I moved to Seattle pretty recently. I've lived in Chicago for longer. Chicago has many "crosstown" bus routes, going north-south along major streets like Ashland, Damen, Western, etc, and not through downtown. So you can get from, say, Pilsen to Wicker Park really easily. You can also get east-west in straightforward ways.
Seattle's situation is totally different, though. The hills and waterways have a major influence on how major roads are laid out. Even in a car most cross-town trips take you on 5 or 99, either near or through downtown. There's already a minor cross-town type route on 23rd/24th Ave. It's not super-long like the Chicago ones, but those aren't necessarily all that useful -- often it's faster to take the L and transfer downtown than ride the Western Ave bus for 10 miles (I used to do this every so often and timed it out at different times of day). I don't think you'll find a place where it's the norm to make long cross-town trips on mass transit without transfers.
The link on the text "lost a domain" points to Mr. Sunde's Twitter feed, providing me with one sentence in his own words stating exactly what the summary did. That's pointless. The whole reason I'd click a link is to get more information about the situation described, preferably from a neutral source (or one that acknowledges its bias). Similarly, a link on the text "suspicious of ICANN for a long time" suggests a resource indicative of that long time, not one stupid tweet.
I actually sort of like Twitter, but you're using it wrong,/. blurb writers!
I have a feeling bombing a store on Black Friday wouldn't stop people from shopping. At the Wal-Mart in suburban New York where the doors were literally "busted" and people trampled to death (this was Black Friday 2008 IIRC) the shoppers just kept shopping. The police tried to clear the store for an investigation and were unable to do it. Not one of humanity's brighter moments.
Point being, if one of those crowds was bombed it probably wouldn't even stop people from shopping at that store. Enterprising family members of the dead would be out in the parking lot auctioning off their newly-unneeded vehicles. Black Friday is a scourge more evil, and more powerful, than terrorism.
Modern Linux desktops have no problem with WPA. But instead of actually showing people the connection settings they need they tell them to log onto some unencrypted network and then run some binary blob, then tell them (incorrectly) they can't connect with OSes the blob doesn't run on. In this particular case you can't blame Linux. It offers a perfectly reasonable way to enter the parameters but the admins won't tell you the parameters.
I don't know for sure, but I've thought about this a bit and I'm pretty sure you're exactly right about this -- unless there's some other reason the Volt pollutes more than the plug-in Prius it should probably be treated the same.
Let's see exactly how much gas that is. $12k buys you about 4,000 gallons of gas where I live today (Seattle). That's probably about 120,000 miles in a Civic (it's about what I get in my 2000 Focus). And that's about a vehicle-lifetime.
If the electric vehicle had no fuel-related costs then the two vehicles would have about equal total costs. Now clearly grid power does cost something (this varies place to place), and today's electrics may require more costly maintenance over their lives, and they have various disadvantages -- lots of space taken up by battery packs, limited range, long charging times. So currently in the US market gas cars are a better deal.
But, you know what, given the relative maturity of the technologies, I've got to give the electric vehicles some credit -- they're getting pretty close. Hybrids are already a straight-up good deal for some people. Just imagine if our economy didn't suck at dealing with externalities. We'd all (we being people in the market for new cars) be looking pretty seriously at electrics. And these are the first mass-market vehicles. So although electric cars can never be a total solution to any real problem, I think they're already more than just a statement, and I'm pretty impressed with that.
I agree. We need to be better at preventing this sort of thing. But it has done us some good. BP's financial strength has meant that instead of going bankrupt and leaving the government with the whole cleanup bill it's actually covering some of the costs. It probably won't cover them all. But it will do better than a smaller company would have done.
Obsolete? The engine can still pollute more on a cold start, and the Volt is likely to have to cold-start often. It's hard to determine what overall emissions of the Volt will be, and that's really what CARB is concerned with.
And, really, that's as it should be. The air is the public good they're concerned with. The societal costs of energy production ought to be baked directly into energy costs.
Problem: in game design you get to ignore all sorts of real-world constraints you can't ignore in the design of an economy.
For example, yeah, it's incredibly hard to get a business started. If, in an RPG, to get a character past level 1, you had to out-compete all the established characters, a lot of people would fail in the early stages. It's hard to find a fair way around that in the real world. Things like economies of scale and interest weren't designed into the economy. They developed for good reasons and have helped us become more prosperous and use resources more efficiently.
It's true that there are some cheaters, people that use their powerful position to influence the admins and change the rules. And there are some rules that hurt small businesses beyond what's necessary. Employer-based health insurance, for example, benefits large employers over small ones to a stupid degree. But I think you could fix all the problems that can really be fixed, and even simplify some laws, and it would still be hard to start a business.
On the other hand, seriously handicapping large enterprises in some industries might have awesome consequences. I'm thinking agriculture and mining here, with the consequences being more local agriculture and more efficient use of the land that's currently wasted on exurban subdivisions.
Typically you guard against this by instituting a capitalization requirement, ensuring that companies involved in drilling have the money and/or the insurance necessary to pay likely claims in case of an accident. This is, in fact, practiced in the oil industry. As far as BP is concerned, it passes this test with flying colors. It has been and will be substantially hurt by the spill (its stock price has lost half its value and it's had to suspend dividend payments -- that's an indication of the magnitude, although I think the market has overreacted, I don't think BP's lost nearly half its value over this incident).
I agree that seizing BP is the wrong approach. I do think that BP the corporation must be held financially responsible for the damage. That's the only way for the market to correctly price in the cost of disasters.
For what it's worth, BP is a massive company that makes a ludicrous amount of money every year. I've heard estimates that the total economic impact of the spill will be on the order of $100 billion. The spill *should* wind up costing BP more than this, because there are non-economic impacts that can't be recovered through the legal system that also need to be baked into the risk calculus. It won't, but that's another story. BP's market cap before the spill was $200 billion. But it will pay out claims, fines, and damages gradually, and it will continue to profit elsewhere in the meantime. The spill will seriously impact the company and its shareholders but it won't kill it. And that's fine.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
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Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It is almost impossible to have your hands "clean of oil". Food production and transportation uses lots of fossil fuels. Especially meat.
But it is possible, as a society, for us to decide we don't want offshore drilling. In fact, I suspect that if oil companies were made to pay fair damages to everyone affected by accidents, and pay real penalties to governments (Federal, a handful of states, and possibly countries like Mexico and Cuba) for ecological damages, they would not find offshore drilling worth the risk. Instead, just watch as lawsuits against BP don't come close to making the affected parties whole. The court system will protect BP as long as they've followed some basic safety regulations. As if the damage sustained by all these other parties was akin to an "act of god".
My point is that it's absurd to say that nobody can oppose offshore drilling if they participate in the economy in any way. You just have to be willing to live with consequences of stopping it (a somewhat reduced standard of living across the board due to higher prices on just about everything; less economic activity in the Gulf region; more oil importing and less oil exporting; but also less pollution everywhere; more economic incentive for energy efficiency; less sprawl).
That sort of holds them responsible. It doesn't do anything to raise money to pay for the disaster. It leaves the owners of BP holding a lot of equipment and buildings they can't use, so they'll sell the company to a liquidation type company that will sell all that stuff to other oil companies.
As far as I can tell BP didn't do anything illegal or unusual in setting up their offshore well, and offshore drilling was and is legal. So legislating a corporate death penalty would be a pretty arbitrary form of punishment. Now that the disaster has occurred the only thing left to do to BP is make sure that litigation against them has a fair chance of success. That includes litigation from affected large businesses, from classes of affected people and small businesses, from the Federal EPA, state EPAs, and probably from Mexican and Cuban concerns as well. If BP can survive fair payouts to all these parties it lives -- if not, it goes the way of SCO.
If BP can't survive fair payouts to all affected parties then it was not sufficiently capitalized and/or insured to undertake offshore drilling. So we'd do well to increase the requirements for capitalization and insurance for offshore drilling to a level ensuring they could probably make fair payouts.
This sounds like common sense. Parties harmed by another party's actions should be compensated, and capitalization/insurance requirements should be sufficient to ensure that this is possible. That's the basic theory behind corporations and limited liability (shareholders are protected personally against litigation and in exchange the corporation must be sufficiently capitalized or insured to handle litigation it might reasonably expect to face). But actually following that would be a radical change from what our government does. How can we know this? Because lately we've seen so many businesses having to be bailed out by the government because they weren't sufficiently capitalized to handle the risk. Even the US automakers, under their bankruptcy settlements, got to essentially write off billions in liability, and they didn't even cause a catastrophic disaster (other than the rise of the American car culture, that is). *Unwilling* creditors were left behind so the *willing* creditors on Wall Street could be paid. To be sure, doing the basic and obvious right thing would send shockwaves through the market. How did we get here?
The key here is the quotes around "fix". This disaster can't be completely fixed, so paying the costs of cleanup is far from being held responsible. Meanwhile plenty of people and groups have incurred costs because of the oil spill: people will see their property depreciate, companies will lose business, and institutions like the government will have spent plenty of money studying the spill and helping with cleanup. And, as GP says, these groups won't be able to recover their costs from BP because the courts will protect them.
If businesses are not held fully responsible for their damages then these damages aren't correctly valued in the economy, and thus there are incentives to take the sort of risks that cause oil spills.
There are some companies that act as if they have this sort of duty. Really, I think we'll find that keeping users' interests in mind at least a little will help ensure long-term success; I don't think Facebook cares. It exists to make money as fast as possible. And that comes straight from the top. There are few tech entrepreneurs I respect less than Zuckerberg.
1. The need for the "strictest animal welfare laws in the country" say a lot about standard practices in animal agriculture. The people that have designed them are not farmers, they are industrialists. Their portrayal of themselves as farmers, with a connection to traditional methods of raising food and care for the land, allows them to get away with many things they couldn't otherwise. But they sure aren't living out there and seeing the consequences.
2a. The standard for whether poultry and egg operations are humane is not standard industry practice. The standard is humanity. The birds are still packed in far denser than they can handle. This has serious consequences for their social development. Many turn to fighting and even cannibalism -- this is why they're often de-beaked (a truly fun and wholesome procedure for everyone involved, to be sure... similarly, pigs in tight conditions often have their tails removed to prevent behavior like tail-biting). Similar to grain monocultures there are poultry monocultures; both the "roasters" (birds raised for meat) and "layers" (birds raised for eggs) have been selectively bred to the point that they can hardly live healthy lives under the best of conditions. But even if you don't care about animal welfare at all, consider the problem: where does all the manure go? It's shoveled into giant, foul-smelling pits in the earth. And how about the spread of diseases among these birds? It's rampant. The manure pits become havens for bacteria and pollute the nearby water and air. Sometimes when there's not enough space in the pits they just spray it into the air. So (a) that's why you have to handle poultry so carefully and (b) that's why the incidence of asthma is so high near factory farms. In any other industry the pollution and disease potential would be regulated. But the lobbyists put on their overalls and say, "Aw, shucks, we don't know nothing about pollution except that we can't afford to prevent it." Meanwhile most of their neighbors don't have the money or clout to do anything about it.
2b. So in this case, what might disgust you, the crowding, the fighting, the smell (apparently it's so nauseating up close that it's caused workers to pass out, and then fall to their deaths in manure pits), is actually an indication that something's wrong. This is so obvious that operators of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs; this abbreviation is used by some because "farms" is really a misnomer) are extremely secretive about what actually goes on there. You can't just get a tour of the Tyson plant. Based on your comment, I'm assuming a neurosurgeon has consented to let you watch a surgery multiple times. The "disgust" here is just squeamishness.
3. So what, exactly, is the great advantage of the modern industrial omnivorous diet we have? It's not the welfare of animals, nor the welfare of workers. It's not the environment, local or global. If you count the subsidy dollars and various tax breaks it's probably not even a cost-efficient source of nutrition. Especially when typical consumption of protein and fat, at least in the USA, is far beyond what's necessary and health. So it's not our health, then, either. I'm a pretty fast runner (just ran 37 minutes for a hilly 10k above 5,000 feet altitude) and I dabble in the other triathlon sports -- point is I have greater nutritional needs than most people. I've been eating vegetarian for almost 6 years and I haven't had any problems fueling my body; I've set plenty of PRs in that time. I don't really see a great advantage to eating meat at all, certainly nothing that outweighs the destruction it causes. It's just convenience and tradition.
You may like to think that animals that are slaughtered for food suffer as little as possible but that's really not true. Their suffering is limited to the extent that it affects the final product. Actually, not even to that extent all the time. Reportedly factory-farmed pork suffers significantly in quality because of stress to the animals.
My understanding is that it's basically possible to eat beef from cows that have lived fairly decent lives (if not full ones -- even grass-fed cattle that wander huge and beautiful ranges are killed young). The majority of cattle raised in the US eat lots of grain, don't have enough room to graze, and don't get to form normal family and social bonds, but some do (you have to look for it). Here in Wyoming you can go to meat markets that will tell you which ranch your beef comes from and where it is. In some cases you can knock on the rancher's door and get a tour. This is what people tell me, at least (I eat vegetarian). Every ranch is different, obviously, but to some degree ranching practice is still passed down through family and community ties, and many ranch owners live on their ranches and do some of the physical work (this gives the decision makers a stake in the conditions affecting workers and the local environment that just doesn't exist for the people that set many intensive agriculture practices).
It's much harder with pork. If you want to eat pork that wasn't raised in sickening conditions (for the animals, the workers in the feed operations, and the environment) you really have to look hard. You'll have to pay a lot of money for the little pork you do eat. With poultry you're SOL unless you personally know the farmer. All the bullshit greenwashing you see on packages at the supermarket is simply that: bullshit greenwashing. "Cage Free" and "Free Range", as they affect poultry raising, are basically meaningless. All the big poultry operations are major corporations that will tell you anything to sell you something.
On the other hand, beef supposedly has a very high carbon footprint and unquestionably has an enormous land-use footprint. This means that it contributes enormously to habitat destruction and the loss of native grasses (so places like Wyoming and Texas used to have far more diverse meadows than they do now). The environmental consequences of intensive agriculture generally are pretty bad. Read about manure disposal practices on poultry and hog farms. Read about streams running red with bloodworms. Read about groundwater contamination. It's plain gross, and materially affecting the rural parts of our world. Then there are monocultures, unintentional gene patent infringement, and chemical runoff coming from grain agriculture.
It's just like a lot of our other conveniences that have nasty consequences. We have to weigh whether this convenience is worth it. The car culture has its conveniences, and it has consequences that are just reaching the shores of Louisiana. The transaction between a consumer and a corporate chicken producer, or between you and a car or oil manufacturer, will usually be mutually beneficial, but has externalities. Animals suffer, the environment is damaged, in many cases people suffer, too (have you ever lived next door to a modern hog feeding operation... or even driven through Iowa on a stuffy summer day?). If we could properly measure these externalities (including risk factors for things like oil spills) we could pay them as we manufacture, building in their costs. This would create an incentive for responsible behavior. Instead the government subsidizes and bails out the people that fuck up (subsidies and environmental allowances for factory farming practices, whether meat, dairy, eggs, fish, or grains, are criminal -- and we all know who ultimately foots the bill for oil spill cleanup, bank failures, etc.). This creates an incentive for irresponsible behavior. It needs to be fixed. Even the way we measure our economy is corrupt, as if all activity is equally good; making, taking, and breaking are all counted a
Small-town airport with 3 flights a day? Could you be talking about Cody, Wyoming? Well, if you are, you may know that a couple years ago someone tried to board a plane in Cody carrying a wrapping paper tube he'd filled with toys for his kids or something. Security thought it might be a pipe bomb and shut down the airport and all roads within a mile of it. That includes the main route into town from the east and south.
So... that indeed sounds like a pretty big gap between treatment of passengers and employees. I also saw a woman wearing a TSA uniform enter an employees-only area by just reaching over a half-height door and flipping a latch (like you'd do to get a baseball out of the neighbor's yard).
Despite this gap, I've never heard of a terrorist plot by an airport employee and we've all heard of plenty of plots by passengers. Maybe they really screen their employees well enough that they can be trusted.
That just doesn't pass the smell test to me. A lot of the slow progress on nuclear deployment has come because the costs to get a plant off the ground and insure it are so high. And even if nuclear power had made electricity cheaper, even now electricity is cheaper than internal combustion for transportation (it has been for a while IIRC). The difficulty has been building electric cars that are both good and cheap. The hardest parts of that, as I understand it, are battery tech and charging tech. They're just today becoming usable, and they're still not cheap. Do you think that having a somewhat cheaper electricity source would have made those things cheap and usable in the 80s? I sure don't.
Some absolute anti-nuke activists are misguided, sure. Some are NIMBYs -- as I can't imagine property values near a nuke plant going anywhere but down, NIMBYism is at least economically rational. Some are concerned about the unbounded risk of nuclear power and that the risk cannot be entirely borne by those responsible for it. And some are legitimately concerned that nuclear fuel is yet another (effectively) non-renewable resource, and one whose extraction could be ecologically dangerous.
The fact is that we're all responsible. We've all helped to create the "car culture", the unending sprawl that requires burning huge amounts of oil. We haven't enforced, though our politicians, that the risks of oil production must be paid for at the gas pump, so we've created an incentive to take risks in exploration. And here we are.
Diaspora is a fine name. Crack a damn dictionary. So it's a four-syllable word that a lot of people don't know. It's also an actual word that has to do with the purpose of the site. So I think it's a fine name, but I also don't think it matters; if the site is good people will learn it.
A lot of open source projects have dumb names. All the KDE apps named as words with Gs replaced with Ks, and vice-versa with Gnome apps. The Crips and Bloods do the same thing, it's absolute silliness. Firefox is a pretty stupid and meaningless name (Mozilla is also meaningless, but at least it sounds cool). And that hasn't stopped its success.
That isn't how Facebook started at all. Mark Zuckerberg was one of those people who was either going to get rich or scam a lot of people trying. He's managed to get rich, and at least be complicit in scamming a lot of people, so I'd say he's lived a pretty successful life.
What I'm talking about is that he was contracted to help build a similar site by some other people and deliberately sandbagged the work so he could build his own instead. Then he hacked into the email accounts of editors of the Harvard student paper for some reason I don't remember. Now he's exploiting his user base at every turn. The point is that Facebook was never a cute community project -- the goal from the beginning was to make lots of money. And that doesn't take a long, sustained success. Facebook will eventually fall; by that time the people that got in on the ground floor will have diversified their investments, and will never have to work again (unless the economy collapses really hard, which is always a possibility).
It's certainly possibly that a site started up with the best intentions could turn into the next Facebook. Similarly it's possible that a government started with the best intentions could turn into the next Stalinist Russia. Governments can try to limit their own power in constitutions but ultimately it comes down to people to make sure the government stays limited -- similarly, this new project can build in technical obstacles to central accumulation of power, but ultimately it comes down to the project's future leaders to make sure that it sticks with its principles.
Facebook's moral compass never *went* haywire. It was haywire from the beginning. It had to act nice to its users for a while to gain a following, but behind the scenes Mark Zuckerberg has always been pure evil.
I don't see how you responded to me at all. I'm hardly a free-market fundamentalist myself, and I don't think there's anyone that can or should force Apple to change their app store. Developers and users should put pressure on Apple to open up because it's good for them. This doesn't make them any more selfish than Apple itself, and to claim that it makes them "entitled" or "whiny", or that Apple's reasons for keeping the platform closed are noble as many defenders do, is silly.
For my part, I think a lot of the future of computing is going to take place on mobile devices. I'd like to see openness and interoperability, not the same stuff re-implemented in different languages for a series of closed platforms. Just a personal preference. I'll vote with my wallet and with my voice. Is that antithetical to a free market? I don't think so.
But isn't it silly that your app will be judged based on the dev tools you use, and not how good an app it is? With all the incredibly stupid crap that makes it into the app store, when a good app comes along, who cares if it was created with a third-party dev tool?
Yes, developers are being selfish. They want to make money, and the easiest way to do that is with a language they're comfortable with. Apple is being selfish, too. It wants to prevent itself from depending on providers of third-party dev tools and runtimes. The reasons it gives in public, based on things like software quality, are specious, and don't gel with Apple's past and present app approval behavior.
There's nothing wrong with being selfish. It's how businesses survive. I won't call the developers noble, nor Apple. I will say this about Apple: by putting itself in a position where it has to approve every app that can run on its devices it has made itself an arbiter of speech and expression. By not allowing any app stores besides its own, it has forced itself to *sell* or *ban* every app, with no middle ground. And, honestly, most apps ever made should logically fall into that middle ground. Not clearly great enough that Apple should give them strong marks of endorsement by selling them, but not bad enough to ban. This makes it hard to make consistent decisions. And Apple has several times equivocated on apps, and has been moved by outside pressure. So it's only logical for app developers to put pressure on Apple publicly.
For what it's worth, if I ever buy a cell phone, it won't be one that's closed off to development.
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That's great, except for the extra distance you have to walk just to continue straight down a street.
Given where our energy situation is going in the west, any idea that forces people to walk farther to improve car traffic flow is plain stupid.
I moved to Seattle pretty recently. I've lived in Chicago for longer. Chicago has many "crosstown" bus routes, going north-south along major streets like Ashland, Damen, Western, etc, and not through downtown. So you can get from, say, Pilsen to Wicker Park really easily. You can also get east-west in straightforward ways.
Seattle's situation is totally different, though. The hills and waterways have a major influence on how major roads are laid out. Even in a car most cross-town trips take you on 5 or 99, either near or through downtown. There's already a minor cross-town type route on 23rd/24th Ave. It's not super-long like the Chicago ones, but those aren't necessarily all that useful -- often it's faster to take the L and transfer downtown than ride the Western Ave bus for 10 miles (I used to do this every so often and timed it out at different times of day). I don't think you'll find a place where it's the norm to make long cross-town trips on mass transit without transfers.
The link on the text "lost a domain" points to Mr. Sunde's Twitter feed, providing me with one sentence in his own words stating exactly what the summary did. That's pointless. The whole reason I'd click a link is to get more information about the situation described, preferably from a neutral source (or one that acknowledges its bias). Similarly, a link on the text "suspicious of ICANN for a long time" suggests a resource indicative of that long time, not one stupid tweet.
I actually sort of like Twitter, but you're using it wrong, /. blurb writers!
I have a feeling bombing a store on Black Friday wouldn't stop people from shopping. At the Wal-Mart in suburban New York where the doors were literally "busted" and people trampled to death (this was Black Friday 2008 IIRC) the shoppers just kept shopping. The police tried to clear the store for an investigation and were unable to do it. Not one of humanity's brighter moments.
Point being, if one of those crowds was bombed it probably wouldn't even stop people from shopping at that store. Enterprising family members of the dead would be out in the parking lot auctioning off their newly-unneeded vehicles. Black Friday is a scourge more evil, and more powerful, than terrorism.
Modern Linux desktops have no problem with WPA. But instead of actually showing people the connection settings they need they tell them to log onto some unencrypted network and then run some binary blob, then tell them (incorrectly) they can't connect with OSes the blob doesn't run on. In this particular case you can't blame Linux. It offers a perfectly reasonable way to enter the parameters but the admins won't tell you the parameters.
I don't know for sure, but I've thought about this a bit and I'm pretty sure you're exactly right about this -- unless there's some other reason the Volt pollutes more than the plug-in Prius it should probably be treated the same.
Let's see exactly how much gas that is. $12k buys you about 4,000 gallons of gas where I live today (Seattle). That's probably about 120,000 miles in a Civic (it's about what I get in my 2000 Focus). And that's about a vehicle-lifetime.
If the electric vehicle had no fuel-related costs then the two vehicles would have about equal total costs. Now clearly grid power does cost something (this varies place to place), and today's electrics may require more costly maintenance over their lives, and they have various disadvantages -- lots of space taken up by battery packs, limited range, long charging times. So currently in the US market gas cars are a better deal.
But, you know what, given the relative maturity of the technologies, I've got to give the electric vehicles some credit -- they're getting pretty close. Hybrids are already a straight-up good deal for some people. Just imagine if our economy didn't suck at dealing with externalities. We'd all (we being people in the market for new cars) be looking pretty seriously at electrics. And these are the first mass-market vehicles. So although electric cars can never be a total solution to any real problem, I think they're already more than just a statement, and I'm pretty impressed with that.
I agree. We need to be better at preventing this sort of thing. But it has done us some good. BP's financial strength has meant that instead of going bankrupt and leaving the government with the whole cleanup bill it's actually covering some of the costs. It probably won't cover them all. But it will do better than a smaller company would have done.
Obsolete? The engine can still pollute more on a cold start, and the Volt is likely to have to cold-start often. It's hard to determine what overall emissions of the Volt will be, and that's really what CARB is concerned with.
And, really, that's as it should be. The air is the public good they're concerned with. The societal costs of energy production ought to be baked directly into energy costs.
Problem: in game design you get to ignore all sorts of real-world constraints you can't ignore in the design of an economy.
For example, yeah, it's incredibly hard to get a business started. If, in an RPG, to get a character past level 1, you had to out-compete all the established characters, a lot of people would fail in the early stages. It's hard to find a fair way around that in the real world. Things like economies of scale and interest weren't designed into the economy. They developed for good reasons and have helped us become more prosperous and use resources more efficiently.
It's true that there are some cheaters, people that use their powerful position to influence the admins and change the rules. And there are some rules that hurt small businesses beyond what's necessary. Employer-based health insurance, for example, benefits large employers over small ones to a stupid degree. But I think you could fix all the problems that can really be fixed, and even simplify some laws, and it would still be hard to start a business.
On the other hand, seriously handicapping large enterprises in some industries might have awesome consequences. I'm thinking agriculture and mining here, with the consequences being more local agriculture and more efficient use of the land that's currently wasted on exurban subdivisions.
Typically you guard against this by instituting a capitalization requirement, ensuring that companies involved in drilling have the money and/or the insurance necessary to pay likely claims in case of an accident. This is, in fact, practiced in the oil industry. As far as BP is concerned, it passes this test with flying colors. It has been and will be substantially hurt by the spill (its stock price has lost half its value and it's had to suspend dividend payments -- that's an indication of the magnitude, although I think the market has overreacted, I don't think BP's lost nearly half its value over this incident).
I agree that seizing BP is the wrong approach. I do think that BP the corporation must be held financially responsible for the damage. That's the only way for the market to correctly price in the cost of disasters.
For what it's worth, BP is a massive company that makes a ludicrous amount of money every year. I've heard estimates that the total economic impact of the spill will be on the order of $100 billion. The spill *should* wind up costing BP more than this, because there are non-economic impacts that can't be recovered through the legal system that also need to be baked into the risk calculus. It won't, but that's another story. BP's market cap before the spill was $200 billion. But it will pay out claims, fines, and damages gradually, and it will continue to profit elsewhere in the meantime. The spill will seriously impact the company and its shareholders but it won't kill it. And that's fine.
It is almost impossible to have your hands "clean of oil". Food production and transportation uses lots of fossil fuels. Especially meat.
But it is possible, as a society, for us to decide we don't want offshore drilling. In fact, I suspect that if oil companies were made to pay fair damages to everyone affected by accidents, and pay real penalties to governments (Federal, a handful of states, and possibly countries like Mexico and Cuba) for ecological damages, they would not find offshore drilling worth the risk. Instead, just watch as lawsuits against BP don't come close to making the affected parties whole. The court system will protect BP as long as they've followed some basic safety regulations. As if the damage sustained by all these other parties was akin to an "act of god".
My point is that it's absurd to say that nobody can oppose offshore drilling if they participate in the economy in any way. You just have to be willing to live with consequences of stopping it (a somewhat reduced standard of living across the board due to higher prices on just about everything; less economic activity in the Gulf region; more oil importing and less oil exporting; but also less pollution everywhere; more economic incentive for energy efficiency; less sprawl).
That sort of holds them responsible. It doesn't do anything to raise money to pay for the disaster. It leaves the owners of BP holding a lot of equipment and buildings they can't use, so they'll sell the company to a liquidation type company that will sell all that stuff to other oil companies.
As far as I can tell BP didn't do anything illegal or unusual in setting up their offshore well, and offshore drilling was and is legal. So legislating a corporate death penalty would be a pretty arbitrary form of punishment. Now that the disaster has occurred the only thing left to do to BP is make sure that litigation against them has a fair chance of success. That includes litigation from affected large businesses, from classes of affected people and small businesses, from the Federal EPA, state EPAs, and probably from Mexican and Cuban concerns as well. If BP can survive fair payouts to all these parties it lives -- if not, it goes the way of SCO.
If BP can't survive fair payouts to all affected parties then it was not sufficiently capitalized and/or insured to undertake offshore drilling. So we'd do well to increase the requirements for capitalization and insurance for offshore drilling to a level ensuring they could probably make fair payouts.
This sounds like common sense. Parties harmed by another party's actions should be compensated, and capitalization/insurance requirements should be sufficient to ensure that this is possible. That's the basic theory behind corporations and limited liability (shareholders are protected personally against litigation and in exchange the corporation must be sufficiently capitalized or insured to handle litigation it might reasonably expect to face). But actually following that would be a radical change from what our government does. How can we know this? Because lately we've seen so many businesses having to be bailed out by the government because they weren't sufficiently capitalized to handle the risk. Even the US automakers, under their bankruptcy settlements, got to essentially write off billions in liability, and they didn't even cause a catastrophic disaster (other than the rise of the American car culture, that is). *Unwilling* creditors were left behind so the *willing* creditors on Wall Street could be paid. To be sure, doing the basic and obvious right thing would send shockwaves through the market. How did we get here?
The key here is the quotes around "fix". This disaster can't be completely fixed, so paying the costs of cleanup is far from being held responsible. Meanwhile plenty of people and groups have incurred costs because of the oil spill: people will see their property depreciate, companies will lose business, and institutions like the government will have spent plenty of money studying the spill and helping with cleanup. And, as GP says, these groups won't be able to recover their costs from BP because the courts will protect them.
If businesses are not held fully responsible for their damages then these damages aren't correctly valued in the economy, and thus there are incentives to take the sort of risks that cause oil spills.
There are some companies that act as if they have this sort of duty. Really, I think we'll find that keeping users' interests in mind at least a little will help ensure long-term success; I don't think Facebook cares. It exists to make money as fast as possible. And that comes straight from the top. There are few tech entrepreneurs I respect less than Zuckerberg.
1. The need for the "strictest animal welfare laws in the country" say a lot about standard practices in animal agriculture. The people that have designed them are not farmers, they are industrialists. Their portrayal of themselves as farmers, with a connection to traditional methods of raising food and care for the land, allows them to get away with many things they couldn't otherwise. But they sure aren't living out there and seeing the consequences.
2a. The standard for whether poultry and egg operations are humane is not standard industry practice. The standard is humanity. The birds are still packed in far denser than they can handle. This has serious consequences for their social development. Many turn to fighting and even cannibalism -- this is why they're often de-beaked (a truly fun and wholesome procedure for everyone involved, to be sure... similarly, pigs in tight conditions often have their tails removed to prevent behavior like tail-biting). Similar to grain monocultures there are poultry monocultures; both the "roasters" (birds raised for meat) and "layers" (birds raised for eggs) have been selectively bred to the point that they can hardly live healthy lives under the best of conditions. But even if you don't care about animal welfare at all, consider the problem: where does all the manure go? It's shoveled into giant, foul-smelling pits in the earth. And how about the spread of diseases among these birds? It's rampant. The manure pits become havens for bacteria and pollute the nearby water and air. Sometimes when there's not enough space in the pits they just spray it into the air. So (a) that's why you have to handle poultry so carefully and (b) that's why the incidence of asthma is so high near factory farms. In any other industry the pollution and disease potential would be regulated. But the lobbyists put on their overalls and say, "Aw, shucks, we don't know nothing about pollution except that we can't afford to prevent it." Meanwhile most of their neighbors don't have the money or clout to do anything about it.
2b. So in this case, what might disgust you, the crowding, the fighting, the smell (apparently it's so nauseating up close that it's caused workers to pass out, and then fall to their deaths in manure pits), is actually an indication that something's wrong. This is so obvious that operators of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs; this abbreviation is used by some because "farms" is really a misnomer) are extremely secretive about what actually goes on there. You can't just get a tour of the Tyson plant. Based on your comment, I'm assuming a neurosurgeon has consented to let you watch a surgery multiple times. The "disgust" here is just squeamishness.
3. So what, exactly, is the great advantage of the modern industrial omnivorous diet we have? It's not the welfare of animals, nor the welfare of workers. It's not the environment, local or global. If you count the subsidy dollars and various tax breaks it's probably not even a cost-efficient source of nutrition. Especially when typical consumption of protein and fat, at least in the USA, is far beyond what's necessary and health. So it's not our health, then, either. I'm a pretty fast runner (just ran 37 minutes for a hilly 10k above 5,000 feet altitude) and I dabble in the other triathlon sports -- point is I have greater nutritional needs than most people. I've been eating vegetarian for almost 6 years and I haven't had any problems fueling my body; I've set plenty of PRs in that time. I don't really see a great advantage to eating meat at all, certainly nothing that outweighs the destruction it causes. It's just convenience and tradition.
You may like to think that animals that are slaughtered for food suffer as little as possible but that's really not true. Their suffering is limited to the extent that it affects the final product. Actually, not even to that extent all the time. Reportedly factory-farmed pork suffers significantly in quality because of stress to the animals.
My understanding is that it's basically possible to eat beef from cows that have lived fairly decent lives (if not full ones -- even grass-fed cattle that wander huge and beautiful ranges are killed young). The majority of cattle raised in the US eat lots of grain, don't have enough room to graze, and don't get to form normal family and social bonds, but some do (you have to look for it). Here in Wyoming you can go to meat markets that will tell you which ranch your beef comes from and where it is. In some cases you can knock on the rancher's door and get a tour. This is what people tell me, at least (I eat vegetarian). Every ranch is different, obviously, but to some degree ranching practice is still passed down through family and community ties, and many ranch owners live on their ranches and do some of the physical work (this gives the decision makers a stake in the conditions affecting workers and the local environment that just doesn't exist for the people that set many intensive agriculture practices).
It's much harder with pork. If you want to eat pork that wasn't raised in sickening conditions (for the animals, the workers in the feed operations, and the environment) you really have to look hard. You'll have to pay a lot of money for the little pork you do eat. With poultry you're SOL unless you personally know the farmer. All the bullshit greenwashing you see on packages at the supermarket is simply that: bullshit greenwashing. "Cage Free" and "Free Range", as they affect poultry raising, are basically meaningless. All the big poultry operations are major corporations that will tell you anything to sell you something.
On the other hand, beef supposedly has a very high carbon footprint and unquestionably has an enormous land-use footprint. This means that it contributes enormously to habitat destruction and the loss of native grasses (so places like Wyoming and Texas used to have far more diverse meadows than they do now). The environmental consequences of intensive agriculture generally are pretty bad. Read about manure disposal practices on poultry and hog farms. Read about streams running red with bloodworms. Read about groundwater contamination. It's plain gross, and materially affecting the rural parts of our world. Then there are monocultures, unintentional gene patent infringement, and chemical runoff coming from grain agriculture.
It's just like a lot of our other conveniences that have nasty consequences. We have to weigh whether this convenience is worth it. The car culture has its conveniences, and it has consequences that are just reaching the shores of Louisiana. The transaction between a consumer and a corporate chicken producer, or between you and a car or oil manufacturer, will usually be mutually beneficial, but has externalities. Animals suffer, the environment is damaged, in many cases people suffer, too (have you ever lived next door to a modern hog feeding operation... or even driven through Iowa on a stuffy summer day?). If we could properly measure these externalities (including risk factors for things like oil spills) we could pay them as we manufacture, building in their costs. This would create an incentive for responsible behavior. Instead the government subsidizes and bails out the people that fuck up (subsidies and environmental allowances for factory farming practices, whether meat, dairy, eggs, fish, or grains, are criminal -- and we all know who ultimately foots the bill for oil spill cleanup, bank failures, etc.). This creates an incentive for irresponsible behavior. It needs to be fixed. Even the way we measure our economy is corrupt, as if all activity is equally good; making, taking, and breaking are all counted a
Small-town airport with 3 flights a day? Could you be talking about Cody, Wyoming? Well, if you are, you may know that a couple years ago someone tried to board a plane in Cody carrying a wrapping paper tube he'd filled with toys for his kids or something. Security thought it might be a pipe bomb and shut down the airport and all roads within a mile of it. That includes the main route into town from the east and south.
So... that indeed sounds like a pretty big gap between treatment of passengers and employees. I also saw a woman wearing a TSA uniform enter an employees-only area by just reaching over a half-height door and flipping a latch (like you'd do to get a baseball out of the neighbor's yard).
Despite this gap, I've never heard of a terrorist plot by an airport employee and we've all heard of plenty of plots by passengers. Maybe they really screen their employees well enough that they can be trusted.
That just doesn't pass the smell test to me. A lot of the slow progress on nuclear deployment has come because the costs to get a plant off the ground and insure it are so high. And even if nuclear power had made electricity cheaper, even now electricity is cheaper than internal combustion for transportation (it has been for a while IIRC). The difficulty has been building electric cars that are both good and cheap. The hardest parts of that, as I understand it, are battery tech and charging tech. They're just today becoming usable, and they're still not cheap. Do you think that having a somewhat cheaper electricity source would have made those things cheap and usable in the 80s? I sure don't.
Some absolute anti-nuke activists are misguided, sure. Some are NIMBYs -- as I can't imagine property values near a nuke plant going anywhere but down, NIMBYism is at least economically rational. Some are concerned about the unbounded risk of nuclear power and that the risk cannot be entirely borne by those responsible for it. And some are legitimately concerned that nuclear fuel is yet another (effectively) non-renewable resource, and one whose extraction could be ecologically dangerous.
The fact is that we're all responsible. We've all helped to create the "car culture", the unending sprawl that requires burning huge amounts of oil. We haven't enforced, though our politicians, that the risks of oil production must be paid for at the gas pump, so we've created an incentive to take risks in exploration. And here we are.
Diaspora is a fine name. Crack a damn dictionary. So it's a four-syllable word that a lot of people don't know. It's also an actual word that has to do with the purpose of the site. So I think it's a fine name, but I also don't think it matters; if the site is good people will learn it.
A lot of open source projects have dumb names. All the KDE apps named as words with Gs replaced with Ks, and vice-versa with Gnome apps. The Crips and Bloods do the same thing, it's absolute silliness. Firefox is a pretty stupid and meaningless name (Mozilla is also meaningless, but at least it sounds cool). And that hasn't stopped its success.
That isn't how Facebook started at all. Mark Zuckerberg was one of those people who was either going to get rich or scam a lot of people trying. He's managed to get rich, and at least be complicit in scamming a lot of people, so I'd say he's lived a pretty successful life.
What I'm talking about is that he was contracted to help build a similar site by some other people and deliberately sandbagged the work so he could build his own instead. Then he hacked into the email accounts of editors of the Harvard student paper for some reason I don't remember. Now he's exploiting his user base at every turn. The point is that Facebook was never a cute community project -- the goal from the beginning was to make lots of money. And that doesn't take a long, sustained success. Facebook will eventually fall; by that time the people that got in on the ground floor will have diversified their investments, and will never have to work again (unless the economy collapses really hard, which is always a possibility).
It's certainly possibly that a site started up with the best intentions could turn into the next Facebook. Similarly it's possible that a government started with the best intentions could turn into the next Stalinist Russia. Governments can try to limit their own power in constitutions but ultimately it comes down to people to make sure the government stays limited -- similarly, this new project can build in technical obstacles to central accumulation of power, but ultimately it comes down to the project's future leaders to make sure that it sticks with its principles.
Facebook's moral compass never *went* haywire. It was haywire from the beginning. It had to act nice to its users for a while to gain a following, but behind the scenes Mark Zuckerberg has always been pure evil.
I don't see how you responded to me at all. I'm hardly a free-market fundamentalist myself, and I don't think there's anyone that can or should force Apple to change their app store. Developers and users should put pressure on Apple to open up because it's good for them. This doesn't make them any more selfish than Apple itself, and to claim that it makes them "entitled" or "whiny", or that Apple's reasons for keeping the platform closed are noble as many defenders do, is silly.
For my part, I think a lot of the future of computing is going to take place on mobile devices. I'd like to see openness and interoperability, not the same stuff re-implemented in different languages for a series of closed platforms. Just a personal preference. I'll vote with my wallet and with my voice. Is that antithetical to a free market? I don't think so.
But isn't it silly that your app will be judged based on the dev tools you use, and not how good an app it is? With all the incredibly stupid crap that makes it into the app store, when a good app comes along, who cares if it was created with a third-party dev tool?
Yes, developers are being selfish. They want to make money, and the easiest way to do that is with a language they're comfortable with. Apple is being selfish, too. It wants to prevent itself from depending on providers of third-party dev tools and runtimes. The reasons it gives in public, based on things like software quality, are specious, and don't gel with Apple's past and present app approval behavior.
There's nothing wrong with being selfish. It's how businesses survive. I won't call the developers noble, nor Apple. I will say this about Apple: by putting itself in a position where it has to approve every app that can run on its devices it has made itself an arbiter of speech and expression. By not allowing any app stores besides its own, it has forced itself to *sell* or *ban* every app, with no middle ground. And, honestly, most apps ever made should logically fall into that middle ground. Not clearly great enough that Apple should give them strong marks of endorsement by selling them, but not bad enough to ban. This makes it hard to make consistent decisions. And Apple has several times equivocated on apps, and has been moved by outside pressure. So it's only logical for app developers to put pressure on Apple publicly.
For what it's worth, if I ever buy a cell phone, it won't be one that's closed off to development.