why don't you also look at their neighbors in Norway for example? And why do they have to do better then the USA? Even if they do worse then the USA, but better then many other countries, my argument stands.
To point out that you are cherry picking your facts, all I have to point out are facts you are not taking into account. I have pointed out more then enough of those along the way.
But ease of doing something doesn't mean that it shouldn't be subject to the same protection as something more difficult to do. Arguably, it should have more protection since the difficult things are already protected by the high barrier to entry.
Since patents exist to 'promote usefull inventions' by means of protecting the investment of the inventor (so she can hopefully make some profit), a lower investment should get less protection, not more.
The idea of patents was never to create a barrier to entry.
Let's try this very slowly. I stated in my original post that the Eu, as a whole, has a worse debt load than the US. You disputed this. I prosed it again. You dispute it again, now, with the claim 'no one knows'. Wel,, yes, they do - I have the links in my article. And, unfortunately for you, I didn't claim it was an 'insurmountable problem', I said i doubt that it could be solved without serious changes to existing social programs. No, really. I have my own words on my screen right now.And I never said it was unique to anybody, just worse in Socialist countries. Seriously - go read it again.
No, you replied to this post, your original post in this thread was this. Your arguing about the dept load of the EU is a diversion, if you'd be comparing the dept load and the development of that dept in both the US and Sweden, it might have had more relevance.
Then, please keep in mind the difference between someone disagreeing with your conclusions and someone disagreeing with your facts, those are really different things.
Cherry picking your facts does not make them incorrect, it makes them incomplete. To be completely clear here, most of the facts you base yourself on are correct, but you seem to lack quite a few of them. You were wrong about the time when Spain joined the EU and the state of the economy, and you seem wrong about voter inertia (not that there is no dispute about changes to social security, but the dispute is not about the need for changes), but again, most of your facts are not under dispute for all I am concerned, the conclusions you come to are what I dispute.
At any rate, this was the post I was replying to initially, and was also the context in which I have been discussing things. It occurs to me that you have been trying to have a discussion about something else. I mistakenly assumed that you also wrote that post, but reading back I see you didn't, sorry for attributing statements to you that you did not make. That said, you seem to be the one changing targets and bringing in an interesting but hardly related article.
"The author also ignores that a social security system can be changed, for example as a response to the European population getting older on average. His only 2 outcomes are either doing away with the system or letting it break down."
This is flat-out false. Period. No way out of it - what you wrote here is factually untrue. I discussed in at least three places, arguably 5, that the consequence of demographic shift will be changes/reductions to social programs.
You are correct there. I read this in the context of the original post I replied to, and what I considered to be the subject of the thread, and concluded something that you simply did not say.
Careful! I never said that the migration of people would destroy the economies short-term, I was speaking of the stress upon social welfare systems. Especially with all that money going backl to Poland, not into the economy of the nations providing health care, etc.
Except for the fact that social security fees are being payed where the work is being done, so no, that doesn't work as you suggest. On top of that, money earned this way means less money from the EU budget has to go there.
"The fact that 3 of the 5 countries I mentioned as being under scrutiny for lousy debt ratios means... that the US does not have a better debt ratio than those nations? Huh?
No, it means that the problem is known and being dealt with by keeping them to very strict budget rules." So, again - the problem that you originally said doesn't exist actually does exist. Fine, you admit that you were wrong. Let's move on.
I never said it does not exist, I said, and still say that it is not an unsolvable problem, and that the bleak outcome predicted by the 'good article' that you refered me to is rather unlikely.
WEll, considering that this is a quote from an article I wrote about the topic I am discussing and was primarily to debunk the myth that "the US has a crushing debt load while Europe does not" it *is* germaine.
Well yes, if that was what we were discussing then that would be rather relevant, but it is not. Also, I never made the claim that either one has a 'crushing debt load', I just pointed out that the serious debt load of EU countries is being worked on.
"And as far as the debt rations of the rest of the EU, please also omit virtually all of Eastern Europe, take the remainder with debt ratios equal to or better than the us, and combine their GDP's. You'll find that they are a fraction of the EU's total productive/consumption capacity, meaning - that the EU, as a whole, hase a worse debt ratio than the US.
With selectively picking the countries that prove your point, sure. I'm also pretty sure I could pick a selection of US states that would show the exact opposite..."
Your reading comprehension is a bit poor - if you read this, it can be summarized as "If you take the combined economies of all of Europe, the whole has a worse debt ration than America as a whole". How can I be cherry-picking when I am talking about every nation together?
Because you were not, you were excluding a substantial part of Europe, pointing out that what you are left with is a small part of Europe that has a relatively low debt load, but is a fraction of Europe, and then you jump to the conclusion that together with the part you just excluded the dept load would be worse then the USA has. Maybe it is, maybe not. Matter of fact is that both have a debt load that you better take seriously and do something about. Again, I never disputed that, I do dispute that this is a near unsolvable problem as your article suggests, and I dispute that this is a problem exclusively found in 'socialist' countries.
Orignially you claimed that I said there were only two possibilities - social welfare systems as they exist, or no social welfare systems. When I point out that that was not true because i discussed how nations have had success with changing social welfare systems (i.e., proved you wrong) you replied with.... A non-sequitor. Is English a second language for you? Seriously, this is not a dig. I simply cannot understand how you can fail to see that I refuted your claim that I had a 'on/off' proposal, then answered with this nonsensical phrase.
Do you even remeber what you write yourself and when?
The post I replied to stated:
1. A perfect communist government would still fail. 2. The more capitalist a nation is, the more prosperous it is (you don't need to have a completely capitalist nation to see it's effects).
I disputed both statements. It is you who has been moving targets to debt loa
Well, let's go over your attempts, here. First of all, the migration of labor from East to West in Europe is already much larger than the earlier South to North because the economies of the East are much weaker, relatively, than were the South's 1-2 decades ago.
Spain joined the EU in the 70s, after decades of civil war, military dictatorship and economic blockade, the situation 1 a 2 decades ago are not in any way representing the situation just after they joined, and you are dead wrong about the state of their economy back before they joined versus the state of eastern European economies today.
You might also want to take a look at how migration between eastern and western Europe is working out, and has been working out for a few years now. Where I live we happen to have many Polish people, who come here to work. After having fixed some small issues regarding social security and taxes, we gladly see them come, they enhance our productivity, thereby helping us make money, and meanwhile they make money themselves, much of which flows back into Poland, helping the economy there. Can you explain how that is somehow economically damaging and something we can't deal with?
'But they take our jobs!!'
Sure, except for that reality shows that they don't.
Interestingly, when my parents were young, they were fearing the influx of Italians, just to find out that it caused little damage, and actually helped the economy. The same happened with the influx of Spanish people.
Also, just like most Polish people now, the large majority of the Italian and Spanish people did not stay here, rather, they worked here part of the year, and went home for another part, and often return completely after a couple of years.
The fact that 3 of the 5 countries I mentioned as being under scrutiny for lousy debt ratios means... that the US does not have a better debt ratio than those nations? Huh?
No, it means that the problem is known and being dealt with by keeping them to very strict budget rules. Hence the outcome predicted by your article is very unlikely.
My point was that the "powerhouses" of the EU (Britain, France, and Germany) have a much worse debt ratio than does the US. Somehow you think that the fact that the EU acknowledges this makes it moot?
Somehow that has anything to do with what I pointed out in the beginning of this discussion (that there are countries that implement many socialist ideas and didn't turn into military dictatorships, extreme poverty and such, but rather the opposite) and shows that for example Sweden and Norway are facing dissaster due to their rather socialist policies?
Your point is hardly relevant to the subject of the discussion, but hey, who cares.
Besides, I was never claiming those 'power houses' (who in his right mind calls France an economic powerhouse to begin with) did much better then the USA, I was saying that there are systems with socialist tendencies that have considerable success in providing a good place to live, with fair chances and good income.
Nope, it doesn't change at all that France and Germany especially have some budget problems, and in case of France those are rather structural in nature, but not so in case of Germany. You might want to keep in mind this thing called German unification, and the price of it. You may also want to keep in mind that virtually everyone in Germany knows that reform is needed, and the argument is more about what exact reforms and when. You probably missed this little detail of germans actually voting in a CDU based government that is a lot stronger on pushing through those reforms also. At least the author of the nice article you pointed at seems to be ignoring this completely.
And as far as the debt rations of the rest of the EU, please also omit virtually all of Eastern Europe, take the remainder with debt ratios equal to or better than the us, and combine their GDP's. You'll find that they are a fraction of the EU's total productive/consump
Ah yes, a 'good' article because it agrees with your point of view?
Its an interesting read, that is for sure, but also a rather biassed opinion piece, lacking any scientific approach to the matter.
Not that there is anything wrong with bias, everyone has bias, but it is not good when that results in cherrypicking the things that come in handy for the point one wants to make while ignoring anything that contradicts it.
In case of this article, for example the author is completely ignoring that the situation Europe faces with regards to Eastern European countries is not new at all, and is a kind of situation that the EU has dealt with quite succesfully in the past. Difference was that back then it was Southern European nations (Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece) joining. Similar predictions were made back then, and nothing even remotely similar to those predictions happened.
Not to mention that the comments about debt vs GDP are silly. 3 of the countries mentioned there are under scruteny from the EU because they don't conform to the budget rules, and what the author forgets to mention is that the other countries in the EU do better upto a lot better then the ones he mentions. Typical case of cherry picking and ignoring what does not come in handy.
The author also ignores that a social security system can be changed, for example as a response to the European population getting older on average. His only 2 outcomes are either doing away with the system or letting it break down. A much simpler solution here is to increase retirement age to compensate for it.
I could go on, but I don't see a point in that, I think I have shown that the author is not doing a good job trying to analyse the facts in an open and scientific way, rather he is picking the details that go well with the argument he wants to make, ignoring everything else where possible, and misrepresenting it where it cannot be easily ignored.
Last but not least, I'm not claiming 'capitalism' is evil, rather the opposite, it brings some extremely usefull ideas to the table. In its extreme form however it also has very serious problems. The same however is true for socialism. You would do wise to open your eyes to the advantages and problems of both approaches. Ideas are not bad because of a name or a system they are part of, they are bad because they don't work. As long as you keep calling everything that is 'socialist' bad beforehand without even trying to understand the ideas and their merrits, you are simply not qualified to discuss it either.
I wasn't talking about standard of living or other strange measures of well being. I'm talking about GDP, average income and growth rate. What is defined as poverty in the US is different than in Sweden. Infant death is measured differently in the US. The lower life expectancy isn't readily explained but could be caused by several different factors like more violence, obesity and more.
Even if you do use them, the USA is not first, that place is still taken by luxemborg, and sweden and esp. norway are pretty close to that same top. Icidentely, all part of 'socialist Europe'. Your statement that if Sweden were in the USA it would be the poorest state is simply not true when looking at average income, or GDP per capita. 'Strange measures of well being like standard of living' happen to be the norm for measuring how well things work out for people for the simple reason that it compensates for 'buying power', whereas GDP per capita does not. Not compensating for this means that you are not measuring what people can afford on their local market.
How well did the black popuation fare against the Swedes when comparing their wages?
Could you please tell me what good Sweden is doing? AFAIK if Sweden was a state in USA it would be the poorest. Also please do a comparison of the wages between [whatever you call your black population today] and the Swedes. You will be surprised.
Sweden may be doing well compared to even more socialist countries but not compared to USA or Hong Kong.
"Better" healthcare is difficult to quantitatively measure. I don't know where you got your "up to 50% cheaper", but yes, there are countries that have lower infant mortaility rates (a common measure of how "good" the healthcare is in a country) than the US, while at the same time, spending less on healthcare per individual.
I base myself first of all on my own experience (having lived in the USA and in the Netherlands), experience of others who have used the system in both places, and on publications from various organisations.
Infant mortality rate is often used because it is somewhat telling for how easily accessable health care is.
Many patients desire a better quality of life, and the market has responded with products and services. Nobody I know measures quality of healthcare by how many liposuctions have been done, but those all count in the healthcare spending per individual.
healthcare spending per individual is a completely useless metric for this for the following very obvious reasons:
1. It fails to account for different cost of healthcare due to factors like hourly pay for qualified workers being different in different countries 2. It says absolutely nothing about how accessable the healthcare system is, ie, does everyone who needs healthcare (also for non life-threatening situations) have access to it?
Lets assume we look at a group of 100 individuals with a total budget of $1m for healthcare:
1 out of those 100 needs a $1m treatment 99 out of those 100 need a $1000 treatment
Obviously, healthcare spending per individual is higher when the 1 person needing the $1m treatment is helped, but for 1/10th of that, 99 times more people can be helped. Yes, the $1m person would probably get some very advanced treatment, which you can use to judge the 'peak quality' that is offered, but the average quality, ie, what a typical person can expect, is extremely bad still since 99 out of 100 go without treatment at all in this example.
Yeah, the numbers are made up, but the issue is be pretty clear I assume, hence healthcare spending per individual is not used by people actually interested in the overall quality of healthcare, rather, it is often used by those who either did not put thought into what it means, or those who want to present a misleading picture of this.
The overall cost of healthcare is important however since it is a major factor in if it can be payed for to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm assuming you do not come from a background of similar experience. It gives a person a somewhat unique perspective on such things
A perspective that should be known, but that is so focussed on one side of the issue that it cannot be the basis for deciding on punishment on its own.
In short, judgement should be without bias, your perspective however has a huge amount of (understandable) bias.
100% certainty of being caught together with low punishments is A LOT more likely to stop people then stiff punishments with an extremely good chance to get away..
The problem with your 'simple' approach is that it is so simple that it does not take into account some extremely relevant issues, like for example the one I just mentioned.
Someone else said that "laws don't convince because they threaten"..
Please don't try to polarize the issue.
Good call..
The spirit in which pornography is created and viewed promotes immorality. This garbage has no place sharing the same fiber as other, more intellectually engaging content. I hope net neutrality doesn't pass in any form through congress so that this rubbish gets shafted with slower transfer of packets. I am probably dreaming now that the Democrats have majority in the house.
Ah, I see, we should leave polarizing the issue to you, nice case of do as I say not as I do eh?
I thought if you used the words God + Evolution side by side, then it would cause a massive implosion of the universe...
If that were the case, the pope would have caused such an implosion already decades ago.
Just keep in mind that the large majority of people who believe in christ don't want to have anything to do with creationalism or anything related to it, regardless of what some extremely noisy fundamentalists would like you to believe.
They go against my ethics. I know I'm not alone in this.
You are completely free to refrain from looking at them, please follow your ethics in this.
You are however not free to push your ethics onto me, please stop trying to do so.
You known if you light up a joint or get yourself drunk or ram yourself full of heroin that it is going to have certain effects on you, potentially including addiction and death.
You know that when you cross the streat, it is going to have some effect, most likely, you getting to the opposite side of the street, but potentially you'll get hit by a car or trip over something or what not.
Even if it doesn't go that far, there WILL be some effect. If these negative effects mess up your life,
You somehow jump from 'some effect' to 'negative effects' without ever trying to show that all those effects are negative.
There are people who use marijuana for medical reasons who can live a less painfull, and probably more productive life due to that. All negative effects you say?
Please replace fear for the unknown by observation and logic, you'll find it works a lot better.
But then for every law, there's probably still someone somewhere who thinks it unjust in some way. You're welcome to consider child-porn laws unjust.
For one, there can be some discussion about what constitutes child porn. It seems to me that in all cases it concerns everything that has an 'underage' person involved in any kind of sexually related activities, but what is underage? 21 in the USA, 18 where I live, and in one of our neighboring countries (UK) it used to be 16, but for what I know its 18 now.
This makes for a lot of material that I could legally buy or sell here, which could get me jailed for child pornography in the USA.
With regards to 'adult porn', in the USA there is an additional measure, community standards, so what might be ok in one location could be considered obscene in another, within the same country.
At any rate, knowing those things, if I want to stay out of jail, I won't run the risk, but following the 'unjust laws' reasoning, both would constitute censorship from my point of view.
And last time I checked, sales and use are two completely different things, especially when talking about something that can be used and distributed freely.
An outright "No Software Patents" stance would say that any company could then duplicate the oil company's unique software, leaving them no protection for their massive investment and intellectual property. Why would software be any different than a machine here?
Your software implementation is protected by copyright, unlike your physical machine, so your competition can't just take your software and use it. They can try to re-implement the same idea, but that will require a substantial investment since correct implementation of an idea is what makes writing software quite difficult, and quite different from going from a design to a physical machine.
I believe this has something to do with a thing called mindshare.
The people at Boca Raton seem to have thought that they could prevent some of the perceived flaws of Unix, and wanted to provide some level of familiarity to developers comming from DOS.
When I was involved with OS/2 and its development, AIX, and Unix in general were considered outdated and flawed, esp. with regards to scheduling and priority management. Considering how systems like OS/2 and BeOS perform under heavy load, and seeing how esp. the schedulers of modern Unix systems look little like what was there in the mid 80s, I still believe they may have had a point.
But if you disagree with the everyone else in the world, then you risk them defining you as insane.
It seems they do that anyway.
If I say that whatever everyone else calls blue is in fact called red, then I made a definition. The fact that noone other then me might use it doesn't change that. While the usefullness of a definition often depends on how well accepted it is within the target audience, definitions themselves do not depend on that.
Some feel the United States is the dominant deciding factor on the definition but the IAU has not turned to democratizing the definition yet."
Lets see now.. democratically deciding a definition? hmm...
At any rate, the USA being the dominant deciding factor might make some sense seeing how they also invest a lot into the actual science part of this, but if the IAU did turn to democratize the decision, then the USA can't be the deciding factor seeing how they are a mere 4% of the world population....
Hmm, good call.. I do agree that the label on th eKeg says something.. but I still would go for the content :)
You seem to care a lot about labels and very little about content.. Not a very good advertisement for the party you are founder of.
Yes - when I say I am discussing a specific topic, that means I am discussing that topic, not something else. The quotes and urls tend to point in that direction. Your argument that my article is not relevant to this discussion is very weak for two reasons; one, you have given every indication that you didn't understand the article in question; two, your actions here indicate you can't follow a line of reasoning. So - let's try again.
When you post into a specific thread, your posts will be read in the context of that thread, what is so difficult to understand about that? Whatever your name is is really irrelevant for that.
For the rest, that I don't understand your article is what you claim, but I rather think you failed to communicate whatever the point of your article was properly. Don't blame the listener for your own failure to communicate properly.
That said, I disagree, I understand your article perfectly fine, but I don't agree with parts of it.
Sweden is a lousy example of a nation 'doing better than America' because they aren't.
Which would be fine, because they do a lot better by any kind of measurement then many 'capitalist' countries, while the point under discussion was that the more capitalist, the more prosperous a country is. Regardless of if Sweden specifically does better or worse then the USA is pretty much irrelevant for that.
Most 'standard of living' surveys don't lower the ranking od Sweden for things like lousy housing or porr access to services, but give them higher scores for things like all-day pre-school, whether it is good for kids or not.
Lousy housing? you obviously have never been there. Poor access to services? please qualify your statements.
If you look at just their unemployment levels and personal GDP shares honestly, you see that if you give them every possible benefit of the doubt and lean in their direction as far as you can, they still come up about 12% short as far as PPP income per person compared to America. They are facing manpower shortages in virtually every high-education field except for education, mainly due to a brain drain of talent and a disastrously low birth rate. Honest thrid-party analysis of their economy shows that the percentage of Swedes living in poverty and in near-poverty is just as high as in the US, but they have a fraction of our wealthy, showing that Socialist tax programs have done little more than eliminate the wealthy.
This my friend is all opinion, and as I have pointed otu a lot earlier in this discussion, including references, is that many disagree. You can just dismiss that, but you'll have to do a much better job at providing an argument then you did, else I'll indeed accuse you of ignoring whatever does not agree with your conclusions.
Let me ask you, does 'honest' mean 'agrees with me' ?
I *did* say this, and I point to my blog article, linked above, for the independent resources that I used for my analysis. Statements about 'cherry picking' and 'bias' from you will be ignored unless acoompanied by statistics. Steve Kanga's "Oh, I love Scandinavia" statements are no better than yours, many of your listed resources (so far) are simply quoting each other or using the same source data, and a fair amount of the stuff you have linked is simply wrong.
I look forward to it.
Cherry picking: I point at northern Europe, Scandinavia in particular, and claim they do relatiovely well despite their socialist tendencies.
You argue about Sweden having to do better then the USA to counter that? It is a small part of northern EUrope. Why don't you also look at their neighbors in Norway for example? And why do they have to do better then the USA? Even if they do worse then the USA, but better then many other countries, my argument stands.
To point out that you are cherry picking your facts, all I have to point out are facts you are not taking into account. I have pointed out more then enough of those along the way.
But ease of doing something doesn't mean that it shouldn't be subject to the same protection as something more difficult to do. Arguably, it should have more protection since the difficult things are already protected by the high barrier to entry.
Since patents exist to 'promote usefull inventions' by means of protecting the investment of the inventor (so she can hopefully make some profit), a lower investment should get less protection, not more.
The idea of patents was never to create a barrier to entry.
Let's try this very slowly. I stated in my original post that the Eu, as a whole, has a worse debt load than the US. You disputed this. I prosed it again. You dispute it again, now, with the claim 'no one knows'. Wel,, yes, they do - I have the links in my article. And, unfortunately for you, I didn't claim it was an 'insurmountable problem', I said i doubt that it could be solved without serious changes to existing social programs. No, really. I have my own words on my screen right now.And I never said it was unique to anybody, just worse in Socialist countries. Seriously - go read it again.
No, you replied to this post, your original post in this thread was this. Your arguing about the dept load of the EU is a diversion, if you'd be comparing the dept load and the development of that dept in both the US and Sweden, it might have had more relevance.
Then, please keep in mind the difference between someone disagreeing with your conclusions and someone disagreeing with your facts, those are really different things.
Cherry picking your facts does not make them incorrect, it makes them incomplete. To be completely clear here, most of the facts you base yourself on are correct, but you seem to lack quite a few of them. You were wrong about the time when Spain joined the EU and the state of the economy, and you seem wrong about voter inertia (not that there is no dispute about changes to social security, but the dispute is not about the need for changes), but again, most of your facts are not under dispute for all I am concerned, the conclusions you come to are what I dispute.
At any rate, this was the post I was replying to initially, and was also the context in which I have been discussing things. It occurs to me that you have been trying to have a discussion about something else. I mistakenly assumed that you also wrote that post, but reading back I see you didn't, sorry for attributing statements to you that you did not make. That said, you seem to be the one changing targets and bringing in an interesting but hardly related article.
"The author also ignores that a social security system can be changed, for example as a response to the European population getting older on average. His only 2 outcomes are either doing away with the system or letting it break down."
This is flat-out false. Period. No way out of it - what you wrote here is factually untrue. I discussed in at least three places, arguably 5, that the consequence of demographic shift will be changes/reductions to social programs.
You are correct there. I read this in the context of the original post I replied to, and what I considered to be the subject of the thread, and concluded something that you simply did not say.
Careful! I never said that the migration of people would destroy the economies short-term, I was speaking of the stress upon social welfare systems. Especially with all that money going backl to Poland, not into the economy of the nations providing health care, etc.
Except for the fact that social security fees are being payed where the work is being done, so no, that doesn't work as you suggest. On top of that, money earned this way means less money from the EU budget has to go there.
"The fact that 3 of the 5 countries I mentioned as being under scrutiny for lousy debt ratios means... that the US does not have a better debt ratio than those nations? Huh?
No, it means that the problem is known and being dealt with by keeping them to very strict budget rules."
So, again - the problem that you originally said doesn't exist actually does exist. Fine, you admit that you were wrong. Let's move on.
I never said it does not exist, I said, and still say that it is not an unsolvable problem, and that the bleak outcome predicted by the 'good article' that you refered me to is rather unlikely.
WEll, considering that this is a quote from an article I wrote about the topic I am discussing and was primarily to debunk the myth that "the US has a crushing debt load while Europe does not" it *is* germaine.
Well yes, if that was what we were discussing then that would be rather relevant, but it is not. Also, I never made the claim that either one has a 'crushing debt load', I just pointed out that the serious debt load of EU countries is being worked on.
"And as far as the debt rations of the rest of the EU, please also omit virtually all of Eastern Europe, take the remainder with debt ratios equal to or better than the us, and combine their GDP's. You'll find that they are a fraction of the EU's total productive/consumption capacity, meaning - that the EU, as a whole, hase a worse debt ratio than the US.
With selectively picking the countries that prove your point, sure.
I'm also pretty sure I could pick a selection of US states that would show the exact opposite..."
Your reading comprehension is a bit poor - if you read this, it can be summarized as "If you take the combined economies of all of Europe, the whole has a worse debt ration than America as a whole". How can I be cherry-picking when I am talking about every nation together?
Because you were not, you were excluding a substantial part of Europe, pointing out that what you are left with is a small part of Europe that has a relatively low debt load, but is a fraction of Europe, and then you jump to the conclusion that together with the part you just excluded the dept load would be worse then the USA has. Maybe it is, maybe not. Matter of fact is that both have a debt load that you better take seriously and do something about. Again, I never disputed that, I do dispute that this is a near unsolvable problem as your article suggests, and I dispute that this is a problem exclusively found in 'socialist' countries.
Orignially you claimed that I said there were only two possibilities - social welfare systems as they exist, or no social welfare systems. When I point out that that was not true because i discussed how nations have had success with changing social welfare systems (i.e., proved you wrong) you replied with.... A non-sequitor. Is English a second language for you? Seriously, this is not a dig. I simply cannot understand how you can fail to see that I refuted your claim that I had a 'on/off' proposal, then answered with this nonsensical phrase.
Do you even remeber what you write yourself and when?
The post I replied to stated:
1. A perfect communist government would still fail. 2. The more capitalist a nation is, the more prosperous it is (you don't need to have a completely capitalist nation to see it's effects).
I disputed both statements. It is you who has been moving targets to debt loa
Well, let's go over your attempts, here. First of all, the migration of labor from East to West in Europe is already much larger than the earlier South to North because the economies of the East are much weaker, relatively, than were the South's 1-2 decades ago.
Spain joined the EU in the 70s, after decades of civil war, military dictatorship and economic blockade, the situation 1 a 2 decades ago are not in any way representing the situation just after they joined, and you are dead wrong about the state of their economy back before they joined versus the state of eastern European economies today.
You might also want to take a look at how migration between eastern and western Europe is working out, and has been working out for a few years now. Where I live we happen to have many Polish people, who come here to work. After having fixed some small issues regarding social security and taxes, we gladly see them come, they enhance our productivity, thereby helping us make money, and meanwhile they make money themselves, much of which flows back into Poland, helping the economy there. Can you explain how that is somehow economically damaging and something we can't deal with?
'But they take our jobs!!'
Sure, except for that reality shows that they don't.
Interestingly, when my parents were young, they were fearing the influx of Italians, just to find out that it caused little damage, and actually helped the economy. The same happened with the influx of Spanish people.
Also, just like most Polish people now, the large majority of the Italian and Spanish people did not stay here, rather, they worked here part of the year, and went home for another part, and often return completely after a couple of years.
The fact that 3 of the 5 countries I mentioned as being under scrutiny for lousy debt ratios means... that the US does not have a better debt ratio than those nations? Huh?
No, it means that the problem is known and being dealt with by keeping them to very strict budget rules. Hence the outcome predicted by your article is very unlikely.
My point was that the "powerhouses" of the EU (Britain, France, and Germany) have a much worse debt ratio than does the US. Somehow you think that the fact that the EU acknowledges this makes it moot?
Somehow that has anything to do with what I pointed out in the beginning of this discussion (that there are countries that implement many socialist ideas and didn't turn into military dictatorships, extreme poverty and such, but rather the opposite) and shows that for example Sweden and Norway are facing dissaster due to their rather socialist policies?
Your point is hardly relevant to the subject of the discussion, but hey, who cares.
Besides, I was never claiming those 'power houses' (who in his right mind calls France an economic powerhouse to begin with) did much better then the USA, I was saying that there are systems with socialist tendencies that have considerable success in providing a good place to live, with fair chances and good income.
Nope, it doesn't change at all that France and Germany especially have some budget problems, and in case of France those are rather structural in nature, but not so in case of Germany. You might want to keep in mind this thing called German unification, and the price of it. You may also want to keep in mind that virtually everyone in Germany knows that reform is needed, and the argument is more about what exact reforms and when. You probably missed this little detail of germans actually voting in a CDU based government that is a lot stronger on pushing through those reforms also. At least the author of the nice article you pointed at seems to be ignoring this completely.
And as far as the debt rations of the rest of the EU, please also omit virtually all of Eastern Europe, take the remainder with debt ratios equal to or better than the us, and combine their GDP's. You'll find that they are a fraction of the EU's total productive/consump
Here is a good article on the subject.
Ah yes, a 'good' article because it agrees with your point of view?
Its an interesting read, that is for sure, but also a rather biassed opinion piece, lacking any scientific approach to the matter.
Not that there is anything wrong with bias, everyone has bias, but it is not good when that results in cherrypicking the things that come in handy for the point one wants to make while ignoring anything that contradicts it.
In case of this article, for example the author is completely ignoring that the situation Europe faces with regards to Eastern European countries is not new at all, and is a kind of situation that the EU has dealt with quite succesfully in the past. Difference was that back then it was Southern European nations (Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece) joining. Similar predictions were made back then, and nothing even remotely similar to those predictions happened.
Not to mention that the comments about debt vs GDP are silly. 3 of the countries mentioned there are under scruteny from the EU because they don't conform to the budget rules, and what the author forgets to mention is that the other countries in the EU do better upto a lot better then the ones he mentions. Typical case of cherry picking and ignoring what does not come in handy.
The author also ignores that a social security system can be changed, for example as a response to the European population getting older on average. His only 2 outcomes are either doing away with the system or letting it break down. A much simpler solution here is to increase retirement age to compensate for it.
I could go on, but I don't see a point in that, I think I have shown that the author is not doing a good job trying to analyse the facts in an open and scientific way, rather he is picking the details that go well with the argument he wants to make, ignoring everything else where possible, and misrepresenting it where it cannot be easily ignored.
Last but not least, I'm not claiming 'capitalism' is evil, rather the opposite, it brings some extremely usefull ideas to the table. In its extreme form however it also has very serious problems. The same however is true for socialism. You would do wise to open your eyes to the advantages and problems of both approaches. Ideas are not bad because of a name or a system they are part of, they are bad because they don't work. As long as you keep calling everything that is 'socialist' bad beforehand without even trying to understand the ideas and their merrits, you are simply not qualified to discuss it either.
I wasn't talking about standard of living or other strange measures of well being. I'm talking about GDP, average income and growth rate. What is defined as poverty in the US is different than in Sweden. Infant death is measured differently in the US. The lower life expectancy isn't readily explained but could be caused by several different factors like more violence, obesity and more.
Even if you do use them, the USA is not first, that place is still taken by luxemborg, and sweden and esp. norway are pretty close to that same top. Icidentely, all part of 'socialist Europe'. Your statement that if Sweden were in the USA it would be the poorest state is simply not true when looking at average income, or GDP per capita. 'Strange measures of well being like standard of living' happen to be the norm for measuring how well things work out for people for the simple reason that it compensates for 'buying power', whereas GDP per capita does not. Not compensating for this means that you are not measuring what people can afford on their local market.
How well did the black popuation fare against the Swedes when comparing their wages?
I bet at least as well as Mexicans in the USA.
Could you please tell me what good Sweden is doing? AFAIK if Sweden was a state in USA it would be the poorest. Also please do a comparison of the wages between [whatever you call your black population today] and the Swedes. You will be surprised.
p -ten-quality-of-life-map.html. htmln _the_United_States
Sweden may be doing well compared to even more socialist countries but not compared to USA or Hong Kong.
Can I have some from whatever you are smoking?
Just some assorted sources, google has many more.
http://www.mapsofworld.com/world-top-ten/world-to
http://quinnell.us/politics/kangas/standardliving
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living_i
"Better" healthcare is difficult to quantitatively measure. I don't know where you got your "up to 50% cheaper", but yes, there are countries that have lower infant mortaility rates (a common measure of how "good" the healthcare is in a country) than the US, while at the same time, spending less on healthcare per individual.
I base myself first of all on my own experience (having lived in the USA and in the Netherlands), experience of others who have used the system in both places, and on publications from various organisations.
Infant mortality rate is often used because it is somewhat telling for how easily accessable health care is.
Many patients desire a better quality of life, and the market has responded with products and services. Nobody I know measures quality of healthcare by how many liposuctions have been done, but those all count in the healthcare spending per individual.
healthcare spending per individual is a completely useless metric for this for the following very obvious reasons:
1. It fails to account for different cost of healthcare due to factors like hourly pay for qualified workers being different in different countries
2. It says absolutely nothing about how accessable the healthcare system is, ie, does everyone who needs healthcare (also for non life-threatening situations) have access to it?
Lets assume we look at a group of 100 individuals with a total budget of $1m for healthcare:
1 out of those 100 needs a $1m treatment
99 out of those 100 need a $1000 treatment
Obviously, healthcare spending per individual is higher when the 1 person needing the $1m treatment is helped, but for 1/10th of that, 99 times more people can be helped. Yes, the $1m person would probably get some very advanced treatment, which you can use to judge the 'peak quality' that is offered, but the average quality, ie, what a typical person can expect, is extremely bad still since 99 out of 100 go without treatment at all in this example.
Yeah, the numbers are made up, but the issue is be pretty clear I assume, hence healthcare spending per individual is not used by people actually interested in the overall quality of healthcare, rather, it is often used by those who either did not put thought into what it means, or those who want to present a misleading picture of this.
The overall cost of healthcare is important however since it is a major factor in if it can be payed for to begin with.