That argument holds water only until the US content providers find advertisers willing to pay for ad impressions to Canadians.
Who will those advertisers be? Maybe a handful of global brands? The future of advertising is smart targeted advertising, not creating a vauge global advertising campaign that tries to appeal to all nationalities, sexes, ages, and demographics. I think that if anything, advertising will become even more specialized (you are an 18 year old female, living in suburban toronto, and you show a preference for hip-hop music, so we a stream an ad specialized to appeal exactly to your demographic).
If you want a certain percentage of YouTube content to be Canadian, and the non-Canadian content outnumbers Canadian content by an unacceptable margin, you simply require that YouTube make large amounts of non-Canadian content unavailable to Canadians.
YouTube will simply detect your IP, and if you are in Canada, you will have greatly restricted access.
The case of Canada and Antigua is different... there are plenty of issues of protectionism that the U.S. can take up with Canada via the WTO, if the U.S. was politically inclined to do so. Both the U.S. and Canada engage in protectionist measure against each other, it is just that domestic politics of Canada encourage playing up Canadian "victimhood" against the U.S., where as people in the U.S. usually ignore Canada... this leads to Canada playing up U.S. protectionism (say, if the Liberals want to beat a Conservative PM by painting him as too "U.S. friendly"), while the U.S. politics there is very little politically to be gained from publicly discussing trade with Canada. The only politician I know of in the U.S. that is remotly anti-Canada is Hillary Clinton, and even at that it is just a token nod to entertainment production unions.
Where as Antigua does not have many protectionist restrictions - There is very little the U.S. could do against Antiqua via the WTO. The payoff is so big that pushing the issue is definitly worth it for Antigua.
Well, the U.S. was "Leader of the Free World" back when the choice was either team up with the U.S. or be consumed by Communism. It wasn't that the U.S. didn't do evil things, it was just they were way better than the alternative. It was pretty easy to be the "good guy" when your enemy had a totalitarian ideology bent on class-extermination and world domination.
Now that globalism and capitalism have destroyed Communism and international Socialism, and virtually all countries are engaged in a global marketplace, the U.S. has become economic competitor #1. The U.S. might not do anything more evil than any other country, but there is so much more to be gained economicly by painting the U.S. as "evil" than painting a smaller and less competitive economic power as "evil". For example, if you are a European automaker, and can convince people that the U.S. is evil and that they shouldn't buy U.S. products, you increase your market for your product. There are unescapable economic forces promoting anti-American, and the U.S. can't really expect anything different, at least until China takes over as the world economic superpower.
In this case, virtually all major countries restrict gambling the same way the U.S. does... and if it isn't gambling services, it is something. However, the U.S. is the largest market for gambling, and so the issue is with the U.S... No one really cares if Sweden restricts online gambling, as the market for gambling in Sweden is so tiny.
You put politicians in charge of science, and then you are shocked to find out that the science is corrupted by politics?
There needs to be a strict seperation between science and the state, the same way there is (or at least is supposed to be) as strict seperation between the church and the state!
If you insist that the government should fund and control science... the price that you pay is that science will become first and foremost a tool to promote political ideology and policy. That is inevitable. That is unstoppable.
And given the government's total power to regulate the economy, and its use of science as a pretense for those regulations, any buisness that doesn't bribe government scientists and officials that fund those scientists, is commiting economic suicide. Every single decent size buisness is forced to pay off government scientists (or the politicians who oversee government science) to survive.
If you want to protect science, you must keep it out of the hands of the state.
Funny, how when the American economy becomes progressively more regulated, the corporations become more and more privledged citizens... compared to the (relatively) laissez faire days of U.S. technological dominance.
The thing that the anti-corporate crowd doesn't seem to understand is that most legislation presented as "protecting us from corporations" is designed to HELP corporations. For example, what effect does FDA regulations, that drive drug testing cost up into the billions, have on the drug market? Well, it means you need a billion dollars to develop a single drug - and the only people who have a billion dollars to test a new drug are the big-pharma multinationals. So drug legislation that is presented as "protecting us from big-pharma" (and the anti-corporate crowd defend tooth and nail), essentially insures an oligarchy of big multinational corporations dominate drug development. It also means that no-one is able to develop drugs for poor people or developing countries, because the regulatory liabilities far outstrip any profit a company can make.
Same thing for automobile development. Why do we have such strict safety standards for automobiles? They say that regulations are designed to protect us from the big evil automotive manufactures. So what effect does the huge billion dollar barrier to entry for testing and liability have on the market? Once again, only a few huge multinational corporations have the billions of dollars in capital to comply with regulations... With the exception of small kit built firms, who are legally prevented from mass producing automobiles, it is impossible to start a new auto company in the U.S.. If you developed a new super-effient hybrid engine automobile, that would drasticly cut CO2 emmisions and help fight global warming, you would not be able to mass produce it and sell it - there is no way anyone could get the billions in capital you would need in order to comply with government regulations and liability. Perhaps you could licence the technology to the big auto companies, but I doubt it because they have a different agenda. The regulations that every Ralph Nadarite will insist are created to keep the big auto companies in check give them an oligarchy on automobile manufacturing. And in the long run, it hurts safety because new innovations from small companies are not allowed to come to market.
I want to buy a crazy French car that runs on air ( http://www.theaircar.com/ ), but they are too "unsafe" for use in the United States. Apparently huge metal monsters that smash apart anything in their path and destroy the envoirnment with CO2 are "safe", but these things aren't. Yeah, thanks for sticking it to those big corporations like Air Car, and protecting the little guys like Ford and GM, Ralph Nader!
The ascendancy of corporations in the U.S. is largely a product of the policies of misguided folks who think they are keeping the corporations in check, and are totally unclear that government regulation is an essential part of Corporatism! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
Big Corporations love Big Government, and hate laissez faire.
And speaking of comparing the U.S. to Scandinavia... most Scandinavian countries have a LOWER corporate tax rate than the United States (which they make up for with a higher income tax). There are far fewer government regulations that companies need to comply with. The Swedish Social Democratic Party (who are supposedly "left wing socialists") can propose allowing citizens to invest 20% of their social insurance deductions into the free market and it isn't controversial at all, but in the supposedly "capitalist" United States even a Republican President and Congress can't allow U.S. citizens to invest 9% of their social security deductions into the free market without being accused of "trying to starve old people". It is a myth, an absolute myth, that the U.S. is somehow a "free market" country, and the Scan
Read the article. Uranium is becoming scarce because we ARE NOT MINING THE STUFF!! If we actually decided to, you know, dig it out of the ground, then there is more than enough Uranium for a shift to nuclear power.
How do you intend to enforce a law saying that bloggers must reveal that they have been paid for a positive review, without compromising the anonymity and freedom that people enjoy on the internet?
In order to prove that a blogger is in fact acting against the FTC rule, you would have to show that they are explicitly receiving money in exchange for the review. Since neither people involved in the transaction have any incentive to reveal the transaction, you have go with a bunch of very expensive, and very dangerous (from a civil liberties standpoint) activities such as undercover sting operations like creating fake law enforcement blogs (which is the very crime they are supposedly fighting against), massive phone tapping and email tapping... or some sort of licensing and supervision scheme for blogs.
Of course, it is even harder than with something like drugs, because if the people involved don't explicitly agree to some sort of payment deal, and just have an unspoken understanding, you can't charge them with anything. Apple could easily just send out a check (or more likely, free "evaluation" Apple products), with no explanation or stated strings attached, to bloggers who give a positive review of Apple products. There would be absolutely no evidence whatsoever to convict Apple on any misdealing. Unless you want to throw people in jail or fine them on purely circumstantial evidence, which most would consider a grave violation of civil liberties.
There is no way to enforce any kind of rule on this in any effective way, without compromising the freedom, anonymity of the internet, and the civil liberties of those on the internet.
You know full well that speech is controlled in many different ways to promote the common good e.g. truth in advertising.
Speech is never controlled for the public good... although censorship is always justified as being "for the public good". Speech is controlled to benifit the ruling class and the rich and powerful. So called "truth-in-advertising" laws are designed to make people less suspicious of advertising ("It is against the law to advertise falsehood... therefore I can believe commercials"), when in fact outright fraudulent claims happen all the time, the English language is ambiguous which makes it possible to make virtually any claim while at the same time being in compliance with laws, and there is no way the government can possibly evaluate all possible advertisment claims for falsehood.
A free society that admits there is falsehood in advertising, and there is virtually nothing the government can do to stop anything short of outright fraud, is one where people are skeptical and on-guard. The society where the government says "we are protecting you from false advertisment", are the people who will will blindly believe everything they see and hear, secure in knowing that the benevolent state is protecting them from any fraud.
Again, willfully misinterpreting what I said for your own ends. You know full well I was referring to his "business", not his opinion.
Do you have any understanding that laws are enforced with violence? That throwing people in jail destroys lives and families? That having large amounts of people in prison not only costs society billions of dollars, but leaves people open to exploitation as well as encouraging a prison-industrial complex? That prisons often act as criminal universities where people who have made a few mistakes are indoctrinated into a life of crime? There is also a terrible danger in any law of the law being used as a pretext for distructive policies like racial profiling, and for the eroding of civil liberties.
Criminal law is a very dangerous thing, to only be used when some behavior is such a clear and present danger as to warrent the social problems and risks to civil liberties involved. To suggest that we should throw people in prison for something as minor as paying people to blog a product is vicious, cruel, and authoritarian. Especially when all that is nessicary is to let people know that a company has been promoting fake blogging, and people will neither trust that company nor that blog for a very very long time. The only reason I can think of that you want to throw this person in jail is because you get off on that kind of thing.
And now we have the straw man. There are many possibilities, you've just chosen the one you think you can argue against. Some other ways to reduce/stop it would be to rely on competitors and consumers to report it, do statistical analysis of blog traffic and to make the penalties so severe (e.g. per-sale fines and executives personally liable) that even a small chance of being caught makes it unprofitable.
OK, so we rely on competitors and consumers to report it... So corporations will give false reports to harm competitors, and consumers will give false reports based on other issues (they don't like the blogger's race, their politics, their negative review of a product they like). This solution leaves people completly innocent of the crime open to terrible abuse, abuse that is worse than the crime itself. Doing statistical analysis of blog traffic? First, how are they going to do statistical analysis of blog traffic without compromising people's civil liberties by forcing non-suspects to turn in their web statistics to government? Second, how does statistical analysis of their blog traffic reveal that they were paid to give a product a good review?
Finally, make the penalties so severe that even a small change of being caught makes it unprofitable? You mean like the U.S. and its War on Drugs? Which put millions of people in prison (t
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal. Remember folks, we need to get rid of free speech to protect free speech! Right after we destroy the village to save it!
A marketing executive claiming that fraudulently misrepresenting paid propaganda as objective third party opinion is somehow okay? He's the one that should be in jail, not the so-called terrorists. So he should go to jail for expressing his opinions on ethics?
It's a real shame truth-in-advertising law hasn't caught up with them yet. "truth-in-advertisment" laws can only apply to traditional media. The internet is international, and impossible to track without big bother controls. There is no reason why a company cannot just operate out of a country where paying people for blog reviews is legal. The only way to stop it then would be big brother spying on all blog operators (which I am sure you wouldn't be against - Any loss of freedom is justified to you protect us from those terrible terrible advertisments - but would be nearly impossible to implement).
While I'm not a lawyer, I have studied media and mass communication law. One of the things we had drilled into us from day one was the full text and meaning of the First Amendment. What we started getting drilled into us from day two, was that your rights under the First Amendment end where someone else's rights begin. That is to say, freedom of speech gives you a wide berth to say what you want, but as soon as you cross the line into threatening someone or directly impacting their safety or well being, you are no longer protected. So are Black Panther protected by the First Amendment when they threaten to "kill whitey"? Communists who advocate violent revolution and the purging of Capitalists, should they go to jail?
Should the Koran be banned, because it says that Muslims should kill people who convert from Islam to other religions?
What about Ann Coulter, when she said about Muslims "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."? Should we put her in jail? That certainly sounds like a pretty vicious threat to me!
Should we throw Pat Roberson in jail for threatening Hugo Chavez?
Should we throw gangster rappers in jail? They are often threatening rival rappers!
You have total anonymity on the internet (at least if you want it), and so it is easy for some random idiot to make a threat with virtually no possibility on it coming back to haunt them. Virtually none of these threats will never amount to anything. No one is going to be attacked or killed - If someone really intended to attack or kill someone, the LAST thing they would do is post a threat on the web.
When I worked screening email for musicians and bands, there were death threats made every single day. I read literally thousands of death threats over the years, and do you know how many turned out to be more than an angry person firing off an email? ZERO!!! None of them ever amounted to anything, out of THOUSANDS of death threats.
Death threats are everyday occurances for celebrities. If you are in the public attention, someone, somewhere, is going to throw an anonymous threat your way. So someone made a threat on your blog? So what - That is the price you pay for fame. Cancelling your speaking gigs and quitting blogging is just plain stupid. Even reporting them to the police is stupid in most cases, as the police are already overworked as it is trying to stop real crimes to be taking a statement about some angry anonymous person who they don't have the resources to track down. Not only that, a good chunk of threats are made under someone elses name in order to get them in trouble or discredit them - if the police ever did manage to track someone down, that person is probably just a victim themselves.
The modern reality is, that if you are on the net, and if you have a widely known public identity, a few people are going to make empty threats. There is no way to avoid it, short of a complete restructuring of how the internet works.
ONLY 6 people? Would invoking the War Measures Act have been more acceptable to you if there had been a hundred or a thousand killed by terrorists?
6 people is not a lot of people compared to the Madrid or London rail bombings, 9/11, the Munich Olypic attacks, and other brutal terrorist attacks around the world. Regardless of how justified the response was in those other attacks, those governments never did anything as extreme as openly suspending civil liberties and moving in the military domesticly to subdue a terrorist group. The response was clearly not in line with how most governments handle terrorism (even the Bush government who is highly critized for the Patriot Act and such).
You make it sound as the Canadian Forces are a foreign entity in their own land.
It is extremly questionable to use military forces against a domestic civilian population. Generally, military forces are considered to be defense against foriegn enemies, and the domestic police forces go after domestic criminals. To use the military, in such a huge way, to supress a domestic group, is highly highly controversial.
Technically the searches and wiretaps were NOT illegal, because essentially martial law was in effect.
The government declared them illegal after the fact. Although at the time, it is pretty clear they were done under the direction of the government.
It was NOT Iraq. There was no street-to-street fighting, no sieges of holy shrines, no massive numbers of casualties. True there were tanks in the neighbourhoods and soldiers on street corners, but they were relatively few and far between compared to the image your statement invokes (I know because I was there). This was not a massive military presence, and it was limited to Québec. The military was nowhere to be seen in the rest of Canada. You make it sound as if the entire country was "occupied" as you put it. It was not a "huge scale".
Could you imagine the controversy in a modern context if Bush ordered the U.S. military to occupy spanish speaking ethnicly mexican parts of the southwest U.S.? Why can't you get it into your head that the primarily English dominated government, ordering troops to occupy the area populated by a cultural and ethnic minority, has terrible negative implications for civil liberties. While it wasn't Iraq in terms of bloodshed, the military clearly wasn't there to enjoy the French food, they were there to intimidate and pacify Quebec seperatists. The military mission of the Canadian troops in Quebec, and the U.S. military in Iraq, are the same - To intimidate and control. That is the whole reason for sending in people trained to fight and kill to an area.
The October Crises was 36 years ago. MANY things have changed since then, and much of that change was because of the invocation of that draconian law, which was one of the only counter-insurgency tools available at the time. Smashing a fly with a sledgehammer? Certainly, but it worked. There have been no real terrorist threats since. Thankfully.
Arguably the FLQ thing died down because the end of the cold war... The Soviets are no longer providing material assistance to insurgancy groups in Western countries as a way to undermind NATO governments. Black September, or the Symbionese Liberation Army, or the FLQ, or any of those kinds of insurgancy groups in Western countries pretty much disapeared after the end of the cold war, regardless of that government's policies.
You could have simply been informative in your post, but instead you chose to editorialize, while seemingly ignoring the context of the time. This does a disservice to people, who are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves, after studying the links you provided, if the government of the time (not just Pierre Trudeau) acted improperly or excessively. You and I may agree that the War Measures Act was an outdated and overreaching Act, but if we choose to say that there were alternat
For those Americans who think Canada is just the benign happy friendly country to the north, look at what happened during Canada's October Crisis (in which only about 6 people were killed in terrorist attacks).
Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, sent in military troops to occupy Canadian territory, rounded up and detained hundreds of people without pressing charges, banned a political party, and the RCMP carried out hundreds of illegal searches and wiretaps.
Americans look at Canada's more lax drug laws, or them allowing U.S. draftees to escape to Canada during the Vietnam war, and think that must be how the Canadian government must be about everything... but the Canadian government can be pretty damn ruthless. There was full-on military style domestic counter-insurgency operations being conducted on a huge scale in Canada in most people's lifetime. George Bush could only dream about getting away with some of that stuff in the United States.
I will not be shocked at all if this legislation passes. Far crazier stuff has gone down in Canada's recent past!
Local bookstores for example are starting to massively suffer from online competition. Customers walk in, browse, leave and order the book from amazon.com for 10-20% less. How do you combat this? Retail cannot lower their prices to the same level online companies can -- they have prime real-estate leases vs a warehouse in some grungy commercial district. They deal in hundreds of books per week in stead of per hour, etc, etc. Local bookstores aren't suffering from online competition... local bookstores are suffering because they suck. For real, there was a whole slew of local buisnesses that used to exist soley because they were the local bookstore. They had horrible service, tiny selection, and you had to pay a lot of money. These are the buisnesses that are now dying. Good riddance.
There are plenty of local bookstores that are doing great buisness - They do this by providing friendly service, by specializing in a specific product (all sci-fi books, all cookbooks), or hosting community events, musicians, and providing service outside of just selling books, or by selling used books (ebay and Amazon cannot compete on price with your local USED bookstore... I would never dream of buying a bunch of paperback novels off of ebay or amazon, when I can go to a used bookstore and buy them for $3.00 a piece).
Nothing stops you from running Linux on these newer systems too. True. And it might even be the case that using Linux on older machines saves energy. My particular beef is with the word "green", which is a marketing buzzword. It is kind of like "smart" was the marketing buzzword in the early 2000s, "green" is the new marketing buzzword of today. Since "green" or "smart" or whatever are totally subjective terms, you can throw them around to the point where they don't mean anything.
I agree with you, that a new server might not provide a net energy savings. However, such a thing would have to be evalutated on a case by case situation. When you saying something like "Linux is more 'Green' than Windows" or the opposite, that is posturing and branding. Much like Pepsi is the "choice of a new generation", Linux is the "choice of a green generation"? Both statements are meaningless.
A more accurate statement would be "The use of Linux, in appropriate situations, can save a significant amount of energy... Here are those situations: blah blah blah etc". That would a legit and helpful statement. But when people talk about being "green", that is marketing speak, and there is usually very little substance behind it. The goal of using the term is to STOP you from thinking and evalutation a situation, and create a knee jerk reaction that you must do something because it is the "green" choice.
I agree with you somewhat. I use a laptop as a desktop machine, specificly to save energy and to save space (and saving space saves energy on heating/cooling if it means you can use a smaller work area).
However, I am skeptical about the energy costs of manufacturing and shipping an item. If you look at something like a computer, I just don't see the energy from manufacturing or shipping the thing to compare with the energy consumption. If you can point out a source where one can find out the energy used in manufacturing and shipping computers, I could be convinced otherwise. But right now, I am of a mind that getting a new computer that uses less energy is better than running an old computer that uses more energy.
You can make some convoluted arguement that just about everything is some way "green", and it will increase the sales (or increase adoption). Being "green" is the new marketing buzzword. It is kind of like "lower fat" products... lower fat than what?
One could easily argue that by keeping older, less energy effecient machines around, you are wasting energy, and therefore Windows is "Greener".
Open up the Yellow Pages. Find a painting service, and find out how much it costs to have a room painted. Then call and find out how much it costs to have a CAT5 wall jack installed in a room. I would be very, very suprised if you can get a room painted (and that isn't counting the cost of the anti-wifi paint), for less than you can get ethernet jacks installed.
Yeah, what you self rightous and stupid Democrats don't bother to think about is that DICK CHENEY BECOMES THE PRESIDENT IF YOU IMPEACH BUSH!!! Typically Democrats: To busy trying to make a completly empty gesture like impeaching Bush to actually do shit like bring the troops home for Iraq, or get rid of the Patriot act. Thank god at least the chairman of the Democratic party of your county had a lick of sense!
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That argument holds water only until the US content providers find advertisers willing to pay for ad impressions to Canadians.
Who will those advertisers be? Maybe a handful of global brands? The future of advertising is smart targeted advertising, not creating a vauge global advertising campaign that tries to appeal to all nationalities, sexes, ages, and demographics. I think that if anything, advertising will become even more specialized (you are an 18 year old female, living in suburban toronto, and you show a preference for hip-hop music, so we a stream an ad specialized to appeal exactly to your demographic).
If you want a certain percentage of YouTube content to be Canadian, and the non-Canadian content outnumbers Canadian content by an unacceptable margin, you simply require that YouTube make large amounts of non-Canadian content unavailable to Canadians.
YouTube will simply detect your IP, and if you are in Canada, you will have greatly restricted access.
The case of Canada and Antigua is different... there are plenty of issues of protectionism that the U.S. can take up with Canada via the WTO, if the U.S. was politically inclined to do so. Both the U.S. and Canada engage in protectionist measure against each other, it is just that domestic politics of Canada encourage playing up Canadian "victimhood" against the U.S., where as people in the U.S. usually ignore Canada... this leads to Canada playing up U.S. protectionism (say, if the Liberals want to beat a Conservative PM by painting him as too "U.S. friendly"), while the U.S. politics there is very little politically to be gained from publicly discussing trade with Canada. The only politician I know of in the U.S. that is remotly anti-Canada is Hillary Clinton, and even at that it is just a token nod to entertainment production unions.
Where as Antigua does not have many protectionist restrictions - There is very little the U.S. could do against Antiqua via the WTO. The payoff is so big that pushing the issue is definitly worth it for Antigua.
Well, the U.S. was "Leader of the Free World" back when the choice was either team up with the U.S. or be consumed by Communism. It wasn't that the U.S. didn't do evil things, it was just they were way better than the alternative. It was pretty easy to be the "good guy" when your enemy had a totalitarian ideology bent on class-extermination and world domination.
Now that globalism and capitalism have destroyed Communism and international Socialism, and virtually all countries are engaged in a global marketplace, the U.S. has become economic competitor #1. The U.S. might not do anything more evil than any other country, but there is so much more to be gained economicly by painting the U.S. as "evil" than painting a smaller and less competitive economic power as "evil". For example, if you are a European automaker, and can convince people that the U.S. is evil and that they shouldn't buy U.S. products, you increase your market for your product. There are unescapable economic forces promoting anti-American, and the U.S. can't really expect anything different, at least until China takes over as the world economic superpower.
In this case, virtually all major countries restrict gambling the same way the U.S. does... and if it isn't gambling services, it is something. However, the U.S. is the largest market for gambling, and so the issue is with the U.S... No one really cares if Sweden restricts online gambling, as the market for gambling in Sweden is so tiny.
You put politicians in charge of science, and then you are shocked to find out that the science is corrupted by politics?
There needs to be a strict seperation between science and the state, the same way there is (or at least is supposed to be) as strict seperation between the church and the state!
If you insist that the government should fund and control science... the price that you pay is that science will become first and foremost a tool to promote political ideology and policy. That is inevitable. That is unstoppable.
And given the government's total power to regulate the economy, and its use of science as a pretense for those regulations, any buisness that doesn't bribe government scientists and officials that fund those scientists, is commiting economic suicide. Every single decent size buisness is forced to pay off government scientists (or the politicians who oversee government science) to survive.
If you want to protect science, you must keep it out of the hands of the state.
Funny, how when the American economy becomes progressively more regulated, the corporations become more and more privledged citizens... compared to the (relatively) laissez faire days of U.S. technological dominance.
The thing that the anti-corporate crowd doesn't seem to understand is that most legislation presented as "protecting us from corporations" is designed to HELP corporations. For example, what effect does FDA regulations, that drive drug testing cost up into the billions, have on the drug market? Well, it means you need a billion dollars to develop a single drug - and the only people who have a billion dollars to test a new drug are the big-pharma multinationals. So drug legislation that is presented as "protecting us from big-pharma" (and the anti-corporate crowd defend tooth and nail), essentially insures an oligarchy of big multinational corporations dominate drug development. It also means that no-one is able to develop drugs for poor people or developing countries, because the regulatory liabilities far outstrip any profit a company can make.
Same thing for automobile development. Why do we have such strict safety standards for automobiles? They say that regulations are designed to protect us from the big evil automotive manufactures. So what effect does the huge billion dollar barrier to entry for testing and liability have on the market? Once again, only a few huge multinational corporations have the billions of dollars in capital to comply with regulations... With the exception of small kit built firms, who are legally prevented from mass producing automobiles, it is impossible to start a new auto company in the U.S.. If you developed a new super-effient hybrid engine automobile, that would drasticly cut CO2 emmisions and help fight global warming, you would not be able to mass produce it and sell it - there is no way anyone could get the billions in capital you would need in order to comply with government regulations and liability. Perhaps you could licence the technology to the big auto companies, but I doubt it because they have a different agenda. The regulations that every Ralph Nadarite will insist are created to keep the big auto companies in check give them an oligarchy on automobile manufacturing. And in the long run, it hurts safety because new innovations from small companies are not allowed to come to market.
I want to buy a crazy French car that runs on air ( http://www.theaircar.com/ ), but they are too "unsafe" for use in the United States. Apparently huge metal monsters that smash apart anything in their path and destroy the envoirnment with CO2 are "safe", but these things aren't. Yeah, thanks for sticking it to those big corporations like Air Car, and protecting the little guys like Ford and GM, Ralph Nader!
The ascendancy of corporations in the U.S. is largely a product of the policies of misguided folks who think they are keeping the corporations in check, and are totally unclear that government regulation is an essential part of Corporatism! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
Big Corporations love Big Government, and hate laissez faire.
And speaking of comparing the U.S. to Scandinavia... most Scandinavian countries have a LOWER corporate tax rate than the United States (which they make up for with a higher income tax). There are far fewer government regulations that companies need to comply with. The Swedish Social Democratic Party (who are supposedly "left wing socialists") can propose allowing citizens to invest 20% of their social insurance deductions into the free market and it isn't controversial at all, but in the supposedly "capitalist" United States even a Republican President and Congress can't allow U.S. citizens to invest 9% of their social security deductions into the free market without being accused of "trying to starve old people". It is a myth, an absolute myth, that the U.S. is somehow a "free market" country, and the Scan
Read the article. Uranium is becoming scarce because we ARE NOT MINING THE STUFF!! If we actually decided to, you know, dig it out of the ground, then there is more than enough Uranium for a shift to nuclear power.
How do you intend to enforce a law saying that bloggers must reveal that they have been paid for a positive review, without compromising the anonymity and freedom that people enjoy on the internet?
In order to prove that a blogger is in fact acting against the FTC rule, you would have to show that they are explicitly receiving money in exchange for the review. Since neither people involved in the transaction have any incentive to reveal the transaction, you have go with a bunch of very expensive, and very dangerous (from a civil liberties standpoint) activities such as undercover sting operations like creating fake law enforcement blogs (which is the very crime they are supposedly fighting against), massive phone tapping and email tapping... or some sort of licensing and supervision scheme for blogs.
Of course, it is even harder than with something like drugs, because if the people involved don't explicitly agree to some sort of payment deal, and just have an unspoken understanding, you can't charge them with anything. Apple could easily just send out a check (or more likely, free "evaluation" Apple products), with no explanation or stated strings attached, to bloggers who give a positive review of Apple products. There would be absolutely no evidence whatsoever to convict Apple on any misdealing. Unless you want to throw people in jail or fine them on purely circumstantial evidence, which most would consider a grave violation of civil liberties.
There is no way to enforce any kind of rule on this in any effective way, without compromising the freedom, anonymity of the internet, and the civil liberties of those on the internet.
You know full well that speech is controlled in many different ways to promote the common good e.g. truth in advertising.
Speech is never controlled for the public good... although censorship is always justified as being "for the public good". Speech is controlled to benifit the ruling class and the rich and powerful. So called "truth-in-advertising" laws are designed to make people less suspicious of advertising ("It is against the law to advertise falsehood... therefore I can believe commercials"), when in fact outright fraudulent claims happen all the time, the English language is ambiguous which makes it possible to make virtually any claim while at the same time being in compliance with laws, and there is no way the government can possibly evaluate all possible advertisment claims for falsehood.
A free society that admits there is falsehood in advertising, and there is virtually nothing the government can do to stop anything short of outright fraud, is one where people are skeptical and on-guard. The society where the government says "we are protecting you from false advertisment", are the people who will will blindly believe everything they see and hear, secure in knowing that the benevolent state is protecting them from any fraud.
Again, willfully misinterpreting what I said for your own ends. You know full well I was referring to his "business", not his opinion.
Do you have any understanding that laws are enforced with violence? That throwing people in jail destroys lives and families? That having large amounts of people in prison not only costs society billions of dollars, but leaves people open to exploitation as well as encouraging a prison-industrial complex? That prisons often act as criminal universities where people who have made a few mistakes are indoctrinated into a life of crime? There is also a terrible danger in any law of the law being used as a pretext for distructive policies like racial profiling, and for the eroding of civil liberties.
Criminal law is a very dangerous thing, to only be used when some behavior is such a clear and present danger as to warrent the social problems and risks to civil liberties involved. To suggest that we should throw people in prison for something as minor as paying people to blog a product is vicious, cruel, and authoritarian. Especially when all that is nessicary is to let people know that a company has been promoting fake blogging, and people will neither trust that company nor that blog for a very very long time. The only reason I can think of that you want to throw this person in jail is because you get off on that kind of thing.
And now we have the straw man. There are many possibilities, you've just chosen the one you think you can argue against. Some other ways to reduce/stop it would be to rely on competitors and consumers to report it, do statistical analysis of blog traffic and to make the penalties so severe (e.g. per-sale fines and executives personally liable) that even a small chance of being caught makes it unprofitable.
OK, so we rely on competitors and consumers to report it... So corporations will give false reports to harm competitors, and consumers will give false reports based on other issues (they don't like the blogger's race, their politics, their negative review of a product they like). This solution leaves people completly innocent of the crime open to terrible abuse, abuse that is worse than the crime itself. Doing statistical analysis of blog traffic? First, how are they going to do statistical analysis of blog traffic without compromising people's civil liberties by forcing non-suspects to turn in their web statistics to government? Second, how does statistical analysis of their blog traffic reveal that they were paid to give a product a good review?
Finally, make the penalties so severe that even a small change of being caught makes it unprofitable? You mean like the U.S. and its War on Drugs? Which put millions of people in prison (t
Should the Koran be banned, because it says that Muslims should kill people who convert from Islam to other religions?
What about Ann Coulter, when she said about Muslims "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."? Should we put her in jail? That certainly sounds like a pretty vicious threat to me!
Should we throw Pat Roberson in jail for threatening Hugo Chavez?
Should we throw gangster rappers in jail? They are often threatening rival rappers!
You have total anonymity on the internet (at least if you want it), and so it is easy for some random idiot to make a threat with virtually no possibility on it coming back to haunt them. Virtually none of these threats will never amount to anything. No one is going to be attacked or killed - If someone really intended to attack or kill someone, the LAST thing they would do is post a threat on the web.
When I worked screening email for musicians and bands, there were death threats made every single day. I read literally thousands of death threats over the years, and do you know how many turned out to be more than an angry person firing off an email? ZERO!!! None of them ever amounted to anything, out of THOUSANDS of death threats.
Death threats are everyday occurances for celebrities. If you are in the public attention, someone, somewhere, is going to throw an anonymous threat your way. So someone made a threat on your blog? So what - That is the price you pay for fame. Cancelling your speaking gigs and quitting blogging is just plain stupid. Even reporting them to the police is stupid in most cases, as the police are already overworked as it is trying to stop real crimes to be taking a statement about some angry anonymous person who they don't have the resources to track down. Not only that, a good chunk of threats are made under someone elses name in order to get them in trouble or discredit them - if the police ever did manage to track someone down, that person is probably just a victim themselves.
The modern reality is, that if you are on the net, and if you have a widely known public identity, a few people are going to make empty threats. There is no way to avoid it, short of a complete restructuring of how the internet works.
ONLY 6 people? Would invoking the War Measures Act have been more acceptable to you if there had been a hundred or a thousand killed by terrorists?
6 people is not a lot of people compared to the Madrid or London rail bombings, 9/11, the Munich Olypic attacks, and other brutal terrorist attacks around the world. Regardless of how justified the response was in those other attacks, those governments never did anything as extreme as openly suspending civil liberties and moving in the military domesticly to subdue a terrorist group. The response was clearly not in line with how most governments handle terrorism (even the Bush government who is highly critized for the Patriot Act and such).
You make it sound as the Canadian Forces are a foreign entity in their own land.
It is extremly questionable to use military forces against a domestic civilian population. Generally, military forces are considered to be defense against foriegn enemies, and the domestic police forces go after domestic criminals. To use the military, in such a huge way, to supress a domestic group, is highly highly controversial.
Technically the searches and wiretaps were NOT illegal, because essentially martial law was in effect.
The government declared them illegal after the fact. Although at the time, it is pretty clear they were done under the direction of the government.
It was NOT Iraq. There was no street-to-street fighting, no sieges of holy shrines, no massive numbers of casualties. True there were tanks in the neighbourhoods and soldiers on street corners, but they were relatively few and far between compared to the image your statement invokes (I know because I was there). This was not a massive military presence, and it was limited to Québec. The military was nowhere to be seen in the rest of Canada. You make it sound as if the entire country was "occupied" as you put it. It was not a "huge scale".
Could you imagine the controversy in a modern context if Bush ordered the U.S. military to occupy spanish speaking ethnicly mexican parts of the southwest U.S.? Why can't you get it into your head that the primarily English dominated government, ordering troops to occupy the area populated by a cultural and ethnic minority, has terrible negative implications for civil liberties. While it wasn't Iraq in terms of bloodshed, the military clearly wasn't there to enjoy the French food, they were there to intimidate and pacify Quebec seperatists. The military mission of the Canadian troops in Quebec, and the U.S. military in Iraq, are the same - To intimidate and control. That is the whole reason for sending in people trained to fight and kill to an area.
The October Crises was 36 years ago. MANY things have changed since then, and much of that change was because of the invocation of that draconian law, which was one of the only counter-insurgency tools available at the time. Smashing a fly with a sledgehammer? Certainly, but it worked. There have been no real terrorist threats since. Thankfully.
Arguably the FLQ thing died down because the end of the cold war... The Soviets are no longer providing material assistance to insurgancy groups in Western countries as a way to undermind NATO governments. Black September, or the Symbionese Liberation Army, or the FLQ, or any of those kinds of insurgancy groups in Western countries pretty much disapeared after the end of the cold war, regardless of that government's policies.
You could have simply been informative in your post, but instead you chose to editorialize, while seemingly ignoring the context of the time. This does a disservice to people, who are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves, after studying the links you provided, if the government of the time (not just Pierre Trudeau) acted improperly or excessively. You and I may agree that the War Measures Act was an outdated and overreaching Act, but if we choose to say that there were alternat
For those Americans who think Canada is just the benign happy friendly country to the north, look at what happened during Canada's October Crisis (in which only about 6 people were killed in terrorist attacks).
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Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, sent in military troops to occupy Canadian territory, rounded up and detained hundreds of people without pressing charges, banned a political party, and the RCMP carried out hundreds of illegal searches and wiretaps.
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Measures_Act
Americans look at Canada's more lax drug laws, or them allowing U.S. draftees to escape to Canada during the Vietnam war, and think that must be how the Canadian government must be about everything... but the Canadian government can be pretty damn ruthless. There was full-on military style domestic counter-insurgency operations being conducted on a huge scale in Canada in most people's lifetime. George Bush could only dream about getting away with some of that stuff in the United States.
I will not be shocked at all if this legislation passes. Far crazier stuff has gone down in Canada's recent past!
There are plenty of local bookstores that are doing great buisness - They do this by providing friendly service, by specializing in a specific product (all sci-fi books, all cookbooks), or hosting community events, musicians, and providing service outside of just selling books, or by selling used books (ebay and Amazon cannot compete on price with your local USED bookstore... I would never dream of buying a bunch of paperback novels off of ebay or amazon, when I can go to a used bookstore and buy them for $3.00 a piece).
That doesn't really matter, 'cause it doesn't look good being all small, either.
I agree with you, that a new server might not provide a net energy savings. However, such a thing would have to be evalutated on a case by case situation. When you saying something like "Linux is more 'Green' than Windows" or the opposite, that is posturing and branding. Much like Pepsi is the "choice of a new generation", Linux is the "choice of a green generation"? Both statements are meaningless.
A more accurate statement would be "The use of Linux, in appropriate situations, can save a significant amount of energy... Here are those situations: blah blah blah etc". That would a legit and helpful statement. But when people talk about being "green", that is marketing speak, and there is usually very little substance behind it. The goal of using the term is to STOP you from thinking and evalutation a situation, and create a knee jerk reaction that you must do something because it is the "green" choice.
I agree with you somewhat. I use a laptop as a desktop machine, specificly to save energy and to save space (and saving space saves energy on heating/cooling if it means you can use a smaller work area).
However, I am skeptical about the energy costs of manufacturing and shipping an item. If you look at something like a computer, I just don't see the energy from manufacturing or shipping the thing to compare with the energy consumption. If you can point out a source where one can find out the energy used in manufacturing and shipping computers, I could be convinced otherwise. But right now, I am of a mind that getting a new computer that uses less energy is better than running an old computer that uses more energy.
You can make some convoluted arguement that just about everything is some way "green", and it will increase the sales (or increase adoption). Being "green" is the new marketing buzzword. It is kind of like "lower fat" products... lower fat than what?
One could easily argue that by keeping older, less energy effecient machines around, you are wasting energy, and therefore Windows is "Greener".
Basicly, the term "Green" is totally meaningless.
Who knew all those home videos of people ghostriding where produced by Viacom?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Sa30lbrisw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlTvSUCCqPo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x30mBix9v0s
Can they sue Viacom for SAG royalties?
If it had TV out, and I could play PSP games on a big TV (but then carry it with me on an airplane as well), I would buy one.
Open up the Yellow Pages. Find a painting service, and find out how much it costs to have a room painted. Then call and find out how much it costs to have a CAT5 wall jack installed in a room. I would be very, very suprised if you can get a room painted (and that isn't counting the cost of the anti-wifi paint), for less than you can get ethernet jacks installed.
I would say that you are definitly "raping" the definition of the word "rape"!
And on a serious note, I am not eager to go back to the days of lynching or mob justice... even for lawyers.
Yeah, what you self rightous and stupid Democrats don't bother to think about is that DICK CHENEY BECOMES THE PRESIDENT IF YOU IMPEACH BUSH!!! Typically Democrats: To busy trying to make a completly empty gesture like impeaching Bush to actually do shit like bring the troops home for Iraq, or get rid of the Patriot act. Thank god at least the chairman of the Democratic party of your county had a lick of sense!