I think the problem is that you are using the term socialism in an academic context, I'm using the popular definition.
I've given you my definitions of the term "socialism." In most places in the world in means people who support the socialist policy in question. In the US politics it means "bad" in an undefined way. I don't think claiming "socailist" means you are a member of or agree with the Socailist Freedom party in the US any more than being a member of the Republican party means you are in favor of republics.
Please tell, me what is the common definition of "socialist" in US political discussions, according to your observations.
THe application has to have support enabled in it- it has to know to call the third party service.
The user calls the service, unless the program author incorporated it in some other way.
They may not know every service- they may have created a framework where user input to text boxes are passed up through a series of plugins.
Nope, text the user selects is passed to the service they select. For example If I highlight some text "this works" then select the Safari: Services: Convert: Rotate-13 the text I selected instantly changes to "guvf jbexf" as per my request. I can just as easily run a grammar checker, or lookup the word in a dozen online dictionaries and display the results in a window that pops up. I can further assign application specific or global shortcut keys to these services. The programmers of Safari did not know someone would write a pile of text manipulation services and they don't need to know. It also works in every other program that uses the normal text handling APIs. Also, programs can offer services directly. For example, the data graphing application "Graphviz" is offering the ability to highlight a series of numbers and generate a graphic from it. My layout tools don't know anything about my graphing tool, but if I highlight a table in it I can output a nice vector graphic to go with it without copying, pasting, and opening another application.
Huge, huge, huge security hole. Remind me never to go to my banks website on a mac.
It would be, were it implemented by idiots the way you suggest and if people installed random services, but that is not really an issue. And whether you like it or not, this functionality is vital to my work-flows and keeps me from ever having to copy and paste text into MS word from wherever, just to spell or grammar check, and then paste it back, something I've seen happen hundreds of times to Windows and even Linux users.
There is a spectrum of economic systems that run the gamut from the extremes of true capitalism to true communism (I'm not an economist. Some people might find fault with this statement, but it's reasonably accurate even if there are exceptions or caveats). Most economic systems fall somewhere in between.
I think you're mistaken in thinking communism and capitalism are polar opposites. In truth, socialism is closer to an opposite to capitalism, than communism is. As for economic systems, all working economic systems are a bunch of individuals and/or communist cells competing in a capitalist economy, while everyone contributes some to socialist programs. In the US most communist cells are family units or extended families, with a few communes and monasteries. These compete in a capitalist economy, while taxes are collected by the central government on spent on socialist programs like public schools, military, police, roads, etc.
We have smaller communist cells than average and less socialism in most areas, although more in military and foreign aid than is normal. History has shown us disaster and violence whenever an economy moves to too much capitalism or too much socialism or too large or small of communist cells. The Libertarian party in the US, would like to greatly reduce socialism by stopping most of it performed by the government. This is indeed extreme, and would probably be disastrous. The point I hope you see from this, however, is that capitalism and communism always co-exist and are not opposites, although increasing the size of communist cells decreases the number of capitalist interactions, it does not decrease the amount of goods traded, except in making them more efficient.
In KDE they are called KParts, and any KDE application can load and use them. For example, spellchecking is used by many apps via a KPart, including the khtml component, which is itself a KPart - so KParts can even use other KParts.
Okay, so if I install KDE (I only have a Gnome machine right now) and I install a random application like an IM client. Can it automatically use the spell checker without the programmers having taken that into account? Can I globally install a KPart that translates from German to English and have all my applications suddenly able to do that? Where within the application can I get to that functionality? Is there a reasonable library of these KParts to choose from that I can just drop somewhere and all my applications will be able to use them?
On OS X I have a spell checker, grammar checker, translation, scripts I wrote, text manipulation scripts, automatic biblio entry generator, dictionary/thesaurus, and online reference lookups that I use daily. If I install KDE can I get all this functionality in my terminal when text editing, my web browser, e-mail, and IM client without coding anything and recompiling? As soon as my new machine arrives, I'll have a KDE setup in a VM for testing, but I'm curious if this is the same type of functionality or if we have a misunderstanding.
The "layout tools", like FrameMaker and Quark Express (I've used them both), suck at text entry and editing, and are they meant to - they are PAGE LAYOUT tools with minimal text editing capabilities.
While both are a bit heavy for text editing, I've never had problems entering text in either of them.
If I know the final output has to be in FrameMaker or Quark, I'll set up MSWord so the style names match and import the final text.
I have had serious issues using Word for text editing, including crashes for large files, poor optimization for lots of graphics, corrupting large files on save, and random errors in the text. I much prefer a simple XML file as input to a layout program, using an easy XML editor. It is more portable for input to multiple tools and end products, is much faster than Word, is much more reliable than word, and lets me apply spelling, grammar, translation, etc. tools more easily. It is also a lot easier to store in versioning systems and supports condition text easily for import, unlike Word. Since almost all layout tools support automated updates of these files, I don't have to re-import many times to get all my end products updated with a minor edit.
I guess my experience differs from yours, but I strongly recommend steering clear of Word for anything you do professionally, especially if you have better tools available.
If you are having problems with short Word documents that contain pictures, I suggest you RTFM and learn how to use styles to control flow, stop inserting blank lines to force layout, and how to paste in pictures so they are in-line text objects and not floating.
I agree with you that WYSIWYG editors are very suited to this task and it is entirely possible that they are having issues because they don't know how to use Word. There is another class of people, however, who do know how to use Word, but still have problems using it for these tasks, because of some of the deficiencies of Word. It really does have a poor formatting engine that makes very poor choices about kerning, consistent placement, and spacing. The fact that it is inconsistent between Word versions, makes it even more of a pain. For advanced users that want the same precision as LaTeX, but using a WYSIWYG editor Adobe Indesign, Framemaker, or Quark is a better option. They also handle long documents and many graphics better, as you probably already know.
YOu can do that in linux today- use CORBA and/or a shared library. For example, the 2 big libraries for spell checking are ispell and aspell.
That isn't the same thing at all, because a program author has to build in support for that library, it does not work by default on all text you see on that OS. The iChat team at Apple and the Adium programmers (whoever they are) did not sit down and decide to include spell checking functionality in their IM clients. Nor did they decide to provide support for translating German IM messages to English. But out of the box I can check spelling in either and once I download a German to English translation service and drop it in my services directory I can do that too, in both programs even though I doubt the programmers even knew such a service existed.
Works for Mac now because APple writes 90% of the software used. If it actually had 3rd party support, that functionality would die overnight.
Apparently you have not used it. It does work in third party programs with no effort on the part of the programmer. That is what makes it useful and valuable.
You criticize me for redefining Socialism, then you take the most liberal possible definition of Socialism and try to make your point.
There are Socialist parties in numerous countries, with differing beliefs in many of them. Just as I would not define a Republican as a person who supports having a representative republic, I would not define a member of a socialist party as someone who supports socialism. Socialism, however has a clearly defined meaning in most of the world and it is very much as I defined it. Just because the term socialism has negative connotations in the US, who published all sorts of weird, negative propaganda about the terms "socialism" and "communism" doe not negate those meanings. Socialized health care is socialism. Socialized schools are socialism. Supporting them is supporting socialism. That does not imply that a person wants increased socialism, or a particular kind of socialism, or extreme amounts of socialism, but it does make them a supporter of socialism as a concept.
Most people understand that the term Socialism has a fairly specific definition in political discussions.
This is true, but not the way you think. Most people consider socialism to be support for some socialist policy. In the US, I'd argue that socialism does not have a well defined meaning but is instead a "scare" word people use to label their opponents as "bad" in an undefined way since all sane people support socialism in some form.
By your definition, Libertarians would also be Republicans just because they both support lower taxes.
This is a non sequitur. Socialism is a concept and an economic element, just like capitalism. A republican might be (and probably is) a socialist and a capitalist, supporting both elements of the economy. A Libertarian might be a capitalist and a communist, supporting both of these aspects of the economy. That does not make a Libertarian a republican because they both support capitalism.
As someone pointed out earlier, Libertarianism only works when people actually think about their long-term good, and I've seen no evidence that people can do so.
I agree that Libertarian economic policies do not work in the long term, but not because of an individual's lack of foresight. They don't work because without any socialism, wage disparity and wealth consolidation rise dramatically until there is no middle class. At this point money and power have consolidated and human nature indicates it will be used to influence the government. History has shown us the poor whose wealth has been consolidated away will be left with fewer rights and perpetual debt and they will eventually take violent action to redistribute the wealth. The consolidation of power when socialism is removed from our economy is no different than the consolidation of power when a hardline communist country increases the communist cell size so much that it basically eliminates capitalism from the economy. They both have the same result.
I think what you are missing is that socialism, communism, and capitalism are elements of the economy, while Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian are political parties. This does not mean there cannot be a "socialist" party, "communist" party or a "capitalist" party, but those are independent of their meanings within the economy.
The end result is everyone writes their own "system level" service. Its a nice idea thats utterly impractical and fails every time.
...except it works on OS X right now and has been working for years. It is probably the second most important reason Linux is not my primary workstation OS. I keep reading how Linux is "catching up" on the desktop, but every time I use it I find it is still behind in vital areas such as this, because no one cares to implement these right and all the people that need or really want these features have moved to OS X and abandoned Linux except for servers. Maybe having one company that can just do it is always going to be the reason Linux lacks functionality. All I know is unless I can use my spell checker, grammar checker, translations, scripts, statistical analysis, dictionary lookups, thesaurus, online resource lookups, text manipulations, biblio reference formatting/creation, and other services in all my major applications and without having to configure preferences separately, I'm unlikely to ever move to Linux.
I would say the opposite. It is much more important that you don't use a WYSIWYG tool when you've got graphics. You want to be able to say "I don't know what page this is going on, but when it gets there, put it in the upper right corner and cause the text to flow around it seperated by a 10 point border."...or other things like that.
If you've ever used Framemaker or Quark or InDesign, you'll know those are WYSIWYG tools designed exactly to address this issue and there is a reason almost the entire publishing industry uses them.
WYSIWYG editors are very bad at this. Especially Word.
Word is WYSIWYG, but it is not really a layout tool at all. If you're trying to use it for the wrong task, you'll have a lot of problems. Now go try a real WYSIWYG layout tool and notice how easy it is.
Adding new things and reformatting takes forever due to Word's horrible reformatting problems.
Here's an exercise. Take LaTeX and Adobe InDesign and go build a 50 page magazine including five or more graphics on each page, with good, but unique layout and colors on each page. Note that they are both using the same layout engine, but one of them offers a WYSIWYG mode in addition to a text/XML editing mode. Notice one of them lets you insert, scale, set transparencies and filters on graphics easily and one is a huge pain in the ass.
You don't have to be a graphic designer to appreciate the difference. Even working with highly technical explanations of engineering manuals that follow a very formulaic layout, you can't deny that Framemaker is simply easier to use, make edits and use all those crazy features like graphics, color, and hyperlinks that are hacks in LaTeX.
and a lot of those people cringe in fear at the thought of actually doing anything at all outside of a WYSIWYG. So a WYSIWG, while much worse at actually getting things done, is the only thing that they can use.
I like vi. I hack PHP and a little C together and build custom XML formats and help systems. I prefer to do my HTML work in a text editor instead of a WYSIWYG. That does not mean WYSIWYG is better or exclusively what I want to use for all, or even most word processing and layout tasks. It's time to stop speculating as to why those poor incompetent "graphics people" are using WYSIWYG tools and actually evaluate them and notice that they are the best UI for some jobs.
KOffice works like that already. It's a great idea and I'd love to see it in operation.
I believe said functionality only works for KOffice components, though. For example, a grammar checking plug-in that works with KWord will not work with GAIM. Is this still the case? My reliance on these plug-in type services is one of the main reasons I'm using OS X for my primary workstation instead of Linux.
OOo would be better off IMHO to split so that the applications can be run in a more standalone manner. This would especially be true for the applications that are typically used in conjunction with Writer such as editing equations, references or SVG graphics.
Agreed. MSOffice and KOffice both provide a better user experience in this regard, in my opinion and experience.
But then, speaking as a professional writer, there is no possible way in which you could convince me that a WYSIWYG word processor is the right tool for any jobs I have; they are toys for people who have grown out of finger painting, not tools for people who deal with large quantities of text.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you. As a professional writer I can apply and test formatting much more quickly using a WYSIWYG editor in combination with a view of the underlying markup than I can using a non-WYSIWYG editor and then periodically testing it. Using just one editing mode, is a serious disadvantage and while maybe you don't think you'll ever use such functionality, you have to respect the desire of others to have more. Especially for writers that use graphics as an integral part of their writing and make use of it for layout, a non-WYSIWYG view is simply too slow and cumbersome.
Note, I'm also not a huge LaTeX fan. I've used it. It works. It is even the best solution for certain categories of projects. I just recognize that it's a pile of hacks to make up for the fact that it was not originally intended to support graphics or color and that the toolset is inappropriate for many tasks.
I look forward to the day you undertake a particular type of project and realize just how painful it is in LaTeX or another markup tool, compared to a professional, WYSIWYG tool.
But seriously, Is there a plugin similar to the 'APA referencing Macro' for MSOffice?
I'm a little concerned by the plug-in trend for applications. I think it is implementing functionality at the wrong level. How much work does it take to create a plug-in to make references like this that work with Word's macro feature. How much effort to make it work with OpenOffice's plug-in system? How much work to implement it once for every application you might want to use references within?
Mac OS X has introduced system services. One plug-in that works on all text that uses the standard APIs in any program. There exists one for automated formatting of references, by the way. If other OS's would just adopt a similar system, or better yet adopt a standard for all of them, we could remove so much duplication of effort and users would get to choose the best of breed for anything they wanted. I mean one spell checking plugin for Firefox, one built into Word, one built into InDesign, one built into Eudora, and none available for photoshop, IM, IRC, and your favorite text editor is a serious waste and failure to properly use the resources put into these tasks. I'm very unhappy with this trend towards application specific plug-ins when what is really desired is modular plug-ins that can be used anywhere.
People have an instinctive notion of property. In the natural state, you own yourself, and so you own the things that you make by yourself.
My hands are my own. If I use my hands to make a spear, then the spear is mine too.
You're mistaken. Our instinctual notion of property is whatever we can take and hold by force. This extends even to the concept of self. You claim that a spear is yours, if you make it with your own hands, but what about the items from which you made the spear. You claim them as yours, simply because you took them from wherever they were. You claim the materials by force.
Extend this concept to inheritance. A man dies. That man had made a spear. Whose spear is it now? Does it belong to all men equally, or to his best friend, to the young hunter he was training and would have wanted it to go to. To a descendant? Almost all property these days has been inherited or is made of items that were inherited. If in the past one man consolidated enough wealth by force to make himself a king and another man was his slave, does it follow that the children of those men should disproportionately inherit simply by circumstance of birth?
Ownership of property is a 'natural right' because it can exist in the absence of any government or law.
In absence of any law or or government people may feel they have the natural right to kill those with dark skin. That does not make it a natural right.
Theft is intuitively wrong, but the communist philosophy is worse than theft.
Theft is simply claiming property and is not instinctually wrong. There have been many cultures over the ages where theft was considered a natural right and a demonstration of the thief's virtue. If you want to see instinctual rights, simply look at apes. They don't recognize any right to property unless you can use force to stop others from taking it. That is instinct, not what you are claiming.
The important thing is to keep in mind that rights really do exist, and should only be transgressed for good reason.
We fundamentally disagree. The right to own things is an artificial construct as is the right to inherit due to relationships, birth, or any other social situation. I'm all in favor of keeping property rights and capitalism as part of our economy, but for the practical benefits it brings, not out of some misguided belief that it is fundamentally "right." I'm also in favor of balancing that capitalism with socialism to redress wealth consolidation and communism to reduce inefficiencies of duplication for small communist cells. Any serious economist looks at the balance of these elements when considering change. The Libertarian party's platform of reducing socialism is exactly the wrong direction based upon the available evidence. It leads to consolidation of power and totalitarianism and violence.
Facts are on their side, as the freer America we had had more upward mobility chances for working people, had less crime, had more economic growth.
Perhaps you should review your "facts." upward mobility, and reduced crime both correlate with increased socialism, not decreased. Libertarianism generally prescribes removing government funded socialism, which results in a decrease in socialism in general. The US is already dangerously less socialist than most industrialized nations and most probably has higher crime and less upward mobility as a result. Further reducing socialism in the US would push our economy into a dangerously extreme position that historically has lead to strictly defined upper and lower classes, no upward mobility, concentrated power into fewer hands, authoritarianism, and forced redistribution of wealth via violence.
You see, without socialism, money consolidates into fewer and fewer hands, because having money to start with is more important for getting more, than working hard or being smart. If I invent a cool new invention and make a million, I've also made 100 million for investors who did nothing but inherit money to start with. In short order, almost all the money is in few hands and those people use it to influence the government and foster corruption and class differences. People feel angry at the unfairness, and simply their position in life and they are faced with desperate situations when a few have a dozen huge mansions and most have very little except perpetual debt, so they redress the difference by turning to crime.
Sorry, but those are the facts of life and the Libertarian platform (for all its good ideas) is dangerously wrong when it comes to this one.
Why should it rely on perfect human beings.
Perfect human beings is a wholly relative term. Libertarianism does, however, rely upon certain ideas that simply do not seem to be true when tested.
If you don't even trust *competing* businesses, why do you trust a centralist organisation run by Those In Power (and their friends, the Fortune 500 CEOs)???
Governments need to be transparent and answerable to the people so there is no trust involved. The problem is, reduced socialism will almost certainly lead to concentration of wealth which is a concentration of power and that money will be used to corrupt the government if it consolidates. Socialism is, by definition, a mechanism for countering that consolidation of wealth. Simply imposing an 80% inheritance tax for estates greater than 1 million dollars, like some Scandinavian countries have, will do more to counter government corruption and increase upward mobility than anything I've seen the Libertarian party propose. The problem is, the people who write our laws are almost 100% those that inherited millions this way and want to continue a legacy of birthrights, rather than equality.
By the way, the modern corporation is a product of state intervention, just like The Cubicle. A free market would have many more smaller businesses.
If you could change our economy into a bunch of unregulated, small businesses tomorrow, they would begin consolidating in a week and in two generations we'd be facing a handful of huge monopolies and oligopolies, providing none of the upward mobility you desire. Monopolies are the natural result of an unregulated capitalist market and at that point differ very little from any other form of authoritarian, centralized power.
Communism needs everybody to work for the *common good*. Ever heard of the tragedy of the commons? Communism doesn't work, because humans are selfish.
This is a really amusing statement when you understand what communism is. Communism does work, because humans are not purely selfish and because they rationally understand the benefits of sharing resources. Communism does not work for very large communist cells. It works great for smaller and medium communist cells. To claim it does not work is to ignore the most common communist cell, the atomic family. I'd argue that it also scales fairly well to larger sizes, with communities or communes of a few dozen people and has worked well in some cases for communes of hundreds of people.
Libertarianism is the *opposite*. We don't not starve because there is regulation. We don't starve because there is a profit to be made in selling food. Libertarianism works, because people are selfish and will maximise *long-term* profit (unlike our modern state-influenced Corporatism, which focuses on short-term gains only).
Actually, Libertarianism and Communism are not polar opposites. Rather, every economy is made up of communist cells, participating in a capitalist system, and with some amount of socialism evening out the richest and poorest. Most libertarians are in favor of communism being maintained at its current level in the US, and not for it to increase to entire communities nor decrease to each family member buying all their own food, shelter, electricity, etc. What Libertarians do favor, is eliminating government involvement in socialism, which most likely will result in greatly decreased socialism. The problem with this is historically, it has not worked. Whenever a economy has tried to move away from a balance of these three elements, it has failed. Moving to even less socialist programs, in the US, which already has less socialism than the average industrialized nation will lead to an extreme and will collapse. Due to the monetary condensation principal that is a given for any real economist, lack of socialism eventually leads to a strictly defined upper an lower class and the elimination of the middle class. This lends itself to authoritarian abuses, concentrated power, and a violent rebellion exactly the same way extremely large communist cell sizes does.
Who said that liberty needs people that are "other than they are??" Maybe you have an example. And don't give me that crap that we need intervention to have "perfect competition" (stupid textbook concept to begin with) or something like that.
Capitalism brings the advantages of competition, motivation and drives innovation, while bringing the disadvantages of wasted, duplicated resources. Unregulated capitalism, leads to monopolies, oligopolies, and concentration of power that eventually removes all of those benefits. It has nothing to do with people not being "perfect" only in moving away from the balance that evolved to work with existing human nature. No "pure" capitalism has ever survived more than a short time without violent upheaval and forced redistribution of wealth (usually at spear point).
Now I support a lot of what the Libertarian party represents and I think a smaller government, with less intervention in many ways and the electoral reforms needed to break the two party system. I often vote Libertarian, in fact. I do not, however, believe their economic ideas to eliminate government socialism are a good idea nor do statistical studies of relative levels of socialism in other countries support decreasing it. In fact, most studies show that increasing socialism and particularly inheritance tax will likely provide significant reductions to violent crime in the US and increase the standard of living. Our current system, where the circumstances of birth are more important to financial success than intelligence, hard work, or any other factor is unfair, and that unfairness leads to a lot of social problems including government corruption and unnecessary expansion. I urge you to really look at economic systems around the world both now and from history and objectively evaluate what is most likely to solve our problems.
As to TFA, I have a question... There are lots of Slashdotters that can probably answer this for me pretty well: Isn't.02% statistically negligible, WRT a market trend report?
That information is not available. You see, the source data was not presented, only the results without and details of the methodology. This is PR, not science and is designed to influence people who pay attention to PR, instead of look at scientific data. The fact that you know what statistically significant means, is indication that you are not in the target market. The PR firm that puts out these studies just looks for a way to use statistics to support the position of whomever pays them. They don't release their data and make really obviously misleading statements because they know most people will never notice anything more than a headline that says, "OS X Failing in the Market." This is the same company that produced a bunch of stats showing how iPod sales are declining and the bubble has burst and used the normal retail sales cycle that happens every year as justification. Gee sales are lower than they were just before last christmas and just like in almost every other retail sales market on the planet? We'd better write a bunch of articles immediately so people know and lets forget to mention that this trend effects anything other than iPods.
I'm always amazed at the vitriol that spews forth on this subject. Although, frankly, post threads like those in response to this article are always interesting to read (and sometimes funny).
There are numerous causes for this. Mac users are a minority, and deviating from the norm in any way is socially a big taboo. As a result, Mac users feel the need to compensate by ardently defending their decisions. Likewise, pointing anything inferior about a product a Mac, Windows, or Linux user is using is a direct attack on their ego. You're telling them emotionally, that they were wrong. Especially for large financial investments, like a computer, people tend to irrationally defend whatever decision they made, because they feel threatened. Finally, many new Mac users find suddenly that a lot of the problems they were having have suddenly disappeared when they get a Mac. As a result, they tend to be astonished that Macs are not more popular and very vocal about praising them, sometimes to excess. All this leads to a culture clash, where people get very loud and often irrationally defensive.
IMVHO, use what machine and OS you like, like what machine and OS you use (if you have a choice). It isn't the chip, the windowing system, the kernel, or the manufacturer... it's what it does for you personally.
Any rational person who uses multiple OS's regularly quickly sees that each has things they do better than others. The problem is most people have only really used one, so they argue from a position of ignorance, simply to defend a choice they don't really have a lot of information about. People also have trouble empathizing with others, especially via weak mediums like blogs, so they operate under the assumption that everyone has the same needs and wants as they do. Add to this an unhealthy dose of misinformation from PR campaigns and astroturf and a few trolls and rabble rousers who just enjoy causing trouble and you get the loud, angry mess that is a OS flame war.
The only thing to do is sit back, enjoy the funny parts, and occasionally try to answer factual questions to help those who truly want real info.
And FYI, extreme Democrat != socialist. On most issues, I consider myself a pretty extreme democrat, but I am not a socialist. I support some sort of national health care system, and a strong social safety net, but I am a small business owner and capitalist.
It is interesting how negative connotations attached to words can cause people to try to redefine them. For example, you claim adamantly to not be a socialist, and then describe several socialist programs you support. Socialism is simply society as a whole contributing to provide some level of support to all of society. Socialized heath care is socialism. Public schools are socialism. Libraries are socialism. Police forces are socialism. Subsidized housing is socialism. Almost all charities are privately funded socialism.
Socialism is an inherent part of human nature, for the whole society to help its members out. Everyone is a socialist to some degree, it is just a matter of how much socialism and what types an individual supports. Libertarianism has, as a common principal, no government involvement in socialism (resulting in drastically reduced socialism). In a country like the US, which already has less socialism than most industrialized nations and which most economists agree is has lower standards of living and greater crime as a result of that, this is an extreme economic position to take.
Now I don't want to start a discussion of political parties stated platforms and functional platforms, but the Democratic party both in principal and in action does support socialism... they just go to great pains to never call it that for PR reasons. The Republican party also supports socialism, albeit different programs and likewise avoids calling it that. I caution you, don't confuse political posturing for reality and public relations with science. It is very easy in these days of mass misinformation campaigns.
Why does libertarianism have to be extreme while republicans and democrats get to straddle a wide range?
First, remember all my statements are in terms of economics. Libertarians don't have to be extreme. The Libertarian party does not have to be extreme. Libertarianism the concept, as it is generally defined, however, is an economic extreme.
It's just a different middle ground. If libertarians ever came to power, they might try to be extreme for a bit, but they'd end up complying with the realities of the world just like every other political party has done. They'd just end up at a different middle ground than those with republican or democratic sensibilities.
This is probably true. I support the Libertarian party platform, perhaps more than the Republican or Democratic party platforms. I have issues with all of them. I actually favor the Libertarians as much for their inherent support for electoral reform and breaking the two party system as much as anything. But this was not a discussion of why one should or should not vote Libertarian, only why, in theory, their economic platform won't work and is actually a move an already extreme economy, even more towards that extremism.
Libertarianism is unworkable and deeply flawed. It, like Communism, relies on something that does not exist: the perfect human being. In order for Libertariansim to work all people must work towards their own elightened self interest. The problem is that's not how humans work.
This is interesting because it is a different way of looking at the same issue I have described before, and with much the same conclusions... but drastically different terminology. From everything I've read, economic extremism fails. Almost every economy is based upon communist cells of some size, operating competitively in a capitalist market, with some degree of socialism mitigating the gap between the very poor and very wealthy. What you refer to as communism, is in fact an economic system that has tried to enforce a very large communist cell size, with large amounts of socialism, and no internal capitalism. It is an extreme to try to eliminate capitalism and it fails, badly.
Libertarianism is a push for a smaller government that eliminates socialism and in some cases communism. It too fails, due to its extremism.
Your arguments about human nature are probably spot on. The balance of communism, socialism, and capitalism has developed in response to how humans operate and all reflect parts of human nature. Your assigning of a human that does not desire socialism as a "perfect" human does not jibe with my, personal opinions, but I think we're on different pages that read the same.
While I do somewhat sympathize w/the writer of the text, I think it's important to point out that some soldiers and security experts actually do think that playing FPS - type games does do one thing for you, which is called `operant conditioning'. That is the exact method that the armies have used to get the soldier to shoot at each other.
Okay, I think you're a little confused. Video games are effective means to operant conditioning. They do not, however, condition people to kill. Conditioning is reflexive reaction and unless you're playing the video game with a gun, it is not going to make you more willing to kill. The army and police forces do use FPS game sin training, but mostly to develop teamwork and tactics (and because it is fun). The army does use psychology to make people more willing to kill others, but this is not operant conditioning. They do this by breaking down a person's emotional base and self confidence. In this way they overcome personal beliefs that killing is wrong and individual decision making is important and instead teach soldiers to believe obeying orders is more important and killing is not even considered in terms of right and wrong for the most part.
The general idea is that a human ape actually is more or less genetically programmed not to kill its species.
This also, is misguided. Man has been killing man for a long time and our "genetic programming" is made up of three, very recognizable parts. The first part is pain/pleasure/instinct/hardwired reactions. The second is emotional responses. The third is rational thought. A blend of these three parts results in our actions. The emotion called anger is the genetic program to destroy a threat and is usually why we kill. Anger can be invoked by fear and they are closely related. In a given situation we might be pumped full of adrenaline by a fight or flight reaction and then kill something that threatens us. Military training is designed to make this behavior controlled and predictably directed.
So, what one does to train soldiers to shoot at human shaped figures is to make them do that. Repeat, repeat, repeat shooting at a human-shaped silhoutte, and you end up w/soldiers that are programmed/conditioned to shoot at human-shaped figures in the battle-field. This works very, very well.
Sort of. The thing is, there are lots of human shaped targets on a battlefield. They need to be trained to shoot the right ones at the right time. Have you seen the pop-up man targets? They spring up suddenly and they all used to have red stars on their helmets.
Now what does this have to do w/FPS ? Well, you repeat, repeat, repeat shooting at human-shaped figures.
Here's where we disagree. You don't want people conditioned to make a mouse clicking gesture when someone pops up in front of them. You want them to aim their rifle. The FPS programs are used more to train higher functions and learn tactics and teamwork. Not to condition a response to sit perfectly still except for twitching your mouse hand.
Games certainly can be useful, but they don't make you a better shot and are not a primary method for overcoming the aversion to killing. I suspect most "experts" who claim otherwise don't really know what they are talking about.
It would likely be more efficient because of better technology. Better surveilance techniques and intel. More accurate weapons. And better military tactics. You don't just throw large numbers of men at each other and see who comes out on top...
Actually, during the world wars some fairly famous studies showed that the main reason most soldiers on a battlefield did not hit the enemy was because they were intentionally missing. Most soldiers could not overcome the moral belief that killing was wrong and so just fired their rifle blindly or at something other than the enemy. Bootcamp was changed from basic instruction in weapons to a brainwashing camp, where people were emotionally destroyed and then taught to obey and kill. The actual training part became and still is much less important. The rates of intentionally missing the enemy have dropped to a tiny percentage as a result.
All of this has little or nothing to do with video games, however, which contrary to previous assertions to not operant condition people to kill. The army uses them to teach tactics, not make people willing to kill.
And so we allow them to arbitrate certain freedoms of people wishing to smoke certain substances because?
...because under the guise of regulating interstate trade they managed a huge power grab and no one stopped them because they used scare tactics and US citizens are cowards.
The Myth of Second Hand Smoke claims that inhaling smoke from somebody else's tobacco is at least as dangerous as being a smoker, if not more so.
Ahhh, but this is not what was stated and this is, by itself, an assumption. There is a lot of research that has gone into secondhand smoke by a lot of different groups, some of which was scientific and some of which was not. While there may have been claims by some that secondhand smoke is more dangerous to nonsmokers, that was by no means claimed by all. The important question is, what are the dangers of secondhand smoke and are they significant?
The study you site involves two people both exposed to secondhand smoke. One is a smoker and one is not. It then monitors the rate of lung/throat cancer, presumably with other controls and normalization on the test group. How then can you claim, "claims that Second Hand Smoke is dangerous are bad pseudo-science at best, intentional lies at worst." when this study only addresses the relative danger of smoke exposure to smokers and non-smokers?
By almost all reputable accounts second hand smoke is dangerous to both smokers and non-smokers, although different studies have shown this to differing degrees. To claim that a study that provides support for the idea that secondhand smoke is not more dangerous to non-smokers somehow supports the idea that secondhand smoke is not dangerous, is what I would refer to as "dangerous pseudo-science." From the CDC, "Secondhand smoke exposure causes heart disease and lung cancer in nonsmoking adults. Nonsmokers who are exposed to secondhand smoke at home or work increase their heart disease risk by 25-30 percent and their lung cancer risk by 20-30 percent."
You seem to have fallen for a bait and switch marketing ploy.
While I mostly agree with your opinion, I'd like some clarification. Are you saying that participation in boxing increases the likelihood to commit those crimes or that the correlation is between people who are likely to become boxers are also likely to commit crimes?
I'm stating that statistically, there is a correlation between people who participate in the sport of boxing and who are convicted of violent crimes and sexual assault, unrelated to boxing. I did not imply a causation at all. It is possible that people who box sustain brain damage, have increased testosterone levels, are exposed to cultural elements, or are simply more conditioned to respond with violence than people who do not box and this leads them to be more likely to commit violent crimes. It is also possible that people with a predisposition towards violent crime, who are members of a criminal culture, or who have very high testosterone levels are more likely to become boxers due to those elements.
The point is, it is plausible that by banning the sport of boxing we could possibly (although not necessarily) decrease violent crime. Of course the same holds true for thousands of other parts of our culture from sports to foods to theater to books.
There's a substantial difference and I'd really like to see your source.
My source for this was a book whose title I unfortunately cannot call to mind and amazon is less than helpful. There was also a fairly famous statistical analysis in the 80s by someone named "Philips" that drew statistical correlations between television events including news reports of suicides and boxing matches to show causative relationships between viewing and committing violence. (Suicides and automobile accidents raise by a statistically significant amount following news coverage of a suicide and assault and battery crimes increase immediately following televised boxing matches.) I'm sorry I don't have more specific citations for you.
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I think the problem is that you are using the term socialism in an academic context, I'm using the popular definition.
I've given you my definitions of the term "socialism." In most places in the world in means people who support the socialist policy in question. In the US politics it means "bad" in an undefined way. I don't think claiming "socailist" means you are a member of or agree with the Socailist Freedom party in the US any more than being a member of the Republican party means you are in favor of republics.
Please tell, me what is the common definition of "socialist" in US political discussions, according to your observations.
THe application has to have support enabled in it- it has to know to call the third party service.
The user calls the service, unless the program author incorporated it in some other way.
They may not know every service- they may have created a framework where user input to text boxes are passed up through a series of plugins.
Nope, text the user selects is passed to the service they select. For example If I highlight some text "this works" then select the Safari: Services: Convert: Rotate-13 the text I selected instantly changes to "guvf jbexf" as per my request. I can just as easily run a grammar checker, or lookup the word in a dozen online dictionaries and display the results in a window that pops up. I can further assign application specific or global shortcut keys to these services. The programmers of Safari did not know someone would write a pile of text manipulation services and they don't need to know. It also works in every other program that uses the normal text handling APIs. Also, programs can offer services directly. For example, the data graphing application "Graphviz" is offering the ability to highlight a series of numbers and generate a graphic from it. My layout tools don't know anything about my graphing tool, but if I highlight a table in it I can output a nice vector graphic to go with it without copying, pasting, and opening another application.
Huge, huge, huge security hole. Remind me never to go to my banks website on a mac.
It would be, were it implemented by idiots the way you suggest and if people installed random services, but that is not really an issue. And whether you like it or not, this functionality is vital to my work-flows and keeps me from ever having to copy and paste text into MS word from wherever, just to spell or grammar check, and then paste it back, something I've seen happen hundreds of times to Windows and even Linux users.
There is a spectrum of economic systems that run the gamut from the extremes of true capitalism to true communism (I'm not an economist. Some people might find fault with this statement, but it's reasonably accurate even if there are exceptions or caveats). Most economic systems fall somewhere in between.
I think you're mistaken in thinking communism and capitalism are polar opposites. In truth, socialism is closer to an opposite to capitalism, than communism is. As for economic systems, all working economic systems are a bunch of individuals and/or communist cells competing in a capitalist economy, while everyone contributes some to socialist programs. In the US most communist cells are family units or extended families, with a few communes and monasteries. These compete in a capitalist economy, while taxes are collected by the central government on spent on socialist programs like public schools, military, police, roads, etc.
We have smaller communist cells than average and less socialism in most areas, although more in military and foreign aid than is normal. History has shown us disaster and violence whenever an economy moves to too much capitalism or too much socialism or too large or small of communist cells. The Libertarian party in the US, would like to greatly reduce socialism by stopping most of it performed by the government. This is indeed extreme, and would probably be disastrous. The point I hope you see from this, however, is that capitalism and communism always co-exist and are not opposites, although increasing the size of communist cells decreases the number of capitalist interactions, it does not decrease the amount of goods traded, except in making them more efficient.
In KDE they are called KParts, and any KDE application can load and use them. For example, spellchecking is used by many apps via a KPart, including the khtml component, which is itself a KPart - so KParts can even use other KParts.
Okay, so if I install KDE (I only have a Gnome machine right now) and I install a random application like an IM client. Can it automatically use the spell checker without the programmers having taken that into account? Can I globally install a KPart that translates from German to English and have all my applications suddenly able to do that? Where within the application can I get to that functionality? Is there a reasonable library of these KParts to choose from that I can just drop somewhere and all my applications will be able to use them?
On OS X I have a spell checker, grammar checker, translation, scripts I wrote, text manipulation scripts, automatic biblio entry generator, dictionary/thesaurus, and online reference lookups that I use daily. If I install KDE can I get all this functionality in my terminal when text editing, my web browser, e-mail, and IM client without coding anything and recompiling? As soon as my new machine arrives, I'll have a KDE setup in a VM for testing, but I'm curious if this is the same type of functionality or if we have a misunderstanding.
The "layout tools", like FrameMaker and Quark Express (I've used them both), suck at text entry and editing, and are they meant to - they are PAGE LAYOUT tools with minimal text editing capabilities.
While both are a bit heavy for text editing, I've never had problems entering text in either of them.
If I know the final output has to be in FrameMaker or Quark, I'll set up MSWord so the style names match and import the final text.
I have had serious issues using Word for text editing, including crashes for large files, poor optimization for lots of graphics, corrupting large files on save, and random errors in the text. I much prefer a simple XML file as input to a layout program, using an easy XML editor. It is more portable for input to multiple tools and end products, is much faster than Word, is much more reliable than word, and lets me apply spelling, grammar, translation, etc. tools more easily. It is also a lot easier to store in versioning systems and supports condition text easily for import, unlike Word. Since almost all layout tools support automated updates of these files, I don't have to re-import many times to get all my end products updated with a minor edit.
I guess my experience differs from yours, but I strongly recommend steering clear of Word for anything you do professionally, especially if you have better tools available.
If you are having problems with short Word documents that contain pictures, I suggest you RTFM and learn how to use styles to control flow, stop inserting blank lines to force layout, and how to paste in pictures so they are in-line text objects and not floating.
I agree with you that WYSIWYG editors are very suited to this task and it is entirely possible that they are having issues because they don't know how to use Word. There is another class of people, however, who do know how to use Word, but still have problems using it for these tasks, because of some of the deficiencies of Word. It really does have a poor formatting engine that makes very poor choices about kerning, consistent placement, and spacing. The fact that it is inconsistent between Word versions, makes it even more of a pain. For advanced users that want the same precision as LaTeX, but using a WYSIWYG editor Adobe Indesign, Framemaker, or Quark is a better option. They also handle long documents and many graphics better, as you probably already know.
YOu can do that in linux today- use CORBA and/or a shared library. For example, the 2 big libraries for spell checking are ispell and aspell.
That isn't the same thing at all, because a program author has to build in support for that library, it does not work by default on all text you see on that OS. The iChat team at Apple and the Adium programmers (whoever they are) did not sit down and decide to include spell checking functionality in their IM clients. Nor did they decide to provide support for translating German IM messages to English. But out of the box I can check spelling in either and once I download a German to English translation service and drop it in my services directory I can do that too, in both programs even though I doubt the programmers even knew such a service existed.
Works for Mac now because APple writes 90% of the software used. If it actually had 3rd party support, that functionality would die overnight.
Apparently you have not used it. It does work in third party programs with no effort on the part of the programmer. That is what makes it useful and valuable.
You criticize me for redefining Socialism, then you take the most liberal possible definition of Socialism and try to make your point.
There are Socialist parties in numerous countries, with differing beliefs in many of them. Just as I would not define a Republican as a person who supports having a representative republic, I would not define a member of a socialist party as someone who supports socialism. Socialism, however has a clearly defined meaning in most of the world and it is very much as I defined it. Just because the term socialism has negative connotations in the US, who published all sorts of weird, negative propaganda about the terms "socialism" and "communism" doe not negate those meanings. Socialized health care is socialism. Socialized schools are socialism. Supporting them is supporting socialism. That does not imply that a person wants increased socialism, or a particular kind of socialism, or extreme amounts of socialism, but it does make them a supporter of socialism as a concept.
Most people understand that the term Socialism has a fairly specific definition in political discussions.
This is true, but not the way you think. Most people consider socialism to be support for some socialist policy. In the US, I'd argue that socialism does not have a well defined meaning but is instead a "scare" word people use to label their opponents as "bad" in an undefined way since all sane people support socialism in some form.
By your definition, Libertarians would also be Republicans just because they both support lower taxes.
This is a non sequitur. Socialism is a concept and an economic element, just like capitalism. A republican might be (and probably is) a socialist and a capitalist, supporting both elements of the economy. A Libertarian might be a capitalist and a communist, supporting both of these aspects of the economy. That does not make a Libertarian a republican because they both support capitalism.
As someone pointed out earlier, Libertarianism only works when people actually think about their long-term good, and I've seen no evidence that people can do so.
I agree that Libertarian economic policies do not work in the long term, but not because of an individual's lack of foresight. They don't work because without any socialism, wage disparity and wealth consolidation rise dramatically until there is no middle class. At this point money and power have consolidated and human nature indicates it will be used to influence the government. History has shown us the poor whose wealth has been consolidated away will be left with fewer rights and perpetual debt and they will eventually take violent action to redistribute the wealth. The consolidation of power when socialism is removed from our economy is no different than the consolidation of power when a hardline communist country increases the communist cell size so much that it basically eliminates capitalism from the economy. They both have the same result.
I think what you are missing is that socialism, communism, and capitalism are elements of the economy, while Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian are political parties. This does not mean there cannot be a "socialist" party, "communist" party or a "capitalist" party, but those are independent of their meanings within the economy.
The end result is everyone writes their own "system level" service. Its a nice idea thats utterly impractical and fails every time.
...except it works on OS X right now and has been working for years. It is probably the second most important reason Linux is not my primary workstation OS. I keep reading how Linux is "catching up" on the desktop, but every time I use it I find it is still behind in vital areas such as this, because no one cares to implement these right and all the people that need or really want these features have moved to OS X and abandoned Linux except for servers. Maybe having one company that can just do it is always going to be the reason Linux lacks functionality. All I know is unless I can use my spell checker, grammar checker, translations, scripts, statistical analysis, dictionary lookups, thesaurus, online resource lookups, text manipulations, biblio reference formatting/creation, and other services in all my major applications and without having to configure preferences separately, I'm unlikely to ever move to Linux.
I would say the opposite. It is much more important that you don't use a WYSIWYG tool when you've got graphics. You want to be able to say "I don't know what page this is going on, but when it gets there, put it in the upper right corner and cause the text to flow around it seperated by a 10 point border." ...or other things like that.
If you've ever used Framemaker or Quark or InDesign, you'll know those are WYSIWYG tools designed exactly to address this issue and there is a reason almost the entire publishing industry uses them.
WYSIWYG editors are very bad at this. Especially Word.
Word is WYSIWYG, but it is not really a layout tool at all. If you're trying to use it for the wrong task, you'll have a lot of problems. Now go try a real WYSIWYG layout tool and notice how easy it is.
Adding new things and reformatting takes forever due to Word's horrible reformatting problems.
Here's an exercise. Take LaTeX and Adobe InDesign and go build a 50 page magazine including five or more graphics on each page, with good, but unique layout and colors on each page. Note that they are both using the same layout engine, but one of them offers a WYSIWYG mode in addition to a text/XML editing mode. Notice one of them lets you insert, scale, set transparencies and filters on graphics easily and one is a huge pain in the ass.
You don't have to be a graphic designer to appreciate the difference. Even working with highly technical explanations of engineering manuals that follow a very formulaic layout, you can't deny that Framemaker is simply easier to use, make edits and use all those crazy features like graphics, color, and hyperlinks that are hacks in LaTeX.
and a lot of those people cringe in fear at the thought of actually doing anything at all outside of a WYSIWYG. So a WYSIWG, while much worse at actually getting things done, is the only thing that they can use.
I like vi. I hack PHP and a little C together and build custom XML formats and help systems. I prefer to do my HTML work in a text editor instead of a WYSIWYG. That does not mean WYSIWYG is better or exclusively what I want to use for all, or even most word processing and layout tasks. It's time to stop speculating as to why those poor incompetent "graphics people" are using WYSIWYG tools and actually evaluate them and notice that they are the best UI for some jobs.
KOffice works like that already. It's a great idea and I'd love to see it in operation.
I believe said functionality only works for KOffice components, though. For example, a grammar checking plug-in that works with KWord will not work with GAIM. Is this still the case? My reliance on these plug-in type services is one of the main reasons I'm using OS X for my primary workstation instead of Linux.
OOo would be better off IMHO to split so that the applications can be run in a more standalone manner. This would especially be true for the applications that are typically used in conjunction with Writer such as editing equations, references or SVG graphics.
Agreed. MSOffice and KOffice both provide a better user experience in this regard, in my opinion and experience.
But then, speaking as a professional writer, there is no possible way in which you could convince me that a WYSIWYG word processor is the right tool for any jobs I have; they are toys for people who have grown out of finger painting, not tools for people who deal with large quantities of text.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you. As a professional writer I can apply and test formatting much more quickly using a WYSIWYG editor in combination with a view of the underlying markup than I can using a non-WYSIWYG editor and then periodically testing it. Using just one editing mode, is a serious disadvantage and while maybe you don't think you'll ever use such functionality, you have to respect the desire of others to have more. Especially for writers that use graphics as an integral part of their writing and make use of it for layout, a non-WYSIWYG view is simply too slow and cumbersome.
Note, I'm also not a huge LaTeX fan. I've used it. It works. It is even the best solution for certain categories of projects. I just recognize that it's a pile of hacks to make up for the fact that it was not originally intended to support graphics or color and that the toolset is inappropriate for many tasks.
I look forward to the day you undertake a particular type of project and realize just how painful it is in LaTeX or another markup tool, compared to a professional, WYSIWYG tool.
But seriously, Is there a plugin similar to the 'APA referencing Macro' for MSOffice?
I'm a little concerned by the plug-in trend for applications. I think it is implementing functionality at the wrong level. How much work does it take to create a plug-in to make references like this that work with Word's macro feature. How much effort to make it work with OpenOffice's plug-in system? How much work to implement it once for every application you might want to use references within?
Mac OS X has introduced system services. One plug-in that works on all text that uses the standard APIs in any program. There exists one for automated formatting of references, by the way. If other OS's would just adopt a similar system, or better yet adopt a standard for all of them, we could remove so much duplication of effort and users would get to choose the best of breed for anything they wanted. I mean one spell checking plugin for Firefox, one built into Word, one built into InDesign, one built into Eudora, and none available for photoshop, IM, IRC, and your favorite text editor is a serious waste and failure to properly use the resources put into these tasks. I'm very unhappy with this trend towards application specific plug-ins when what is really desired is modular plug-ins that can be used anywhere.
People have an instinctive notion of property. In the natural state, you own yourself, and so you own the things that you make by yourself. My hands are my own. If I use my hands to make a spear, then the spear is mine too.
You're mistaken. Our instinctual notion of property is whatever we can take and hold by force. This extends even to the concept of self. You claim that a spear is yours, if you make it with your own hands, but what about the items from which you made the spear. You claim them as yours, simply because you took them from wherever they were. You claim the materials by force.
Extend this concept to inheritance. A man dies. That man had made a spear. Whose spear is it now? Does it belong to all men equally, or to his best friend, to the young hunter he was training and would have wanted it to go to. To a descendant? Almost all property these days has been inherited or is made of items that were inherited. If in the past one man consolidated enough wealth by force to make himself a king and another man was his slave, does it follow that the children of those men should disproportionately inherit simply by circumstance of birth?
Ownership of property is a 'natural right' because it can exist in the absence of any government or law.
In absence of any law or or government people may feel they have the natural right to kill those with dark skin. That does not make it a natural right.
Theft is intuitively wrong, but the communist philosophy is worse than theft.
Theft is simply claiming property and is not instinctually wrong. There have been many cultures over the ages where theft was considered a natural right and a demonstration of the thief's virtue. If you want to see instinctual rights, simply look at apes. They don't recognize any right to property unless you can use force to stop others from taking it. That is instinct, not what you are claiming.
The important thing is to keep in mind that rights really do exist, and should only be transgressed for good reason.
We fundamentally disagree. The right to own things is an artificial construct as is the right to inherit due to relationships, birth, or any other social situation. I'm all in favor of keeping property rights and capitalism as part of our economy, but for the practical benefits it brings, not out of some misguided belief that it is fundamentally "right." I'm also in favor of balancing that capitalism with socialism to redress wealth consolidation and communism to reduce inefficiencies of duplication for small communist cells. Any serious economist looks at the balance of these elements when considering change. The Libertarian party's platform of reducing socialism is exactly the wrong direction based upon the available evidence. It leads to consolidation of power and totalitarianism and violence.
Facts are on their side, as the freer America we had had more upward mobility chances for working people, had less crime, had more economic growth.
Perhaps you should review your "facts." upward mobility, and reduced crime both correlate with increased socialism, not decreased. Libertarianism generally prescribes removing government funded socialism, which results in a decrease in socialism in general. The US is already dangerously less socialist than most industrialized nations and most probably has higher crime and less upward mobility as a result. Further reducing socialism in the US would push our economy into a dangerously extreme position that historically has lead to strictly defined upper and lower classes, no upward mobility, concentrated power into fewer hands, authoritarianism, and forced redistribution of wealth via violence.
You see, without socialism, money consolidates into fewer and fewer hands, because having money to start with is more important for getting more, than working hard or being smart. If I invent a cool new invention and make a million, I've also made 100 million for investors who did nothing but inherit money to start with. In short order, almost all the money is in few hands and those people use it to influence the government and foster corruption and class differences. People feel angry at the unfairness, and simply their position in life and they are faced with desperate situations when a few have a dozen huge mansions and most have very little except perpetual debt, so they redress the difference by turning to crime.
Sorry, but those are the facts of life and the Libertarian platform (for all its good ideas) is dangerously wrong when it comes to this one.
Why should it rely on perfect human beings.
Perfect human beings is a wholly relative term. Libertarianism does, however, rely upon certain ideas that simply do not seem to be true when tested.
If you don't even trust *competing* businesses, why do you trust a centralist organisation run by Those In Power (and their friends, the Fortune 500 CEOs)???
Governments need to be transparent and answerable to the people so there is no trust involved. The problem is, reduced socialism will almost certainly lead to concentration of wealth which is a concentration of power and that money will be used to corrupt the government if it consolidates. Socialism is, by definition, a mechanism for countering that consolidation of wealth. Simply imposing an 80% inheritance tax for estates greater than 1 million dollars, like some Scandinavian countries have, will do more to counter government corruption and increase upward mobility than anything I've seen the Libertarian party propose. The problem is, the people who write our laws are almost 100% those that inherited millions this way and want to continue a legacy of birthrights, rather than equality.
By the way, the modern corporation is a product of state intervention, just like The Cubicle. A free market would have many more smaller businesses.
If you could change our economy into a bunch of unregulated, small businesses tomorrow, they would begin consolidating in a week and in two generations we'd be facing a handful of huge monopolies and oligopolies, providing none of the upward mobility you desire. Monopolies are the natural result of an unregulated capitalist market and at that point differ very little from any other form of authoritarian, centralized power.
Communism needs everybody to work for the *common good*. Ever heard of the tragedy of the commons? Communism doesn't work, because humans are selfish.
This is a really amusing statement when you understand what communism is. Communism does work, because humans are not purely selfish and because they rationally understand the benefits of sharing resources. Communism does not work for very large communist cells. It works great for smaller and medium communist cells. To claim it does not work is to ignore the most common communist cell, the atomic family. I'd argue that it also scales fairly well to larger sizes, with communities or communes of a few dozen people and has worked well in some cases for communes of hundreds of people.
Libertarianism is the *opposite*. We don't not starve because there is regulation. We don't starve because there is a profit to be made in selling food. Libertarianism works, because people are selfish and will maximise *long-term* profit (unlike our modern state-influenced Corporatism, which focuses on short-term gains only).
Actually, Libertarianism and Communism are not polar opposites. Rather, every economy is made up of communist cells, participating in a capitalist system, and with some amount of socialism evening out the richest and poorest. Most libertarians are in favor of communism being maintained at its current level in the US, and not for it to increase to entire communities nor decrease to each family member buying all their own food, shelter, electricity, etc. What Libertarians do favor, is eliminating government involvement in socialism, which most likely will result in greatly decreased socialism. The problem with this is historically, it has not worked. Whenever a economy has tried to move away from a balance of these three elements, it has failed. Moving to even less socialist programs, in the US, which already has less socialism than the average industrialized nation will lead to an extreme and will collapse. Due to the monetary condensation principal that is a given for any real economist, lack of socialism eventually leads to a strictly defined upper an lower class and the elimination of the middle class. This lends itself to authoritarian abuses, concentrated power, and a violent rebellion exactly the same way extremely large communist cell sizes does.
Who said that liberty needs people that are "other than they are??" Maybe you have an example. And don't give me that crap that we need intervention to have "perfect competition" (stupid textbook concept to begin with) or something like that.
Capitalism brings the advantages of competition, motivation and drives innovation, while bringing the disadvantages of wasted, duplicated resources. Unregulated capitalism, leads to monopolies, oligopolies, and concentration of power that eventually removes all of those benefits. It has nothing to do with people not being "perfect" only in moving away from the balance that evolved to work with existing human nature. No "pure" capitalism has ever survived more than a short time without violent upheaval and forced redistribution of wealth (usually at spear point).
Now I support a lot of what the Libertarian party represents and I think a smaller government, with less intervention in many ways and the electoral reforms needed to break the two party system. I often vote Libertarian, in fact. I do not, however, believe their economic ideas to eliminate government socialism are a good idea nor do statistical studies of relative levels of socialism in other countries support decreasing it. In fact, most studies show that increasing socialism and particularly inheritance tax will likely provide significant reductions to violent crime in the US and increase the standard of living. Our current system, where the circumstances of birth are more important to financial success than intelligence, hard work, or any other factor is unfair, and that unfairness leads to a lot of social problems including government corruption and unnecessary expansion. I urge you to really look at economic systems around the world both now and from history and objectively evaluate what is most likely to solve our problems.
As to TFA, I have a question... There are lots of Slashdotters that can probably answer this for me pretty well: Isn't .02% statistically negligible, WRT a market trend report?
That information is not available. You see, the source data was not presented, only the results without and details of the methodology. This is PR, not science and is designed to influence people who pay attention to PR, instead of look at scientific data. The fact that you know what statistically significant means, is indication that you are not in the target market. The PR firm that puts out these studies just looks for a way to use statistics to support the position of whomever pays them. They don't release their data and make really obviously misleading statements because they know most people will never notice anything more than a headline that says, "OS X Failing in the Market." This is the same company that produced a bunch of stats showing how iPod sales are declining and the bubble has burst and used the normal retail sales cycle that happens every year as justification. Gee sales are lower than they were just before last christmas and just like in almost every other retail sales market on the planet? We'd better write a bunch of articles immediately so people know and lets forget to mention that this trend effects anything other than iPods.
I'm always amazed at the vitriol that spews forth on this subject. Although, frankly, post threads like those in response to this article are always interesting to read (and sometimes funny).
There are numerous causes for this. Mac users are a minority, and deviating from the norm in any way is socially a big taboo. As a result, Mac users feel the need to compensate by ardently defending their decisions. Likewise, pointing anything inferior about a product a Mac, Windows, or Linux user is using is a direct attack on their ego. You're telling them emotionally, that they were wrong. Especially for large financial investments, like a computer, people tend to irrationally defend whatever decision they made, because they feel threatened. Finally, many new Mac users find suddenly that a lot of the problems they were having have suddenly disappeared when they get a Mac. As a result, they tend to be astonished that Macs are not more popular and very vocal about praising them, sometimes to excess. All this leads to a culture clash, where people get very loud and often irrationally defensive.
IMVHO, use what machine and OS you like, like what machine and OS you use (if you have a choice). It isn't the chip, the windowing system, the kernel, or the manufacturer... it's what it does for you personally.
Any rational person who uses multiple OS's regularly quickly sees that each has things they do better than others. The problem is most people have only really used one, so they argue from a position of ignorance, simply to defend a choice they don't really have a lot of information about. People also have trouble empathizing with others, especially via weak mediums like blogs, so they operate under the assumption that everyone has the same needs and wants as they do. Add to this an unhealthy dose of misinformation from PR campaigns and astroturf and a few trolls and rabble rousers who just enjoy causing trouble and you get the loud, angry mess that is a OS flame war.
The only thing to do is sit back, enjoy the funny parts, and occasionally try to answer factual questions to help those who truly want real info.
And FYI, extreme Democrat != socialist. On most issues, I consider myself a pretty extreme democrat, but I am not a socialist. I support some sort of national health care system, and a strong social safety net, but I am a small business owner and capitalist.
It is interesting how negative connotations attached to words can cause people to try to redefine them. For example, you claim adamantly to not be a socialist, and then describe several socialist programs you support. Socialism is simply society as a whole contributing to provide some level of support to all of society. Socialized heath care is socialism. Public schools are socialism. Libraries are socialism. Police forces are socialism. Subsidized housing is socialism. Almost all charities are privately funded socialism.
Socialism is an inherent part of human nature, for the whole society to help its members out. Everyone is a socialist to some degree, it is just a matter of how much socialism and what types an individual supports. Libertarianism has, as a common principal, no government involvement in socialism (resulting in drastically reduced socialism). In a country like the US, which already has less socialism than most industrialized nations and which most economists agree is has lower standards of living and greater crime as a result of that, this is an extreme economic position to take.
Now I don't want to start a discussion of political parties stated platforms and functional platforms, but the Democratic party both in principal and in action does support socialism... they just go to great pains to never call it that for PR reasons. The Republican party also supports socialism, albeit different programs and likewise avoids calling it that. I caution you, don't confuse political posturing for reality and public relations with science. It is very easy in these days of mass misinformation campaigns.
Why does libertarianism have to be extreme while republicans and democrats get to straddle a wide range?
First, remember all my statements are in terms of economics. Libertarians don't have to be extreme. The Libertarian party does not have to be extreme. Libertarianism the concept, as it is generally defined, however, is an economic extreme.
It's just a different middle ground. If libertarians ever came to power, they might try to be extreme for a bit, but they'd end up complying with the realities of the world just like every other political party has done. They'd just end up at a different middle ground than those with republican or democratic sensibilities.
This is probably true. I support the Libertarian party platform, perhaps more than the Republican or Democratic party platforms. I have issues with all of them. I actually favor the Libertarians as much for their inherent support for electoral reform and breaking the two party system as much as anything. But this was not a discussion of why one should or should not vote Libertarian, only why, in theory, their economic platform won't work and is actually a move an already extreme economy, even more towards that extremism.
Libertarianism is unworkable and deeply flawed. It, like Communism, relies on something that does not exist: the perfect human being. In order for Libertariansim to work all people must work towards their own elightened self interest. The problem is that's not how humans work.
This is interesting because it is a different way of looking at the same issue I have described before, and with much the same conclusions... but drastically different terminology. From everything I've read, economic extremism fails. Almost every economy is based upon communist cells of some size, operating competitively in a capitalist market, with some degree of socialism mitigating the gap between the very poor and very wealthy. What you refer to as communism, is in fact an economic system that has tried to enforce a very large communist cell size, with large amounts of socialism, and no internal capitalism. It is an extreme to try to eliminate capitalism and it fails, badly.
Libertarianism is a push for a smaller government that eliminates socialism and in some cases communism. It too fails, due to its extremism.
Your arguments about human nature are probably spot on. The balance of communism, socialism, and capitalism has developed in response to how humans operate and all reflect parts of human nature. Your assigning of a human that does not desire socialism as a "perfect" human does not jibe with my, personal opinions, but I think we're on different pages that read the same.
While I do somewhat sympathize w/the writer of the text, I think it's important to point out that some soldiers and security experts actually do think that playing FPS - type games does do one thing for you, which is called `operant conditioning'. That is the exact method that the armies have used to get the soldier to shoot at each other.
Okay, I think you're a little confused. Video games are effective means to operant conditioning. They do not, however, condition people to kill. Conditioning is reflexive reaction and unless you're playing the video game with a gun, it is not going to make you more willing to kill. The army and police forces do use FPS game sin training, but mostly to develop teamwork and tactics (and because it is fun). The army does use psychology to make people more willing to kill others, but this is not operant conditioning. They do this by breaking down a person's emotional base and self confidence. In this way they overcome personal beliefs that killing is wrong and individual decision making is important and instead teach soldiers to believe obeying orders is more important and killing is not even considered in terms of right and wrong for the most part.
The general idea is that a human ape actually is more or less genetically programmed not to kill its species.
This also, is misguided. Man has been killing man for a long time and our "genetic programming" is made up of three, very recognizable parts. The first part is pain/pleasure/instinct/hardwired reactions. The second is emotional responses. The third is rational thought. A blend of these three parts results in our actions. The emotion called anger is the genetic program to destroy a threat and is usually why we kill. Anger can be invoked by fear and they are closely related. In a given situation we might be pumped full of adrenaline by a fight or flight reaction and then kill something that threatens us. Military training is designed to make this behavior controlled and predictably directed.
So, what one does to train soldiers to shoot at human shaped figures is to make them do that. Repeat, repeat, repeat shooting at a human-shaped silhoutte, and you end up w/soldiers that are programmed/conditioned to shoot at human-shaped figures in the battle-field. This works very, very well.
Sort of. The thing is, there are lots of human shaped targets on a battlefield. They need to be trained to shoot the right ones at the right time. Have you seen the pop-up man targets? They spring up suddenly and they all used to have red stars on their helmets.
Now what does this have to do w/FPS ? Well, you repeat, repeat, repeat shooting at human-shaped figures.
Here's where we disagree. You don't want people conditioned to make a mouse clicking gesture when someone pops up in front of them. You want them to aim their rifle. The FPS programs are used more to train higher functions and learn tactics and teamwork. Not to condition a response to sit perfectly still except for twitching your mouse hand.
Games certainly can be useful, but they don't make you a better shot and are not a primary method for overcoming the aversion to killing. I suspect most "experts" who claim otherwise don't really know what they are talking about.
It would likely be more efficient because of better technology. Better surveilance techniques and intel. More accurate weapons. And better military tactics. You don't just throw large numbers of men at each other and see who comes out on top...
Actually, during the world wars some fairly famous studies showed that the main reason most soldiers on a battlefield did not hit the enemy was because they were intentionally missing. Most soldiers could not overcome the moral belief that killing was wrong and so just fired their rifle blindly or at something other than the enemy. Bootcamp was changed from basic instruction in weapons to a brainwashing camp, where people were emotionally destroyed and then taught to obey and kill. The actual training part became and still is much less important. The rates of intentionally missing the enemy have dropped to a tiny percentage as a result.
All of this has little or nothing to do with video games, however, which contrary to previous assertions to not operant condition people to kill. The army uses them to teach tactics, not make people willing to kill.
And so we allow them to arbitrate certain freedoms of people wishing to smoke certain substances because?
...because under the guise of regulating interstate trade they managed a huge power grab and no one stopped them because they used scare tactics and US citizens are cowards.
The Myth of Second Hand Smoke claims that inhaling smoke from somebody else's tobacco is at least as dangerous as being a smoker, if not more so.
Ahhh, but this is not what was stated and this is, by itself, an assumption. There is a lot of research that has gone into secondhand smoke by a lot of different groups, some of which was scientific and some of which was not. While there may have been claims by some that secondhand smoke is more dangerous to nonsmokers, that was by no means claimed by all. The important question is, what are the dangers of secondhand smoke and are they significant?
The study you site involves two people both exposed to secondhand smoke. One is a smoker and one is not. It then monitors the rate of lung/throat cancer, presumably with other controls and normalization on the test group. How then can you claim, "claims that Second Hand Smoke is dangerous are bad pseudo-science at best, intentional lies at worst." when this study only addresses the relative danger of smoke exposure to smokers and non-smokers?
By almost all reputable accounts second hand smoke is dangerous to both smokers and non-smokers, although different studies have shown this to differing degrees. To claim that a study that provides support for the idea that secondhand smoke is not more dangerous to non-smokers somehow supports the idea that secondhand smoke is not dangerous, is what I would refer to as "dangerous pseudo-science." From the CDC, "Secondhand smoke exposure causes heart disease and lung cancer in nonsmoking adults. Nonsmokers who are exposed to secondhand smoke at home or work increase their heart disease risk by 25-30 percent and their lung cancer risk by 20-30 percent."
You seem to have fallen for a bait and switch marketing ploy.
While I mostly agree with your opinion, I'd like some clarification. Are you saying that participation in boxing increases the likelihood to commit those crimes or that the correlation is between people who are likely to become boxers are also likely to commit crimes?
I'm stating that statistically, there is a correlation between people who participate in the sport of boxing and who are convicted of violent crimes and sexual assault, unrelated to boxing. I did not imply a causation at all. It is possible that people who box sustain brain damage, have increased testosterone levels, are exposed to cultural elements, or are simply more conditioned to respond with violence than people who do not box and this leads them to be more likely to commit violent crimes. It is also possible that people with a predisposition towards violent crime, who are members of a criminal culture, or who have very high testosterone levels are more likely to become boxers due to those elements.
The point is, it is plausible that by banning the sport of boxing we could possibly (although not necessarily) decrease violent crime. Of course the same holds true for thousands of other parts of our culture from sports to foods to theater to books.
There's a substantial difference and I'd really like to see your source.
My source for this was a book whose title I unfortunately cannot call to mind and amazon is less than helpful. There was also a fairly famous statistical analysis in the 80s by someone named "Philips" that drew statistical correlations between television events including news reports of suicides and boxing matches to show causative relationships between viewing and committing violence. (Suicides and automobile accidents raise by a statistically significant amount following news coverage of a suicide and assault and battery crimes increase immediately following televised boxing matches.) I'm sorry I don't have more specific citations for you.