The Institute for Justice is worth checking out at http://www.ij.org . They provide legal aid to people who are fighting for free speech, free enterprise and such, and are less compromised than the ACLU.
Some people seem to have such a powerful egalitarianism reflex they don't even bother to think before blurting out that tired refrain "what about the poor?" But this time that comment is entirely inappropriate.
Folks, intelligence is not a zero-sum game. Spending more on your kid's intelligence is not like spending more on your kid's Ferrari. Intelligence has huge positive externalities. Spending money to make your kid smarter is a social good; it benefits everybody, not just your kid.
If rich people can make their kids smarter, I want them to do it. Because we will all reap the benefits. Smart people create better bridges, more efficient automobiles, faster computers, better laws, better court judgements and better operating systems than dumb people do. Intelligence matters. Think of _any_ problem we face today whether it be political, social or technological, and if you have more smart people thinking about that problem, it'll get solved faster.
So when and if a legitimate "smart drug" shows up on the market, we should let the early adopters - those who are highly risk-tolerant and have the bucks - try it first, and the rest of us will join in as the cost comes down and the technology acquires a decent track record. Same as with any other technology, there'll be some sort of adoption curve and that's okay.
(Can people tell I just re-read Atlas Shrugged?:-) )
According to the literature, being an NT is highly correllated with being a computer geeks. It's also highly correllated with being a libertarian; the LP used Myers-Briggs for a while to teach communication skills and they'd routinely find that nearly the entire audience was in the NT quadrant.
According to Roger Ebert's interviews with the directors, the movie was indeed made for roughly $30,000. Also, though they didn't have a detailed script, they did provide the characters with rough notes telling them what they should be doing. So it was a mix of directed acting and improvisation.
If mail companies "increased the price of postage fourfold" they'd go broke. And not just because some other company would undercut them and steal all the business; even a monopoly provider wouldn't find it in his best interest to charge that much. The price at which a monopolist maximizes his profit is not infinitely high; the more you charge for mail the less mail people will send.
If all mail cost a dollar and a half to send, everyone with a computer would pay their bills electronically over the web and everyone without a computer would pay their bills over the phone via credit card and/or checking account autodeposit. Companies that for some reason had to send out printed statements would start billing in six-month increments instead of one-month increments, or would hire their own delivery service rather than using the mail. People would use email and telephone instead of personal letters even more than they do now.
And dozens of local companies would start competing using the existing FedEx and UPS infrastructure for long-range travel and local couriers or pick-up locations for local delivery.
Really, it's ridiculous that mail is as expensive as it is now. Privatisation couldn't help but lower prices.
You can verify the claims made at the requirements page of Stamps.com ; If you want to print stamps, you need Windows; Linux and other OSes need not apply.
Of course they still use Apache to serve their pages...:-)
-Glen Raphael
(I'd moderate it up myself, but I've already posted in this thread).
because it is legally required to charge the same rate for first-class mail, regardless of costs, the USPS has been given an exclusive right to carry such mail.
Actually, charging the same rate for all mail within a region via the mechanism of prepaid stamps turns out to be very economically efficient; it would cost more than it is worth to introduce variable pricing. (Or at least that used to be the case, nowadays with computers and 9-digit ZIPs it would probably be a lot cheaper to discriminate in that fashion.) My vague recollection is that one-rate mail delivery was a private innovation that the Post Office copied. If we got rid of the legal monopoly over first-class mail we'd undoubtedly continue to have mostly one-rate pricing until some better (from the customer point of view) arrangement is invented.
Note that UPS and FedEx and Airborne currently don't bother to price discriminate based on location. They could charge different prices and certainly would if it were profitable to do so...
Also note that in many rural areas UPS already has better local coverage than the Post Office does; UPS generally drives a truck out to your door while the Post Office only delivers to the nearest "Mail Stop" which might be many miles away.
Right now it's illegal to deliver 1st-class mail for less than the post office charges. UPS and FedEx have no choice but to charge more than the post office, so they specialize in higher-end service - less waiting in line, better customer support and more reliable delivery at a somewhat higher cost.
If we simply get rid of the laws that maintain the remainder of the postal monopoly, whatever private companies enter the breech will undoubtedly be able to provide the same level of service for half the cost the Post Office charges. So no, there's no reason for the Post Office to exist as a government-granted monopoly service provider. Sell it off!
Side note: when UPS first started delivering packages, the Post Office claimed that it couldn't make money delivering packages and did this at a loss, subsidized by first class mail. UPS managed to make a profit providing nationwide coverage for significantly less than the post office was then charging. There's no reason to think First Class mail is any different in this regard; a profit-oriented company could undoubtedly improve things.
Also, the Pony Express was essentially a private first-class mail-delivery service, one of several of that era.
Fire protection is not a national responsibility, nor is road maintenance. If the federal government stopped taxing incomes this would have essentially no impact on the ability of states and localities to solve their own problems in these areas.
Privately run for-profit fire protection companies are generally able to provide better service at a lower cost than are public firms. Most rural areas still have volunteer fire departments rather than a city-paid force, and in many areas businesses and individuals have the option of subscribing to one or more competitive firms.
In short, there's no reason to think fire services couldn't be provided without a federal income tax. Just ask the Rural/Metro company of Arizona whether they provide fire protection!
Rural/Metro currently provides fire protection services to more than 25 communities, and responds to more than 60,000 calls annually. Studies have shown that Rural/Metro's fire protection provides residents with a higher degree of safety than is available in most communities, while featuring comparatively lower costs.
And Rural/Metro's emphasis on fire prevention has resulted in an incidence of structure fires that is more than 300% lower than the national average.
As for Canada invading, I wouldn't be too worried about them because we have all the guns.:-)
Let's put it another way, I'm so glad your willing to bet tens of thousands of people's lives on your certainty.
No. Every time we build a hydroelectric dam, we're betting tens of thousands of lives on our expectation that no major accident will occur. But modern reactors just aren't that dangerous, for all the reasons given in the earlier postings.
The worst conceivable accident related to energy production would be if the Folsom Dam (right above a heavily populated area) collapsed; that could easily kill over a hundred thousand people in a flash flood. Oil and gas refinery explosions kill at least hundreds (thousands?) of people every year, as do coal-mining accidents. But the worst conceivable accident in a U.S.-style nuclear plant would kill only tens of people, not tens of thousands. This is much less deadly than even the normal-case level of risk we accept in every other industry in the country.
Several years ago some of Bill Gates' associates (libertarians at Microsoft) were trying to get him involved in politics. They wanted Gates to either run for office or use some of his money to support a political campaign. Gates wasn't willing to do it, and his stated reasoning was that it was a bad idea to get involved in politics unless he could devote full-time attention to it, and he was too busy with Microsoft to do that at this time. The same sound reasoning applies equally well to making huge charitable donations.
Bill Gates doesn't like to attack problems in a half-assed fashion; he wants to work on one problem at a time and attack it thoroughly. We know this from his business ventures; Microsoft generally doesn't give up until it wins. (or, more rarely, is thoroughly defeated despite vast expenditure of effort). What makes the company so successful is its focus: Gates picks his battles carefully, and doesn't attack unless he thinks the odds are good.
Apply this mindset to charitable efforts and it's quite easy to explain what we saw with Rockefeller and what we can expect from Gates. Gates will keep earning money until he gets bored or frustrated with his current path and retires from active service with Microsoft. After that, he'll start worrying about how to give the money away.
But I don't blame him at all for not spending or donating much money now. Giving away that magnitude of money is basically a full-time job. Think of your favorite charity. Could it handle a grant of, say, one billion dollars? Do they have the accounting resources, the banking resources, the talent, the scruples and common sense at all levels, to use it effectively? Could he just write them a check and expect good things to happen?
With great fortunes come great responsibility. Bill should keep doing what he's doing until he has the time and energy to focus on charity, and then he should think long and hard and carefully about how to donate money in a way that does more good than harm.
OTOH, by the late 80's, we also were well into a recession big enough that many wanted to classify it as a depression, including one of the largest stock market crashes in history.
Once again, not true. There was no recession in the late 80s while Reagan was president.
"Analog" is presumably thinking of the October 1987 crash. The Mining Company has an article about it that starts as follows:
The magnitude of the 1987 stock market crash was much more severe than the 1929 crash - a drop of 22.6% versus 12.8%. The loss to investors amounted to $500 billion. Over the four day period leading up to the October 19th crash the market fell by over 30%. By today's level's this represents a 2,200 point drop in the Dow. However, while the 1929 crash is commonly believed to have led to the Great Depression, the 1987 crash seemed to have no lasting effect on the real economy.
So he was partially right about the crash. Regarding the "it hurt the poor" tone, my guess is that Analog is glomming together the "Reagan-Bush years" and thinking of them as the same thing. Lots of liberal commentators have done that in the past. For the record: Reagan generally cut taxes (but not spending) but Bush raised taxes back to where they were. So fiscal conservatives generally loved Reagan and hated Bush. Reagan served in office from 1980-1988. However much credit you choose to give the president, the poor probably did a lot better in the low-inflation Reagan era than the high-inflation Carter era, but growth rates dropped a lot (and spending and taxing increased a lot) during the Bush years.
Regarding cloned replacement organs: Yeah, sure. I bet the tobacco industry would just love that. *smirk*
The mortality rate of humans is still 100%. Everyone eventually dies.
Choosing to eat fatty foods or smoke cigarettes may well for some people improve their quality of life enough that the benefits to them outweigh the costs. That's all there is to it. Living an "unhealthy" lifestyle is not immoral, it's simply a choice. Like choosing to cross the street.
The ability to clone organs no more contributes to immorality than does the ability to take antibiotics. Every bit of medical progress lets people live longer and healthier lives and this should be celebrated.
("Where have you EVER seen a competitive network built?")
Competitive networks were originally the norm for electricity and phone service. And it was traditional for cable in many areas as well, simply because it took a while for the usual level of graft and rent-seeking to show up. You only get monopoly after government at some level grants monopoly. Consumer's Digest magazine did a survey of cable competition sometime around 1986 where they matched up similar localities where one had two or more competing cable companies and the other had a monopoly provider. The areas that allowed competion had about a third more cable channels available and charged just about half the price-per-channel of the monopoly regions.
If the arguments for monopoly were correct you'd expect competitive regions to have higher costs because there's more duplication of effort. But in fact the arguments for monopoly are not correct, and the proof of this is that competitive utility providers actually have lower costs than monopoly providers pretty much everywhere anybody has bothered to make the comparison.
Last I heard, the city of Lubbock, Texas still has two competing electricity providers, both of whom have the entire town wired. If you're not happy with your service you can just call in and have them change the meter to connect to the other line. And costs are low, because the cost of the wires is a tiny portion of the total cost of providing such a service and competition leads to vast efficiency improvements in all areas of production that more than make up for losses due to duplication in this one area.
And don't forget that when you're talking about a basic utility, having some level of duplication of effort is a big win; it means that people who are really concerned with reliability can subscribe to BOTH networks and be assured of continuous service.
(Isn't it horribly inefficient that most newspapers have their own separate overlapping distribution chains? It might plausibly be more efficient if we passed a law granting the first newspaper who buys all those trucks and hires all those drivers an exclusive right to sell newspapers in a given area. But this would be stupid. Likewise for cable.)
I live in a relatively upscale high-density private housing project called "The Crossings" in Mountain View and I attended the city council meetings when the place was being developed. The local city interests were terrified that allowing any more high-density land use would create slums and lower housing values, so the city built in all sorts of ridiculous restrictions on the land use which had the side effect of making the developers less able to build and sell what people want to buy.
For instance, there are a couple of corner units which ought to just be housing but are zoned for commercial retail. These "retail" units have little available parking, almost no drive-by traffic and no walk-by traffic, but somebody on the planning board thought it would be nice to have a bookstore or a coffee shop there to serve the nonexistent demand from the nonexistent CalTrain passengers at the essentially unused San Antonio station.
Heck, I'd love to see a bookstore or coffeeshop there too since it would be convenient to me, but there's no way any business owner in his right mind would locate one there; any such place would go bankrupt in six months. So these "retail" units go unused and vacant; they've been empty for over a year.
There would be no shortage of cheap housing in Silicon Valley if the state and local government simply chose to _allow_ developers to build cheap housing. It's purely a political problem. There is a demand but no supply because building high-density housing is illegal unless the developer is really good at flattering, bribing and convincing government officials to let him or her build what people want to buy.
If you're referring to this speech, your claim makes no sense. Hitler's speeches were full of references to the events, places and people of the time; in order to claim one as present day you'd have to do a fair bit of rewriting or at least selective editing.
If you're thinking of a different speech, which one?
The consensus of the literature in criminology is that guns in private hands save lives and prevent crimes.
The CDC-funded studies by Dr. Arthur Kellerman that claim to show otherwise have been pretty well discredited; you can find some relevant discussion in this Reason article. Kellerman's main sin seems to be selective use of data; he chooses to study a population that he thinks will support his thesis and finds excuses to throw out contrary examples until the data fits the thesis.
The Lott/Mustard study used the entire United States rather than a single city or county, and found a significant deterrence effect.
If something has a half-life of 10,000 years it's not decomposing very quickly, which means it's not producing very much radiation per unit time. The stuff which is actually worth _worrying about_ has a half-life of weeks or months or days.
Look at it another way: at least it is decomposing! We use chlorine to clean our pools and protect our drinking water but chlorine gas (and chlorine bleach, for that matter) stays poisonous just about forever.
Three Mile Island was just about the worst accident imaginable and yet no civilians were ever endangered by it. I deny the "could devastate an entire eastern state" claim; what are your assumptions there? And while you're considering worst case scenarios, compare it to a big hydroelectric dam breaking...
Slashdot Mirror
It's informative, interesting, and highly relevant.
The Institute for Justice is worth checking out at http://www.ij.org . They provide legal aid to people who are fighting for free speech, free enterprise and such, and are less compromised than the ACLU.
Folks, intelligence is not a zero-sum game. Spending more on your kid's intelligence is not like spending more on your kid's Ferrari. Intelligence has huge positive externalities. Spending money to make your kid smarter is a social good; it benefits everybody, not just your kid.
If rich people can make their kids smarter, I want them to do it. Because we will all reap the benefits. Smart people create better bridges, more efficient automobiles, faster computers, better laws, better court judgements and better operating systems than dumb people do. Intelligence matters. Think of _any_ problem we face today whether it be political, social or technological, and if you have more smart people thinking about that problem, it'll get solved faster.
So when and if a legitimate "smart drug" shows up on the market, we should let the early adopters - those who are highly risk-tolerant and have the bucks - try it first, and the rest of us will join in as the cost comes down and the technology acquires a decent track record. Same as with any other technology, there'll be some sort of adoption curve and that's okay.
(Can people tell I just re-read Atlas Shrugged? :-) )
According to the literature, being an NT is highly correllated with being a computer geeks. It's also highly correllated with being a libertarian; the LP used Myers-Briggs for a while to teach communication skills and they'd routinely find that nearly the entire audience was in the NT quadrant.
According to Roger Ebert's interviews with the directors, the movie was indeed made for roughly $30,000. Also, though they didn't have a detailed script, they did provide the characters with rough notes telling them what they should be doing. So it was a mix of directed acting and improvisation.
If all mail cost a dollar and a half to send, everyone with a computer would pay their bills electronically over the web and everyone without a computer would pay their bills over the phone via credit card and/or checking account autodeposit. Companies that for some reason had to send out printed statements would start billing in six-month increments instead of one-month increments, or would hire their own delivery service rather than using the mail. People would use email and telephone instead of personal letters even more than they do now.
And dozens of local companies would start competing using the existing FedEx and UPS infrastructure for long-range travel and local couriers or pick-up locations for local delivery.
Really, it's ridiculous that mail is as expensive as it is now. Privatisation couldn't help but lower prices.
Of course they still use Apache to serve their pages... :-)
-Glen Raphael
(I'd moderate it up myself, but I've already posted in this thread).
Note that UPS and FedEx and Airborne currently don't bother to price discriminate based on location. They could charge different prices and certainly would if it were profitable to do so...
Also note that in many rural areas UPS already has better local coverage than the Post Office does; UPS generally drives a truck out to your door while the Post Office only delivers to the nearest "Mail Stop" which might be many miles away.
If we simply get rid of the laws that maintain the remainder of the postal monopoly, whatever private companies enter the breech will undoubtedly be able to provide the same level of service for half the cost the Post Office charges. So no, there's no reason for the Post Office to exist as a government-granted monopoly service provider. Sell it off!
Side note: when UPS first started delivering packages, the Post Office claimed that it couldn't make money delivering packages and did this at a loss, subsidized by first class mail. UPS managed to make a profit providing nationwide coverage for significantly less than the post office was then charging. There's no reason to think First Class mail is any different in this regard; a profit-oriented company could undoubtedly improve things.
Also, the Pony Express was essentially a private first-class mail-delivery service, one of several of that era.
Privately run for-profit fire protection companies are generally able to provide better service at a lower cost than are public firms. Most rural areas still have volunteer fire departments rather than a city-paid force, and in many areas businesses and individuals have the option of subscribing to one or more competitive firms.
In short, there's no reason to think fire services couldn't be provided without a federal income tax. Just ask the Rural/Metro company of Arizona whether they provide fire protection!
As for Canada invading, I wouldn't be too worried about them because we have all the guns.No. Every time we build a hydroelectric dam, we're betting tens of thousands of lives on our expectation that no major accident will occur. But modern reactors just aren't that dangerous, for all the reasons given in the earlier postings.
The worst conceivable accident related to energy production would be if the Folsom Dam (right above a heavily populated area) collapsed; that could easily kill over a hundred thousand people in a flash flood. Oil and gas refinery explosions kill at least hundreds (thousands?) of people every year, as do coal-mining accidents. But the worst conceivable accident in a U.S.-style nuclear plant would kill only tens of people, not tens of thousands. This is much less deadly than even the normal-case level of risk we accept in every other industry in the country.
Bill Gates doesn't like to attack problems in a half-assed fashion; he wants to work on one problem at a time and attack it thoroughly. We know this from his business ventures; Microsoft generally doesn't give up until it wins. (or, more rarely, is thoroughly defeated despite vast expenditure of effort). What makes the company so successful is its focus: Gates picks his battles carefully, and doesn't attack unless he thinks the odds are good.
Apply this mindset to charitable efforts and it's quite easy to explain what we saw with Rockefeller and what we can expect from Gates. Gates will keep earning money until he gets bored or frustrated with his current path and retires from active service with Microsoft. After that, he'll start worrying about how to give the money away.
But I don't blame him at all for not spending or donating much money now. Giving away that magnitude of money is basically a full-time job. Think of your favorite charity. Could it handle a grant of, say, one billion dollars? Do they have the accounting resources, the banking resources, the talent, the scruples and common sense at all levels, to use it effectively? Could he just write them a check and expect good things to happen?
With great fortunes come great responsibility. Bill should keep doing what he's doing until he has the time and energy to focus on charity, and then he should think long and hard and carefully about how to donate money in a way that does more good than harm.
Good luck, Bill. You'll need it!
So he was partially right about the crash. Regarding the "it hurt the poor" tone, my guess is that Analog is glomming together the "Reagan-Bush years" and thinking of them as the same thing. Lots of liberal commentators have done that in the past. For the record: Reagan generally cut taxes (but not spending) but Bush raised taxes back to where they were. So fiscal conservatives generally loved Reagan and hated Bush. Reagan served in office from 1980-1988. However much credit you choose to give the president, the poor probably did a lot better in the low-inflation Reagan era than the high-inflation Carter era, but growth rates dropped a lot (and spending and taxing increased a lot) during the Bush years.
(Side note: don't blame me, I vote Libertarian)
Yeah, sure. I bet the tobacco industry would just love that. *smirk*
The mortality rate of humans is still 100%. Everyone eventually dies.
Choosing to eat fatty foods or smoke cigarettes may well for some people improve their quality of life enough that the benefits to them outweigh the costs. That's all there is to it. Living an "unhealthy" lifestyle is not immoral, it's simply a choice. Like choosing to cross the street.
The ability to clone organs no more contributes to immorality than does the ability to take antibiotics. Every bit of medical progress lets people live longer and healthier lives and this should be celebrated.
So smoke 'em if you got em... :-)
Competitive networks were originally the norm for electricity and phone service. And it was traditional for cable in many areas as well, simply because it took a while for the usual level of graft and rent-seeking to show up. You only get monopoly after government at some level grants monopoly. Consumer's Digest magazine did a survey of cable competition sometime around 1986 where they matched up similar localities where one had two or more competing cable companies and the other had a monopoly provider. The areas that allowed competion had about a third more cable channels available and charged just about half the price-per-channel of the monopoly regions.
If the arguments for monopoly were correct you'd expect competitive regions to have higher costs because there's more duplication of effort. But in fact the arguments for monopoly are not correct, and the proof of this is that competitive utility providers actually have lower costs than monopoly providers pretty much everywhere anybody has bothered to make the comparison.
Last I heard, the city of Lubbock, Texas still has two competing electricity providers, both of whom have the entire town wired. If you're not happy with your service you can just call in and have them change the meter to connect to the other line. And costs are low, because the cost of the wires is a tiny portion of the total cost of providing such a service and competition leads to vast efficiency improvements in all areas of production that more than make up for losses due to duplication in this one area.
And don't forget that when you're talking about a basic utility, having some level of duplication of effort is a big win; it means that people who are really concerned with reliability can subscribe to BOTH networks and be assured of continuous service.
(Isn't it horribly inefficient that most newspapers have their own separate overlapping distribution chains? It might plausibly be more efficient if we passed a law granting the first newspaper who buys all those trucks and hires all those drivers an exclusive right to sell newspapers in a given area. But this would be stupid. Likewise for cable.)
I live in a relatively upscale high-density private housing project called "The Crossings" in Mountain View and I attended the city council meetings when the place was being developed. The local city interests were terrified that allowing any more high-density land use would create slums and lower housing values, so the city built in all sorts of ridiculous restrictions on the land use which had the side effect of making the developers less able to build and sell what people want to buy.
For instance, there are a couple of corner units which ought to just be housing but are zoned for commercial retail. These "retail" units have little available parking, almost no drive-by traffic and no walk-by traffic, but somebody on the planning board thought it would be nice to have a bookstore or a coffee shop there to serve the nonexistent demand from the nonexistent CalTrain passengers at the essentially unused San Antonio station.
Heck, I'd love to see a bookstore or coffeeshop there too since it would be convenient to me, but there's no way any business owner in his right mind would locate one there; any such place would go bankrupt in six months. So these "retail" units go unused and vacant; they've been empty for over a year.
There would be no shortage of cheap housing in Silicon Valley if the state and local government simply chose to _allow_ developers to build cheap housing. It's purely a political problem. There is a demand but no supply because building high-density housing is illegal unless the developer is really good at flattering, bribing and convincing government officials to let him or her build what people want to buy.
If you're thinking of a different speech, which one?
A guy named John Figeroa plans to sell Palm V-8s for $600 or do upgrades for $150. His web site includes a bunch of great pictures. I'm tempted.
There's a guy who will either sell you a pre-made Palm V-8 for $600 or will upgrade yours for $150. Here are some pictures.
The consensus of the literature in criminology is that guns in private hands save lives and prevent crimes.
The CDC-funded studies by Dr. Arthur Kellerman that claim to show otherwise have been pretty well discredited; you can find some relevant discussion in this Reason article. Kellerman's main sin seems to be selective use of data; he chooses to study a population that he thinks will support his thesis and finds excuses to throw out contrary examples until the data fits the thesis.
The Lott/Mustard study used the entire United States rather than a single city or county, and found a significant deterrence effect.
Folks interested in either side of the issue should consider reading these two books:
More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws by John R. Lott
Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America by Gary Kleck.
If something has a half-life of 10,000 years it's not decomposing very quickly, which means it's not producing very much radiation per unit time. The stuff which is actually worth _worrying about_ has a half-life of weeks or months or days.
Look at it another way: at least it is decomposing! We use chlorine to clean our pools and protect our drinking water but chlorine gas (and chlorine bleach, for that matter) stays poisonous just about forever.
Three Mile Island was just about the worst accident imaginable and yet no civilians were ever endangered by it. I deny the "could devastate an entire eastern state" claim; what are your assumptions there? And while you're considering worst case scenarios, compare it to a big hydroelectric dam breaking...
Check out Th e Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon. Especially the nuclear power chapter.