try teaching someone with no exposure to computer science or higher level mathematics to perform addition, substraction, multiplication and division on a base other than ten ( what he/she is used to). Maybe this is the problem the researchers are running into.
Stating that those are two different cognitive abilities doesn't cut it for me. Maybe it's because I'm entrenched in the structur of my brain, but how could a human without any concept of 3, 4 or x > 2 compare two sets, both having a count of 'many', for size? It seems impossible as 'many' must equal 'many' unless you have 'less-many' and 'more-many' and if that's the case, you just break the sets further down until each set only contains the smallest possible increment for complete physical objects, integers. If exposed to the problem of deciding between 50 and 51 berries, I would think that there is a real possibility that those 'many' people will verbalize their concepts by discovering numbering on base three. Just consider, its quite easy: count the berries, reach two, start over by counting how many two-berries there are, reach two and so on.
thought patterns brought about by indoctrination do not lable themselves as such. Also, they need not lead to what from the outside seems as the consistent action. Regardless of wether or not russians really want communism back, people could simply judge the current incarnation of the KP as incompetent.
I did not say that all russians still suffer from the effects of their indoctrination ( that surly happenend, unless you didn't go to school). And even if I did, in a society founded on the principles of liberty this would be acceptable as my free speech. A facist could be recognized by calling on the state to supress all other opinions or biases as 'inferior', by force if necessary. A plural society is just that: all people voicing their opinion, peacefully arguing in an effort to convince their fellow man. A fascist society is singular: the state / party opinion is the truth (tm) and those that disagree will be punished, the severity of which will be determined according to the priorities on topics to which dissenting opinion has been voiced. To make it short, a bias is okay as long as everybody gets to have theirs.
I am stunned. As you point out, mass and energy are equivalent. What good is equivalency when even the words can't be swapped in a sentence (obvious from the shouting)?
All I know is that within the SED ( dictating party in east germany) there was substantial argument along the lines of 'we can't open the death camps, again, when stalin pushes along with this'. This is well documented at the german federal agency in charge of documenting crimes committed by former east german regime participants.
Also, russian historicans are not all they are cranked up to be, especially from the soviet era. No offense, but everyone born before 1990 in russia must at least be scrutenized to ensure he/she has freed themselves from indoctrination.
I hope this was just bait. If not, I wonder how you imagine the life of the proto humans, ancients or middle age peasants was in regard to time to spare for love and play.
well, I am sorry, but as Stalins daugther pointed out, Stalin was a borderline antisemite which, btw. fits nicely with being a communist. Also he killed jews, some of them because they where jews. And had he lived longer, he would have executed his plan to exterminate jews in russia. Considering this information, I just found it difficult to accept that jews would prefere stalin over hitler, as one is as bad as the other.
Also, I am not an american, but thanks anyways. I really do take that as a compliment.
As painitng Stalin as ONLY mad guy puts some shade on entire history of my country.
What the hell was he then? How many millions do you have to kill, enslave and let starve and rob of their general freedoms to count as thouroghly mad? Please tell me, how many does it take? And don't be mistaken, hitler had very good reasons for doing what he did. Just the premises that his conclusions where based on where mad to begin with, just as stalins. Of this, nothing but madness can come.
and not dualistic thinking and rather pure logical conclusions could lead to those fasist conclusions made by Hitler that russians ( as well as jews) are 'under people'.
No it wouldn't. Starting from the premise that all man are created equal, no chain of valid reasoning could lead to the condemnation of the rusian people as 'under people'. You see, the plausibility of the content matters. To be more specific, a chain of valid reasoning can only be attacked at the premise. Also, I don't see the merits of embracing contratictions. The axioms A=A and A!=B are at the core of existance, of reality you could say. A contradiction is an indication of incomplete or false perception and or reasoning.
where Grrenland was nowhere near it's current geographical placement.
Yeah I suppose that is possible too. But I wonder, where does the name greenland come from? The obvious solution would be that whoever discovered it, found it to be green.
Well, the whole climate debate is so skewed by heavy interest on both sides of the argument that truth will be hard to find. We'll find out anyways, I guess.
I dont know whether it was the Nena CD in the background or your tiny moustache and fervent body language, but it does not need five years of german lessons to decipher 'the wolf'...
Yeah, the moustache is dead give away, isn't it;). 'Wulf' is actually my first name though and it doesn't mean anything nowadays (it used to mean wolf, in middle german).
Have I nice day in denmark, and I just hope it rains there as well;)
I wonder where your divine wisdom comes from. Did god speak to you and revealed what was to come? And as you know with certainty what the futher holds maybe you could help me out with my portfolio.
Your post is nonsense. What would you substitute for self interest? The interest of others? The mayority? Some perceived interest of nature that contemporary greens define as remaining absolute static (nature being really all for remaining static as can be seen by the quite uneventful history of the planet)?
it is. Because you don't want to starve and die of the flu ( profits/wealth) and you also want some free time and comfort in your life so you make and use tools (efficiency).
I actually didn't want to get into a fight about the exact facets of stalins madness. The orignal poster implied that jews would have prefered stalin over hitler. I just pointed out that stalin killed jew because they were jews. He did and whatever else his grand scheme entailed I don't care much about.
As a tip for you: judging if something is right instead of evaluating the consequences is the best method to prevent tyranny, it is the first step towards humanitarianism.
economics has only meaning in relation to scarity. an economic system is only required if not everyone can have everything he wants at the time he wants forever long he lives. History of mankind: 'work' (hunt, pick fruits) as long as you manage to stay awake but still feel hungry ->(xxxxxxx years later) just say 'hamburger'. In between is the 45 hour work week that the unions didn't force.
don't talk about things you don't know about. I know plenty of people that 'wanted' socialism to work in east germany and the sovjiet union. It's not because people are lazy bums why communism will fail each time. Wanting something is not enough, the process matters and I hate to break it to you: top down direction for every detail of a highly complex, coupled, chaotic system (the economy) will not work. The problem is is threefold: information, priorities and action.
The geek explaination would be that you can not externalize the processing power of the system (the (capitalist) economy) without rebuilding the system in it's exact same state but with the ability to tweak variables and a fast forward button. In a cap economy, millions of independent agents ('humans' or 'coperations') process information, weight priorities and choose a course of action, thereby creating information about their priorties for other actors and so it ripples throughout the economy. As a centralized planner ( as socialism/communism would require), you can not possibly achieve anything near the speed or precision because of limitation in processing power and bandwith with which information is transfered.
No central planner can anticipate all effects a certain action might have nor can he weigh all priorities of all people and choose the best course of action. This is why, over long or short, instead of trying to coordinate the priorities of everyone he will choose the easier way of just acting on his priorities. The communist society then just becomes the extension, part of, the planner. And while in a cap economy, many bad decisions can be made and are, the advantage is that it only affects the actors that are implicated. Also the fact that bad decisions have been made becomes clear quickly, not turning profits comes to mind as a good indicator. The planner meanwhile drags millions of people into starvation with just one decision. No one is there to correct him, and all get screwed over for his mistake.
insightful? maybe if your 15. funny would have cut it. In the world you have called for, I will join up with my fellow libertarians and build a prosperous community based on self ownership and property rights. My then very successful security agency will be happy to deal with people like you in a matter that could become stressful for you if you ever dared to violate the property rights of anyone in libertasia.
capitalism doesn't require anything. It's an integral part of human nature. every child will pick it up seemlessly in play. All you can do is to make humans jump through hoops and thereby create a system full of artificial constraints that do everything but not what you intended. You can make it so bloated, bloody and difficult that humans have no chance to attain what they are striving for: a better life. This is communism.
yeah, because we all know how stalin loved the jews. Them being the 'world capital' and generally masterminds in the grand scheme to enlsave the workers and all.
Of course I know that the whole truth of the matter has not been uncovered, but when you use statements like " you can not stop the gulf stream unless you stop earth from rotating.", I have to fight fire with fire.
Yeah, I know. I just took a cheap shop at you. Sorry:-)
The points you bring up are good but they are not the end of knowledge. Pollution has been constantly getting better since the 90 ( especially after the downfall of the eastern block that where the greatest poluters in all of history). Ice, well the ice. Firstly, probably we are admits an interglacial period, part of a cycle that possibly has been going on for millions of years and usually takes about 12000 years to complete, then, europe will be covered by ice sheets again (mind you, this data can be considered empirical knowledge as it has been gathered not from models but from piecing together the planets past). For the last 10000 years, the icesheets, both polar and antarctic have been retreating, so a little melting is nothing to worry about. And while we are at it: lately there has been a discovery of preserved but dead vegetation between the ice and the ground on greenland. So maybe its not so unusual for greenland to have no ice at all. Also, other meassurenments have shown the antarctic ice shield actually growing the last few years. And in the alps the glaciers have grown from 10% to 30%. So, any evidence is still inconclusive I would think.
I also suspect you didn't read any of my linked articles, and that you're from Germany.
I glanced over them, it appeared all very familiar, what with the salt water and sweet water and the new ice age. And yes, I noted the one article was in american publication. How did you know I was german? Did I accidently invade anyone?:)
is that sweden or norway? I think norway. Well anyways, what is missing a lot in europe is the teaching of the scientific method and what made it so special. I'll tell you for free: Nothing is certain ( yeah I know my post sounded differently) and if someone is telling you so there is probably something up. The european media has denied itself, consitently, to moderate the scientific debate that is, in fact happening. It has come to the point where most europeans aren't aware of the fact that serious and acclaimed researchers, research institutions and publications don't agree that there is warming at all, or if there is, that mankind is to blame. Nor does everybody agree that a heating climate will do much harm. It is outstanding how envioremntalists have convinced the public here that doom is impending, based on scientific models of the climate where 75% of all relevant variables can not be determined in value nor in relative importance. Global Warming has not the same strength of therotical or experimental underpinning as things falling to ground on earth. Want to talk about how much you know about the world?
yeah, somehow I knew when I typed it that I was probably wrong about the 'first' part. Also, eventhough my sentence conveyed things differently, when saying it was the 'first to' I was exclusivly thinking about realistic weapons. At least CS is the first game/mod where I saw actual real world weapons (and only those) available.
Re:Keep those damned poor people from getting orga
on
Todd Need[ed] a Liver
·
· Score: 1
But with today's system, someone with liver cancer should get the liver before someone who drank his liver into failure, all else being equal. In a highest-bidder auction, money, not ethics, decides who lives and who dies.
I don't know what your ethics entail. Mine say that no life is less worth than an other. This is the main pillar of western morals. So, how do you suppose this fundamental rule is to be reconciled with appointing committees that actually get to decide on factors that will favor one life over an other? I am not sure I made this clear enough, so feel free to make me clarify:-).
That sounds pretty damning to me, but I admit that the suit has not gone to trial yet. On the other hand, I'm not in the judicial branch of government, so I will exercise my right to presume them guilty based on what I know at this time
After reading the link, I couldn't help but think that the root problem were price caps in california after the so called 'deregulation' that actually was just a 'reregulation'. As every economics bachelor knows, price caps can have just one consequence: insufficient supply. Of course, enron is not the only company in the business so the other companies compliance with the price cap helped increase the shortage, thereby making it profitable enough for enron to circumvent 'the law' despite the risk of legal sanctions. Also, there are two other aspects in this particular case.
First off are morals: a price cap is akin to slavery. If government put a price cap on your wage instead of company products ( it happenend with gasoline too) and then, after seeing how supply of labor gets critically short, forces people to work at the price cap (as they do with companies), this would be more obvious. Secondly there is governmental stupidity: Everyone in the power business in california has been able to watch the state legislature do their best to obstruct any and all meassures that would enhance energy production and delievery. It starts at laws that fully prevent the building of power plants anywhere in CA and ends with price caps, that, as has been pointed out, don't exactly encourage suppliers to join the market. Hence I fully understand the 'burn burn' comment in the article. Having the grid burning down is just the logical means to the end that the state government has been, unconsciously I hope, pursuing all along: ending power consumption in CA.
No, companies are, first and foremost, committed to their stockholders. That's why wildly profitable drug companies charge huge sums of money in the U.S. for drugs that treat AIDS, cancer, and other life-threatening diseases while selling the same drugs for a fraction of that in other countries. That's why gas prices skyrocket by 50% or more when oil prices rise by 10-20%. It's why they stay high long after oil prices have dropped back down.
You are right about the stockholders. Of course companies are formost committed to turning a profit. It was my mistake for using a premise that you don't accept, as I could have known. The premise is this: making the customer happy is most profitable in the vast majority of cases.
Drug companies charge more where their patents are enforced by the government and less in i.e. african nations where they have to compete against ripped off generics that are dumped at way lower prices ( not surprisingly, as the generic manufactures saved the billions of dollars going into R&D). The question of whether patents are moral or useful is a whole other can of worms that I don't want to open, partly because I am not totally convinced either way yet. What I will say though is this: the higher price in countries where they have a monopoly on their drug is the pay off and pay back for the research efforts that they have invested in, often times huge amounts of dollars over very long periods of time. The only reason why people would invest so much money with so many risks and unknowns ( is there a drug to discover?
since when has anything raw been a 'good' diet? especially fish? and btw japan gets bronze for digestion related cancer, probably because the tummy doesn't like that spicey food very much.
Slashdot Mirror
try teaching someone with no exposure to computer science or higher level mathematics to perform addition, substraction, multiplication and division on a base other than ten ( what he/she is used to). Maybe this is the problem the researchers are running into.
Stating that those are two different cognitive abilities doesn't cut it for me. Maybe it's because I'm entrenched in the structur of my brain, but how could a human without any concept of 3, 4 or x > 2 compare two sets, both having a count of 'many', for size? It seems impossible as 'many' must equal 'many' unless you have 'less-many' and 'more-many' and if that's the case, you just break the sets further down until each set only contains the smallest possible increment for complete physical objects, integers. If exposed to the problem of deciding between 50 and 51 berries, I would think that there is a real possibility that those 'many' people will verbalize their concepts by discovering numbering on base three. Just consider, its quite easy: count the berries, reach two, start over by counting how many two-berries there are, reach two and so on.
thought patterns brought about by indoctrination do not lable themselves as such. Also, they need not lead to what from the outside seems as the consistent action. Regardless of wether or not russians really want communism back, people could simply judge the current incarnation of the KP as incompetent.
I did not say that all russians still suffer from the effects of their indoctrination ( that surly happenend, unless you didn't go to school). And even if I did, in a society founded on the principles of liberty this would be acceptable as my free speech. A facist could be recognized by calling on the state to supress all other opinions or biases as 'inferior', by force if necessary. A plural society is just that: all people voicing their opinion, peacefully arguing in an effort to convince their fellow man. A fascist society is singular: the state / party opinion is the truth (tm) and those that disagree will be punished, the severity of which will be determined according to the priorities on topics to which dissenting opinion has been voiced. To make it short, a bias is okay as long as everybody gets to have theirs.
I am stunned. As you point out, mass and energy are equivalent. What good is equivalency when even the words can't be swapped in a sentence (obvious from the shouting)?
All I know is that within the SED ( dictating party in east germany) there was substantial argument along the lines of 'we can't open the death camps, again, when stalin pushes along with this'. This is well documented at the german federal agency in charge of documenting crimes committed by former east german regime participants.
Also, russian historicans are not all they are cranked up to be, especially from the soviet era. No offense, but everyone born before 1990 in russia must at least be scrutenized to ensure he/she has freed themselves from indoctrination.
I hope this was just bait. If not, I wonder how you imagine the life of the proto humans, ancients or middle age peasants was in regard to time to spare for love and play.
well, I am sorry, but as Stalins daugther pointed out, Stalin was a borderline antisemite which, btw. fits nicely with being a communist. Also he killed jews, some of them because they where jews. And had he lived longer, he would have executed his plan to exterminate jews in russia. Considering this information, I just found it difficult to accept that jews would prefere stalin over hitler, as one is as bad as the other.
Also, I am not an american, but thanks anyways. I really do take that as a compliment.
As painitng Stalin as ONLY mad guy puts some shade on entire history of my country.
What the hell was he then? How many millions do you have to kill, enslave and let starve and rob of their general freedoms to count as thouroghly mad? Please tell me, how many does it take? And don't be mistaken, hitler had very good reasons for doing what he did. Just the premises that his conclusions where based on where mad to begin with, just as stalins. Of this, nothing but madness can come.
and not dualistic thinking and rather pure logical conclusions could lead to those fasist conclusions made by Hitler that russians ( as well as jews) are 'under people'.
No it wouldn't. Starting from the premise that all man are created equal, no chain of valid reasoning could lead to the condemnation of the rusian people as 'under people'. You see, the plausibility of the content matters. To be more specific, a chain of valid reasoning can only be attacked at the premise. Also, I don't see the merits of embracing contratictions. The axioms A=A and A!=B are at the core of existance, of reality you could say. A contradiction is an indication of incomplete or false perception and or reasoning.
where Grrenland was nowhere near it's current geographical placement.
;). 'Wulf' is actually my first name though and it doesn't mean anything nowadays (it used to mean wolf, in middle german).
;)
Yeah I suppose that is possible too. But I wonder, where does the name greenland come from? The obvious solution would be that whoever discovered it, found it to be green. Well, the whole climate debate is so skewed by heavy interest on both sides of the argument that truth will be hard to find. We'll find out anyways, I guess.
I dont know whether it was the Nena CD in the background or your tiny moustache and fervent body language, but it does not need five years of german lessons to decipher 'the wolf'...
Yeah, the moustache is dead give away, isn't it
Have I nice day in denmark, and I just hope it rains there as well
I wonder where your divine wisdom comes from. Did god speak to you and revealed what was to come? And as you know with certainty what the futher holds maybe you could help me out with my portfolio.
Your post is nonsense. What would you substitute for self interest? The interest of others? The mayority? Some perceived interest of nature that contemporary greens define as remaining absolute static (nature being really all for remaining static as can be seen by the quite uneventful history of the planet)?
it is. Because you don't want to starve and die of the flu ( profits/wealth) and you also want some free time and comfort in your life so you make and use tools (efficiency).
I actually didn't want to get into a fight about the exact facets of stalins madness. The orignal poster implied that jews would have prefered stalin over hitler. I just pointed out that stalin killed jew because they were jews. He did and whatever else his grand scheme entailed I don't care much about.
As a tip for you: judging if something is right instead of evaluating the consequences is the best method to prevent tyranny, it is the first step towards humanitarianism.
economics has only meaning in relation to scarity. an economic system is only required if not everyone can have everything he wants at the time he wants forever long he lives. History of mankind: 'work' (hunt, pick fruits) as long as you manage to stay awake but still feel hungry ->(xxxxxxx years later) just say 'hamburger'. In between is the 45 hour work week that the unions didn't force.
don't talk about things you don't know about. I know plenty of people that 'wanted' socialism to work in east germany and the sovjiet union. It's not because people are lazy bums why communism will fail each time. Wanting something is not enough, the process matters and I hate to break it to you: top down direction for every detail of a highly complex, coupled, chaotic system (the economy) will not work. The problem is is threefold: information, priorities and action.
The geek explaination would be that you can not externalize the processing power of the system (the (capitalist) economy) without rebuilding the system in it's exact same state but with the ability to tweak variables and a fast forward button. In a cap economy, millions of independent agents ('humans' or 'coperations') process information, weight priorities and choose a course of action, thereby creating information about their priorties for other actors and so it ripples throughout the economy. As a centralized planner ( as socialism/communism would require), you can not possibly achieve anything near the speed or precision because of limitation in processing power and bandwith with which information is transfered.
No central planner can anticipate all effects a certain action might have nor can he weigh all priorities of all people and choose the best course of action. This is why, over long or short, instead of trying to coordinate the priorities of everyone he will choose the easier way of just acting on his priorities. The communist society then just becomes the extension, part of, the planner. And while in a cap economy, many bad decisions can be made and are, the advantage is that it only affects the actors that are implicated. Also the fact that bad decisions have been made becomes clear quickly, not turning profits comes to mind as a good indicator. The planner meanwhile drags millions of people into starvation with just one decision. No one is there to correct him, and all get screwed over for his mistake.
read this http://washingtontimes.com/books/20030816-105043-6 895r.htm.
Also I hope you didn't try to justify stalins murders just now.
thank you! I love you, I think. I'll be offering defense contracts shortly. You'll get a special rebate.
insightful? maybe if your 15. funny would have cut it. In the world you have called for, I will join up with my fellow libertarians and build a prosperous community based on self ownership and property rights. My then very successful security agency will be happy to deal with people like you in a matter that could become stressful for you if you ever dared to violate the property rights of anyone in libertasia.
capitalism doesn't require anything. It's an integral part of human nature. every child will pick it up seemlessly in play. All you can do is to make humans jump through hoops and thereby create a system full of artificial constraints that do everything but not what you intended. You can make it so bloated, bloody and difficult that humans have no chance to attain what they are striving for: a better life. This is communism.
i am sure it gives you a nice warm feeling to know how far you are ahead of the pack.
yeah, because we all know how stalin loved the jews. Them being the 'world capital' and generally masterminds in the grand scheme to enlsave the workers and all.
Of course I know that the whole truth of the matter has not been uncovered, but when you use statements like " you can not stop the gulf stream unless you stop earth from rotating.", I have to fight fire with fire.
:-)
:)
Yeah, I know. I just took a cheap shop at you. Sorry
The points you bring up are good but they are not the end of knowledge. Pollution has been constantly getting better since the 90 ( especially after the downfall of the eastern block that where the greatest poluters in all of history). Ice, well the ice. Firstly, probably we are admits an interglacial period, part of a cycle that possibly has been going on for millions of years and usually takes about 12000 years to complete, then, europe will be covered by ice sheets again (mind you, this data can be considered empirical knowledge as it has been gathered not from models but from piecing together the planets past). For the last 10000 years, the icesheets, both polar and antarctic have been retreating, so a little melting is nothing to worry about. And while we are at it: lately there has been a discovery of preserved but dead vegetation between the ice and the ground on greenland. So maybe its not so unusual for greenland to have no ice at all. Also, other meassurenments have shown the antarctic ice shield actually growing the last few years. And in the alps the glaciers have grown from 10% to 30%. So, any evidence is still inconclusive I would think.
I also suspect you didn't read any of my linked articles, and that you're from Germany.
I glanced over them, it appeared all very familiar, what with the salt water and sweet water and the new ice age. And yes, I noted the one article was in american publication. How did you know I was german? Did I accidently invade anyone?
you realize that the word resource relates direktly to human usage? In other words, stop using them and instantly you have no resources at all left.
is that sweden or norway? I think norway. Well anyways, what is missing a lot in europe is the teaching of the scientific method and what made it so special. I'll tell you for free: Nothing is certain ( yeah I know my post sounded differently) and if someone is telling you so there is probably something up. The european media has denied itself, consitently, to moderate the scientific debate that is, in fact happening. It has come to the point where most europeans aren't aware of the fact that serious and acclaimed researchers, research institutions and publications don't agree that there is warming at all, or if there is, that mankind is to blame. Nor does everybody agree that a heating climate will do much harm. It is outstanding how envioremntalists have convinced the public here that doom is impending, based on scientific models of the climate where 75% of all relevant variables can not be determined in value nor in relative importance. Global Warming has not the same strength of therotical or experimental underpinning as things falling to ground on earth. Want to talk about how much you know about the world?
yeah, somehow I knew when I typed it that I was probably wrong about the 'first' part. Also, eventhough my sentence conveyed things differently, when saying it was the 'first to' I was exclusivly thinking about realistic weapons. At least CS is the first game/mod where I saw actual real world weapons (and only those) available.
But with today's system, someone with liver cancer should get the liver before someone who drank his liver into failure, all else being equal. In a highest-bidder auction, money, not ethics, decides who lives and who dies.
I don't know what your ethics entail. Mine say that no life is less worth than an other. This is the main pillar of western morals. So, how do you suppose this fundamental rule is to be reconciled with appointing committees that actually get to decide on factors that will favor one life over an other? I am not sure I made this clear enough, so feel free to make me clarify
That sounds pretty damning to me, but I admit that the suit has not gone to trial yet. On the other hand, I'm not in the judicial branch of government, so I will exercise my right to presume them guilty based on what I know at this time
After reading the link, I couldn't help but think that the root problem were price caps in california after the so called 'deregulation' that actually was just a 'reregulation'. As every economics bachelor knows, price caps can have just one consequence: insufficient supply. Of course, enron is not the only company in the business so the other companies compliance with the price cap helped increase the shortage, thereby making it profitable enough for enron to circumvent 'the law' despite the risk of legal sanctions. Also, there are two other aspects in this particular case.
First off are morals: a price cap is akin to slavery. If government put a price cap on your wage instead of company products ( it happenend with gasoline too) and then, after seeing how supply of labor gets critically short, forces people to work at the price cap (as they do with companies), this would be more obvious.
Secondly there is governmental stupidity: Everyone in the power business in california has been able to watch the state legislature do their best to obstruct any and all meassures that would enhance energy production and delievery. It starts at laws that fully prevent the building of power plants anywhere in CA and ends with price caps, that, as has been pointed out, don't exactly encourage suppliers to join the market. Hence I fully understand the 'burn burn' comment in the article. Having the grid burning down is just the logical means to the end that the state government has been, unconsciously I hope, pursuing all along: ending power consumption in CA.
No, companies are, first and foremost, committed to their stockholders. That's why wildly profitable drug companies charge huge sums of money in the U.S. for drugs that treat AIDS, cancer, and other life-threatening diseases while selling the same drugs for a fraction of that in other countries. That's why gas prices skyrocket by 50% or more when oil prices rise by 10-20%. It's why they stay high long after oil prices have dropped back down.
You are right about the stockholders. Of course companies are formost committed to turning a profit. It was my mistake for using a premise that you don't accept, as I could have known. The premise is this: making the customer happy is most profitable in the vast majority of cases.
Drug companies charge more where their patents are enforced by the government and less in i.e. african nations where they have to compete against ripped off generics that are dumped at way lower prices ( not surprisingly, as the generic manufactures saved the billions of dollars going into R&D). The question of whether patents are moral or useful is a whole other can of worms that I don't want to open, partly because I am not totally convinced either way yet. What I will say though is this: the higher price in countries where they have a monopoly on their drug is the pay off and pay back for the research efforts that they have invested in, often times huge amounts of dollars over very long periods of time. The only reason why people would invest so much money with so many risks and unknowns ( is there a drug to discover?
since when has anything raw been a 'good' diet? especially fish? and btw japan gets bronze for digestion related cancer, probably because the tummy doesn't like that spicey food very much.