I'd argue that a purely socialist state has never really existed at all. Marx's fundamental theory was that agrarian societies were not at a level of social or economic development where his economic and political theories would even work. Both the Soviet Union and China had to literally ramp up their fundamentally agrarian economies through rapid industrialization just to get them to a point where the whole notion of collectivism, in the Marxist sense, would even be possible. And really, since most of the Communist economies ended up being labeled some variant of "Marxist-Leninist", these economies still retained a limited space for private enterprise, at least until the Cultural Revolution in China, which even most Chinese Communists now view as a horrible aberration that had more to do with Mao reasserting control of China after he'd been effectively sidelined when the full extent of the catastrophe that the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s had created.
Exactly. It's more a question of redistribution. I don't think many progressives (however that is defined) want a state-run economy, which really is what socialism, at least as it is traditionally defined, is about. It's been useful for conservatives and libertarians to define progressive economic ideas which are fundamentally redistributive as somehow Marxian, but they're really not.
That's the nature of tariffs, to influence a foreign government. By their nature, of course, tariffs are not covert. Quite the opposite, they are loudly and proudly pronounced.
Also consider that the other countries are putting selective tariffs in place, targeting industries in specific states and districts, with an eye towards giving GOP lawmakers, who have thus far been largely unwilling to intervene in the trade wars, as much grief as possible.
It's likely suppliers are ripping everyone off. They'll bump up prices to just south of what the tariffs are pricing foreign imports at, simply because the government has picked them as the winners. You don't actually think that suppliers are nice guys who actually want to help out their fellow American businesses, do you?
Shopping around for factory sites has been going on for a long time. Obviously it's in commercial concerns' best interests to extract the best deal they can get. Heck, Ireland was pulling the same stunt with the entire country, using its status as a member state of the EU and coupling it with a low corporate tax rate, giving big tech firms the EU headquarters they needed along with a willing partner in laundering profits made in the Common Market through what amounted to a nation-wide tax haven. Obviously this went against the spirit of the Common Market, and the EU has shut it down and ordered Ireland to collect the taxes it should have been all along, but sadly such mechanisms don't exist everywhere. It certainly happens in the US and Canada, where pressure is put on state/provincial and municipal governments to drop the tax revenues down, and of course, governments will extract these commitments to do blah blah blah for lots of years, but when it becomes convenient to pull up stakes and move to another jurisdictions even more willing to whore themselves in the race to the bottom, they'll walk anyways.
Even if Maduro died tomorrow, the Army is controlled by the Chavistas, and those generals have a vested interest in making sure the regime stays afloat (they're as corrupt as hell and a new government would almost certainly lock them up). Killing Maduro would probably makes things worse since the Chavistas would both be able to blame the US and simultaneously lock up opposition leaders. The best that can happen is a revolution coupled with a colonels revolt or coup. At that point the Chavistas would probably flee the country with suitcases filled with gold and US currency.
So I'm thinking you're probably the very efficient and brilliant coder type that, put off in a room by yourself, probably does pretty good, but in reality, everyone hates your guts, hates interacting with you, you have no chance of moving up in the organization, because you have such an abrasive and corrosive personality coupled with extraordinary arrogance that the thought of you ever having any authority over anyone sends chills through both your managers' and your peers' spines. Eventually, because, you know, you don't get or even like women (the feeling is mutual of course), you'll write some long diatribe on the superiority of male coders and why women should be happy to just answer the phones in between squeezing out babies, and you'll be fired, become a hero on Breitbarts, probably get hired by a right wing think tank, and do fairly well because you'll be working with all the other spectrum disorder malcontents whose parents didn't have the good sense to send them to cognitive therapy for long enough for you to learn how move through life as a functioning and tolerable adult.
IBM still makes a good deal of its money building hardware and operating systems that support 40+ year old software. Some of this software has cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop over decades, and replacing it would be obscenely expensive, not to mention disruptive. And really if it still works and is still maintainable, then what's the problem? When you stop finding programmers who can work on the system, then you've got a problem, but until then if you have a vast sunk cost
The chief issue, apart from any language, is discipline. When you have someone with little experience or training in coding standards, in basic understanding of good programming practices, an easy-to-language like BASIC is a recipe for spaghetti code. What modern languages do is impose a certain degree of discipline. You can still get write terrible code in these languages, but for the most part they set the bar high enough that it requires some understanding of good programming to even begin to use a language like Java, Python or C#.
You can certainly make easy languages, and there are no lack of then, but I've seen (and had to repair) the messes that lack of discipline, understanding and experience that languages like VBA and PHP can facilitate. Worse, I've seen these messes running as mission critical applications, with the original writer long gone or no longer able to remember what they hell they did, let alone maintain.
If it's one offs meant to solve a single problem, there's justification for this kind of programming, but these macro and scripting language solutions all too often end up performing mission critical functions, and they're like snowballs rolling down hill, becoming bigger and more chaotic until they literally are unmanageable, and then they break or some data structure changes or it has to be installed on a new server, and it all goes to Hell.
Considering most of those poles sit on right of ways, I don't think there should be any question. Existing cable and telco companies have gained enormous advantage for decades of what is essentially a subsidy, so frankly, I think the question should be posed "If you want that much control, we're going to start renting those right of ways, at say, $1000 per foot per year adjusted annually for inflation, and then you can dictate who gets on those poles, otherwise, don't ever waste our time again."
At which point what is the point? There are android tablets of similar price range if all you want to do is surf and watch YouTube. It's not like it's gutsy enough to run any of the windows software that would differentiate it enough, and Microsoft's app store still blows compared to Google's or Apple's. So you're going to buy a tablet that's at the bottom end, can only run the lowest part of the windows ecosydtem's available software. If I still wanted a tablet (which I don't) I'd buy something that would give me more bang for the buck.
In nature, at least, any contagion that reproduces too quickly will ultimately kill off all the hosts. That's the nature of Ebola, so deadly that it quickly kills off a population and then runs out of hosts, and goes dormant again. So even with fast reproducing viruses, there's a limiter of one sort or another; either kill-kill-kill and then run out of hosts, or only kill a certain percentage of hosts, enough to continue propagating and evolving. But not even highly lethal viruses like Ebola kill perfectly, mortality rates may be high, but if you imagine something incredibly virulent that invades bacteria, who can reproduce with astonishing rapidity, even a 90%-95% mortality rate means 5%-10% survive, and if that survival is due to some genetic difference, it means that small group of survivors will take over the niche their non-immune brethren could not.
But there's a significant risk in my view of using phages and other similar things that infect bacteria. They evolve too, and let's imagine that every once in a while one of those populations of phages gets a taste for, say, E. coli. Well all of a sudden, your gut bacteria could become a target. While it might seem farfetched, and most phages are pretty specific to at least families of bacteria, one has to ponder that evolution is an equal opportunity offender.
Not to mention the original unwanted bacteria will evolve new defenses. This is an arms race that's been going on for nearly four billion years and one we can only hope to gain temporary advantages from. We will be fighting these contagious for our entire time in this universe.
Campaign finance law requires disclosure. That's why questions about Cohen's paying off Daniels is an issue. If he spent money, even his own money, to get rid of a problem that gave Trump benefit during the campaign, that is a campaign contribution, and has to be declared.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you should actually go to college.
I'd argue that a purely socialist state has never really existed at all. Marx's fundamental theory was that agrarian societies were not at a level of social or economic development where his economic and political theories would even work. Both the Soviet Union and China had to literally ramp up their fundamentally agrarian economies through rapid industrialization just to get them to a point where the whole notion of collectivism, in the Marxist sense, would even be possible. And really, since most of the Communist economies ended up being labeled some variant of "Marxist-Leninist", these economies still retained a limited space for private enterprise, at least until the Cultural Revolution in China, which even most Chinese Communists now view as a horrible aberration that had more to do with Mao reasserting control of China after he'd been effectively sidelined when the full extent of the catastrophe that the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s had created.
Exactly. It's more a question of redistribution. I don't think many progressives (however that is defined) want a state-run economy, which really is what socialism, at least as it is traditionally defined, is about. It's been useful for conservatives and libertarians to define progressive economic ideas which are fundamentally redistributive as somehow Marxian, but they're really not.
That's the nature of tariffs, to influence a foreign government. By their nature, of course, tariffs are not covert. Quite the opposite, they are loudly and proudly pronounced.
How's that support for dual boot coming along?
This is like a faith healer blaming the people who didn't get better for his own inability to heal them.
Also consider that the other countries are putting selective tariffs in place, targeting industries in specific states and districts, with an eye towards giving GOP lawmakers, who have thus far been largely unwilling to intervene in the trade wars, as much grief as possible.
It's likely suppliers are ripping everyone off. They'll bump up prices to just south of what the tariffs are pricing foreign imports at, simply because the government has picked them as the winners. You don't actually think that suppliers are nice guys who actually want to help out their fellow American businesses, do you?
I doubt a ship from the 1960s has that many secrets of interest to competing powers.
The flaw here is a physical theory, basically the theory that the universe is holographic.
Huh,? Every quanta has angular momentum. Motion, as it were, is a fundamental property of the universe.
Shopping around for factory sites has been going on for a long time. Obviously it's in commercial concerns' best interests to extract the best deal they can get. Heck, Ireland was pulling the same stunt with the entire country, using its status as a member state of the EU and coupling it with a low corporate tax rate, giving big tech firms the EU headquarters they needed along with a willing partner in laundering profits made in the Common Market through what amounted to a nation-wide tax haven. Obviously this went against the spirit of the Common Market, and the EU has shut it down and ordered Ireland to collect the taxes it should have been all along, but sadly such mechanisms don't exist everywhere. It certainly happens in the US and Canada, where pressure is put on state/provincial and municipal governments to drop the tax revenues down, and of course, governments will extract these commitments to do blah blah blah for lots of years, but when it becomes convenient to pull up stakes and move to another jurisdictions even more willing to whore themselves in the race to the bottom, they'll walk anyways.
Except it's not a socialist regime. It's a much more mundane kleptocracy.
Even if Maduro died tomorrow, the Army is controlled by the Chavistas, and those generals have a vested interest in making sure the regime stays afloat (they're as corrupt as hell and a new government would almost certainly lock them up). Killing Maduro would probably makes things worse since the Chavistas would both be able to blame the US and simultaneously lock up opposition leaders. The best that can happen is a revolution coupled with a colonels revolt or coup. At that point the Chavistas would probably flee the country with suitcases filled with gold and US currency.
So I'm thinking you're probably the very efficient and brilliant coder type that, put off in a room by yourself, probably does pretty good, but in reality, everyone hates your guts, hates interacting with you, you have no chance of moving up in the organization, because you have such an abrasive and corrosive personality coupled with extraordinary arrogance that the thought of you ever having any authority over anyone sends chills through both your managers' and your peers' spines. Eventually, because, you know, you don't get or even like women (the feeling is mutual of course), you'll write some long diatribe on the superiority of male coders and why women should be happy to just answer the phones in between squeezing out babies, and you'll be fired, become a hero on Breitbarts, probably get hired by a right wing think tank, and do fairly well because you'll be working with all the other spectrum disorder malcontents whose parents didn't have the good sense to send them to cognitive therapy for long enough for you to learn how move through life as a functioning and tolerable adult.
IBM still makes a good deal of its money building hardware and operating systems that support 40+ year old software. Some of this software has cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop over decades, and replacing it would be obscenely expensive, not to mention disruptive. And really if it still works and is still maintainable, then what's the problem? When you stop finding programmers who can work on the system, then you've got a problem, but until then if you have a vast sunk cost
A fad language? It's one of the most widely used languages in the world. It's like calling COBOL a fad language
And I'm sure with you're amiable demeanor, you prove your adequacy to your managers all the time.
The chief issue, apart from any language, is discipline. When you have someone with little experience or training in coding standards, in basic understanding of good programming practices, an easy-to-language like BASIC is a recipe for spaghetti code. What modern languages do is impose a certain degree of discipline. You can still get write terrible code in these languages, but for the most part they set the bar high enough that it requires some understanding of good programming to even begin to use a language like Java, Python or C#.
You can certainly make easy languages, and there are no lack of then, but I've seen (and had to repair) the messes that lack of discipline, understanding and experience that languages like VBA and PHP can facilitate. Worse, I've seen these messes running as mission critical applications, with the original writer long gone or no longer able to remember what they hell they did, let alone maintain.
If it's one offs meant to solve a single problem, there's justification for this kind of programming, but these macro and scripting language solutions all too often end up performing mission critical functions, and they're like snowballs rolling down hill, becoming bigger and more chaotic until they literally are unmanageable, and then they break or some data structure changes or it has to be installed on a new server, and it all goes to Hell.
Considering most of those poles sit on right of ways, I don't think there should be any question. Existing cable and telco companies have gained enormous advantage for decades of what is essentially a subsidy, so frankly, I think the question should be posed "If you want that much control, we're going to start renting those right of ways, at say, $1000 per foot per year adjusted annually for inflation, and then you can dictate who gets on those poles, otherwise, don't ever waste our time again."
At which point what is the point? There are android tablets of similar price range if all you want to do is surf and watch YouTube. It's not like it's gutsy enough to run any of the windows software that would differentiate it enough, and Microsoft's app store still blows compared to Google's or Apple's. So you're going to buy a tablet that's at the bottom end, can only run the lowest part of the windows ecosydtem's available software. If I still wanted a tablet (which I don't) I'd buy something that would give me more bang for the buck.
In nature, at least, any contagion that reproduces too quickly will ultimately kill off all the hosts. That's the nature of Ebola, so deadly that it quickly kills off a population and then runs out of hosts, and goes dormant again. So even with fast reproducing viruses, there's a limiter of one sort or another; either kill-kill-kill and then run out of hosts, or only kill a certain percentage of hosts, enough to continue propagating and evolving. But not even highly lethal viruses like Ebola kill perfectly, mortality rates may be high, but if you imagine something incredibly virulent that invades bacteria, who can reproduce with astonishing rapidity, even a 90%-95% mortality rate means 5%-10% survive, and if that survival is due to some genetic difference, it means that small group of survivors will take over the niche their non-immune brethren could not.
But there's a significant risk in my view of using phages and other similar things that infect bacteria. They evolve too, and let's imagine that every once in a while one of those populations of phages gets a taste for, say, E. coli. Well all of a sudden, your gut bacteria could become a target. While it might seem farfetched, and most phages are pretty specific to at least families of bacteria, one has to ponder that evolution is an equal opportunity offender.
Not to mention the original unwanted bacteria will evolve new defenses. This is an arms race that's been going on for nearly four billion years and one we can only hope to gain temporary advantages from. We will be fighting these contagious for our entire time in this universe.
Since Slashdot didn't put at least two submissions on the topic, for your perusal:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...
Campaign finance law requires disclosure. That's why questions about Cohen's paying off Daniels is an issue. If he spent money, even his own money, to get rid of a problem that gave Trump benefit during the campaign, that is a campaign contribution, and has to be declared.