Actually, I don't subscribe to any theory of rights. I think people have the ability to do anything they want at any time, running the spectrum from picking their nose to murdering people and eating their flesh to taking people who pick their nose and throwing them in jail.
I agree. Sorry I assumed you thought differently.
If the government had stopped others from harming me, sure, but rights enumerated in the Constitution rarely apply to anything third parties due to me.
I gave several examples in my previous post of how the government helps to prevent other private citizens from harming you. I agree that the constitution doesn't explicitly grant you such protection, but the constitution was clearly not intented to completely specify the functions of the legal and judicial systems. So what's your point?
OTOH, the government protects me against certain specific types of harm and torts in general, which is people harming me in general, so if the guy down the street doesn't like my blog and arrests me, throwing me in his basement, I can have him arrested for kidnapping and sue him. So I guess you could argue that is a protection against him violating my right to be free from unreasonable seizures.
Exactly, which seems to contradict what you were saying above.
The government does not 'protect' rights. All it has done is promise not to abridge them.
Erm, rubbish. Unless you take the term "government" to exclude the legal system. If someone defrauds me, I can sue them. If someone steals my car, they'll go to jail. Now who do you think pays for all those judges, courtrooms and policemen? And how are they not protecting my rights, both directly and by establishing a deterrant?
Whatever theory of "natural rights" or "natural law" you may subscribe to (and I really think you ought to cancel your subscription), rights only exist in any practical sense when they are protected by a powerful entity of some kind. You can't have a right to free speech, for example, unless it is recognised by the most powerful organisation in your area (which is usually your government). Similarly, you can't have a right to freely sell the produce of your labour unless the government prevents a business rival employing thugs to smash up your workshop. The list goes on. Your government protects your rights more effectively than any other organisation.
Corporations have limited power precisely because powers are delegated to the government. You can either have the power to use lethal force resting with the government or with private organisations. I prefer the former, since it's accountable to the people.
If the government says you can't eat chocolate on Sunday, they can MAKE you not eat chocolate on Sunday through the use of force.
No, they can't make me. I have the alternative of dying or going to jail. Just as if Microsoft ensures that I need Word 2000 in order to open a Word 2000 document, I have the alternative of not opening the document and perhaps losing money for my business as a result. Ignoring the difference of scale (jail vs. losing business, which might in any case come to the same thing!) the issues are the same with governments' and corporations' power to force people to do things. However, if you take away power from the government, the difference of scale vanishes. Suddenly Microsoft can force me to do things at gunpoint, and there's no entity powerful enough to stop it.
Hence, his point is, do not empower the governmental side of things too much in order to "seve yourself" from the corporate side. A corporation weilding massive amounts of power is still fairly benign in it's abilities to affect your rights, whereas a government overly empowered when it gets a chip on it's shoulder is a very dangerous thing.
Without government power, corporations would not be this benign. Better to make sure that the government is decentralized and democratic, so that there are no concentrations of power (either public or private) beyond necessity. It's intolerabe that areas of life as important as communication should be regulated to a significant extent by private organisations which don't have the public interest at heart. Sure, in the present state of affairs corporations are less powerful than governments, but if we keep giving more and more power to private interests that will cease to be the case.
individual freedom is rarely enforced at gunpoint, but removing the threat of force means that individual freedom becomes only a priviledge, not a right.
I think ultimately indivual freedom is a privaledge. It's a privaledge of living in a society formed of largely rational people who are prepared to respect each other. History, I think, has shown that violence on all scales, from the individual upwards, has primarily worked as a tool of opression and not of liberty. Ultimately, what will your gun protect you from? You're more likely to die if you're carrying a gun because it makes you more of a threat, and other people are therefore more likely to shoot you. You may perhaps succeed in preventing your TV from being stolen, but probably at the cost of another human life. When the alternative is making an insurance claim, this seems a rather suboptimal outcome.
England is usually held up as a model of a successful "socialist Republic"
No it isn't. England is one of the least socialist countries in the world, probably second only to the US and a few others in its unrestricted capitalism. Don't be fooled by the fact that the current Prime Minister claims to be a member of the "labour" party. He's almost as much of a corporate crony as Bush. I guess you're just another dumb Fox-knobbled American who thinks that socialism = any degree of state control of the economy, whereas most forms of socialism actually reject centrally planned economies. To quote Marx: "Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinated to it."
Incidentally, it's hard to see how Britain could be a "socialist Republic" when it has a Monarchy. Contradiction in terms, surely?
And posts on Slashdot don't lean to the left. All you need to do to get a +5 Insightful is copy and paste libertarian propaganda.
Your last sentence simply makes no sense (do you know what "unileteral" means?), so I can't really respond to it. But I've been reading Slashdot for a while and I haven't seen many people arguing that the US ought (in general terms) to emulate Britain.
Regarding the subject of the article, I think the US and Britain are more or less tied in terms of how far they've managed to restrict the civil liberties of their citizens in recent years. The US constitution is a great document, but it's being systematically ignored and if the US population continues in apathy it won't be worth the paper it's written on.
That said, it is important to realize that a government solution to any problem is inherently revolves around the authorization of violence. That is where all power of the government stems from.
Ah, but since all (significant) private property is protected by governments and their judicial systems, is it not the case that any private solution to a problem ultimately rests on the power of the government to authorize violence? After all, if the population tried to prevent AOL from selling broadband, MEN WITH GUNS would step in to protect AOL's property rights. The fact is that all legal actions are ultimately protected by the threat of violence, whether they are actions of government or actions of private entities. The only way to get around this is not to have any laws at all.
There are a wide variety of options to choose from. No company is censoring what I say. If one did, I would choose an alterative! Quite simple, I have no alternative to the government that is holding me.
First, your only protection against monopoly, and hence against the possibility of having no alternative company to choose from, is the power of government to break up monopolies. Second, your government (unlike any company you can name) is bound by its constitution to protect your free speech. You're trying to present government as an entity that takes rights away from you, but in fact government is the most effective protector of your right to speech, property and liberty. Sure, government power can be abused, but only when there's an apathetic public. You can't say the same for private power, which is far more dangerous.
Please give me a list of companies that can force me to do anything? Microsoft? They can't force me to do anything
If you don't think the government forces you to do anything at gunpoint, I ask you, what happens when you don't pay your taxes? what happens if you don't follow silly traffic laws like buckling your seat belt? what happens if you jay-walk in an empty street?
Oh God, another crazy on about MEN WITH GUNS forcing him to do things AT GUNPOINT by POINTING THEIR GUNS AT HIM. Oddly, these crazy people are usually very insistent on their own right to "defend" themselves with LETHAL FORCE, and fail to realise that their own rights, which they claim to cherish so greatly, can only be upheld by the threat of government force against anyone who should violate them. Yeah, laws have to be enforced, sometimes (though very rarely) with guns, but what does this have to do with accountability or free speech? Would we have any more of either if people who drive dangerously are allowed to get away with it? Would you rather have laws enforced by MEN WITH GUNS employed by a private company? In short, what is your big problem with MEN WITH GUNS? And how does government use of force make it less acountable than a private firm which answers only to its shareholders?
Oh, and if you jay-walk in an empty street, no-one will see you, so nothing will happen to you! Duh.
The "sides" in wars are not unitary moral entities. The government of one country may be completely corrupt and amoral, but its soldiors may still scrupulously abide by the rules of war (which don't necessarily break down just because some other rules break down). Indeed, countries can commit great crimes without any single individual within them having done anything wrong, at least in theory.
It's completely different. Chomsky didn't say anything at all like what the poster you're replying to said. In fact, he's fairly skeptical about any links between how language works and how the mind in general works, as he takes our knowledge of language to be a specialised innate system. Moreover, Chomsky actually added some substance to the idea by making specific proposals about what a universal grammar looks like.
War doesn't have a concept of anything because it's not a thinking entity. The people who plan, fight and suffer from war, however, do have a concept of right and wrong.
War is by definition when all the rules break down.
No. Go look up the definition of "war".
When normal rules of human interaction (like talk it out before resorting to violence) all go to hell.
No. Even when the normal rules of human interaction break down, other rules can still be upheld.
It's depressing being a linguistics student. Every time a language-related topic is raised you have to listen to people who don't know what they're talking about spouting off and getting modded +5 insightful (or whatever the non-Slashdot equivalent of this accolade may be).
What makes English such a pain in the backside is that the language has been so utterly simplified over the millenia
No, it hasn't been simplified. At least, you won't find any linguist or student of Old or Middle English who'll claim that it has simplified as opposed to changed. Presumably you'll back up this outlandish statement with, say, a detailed analysis of the history of the case system in English from the Norman conquest onwards?
that we have lots of words with identical spellings, but different parts of speech.
Yeah, just like every other language. Do you have any data suggesting that English is unusual in this respect?
This makes the word order critical.
Word order isn't critical because of homographs, it's critical because the rules of English grammar are strict about word order. From a more practical point of view, it's critical because English is too poorly inflected for a parser to work out the structure of a sentence without reference to the order of the words. In any case, there's nothing particularly difficult about parsing languages with strict word order rules, or parsing languages with homophones and homophones, or parsing languages with both.
Every time the spelling distinction between words breaks down, it becomes significantly more difficult for anything short of a person to get meaning out of a sentence.
Not really. The problem of people writing "their" instead of "they're" is absolutely trivial compared to the staggeringly difficult task of accurately parsing natural language, or machine translation, or any other NLP problem of similar complexity. For God's sake, just list "their" as a synonim for "they're" in your parser and it will figure out which meaning was intended from the grammatical structure (there are few, if any, syntactic contexts in which more than one of "there", "their" or "they're" is correct).
If we don't, in a matter of just a few years, we'll get to the point where nobody can understand anything.
People have been saying this for hundreds of years.
So, basically, you've taken one of the most difficult areas of AI (NLP) and argued that it's really difficult these days because sometimes people spell "they're" incorrectly. Weird.
Just to clarify, I have contradicted myself on one point. I admit I was wrong to say that an employee will get payed more than his labour is worth if he has a monopoly on that kind of labour. First paragraph of my reply is a revision of my previous argument which had this flaw.
Perception, my dear brpr. If I believe that this individual will not produce more value than the money I pay them, I will simply keep the money.
True, but you're missing the point. Most of the time, you pay people considerably less than what their work is worth to you (*) because competition is driving down the price of labour. For this reason, although the price of labour is limited (at least in theory) by the value of the labour performed to the employer, it is not determined by this value. Thus, a minimum wage is very unlikely to force an employer into paying more than an employee's labour is worth, since they're usually paying quite a bit less than that anyway.
Securing your server is an excellent example. What's it worth to you? Even if I am the only one in the world who can do it, if I try to charge more than securing the server is worth to you, you won't pay it.
True, but see above.
Nowhere do you deny that a minimum wage will price some workers out of the market, or some work from being done at all.
Indeed not, I merely note that it's an empirical issue, i.e. you cannot argue from first principles that a minimum wage will always cause unemployment, or even that it will cause unemployment most of the time. Empirical studies totally undermine your argument, for example this excellent paper (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_i d=228689) which argues that unemployment is primarily linked to inequality ("...contradicting the often-repeated view that unemployment in Europe is attributable to rigid wage structures, high minimum wages and generous social welfare systems."). The paper shows that many factors which are totally ignored by your phony-deductive theory have a significant effect on unemployment levels. In my previous post, admittedly, I was more focused on the possible benefits of having a minimum wage even if it did lead to higher unemployment. Having looked into the issue a little more, I'm now more skeptical that a minimum wage would significantly increase unemployment.
What are you arguing against, anyway? You don't actually contradict me, except in the effort to promote/denigrate the "labor theory of value", when I was actually talking about the "value of labor".
I'm not sure if the the position I was attacking, even if it wasn't your position, was technically the labour theory of value (I'm genuinely not sure). I didn't attack your specific argument because the 3rd paragraph of your original post makes no sense to me. Why can I negotiate $x+1 tomorrow? If I make 50 widgets for you on Wednesday, why will another 50 widgets on Thursday be worth more to you? You might not even want any more widgets at all on Thursday! What is your argument in this paragraph even supposed to establish? That minimum wages don't increase the median wage? If so, this is flatly contradicted by the empirical evidence. I suspect that's not what it's meant to establish, but that's my best guess.
Oh, and "simplistic" doesn't mean wrong. It just means simple enough that people can understand it. If your theory cannot be explained simply, there is little value to your theory except to you.
I disagree. Sometimes the real world is complex, and even good theories cannot always get rid of this complexity entirely. An economic theory which is simple enough to be summed up in a paragraph or two is likely to be wrong, because economies are influenced by an enormous range of factors, including one of enormous complexity: human psychology. I'm not offering any particular alternative theory here, merely arguing that your theory is flawed and contradicted by the empirical evidence. If you're familiar with the economics literature, you'll be aware of the various alternatives.
(*) Another problem with your argument which I'm ignoring here for simplicity is that it's incredibly difficult to work o
Indeed, which is precisely what libertarians foolishly and naively advocate. There is nothing in their proposed political system to prevent a private institution amassing a private army or police force more powerful than anything the government has. And in order for the government to counter private armies, taxes would have to be raised, contrary to libertarian principles. Once the government is less powerful than some of its citizens, the law ceases to be any defence against private tyranny. In fact, one may as well call the biggest private organization in a libertarian society "the government".
In a society where the government has virtually no power, power will be transferred to large, non-democratic institutions such as corporations. They may well go on to establish de facto monopolies on the use of force and on employment.
Nonsense. You're assuming that wages are based on the value of the labour performed by the worker, but they aren't. As any good free market idealogue should know, they're determined by the supply and demand for the particular form of labour involved (which is only indirectly influenced by the value of its product). If you secure my server for me, this may be worth, say, $10,000 dollars to my business. But if you happen to be the only person in the country qualified to secure my server, you'll receive a much higher wage than the value of your work. All your arguments are based on the false assumption that wages are determined by the value of work to the employee, and are hence invalid.
It may perhaps be true that a minimum wage creates a "permanent class of unemployed", but your analysis is massively over-simplisitc here. First, it's an empirical question whether any given minimum wage will be high enough to cause a significant degree of unemployment. It is simply a question of whether enough companies can afford to pay above the market rate for some of their employees. They may of may not be able to, depending on an enormous range of factors. In the worst case, the "permanent" class of unemployed isn't permanent at all -- there will be a cycle of unskilled workers going in and out of unemployment. If benefits are reasonably high, this is probably better than full employment at low wages.
also, can you imagine the look of horror when the pilot realizes that with that much g force
Erm, I don't think you understand G forces. Just because the plane is flying fast doesn't mean it will be undergoing high G. A Mach 2 plane flying straight and level (or making a steady climb or dive) will be at 1G.
The only thing that actually makes XML slightly better to deal with is that it's a document format, not a programming language.
Erm, XML and S-expressions are both data formats. It so happens that S-expressions are used to express programs in a number of programming languages in the Lisp family, but this doesn't stop them being a data format. You're very confused.
Also, the facts that they're never nested directly next to each other and that they describe themselves helps. With LISP you get stuff like
(((((this)))))
Erm, no you don't. You might conceivably have a data structure with that level of vacuous nesting (just as you might have in any other language, where it wouldn't be any more readable than in Lisp), but actual Lisp code would never look like that.
I prefer Haskell to Lisp mself, but it's sad to see ignorant criticisms inevitably modified insightful by a Slashdot crowd who these days could barely manage to program in BASIC.
By the way - opportunities have more to do with your economic class than your race.
I agree; nothing I said contradicts this. In fact I explicitly stated that the disparity in achievement between races was due to education and other "social/cultural" factors, which obviously includes class.
The better your economic level, the better your education.
Right, but that's not an inevitable fact about life. That's something that can and should be changed. There are always going to be poor people in a capitalist society, so you'd better have an egalatarian education system to compensate.
You think that just because you're white or asian you can automatically have any education and profession you want?!
I think the poster you're replying to would agree with everything you said. He was implictly arguing that (since there is no innate difference in intelligence between people of different races) other factors must be responsible for the discrepancy.
Why is it considered such an anathema merely to suggest that people with similar genotypes would have similar phenotypes?
Black people don't have similar genotypes. There's an enormous amount of ethnic diveristy (especially in Africa, but I expect among blacks in the US too). Don't be fooled into thinking that similar skin color = similar genes. Black people as a group no more have genes in common than tall people or blond people.
There are two sides to a penny. I can flip it 100 times but that doesn't mean it is going to turn up heads exactly 50% of the time and tails exactly 50% of the time. It's entirely possible that it could turn up 80/20 or 60/40 or 30/70. Was there any bias in the coin? No, that's just the way things go. Just because there is the potential for an even toss of the coin does not mean the end will always be even.
People follow the things that interest them. You can't just say "15% of the population is black but only 5% of the gaming industry is - oh noes CONSPIRACIES!".
Yes, you can, because the sample size is very large and the difference is statistically significant. You can't put this sort of discrepancy down to chance.
And "people follow the things that interest them"? Yeah, I guess all those minimum wage cleaners just love mopping! Come on, people follow the things that interest them to the extent permitted by their innate abilities and the education they have access to. The available evidence suggests that on average the innate ability of black/hispanic children is just as high as that of white children, but they tend to have a poorer education (and of course there's a multidude of other social/cultural factors getting in the way of their progress).
SERIES 2000 has been a free download for a long time now. Series was in CLTL2, f.f.s.
Yes, but the abstraction isn't integrated into the standard library, and you can't use the list functions to operate on series.
Come off of it. It just plain isn't. Let's look at the spec, shall we? "Dear lord", he said with remembered horror, "Layout? Haskell syntax is FREAKING 2-DIMENSIONAL".
The use of layout is just a feature of the lexer. You could just as easily use indentation instead of brackets to group symbols in lisp code (in fact Guile has an extension to allow you to do this in Scheme). It doesn't really make the syntax as such any more complicated. Obviously, Haskell syntax is somewhat more complex than Lisp syntax, but it's also much more concise. How long is the Lisp equivalent of the following?
reverse = foldl (flip (:)) []
Writing idiomatic programs in lisp IS extending lisp. If you're not, you're doing it, well, not wrong as such, but rather suboptimally.
Yes, but there's a difference between "extending lisp" in the usual sense and "writing a new language on top of lisp", which is a waste of time when the new language already exists! It's absurd to argue that if I want to write a program using lazy functional idioms that I should first spend days/months extending Lisp to fully support these idioms, instead of just using Haskell.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I don't subscribe to any theory of rights. I think people have the ability to do anything they want at any time, running the spectrum from picking their nose to murdering people and eating their flesh to taking people who pick their nose and throwing them in jail.
I agree. Sorry I assumed you thought differently.
If the government had stopped others from harming me, sure, but rights enumerated in the Constitution rarely apply to anything third parties due to me.
I gave several examples in my previous post of how the government helps to prevent other private citizens from harming you. I agree that the constitution doesn't explicitly grant you such protection, but the constitution was clearly not intented to completely specify the functions of the legal and judicial systems. So what's your point?
OTOH, the government protects me against certain specific types of harm and torts in general, which is people harming me in general, so if the guy down the street doesn't like my blog and arrests me, throwing me in his basement, I can have him arrested for kidnapping and sue him. So I guess you could argue that is a protection against him violating my right to be free from unreasonable seizures.
Exactly, which seems to contradict what you were saying above.
The government does not 'protect' rights. All it has done is promise not to abridge them.
Erm, rubbish. Unless you take the term "government" to exclude the legal system. If someone defrauds me, I can sue them. If someone steals my car, they'll go to jail. Now who do you think pays for all those judges, courtrooms and policemen? And how are they not protecting my rights, both directly and by establishing a deterrant?
Whatever theory of "natural rights" or "natural law" you may subscribe to (and I really think you ought to cancel your subscription), rights only exist in any practical sense when they are protected by a powerful entity of some kind. You can't have a right to free speech, for example, unless it is recognised by the most powerful organisation in your area (which is usually your government). Similarly, you can't have a right to freely sell the produce of your labour unless the government prevents a business rival employing thugs to smash up your workshop. The list goes on. Your government protects your rights more effectively than any other organisation.
Corporations have NO power to enforce anything.
Corporations have limited power precisely because powers are delegated to the government. You can either have the power to use lethal force resting with the government or with private organisations. I prefer the former, since it's accountable to the people.
If the government says you can't eat chocolate on Sunday, they can MAKE you not eat chocolate on Sunday through the use of force.
No, they can't make me. I have the alternative of dying or going to jail. Just as if Microsoft ensures that I need Word 2000 in order to open a Word 2000 document, I have the alternative of not opening the document and perhaps losing money for my business as a result. Ignoring the difference of scale (jail vs. losing business, which might in any case come to the same thing!) the issues are the same with governments' and corporations' power to force people to do things. However, if you take away power from the government, the difference of scale vanishes. Suddenly Microsoft can force me to do things at gunpoint, and there's no entity powerful enough to stop it.
Hence, his point is, do not empower the governmental side of things too much in order to "seve yourself" from the corporate side. A corporation weilding massive amounts of power is still fairly benign in it's abilities to affect your rights, whereas a government overly empowered when it gets a chip on it's shoulder is a very dangerous thing.
Without government power, corporations would not be this benign. Better to make sure that the government is decentralized and democratic, so that there are no concentrations of power (either public or private) beyond necessity. It's intolerabe that areas of life as important as communication should be regulated to a significant extent by private organisations which don't have the public interest at heart. Sure, in the present state of affairs corporations are less powerful than governments, but if we keep giving more and more power to private interests that will cease to be the case.
individual freedom is rarely enforced at gunpoint, but removing the threat of force means that individual freedom becomes only a priviledge, not a right.
I think ultimately indivual freedom is a privaledge. It's a privaledge of living in a society formed of largely rational people who are prepared to respect each other. History, I think, has shown that violence on all scales, from the individual upwards, has primarily worked as a tool of opression and not of liberty. Ultimately, what will your gun protect you from? You're more likely to die if you're carrying a gun because it makes you more of a threat, and other people are therefore more likely to shoot you. You may perhaps succeed in preventing your TV from being stolen, but probably at the cost of another human life. When the alternative is making an insurance claim, this seems a rather suboptimal outcome.
England is usually held up as a model of a successful "socialist Republic"
No it isn't. England is one of the least socialist countries in the world, probably second only to the US and a few others in its unrestricted capitalism. Don't be fooled by the fact that the current Prime Minister claims to be a member of the "labour" party. He's almost as much of a corporate crony as Bush. I guess you're just another dumb Fox-knobbled American who thinks that socialism = any degree of state control of the economy, whereas most forms of socialism actually reject centrally planned economies. To quote Marx: "Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinated to it."
Incidentally, it's hard to see how Britain could be a "socialist Republic" when it has a Monarchy. Contradiction in terms, surely?
And posts on Slashdot don't lean to the left. All you need to do to get a +5 Insightful is copy and paste libertarian propaganda.
Your last sentence simply makes no sense (do you know what "unileteral" means?), so I can't really respond to it. But I've been reading Slashdot for a while and I haven't seen many people arguing that the US ought (in general terms) to emulate Britain.
Regarding the subject of the article, I think the US and Britain are more or less tied in terms of how far they've managed to restrict the civil liberties of their citizens in recent years. The US constitution is a great document, but it's being systematically ignored and if the US population continues in apathy it won't be worth the paper it's written on.
That said, it is important to realize that a government solution to any problem is inherently revolves around the authorization of violence. That is where all power of the government stems from.
Ah, but since all (significant) private property is protected by governments and their judicial systems, is it not the case that any private solution to a problem ultimately rests on the power of the government to authorize violence? After all, if the population tried to prevent AOL from selling broadband, MEN WITH GUNS would step in to protect AOL's property rights. The fact is that all legal actions are ultimately protected by the threat of violence, whether they are actions of government or actions of private entities. The only way to get around this is not to have any laws at all.
There are a wide variety of options to choose from. No company is censoring what I say. If one did, I would choose an alterative! Quite simple, I have no alternative to the government that is holding me.
First, your only protection against monopoly, and hence against the possibility of having no alternative company to choose from, is the power of government to break up monopolies. Second, your government (unlike any company you can name) is bound by its constitution to protect your free speech. You're trying to present government as an entity that takes rights away from you, but in fact government is the most effective protector of your right to speech, property and liberty. Sure, government power can be abused, but only when there's an apathetic public. You can't say the same for private power, which is far more dangerous.
Please give me a list of companies that can force me to do anything? Microsoft? They can't force me to do anything
If you don't think the government forces you to do anything at gunpoint, I ask you, what happens when you don't pay your taxes? what happens if you don't follow silly traffic laws like buckling your seat belt? what happens if you jay-walk in an empty street?
Oh God, another crazy on about MEN WITH GUNS forcing him to do things AT GUNPOINT by POINTING THEIR GUNS AT HIM. Oddly, these crazy people are usually very insistent on their own right to "defend" themselves with LETHAL FORCE, and fail to realise that their own rights, which they claim to cherish so greatly, can only be upheld by the threat of government force against anyone who should violate them. Yeah, laws have to be enforced, sometimes (though very rarely) with guns, but what does this have to do with accountability or free speech? Would we have any more of either if people who drive dangerously are allowed to get away with it? Would you rather have laws enforced by MEN WITH GUNS employed by a private company? In short, what is your big problem with MEN WITH GUNS? And how does government use of force make it less acountable than a private firm which answers only to its shareholders?
Oh, and if you jay-walk in an empty street, no-one will see you, so nothing will happen to you! Duh.
The "sides" in wars are not unitary moral entities. The government of one country may be completely corrupt and amoral, but its soldiors may still scrupulously abide by the rules of war (which don't necessarily break down just because some other rules break down). Indeed, countries can commit great crimes without any single individual within them having done anything wrong, at least in theory.
It's completely different. Chomsky didn't say anything at all like what the poster you're replying to said. In fact, he's fairly skeptical about any links between how language works and how the mind in general works, as he takes our knowledge of language to be a specialised innate system. Moreover, Chomsky actually added some substance to the idea by making specific proposals about what a universal grammar looks like.
War has no concept of right and wrong.
War doesn't have a concept of anything because it's not a thinking entity. The people who plan, fight and suffer from war, however, do have a concept of right and wrong.
War is by definition when all the rules break down.
No. Go look up the definition of "war".
When normal rules of human interaction (like talk it out before resorting to violence) all go to hell.
No. Even when the normal rules of human interaction break down, other rules can still be upheld.
What makes English such a pain in the backside is that the language has been so utterly simplified over the millenia
No, it hasn't been simplified. At least, you won't find any linguist or student of Old or Middle English who'll claim that it has simplified as opposed to changed. Presumably you'll back up this outlandish statement with, say, a detailed analysis of the history of the case system in English from the Norman conquest onwards?
that we have lots of words with identical spellings, but different parts of speech.
Yeah, just like every other language. Do you have any data suggesting that English is unusual in this respect?
This makes the word order critical.
Word order isn't critical because of homographs, it's critical because the rules of English grammar are strict about word order. From a more practical point of view, it's critical because English is too poorly inflected for a parser to work out the structure of a sentence without reference to the order of the words. In any case, there's nothing particularly difficult about parsing languages with strict word order rules, or parsing languages with homophones and homophones, or parsing languages with both.
Every time the spelling distinction between words breaks down, it becomes significantly more difficult for anything short of a person to get meaning out of a sentence.
Not really. The problem of people writing "their" instead of "they're" is absolutely trivial compared to the staggeringly difficult task of accurately parsing natural language, or machine translation, or any other NLP problem of similar complexity. For God's sake, just list "their" as a synonim for "they're" in your parser and it will figure out which meaning was intended from the grammatical structure (there are few, if any, syntactic contexts in which more than one of "there", "their" or "they're" is correct).
If we don't, in a matter of just a few years, we'll get to the point where nobody can understand anything.
People have been saying this for hundreds of years.
So, basically, you've taken one of the most difficult areas of AI (NLP) and argued that it's really difficult these days because sometimes people spell "they're" incorrectly. Weird.
Just to clarify, I have contradicted myself on one point. I admit I was wrong to say that an employee will get payed more than his labour is worth if he has a monopoly on that kind of labour. First paragraph of my reply is a revision of my previous argument which had this flaw.
Perception, my dear brpr. If I believe that this individual will not produce more value than the money I pay them, I will simply keep the money.
True, but you're missing the point. Most of the time, you pay people considerably less than what their work is worth to you (*) because competition is driving down the price of labour. For this reason, although the price of labour is limited (at least in theory) by the value of the labour performed to the employer, it is not determined by this value. Thus, a minimum wage is very unlikely to force an employer into paying more than an employee's labour is worth, since they're usually paying quite a bit less than that anyway.
Securing your server is an excellent example. What's it worth to you? Even if I am the only one in the world who can do it, if I try to charge more than securing the server is worth to you, you won't pay it.
True, but see above.
Nowhere do you deny that a minimum wage will price some workers out of the market, or some work from being done at all.
Indeed not, I merely note that it's an empirical issue, i.e. you cannot argue from first principles that a minimum wage will always cause unemployment, or even that it will cause unemployment most of the time. Empirical studies totally undermine your argument, for example this excellent paper (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_i d=228689) which argues that unemployment is primarily linked to inequality ("...contradicting the often-repeated view that unemployment in Europe is attributable to rigid wage structures, high minimum wages and generous social welfare systems."). The paper shows that many factors which are totally ignored by your phony-deductive theory have a significant effect on unemployment levels. In my previous post, admittedly, I was more focused on the possible benefits of having a minimum wage even if it did lead to higher unemployment. Having looked into the issue a little more, I'm now more skeptical that a minimum wage would significantly increase unemployment.
What are you arguing against, anyway? You don't actually contradict me, except in the effort to promote/denigrate the "labor theory of value", when I was actually talking about the "value of labor".
I'm not sure if the the position I was attacking, even if it wasn't your position, was technically the labour theory of value (I'm genuinely not sure). I didn't attack your specific argument because the 3rd paragraph of your original post makes no sense to me. Why can I negotiate $x+1 tomorrow? If I make 50 widgets for you on Wednesday, why will another 50 widgets on Thursday be worth more to you? You might not even want any more widgets at all on Thursday! What is your argument in this paragraph even supposed to establish? That minimum wages don't increase the median wage? If so, this is flatly contradicted by the empirical evidence. I suspect that's not what it's meant to establish, but that's my best guess.
Oh, and "simplistic" doesn't mean wrong. It just means simple enough that people can understand it. If your theory cannot be explained simply, there is little value to your theory except to you.
I disagree. Sometimes the real world is complex, and even good theories cannot always get rid of this complexity entirely. An economic theory which is simple enough to be summed up in a paragraph or two is likely to be wrong, because economies are influenced by an enormous range of factors, including one of enormous complexity: human psychology. I'm not offering any particular alternative theory here, merely arguing that your theory is flawed and contradicted by the empirical evidence. If you're familiar with the economics literature, you'll be aware of the various alternatives.
(*) Another problem with your argument which I'm ignoring here for simplicity is that it's incredibly difficult to work o
Indeed, which is precisely what libertarians foolishly and naively advocate. There is nothing in their proposed political system to prevent a private institution amassing a private army or police force more powerful than anything the government has. And in order for the government to counter private armies, taxes would have to be raised, contrary to libertarian principles. Once the government is less powerful than some of its citizens, the law ceases to be any defence against private tyranny. In fact, one may as well call the biggest private organization in a libertarian society "the government".
In a society where the government has virtually no power, power will be transferred to large, non-democratic institutions such as corporations. They may well go on to establish de facto monopolies on the use of force and on employment.
Nonsense. You're assuming that wages are based on the value of the labour performed by the worker, but they aren't. As any good free market idealogue should know, they're determined by the supply and demand for the particular form of labour involved (which is only indirectly influenced by the value of its product). If you secure my server for me, this may be worth, say, $10,000 dollars to my business. But if you happen to be the only person in the country qualified to secure my server, you'll receive a much higher wage than the value of your work. All your arguments are based on the false assumption that wages are determined by the value of work to the employee, and are hence invalid.
It may perhaps be true that a minimum wage creates a "permanent class of unemployed", but your analysis is massively over-simplisitc here. First, it's an empirical question whether any given minimum wage will be high enough to cause a significant degree of unemployment. It is simply a question of whether enough companies can afford to pay above the market rate for some of their employees. They may of may not be able to, depending on an enormous range of factors. In the worst case, the "permanent" class of unemployed isn't permanent at all -- there will be a cycle of unskilled workers going in and out of unemployment. If benefits are reasonably high, this is probably better than full employment at low wages.
also, can you imagine the look of horror when the pilot realizes that with that much g force
Erm, I don't think you understand G forces. Just because the plane is flying fast doesn't mean it will be undergoing high G. A Mach 2 plane flying straight and level (or making a steady climb or dive) will be at 1G.
Well, those who don't learn advanced programming languages are doomed to reinvent them -- badly.
The only thing that actually makes XML slightly better to deal with is that it's a document format, not a programming language.
Erm, XML and S-expressions are both data formats. It so happens that S-expressions are used to express programs in a number of programming languages in the Lisp family, but this doesn't stop them being a data format. You're very confused.
Also, the facts that they're never nested directly next to each other and that they describe themselves helps. With LISP you get stuff like (((((this)))))
Erm, no you don't. You might conceivably have a data structure with that level of vacuous nesting (just as you might have in any other language, where it wouldn't be any more readable than in Lisp), but actual Lisp code would never look like that.
I prefer Haskell to Lisp mself, but it's sad to see ignorant criticisms inevitably modified insightful by a Slashdot crowd who these days could barely manage to program in BASIC.
So why focus on the gaming industry?
I wasn't, really.
By the way - opportunities have more to do with your economic class than your race.
I agree; nothing I said contradicts this. In fact I explicitly stated that the disparity in achievement between races was due to education and other "social/cultural" factors, which obviously includes class.
The better your economic level, the better your education.
Right, but that's not an inevitable fact about life. That's something that can and should be changed. There are always going to be poor people in a capitalist society, so you'd better have an egalatarian education system to compensate.
You think that just because you're white or asian you can automatically have any education and profession you want?!
No, of course I don't. See above.
White or not, you're not very intelligent ;)
I think the poster you're replying to would agree with everything you said. He was implictly arguing that (since there is no innate difference in intelligence between people of different races) other factors must be responsible for the discrepancy.
Why is it considered such an anathema merely to suggest that people with similar genotypes would have similar phenotypes?
Black people don't have similar genotypes. There's an enormous amount of ethnic diveristy (especially in Africa, but I expect among blacks in the US too). Don't be fooled into thinking that similar skin color = similar genes. Black people as a group no more have genes in common than tall people or blond people.
There are two sides to a penny. I can flip it 100 times but that doesn't mean it is going to turn up heads exactly 50% of the time and tails exactly 50% of the time. It's entirely possible that it could turn up 80/20 or 60/40 or 30/70. Was there any bias in the coin? No, that's just the way things go. Just because there is the potential for an even toss of the coin does not mean the end will always be even. People follow the things that interest them. You can't just say "15% of the population is black but only 5% of the gaming industry is - oh noes CONSPIRACIES!".
Yes, you can, because the sample size is very large and the difference is statistically significant. You can't put this sort of discrepancy down to chance.
And "people follow the things that interest them"? Yeah, I guess all those minimum wage cleaners just love mopping! Come on, people follow the things that interest them to the extent permitted by their innate abilities and the education they have access to. The available evidence suggests that on average the innate ability of black/hispanic children is just as high as that of white children, but they tend to have a poorer education (and of course there's a multidude of other social/cultural factors getting in the way of their progress).
SERIES 2000 has been a free download for a long time now. Series was in CLTL2, f.f.s.
Yes, but the abstraction isn't integrated into the standard library, and you can't use the list functions to operate on series.
Come off of it. It just plain isn't. Let's look at the spec, shall we? "Dear lord", he said with remembered horror, "Layout? Haskell syntax is FREAKING 2-DIMENSIONAL".
The use of layout is just a feature of the lexer. You could just as easily use indentation instead of brackets to group symbols in lisp code (in fact Guile has an extension to allow you to do this in Scheme). It doesn't really make the syntax as such any more complicated. Obviously, Haskell syntax is somewhat more complex than Lisp syntax, but it's also much more concise. How long is the Lisp equivalent of the following?
reverse = foldl (flip (:)) []
Writing idiomatic programs in lisp IS extending lisp. If you're not, you're doing it, well, not wrong as such, but rather suboptimally.
Yes, but there's a difference between "extending lisp" in the usual sense and "writing a new language on top of lisp", which is a waste of time when the new language already exists! It's absurd to argue that if I want to write a program using lazy functional idioms that I should first spend days/months extending Lisp to fully support these idioms, instead of just using Haskell.