I'm not sure why you think that their birth rates mean that their society is going to die. Typically nations that accumulate a good amount of prosperity end up with lower birth rates. America is also following along this trend. What this means is that elderly care will become an issue until the population starts rising again. You do know that just because it is lowering now, doesn't mean it will continue to, right?
Your little bit of hyperbole about roving barbarian gangs are amusing. A riot in Paris does not extrapolate to roving bands of barbarians across all of Europe. Or at least, if they do have such problems, then I'm certainly worried about living in America, which ranksprettypoorly compared to many European nations.
Your little xenophobic rant is also a little bit of right-wing hyperbole. Care to provide any evidence that this is actually a serious problem? Because every time I've been to Europe or talked to Europeans they don't seem to think this is a problem. Well, other than a minority of people trying to fan the flames of bigotry by taking things grossly out of context to win weak-minded fools over to their side.
Your rant is thoroughly amusing since its so far detached from actual reality. Having lived in Europe, and working with people who live, and lived, in Europe, I can safely say you've cranked the hyperbole up to 11. Its actually a very nice and safe place to live. You really need to stop getting your info from whatever echo chamber you get it from and find some sources that are at least a bit closer to reality.
On the plus side, you've pretty much proven my point. You're close-minded. You reject anything that doesn't match your reality. This isn't doing your side any favors.
Er what? Last time I checked, the Dems weren't proposing anything that would put us any farther to the left than Europe, and Europe is hardly hell on earth. On the contrary, we are behind a decent amount of those awful socialist countries on the quality of life index. I'm also wondering where you're getting narcissistic behavior out of Obama... seems like another one of those ridiculous strawmen that Republicans have been trotting out recently.
The rest of your post is just delusional mental masturbation where you imagine your political opponents as evil or stupid. This is probably in contrast to the paragon of intelligence, even-handedness, and integrity that you represent.
Here's a news flash: liberals aren't all that different than conservatives in that they want people to live generally free and happy lives. They just disagree with you on certain principles and means of accomplishing that. Your error is that you take your position to be the obvious truth, despite the fact that its not, and then use that to denigrate your opponents.
Not that this post will change your mind, since you seem to put herculean effort into your close-mindedness.
Well, they claim to be "fair and balanced" while those other networks don't. There was a study released that also found that people who got their news from Fox News were significantly misinformed about important issues (Iraq involvement in 9/11, WMDs, etc). They're pretty blatantly biased, and while that's hardly noteworthy for a news network, claiming to be "fair and balanced" sets off the bullshit sensor spectacularly.
I agree with your point that the poor in this country likely still have a lot to lose. I'd argue though, that a lot of them wouldn't perceive that they have much to lose in terms of police protection. It'd be hard to get voluntary taxes out of them until after things went all Somalia.
I was not suggesting at all that we should let people with common diseases die to fund research into rarer diseases and you know it. Pushing more money into research does not necessarily produce results faster. Following from that, its only logical that we can research some rarer diseases while still covering research for the common ones. Obviously we can't fund everything, but I haven't seen any evidence that the common diseases are under-funded, and we seem to have enough left for at least some of the rare ones.
That's laboring under the assumption that more money can produce a cure quicker, or at all. At some point, no matter how much money you spend, its still going to take a lot of time and testing to develop a cure. In some cases, you might get nothing at all. In some cases, the idea that leads to a cure can come from unexpected places. Human ingenuity is not only limited by money.
I would think that the poor probably wouldn't want to fund such an effort. The police and courts have, historically, not been all that kind to them, and in many cases they view the police and courts as an aggressor rather than a defender. The poor don't exactly have a lot of property worth protecting, and from their point of view probably wouldn't be any worse off under many other countries' rule.
The value of police, courts, and military protection are heavily skewed towards the rich.
Under that line of thought, do you support having a military and police force, and how would you fund those things? Do you support public funding of those or voluntary payment? I only ask that because a lot of libertarians seem to make an exception for the military and police, under the premise that they are necessary to secure property rights. The problem is that those people are then advocating use of force and violation of rights of individuals in order to guarantee their own property rights. If you are an anarcho-capitalist, and support voluntary payment for securing your property, then no contradiction exists. Otherwise, saying that the "ends don't justify the means," while at the same time advocating a special case where they suddenly DO, comes off as hypocritical.
The private market only does research which has a positive expected return for a certain subgroup (their company), not for society as a whole. In most cases this works well, since the company gets positive return by giving positive return to society. In some edge cases, a company gets positive return by giving negative returns to society, or cannot give society positive returns because that would entail negative returns for the company. Government regulation is used for the former and charity (or government funded social projects, if you tend towards social capitalism) are used for the latter.
You're forgetting about Macrovision. They had a copy protection system for VHS that messed with the automatic gain control, so that if you tried to copy between two VCRs the picture would fluctuate and make the copy unwatchable.
Psht, I'm having to fill out forms for a K-1 Visa for my fiance (basically allowing her to enter the country to marry), and most of the forms assume (through field spacing, formatting, and labels) that her address and telephone number are US-style. These are forms that are, explicitly, for foreigners living in foreign countries. So yeah, I can sympathize.
Of course, there was also the I-134 form which didn't seem to realize that I could be born off of foreign soil, be a US citizen through my parents, and still not have a citizenship certificate number (I had a FS-230 and a DS-1350, none of which have a serial number).
Basically, I'd like to find the people that design these forms and beat them with a sack of potatoes.
I wasn't talking about whether it was justified, but the data does seem to indicate your position that social capitalism removes opportunity isn't supported.
I actually have a question: do you support taxes or tariffs for the purpose of providing the military, police, and courts? If so, how can you justify violating my property rights in order to protect your property? Assuming you have a society that regards things like health care and education as human rights, how can you justify the former and not the latter?
Honest question. I'd like to hear your point of view.
Pay lip service to intellectuals is not the same as giving them the freedoms they need to achieve their goals and values. Neither their good intentions (wanting successful nationalized companies) nor their ends (actually having successful nationalized companies) justify the means (nationalization through the violation of individual rights).
They do believe a man with ideas are important in only one sense - in the sense that they are able to leech off him.
If that's the case, then why does research show that people in those countries have a relative economic mobility equal to or greater than those in the United States? It would seem that the policies in the countries that the grandparent cited are affording their citizens more freedom to achieve their goals and values, if the data is any indication.
"Just works" is inherently subjective, and dependent on hardware and usage needs of the user. This makes it pretty-much a worthless metric (whether we're talking about Linux, OSX, or Windows), unless you're talking about a particular OS-software-hardware combo (in other words, an out-of-the-box experience, like OEM PCs).
For instance, Linux rarely ever "just works" for me, and I usually have to jump down into hand-editing config files in order to get it working. Does that mean it isn't ready for the desktop? Not necessarily; in this case it just means that I'm unlucky and my hardware doesn't work well with Linux.
If you use your computer for email and web browsing, Linux definitely "just works." If you want to play games, then its not going to "just work" for you.
My Mac just worked for me, but for my girlfriend? Not so much. I had to track down and install codecs so she could use Veoh.
So yeah, I rank "just works" up there with TCO. It says little about what kind of experience I can expect.
Well if you want to play that game, then the idea of human rights are a relatively recent idea too. Whether the idea is new or old doesn't really have any bearing on its merits.
Eh? The Chicago to St. Louis Amtrak has almost always taken me around 5 1/2 - 6 hours, except for one particularly bad time where we were repeatedly delayed and ended up taking about 8 hours. Its never taken me 9 hours.
Yes it is your fault. You are being presumptuous. Again, you are assuming that there is something wrong with my life. There isn't, and I gave no indication in my post that there was. What few problems I've had to deal with, I have. The comments about "shitty job shitty friends" were hypothetical, which you seem to be too dense to realize. The point of my post was that my problems are, for the most part, external and not internal. You took that statement and twisted it into what you wanted to see.
That, my friend, projects quite a bad image of *you*. You are presumptuous. You twist my words to feel superior. That is a very bad quality, and it makes you look like an ass. It is up to you to realize and do something about that.
I don't know about Unix, but Linux servers can definitely be compromised and added to botnets. I recall an article that suggested that compromised Linux servers were typically used for the C&C servers for a lot of botnets. I couldn't find the article after googling, but light googling turned up similar articles such as this: http://lwn.net/Articles/222153/.
To address your second point, its true that its foolish to say that market share is the only point that matters. But its also foolish to say it doesn't matter at all. In reality, malware authors want to get the maximum penetration, so the equation comes out to(installed base * probability of infection). You could have the most insecure OS in the world, but if only 2 people are using it, no-one is going to bother. Likewise, you can have 99.99% market saturation, but if its incredibly difficult to penetrate, then no-one is going to bother.
But when it comes down to it, the OS you're running is only as secure as its stupidest user. There's pretty much no way to stop a user from installing malware along with their funny cursors and warez, short of not giving them root/admin (which, if its their computer, is not really feasible).
Oh, by the way, the vast majority of those MSSQL attacks are SQL injection attacks (stupid developers, not the product), combined with poor database permissions (stupid DBAs, not the product). IIS has been incredibly secure since version 6, and Windows Server is OK out of the box and getting better.
That's based on the assumption that its quicker and easier to build a nuclear reactor than capture carbon. That may be the case (and as you pointed out, carbon capture is basically a non-existent industry), but I'm certainly not able to make that call. And reading the article, it doesn't seem like Chu is necessarily making that call either. He's simply saying that we need to investigate options that cover a lot of situations (and nuclear is one of those), because its hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution to something that involves the daily lives of so many people.
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I'm not sure why you think that their birth rates mean that their society is going to die. Typically nations that accumulate a good amount of prosperity end up with lower birth rates. America is also following along this trend. What this means is that elderly care will become an issue until the population starts rising again. You do know that just because it is lowering now, doesn't mean it will continue to, right?
Your little bit of hyperbole about roving barbarian gangs are amusing. A riot in Paris does not extrapolate to roving bands of barbarians across all of Europe. Or at least, if they do have such problems, then I'm certainly worried about living in America, which ranks pretty poorly compared to many European nations.
Your little xenophobic rant is also a little bit of right-wing hyperbole. Care to provide any evidence that this is actually a serious problem? Because every time I've been to Europe or talked to Europeans they don't seem to think this is a problem. Well, other than a minority of people trying to fan the flames of bigotry by taking things grossly out of context to win weak-minded fools over to their side.
And this is in addition to the fact that Europe has equal or better relative economic mobility (that means that a poor guy is more likely to upgrade his social status in Europe... so much for the American dream), better life expectancy, better overall education, and arguably better, more efficient, and cheaper health care. About the only part of your rant grounded in fact is the tax rate, which is a between 10%-20% more. But I know a lot of Europeans who are happy with that tax rate, given all of the benefits that they get from it above.
Your rant is thoroughly amusing since its so far detached from actual reality. Having lived in Europe, and working with people who live, and lived, in Europe, I can safely say you've cranked the hyperbole up to 11. Its actually a very nice and safe place to live. You really need to stop getting your info from whatever echo chamber you get it from and find some sources that are at least a bit closer to reality.
On the plus side, you've pretty much proven my point. You're close-minded. You reject anything that doesn't match your reality. This isn't doing your side any favors.
Er what? Last time I checked, the Dems weren't proposing anything that would put us any farther to the left than Europe, and Europe is hardly hell on earth. On the contrary, we are behind a decent amount of those awful socialist countries on the quality of life index. I'm also wondering where you're getting narcissistic behavior out of Obama... seems like another one of those ridiculous strawmen that Republicans have been trotting out recently.
The rest of your post is just delusional mental masturbation where you imagine your political opponents as evil or stupid. This is probably in contrast to the paragon of intelligence, even-handedness, and integrity that you represent.
Here's a news flash: liberals aren't all that different than conservatives in that they want people to live generally free and happy lives. They just disagree with you on certain principles and means of accomplishing that. Your error is that you take your position to be the obvious truth, despite the fact that its not, and then use that to denigrate your opponents.
Not that this post will change your mind, since you seem to put herculean effort into your close-mindedness.
Well, they claim to be "fair and balanced" while those other networks don't. There was a study released that also found that people who got their news from Fox News were significantly misinformed about important issues (Iraq involvement in 9/11, WMDs, etc). They're pretty blatantly biased, and while that's hardly noteworthy for a news network, claiming to be "fair and balanced" sets off the bullshit sensor spectacularly.
I agree with your point that the poor in this country likely still have a lot to lose. I'd argue though, that a lot of them wouldn't perceive that they have much to lose in terms of police protection. It'd be hard to get voluntary taxes out of them until after things went all Somalia.
No, no sarcasm. Political discussions can be heated, and its nice to get intelligent responses.
Thanks for answering my questions in a reasonable manner.
I was not suggesting at all that we should let people with common diseases die to fund research into rarer diseases and you know it. Pushing more money into research does not necessarily produce results faster. Following from that, its only logical that we can research some rarer diseases while still covering research for the common ones. Obviously we can't fund everything, but I haven't seen any evidence that the common diseases are under-funded, and we seem to have enough left for at least some of the rare ones.
That's laboring under the assumption that more money can produce a cure quicker, or at all. At some point, no matter how much money you spend, its still going to take a lot of time and testing to develop a cure. In some cases, you might get nothing at all. In some cases, the idea that leads to a cure can come from unexpected places. Human ingenuity is not only limited by money.
I would think that the poor probably wouldn't want to fund such an effort. The police and courts have, historically, not been all that kind to them, and in many cases they view the police and courts as an aggressor rather than a defender. The poor don't exactly have a lot of property worth protecting, and from their point of view probably wouldn't be any worse off under many other countries' rule.
The value of police, courts, and military protection are heavily skewed towards the rich.
Under that line of thought, do you support having a military and police force, and how would you fund those things? Do you support public funding of those or voluntary payment? I only ask that because a lot of libertarians seem to make an exception for the military and police, under the premise that they are necessary to secure property rights. The problem is that those people are then advocating use of force and violation of rights of individuals in order to guarantee their own property rights. If you are an anarcho-capitalist, and support voluntary payment for securing your property, then no contradiction exists. Otherwise, saying that the "ends don't justify the means," while at the same time advocating a special case where they suddenly DO, comes off as hypocritical.
I think its better for humanity if we do both. We don't have to cure all the common diseases until we move on to the harder ones.
The private market only does research which has a positive expected return for a certain subgroup (their company), not for society as a whole. In most cases this works well, since the company gets positive return by giving positive return to society. In some edge cases, a company gets positive return by giving negative returns to society, or cannot give society positive returns because that would entail negative returns for the company. Government regulation is used for the former and charity (or government funded social projects, if you tend towards social capitalism) are used for the latter.
You're forgetting about Macrovision. They had a copy protection system for VHS that messed with the automatic gain control, so that if you tried to copy between two VCRs the picture would fluctuate and make the copy unwatchable.
Psht, I'm having to fill out forms for a K-1 Visa for my fiance (basically allowing her to enter the country to marry), and most of the forms assume (through field spacing, formatting, and labels) that her address and telephone number are US-style. These are forms that are, explicitly, for foreigners living in foreign countries. So yeah, I can sympathize.
Of course, there was also the I-134 form which didn't seem to realize that I could be born off of foreign soil, be a US citizen through my parents, and still not have a citizenship certificate number (I had a FS-230 and a DS-1350, none of which have a serial number).
Basically, I'd like to find the people that design these forms and beat them with a sack of potatoes.
A Youtube video of the Uwe Boll movie Seed is blocked via that list as well, no kidding.
So what you're saying is that its not all bad.
I wasn't talking about whether it was justified, but the data does seem to indicate your position that social capitalism removes opportunity isn't supported.
I actually have a question: do you support taxes or tariffs for the purpose of providing the military, police, and courts? If so, how can you justify violating my property rights in order to protect your property? Assuming you have a society that regards things like health care and education as human rights, how can you justify the former and not the latter?
Honest question. I'd like to hear your point of view.
Pay lip service to intellectuals is not the same as giving them the freedoms they need to achieve their goals and values. Neither their good intentions (wanting successful nationalized companies) nor their ends (actually having successful nationalized companies) justify the means (nationalization through the violation of individual rights).
They do believe a man with ideas are important in only one sense - in the sense that they are able to leech off him.
If that's the case, then why does research show that people in those countries have a relative economic mobility equal to or greater than those in the United States? It would seem that the policies in the countries that the grandparent cited are affording their citizens more freedom to achieve their goals and values, if the data is any indication.
"Just works" is inherently subjective, and dependent on hardware and usage needs of the user. This makes it pretty-much a worthless metric (whether we're talking about Linux, OSX, or Windows), unless you're talking about a particular OS-software-hardware combo (in other words, an out-of-the-box experience, like OEM PCs).
For instance, Linux rarely ever "just works" for me, and I usually have to jump down into hand-editing config files in order to get it working. Does that mean it isn't ready for the desktop? Not necessarily; in this case it just means that I'm unlucky and my hardware doesn't work well with Linux.
If you use your computer for email and web browsing, Linux definitely "just works." If you want to play games, then its not going to "just work" for you.
My Mac just worked for me, but for my girlfriend? Not so much. I had to track down and install codecs so she could use Veoh.
So yeah, I rank "just works" up there with TCO. It says little about what kind of experience I can expect.
Wow, you articulated that very well. It very much matches my thoughts on Libertarianism.
What Star Ocean/PS3 thing?
Well if you want to play that game, then the idea of human rights are a relatively recent idea too. Whether the idea is new or old doesn't really have any bearing on its merits.
Eh? The Chicago to St. Louis Amtrak has almost always taken me around 5 1/2 - 6 hours, except for one particularly bad time where we were repeatedly delayed and ended up taking about 8 hours. Its never taken me 9 hours.
Yes it is your fault. You are being presumptuous. Again, you are assuming that there is something wrong with my life. There isn't, and I gave no indication in my post that there was. What few problems I've had to deal with, I have. The comments about "shitty job shitty friends" were hypothetical, which you seem to be too dense to realize. The point of my post was that my problems are, for the most part, external and not internal. You took that statement and twisted it into what you wanted to see.
That, my friend, projects quite a bad image of *you*. You are presumptuous. You twist my words to feel superior. That is a very bad quality, and it makes you look like an ass. It is up to you to realize and do something about that.
Good luck.
I don't know about Unix, but Linux servers can definitely be compromised and added to botnets. I recall an article that suggested that compromised Linux servers were typically used for the C&C servers for a lot of botnets. I couldn't find the article after googling, but light googling turned up similar articles such as this: http://lwn.net/Articles/222153/.
To address your second point, its true that its foolish to say that market share is the only point that matters. But its also foolish to say it doesn't matter at all. In reality, malware authors want to get the maximum penetration, so the equation comes out to(installed base * probability of infection). You could have the most insecure OS in the world, but if only 2 people are using it, no-one is going to bother. Likewise, you can have 99.99% market saturation, but if its incredibly difficult to penetrate, then no-one is going to bother.
But when it comes down to it, the OS you're running is only as secure as its stupidest user. There's pretty much no way to stop a user from installing malware along with their funny cursors and warez, short of not giving them root/admin (which, if its their computer, is not really feasible).
Oh, by the way, the vast majority of those MSSQL attacks are SQL injection attacks (stupid developers, not the product), combined with poor database permissions (stupid DBAs, not the product). IIS has been incredibly secure since version 6, and Windows Server is OK out of the box and getting better.
That's based on the assumption that its quicker and easier to build a nuclear reactor than capture carbon. That may be the case (and as you pointed out, carbon capture is basically a non-existent industry), but I'm certainly not able to make that call. And reading the article, it doesn't seem like Chu is necessarily making that call either. He's simply saying that we need to investigate options that cover a lot of situations (and nuclear is one of those), because its hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution to something that involves the daily lives of so many people.