Hey, don't try to attach your views to the arguement for freedom. While the freedom loving persons should despise hate-speech laws because they are really designed to censor and limit political debate... restricting immigration is also an authoritarian act. While I respect your right to critize immigration, free immigration is an important part of a free society. Restricting how/when and where people can live is just as bad as restricting free-speech.
Could you imagine how bad food would suck in England if it wasn't for immigration? Give me a curry over tra and scones any day!:)
Nuclear power plants DONT fail really really badly. Chernobal is the only example of a catastrophic failure, and the death toll was comparible to a bad chemical spill (remember bhopal india?), and orders of magnitude less that the most destructive hydoelectric mishaps (230,000 died in the 1975 hunan dam bursts in China, and thousands die in dam accidents every year throughout the world, certainly more than were killed from Chernobal). 50,000 people die each year from diseases related to burning fossil fuels in North America alone (and that is without any mishap).
Nuclear power is the safest power generation system ever put into real large-scale use.
Of course it is fashionable to talk about individual rights and to rally against the state with regards to the "War on Terror", but for most people it is pure hipocracy.
Most people who hate the "War on Terror" agree with just about every other authoritarian policy modern governments take... whether it is economic central planning, "hate speech" laws or "decentcy laws", campaign finance reform, gun control, public schooling, national health care, whatever...
The idea that citicens must give up their individual rights and hand over power to the state in order to bring collective security and safety is the fundamental ideal of collectivism and socialism. How is the government taking your money by force, and then taking all individual choice out of healthcare and giving it to the state, somehow different that the basic ideals of the "War on Terror"? If you support government survailence and control of speech to protect people from being "offended", then how can you really be upset if the government curtails liberties to protect people from being blown up? Why were leftist giddy and cheering when the ATF blows up a church with 100 kids inside inside because "they might have guns", but are outraged when they are searched at an airport. The think Castro is the greatest guy in the world, even though nothing in the Patroit Act or the "War on Terror" even matches the police state of Cuba.
Don't get me wrong. I am not defending the police state... but then again, I am not a socialist or collectivist. I beleive individual rights are more important that collective safety. So it is consistant with my worldview. But socialists and collectivists need to realize that the police state is the ultimate outcome of their ideology.
"WHAT? You don't know me? Why, I am famous. Yes I am so, so famous! You must be an idiot if you don't know my name! Why I am your worse nightmare! I said that in a very famous online flame war! I am the famous open source guy! I am up there with Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds. You have heard of them, but you never head of me? But I am famous! Your an idiot if you don't know who I am!"
What a pompous ass!
Can't we get some open source advocates with charisma? Maybe we could all pitch in and hire an out of work TV actor to be our open source spokesperson, instead of the usual juvenile socially disaffected geeks.
Canada has the population of a large American state like Florida or California. Do you think Canada is helpless to respond to natural disasters because it isn't part of some giant centrally planned network to protect 300 million people? Do you think their response would be better or worse than FEMA?
Sweden has a population not much more than Louisiana... and there is certainly no centralized European system like FEMA that would come to their rescue. So which place would you rather be in an emergency?
I garantee you that emergency response would be better in both countries, and I garantee you it isn't because they spend more money.
Bigger isn't always better. Central planning is a disaster, because there are natural limits on size and complexity of a coherent entity. You are never going to make an efficient and effective national government agency, because such a thing is not possible. A national government for a country of 300 million people is like the giant dinosour: most resources must be spent just keeping it alive . That is why we have state and local governments where are supposed to be able to make decisions for themselves (well, we also have state governments to prevent totalitarians, which anyone who is being forced out of New Orleans at gunpoint, having property and weapons confiscated, and being taken to FEMA managed Soviet style prison camps can attest is also a problem).
The trouble is that people now worship government. Suggesting that we take power away from the federal government and giving it to local people to decide their own fate is tantamount to calling Jesus a homosexual in our culture. It is blasphamy against the state.
Do you remember as a kid reading books about dinosours? Remember the largest of those huge, monsterous dinosours (things like a Brontosaurous). They were so large that nearly all their time was spent eating, just to provide enough energy for it to continue living. It had to live in swamps and water because it was so heavy that it could barely stand on its own. It required so much resources that it was locked in to a certain ecologic nitch, and the slightest change could have disasterous effects.
Also, being a Slashdot reader, you much know a little bit about programing. So you know that the bigger the software project, the more source code and the greater the complexity, the more difficult it is to debug and the more resources that are required just to manage the project and the source code, and the harder it is to make secure. Finally, things get so big, bloated, complicated, and unmanagable, and you have Microsoft Windows.
That is true for all dynamic systems in the universe. The larger and more complicated a system is, the more resources it takes just to fight entropy.
People forget that yes, even the most sacred and revered holy institution in our culture, the government, must obey the laws of the Universe. While most people have absolute faith in the omnipotence of the state, things like complexity and entrophy effect the government just like anything else.
And so, when you create a vast huge complex government beurocracy like FEMA (and FEMA is part of an even more vast, huge, complicated beurocratic structure), most of the resources of FEMA are going to be spent preserving the buerocratic structure, securing funding, lobbying and public relations, etc... And giant Federal organization like FEMA must spend most of its resources just surviving, and can be disrupted by even the slightlest change in it's enviornment (like a large nation emergency). It is inevitable that FEMA will be nearly impotent in situations like this. Give it more personel, more money, more power, put a commitee of "fact-finders" to supervise, it won't help.
So no, FEMA is not living in a cave, the middle of the desert or anything like that. FEMA is working at maximum efficency and effectivness to do it's job.
But thing that will never enter the typical persons mind, you will never hear on TV, and will most certainly never be considered by the government is that maybe the whole idea of having one monsterous FEDERAL emergency management agency would be far less effective that have a plurality of highly adapted and streamlined local emergency management agencies.
If Yahoo decides to help China enforce it's laws, people will be outraged that Yahoo is cooperating with am oppressive regime. However, if Yahoo didn't cooperate with Chinese laws, the very same people would be outraged about "outlaw companies subverting soveriegn governments", and it would be seen as "Western Imperialism" or "American Arrogance".
Notice how there is absolutly no anger whatsoever at the Chinese government, only at Yahoo for simply RESPECTING THE LAWS of that government!
The same people who thing Yahoo is evil for turning over information to China, collected IN China, as required by law, are the same people who demand that the EU start selling advanced offensive weapons systems to China. I guess it is totally evil for people to obey China's laws when they are in China, but totally OK to help China to bomb other countries.
No, I haven't noticed the trend of increasingly powerful storms. There doesn't appear to be any clear evidence that is happening. I HAVE noticed the trend of increasingly large human populations, expanding to ever more areas of undeveloped land, and increasing the chances that a disaster will happen in a populated area.
Re:And yet Europe seems to be doing fine
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Sexually liberated Europe? Would that be Portugal where abortion is illegal? Or the UK were hardcore pornography is illegal? And I am not even mentioning Turkish or Eastern European laws and attitudes, but I could have a field day with those!
A few western european capitals are pretty progressive and that is to be admired, but most of Europe is 30 years behind rural Mississippi in it's attitudes toward sex.
More pro-censorship Propoganda.
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Paul considers this, but her the book discusses concrete harm, and she argues that civil liberties are not absolute where one person's rights hurt other people (not many argue for their right to cry "fire" in a crowded theater, for example).
So typical of modern day advocates of censorship and totalitarianism. If you want to ban a certain type of speech or expression you don't like, create "scientific evidence" that it causes some sort of harm, and of course reference the tired, old "fire in a crowded theater" arguement.
Of course any "scientific evidence" is total BS. No one can even come to any sort of definition about what "pornography" is (many people argue that the musical "Hair", or "Herbal Essenses" TV commercials, or safe sex pamphlets, or comic books, or top-40 hip-hop music, wardwrobe malfunctions, or gay pride parades, are pornographic). Given that there is no objective way to even classify pornography, and that the term is applied to virtually anything that someone wants censored, and given that it is virtually impossible to do things like double blind testing, there is absolutly no way anybody can make any sort of generalizations about "pornography" and claim they are in any way scientific or objective.
The real story in this is how in America, as well as Canada and Western Europe, liberal ideals such as Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Expression have come under attack by the intelectuals who used to champion those ideas. What is more disturbing that pornography is how intellectuals like Paul have almost universaly come to rabidly endorse total state control of speech and expression. If people are worried about the mainstreaming of pornography, they need to be much more worried about the mainstreaming of totalitarianism.
Yes, but there is musical innovation happening with guitars. People are constantly doing new things with guitars.
Where as the 303 sound has totally stagnated. The 303 was remarkable because it was this cheap little synth that cats could buy for next to nothing and create sounds that the makers of the 303 never intended. It was part of the whole philosophy of black urban youth taking this discarded technology and turning into something remarkable, a kind of metaphor for discarded Urban areas like Detroit and Chicago that spawned Techno and House music respectivly.
But now the 303 isn't a cheap synth for underground producers... it is an expensive synth for collectors that creates a sound that stopped being innovative ten years ago. It is not the instrument that the Juan Atkins or Derek May of the 21st century is going to use, it is for pretensious wankers... it is like collecting a Stratovarius.
You are ignoring the increased economy of mass production. The system cost $100,000 now, but it would be a fraction of that cost if every pool had one.
The high cost comes from the fact that the development cost has to be recouped from sales of the item. So if it cost $10,000,000 to develop, and you only sell 10 of them, there is a cost of $100,000 for each one just for development. If you sold one for all 7.6 million pools in the country, the development cost is less than a big mac.
That is why I can afford a laptop more powerful than a NASA supercomputer in the 1960s, or I can make a long distance phone call for $0.05 a minute that used to cost $5.00 (not adjusted for inflation... it would cost even more with inflation) a minute in the 1960s.
But yes, I agree with your premise, even if your arguement is flawed. Because any cost is essentially paid for by the labor and toil of humans, and because there is an opportunity cost to everything, there is in fact a price on human life even if we find it distastful to admit it.
If you are trying to say that blocking an IP for a country is somehow comparable to say, South African apartied, or segregation in the U.S. South, or not letting women vote in Saudi Arabia, or any of the horrors we normally think about when someone mentions "discrimination", then you are crazy! Absolutly crazy!
I just entered a contest online for Coca Cola. The contest is only open to residents of Canada. Are you calling than discrimination? Coca Cola Canada is running the contest, and they have decided to only open it to people in thier market. I don't see anything unethical about that at all.
If I make a phone call to China, I will pay more money than a phone call to somewhere in Canada. Don't you consider that discrimination against China? NO! China is farther away, and outside the national infrastructure, so it makes perfect sense to charge more for a call to china.
If you are in the U.S., and you visit Canada, you can do so without a passport (you only need a photo ID or birth cirtificate). If you visit Canada from China, you will need a passport. Is that discrimination?
Likewise, if I run a buisness that ships fruitcakes to North America, and if hacking attempts into my server from China are causing problems, then it isn't discrimination to block Chinese IPs. If I am running a blog site for my friends to read, and I don't have any friends living in South Korea, there is nothing wrong with banning those IPs.
What you are calling "discrimination" would make most of the tax, immigration, and social services of nearly every country in the world "discrimination".
The Chinese GOVERNMENT is blocking sites, and it is blocking sites that it doesn't own. It is an act of coersion being done to unwilling participants (the site viewer wants to view the page, and the site-owner wants to show the page).
That is a whole different world from a site-owner blocking ips from certain countries. The site-owner ONWS THE SITE... the server is his own private property. If he does not want to server information to certain IPs, that is fully his perogative. Just like if I owned a mail-order buisness, I can say "I only ship products to cetain countries".
While Chavez is making some token attempts to help people, if real significant portion of oil revenues were being used to help the poor they could garantee every person in Venezuela western style medical care, diet, and education. There are serious questions about were all that money is going.
The main reason why people outside Venezuela love him so much is not because he is some kind of people's hero, it is because they like his anti-American rhetoric. It gives people in countries married to the U.S. economicly and politically a vicarious thrill to have Chavez stand up to the U.S. when their own leaders will not. Chavez could be running death squads all over the country (and some have even made the allegation), and I don't think anyone would take issue with it as long as he kept up the anti-American rhetoric.
But 100 years ago, people would have the common sense not to build their homes in flood plains and in hurricane prone areas.
When the government started garanting insurance for what is stupid behavior, they eliminated any person cost for building a home in an area where such disasters are inevitable. It is the government insurance that caused the problem in the first place.
If a private insurance company won't insure something, you can damn well be sure it is for a reason: BECAUSE A DISASTER IS INEVITABLE, AND THE COST OF INSURANCE WILL NOT COVER THE PAYOUTS.
American taxpayers are essentially subsidizing disasters.
Yes... except that instead of spending hundreds of millions building a stadium that does a mediocre job of acting as a shelter, they could build an excellent shelter for tens of millions.
MOST real enviornmentalists are NOT totalitarian or left-wing. But the most vocal subsection of enviornmentalists are practicly hardcore Stalinists. And so people who are concerned about totalitarianism, will naturally be hostile towards the enviornmental movement, even though the silent majority of people concerned about the enviornment are not totalitarian.
If you want to rally the average joe behind the enviornmental movement, the enviornmental movement must give up its anti-capitalist, anti-free-market, anti-American, pro-command-economy, pro-state assumptions.
The catch is what you mean by "shouldn't we do our best to counteract it's effects as much as possible?".
When people say "shouldn't we do something to stop it?", they really mean "shouldn't we give the government vast new expanded powers to regulate society, because only the government authority is efficient and trustworthy enough to solve the problem of pollution". The concept of massive government regulation and central-planning are implicit in what you are saying, because absolutly no-one of any political persuation wants to stop people from voluntarily acting to stop global warming.
If someone doesn't support the Patriot Act, or G. W. Bush's "War on Terror", that doesn't mean they are a terrorist or support terrorism. It means that: A) They don't think the Patriot Act or the G. W. Bush's "War on Terror" is an effective policy in combating terrorism and/or B) They feel the solution to the problem is worse than the problem itself (i.e. bombing cities, government servialence without a warrent, etc., are actually worse than the terrorist acts they are meant to stop).
When G. W. Bush and right-wing totalitarians stir up sensationalism and fear of an "impending terrorist nuclear attack", they are provoking an emotional response in order to get people to agree to expanded government powers they would normaly be skeptical about. And to squeltch any sort of debate about what we should do about a very real terrorist threat... When people say "shouldn't we do out best to stop terrorism as best as possible" , there is a hidden assumption that there is only one succesful way to combat terrorism, and that anyone who doesn't support it supports terrorism.
And the same thing is true about the left-wing totalitarians. It is clear that global warming is going to be a problem, and by sensationalistic fear-mongering about "impending ecological disaster", they can try to get people out of fear and desperation to agree to expanded government regulation and control of the economy. Instead of having a serious debate about what we should do to reverse global warming... central-planning and top-down government control is presented as the "only solution", and anyone who disagrees with those policies is an "eco-terrorist".
If the so-called enviornmentalists really want to do something about global-warming, they are going to have to stop using global-warming and the enviornment as a pretense for promoting their political, economic, and social agenda. No sane person on the planet wants to wait around for the enviornment to be destroyed. But when the only solution presented to us is totalitarianism (or at least what we percieve to be totalitarianism), you are naturally going to have the resistance and skepticism you see from many people on slashdot. We can read the assumptions in your statements, and those make us very worried.
There isn't going to be a permanent state of affairs of American companies offshoring professional jobs in order to get cheap labor.
It is simple supply and demand. If the demand for skilled Indian labor increases, and the supply of skilled indian labor doesn't expand to meet the demand, price will go up. Eventually, it will go up to about the same amount as it is here.
And, because it is SKILLED labor, these people are smart enough to make sure they don't spend the rest of their life in a sweat shop. They WILL find a way to increase thier standard of living over time.
At one time Japan was the place where low quality products were produced by extremly cheap labor. 30 years later and Japanese skilled workers make higher income than in the U.S and their product is considered superior. (There have been a lot of jobs that stayed in Japan that didn't come back to the U.S. after Japan became wealthy, but that is because Japanese are better educated and more competent than the average American, not because they work for cheap.)
A country that is well educated, smart, hard-working, and honest doesn't have to worry about being devistated by offshoring... which means America may very well be in trouble, but the problem isn't free-trade or Indian programers, the problem is Americans.
Dreaming is great. But dreams aren't garanteed to come true. People DID dream about traveling to the moon and Concord jets, and people developed the systems.
But since society could not find a need for this technology, we aren't going to subsidize it for the sake of dreams. The technology is not useful yet. When we need moon travel or supersonic jets, we will use them.
Neither the Concord nor the Moon Landings were economicly sustainable. They were impressive acomplishments, but neither one really served too much of a purpose for society at large. They were more propoganda stunts and political gestures than the start of any real industry.
It seems like it is possible to push ahead on certain technologies by throwing massive amounts of money at it, but unless the economy and society are ready for that technology, then it is going to fall flat on its face.
If some pressing need for a supersonic airliner would emerge (right now, thanks to telecommunications, we need a supersonic airliner less than in the 60s), or we discovered something terrificly valuable on the moon, then no doubt those technologies would be revived very quickly.
In terms of this new supersonic liner, with fuel prices skyrocketing, people freaking out about terrorism in the airline industry, and with customers that want cheap cheap cheap, I think the new supersonic liner will be no better than the last one.
Why can't they take that money and research how to make more ergonomic and comfortable seating? THAT is something airlines desperatly need!
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, don't try to attach your views to the arguement for freedom. While the freedom loving persons should despise hate-speech laws because they are really designed to censor and limit political debate... restricting immigration is also an authoritarian act. While I respect your right to critize immigration, free immigration is an important part of a free society. Restricting how/when and where people can live is just as bad as restricting free-speech.
:)
Could you imagine how bad food would suck in England if it wasn't for immigration? Give me a curry over tra and scones any day!
Nuclear power plants DONT fail really really badly. Chernobal is the only example of a catastrophic failure, and the death toll was comparible to a bad chemical spill (remember bhopal india?), and orders of magnitude less that the most destructive hydoelectric mishaps (230,000 died in the 1975 hunan dam bursts in China, and thousands die in dam accidents every year throughout the world, certainly more than were killed from Chernobal). 50,000 people die each year from diseases related to burning fossil fuels in North America alone (and that is without any mishap).
Nuclear power is the safest power generation system ever put into real large-scale use.
Of course it is fashionable to talk about individual rights and to rally against the state with regards to the "War on Terror", but for most people it is pure hipocracy.
Most people who hate the "War on Terror" agree with just about every other authoritarian policy modern governments take... whether it is economic central planning, "hate speech" laws or "decentcy laws", campaign finance reform, gun control, public schooling, national health care, whatever...
The idea that citicens must give up their individual rights and hand over power to the state in order to bring collective security and safety is the fundamental ideal of collectivism and socialism. How is the government taking your money by force, and then taking all individual choice out of healthcare and giving it to the state, somehow different that the basic ideals of the "War on Terror"? If you support government survailence and control of speech to protect people from being "offended", then how can you really be upset if the government curtails liberties to protect people from being blown up? Why were leftist giddy and cheering when the ATF blows up a church with 100 kids inside inside because "they might have guns", but are outraged when they are searched at an airport. The think Castro is the greatest guy in the world, even though nothing in the Patroit Act or the "War on Terror" even matches the police state of Cuba.
Don't get me wrong. I am not defending the police state... but then again, I am not a socialist or collectivist. I beleive individual rights are more important that collective safety. So it is consistant with my worldview. But socialists and collectivists need to realize that the police state is the ultimate outcome of their ideology.
I was making a joke about the TV actor thing, but Will Wheaton isn't that bad of an idea.
Will Wheaton is no Ricardo Montalban, be he would at least be charasmatic enough not to do more harm than good.
And seeing as he is a bit of an open-source geek, hopefully he would do it for free.
Here is a small digest of the reply to Microsoft:
"WHAT? You don't know me? Why, I am famous. Yes I am so, so famous! You must be an idiot if you don't know my name! Why I am your worse nightmare! I said that in a very famous online flame war! I am the famous open source guy! I am up there with Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds. You have heard of them, but you never head of me? But I am famous! Your an idiot if you don't know who I am!"
What a pompous ass!
Can't we get some open source advocates with charisma? Maybe we could all pitch in and hire an out of work TV actor to be our open source spokesperson, instead of the usual juvenile socially disaffected geeks.
Canada has the population of a large American state like Florida or California. Do you think Canada is helpless to respond to natural disasters because it isn't part of some giant centrally planned network to protect 300 million people? Do you think their response would be better or worse than FEMA?
Sweden has a population not much more than Louisiana... and there is certainly no centralized European system like FEMA that would come to their rescue. So which place would you rather be in an emergency?
I garantee you that emergency response would be better in both countries, and I garantee you it isn't because they spend more money.
Bigger isn't always better. Central planning is a disaster, because there are natural limits on size and complexity of a coherent entity. You are never going to make an efficient and effective national government agency, because such a thing is not possible. A national government for a country of 300 million people is like the giant dinosour: most resources must be spent just keeping it alive . That is why we have state and local governments where are supposed to be able to make decisions for themselves (well, we also have state governments to prevent totalitarians, which anyone who is being forced out of New Orleans at gunpoint, having property and weapons confiscated, and being taken to FEMA managed Soviet style prison camps can attest is also a problem).
The trouble is that people now worship government. Suggesting that we take power away from the federal government and giving it to local people to decide their own fate is tantamount to calling Jesus a homosexual in our culture. It is blasphamy against the state.
Do you remember as a kid reading books about dinosours? Remember the largest of those huge, monsterous dinosours (things like a Brontosaurous). They were so large that nearly all their time was spent eating, just to provide enough energy for it to continue living. It had to live in swamps and water because it was so heavy that it could barely stand on its own. It required so much resources that it was locked in to a certain ecologic nitch, and the slightest change could have disasterous effects.
Also, being a Slashdot reader, you much know a little bit about programing. So you know that the bigger the software project, the more source code and the greater the complexity, the more difficult it is to debug and the more resources that are required just to manage the project and the source code, and the harder it is to make secure. Finally, things get so big, bloated, complicated, and unmanagable, and you have Microsoft Windows.
That is true for all dynamic systems in the universe. The larger and more complicated a system is, the more resources it takes just to fight entropy.
People forget that yes, even the most sacred and revered holy institution in our culture, the government, must obey the laws of the Universe. While most people have absolute faith in the omnipotence of the state, things like complexity and entrophy effect the government just like anything else.
And so, when you create a vast huge complex government beurocracy like FEMA (and FEMA is part of an even more vast, huge, complicated beurocratic structure), most of the resources of FEMA are going to be spent preserving the buerocratic structure, securing funding, lobbying and public relations, etc... And giant Federal organization like FEMA must spend most of its resources just surviving, and can be disrupted by even the slightlest change in it's enviornment (like a large nation emergency). It is inevitable that FEMA will be nearly impotent in situations like this. Give it more personel, more money, more power, put a commitee of "fact-finders" to supervise, it won't help.
So no, FEMA is not living in a cave, the middle of the desert or anything like that. FEMA is working at maximum efficency and effectivness to do it's job.
But thing that will never enter the typical persons mind, you will never hear on TV, and will most certainly never be considered by the government is that maybe the whole idea of having one monsterous FEDERAL emergency management agency would be far less effective that have a plurality of highly adapted and streamlined local emergency management agencies.
There is no life on Mars, and rocks don't have feelings.
And, if manufacturing, mining, and farming could be made affordable on Mars, it could be a substitute for destroying the enviornment on the Earth.
If Yahoo decides to help China enforce it's laws, people will be outraged that Yahoo is cooperating with am oppressive regime. However, if Yahoo didn't cooperate with Chinese laws, the very same people would be outraged about "outlaw companies subverting soveriegn governments", and it would be seen as "Western Imperialism" or "American Arrogance".
Notice how there is absolutly no anger whatsoever at the Chinese government, only at Yahoo for simply RESPECTING THE LAWS of that government!
The same people who thing Yahoo is evil for turning over information to China, collected IN China, as required by law, are the same people who demand that the EU start selling advanced offensive weapons systems to China. I guess it is totally evil for people to obey China's laws when they are in China, but totally OK to help China to bomb other countries.
No, I haven't noticed the trend of increasingly powerful storms. There doesn't appear to be any clear evidence that is happening. I HAVE noticed the trend of increasingly large human populations, expanding to ever more areas of undeveloped land, and increasing the chances that a disaster will happen in a populated area.
Sexually liberated Europe? Would that be Portugal where abortion is illegal? Or the UK were hardcore pornography is illegal? And I am not even mentioning Turkish or Eastern European laws and attitudes, but I could have a field day with those!
A few western european capitals are pretty progressive and that is to be admired, but most of Europe is 30 years behind rural Mississippi in it's attitudes toward sex.
Paul considers this, but her the book discusses concrete harm, and she argues that civil liberties are not absolute where one person's rights hurt other people (not many argue for their right to cry "fire" in a crowded theater, for example).
So typical of modern day advocates of censorship and totalitarianism. If you want to ban a certain type of speech or expression you don't like, create "scientific evidence" that it causes some sort of harm, and of course reference the tired, old "fire in a crowded theater" arguement.
Of course any "scientific evidence" is total BS. No one can even come to any sort of definition about what "pornography" is (many people argue that the musical "Hair", or "Herbal Essenses" TV commercials, or safe sex pamphlets, or comic books, or top-40 hip-hop music, wardwrobe malfunctions, or gay pride parades, are pornographic). Given that there is no objective way to even classify pornography, and that the term is applied to virtually anything that someone wants censored, and given that it is virtually impossible to do things like double blind testing, there is absolutly no way anybody can make any sort of generalizations about "pornography" and claim they are in any way scientific or objective.
The real story in this is how in America, as well as Canada and Western Europe, liberal ideals such as Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Expression have come under attack by the intelectuals who used to champion those ideas. What is more disturbing that pornography is how intellectuals like Paul have almost universaly come to rabidly endorse total state control of speech and expression. If people are worried about the mainstreaming of pornography, they need to be much more worried about the mainstreaming of totalitarianism.
Yes, but there is musical innovation happening with guitars. People are constantly doing new things with guitars.
Where as the 303 sound has totally stagnated. The 303 was remarkable because it was this cheap little synth that cats could buy for next to nothing and create sounds that the makers of the 303 never intended. It was part of the whole philosophy of black urban youth taking this discarded technology and turning into something remarkable, a kind of metaphor for discarded Urban areas like Detroit and Chicago that spawned Techno and House music respectivly.
But now the 303 isn't a cheap synth for underground producers... it is an expensive synth for collectors that creates a sound that stopped being innovative ten years ago. It is not the instrument that the Juan Atkins or Derek May of the 21st century is going to use, it is for pretensious wankers... it is like collecting a Stratovarius.
Except that the whole acid 303 sound has been crazy played out for about 10 years now. Anyone who believes otherwise is fooling themselves.
You are ignoring the increased economy of mass production. The system cost $100,000 now, but it would be a fraction of that cost if every pool had one.
The high cost comes from the fact that the development cost has to be recouped from sales of the item. So if it cost $10,000,000 to develop, and you only sell 10 of them, there is a cost of $100,000 for each one just for development. If you sold one for all 7.6 million pools in the country, the development cost is less than a big mac.
That is why I can afford a laptop more powerful than a NASA supercomputer in the 1960s, or I can make a long distance phone call for $0.05 a minute that used to cost $5.00 (not adjusted for inflation... it would cost even more with inflation) a minute in the 1960s.
But yes, I agree with your premise, even if your arguement is flawed. Because any cost is essentially paid for by the labor and toil of humans, and because there is an opportunity cost to everything, there is in fact a price on human life even if we find it distastful to admit it.
If you are trying to say that blocking an IP for a country is somehow comparable to say, South African apartied, or segregation in the U.S. South, or not letting women vote in Saudi Arabia, or any of the horrors we normally think about when someone mentions "discrimination", then you are crazy! Absolutly crazy!
I just entered a contest online for Coca Cola. The contest is only open to residents of Canada. Are you calling than discrimination? Coca Cola Canada is running the contest, and they have decided to only open it to people in thier market. I don't see anything unethical about that at all.
If I make a phone call to China, I will pay more money than a phone call to somewhere in Canada. Don't you consider that discrimination against China? NO! China is farther away, and outside the national infrastructure, so it makes perfect sense to charge more for a call to china.
If you are in the U.S., and you visit Canada, you can do so without a passport (you only need a photo ID or birth cirtificate). If you visit Canada from China, you will need a passport. Is that discrimination?
Likewise, if I run a buisness that ships fruitcakes to North America, and if hacking attempts into my server from China are causing problems, then it isn't discrimination to block Chinese IPs. If I am running a blog site for my friends to read, and I don't have any friends living in South Korea, there is nothing wrong with banning those IPs.
What you are calling "discrimination" would make most of the tax, immigration, and social services of nearly every country in the world "discrimination".
This isn't hypocritical at all.
The Chinese GOVERNMENT is blocking sites, and it is blocking sites that it doesn't own. It is an act of coersion being done to unwilling participants (the site viewer wants to view the page, and the site-owner wants to show the page).
That is a whole different world from a site-owner blocking ips from certain countries. The site-owner ONWS THE SITE... the server is his own private property. If he does not want to server information to certain IPs, that is fully his perogative. Just like if I owned a mail-order buisness, I can say "I only ship products to cetain countries".
The two are completly different phenomena.
Don't get caught up in the propoganda.
While Chavez is making some token attempts to help people, if real significant portion of oil revenues were being used to help the poor they could garantee every person in Venezuela western style medical care, diet, and education. There are serious questions about were all that money is going.
The main reason why people outside Venezuela love him so much is not because he is some kind of people's hero, it is because they like his anti-American rhetoric. It gives people in countries married to the U.S. economicly and politically a vicarious thrill to have Chavez stand up to the U.S. when their own leaders will not. Chavez could be running death squads all over the country (and some have even made the allegation), and I don't think anyone would take issue with it as long as he kept up the anti-American rhetoric.
But 100 years ago, people would have the common sense not to build their homes in flood plains and in hurricane prone areas.
When the government started garanting insurance for what is stupid behavior, they eliminated any person cost for building a home in an area where such disasters are inevitable. It is the government insurance that caused the problem in the first place.
If a private insurance company won't insure something, you can damn well be sure it is for a reason: BECAUSE A DISASTER IS INEVITABLE, AND THE COST OF INSURANCE WILL NOT COVER THE PAYOUTS.
American taxpayers are essentially subsidizing disasters.
Yes... except that instead of spending hundreds of millions building a stadium that does a mediocre job of acting as a shelter, they could build an excellent shelter for tens of millions.
You are missing the point.
MOST real enviornmentalists are NOT totalitarian or left-wing. But the most vocal subsection of enviornmentalists are practicly hardcore Stalinists. And so people who are concerned about totalitarianism, will naturally be hostile towards the enviornmental movement, even though the silent majority of people concerned about the enviornment are not totalitarian.
If you want to rally the average joe behind the enviornmental movement, the enviornmental movement must give up its anti-capitalist, anti-free-market, anti-American, pro-command-economy, pro-state assumptions.
The catch is what you mean by "shouldn't we do our best to counteract it's effects as much as possible?".
When people say "shouldn't we do something to stop it?", they really mean "shouldn't we give the government vast new expanded powers to regulate society, because only the government authority is efficient and trustworthy enough to solve the problem of pollution". The concept of massive government regulation and central-planning are implicit in what you are saying, because absolutly no-one of any political persuation wants to stop people from voluntarily acting to stop global warming.
If someone doesn't support the Patriot Act, or G. W. Bush's "War on Terror", that doesn't mean they are a terrorist or support terrorism. It means that: A) They don't think the Patriot Act or the G. W. Bush's "War on Terror" is an effective policy in combating terrorism and/or B) They feel the solution to the problem is worse than the problem itself (i.e. bombing cities, government servialence without a warrent, etc., are actually worse than the terrorist acts they are meant to stop).
When G. W. Bush and right-wing totalitarians stir up sensationalism and fear of an "impending terrorist nuclear attack", they are provoking an emotional response in order to get people to agree to expanded government powers they would normaly be skeptical about. And to squeltch any sort of debate about what we should do about a very real terrorist threat... When people say "shouldn't we do out best to stop terrorism as best as possible" , there is a hidden assumption that there is only one succesful way to combat terrorism, and that anyone who doesn't support it supports terrorism.
And the same thing is true about the left-wing totalitarians. It is clear that global warming is going to be a problem, and by sensationalistic fear-mongering about "impending ecological disaster", they can try to get people out of fear and desperation to agree to expanded government regulation and control of the economy. Instead of having a serious debate about what we should do to reverse global warming... central-planning and top-down government control is presented as the "only solution", and anyone who disagrees with those policies is an "eco-terrorist".
If the so-called enviornmentalists really want to do something about global-warming, they are going to have to stop using global-warming and the enviornment as a pretense for promoting their political, economic, and social agenda. No sane person on the planet wants to wait around for the enviornment to be destroyed. But when the only solution presented to us is totalitarianism (or at least what we percieve to be totalitarianism), you are naturally going to have the resistance and skepticism you see from many people on slashdot. We can read the assumptions in your statements, and those make us very worried.
There isn't going to be a permanent state of affairs of American companies offshoring professional jobs in order to get cheap labor.
It is simple supply and demand. If the demand for skilled Indian labor increases, and the supply of skilled indian labor doesn't expand to meet the demand, price will go up. Eventually, it will go up to about the same amount as it is here.
And, because it is SKILLED labor, these people are smart enough to make sure they don't spend the rest of their life in a sweat shop. They WILL find a way to increase thier standard of living over time.
At one time Japan was the place where low quality products were produced by extremly cheap labor. 30 years later and Japanese skilled workers make higher income than in the U.S and their product is considered superior. (There have been a lot of jobs that stayed in Japan that didn't come back to the U.S. after Japan became wealthy, but that is because Japanese are better educated and more competent than the average American, not because they work for cheap.)
A country that is well educated, smart, hard-working, and honest doesn't have to worry about being devistated by offshoring... which means America may very well be in trouble, but the problem isn't free-trade or Indian programers, the problem is Americans.
Dreaming is great. But dreams aren't garanteed to come true. People DID dream about traveling to the moon and Concord jets, and people developed the systems.
But since society could not find a need for this technology, we aren't going to subsidize it for the sake of dreams. The technology is not useful yet. When we need moon travel or supersonic jets, we will use them.
Neither the Concord nor the Moon Landings were economicly sustainable. They were impressive acomplishments, but neither one really served too much of a purpose for society at large. They were more propoganda stunts and political gestures than the start of any real industry.
It seems like it is possible to push ahead on certain technologies by throwing massive amounts of money at it, but unless the economy and society are ready for that technology, then it is going to fall flat on its face.
If some pressing need for a supersonic airliner would emerge (right now, thanks to telecommunications, we need a supersonic airliner less than in the 60s), or we discovered something terrificly valuable on the moon, then no doubt those technologies would be revived very quickly.
In terms of this new supersonic liner, with fuel prices skyrocketing, people freaking out about terrorism in the airline industry, and with customers that want cheap cheap cheap, I think the new supersonic liner will be no better than the last one.
Why can't they take that money and research how to make more ergonomic and comfortable seating? THAT is something airlines desperatly need!