The coup already happened. The Democrats and the Republicans are the same party. If one party were to blatently take over, people would be outraged. But if one party pretends to be two parties, or the two parties agree to work together, people get so caught up in partisian politics that they aren't going to question the system as a whole. The Democrats tend to focus on repressive socialist economic politicies, and Republican on beligerant nationalistic military/police policies, and the compromise is national socialism.
So the coup DID happen... but don't complain because it is the party you support in charge!
No, this is not comparible with firearms or ciggarettes.
A more comparible analogy would be, say the Koran. The vast majority of families in the U.S. are Christian, and wouldn't want their kids reading the Koran, or considering Islam as a religion they would like to pursue.
Would it be OK to ban the sale of the Koran to children?
Those for freedom say no: the danger of censorship is greater than the danger that somehow kids will be exposed to something their parents don't approve of. Totalitarians (who, unfortunatly, are in the majority), want the government to ban things first, and ask questions later.
For example, it seems very tempting, if you are a video game company, to make a PS2 game that will play on the PS3, than to make a PS3 game. After all, if you make a PS2 game, you can sell for both platforms. But if you make a PS3 game, you can only sell on the new platform.
Where as, if there is no backwards compatibility, you are more likely to make games for the new platform than the old.
So I would say that backwards compatibility can be a problem. If you are spending a lot of money on a new box, you want to make sure they are going to be developing games the fully use its capabilites.
How does Canada and Western Europe manage to teach their kids with less money than the United States? If it is all just a matter of the schools not getting enough money, as you imply, then the U.S. should have the best schooling in the world - After all, the U.S. spends the most per-capita on education!
Not true... you should easily be able to get your kid a private education for $10,000... but assuming that what you were saying is true, that private schools cost more than that - if every student had $10,000 to spend on education, you would find lots of people willing to provide it.
Where do people get the dumb idea that the amount of education spending is decreasing? Funding for education has increased every single year! The U.S. has the highest funded educational system in the world!
Whatever problems the U.S. educational system has, it has absolutly nothing to do with there not being enough money!
Yeah, chemistry sets are not safe... but shouldn't we be doing our best to eliminate skateboards, monkey bars and swing sets, roller blades, base ball bats, and any of the other dangerous things that kill a lot more people than old school chemistry sets ever did?
The religious right are a bit crazy. But lets not remember that it is the left who also teaches "intelligent design" (Gaia Earth Theory, anyone!?), supports retarded anti-science ideas (feminists argue that logic is simply another part of the male heirarchy, and Newtonian physics is a metaphore for rape designed to victimize women, etc., etc.)... In politically correct university "Racial Tolerance" classes, students learn that it has been scientificly proven blacks are geneticly programmed to be late, and whites geneticly programmed to be on time (and therefore it is "racist" to expect black students to be on time for class). And lets not forget left wing hysteria when it comes to nuclear power, or genetic modification.
I have no doubt that the right would turn the U.S. into a Taliban style theocracy if they could, but I have no doubt that the left would turn the U.S. into some Pol Pot Khmer Rouge bloodbath if they had their way. Basicly, both the Right and the Left (and the people who support the Left and Right) are anti-science, reactionary, totalitarian, racist fucks.
It is all good you are skeptical of the right, but if that means that you support the "Left", then you are just as evil.
He sold the hard drive...
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Online Revenge
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When he sold the hard drive, he sold the contents of the hard drive.
Re:Americans don't want more vacation time!
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The economics are still the same... if they need you to be available all the time, they could hire you and someone else to each be available 50% of the time... provided that the total costs for each employee are now 50% of what they were when it was just you. In the long run, it makes no difference to them.
If they don't offer the option, it is probably because people don't want to work for %50 of what your wage is. A person making $100,000 a year probably won't want to go down to $50,000 (or maybe less, because I am not including fixed health insurance cost, hidden taxes usually payed by the employer on each employee, the cost of the extra work space and equipment, etc.). But, if people WHERE willing to make the trade off, companies really wouldn't care.
There is no conspiracy to keep Americans working extra hours... it is just that Americans have come to expect two cars in the garage, a home in the suburbs, lots of consumer goods, that wouldn't be typical of the average person in say France. If Americans were willing to live a more modest life style, they could work a lot less. But if Americans are expecting to work like French, and still live like Americans, it is not going to work. There has to be a trade off. At some point, the equation has to be balanced. More leisure time means less goods and services produced - And hence, it means less goods and services to be consumed - And there is no way to get around that.
People need to understand the economics of the issue. From the point of view of a company, they are willing to pay X amount of dollars for Y amount of labor. If the labor is done by 2 highly payed employees with little vacation time, or by 3 lesser paid employees with more vacation time, makes no difference at all to the company - so long as their costs are the same. There is no comspiracy to make you work more - companies will give all the vacation time that employees want, if enough employees want it that way.
If people were willing to be paid less, they would get more vacation time. The thing is, as much as people SAY they want more vacation time... people like having a nice car, a big house, lots of new clothes, a pair of jetskis, a big screen TV, and all the things that an upper middle class lifestyle brings. People choose material objects over vacation time.
Europeans get more vacation time, and work less, but they also have a lot less material objects than Americans.
There is nothing wrong with either system, so long as people are actually making the choice for themselves. I know that it isn't hard for an American to have a lot of free time if they were willing to make do with less material goods. And I am assuming that Europans could work more and make more money if they wanted to (although I am not knowledgable enough to say that with authority).
The main thing is that Americans need to understand that there is a trade off. There is no way, short of imporvements in technology/automation, that we can work less and make the same amount of money. Like all things, there are costs and benifits, and one needs to balance the two.
You are correct... a free market would be the best option, no doubt. But lets realize that the telecom industry is a sad parody of the free market. It is so regulated, controlled, and messed up - and the big telecom companies SUPPORT the regulation (because it is a barrier to market and keeps out competition from small companies), so the regulation isn't going to change soon.
Since no politician or government is going to give up it's stranglehold on telecommunications, and since the big corporations aren't going to be pushing for a laize faire system (they benifit too much from the government regulation), right now net neurtrality is the best short term political viable solution.
I don't quite understand what makes you think Los Angeles in the movie is particularly "disturbing", or what you mean "L.A. doesn't look that bad yet". The L.A. in Blade Runner was inspired by Hong Kong and Tokyo, it isn't supposed to be some sort of distopia. The future Los Angeles doesn't seem a particularly unpleasant place to live - I would probably prefer the Hong Kong version of L.A. to the real-life modern version.
Well, largely the U.S. already has the data on those people. If the people's own government has that data, most likely any country that has a proper espionage apperatus has the data or can get it pretty easily if they desire it. The only way to make sure your data isn't in a dubious database in the U.S. or elsewhere is to make sure the data doesn't exist anywhere, or at least not in a big central government database (like revenue service databases, or health service databases, etc.)...
While it is good that the E.U. isn't turning over data to the U.S., this appears to be more political posturing than real concern over the privacy of it's citizens. You can't have huge government databases on people domesticly, and not expect foriegn governments (or foriegn corporations with connections to that government) to not exploit that information. All the "data privacy" laws in the world aren't going to protect your data when the government has it all in one place ready to be used by anyone who has the resources to bribe a few people.
Except that nuclear power is a viable, usable technology right now - that we can immediatly start to put to use replacing our aging coal plants and filling demand for new plants. Nuclear power is less dangerous than global warming, and cutting power consumption is even more dangerous still (apparently, people arent aware that urban populations require industrialized farming, transportation, and food processing to feed themselves... and the population is growing exponentially... which means that conservation doesn't really have any effect. It is either consume more energy or starve and die).
Fusion power is great, but I rather not have our future be dependent on a technology not yet invented. Especially when we have options that are cheap and reasonably safe.
We have a bunch of bitter and envyious Slashdot nerds here:
In nearly all public schools, good grades are a requirement for participation in sports. As a general rule, high school athletes tend to do better acedemicly than non-athletes. They get better grades, score higher on their SATs, they are more likely to attend University. The stereotype of the "stupid jock" is just not true. It is a myth.
Not only that, but just about everyone else in the world loves sports, movies, and pop culture. If you have ever seen European's passion for Football, you wouldn't doubt that sports are just as important to them as they are to us. Hell, when I visited the Forbidden City in Beijing, the guards had set up a basketball court RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FORBIDDEN CITY!!!... and no-one I spoke to in China wanted to talk about anything other than Basketball. Sports just doesn't explain why science is declining in the U.S..
No, this has absolutly nothing to do with Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is token election year rhetoric that only a handful of rural schools ever taught. Probably fewer than 10,000 students have actually been exposed to the teaching of Intelligent Design as curriculum at public schools. And even where it is taught, it may be harmful to one's knowledge of evolution (and that is debatable... Intelligent Design isn't so much "bad science", as much as it is "non science" philisophical crap), but most science would be completly unaffected. Certainly it isn't any more damaging that the "Gaia Earth Theory" crap that they included in my HS biology textbook in the early 90s.
Here are some REAL reasons why public schools are crap:
1. Zero accountability of teachers: It most places, once a teacher is tenured, it cost more to fire a teacher than it does to pay their lifetime salary until retirement. That means that unless teachers are caught having sex with students, or something completly sensational, that teachers know they cannot be fired or punished in any way whatsoever.
2. Zero choice by parents: You send your kids to the school based on where you live. Maybe a few ultra-rich people can afford to move to wherever the schools are good, but for nearly everyone else they are stuck with no choice in schools to send their kid. They also have almost no control over school policies - sure, they can vote for a figurehead school board every couple years (maybe)... but since the school board can't fire teachers, they are really powerless to effect the actual quality of education.
3. Politics are just as important as education: OK, maybe this does have something to do with ID, but ID is only one tiny example. Basicly, schools are a political and ideological battleground, with every political group wanting to push it's own agenda. But it isn't just ID, nearly every political group tries to push it's agenda in public schools. For every right-wing Christian bullshit like ID, there is some Left Wing Hippie bullshit like Gaia Theory (which is basicly Intelligent Design).
The whole "Intelligent Design is ruining education" is just a catchphrase for people who want to Blame Bush for Everything. The fact is our Soviet style education system has been in a lot of trouble long before G.W. Bush ran for any office.
This is definitly bad, but it is not that much different than what exists in most countries today. Already, today, you have some sort of social insurance card, probably a government issued health card, you have credit cards and bank cards which report all transactions to the government, to open any sort of buisness, or do home repair on your house, you need to get an inspection where some government official enters your home or buisness. You can be asked for ID or searched anywhere at any time.
DNA tracking is just a technological improvement on what has been happening (probably with your support) for the last 50 years. It is certainly evil, but it is not a sign of a comming Big Brother society... that Big Brother society has been being built with overwelming popular support forever now.
Look, every benifit has a cost. You want to live in a society where everything from how long you are allowed to grow grass in your yard, to what sorts of jokes you can tell, to what file formats you can play on your MP3 player, to what version of history is allowed to be taught to children, is regulated and controlled by the government. The price you pay for having the government micromanage every single aspect of your life, is a police state. There is no way the government can run and regulate everything (as most of you want it to be), and not have the government monitoring what it is regulating. A police state is the inevitable consequence of a powerful, centrallized, activist government.
In this case, if you support the idea of the government cracking down on illegal immigration, well how the hell is the government supposed to do that effectivly? Now, I am totally against restricting immigration, so I can consistantly be against this sort of thing. But if you don't support some sort of centralized and foolproof tracking of Americans, then how the hell do you expect to crack down on illegal immigration? The price you pay for the "awesome social benifit" of having fewer dark skin people, is Big Brother tracking you by DNA... Much like when you buy a car or stereo or house, you must weight the costs against the benifits.
How will they tax the average Joe who got his PC hax0red and is being used a zombie for SPAM?
They will treat it the same way they treat zombie machines being used for file-sharing copyright music, or zombie machines used for kiddie-porn, or whatever: You will have to prove your innocence beyond any shadow of the doubt (without using your computer, because that has been seized).
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The coup already happened. The Democrats and the Republicans are the same party. If one party were to blatently take over, people would be outraged. But if one party pretends to be two parties, or the two parties agree to work together, people get so caught up in partisian politics that they aren't going to question the system as a whole. The Democrats tend to focus on repressive socialist economic politicies, and Republican on beligerant nationalistic military/police policies, and the compromise is national socialism.
So the coup DID happen... but don't complain because it is the party you support in charge!
No, this is not comparible with firearms or ciggarettes.
A more comparible analogy would be, say the Koran. The vast majority of families in the U.S. are Christian, and wouldn't want their kids reading the Koran, or considering Islam as a religion they would like to pursue.
Would it be OK to ban the sale of the Koran to children?
Those for freedom say no: the danger of censorship is greater than the danger that somehow kids will be exposed to something their parents don't approve of. Totalitarians (who, unfortunatly, are in the majority), want the government to ban things first, and ask questions later.
Are you being sarcastic, or are you serious?
For example, it seems very tempting, if you are a video game company, to make a PS2 game that will play on the PS3, than to make a PS3 game. After all, if you make a PS2 game, you can sell for both platforms. But if you make a PS3 game, you can only sell on the new platform.
Where as, if there is no backwards compatibility, you are more likely to make games for the new platform than the old.
So I would say that backwards compatibility can be a problem. If you are spending a lot of money on a new box, you want to make sure they are going to be developing games the fully use its capabilites.
How does Canada and Western Europe manage to teach their kids with less money than the United States? If it is all just a matter of the schools not getting enough money, as you imply, then the U.S. should have the best schooling in the world - After all, the U.S. spends the most per-capita on education!
Not true... you should easily be able to get your kid a private education for $10,000 ... but assuming that what you were saying is true, that private schools cost more than that - if every student had $10,000 to spend on education, you would find lots of people willing to provide it.
Where do people get the dumb idea that the amount of education spending is decreasing? Funding for education has increased every single year! The U.S. has the highest funded educational system in the world!
Whatever problems the U.S. educational system has, it has absolutly nothing to do with there not being enough money!
Yeah, chemistry sets are not safe... but shouldn't we be doing our best to eliminate skateboards, monkey bars and swing sets, roller blades, base ball bats, and any of the other dangerous things that kill a lot more people than old school chemistry sets ever did?
The religious right are a bit crazy. But lets not remember that it is the left who also teaches "intelligent design" (Gaia Earth Theory, anyone!?), supports retarded anti-science ideas (feminists argue that logic is simply another part of the male heirarchy, and Newtonian physics is a metaphore for rape designed to victimize women, etc., etc.)... In politically correct university "Racial Tolerance" classes, students learn that it has been scientificly proven blacks are geneticly programmed to be late, and whites geneticly programmed to be on time (and therefore it is "racist" to expect black students to be on time for class). And lets not forget left wing hysteria when it comes to nuclear power, or genetic modification.
I have no doubt that the right would turn the U.S. into a Taliban style theocracy if they could, but I have no doubt that the left would turn the U.S. into some Pol Pot Khmer Rouge bloodbath if they had their way. Basicly, both the Right and the Left (and the people who support the Left and Right) are anti-science, reactionary, totalitarian, racist fucks.
It is all good you are skeptical of the right, but if that means that you support the "Left", then you are just as evil.
When he sold the hard drive, he sold the contents of the hard drive.
The economics are still the same... if they need you to be available all the time, they could hire you and someone else to each be available 50% of the time... provided that the total costs for each employee are now 50% of what they were when it was just you. In the long run, it makes no difference to them.
If they don't offer the option, it is probably because people don't want to work for %50 of what your wage is. A person making $100,000 a year probably won't want to go down to $50,000 (or maybe less, because I am not including fixed health insurance cost, hidden taxes usually payed by the employer on each employee, the cost of the extra work space and equipment, etc.). But, if people WHERE willing to make the trade off, companies really wouldn't care.
There is no conspiracy to keep Americans working extra hours... it is just that Americans have come to expect two cars in the garage, a home in the suburbs, lots of consumer goods, that wouldn't be typical of the average person in say France. If Americans were willing to live a more modest life style, they could work a lot less. But if Americans are expecting to work like French, and still live like Americans, it is not going to work. There has to be a trade off. At some point, the equation has to be balanced. More leisure time means less goods and services produced - And hence, it means less goods and services to be consumed - And there is no way to get around that.
People need to understand the economics of the issue. From the point of view of a company, they are willing to pay X amount of dollars for Y amount of labor. If the labor is done by 2 highly payed employees with little vacation time, or by 3 lesser paid employees with more vacation time, makes no difference at all to the company - so long as their costs are the same. There is no comspiracy to make you work more - companies will give all the vacation time that employees want, if enough employees want it that way.
If people were willing to be paid less, they would get more vacation time. The thing is, as much as people SAY they want more vacation time... people like having a nice car, a big house, lots of new clothes, a pair of jetskis, a big screen TV, and all the things that an upper middle class lifestyle brings. People choose material objects over vacation time.
Europeans get more vacation time, and work less, but they also have a lot less material objects than Americans.
There is nothing wrong with either system, so long as people are actually making the choice for themselves. I know that it isn't hard for an American to have a lot of free time if they were willing to make do with less material goods. And I am assuming that Europans could work more and make more money if they wanted to (although I am not knowledgable enough to say that with authority).
The main thing is that Americans need to understand that there is a trade off. There is no way, short of imporvements in technology/automation, that we can work less and make the same amount of money. Like all things, there are costs and benifits, and one needs to balance the two.
You are correct... a free market would be the best option, no doubt. But lets realize that the telecom industry is a sad parody of the free market. It is so regulated, controlled, and messed up - and the big telecom companies SUPPORT the regulation (because it is a barrier to market and keeps out competition from small companies), so the regulation isn't going to change soon.
Since no politician or government is going to give up it's stranglehold on telecommunications, and since the big corporations aren't going to be pushing for a laize faire system (they benifit too much from the government regulation), right now net neurtrality is the best short term political viable solution.
Don't worry... Mr. Blade Runner Guy Who I Don't Remember His Name (played by Harrison Ford) shoots first in Blade Runner.
I don't quite understand what makes you think Los Angeles in the movie is particularly "disturbing", or what you mean "L.A. doesn't look that bad yet". The L.A. in Blade Runner was inspired by Hong Kong and Tokyo, it isn't supposed to be some sort of distopia. The future Los Angeles doesn't seem a particularly unpleasant place to live - I would probably prefer the Hong Kong version of L.A. to the real-life modern version.
Well, largely the U.S. already has the data on those people. If the people's own government has that data, most likely any country that has a proper espionage apperatus has the data or can get it pretty easily if they desire it. The only way to make sure your data isn't in a dubious database in the U.S. or elsewhere is to make sure the data doesn't exist anywhere, or at least not in a big central government database (like revenue service databases, or health service databases, etc.)...
While it is good that the E.U. isn't turning over data to the U.S., this appears to be more political posturing than real concern over the privacy of it's citizens. You can't have huge government databases on people domesticly, and not expect foriegn governments (or foriegn corporations with connections to that government) to not exploit that information. All the "data privacy" laws in the world aren't going to protect your data when the government has it all in one place ready to be used by anyone who has the resources to bribe a few people.
Except that nuclear power is a viable, usable technology right now - that we can immediatly start to put to use replacing our aging coal plants and filling demand for new plants. Nuclear power is less dangerous than global warming, and cutting power consumption is even more dangerous still (apparently, people arent aware that urban populations require industrialized farming, transportation, and food processing to feed themselves... and the population is growing exponentially... which means that conservation doesn't really have any effect. It is either consume more energy or starve and die).
Fusion power is great, but I rather not have our future be dependent on a technology not yet invented. Especially when we have options that are cheap and reasonably safe.
We have a bunch of bitter and envyious Slashdot nerds here:
In nearly all public schools, good grades are a requirement for participation in sports. As a general rule, high school athletes tend to do better acedemicly than non-athletes. They get better grades, score higher on their SATs, they are more likely to attend University. The stereotype of the "stupid jock" is just not true. It is a myth.
Not only that, but just about everyone else in the world loves sports, movies, and pop culture. If you have ever seen European's passion for Football, you wouldn't doubt that sports are just as important to them as they are to us. Hell, when I visited the Forbidden City in Beijing, the guards had set up a basketball court RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FORBIDDEN CITY!!!... and no-one I spoke to in China wanted to talk about anything other than Basketball. Sports just doesn't explain why science is declining in the U.S..
No, this has absolutly nothing to do with Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is token election year rhetoric that only a handful of rural schools ever taught. Probably fewer than 10,000 students have actually been exposed to the teaching of Intelligent Design as curriculum at public schools. And even where it is taught, it may be harmful to one's knowledge of evolution (and that is debatable... Intelligent Design isn't so much "bad science", as much as it is "non science" philisophical crap), but most science would be completly unaffected. Certainly it isn't any more damaging that the "Gaia Earth Theory" crap that they included in my HS biology textbook in the early 90s.
Here are some REAL reasons why public schools are crap:
1. Zero accountability of teachers: It most places, once a teacher is tenured, it cost more to fire a teacher than it does to pay their lifetime salary until retirement. That means that unless teachers are caught having sex with students, or something completly sensational, that teachers know they cannot be fired or punished in any way whatsoever.
2. Zero choice by parents: You send your kids to the school based on where you live. Maybe a few ultra-rich people can afford to move to wherever the schools are good, but for nearly everyone else they are stuck with no choice in schools to send their kid. They also have almost no control over school policies - sure, they can vote for a figurehead school board every couple years (maybe)... but since the school board can't fire teachers, they are really powerless to effect the actual quality of education.
3. Politics are just as important as education: OK, maybe this does have something to do with ID, but ID is only one tiny example. Basicly, schools are a political and ideological battleground, with every political group wanting to push it's own agenda. But it isn't just ID, nearly every political group tries to push it's agenda in public schools. For every right-wing Christian bullshit like ID, there is some Left Wing Hippie bullshit like Gaia Theory (which is basicly Intelligent Design).
The whole "Intelligent Design is ruining education" is just a catchphrase for people who want to Blame Bush for Everything. The fact is our Soviet style education system has been in a lot of trouble long before G.W. Bush ran for any office.
Your financial information is private, yet you have to turn that over to the IRS!
If a "legal U.S. worker" refuses to be DNA tested on religious grounds, can they force that worker to be so tested?
If you refuse, you get deported to a country of your choice!
This is definitly bad, but it is not that much different than what exists in most countries today. Already, today, you have some sort of social insurance card, probably a government issued health card, you have credit cards and bank cards which report all transactions to the government, to open any sort of buisness, or do home repair on your house, you need to get an inspection where some government official enters your home or buisness. You can be asked for ID or searched anywhere at any time.
DNA tracking is just a technological improvement on what has been happening (probably with your support) for the last 50 years. It is certainly evil, but it is not a sign of a comming Big Brother society... that Big Brother society has been being built with overwelming popular support forever now.
Look, every benifit has a cost. You want to live in a society where everything from how long you are allowed to grow grass in your yard, to what sorts of jokes you can tell, to what file formats you can play on your MP3 player, to what version of history is allowed to be taught to children, is regulated and controlled by the government. The price you pay for having the government micromanage every single aspect of your life, is a police state. There is no way the government can run and regulate everything (as most of you want it to be), and not have the government monitoring what it is regulating. A police state is the inevitable consequence of a powerful, centrallized, activist government.
In this case, if you support the idea of the government cracking down on illegal immigration, well how the hell is the government supposed to do that effectivly? Now, I am totally against restricting immigration, so I can consistantly be against this sort of thing. But if you don't support some sort of centralized and foolproof tracking of Americans, then how the hell do you expect to crack down on illegal immigration? The price you pay for the "awesome social benifit" of having fewer dark skin people, is Big Brother tracking you by DNA... Much like when you buy a car or stereo or house, you must weight the costs against the benifits.
Now that the government is eliminating the phone tax, the U.S. needs an email tax to continue funding the Spanish-American war! REMEMBER THE MAINE!!!!
How will they tax the average Joe who got his PC hax0red and is being used a zombie for SPAM?
They will treat it the same way they treat zombie machines being used for file-sharing copyright music, or zombie machines used for kiddie-porn, or whatever: You will have to prove your innocence beyond any shadow of the doubt (without using your computer, because that has been seized).
When it's THEIR thing that is being taxed!