Sorry... I was more arguing against the typical Slashdot person than you specificly, so I didn't bother to check your sig. I shouldn't have made any assumptions, I apologize.
Actually, gun control in America was invented by the Klu Klux Klan... they wanted to be able to kill black people without black people being able to fight back, so they pressed for a gun licencing scheme which would exclude blacks, by charging a licence fee too expensive for most of the former-slaves to afford, and just general intimidation in the licencing process.
You see, in history, every oppressed minority, or enslaved group has been denied the right to possess weapons. Traditionaly only the upper classes and ruling classes had been allowed to own weapons and be trained in their use. That is why people many diverse people such as Mohandas Ghandi, George Orwell, Malcom X, all felt that citizens should be allowed to be armed.
The "left" in America is really a politically correct version of the "Right". The reason they want all Americans disarmed, is because they know that every oppressed minority and enslaved group was not allowed to own weapons. They intend to make the citizens slaves while the upper class and the ruling class run our lives from above.
Citizen disarmament is the fundamental first step in despotism and totalitarianism, and no person can be against slavery, genocide, and oppression and support gun control. Citizen disarmenet is the universal first step to facism.
You are a facist and totalitarian... you are either just too smart to admit it, or too dumb to understand it.
Anonymous speech means no one can track it, that there is no way you can be found out.
If the government requires that all speech can be tracked to a person, it is not anonymous. The government may forgo it's power to find out who you are (the same way a cop doesn't have to give you a speeding ticket if you are speeding). Most of the time the government will care less when some nitwit posts "Fuck Amerikka! Dubya is hitler!" or something like that.
But at some time, somewhere, someone is going to have some real dirt on a politician, or some real incriminating evidence that could threaten someone in power. Someone might have some very powerful arguements against a certain government policy, and be influencing a lot of people. And that is what these laws are designed to go after.
Remember, even if you can post anonymously, even if you can get around the restrictions, these laws are for going after you. They are for going after the blogs, forums, etc., that allow you to post your messages.
The trouble is, both sides of the political spectrum in America have very strong reasons to support censorship. Republicans and Conservatives of course want to ban speech that promotes promiscuity, homosexuality, or questions Christianity. Of course, the Left will stand against this type of censorship up and only until you tell them that we need censorship to ban speech that demeans or insults women, "hate speech", pornography, or speech that "exploits" children (like soda advertisments), or paid advertising that questions the infailability of elected officials.
No one is willing to stand up for 100% free speech. No-one is willing to be called a "Satanist" or "Nazi" or whatever for standing up for controversial speech. So once you accept that speech should be regulated (which you do, if you voted Republican or Democrat), well, it is only a tiny step to regulating like this bill does. Everyone wants to blame the other party, and no one wants to take responsiblity for being pro-censorship. You can't be fully anti-censorship until you take responsiblity for the censorship your OWN party supports.
Right now there is only one party in the U.S. that doesn't support censorship (the Libertarian party), and needless to say that party or it's idea's aren't very popular.
While what you are saying IS true, America IS destroying itself with rediculous legislation... America's saving grace seems to be that other industrialized nations are doing the same thing.
I mean, European governments and the EU have no shortage of retarded legislation restricting free speech, commerce, and privacy on the internet. And places like China definitly don't have speech internet legislation that I would want to emulate, although they tend to be moving towards more freedom (where the U.S. and Europe are moving towards less).
It would be very reasuring if the current Totalitarian insanity was was somehow limited to the United States... but Europe especially seems eager to mandate and legislate on virtually all aspects of human life. The U.S. won't be irrelevant so long as everyone else in the world is knocking on Big Brother's door too.
Hey brother, perhaps not. There is a significant difference between our age and the age of our grandfathers. But as an American, I only blame ourselves. Yes, the products we purchase nowadays are different than the products our grandparents purchased (yes, my grandparents still own the refrigerator that they owned when they were married, although they purchased five since then they keep the first refrigerator they ever owned in the basement and it works perfectly... and their tube based hifi they still have in the living room would be a modern hifi-fanatic's wet dream), but the significant difference is how hard we work for it all. Seriously, no-one in America works as hard as our grandfathers... no-one has either worked as hard, nor made as many sacrifices for his family (my grandfather managed, on a working class factory workers income, so send his children to the same private boarding schools at millionaires and president's back in the day)...
If you are American (which I assume you are), you got to understand that ultimately we ourselves have only ourselves to blame. We just aren't the same people who built the model T, or invented the modern television, or created Hollywood. It isn't anyone's fault but ourselves that we no longer are the center of the industrial world. WE got lazy, and arrogant, and egotistical. and our present state isn't the fault of the Chinese or Indians or anyone else but our selves!
If they can produce it cheaper and better than us, it is because they are better. They won. They are the shit! Like I learned playing sports in the U.S.A. when I was a kid (I don't live in the U.S.A. any longer), they won! They got the better of us! And we should respect then for it, not hate them for it! The last bit of honor and self-respect we can have is to know they are the winners, and treat them with the proper respect that they truly deserve.
Fuck the non-Americans that are reading this... we should know that every civilization that has ever existed has had it's time, and it is not longer our time. We are the British, or Portuguese of our era Either our children fight and struggle and sacrifice to be the best, or we end up as we deserve. Do you undestand. Protectionism isn't the solution. We either win fairly, or we are lost.
That is completly false. Almost all economic regulation has been concieved and supported by large buisness and the ultra-rich. In a 100% free market economy, companies reach the natural limits of growth... there is an equalibrium point were there is diminished returns for getting any bigger. Smaller, hungry, and more competitive companies rise up and take advantage of the natural entropy of large institutions.
That is why corporations and the ultra rich have always supported "progressive" causes and government regulation. The government regulation allows the government to restrict competition, recieve direct or indirect subsidies, and escape the harsh realities of the free market.
100% free market capitalism hasn't been able to sustain itself, because capitalists aren't "Capitalists". The free market is the most cruel and unforgiving towards capitalists. Big Corporations and the ultra-rich are dependent on government. Big corporations can not exist without government. And so big corporations support big government, regulation, licencing, and centralized control almost universally.
Unfortunatly, when we allowed education to become nationalized for all practicle purposes, and the media to be regulated by the government, our only source of information is information approved by the corporations telling us that government exists to help or protect us.
The amount of goods and services that a person can afford per hour of labor has been steadily increasing. Your average middle class worker now can afford more food, more housing, more automobile, and certainly more consumer electronics than he ever could.
Confirm this for yourself. Find out what the average wage was 30 years ago or 40 years ago. Look in an old catalog, and look at what someone could purchase with their wages then, and compare it with average wages and what they can afford to purchase now. Aside from things like big screen TVs and computers that obviously we can afford more of now, we can now afford more clothes, more lawnmowers, more washing machines, more sofas, etc. We can afford to eat out more, purchase more pre-packaged/advertized food products. People can now afford better housing. People can pretty much afford much more of everything.
You do understand that cheaper goods = higher income, right? There is no difference if a shirt cost $10, and you make $10 an hour, or if a shirt cost $5, and you make $5 an hour, right?
Americans today are the wealthiest people in the world, living in the most wealthy period of history. This is undenyably the truth.
There is something to be said about the so called gap between the "rich" and "poor", but a better way to describe it would be the gap between the "Richest", and the "rich". It is true that the richest group of people have seen their real consumption increase much faster than the middle class or poor. And unlike a lot of people, I would fully agree with you that disparity between the rich and the richest is undesirable. It would be much better to see income increase evenly amoung all people.
But this disparity doesn't have much to do with foriegn trade. It has more to do with the minimum capital required to do buisness in the United States. 50 years ago, lets say you wanted to open a buisness, let say a small factory that machines parts. Such a buisness would be fairly easy for a middle class person to start. But not so today. The cost of OSHA compliance, compliance with local/state/country/federal enviornmental laws and hiring the experts, lawyers, to ensure compliance, insuring that you comply with all the non-enviornment local/state/country/federal laws, ensuring that you meet all the conditions that your workplace is handicapped accessible, making sure you are not only in full compliance with the 75,000 pages of tax laws, but that you can prove to the IRS you are in full compliance... making sure you are an "equal oportunity employer" (this wouldn't be so bad if it was simply banning discrimination, but it is thousands of pages of rules and regulations that can be quite counter-inuitive, and you are going to have to hire a lawyer to deal with them), and lets not forget the cost of liability insurance, because people in America love to deal with them.
Basicly, you are talking a cost of several million dollars to start a significant buisness in the U.S.... Yeah, there are exceptions, you CAN probably start a little web design buisness, or open a video or music shop, or a resteraunt for less money... or possibly even a super highly specialized item... but you are NOT going to be manufacturing a consumer product in the U.S. for less than a couple million - and that leaves out the vast majority of Americans from opening a buisness. That means less competition for big buisness., etc.
Bush might not understand the problem, but most protectionists and Bush critics don't understand the problem either.
We are not losing jobs because of outsourcing... our economy isn't declining because of foriegn competition... and certainly having the government restrict trade with the rest of the world is not going to solve our problems.
The reason the U.S. is declining, is because we are lazy, our education system is failing (despite the fact that the U.S. has the best funded primary and secondary education system in the world! Our education system isn't failing because "Bush cut funding"), we are hostile to buisness and industry and do everything to discourage economic production, and we want the government to provide everything for us so our country is borrowing lots of money (so our trade partners purchase U.S. Treasury Bonds instead of purchasing American made goods).
The only thing that has kept our economy viable for so long is free trade with other countries. If we resort to protectionism, we will cause another Great Depression like the last time we resorted to protectionism.
Yes, but we are living in a retarded country if you think invading Iraq, or using the NSA to spy on Americans, or creating a prescription drug plan while our country runs trillion dollar deficits, is the reasonable middle of the road, populist thing to do... but letting foriegners build our software or run our ports is some sinister "conspiracy" that everyone fears.
The Dubai ports deal and trade with India is one of the few things that Dubya gets right.
But you are claiming that more government management of the economy is the solution to government mismanagement of the economy.
Housing boom is caused by lowered interest rates, DECIDED BY THE GOVERNMENT. Government bureacracy is the government of course. Armed services is the government.
So, a draconian isolationist protectionist "iron curtain" (what would be a good name for an American "Iron Curtian", for China is was the "Bamboo Curtain"... maybe it would be the "Particle Board and Plexiglass Curtain"? Anyway, I am straying from the topic.) won't nessicarily help us economicly.
Therefore I suggest that the USA should keep and nourish in the USA some minimum, perhaps of 20-30%, of the industries that are outsourced.
You don't think the U.S.A. should do this, you think the GOVERNMENT should do this. U.S.A. != U.S. government. You are not talking about a social movement to accomplish your goals, you are talking about a government program that would have vast costs (not only the economic cost of paying more for items manufactured in America, but the cost of survailence and proving compliance), and the extreme dangers of selective prosecusion, mis-use of survalience (for example, when the Homeland Production Board is wiretapping the private phones of company employees to enforce this law, or when your email is being screened to look for potential "Unpatriotic Consumerism", will they misuse this information?) Let's say you forget to fill out government form #128437B Section 2 and give the Homeland Production Board 6 months notice, when you purchased electronic components for a friends computer, are you going to be willing to do the time in prison?
I will make a suggestion - perhaps people are off-shoring their production because the U.S. is so hostile towards buisness, so regulated, so controlled, so prone to selective prosecution and political manipulation and such. For example, you mentioned that flu vaccine is no longer manufactured in the United States. Do you know why? Because the cost of lawsuits, and the extreme costs of meeting U.S. regulations of the manufacture of flu vaccine, make it virtually impossible to manufacture in the United States. The laws and liability don't make us any safer, because we are purchasing it from countries where the law is less strict - they just garantee we will outsource.
If the cost to manufacture a widget in China is $2, and the cost of compliance with U.S. law to manufacture the item in the U.S. is $44 per item (from liability insurance, licencing, inspection fees, defending against frivolous lawsuits, etc.) not including labor, materials, etc., it is just unviable to produce the item in the United States.
This would also turn the 'just in time manufacturing' on its head because a minimum amount of raw materials and goods would have to be kept in the pipeline. Automation and "just in time" manufacturing isn't going to help us. For a true example, there is a company in the U.S. that does manufacuring of clothing - they have an almost fully automated system, and in theory they can make clothing cheaper than some sweatshop in Indonesia, and because it is all computer controlled they can do it in much smaller batches and with orders of magnitude more turnaround time than in the U.S.... However, in the first year they opened for buisness, they were sited for "dumping industrial waste". The "industrial waste" was that they had a leaky hose faucet at the side of their building. Because the building was designated an industrial building, anything that came out of the building was "industrial waste", even though it was harmless tap water, and only leaking a few drops a day. They couldn't just take the tap out, because the "system" needed to go through "industrial de-commissioning". So all in all the costs for all the work, fines, legal advice, etc., were around $500,000... This kind of random cost must be paid for in the cost of the manufactured goods, and because of this the foriegn goods are still cheaper.
Lets say you have a small manufacturing plant, with maybe 6 or 7 employees, not some big corporation or anything. Figure about $500,000 to $1,000,000 costs a year in this type of legal bullshit. There is no way to compete on price in manufacturing anything in the U.S.... We can manufacture supercomputers, advanced medicines, military hardware, because those are so expensive that cost isn't really a concern. But the United States has ensured that manufacturing consumer goods simply isn't viable. U.S. companies would have outsourced years ago if the U.S. had been as industry-hostile as it is now.
I don't think the whole Apollo thing had a lot to do with the development of ICs and microelectronics. Most of that was developed for ICBMs and such. Apollo borrowed a lot of technology from from the ICBM program.
Monitoring and oordinating the launch of thousands of unmanned missles, who need to hit their target with relative precision, all at a few minutes of notice, is something that would drive microelectronics more than the Apollo program. When I was at the Smithsonian not too long ago, looking at their computer artifacts, it seems pretty clear that ICBMs were using advanced microelectronics before the space program.
However, there is a falacy in thinking either one is a great investment. If the money that went into space exploration or military research went directly into research for civilian use, it would be much more productive at producing consumer technology. Especially if the research was being completed by private companies trying to fufill consumer needs and demands.
I would buy a next gen console if I could. No place near me is selling just an Xbox 360 and accessories I want. All the places either don't have the Xbox 360, or are selling it as a $1000 package along with 10 games and 4 controllers and a bunch of crap that I don't really want.
Seriously, when are these companies gonna learn that the vast majority of people aren't going to go on a waiting list, camp out in front of the store, or purchase a bunch of crap we don't need just to help you beta test your product? If you want us to give you our money, then make it easy for us to give you our money.
Don't expect us to think it is some sort of privledge or gift from god to buy your product. It is a console, not antibiotics. There are any number of leisure and entertainment items I could spend my money on instead.
You candy bar analogy is also not valid. I would consider it more like me asking you to invest money in my company and doing a PR campaign to show what you get back for that money ie make a good product and advertise it so that more people will throw money at you.
That's funny, but no one has ever asked me to invest money in NASA before. The government just kind of took the money away from me, without giving me a choice.
So, how do I sell my shares? How can I opt out of purchasing any more shares? Is NASA going to be willing to regulated by the Securities Exchange Commission? Is NASA going to be broken up into smaller companies by the FTC?... after all, it is a monopoly?
Hmmm... somehow I have trouble grasping your whole "investment" analogy.
A better analogy would be if someone pointed a gun to my head, and stole my money... and then promoted his wife's new diamond ring as a "spinoff technology".
This is very similiar to the broken window falacy.
Sure, NASA research can produce useful spinoffs... but so could just researching the spinoff technologies directly (and probably much more efficently). We spend how many billions on space travel? And we get a laser measurement system? That could just have easily been developed by the private sector for a fraction of the cost. Bahh, this is pure propoganda in order to drum up funding. "Look, our NASA technology has civilian uses too! Isn't this wonderful! So don't feel bad about giving up lots of money".
Our decision to fund a space program should be based on our need/want for a space program... not on any possible side benfits, which could be better addressed directly.
Why doesn't NASA licence the technology? Hmmm.... well maybe the technology developed by a government agency, with tax money, belongs to all the taxpayers anyway?
Why doesn't the government trademark the flag and licence that too?
Hydrogen is just a way to store electric energy - you generate electricity, create hydrogen and oxygen for your fuel cells from the electricy. Think of hydrogen as just a form of battery, not an alternative fuel like biofuel. Please don't lump hydrogen technology with unviable things like biofuel.
But farming is an enviornmentally destructive process... REALLY bad. Biodiesel is a great idea if we are talking about making it out of waste products that we weren't going to use anyway (corn cobs, human and animal wastes, etc.), but as a end all replacement for fossil fuels, it is a bad idea. Soil can be depleated, natural land clearcut to make room for more farmland, water sources being overused for irrigation, fertilizer and pesticide run off... farming just isn't an enviornmentaly friendly process people think it is. And in the end it is just an extremly inefficent form of solar power. Biodiesel is currently easier to store than electricity from solar, but with hydrogen fuel cells (which are really just hydrogen batteries) and the like, it is less and less of a problem.
I would rather see nuclear power and solar power as the the replacement for fossil fuels than biodiel.
You are 100% dead on correct about starving people though. There is enough food for everyone.
I have paid close to 200% duy on music I ordered from the U.S... and I have paid 100% duty on video games... this is total cost, so it includes PST, GST, duty, brokrage fees, inspection fees, etc., I do not know the exact breakdown, as I don't have the invoices in front of me. I also used to work for an online retailer in the U.S., and can confirm my experiencies are not unique... out of all our orders to Canada, we couldn't figure out any real hard fast system to help our customers in Canada know how much duty they might pay - The only way we could cover our ass was to warn Canadians that they might in fact pay up to 200% in duty in some cases.
But all that is beside the point. The point is, U.S. customs almost never charge duty (I have never paid duty while living in the U.S.), and Canadian customs charge duty all the time. Canadians aren't going to be able to buy cheap CDs from the U.S., the same way people in the U.S. buy cheap drugs from Canada.
Society as a whole is benefited from the availability of free public schools. I'm surprised that you don't want to give money to the teachers that teach our youth.
It isn't really an issue of public good, or benifiting society as a whole. Nearly all government programs will provide some sort of benifit to someone, in some tiny vauge way at least. Almost every government policy, from the Iraq war to Medicare will be endorsed as "benifiting society" or "being for the public good". The question is if the program in question is the most efficient way to provide for a need, if the costs of such a program are worth the benifits, and if there is any unforseen complication of the program - Usually none of these things are considered by the advocates of a government program (they just declare "You don't support the Iraq War because you want the terrorists to win", or "You want old people to die, that is why you don't support Medicare", and the program becomes a disaster.
For example, "Free Public Schools" != "Government Monopoly Schools". Just because we want all kids to be educated, doesn't mean that we need to do so with a violent government monopoly. There are any number of systems that could garantee every child an education, just like there are any number of ways that music can be funded without a government tax on CDs. Just because education or music is a public need does not justify any action that someone claims provides for that need. I could claim that pagan-style child blood sacrafice will boots our crops, and that the government should require child sacrafice of all farmers, and that anybody that doesn't support the program is "anti-farmer"... but that doesn't mean that sacraficing humans to grow crops is something we should do.
In the case of the United States, the amount of money paid into education is far beyond the results achieved. Most industrialized countries can provide a far better education at a fraction of the cost of the United States educational system - the U.S. is #1 in government educational spending, and at the very bottom of industrialized nations in achedemic performance. The U.S. educational system is failing to provide a proper education to children, yet it is charging more than it costs anywhere else in the world. Clearly, the government taxing and spending a lot of money arguably for education != providing education. The person above is not complaining about having to educate children, they are complaing about a violent monopoly system that compels participation. Clearly, at least in the example of the U.S., forcing people to pay for education does not benifit society.
In the case of Canada, the extra amount of money that is put into the music industry because of this CD tax doesn't seem to be stimulating a brand new cultural explosion of music. Not only does the government of Canada have this system of taxing CDs and redistributing the money to certain record companies, but the Canadaian government has all sorts of other programs in order to promote music and the arts. It subsidizes music, it has it's own government subsidized TV and radio networks to promote music and culture. And what is the effect? Music isn't any cheaper, or more accessible, or better than anywhere else in the world. The justification of this tax is to help produce music, but it is not doing anything of the sort.
Part of the reason why both public education in the U.S., and this whole CD tax for music thing in Canada is such a failure, is that the costs are not paid by those who enjoy the benifits, and that distorts value. Everyone pays a CD tax, even if they are not burning music to the CD... and those people whose music is burned to a CD have no garantee of being paid for the music they produced. In public education, those who pay for the education are not the ones recieving the most benifit... it distorts proper cost/benfit evalutions of the system (meaning, if you are poor, and your kids recieve a crap education, you are not that upset because you didn't pay much... even though
Because Canada has postal nazis who aren't afraid to levy an import fee on just about anything coming in the mail. When I was living in the U.S., I could order stuff worth $5,000, and not pay a cent of duy. Now that I live in Canada, I am not suprised when I have to pay 200%+ duty on things ordered from outside Canada.
If, by "designed to reduce negative distorions of the market mechanism" you mean that the people who create taxes use some sort of vauge "public good" rhetoric to justify them, you are correct.
But there is no reason to believe that any tax causes the market price of something to more accuratly reflect supply and demand, or consumption. Taxes are pretty much just a system for a government (or powerful lobby, such as the music industry, operating through the government) to get revenue... a politician isn't going to say "We are creating this tax because we want your money, bitch!", they are naturally going to give some excuse on how the tax is of great benifit to humanity and anyone who opposes it hates children and puppy-dogs.
In this case, the tax on CD sales goes to powerful music lobbies, and the money is funneled to big corporations. The system distortes the market because the way that the tax money is distributed doesn't nessicarily reflect consumption. The money goes to big record companies, not to who produces the music that a lot of people enjoy. An indie artist could be a very popular download and be enjoyed by millions of people, but recieve no money from this system because they are not part of the big industry machine.
Do you think if the Republican party said "We want you Republicans to go to the Democratic Primary in X State, pack the building full of Republicans, and refuse to leave, in order to sabatoge the Democratic attempts to pick a candidate... so that we can make sure Democrats do not end up on the ballot and our candidate is garanteed a win"... do you think if they said that, that there would be no legal repercussions for the Republics? (or for the Democrats if it was the opposite?). It would most certainly be considered a crime and the people involved would most certainly end up in prison.
When the Democrats did it to the Green Party, it was illegal, and they should go to prison. It was a case where the Democrats were openly, and proudly commiting elecion fraud for everyone to see.
When Democrats sued the Green Party and Libertarian Party to keep them off the ballot, they admitted openly and proudly that the only reason they did so was to keep those parties from getting votes. That is a blatent crime. It is against the law.
And these are a few of the things that the Democratic party does, that are not only against the law, but that the Democratic party proudly admits, openly and freely (they brag about it, in fact). If these people obsessing about voting machines were really concerned about democracy at all, they would demand that charges be filed against the Democratic leadership. This attempt to discredit the voting machines has nothing to do with properly counting votes, and everything to do with trying to spread FUD about elections that the Democrats lost. It is clearly partisan politics, plain and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry... I was more arguing against the typical Slashdot person than you specificly, so I didn't bother to check your sig. I shouldn't have made any assumptions, I apologize.
Actually, gun control in America was invented by the Klu Klux Klan... they wanted to be able to kill black people without black people being able to fight back, so they pressed for a gun licencing scheme which would exclude blacks, by charging a licence fee too expensive for most of the former-slaves to afford, and just general intimidation in the licencing process.
You see, in history, every oppressed minority, or enslaved group has been denied the right to possess weapons. Traditionaly only the upper classes and ruling classes had been allowed to own weapons and be trained in their use. That is why people many diverse people such as Mohandas Ghandi, George Orwell, Malcom X, all felt that citizens should be allowed to be armed.
The "left" in America is really a politically correct version of the "Right". The reason they want all Americans disarmed, is because they know that every oppressed minority and enslaved group was not allowed to own weapons. They intend to make the citizens slaves while the upper class and the ruling class run our lives from above.
Citizen disarmament is the fundamental first step in despotism and totalitarianism, and no person can be against slavery, genocide, and oppression and support gun control. Citizen disarmenet is the universal first step to facism.
You are a facist and totalitarian... you are either just too smart to admit it, or too dumb to understand it.
The militia is any group of able bodied adults.
"Well Regulated" simply means that the militia isn't going around looting, or hanging people without trial, etc.
Anonymous speech means no one can track it, that there is no way you can be found out.
If the government requires that all speech can be tracked to a person, it is not anonymous. The government may forgo it's power to find out who you are (the same way a cop doesn't have to give you a speeding ticket if you are speeding). Most of the time the government will care less when some nitwit posts "Fuck Amerikka! Dubya is hitler!" or something like that.
But at some time, somewhere, someone is going to have some real dirt on a politician, or some real incriminating evidence that could threaten someone in power. Someone might have some very powerful arguements against a certain government policy, and be influencing a lot of people. And that is what these laws are designed to go after.
Remember, even if you can post anonymously, even if you can get around the restrictions, these laws are for going after you. They are for going after the blogs, forums, etc., that allow you to post your messages.
The trouble is, both sides of the political spectrum in America have very strong reasons to support censorship. Republicans and Conservatives of course want to ban speech that promotes promiscuity, homosexuality, or questions Christianity. Of course, the Left will stand against this type of censorship up and only until you tell them that we need censorship to ban speech that demeans or insults women, "hate speech", pornography, or speech that "exploits" children (like soda advertisments), or paid advertising that questions the infailability of elected officials.
No one is willing to stand up for 100% free speech. No-one is willing to be called a "Satanist" or "Nazi" or whatever for standing up for controversial speech. So once you accept that speech should be regulated (which you do, if you voted Republican or Democrat), well, it is only a tiny step to regulating like this bill does. Everyone wants to blame the other party, and no one wants to take responsiblity for being pro-censorship. You can't be fully anti-censorship until you take responsiblity for the censorship your OWN party supports.
Right now there is only one party in the U.S. that doesn't support censorship (the Libertarian party), and needless to say that party or it's idea's aren't very popular.
While what you are saying IS true, America IS destroying itself with rediculous legislation... America's saving grace seems to be that other industrialized nations are doing the same thing.
I mean, European governments and the EU have no shortage of retarded legislation restricting free speech, commerce, and privacy on the internet. And places like China definitly don't have speech internet legislation that I would want to emulate, although they tend to be moving towards more freedom (where the U.S. and Europe are moving towards less).
It would be very reasuring if the current Totalitarian insanity was was somehow limited to the United States... but Europe especially seems eager to mandate and legislate on virtually all aspects of human life. The U.S. won't be irrelevant so long as everyone else in the world is knocking on Big Brother's door too.
Hey brother, perhaps not. There is a significant difference between our age and the age of our grandfathers. But as an American, I only blame ourselves. Yes, the products we purchase nowadays are different than the products our grandparents purchased (yes, my grandparents still own the refrigerator that they owned when they were married, although they purchased five since then they keep the first refrigerator they ever owned in the basement and it works perfectly... and their tube based hifi they still have in the living room would be a modern hifi-fanatic's wet dream), but the significant difference is how hard we work for it all. Seriously, no-one in America works as hard as our grandfathers... no-one has either worked as hard, nor made as many sacrifices for his family (my grandfather managed, on a working class factory workers income, so send his children to the same private boarding schools at millionaires and president's back in the day)...
If you are American (which I assume you are), you got to understand that ultimately we ourselves have only ourselves to blame. We just aren't the same people who built the model T, or invented the modern television, or created Hollywood. It isn't anyone's fault but ourselves that we no longer are the center of the industrial world. WE got lazy, and arrogant, and egotistical. and our present state isn't the fault of the Chinese or Indians or anyone else but our selves!
If they can produce it cheaper and better than us, it is because they are better. They won. They are the shit! Like I learned playing sports in the U.S.A. when I was a kid (I don't live in the U.S.A. any longer), they won! They got the better of us! And we should respect then for it, not hate them for it! The last bit of honor and self-respect we can have is to know they are the winners, and treat them with the proper respect that they truly deserve.
Fuck the non-Americans that are reading this... we should know that every civilization that has ever existed has had it's time, and it is not longer our time. We are the British, or Portuguese of our era Either our children fight and struggle and sacrifice to be the best, or we end up as we deserve. Do you undestand. Protectionism isn't the solution. We either win fairly, or we are lost.
That is completly false. Almost all economic regulation has been concieved and supported by large buisness and the ultra-rich. In a 100% free market economy, companies reach the natural limits of growth... there is an equalibrium point were there is diminished returns for getting any bigger. Smaller, hungry, and more competitive companies rise up and take advantage of the natural entropy of large institutions.
That is why corporations and the ultra rich have always supported "progressive" causes and government regulation. The government regulation allows the government to restrict competition, recieve direct or indirect subsidies, and escape the harsh realities of the free market.
100% free market capitalism hasn't been able to sustain itself, because capitalists aren't "Capitalists". The free market is the most cruel and unforgiving towards capitalists. Big Corporations and the ultra-rich are dependent on government. Big corporations can not exist without government. And so big corporations support big government, regulation, licencing, and centralized control almost universally.
Unfortunatly, when we allowed education to become nationalized for all practicle purposes, and the media to be regulated by the government, our only source of information is information approved by the corporations telling us that government exists to help or protect us.
The amount of goods and services that a person can afford per hour of labor has been steadily increasing. Your average middle class worker now can afford more food, more housing, more automobile, and certainly more consumer electronics than he ever could.
... Yeah, there are exceptions, you CAN probably start a little web design buisness, or open a video or music shop, or a resteraunt for less money... or possibly even a super highly specialized item... but you are NOT going to be manufacturing a consumer product in the U.S. for less than a couple million - and that leaves out the vast majority of Americans from opening a buisness. That means less competition for big buisness., etc.
Confirm this for yourself. Find out what the average wage was 30 years ago or 40 years ago. Look in an old catalog, and look at what someone could purchase with their wages then, and compare it with average wages and what they can afford to purchase now. Aside from things like big screen TVs and computers that obviously we can afford more of now, we can now afford more clothes, more lawnmowers, more washing machines, more sofas, etc. We can afford to eat out more, purchase more pre-packaged/advertized food products. People can now afford better housing. People can pretty much afford much more of everything.
You do understand that cheaper goods = higher income, right? There is no difference if a shirt cost $10, and you make $10 an hour, or if a shirt cost $5, and you make $5 an hour, right?
Americans today are the wealthiest people in the world, living in the most wealthy period of history. This is undenyably the truth.
There is something to be said about the so called gap between the "rich" and "poor", but a better way to describe it would be the gap between the "Richest", and the "rich". It is true that the richest group of people have seen their real consumption increase much faster than the middle class or poor. And unlike a lot of people, I would fully agree with you that disparity between the rich and the richest is undesirable. It would be much better to see income increase evenly amoung all people.
But this disparity doesn't have much to do with foriegn trade. It has more to do with the minimum capital required to do buisness in the United States. 50 years ago, lets say you wanted to open a buisness, let say a small factory that machines parts. Such a buisness would be fairly easy for a middle class person to start. But not so today. The cost of OSHA compliance, compliance with local/state/country/federal enviornmental laws and hiring the experts, lawyers, to ensure compliance, insuring that you comply with all the non-enviornment local/state/country/federal laws, ensuring that you meet all the conditions that your workplace is handicapped accessible, making sure you are not only in full compliance with the 75,000 pages of tax laws, but that you can prove to the IRS you are in full compliance... making sure you are an "equal oportunity employer" (this wouldn't be so bad if it was simply banning discrimination, but it is thousands of pages of rules and regulations that can be quite counter-inuitive, and you are going to have to hire a lawyer to deal with them), and lets not forget the cost of liability insurance, because people in America love to deal with them.
Basicly, you are talking a cost of several million dollars to start a significant buisness in the U.S.
Bush might not understand the problem, but most protectionists and Bush critics don't understand the problem either.
We are not losing jobs because of outsourcing... our economy isn't declining because of foriegn competition... and certainly having the government restrict trade with the rest of the world is not going to solve our problems.
The reason the U.S. is declining, is because we are lazy, our education system is failing (despite the fact that the U.S. has the best funded primary and secondary education system in the world! Our education system isn't failing because "Bush cut funding"), we are hostile to buisness and industry and do everything to discourage economic production, and we want the government to provide everything for us so our country is borrowing lots of money (so our trade partners purchase U.S. Treasury Bonds instead of purchasing American made goods).
The only thing that has kept our economy viable for so long is free trade with other countries. If we resort to protectionism, we will cause another Great Depression like the last time we resorted to protectionism.
Yes, but we are living in a retarded country if you think invading Iraq, or using the NSA to spy on Americans, or creating a prescription drug plan while our country runs trillion dollar deficits, is the reasonable middle of the road, populist thing to do... but letting foriegners build our software or run our ports is some sinister "conspiracy" that everyone fears.
The Dubai ports deal and trade with India is one of the few things that Dubya gets right.
But you are claiming that more government management of the economy is the solution to government mismanagement of the economy.
Housing boom is caused by lowered interest rates, DECIDED BY THE GOVERNMENT. Government bureacracy is the government of course. Armed services is the government.
So, a draconian isolationist protectionist "iron curtain" (what would be a good name for an American "Iron Curtian", for China is was the "Bamboo Curtain"... maybe it would be the "Particle Board and Plexiglass Curtain"? Anyway, I am straying from the topic.) won't nessicarily help us economicly.
Therefore I suggest that the USA should keep and nourish in the USA some minimum, perhaps of 20-30%, of the industries that are outsourced.
... However, in the first year they opened for buisness, they were sited for "dumping industrial waste". The "industrial waste" was that they had a leaky hose faucet at the side of their building. Because the building was designated an industrial building, anything that came out of the building was "industrial waste", even though it was harmless tap water, and only leaking a few drops a day. They couldn't just take the tap out, because the "system" needed to go through "industrial de-commissioning". So all in all the costs for all the work, fines, legal advice, etc., were around $500,000... This kind of random cost must be paid for in the cost of the manufactured goods, and because of this the foriegn goods are still cheaper.
... We can manufacture supercomputers, advanced medicines, military hardware, because those are so expensive that cost isn't really a concern. But the United States has ensured that manufacturing consumer goods simply isn't viable. U.S. companies would have outsourced years ago if the U.S. had been as industry-hostile as it is now.
You don't think the U.S.A. should do this, you think the GOVERNMENT should do this. U.S.A. != U.S. government. You are not talking about a social movement to accomplish your goals, you are talking about a government program that would have vast costs (not only the economic cost of paying more for items manufactured in America, but the cost of survailence and proving compliance), and the extreme dangers of selective prosecusion, mis-use of survalience (for example, when the Homeland Production Board is wiretapping the private phones of company employees to enforce this law, or when your email is being screened to look for potential "Unpatriotic Consumerism", will they misuse this information?) Let's say you forget to fill out government form #128437B Section 2 and give the Homeland Production Board 6 months notice, when you purchased electronic components for a friends computer, are you going to be willing to do the time in prison?
I will make a suggestion - perhaps people are off-shoring their production because the U.S. is so hostile towards buisness, so regulated, so controlled, so prone to selective prosecution and political manipulation and such. For example, you mentioned that flu vaccine is no longer manufactured in the United States. Do you know why? Because the cost of lawsuits, and the extreme costs of meeting U.S. regulations of the manufacture of flu vaccine, make it virtually impossible to manufacture in the United States. The laws and liability don't make us any safer, because we are purchasing it from countries where the law is less strict - they just garantee we will outsource.
If the cost to manufacture a widget in China is $2, and the cost of compliance with U.S. law to manufacture the item in the U.S. is $44 per item (from liability insurance, licencing, inspection fees, defending against frivolous lawsuits, etc.) not including labor, materials, etc., it is just unviable to produce the item in the United States.
This would also turn the 'just in time manufacturing' on its head because a minimum amount of raw materials and goods would have to be kept in the pipeline.
Automation and "just in time" manufacturing isn't going to help us. For a true example, there is a company in the U.S. that does manufacuring of clothing - they have an almost fully automated system, and in theory they can make clothing cheaper than some sweatshop in Indonesia, and because it is all computer controlled they can do it in much smaller batches and with orders of magnitude more turnaround time than in the U.S.
Lets say you have a small manufacturing plant, with maybe 6 or 7 employees, not some big corporation or anything. Figure about $500,000 to $1,000,000 costs a year in this type of legal bullshit. There is no way to compete on price in manufacturing anything in the U.S.
I don't think the whole Apollo thing had a lot to do with the development of ICs and microelectronics. Most of that was developed for ICBMs and such. Apollo borrowed a lot of technology from from the ICBM program.
Monitoring and oordinating the launch of thousands of unmanned missles, who need to hit their target with relative precision, all at a few minutes of notice, is something that would drive microelectronics more than the Apollo program. When I was at the Smithsonian not too long ago, looking at their computer artifacts, it seems pretty clear that ICBMs were using advanced microelectronics before the space program.
However, there is a falacy in thinking either one is a great investment. If the money that went into space exploration or military research went directly into research for civilian use, it would be much more productive at producing consumer technology. Especially if the research was being completed by private companies trying to fufill consumer needs and demands.
I would buy a next gen console if I could. No place near me is selling just an Xbox 360 and accessories I want. All the places either don't have the Xbox 360, or are selling it as a $1000 package along with 10 games and 4 controllers and a bunch of crap that I don't really want.
Seriously, when are these companies gonna learn that the vast majority of people aren't going to go on a waiting list, camp out in front of the store, or purchase a bunch of crap we don't need just to help you beta test your product? If you want us to give you our money, then make it easy for us to give you our money.
Don't expect us to think it is some sort of privledge or gift from god to buy your product. It is a console, not antibiotics. There are any number of leisure and entertainment items I could spend my money on instead.
You candy bar analogy is also not valid. I would consider it more like me asking you to invest money in my company and doing a PR campaign to show what you get back for that money ie make a good product and advertise it so that more people will throw money at you.
That's funny, but no one has ever asked me to invest money in NASA before. The government just kind of took the money away from me, without giving me a choice.
So, how do I sell my shares? How can I opt out of purchasing any more shares? Is NASA going to be willing to regulated by the Securities Exchange Commission? Is NASA going to be broken up into smaller companies by the FTC?... after all, it is a monopoly?
Hmmm... somehow I have trouble grasping your whole "investment" analogy.
A better analogy would be if someone pointed a gun to my head, and stole my money... and then promoted his wife's new diamond ring as a "spinoff technology".
This is very similiar to the broken window falacy.
Sure, NASA research can produce useful spinoffs... but so could just researching the spinoff technologies directly (and probably much more efficently). We spend how many billions on space travel? And we get a laser measurement system? That could just have easily been developed by the private sector for a fraction of the cost. Bahh, this is pure propoganda in order to drum up funding. "Look, our NASA technology has civilian uses too! Isn't this wonderful! So don't feel bad about giving up lots of money".
Our decision to fund a space program should be based on our need/want for a space program... not on any possible side benfits, which could be better addressed directly.
Why doesn't NASA licence the technology? Hmmm.... well maybe the technology developed by a government agency, with tax money, belongs to all the taxpayers anyway?
Why doesn't the government trademark the flag and licence that too?
Hydrogen is just a way to store electric energy - you generate electricity, create hydrogen and oxygen for your fuel cells from the electricy. Think of hydrogen as just a form of battery, not an alternative fuel like biofuel. Please don't lump hydrogen technology with unviable things like biofuel.
But farming is an enviornmentally destructive process... REALLY bad. Biodiesel is a great idea if we are talking about making it out of waste products that we weren't going to use anyway (corn cobs, human and animal wastes, etc.), but as a end all replacement for fossil fuels, it is a bad idea. Soil can be depleated, natural land clearcut to make room for more farmland, water sources being overused for irrigation, fertilizer and pesticide run off... farming just isn't an enviornmentaly friendly process people think it is. And in the end it is just an extremly inefficent form of solar power. Biodiesel is currently easier to store than electricity from solar, but with hydrogen fuel cells (which are really just hydrogen batteries) and the like, it is less and less of a problem.
I would rather see nuclear power and solar power as the the replacement for fossil fuels than biodiel.
You are 100% dead on correct about starving people though. There is enough food for everyone.
I have paid close to 200% duy on music I ordered from the U.S... and I have paid 100% duty on video games... this is total cost, so it includes PST, GST, duty, brokrage fees, inspection fees, etc., I do not know the exact breakdown, as I don't have the invoices in front of me. I also used to work for an online retailer in the U.S., and can confirm my experiencies are not unique... out of all our orders to Canada, we couldn't figure out any real hard fast system to help our customers in Canada know how much duty they might pay - The only way we could cover our ass was to warn Canadians that they might in fact pay up to 200% in duty in some cases.
But all that is beside the point. The point is, U.S. customs almost never charge duty (I have never paid duty while living in the U.S.), and Canadian customs charge duty all the time. Canadians aren't going to be able to buy cheap CDs from the U.S., the same way people in the U.S. buy cheap drugs from Canada.
Society as a whole is benefited from the availability of free public schools. I'm surprised that you don't want to give money to the teachers that teach our youth.
It isn't really an issue of public good, or benifiting society as a whole. Nearly all government programs will provide some sort of benifit to someone, in some tiny vauge way at least. Almost every government policy, from the Iraq war to Medicare will be endorsed as "benifiting society" or "being for the public good". The question is if the program in question is the most efficient way to provide for a need, if the costs of such a program are worth the benifits, and if there is any unforseen complication of the program - Usually none of these things are considered by the advocates of a government program (they just declare "You don't support the Iraq War because you want the terrorists to win", or "You want old people to die, that is why you don't support Medicare", and the program becomes a disaster.
For example, "Free Public Schools" != "Government Monopoly Schools". Just because we want all kids to be educated, doesn't mean that we need to do so with a violent government monopoly. There are any number of systems that could garantee every child an education, just like there are any number of ways that music can be funded without a government tax on CDs. Just because education or music is a public need does not justify any action that someone claims provides for that need. I could claim that pagan-style child blood sacrafice will boots our crops, and that the government should require child sacrafice of all farmers, and that anybody that doesn't support the program is "anti-farmer"... but that doesn't mean that sacraficing humans to grow crops is something we should do.
In the case of the United States, the amount of money paid into education is far beyond the results achieved. Most industrialized countries can provide a far better education at a fraction of the cost of the United States educational system - the U.S. is #1 in government educational spending, and at the very bottom of industrialized nations in achedemic performance. The U.S. educational system is failing to provide a proper education to children, yet it is charging more than it costs anywhere else in the world. Clearly, the government taxing and spending a lot of money arguably for education != providing education. The person above is not complaining about having to educate children, they are complaing about a violent monopoly system that compels participation. Clearly, at least in the example of the U.S., forcing people to pay for education does not benifit society.
In the case of Canada, the extra amount of money that is put into the music industry because of this CD tax doesn't seem to be stimulating a brand new cultural explosion of music. Not only does the government of Canada have this system of taxing CDs and redistributing the money to certain record companies, but the Canadaian government has all sorts of other programs in order to promote music and the arts. It subsidizes music, it has it's own government subsidized TV and radio networks to promote music and culture. And what is the effect? Music isn't any cheaper, or more accessible, or better than anywhere else in the world. The justification of this tax is to help produce music, but it is not doing anything of the sort.
Part of the reason why both public education in the U.S., and this whole CD tax for music thing in Canada is such a failure, is that the costs are not paid by those who enjoy the benifits, and that distorts value. Everyone pays a CD tax, even if they are not burning music to the CD... and those people whose music is burned to a CD have no garantee of being paid for the music they produced. In public education, those who pay for the education are not the ones recieving the most benifit... it distorts proper cost/benfit evalutions of the system (meaning, if you are poor, and your kids recieve a crap education, you are not that upset because you didn't pay much... even though
Because Canada has postal nazis who aren't afraid to levy an import fee on just about anything coming in the mail. When I was living in the U.S., I could order stuff worth $5,000, and not pay a cent of duy. Now that I live in Canada, I am not suprised when I have to pay 200%+ duty on things ordered from outside Canada.
If, by "designed to reduce negative distorions of the market mechanism" you mean that the people who create taxes use some sort of vauge "public good" rhetoric to justify them, you are correct.
But there is no reason to believe that any tax causes the market price of something to more accuratly reflect supply and demand, or consumption. Taxes are pretty much just a system for a government (or powerful lobby, such as the music industry, operating through the government) to get revenue... a politician isn't going to say "We are creating this tax because we want your money, bitch!", they are naturally going to give some excuse on how the tax is of great benifit to humanity and anyone who opposes it hates children and puppy-dogs.
In this case, the tax on CD sales goes to powerful music lobbies, and the money is funneled to big corporations. The system distortes the market because the way that the tax money is distributed doesn't nessicarily reflect consumption. The money goes to big record companies, not to who produces the music that a lot of people enjoy. An indie artist could be a very popular download and be enjoyed by millions of people, but recieve no money from this system because they are not part of the big industry machine.
Really? It isn't against the law?
Do you think if the Republican party said "We want you Republicans to go to the Democratic Primary in X State, pack the building full of Republicans, and refuse to leave, in order to sabatoge the Democratic attempts to pick a candidate... so that we can make sure Democrats do not end up on the ballot and our candidate is garanteed a win"... do you think if they said that, that there would be no legal repercussions for the Republics? (or for the Democrats if it was the opposite?). It would most certainly be considered a crime and the people involved would most certainly end up in prison.
When the Democrats did it to the Green Party, it was illegal, and they should go to prison. It was a case where the Democrats were openly, and proudly commiting elecion fraud for everyone to see.
When Democrats sued the Green Party and Libertarian Party to keep them off the ballot, they admitted openly and proudly that the only reason they did so was to keep those parties from getting votes. That is a blatent crime. It is against the law.
And these are a few of the things that the Democratic party does, that are not only against the law, but that the Democratic party proudly admits, openly and freely (they brag about it, in fact). If these people obsessing about voting machines were really concerned about democracy at all, they would demand that charges be filed against the Democratic leadership. This attempt to discredit the voting machines has nothing to do with properly counting votes, and everything to do with trying to spread FUD about elections that the Democrats lost. It is clearly partisan politics, plain and simple.