I don't think it is anti-western rhetoric... they are not advocating a return to 19th century living by the 1st world.
I think this is the reaction to anti-microbial everything for children. Kids aren't allowed to play outside unsupervised in the dirt anymore (many kids aren't allowed to play outside anymore). Soaps, baby toys, etc., all comtain special anti-microbial materials. Super antiseptic sprays are a hot seller... and no-one eats anything raw or unpasterized before.
The over-protective parents who make sure their children are not exposed to anything are probably doing more harm than good!
Not exactly. It is possible to have a small, elegant OS, and still keep it very close an proprietary.
But even if they totally opened up their system, here are other important reasons why Microsoft could still the biggest player in the market (they are not a monopoly, by the way. OSX, Linux, BSD... there hasn't been so many readily available OS choices since the days of Commodore and Atari computers).
1. Microsoft comes with the computer... I think this is the main reason why most people use Windows. 2. Office... Microsoft Office is the unofficial standard in buisness, so anyone who wants to run office will run Windows. 3. It is what everyone is already used to... as long as the look and feel doesn't change, a lot of people will keep windows instead of learning something new.
Are you saying that the worst murderous mobsters can operate massive criminal enterprises on a website hosted in an anarchistic country and their registrar should be prevented from denying them service?
Are you saying that doctors should provide medical service to people they suspect of being murderous mobsters? Are you saying landlords should not evict anyone they suspect of being murderous mobsters? Are you saying the phone company shouldn't cut the service of anyone they suspect to be murderous mobsters?
Sorry, but if buisnesses are expected to enforce the law on people, without trial or do process - and to do it in a way where they have an incentive to do it to make money - they what is the point of having a judiciary where people are innocent until proven guilty - they will already be pariah before any trail happens.
The record company gives a cash advance on a contract. So if you sign a contract with a record company, you might get lets say a $100,000 check. The advance will eventually be taken out of royalties (as it is an ADVANCE on royalties), but realisticly, most artists on a big lable will never pay back their advance. They will also advance money for videos and such things. The highly successful artists subsidize the lesser know artists. A lot of artists make more money than they would doing it all on their own.
Also, Traditional record stores are hardly irrelevent. They continue to sell lots of product, and continue to be the major money maker for record companies. And that is not going to change for a long time. Personally, I am not going to pay money for a 128kb DRMed music file, when I can get an uncompressed and unencrypted CD for the same price - along with artwork/packaging, and it isn't going to disapear when my HD crashes.
Re:It shouldnt take a mega-catastrophe to get it
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Arctic Sea Level Falling?
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Except that weather is full of random fluxuations and anomylous local occurances. It is very bad science to say that every random weather patter that we can't explain is caused by global warming. It is fearmongering and political posturing, not science.
If they had a decent sci-fi mmpog, I might actually get into playing mmpogs. The only big one that I know of is Anarchy Online and Star Wars Galaxies, where were both mostly sword and socery fantasy setting skinned into a space theme (use "the force", or "nano technology" istead of magic for spells, but essentially fantasy).
Even if they had something like Grand Theft Auto Online, it would appeal to people like me who just aren't that into a fantasy setting.
The U.S. allows inspection of it's nuclear arsenal. The fear with Iran is not nessicarily that Iran will nuke anybody, but that someone will steal the weapons and use them for a terrorist attack or something like that. While Iran has every right to develop nuclear weapons like any other nation, allowing inspections of the weapons the same way the U.S. and Russia allow inspections, would be a good step in easing people's fears about the security of those weapons.
Taxpayer money is never used for a person's own good. If it was used for people's own good, they would give the money voluntarily. The fact that people have to be threatened with prison and violence in order to pay up is a pretty reliable indicator that the money is not being used to help the people.
Judging by the tax rates all over the world, I would say that the U.S. taxpayers aren't the only ones being taken for a ride.
And, at least with nuclear bombs, even though the money is wasted, at least it is wasted on something that will most likely never actually be used. Flushing money down the toilet for something totally useless isn't exactly the worse thing that could be done with taxpayer money.
Um, sorry to break your self-hatred and self pity, but living in the modern western world is pretty damn great. Most people have plenty of food, comfortable homes, good health... we have exposure to food, music, movies, and culture from all around the world. Nearly everyone I know is pretty damn happy, and the few I know who are unhappy it is usually family problems or personal mistakes and has nothing to do with "oppressive western society".
I mean, you do know what life is like in the third world, and in the pre-industrial area, right? Perhaps you need to travel more, or read more history. Life is in the west is pretty much the best human living ever in the history of the species.
Every society has to evolve from a poor agrarian society, to a wealthy industrial society. All the people complaining about sweatshops in China are very short on other alternatives - it is not like the workers would be working for $50+ an hour like GM assembly line workers if it wasn't for the Ipod gig. And it is not like the people in the west complaining about the sweatshops have any vast pool of resources they plan to mobilize to improve the standard of living.
Sweatshops will disapear as a country becomes richer. Despite what the propoganda tells you, sweatshops in North America and Western Europe didn't disapear because the government banned them... they disappeared over time because those countries became rich and prosperous enough that they could afford to pay everyone a decent wage. Productivity was so high, that goods and services became so cheap, that everyone could afford stuff. If a country is too poor to provide good wages to all people, it doesn't matter if you have good intentions, people are going to be poor and exploited.
Chinese sweat shops are attracting foriegn capital, increasing the means of production and ultimatly raising the standard of living for all Chinese. It may come as a suprise, but China has one of the fastest increasing standards of living and fastest growing economies in the world: It's economy and standard of living are growing faster than all the G8 nations for what it is worth!
If you are going to condemn sweatshops in China, you had better come with a pretty damn good economic plan as a substitute - because things are improving at quite a pace right now (far faster than it did in Chinas socialist past).
Sony and Universal are the largest record labels, and they are Japanese and French respectively.
Although in the age of global media, nationality is largely irrelevant. Sex, income, age, urban/suburban/rural, and your selected youth subculture has much more to do with what music you listen to than the geo-political boundries that were carved up by European powers in the last century. And the way capital works in the modern market, a company can be "American" because it is traded on the NYSE, but be owned almost entirely by Saudis or Japanese or whoever.
As a slightly related note, Jean Chretien's son-in-law was president of Vivendi/Universal.
If you have a form of government that is highly centralized, with virtually no limits to the control it can exercise on people, then opportunists will take advantage of that power. The more centralized a government, the easier it is to control, and the more powerful a government, the more opportunity for power or profit by manipulating it.
It is unrealistic to assume that a state as centralized and powerful as the government of Canada wouldn't be ripe with corruption. People don't understand politics, because they try to understand politics and government as a "moral" issue that is somehow seperate from the laws of physics and reality. Any system gets large enough, and it is more and more difficult to fight entrophy. In creatures, large creatures are more prone to parasites and diseases, and require much more food energy just to survive with little added benift. In a software project, as you have more and more source code and more and more complexity, development of the software will require more and more resources just to manage the project and debug. Likewise, a large government like Canada will naturaly have vast amounts of corruption. In everything from Empires, to bread molds, to youtube internet memes, there seems to be a certain threshold for growth beyond which a system tends to lose cohesion and fall apart.
Many Canadians still don't get that they are no longer a "small" country. It is no longer the "northern wilderness" it was 100 years ago, and the government has grown to be a leviathan. Canadians think theirs is a "smaller, friendlier" government, because they tend to compare themselves to the United States which is the epitome of vast unchecked leviathan monster government. But the Canadian government has become a vast beurocracy that dominates nearly all of Canadian life - Making secret deals with the government is the only way a large buisness can survive in Canada.
If Canada didn't have a "Heritage Minister" to control the flow of information, there would be no central authority for big media to manipulate (real heritage is a spontanious cultural expression of the people, and not a commmodity like water or petroleum to be centrally planned by the state). If the government didn't have vast powers to regulate communication protocols, media, computer networks, and electronic devices, bribery and corruption would be irrelevant: There would be no point in trying to manipulate authority that doesn't exist.
Immigration to the U.S. is extremly easy. Just move to the U.S. and start working. The U.S. has millions of "illegal" immigrants. And I am not just talking about Mexicans, I have known a lot of people who did the same from Europe, and all of them just came over and started working. Once you are here, it is a cinch to find someone who will want to sponser you, or you might even meet a nice American girl who you want to marry. The thing you got to understand is that the immigration laws in the U.S. are extremly lax, but there is an extreme shortage of manpower to deal with the hundreds of millions of people who want to move to the U.S.... the system is totally swamped... which means the people who are willing to bend the rules usually do better than the people who do everything according to the letter of the law. The way I figure it, if you are willing to show a healthy disrespect for the law, you will fit in just fine in the U.S..
Also, you could move to Canada, which is even easier than the U.S. on immigration, and in a couple years have your Canadian citizenship which gives you a fasttrack to moving to the U.S., because the U.S. and Canada have a special agreement on immigration.
Now, for further insight- I am a college student, a soon to be senior political science and history major, I pull 4.0's with nothing more than Earl Gray tea doused in honey to help me write those term papers on Progressive politics until 3:00 am. I equate taking controlled substances illegally in order to gain an "edge" to writing notes on the palm of your hand before stepping into the exam room. I got my high GPA the honest way, I'm going to take my GRE the honest way, and I'm going to persue my PhD the honest way.
I consider staying up until 3AM working to gain an "edge" the same as writing notes on the palm of your hand before stepping into the exam room. Lack of sleep not only can cause health problems, but can be dangerous to others if you are driving a motor vehicle or operating heavy machinery. What about the people who are narcoleptic or need their beauty sleep? What about the other students who are forced to engage in this reckless sleepless behavior in order to compete with you?
I think it is time the University and the Police step in. If you would have actually been learning from your Progressive Politics studies, it is that we desperatly need the government to legislate on this issue, and to criminalize the dangerous and reckless behavior that you engage in! And there should be a strictly enforce state-mandidated sleeping regime that all students should be required to adhere to!
I don't think it is fair that you get a competitive edge by using exercise. I think that the government should ban people from exercising, so all workers are on a level playing field. If people can get an edge through the strategic use of exercise, it is only a matter of time before everyone will be forced to exercise in order to compete!
But buyer beware is coming back, just in a different form! For example, lets take peanuts (And peanut allergies). People are so sue happy, that companies that don't make any products with any sort of peanut ingredient are labeling their product as having peanuts to cover their asses legally. It is way easier to put a disclaimer on a package saying "this might contain peanuts", than to try to garantee a product doesn't have peanuts and face legal repercussions. It is only a matter of time (and it has damn near almost heere already), that all packages, no-matter what the food or what the circumstance is, will contain warnings about peanuts.
People alergic to peanuts must have thought they were smart for suing about traces of peanuts in food... but soon they won't be able to know what foods contain peanuts because every company and every food product is going to protect themselves with a peanut warning.
Same with warning on prescription drugs. Prescriptions drugs now contain warners about "side effects" that include just about every possible symptom anyone can possibly have. It is easier to just give a rediciously long list of possible side effects, than to face the consequences of a law suit. The end result is that the "side effect" warnings of prescription drugs are completly useless. Virtually all the side effects listed for a prescription drug are listed just to cover the asses of the drug maker, and so it is impossible to get any realistic side effect information on a drug from a manufacturer.
When I buy some non-drowsy cold medicine, I don't really know if I can drive a car after taking the medicine or not, because every drug manufacturer is so afraid of a legal action that they will say not to operate a motor vehicle or heavy machinary just to play it safe.
Likewise, if you punish video game makers frivolously, they are just going to cover their ass by making everything Mature or Adult Only. Since the vast majority of video games are purchased by adults, and since kids that purchase video games most of the time purchase it with a parent present anyway, companies are just gonna make every single game Adult Only. Wall Mart might not stock AO games now, but if that is the only way they can sell Barbie Pony Adventure and Deer Hunter, they will eventually change their policy.
The end result for the rating system will be the same. There is no foolproof way to make sure there will never be something interpreted as "offensive" or "adult" or "suggestive" by some board or agency or group. When all games have a panel of catch all warnings and disclaimers, it is going to be harder for parents to judge a game than it is now.
Lawmakers make laws. That is what they do! Politicians need to be seen as "doing something about the problem"... even if they know that more laws won't help, they want to be seen as "taking a stand" and "standing up for the people" on an issue. If a politician doesn't call for more regulation, then he will be accused of "doing nothing to help the victims".
Duh... Freedom of Speech and free expression trumps any sort of democratic process, because democracy cannot exist in the absence of free speech. Our basic human rights are not negotable with a mob.
The only way to fight censorship is civil disobedience to censorship laws. The only way to fight censorship is to blatently violate laws that are created to regulate speech. We need to recognize that any government that controls speech is not democratic, and has no moral authority over us.
We don't have to convince anyone, not Congress, not "The People", not anyone, of our right to absolute free expression. We simply need to learn how to resist forms of control that the government will try to put on expression.
Having played free online gaming on the PC, and having played online gaming where a Gamer Tag is connected to physical address and credit card number - I will gladly pay the $50 a year to be able to block cheaters, racists, spammers, etc. and my leisure. The ability to close people's accounts and have it actually mean something on Xbox Live is worth a lot more than you think.
How much do you want to bet if they came out with the a new console, the "iGame", with a white designer pod look, and designed to interface with your iPod, that it would be a groundbreaking success!? All the Apple fanatics living the i-lifestyle would buy it for sure!
Back when Apple created the Pippin, Apple didn't have the widespread cult following it does now. Apple wasn't a "lifestyle choice".
In Europe, power lies in the state, and exploitation is performed by the state. The big health care monopolies, media monopolies, energy monopolies, transportation monopolies, are state run. The large monopolies are by and large one and the same as the state, so there is no reason for them to lobby the political class - THEY ARE THE POLITICAL CLASS!!!
The EU is attacking "monopolies" like Microsoft, not because Microsoft is a monopoly (because, of course, any state run industry is a monopoly), but because they percieve Microsoft as a threat to their own monopoly status in many industries. For example, EU vs. Microsoft is not "The People vs. Microsoft"... it is more like "IBM vs. Microsoft". The large corporate monopolies are seen as a threat to government dominance over European life.
Now, not that I think the U.S. is that much better - after the end of the cold war the "conservatives" in the U.S. abandoned any sort of "free market" ideology they once had, and the U.S. economy is rapidly coming more and more under control of the government (especially in the last 6 years). But, in the U.S., the government being the center of the society is relatively new, and so a lot of lobbying still goes on.
The thing to remember is that the government is simply a corporation with guns and a flag! Government controlled education and media might condition you to believe that the state is somehow fundamentally different than a large corporation - but the state is simply the largest, most powerful corporate monopoly in a geographic area.
No... Socialism, as defined by economists, is when the means of production are owned or controlled by the state. The Nazis were right wing socialists (Nazi is short for Nationalist Socialist), as the means of production were exclusively controlled by the state. Claiming that "the means of production is owned by the people" when they are owned by the state, as many leftists do, it a meaningless abstraction - empty rhetoric used to explain away the fact that far-left and far-right societies are usually almost indistinguishable.
All governments claim to be "owned by the people", or to "serve the people", both Left wing governments, and Right wing governments. The Left is no more "for the people" than the Right. Both are violent, authoritarian, racist ideologies when allowed to be taken to the extreme.
The whole Left-Right dicotomy is a false one. A more accurate spectrum would be Anarchist or Minarchist on one side, and Left and Right wing totalitarianism on the other side (Marxism Leninism, Nazism, etc.).
Come on now... do you think that your government gives a slightest damn if you are exploited by monopolies? Governments sometimes go after monopolies, because large monopolistic corporations and even more large and monopolistic governments are competing to see who owns you.
Don't worry though, if the government takes control of capital (Left Wing Socialism), or capital takes control of government (Right Wing Socialism), the end result is likely to be indistinguishable aside from a few cosmetic differences (Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot, or Hitler and Pinoche... take your pick and enjoy!). You are gonna get screwed by the government either way... but you seem to believe the propoganda that "the government exists to protect you", so I guess in that case you have nothing to worry about!
This is the flaw of Central Planning...
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Kill the head, and everything dies. Or take over the head.
If our entire economy and society wasn't structured around one central all-powerful government institution... then it wouldn't be nessicary to carry out expensive, retarded exercises like this. Keep infrastructure extremly decentralized, extremly diverse and non-standardized, and the strategy of one big dramatic attack wouldn't make sense.
And as a side benifit, facism would be damn near impossible because there would be no way one small group of people could take control of all the numerous and completly diverse centers of power.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it is anti-western rhetoric... they are not advocating a return to 19th century living by the 1st world.
I think this is the reaction to anti-microbial everything for children. Kids aren't allowed to play outside unsupervised in the dirt anymore (many kids aren't allowed to play outside anymore). Soaps, baby toys, etc., all comtain special anti-microbial materials. Super antiseptic sprays are a hot seller... and no-one eats anything raw or unpasterized before.
The over-protective parents who make sure their children are not exposed to anything are probably doing more harm than good!
Not exactly. It is possible to have a small, elegant OS, and still keep it very close an proprietary.
But even if they totally opened up their system, here are other important reasons why Microsoft could still the biggest player in the market (they are not a monopoly, by the way. OSX, Linux, BSD... there hasn't been so many readily available OS choices since the days of Commodore and Atari computers).
1. Microsoft comes with the computer... I think this is the main reason why most people use Windows.
2. Office... Microsoft Office is the unofficial standard in buisness, so anyone who wants to run office will run Windows.
3. It is what everyone is already used to... as long as the look and feel doesn't change, a lot of people will keep windows instead of learning something new.
Are you saying that the worst murderous mobsters can operate massive criminal enterprises on a website hosted in an anarchistic country and their registrar should be prevented from denying them service?
Are you saying that doctors should provide medical service to people they suspect of being murderous mobsters? Are you saying landlords should not evict anyone they suspect of being murderous mobsters? Are you saying the phone company shouldn't cut the service of anyone they suspect to be murderous mobsters?
Sorry, but if buisnesses are expected to enforce the law on people, without trial or do process - and to do it in a way where they have an incentive to do it to make money - they what is the point of having a judiciary where people are innocent until proven guilty - they will already be pariah before any trail happens.
itunes hasn't been around that long. Weird Al could have easily negotiated his contract before legal digital download sales were even a consideration.
The record company gives a cash advance on a contract. So if you sign a contract with a record company, you might get lets say a $100,000 check. The advance will eventually be taken out of royalties (as it is an ADVANCE on royalties), but realisticly, most artists on a big lable will never pay back their advance. They will also advance money for videos and such things. The highly successful artists subsidize the lesser know artists. A lot of artists make more money than they would doing it all on their own.
Also, Traditional record stores are hardly irrelevent. They continue to sell lots of product, and continue to be the major money maker for record companies. And that is not going to change for a long time. Personally, I am not going to pay money for a 128kb DRMed music file, when I can get an uncompressed and unencrypted CD for the same price - along with artwork/packaging, and it isn't going to disapear when my HD crashes.
Except that weather is full of random fluxuations and anomylous local occurances. It is very bad science to say that every random weather patter that we can't explain is caused by global warming. It is fearmongering and political posturing, not science.
If they had a decent sci-fi mmpog, I might actually get into playing mmpogs. The only big one that I know of is Anarchy Online and Star Wars Galaxies, where were both mostly sword and socery fantasy setting skinned into a space theme (use "the force", or "nano technology" istead of magic for spells, but essentially fantasy).
Even if they had something like Grand Theft Auto Online, it would appeal to people like me who just aren't that into a fantasy setting.
The U.S. allows inspection of it's nuclear arsenal. The fear with Iran is not nessicarily that Iran will nuke anybody, but that someone will steal the weapons and use them for a terrorist attack or something like that. While Iran has every right to develop nuclear weapons like any other nation, allowing inspections of the weapons the same way the U.S. and Russia allow inspections, would be a good step in easing people's fears about the security of those weapons.
Taxpayer money is never used for a person's own good. If it was used for people's own good, they would give the money voluntarily. The fact that people have to be threatened with prison and violence in order to pay up is a pretty reliable indicator that the money is not being used to help the people.
Judging by the tax rates all over the world, I would say that the U.S. taxpayers aren't the only ones being taken for a ride.
And, at least with nuclear bombs, even though the money is wasted, at least it is wasted on something that will most likely never actually be used. Flushing money down the toilet for something totally useless isn't exactly the worse thing that could be done with taxpayer money.
Um, sorry to break your self-hatred and self pity, but living in the modern western world is pretty damn great. Most people have plenty of food, comfortable homes, good health... we have exposure to food, music, movies, and culture from all around the world. Nearly everyone I know is pretty damn happy, and the few I know who are unhappy it is usually family problems or personal mistakes and has nothing to do with "oppressive western society".
I mean, you do know what life is like in the third world, and in the pre-industrial area, right? Perhaps you need to travel more, or read more history. Life is in the west is pretty much the best human living ever in the history of the species.
Every society has to evolve from a poor agrarian society, to a wealthy industrial society. All the people complaining about sweatshops in China are very short on other alternatives - it is not like the workers would be working for $50+ an hour like GM assembly line workers if it wasn't for the Ipod gig. And it is not like the people in the west complaining about the sweatshops have any vast pool of resources they plan to mobilize to improve the standard of living.
Sweatshops will disapear as a country becomes richer. Despite what the propoganda tells you, sweatshops in North America and Western Europe didn't disapear because the government banned them... they disappeared over time because those countries became rich and prosperous enough that they could afford to pay everyone a decent wage. Productivity was so high, that goods and services became so cheap, that everyone could afford stuff. If a country is too poor to provide good wages to all people, it doesn't matter if you have good intentions, people are going to be poor and exploited.
Chinese sweat shops are attracting foriegn capital, increasing the means of production and ultimatly raising the standard of living for all Chinese. It may come as a suprise, but China has one of the fastest increasing standards of living and fastest growing economies in the world: It's economy and standard of living are growing faster than all the G8 nations for what it is worth!
If you are going to condemn sweatshops in China, you had better come with a pretty damn good economic plan as a substitute - because things are improving at quite a pace right now (far faster than it did in Chinas socialist past).
Sony and Universal are the largest record labels, and they are Japanese and French respectively.
Although in the age of global media, nationality is largely irrelevant. Sex, income, age, urban/suburban/rural, and your selected youth subculture has much more to do with what music you listen to than the geo-political boundries that were carved up by European powers in the last century. And the way capital works in the modern market, a company can be "American" because it is traded on the NYSE, but be owned almost entirely by Saudis or Japanese or whoever.
As a slightly related note, Jean Chretien's son-in-law was president of Vivendi/Universal.
If you have a form of government that is highly centralized, with virtually no limits to the control it can exercise on people, then opportunists will take advantage of that power. The more centralized a government, the easier it is to control, and the more powerful a government, the more opportunity for power or profit by manipulating it.
It is unrealistic to assume that a state as centralized and powerful as the government of Canada wouldn't be ripe with corruption. People don't understand politics, because they try to understand politics and government as a "moral" issue that is somehow seperate from the laws of physics and reality. Any system gets large enough, and it is more and more difficult to fight entrophy. In creatures, large creatures are more prone to parasites and diseases, and require much more food energy just to survive with little added benift. In a software project, as you have more and more source code and more and more complexity, development of the software will require more and more resources just to manage the project and debug. Likewise, a large government like Canada will naturaly have vast amounts of corruption. In everything from Empires, to bread molds, to youtube internet memes, there seems to be a certain threshold for growth beyond which a system tends to lose cohesion and fall apart.
Many Canadians still don't get that they are no longer a "small" country. It is no longer the "northern wilderness" it was 100 years ago, and the government has grown to be a leviathan. Canadians think theirs is a "smaller, friendlier" government, because they tend to compare themselves to the United States which is the epitome of vast unchecked leviathan monster government. But the Canadian government has become a vast beurocracy that dominates nearly all of Canadian life - Making secret deals with the government is the only way a large buisness can survive in Canada.
If Canada didn't have a "Heritage Minister" to control the flow of information, there would be no central authority for big media to manipulate (real heritage is a spontanious cultural expression of the people, and not a commmodity like water or petroleum to be centrally planned by the state). If the government didn't have vast powers to regulate communication protocols, media, computer networks, and electronic devices, bribery and corruption would be irrelevant: There would be no point in trying to manipulate authority that doesn't exist.
Immigration to the U.S. is extremly easy. Just move to the U.S. and start working. The U.S. has millions of "illegal" immigrants. And I am not just talking about Mexicans, I have known a lot of people who did the same from Europe, and all of them just came over and started working. Once you are here, it is a cinch to find someone who will want to sponser you, or you might even meet a nice American girl who you want to marry. The thing you got to understand is that the immigration laws in the U.S. are extremly lax, but there is an extreme shortage of manpower to deal with the hundreds of millions of people who want to move to the U.S. ... the system is totally swamped... which means the people who are willing to bend the rules usually do better than the people who do everything according to the letter of the law. The way I figure it, if you are willing to show a healthy disrespect for the law, you will fit in just fine in the U.S..
Also, you could move to Canada, which is even easier than the U.S. on immigration, and in a couple years have your Canadian citizenship which gives you a fasttrack to moving to the U.S., because the U.S. and Canada have a special agreement on immigration.
Now, for further insight- I am a college student, a soon to be senior political science and history major, I pull 4.0's with nothing more than Earl Gray tea doused in honey to help me write those term papers on Progressive politics until 3:00 am. I equate taking controlled substances illegally in order to gain an "edge" to writing notes on the palm of your hand before stepping into the exam room. I got my high GPA the honest way, I'm going to take my GRE the honest way, and I'm going to persue my PhD the honest way.
I consider staying up until 3AM working to gain an "edge" the same as writing notes on the palm of your hand before stepping into the exam room. Lack of sleep not only can cause health problems, but can be dangerous to others if you are driving a motor vehicle or operating heavy machinery. What about the people who are narcoleptic or need their beauty sleep? What about the other students who are forced to engage in this reckless sleepless behavior in order to compete with you?
I think it is time the University and the Police step in. If you would have actually been learning from your Progressive Politics studies, it is that we desperatly need the government to legislate on this issue, and to criminalize the dangerous and reckless behavior that you engage in! And there should be a strictly enforce state-mandidated sleeping regime that all students should be required to adhere to!
I don't think it is fair that you get a competitive edge by using exercise. I think that the government should ban people from exercising, so all workers are on a level playing field. If people can get an edge through the strategic use of exercise, it is only a matter of time before everyone will be forced to exercise in order to compete!
But buyer beware is coming back, just in a different form! For example, lets take peanuts (And peanut allergies). People are so sue happy, that companies that don't make any products with any sort of peanut ingredient are labeling their product as having peanuts to cover their asses legally. It is way easier to put a disclaimer on a package saying "this might contain peanuts", than to try to garantee a product doesn't have peanuts and face legal repercussions. It is only a matter of time (and it has damn near almost heere already), that all packages, no-matter what the food or what the circumstance is, will contain warnings about peanuts.
People alergic to peanuts must have thought they were smart for suing about traces of peanuts in food... but soon they won't be able to know what foods contain peanuts because every company and every food product is going to protect themselves with a peanut warning.
Same with warning on prescription drugs. Prescriptions drugs now contain warners about "side effects" that include just about every possible symptom anyone can possibly have. It is easier to just give a rediciously long list of possible side effects, than to face the consequences of a law suit. The end result is that the "side effect" warnings of prescription drugs are completly useless. Virtually all the side effects listed for a prescription drug are listed just to cover the asses of the drug maker, and so it is impossible to get any realistic side effect information on a drug from a manufacturer.
When I buy some non-drowsy cold medicine, I don't really know if I can drive a car after taking the medicine or not, because every drug manufacturer is so afraid of a legal action that they will say not to operate a motor vehicle or heavy machinary just to play it safe.
Likewise, if you punish video game makers frivolously, they are just going to cover their ass by making everything Mature or Adult Only. Since the vast majority of video games are purchased by adults, and since kids that purchase video games most of the time purchase it with a parent present anyway, companies are just gonna make every single game Adult Only. Wall Mart might not stock AO games now, but if that is the only way they can sell Barbie Pony Adventure and Deer Hunter, they will eventually change their policy.
The end result for the rating system will be the same. There is no foolproof way to make sure there will never be something interpreted as "offensive" or "adult" or "suggestive" by some board or agency or group. When all games have a panel of catch all warnings and disclaimers, it is going to be harder for parents to judge a game than it is now.
Lawmakers make laws. That is what they do! Politicians need to be seen as "doing something about the problem"... even if they know that more laws won't help, they want to be seen as "taking a stand" and "standing up for the people" on an issue. If a politician doesn't call for more regulation, then he will be accused of "doing nothing to help the victims".
Duh... Freedom of Speech and free expression trumps any sort of democratic process, because democracy cannot exist in the absence of free speech. Our basic human rights are not negotable with a mob.
The only way to fight censorship is civil disobedience to censorship laws. The only way to fight censorship is to blatently violate laws that are created to regulate speech. We need to recognize that any government that controls speech is not democratic, and has no moral authority over us.
We don't have to convince anyone, not Congress, not "The People", not anyone, of our right to absolute free expression. We simply need to learn how to resist forms of control that the government will try to put on expression.
Having played free online gaming on the PC, and having played online gaming where a Gamer Tag is connected to physical address and credit card number - I will gladly pay the $50 a year to be able to block cheaters, racists, spammers, etc. and my leisure. The ability to close people's accounts and have it actually mean something on Xbox Live is worth a lot more than you think.
How much do you want to bet if they came out with the a new console, the "iGame", with a white designer pod look, and designed to interface with your iPod, that it would be a groundbreaking success!? All the Apple fanatics living the i-lifestyle would buy it for sure!
Back when Apple created the Pippin, Apple didn't have the widespread cult following it does now. Apple wasn't a "lifestyle choice".
In Europe, power lies in the state, and exploitation is performed by the state. The big health care monopolies, media monopolies, energy monopolies, transportation monopolies, are state run. The large monopolies are by and large one and the same as the state, so there is no reason for them to lobby the political class - THEY ARE THE POLITICAL CLASS!!!
The EU is attacking "monopolies" like Microsoft, not because Microsoft is a monopoly (because, of course, any state run industry is a monopoly), but because they percieve Microsoft as a threat to their own monopoly status in many industries. For example, EU vs. Microsoft is not "The People vs. Microsoft"... it is more like "IBM vs. Microsoft". The large corporate monopolies are seen as a threat to government dominance over European life.
Now, not that I think the U.S. is that much better - after the end of the cold war the "conservatives" in the U.S. abandoned any sort of "free market" ideology they once had, and the U.S. economy is rapidly coming more and more under control of the government (especially in the last 6 years). But, in the U.S., the government being the center of the society is relatively new, and so a lot of lobbying still goes on.
The thing to remember is that the government is simply a corporation with guns and a flag! Government controlled education and media might condition you to believe that the state is somehow fundamentally different than a large corporation - but the state is simply the largest, most powerful corporate monopoly in a geographic area.
No... Socialism, as defined by economists, is when the means of production are owned or controlled by the state. The Nazis were right wing socialists (Nazi is short for Nationalist Socialist), as the means of production were exclusively controlled by the state. Claiming that "the means of production is owned by the people" when they are owned by the state, as many leftists do, it a meaningless abstraction - empty rhetoric used to explain away the fact that far-left and far-right societies are usually almost indistinguishable.
All governments claim to be "owned by the people", or to "serve the people", both Left wing governments, and Right wing governments. The Left is no more "for the people" than the Right. Both are violent, authoritarian, racist ideologies when allowed to be taken to the extreme.
The whole Left-Right dicotomy is a false one. A more accurate spectrum would be Anarchist or Minarchist on one side, and Left and Right wing totalitarianism on the other side (Marxism Leninism, Nazism, etc.).
Come on now... do you think that your government gives a slightest damn if you are exploited by monopolies? Governments sometimes go after monopolies, because large monopolistic corporations and even more large and monopolistic governments are competing to see who owns you.
Don't worry though, if the government takes control of capital (Left Wing Socialism), or capital takes control of government (Right Wing Socialism), the end result is likely to be indistinguishable aside from a few cosmetic differences (Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot, or Hitler and Pinoche... take your pick and enjoy!). You are gonna get screwed by the government either way... but you seem to believe the propoganda that "the government exists to protect you", so I guess in that case you have nothing to worry about!
Kill the head, and everything dies. Or take over the head.
If our entire economy and society wasn't structured around one central all-powerful government institution... then it wouldn't be nessicary to carry out expensive, retarded exercises like this. Keep infrastructure extremly decentralized, extremly diverse and non-standardized, and the strategy of one big dramatic attack wouldn't make sense.
And as a side benifit, facism would be damn near impossible because there would be no way one small group of people could take control of all the numerous and completly diverse centers of power.