This exact behavior occurs on highways, parking lots, and all kinds of public places every day. In fact, on highways it regularly culminates in an actual fatality. I think people think they have some sort of anonymity because they are behind glass, even though that is an utter illusion. You're more anonymous on foot, but people rarely scream at each other over how they walk. I think there is something about being face-to-face that causes most people to be more polite. I see screaming fits, fists, and middle fingers on the roads every day. I see obscenity-laced illiterate rants everywhere on the internet. I don't see this in person, face-to-face most days, at least not yet.
Others more articulate than I have already addressed your points, and I'd like to basically agree with them.
I can have it both ways, I do have it both ways, and I want to keep having it both ways! I like a free market, with controls to prevent obvious abuses such as price-fixing, monopoly abuse, false advertising, fraud, product safety, etc. Kind of like the system I enjoy now, although I'd make certain changes given the chance.
There are plenty of things a local business can offer that an online-only one cannot. Things like same-day service, personal interaction, security of having an actual store to bring your broken crap back to, free handjob with purchase, the possibilities are endless. I think the entrepreneurial spirit can find a way to keep local businesses rolling. If you want to have a crap store with nothing to justify your high prices (compUSA I'm looking at you) you DESERVE to go out of business.
They have a monopoly on their signed artists. If you want the latest piece of crap by Vanilla Ice or whoever is popular these days, you've gotta pay the RIAA or don the eyepatch.
I don't like popular music, and I don't respect it, but surely you have to agree that musicians aren't interchangeable.
If you have a cafe that plays music, you have to pay the RIAA. There are a lot of tentacles in a lot of pies. I support independent artists, but still recognize RIAA labels as a monopoly.
America had really bad environmental problems and robber baron abuse that led to our current laws. You might be interested in reading up on burning rivers, The Jungle, treatment of miners and railroad workers, etc. Our system was broken in a spectacular way, a very free-market way. We have monopoly laws because of numerous entrenched successful monopolies. Read up on company towns, Standard Oil, etc. It wasn't some paranoid fantasy about things that could happen.
I don't know why you're talking about the Soviets and complaining about government monopolies. We're talking about private business.
In my experience, small businesses are nimble enough to survive. It is the huge corporate stores I see dying. I cheer every time a best buy, compusa, k-mart, etc. bites the dust. Amazon's competition is barnes and noble, borders, etc. who already killed off the weak small bookstores. I'd wet my pants with delight if barnes and noble went under thanks to amazon. It broke my heart to watch the megacorps drive independant record stores, bookstores, coffeshops, retail stores, groceries, etc. out of business. If the internet can return the favor, I say why not?
My neighborhood is full of thriving small businesses that I cheerfully support. They all have something to offer that doesn't translate well to an online-only model. There's even a growing independent computer shop that seems to live on fixing non-technical people's machines. I bought a power supply there last month for a few bucks more than I'd pay online with shipping. I was grateful to have my machine running again the same day.
I don't see any reason to prop up stupid ugly identical chain retail stores. Let the internet kill them.
The jobs point is hopeless. Jobs have been lost since the dawn of time because of technological and political changes. I've lost 2 jobs because of this. I don't like it, but you can't stop it. Trying to stop it is expensive and counterproductive. Maybe these people could get jobs delivering for UPS and the post office, or 1st level customer service and tech support.
I strongly disagree about your second point. I think it is more efficient for people to order online in most cases than to go to the store. You avoid the extra trip in a car, the resources to chill/heat/light/staff the store. The mailman comes by anyway, he just needs a bigger truck. The goods are shipped over long distances already, impact on roads, gas, rail would be nothing at all.
If online retailers can provide the same thing for 24% less then we should have very few brick and mortar retailers.
Grocery stores would still exist, as would convenience stores. Clothing shops might do OK since people like to try things on. There are always impulse/emergency items, in many categories. I can see the need for a handful of electronic/computer retailers in a large city.
Can you give me a good reason we should prop up an obsolete business model besides nostalgia or personal preference?
The way I've shopped in the last 10 years is: Online comparison/research. Online purchase unless shipping is more expensive than local, I want an easy return, I need to touch/smell/hear/taste the item first, or I'm in a big hurry.
I always assumed that eventually everyone would adopt this model of shopping and we'd see a massive collapse of brick-and-mortar retailers. Retailers that are smart will be able to adapt. Lots of opportunities, like partnering with an online retailer, offering amenities that aren't possible online, etc.
It's called the lottery mentality. That's what happens when you don't teach people math and statistics. It's also why people are terrified of child molesters and terrorists and find nothing daunting about driving angrily while talking on their cellphone for 2 hours a day.
I am not a tidy person, but my office is often worse than any of those pictures. My house is easily 10,000 times worse than any of those pictures. No stacks of shelves and boxes 12 feet high, no overflowing totes full of tangled wires. Do I need to post pictures of my computer room to give the internet a standard of what a cluttered room looks like?
The reasons I don't like to watch video on cc's website:
Their website is an ugly, flash-infested, huge, slow, horrible, mouse-only trainwreck. It makes me feel dirty to use it. The Pokemon website is less embarrassing. You can only watch segments. I want to kick back for 15 minutes and watch the whole show without mousing around every 2 minutes! It doesn't let you download for mobile devices. It doesn't allow fullscreen.
I've got friends in the Colorado Rockies that have well water and periodically have some bacterial problems. They drink bottled unless it gets boiled first.
Exceptions aside, the vast majority of bottled-water drinkers live in areas with 100% safe tap water. In 90%+ of North America, aside from extreme rural areas and occasional exceptions, tap water is safe.
I suppose a bit of cheerleading for your favorite manufacturer or platform is understandable. If the manufacturer does well you're more likely to have access to resources for your own machine, even if it is obsolete. The funny thing is that there are more Commodore and Atari resources now than I ever had back when the machines were current!
I guess I'm not a very good nerd. I grew up with Commodore, but that didn't stop me from buying an Atari ST when I started using MIDI a lot. I had no problem getting a PC when that was what I was being paid to work on. Despite learning Unix in school I use Windows quite often, although I have linux boxes too.
Well, that's the crux of the matter. You can have a surveillance society, where everything everyone does is analyzed and judged and people will still molest children. Only now, those molested children have to suffer in a repressed thoughtcrime environment. Most children are molested by someone they know. No way to stop that by passing laws.
There is something fishy about child molestation anyway. I think it's weird that you are better off killing a kid than molesting the kid. You're better off killing a kid than having kiddie porn. Seems out of whack to me. I think killing someone is the worst thing that you can do to them.
The whole problem with freedom is that people will do things that we don't like. Freedom of speech means we have to put up with the KKK, NAMBLA, and John Tesh. I like the idea of giving everyone freedom and if they do something that hurts someone, they are punished. I don't like preventative laws. You are punishing everyone, and you'll never remove all risk.
Freedom is so important to me I would die for it. I think it is important enough to put up with all the risks inherent in life, too. The trick of trying to legislate yourself into safety is that you will never be safe. Even if we were all shackled in cages from birth there would still be crime and premature death. There's a tradeoff where you can give up some freedom for some safety. I think we should err on the side of freedom. A crass way to look at it is this: a few extra crimes are committed on the one hand. On the other hand we have millions living in a free state.
I think that legislating morality is a trap, and that liberty and the pursuit of happiness should be near the top of our priorities. I think the USA should be very far away from a Sharia-type legal system. I make no claims that a fascist nanny-state would be unconstitutional. We live in one now. No matter how many things we ban we will never be 100% safe, and we'll keep passing more and more draconian laws. I think this direction is a mistake for our country, and I'll do what I can to change that. It won't be easy. A lot of citizens are risk-obsessed fear junkies, forever fixating on unlikely terrible things. Begging to give up their rights, be told what to do, and won't somebody please think of the children.
Some people would prefer to live in a police state with strict laws about everything. Those people have been dominating politics for some time. I think if/when it progresses so far that it is too late to change things a lot of those people will be sorry. The locked-down rigid rules will be so detailed and vast that nobody will like all of them, but they'll have to live by them. Punishment for violation will be swift and drastic. We already imprison a horrific percentage of our populace and if we continue to criminalize everything we'll all live in a virtual prison. Land of the free, it was nice while it lasted.
Sadly, most of the world seems to be heading in that direction. China and India, the future of this planet to no small extent, have abysmal human rights. Africa is a nightmare. Lots of Europe is already a surveillance-hungry ban-happy control freak's paradise. Then we have the spectre of a resurgence of Islam, spreading the very opposite of liberty.
I liked it better when the US was a beacon of freedom instead of a place police states get good ideas from. I remember when we tried to be different from our enemies, now we seem determined to out-do them in oppression.
If you like all of these developments you have my congratulations. Your ideals are ascendant and successful. Please try to keep in mind, though, eventually the laws will become constrictive even to you.
I understand people are different, but I don't understand how anyone could think that tolerance and minding your own business are bad things. It seems so obvious that if more people would focus on their own life, family and friends instead of controlling the actions of strangers the world would be a finer place. Oh well, I accept that there are people who feel that way. I don't have to like it.
Wow, reading this whole thread was painful. On the chance you're honestly not understanding this, I'll try. We have a case of fuzzy semantics clouding things.
When people complain about "legislating morality" they are generally referring to Puritanical/Islamic type of laws. Laws banning obscenity, alcohol, sexuality, etc. Secular laws regarding murder, theft, etc. are held to be different because there is an obvious victim and lack of consent.
Certainly many of our secular laws have moral components, but resistance comes for laws that are made for little other benefit than a moral one.
Trying to legislate a purely moral framework is problematic. For one thing, there are many conflicting moral codes. You run the risk of needless fascism and crazy outcomes like stoning a woman for being raped. Lots of people think that moral codes are more meaningful if applied personally and voluntarily, and this obviously handles the whole differing moral codes problem as well.
There, hopefully now you understand that there is a perspective that believes that attempts to "legislate morality" are misguided. I don't demand that you agree with this opinion, but I hope you can recognize that it exists and I hope you can understand how a person could have this opinion in good faith.
I think maybe a key difference between camps is the issue of consent. An authoritarian approach does not consider consent relevant, morality is morality. A hand-off approach considers consent to be key to most laws.
That's an optimistic prediction. I think it's more likely that if Roe vs Wade is overturned the Christian right will push even harder. Abortion would be restricted, then banned with exceptions, then banned outright, then punishable by death, then they'd ban birth control, then they'd ban the HPV vaccine, sex ed, who knows what crazy thing they'd think up. I'm glad they're stuck on abortion (given such meddlesome people must exist) because that gives them less time to focus on even more invasive nightmares.
Very few "pro-lifers" care about the babies. If they did care, they'd support birth control and sex ed, which reduce the demand for abortions and improve the babies lot in life. But they don't. They absolutely loathe sex ed and birth control. I think it's because they hate and fear sex, and the abortion fixation is a way to try to make people who like sex pay. Same thing with the opposition to HPV vaccine. Blatant "make the fornicators pay" baloney. It's going to cost countless lives of innocent women. How pro-life is that?
Actually, we are referred to by most of the world as (after we translate) United Statesians. Spanish for USA is Los E.E.U.U. French is Les Etats-Unis. Most languages don't even specify America in their term for the US of A. Therefore, most people don't even have the word America in mind when saying their local term for the USA. Some Americans seem to really get bothered by this, but it doesn't make sense to me at all. Germans don't get all pissed off that we don't call them Deutschlanders.
I like the BBC model too. I don't think an ad-immersed society is the best way to do things. One idea I've had is that maybe we need to go back to the dawn of television. Chesterfield could make a show with a modern-day Groucho Marx. No ads necessary, people download the show or give it to their friends and it's free advertising for Chesterfield! The best shows would become the most popular, and some lame propaganda show that's basically an infomercial would have the popularity of a 4am tuesday timeslot. I think it makes a lot of sense. Instead of Toyota giving a bunch of networks money for stupid ads totaling $200 million they'd make 40 $5 million shows that happen to have macho guys towing shit. You could even have compatible products pool their resources: Towing shit while drinking Coors and smoking Chesterfields!
Let's face it, US TV can't get any worse. Why not give a different model a try? It'd even work for movie-level budgets.
Slashdot Mirror
This exact behavior occurs on highways, parking lots, and all kinds of public places every day. In fact, on highways it regularly culminates in an actual fatality. I think people think they have some sort of anonymity because they are behind glass, even though that is an utter illusion. You're more anonymous on foot, but people rarely scream at each other over how they walk. I think there is something about being face-to-face that causes most people to be more polite. I see screaming fits, fists, and middle fingers on the roads every day. I see obscenity-laced illiterate rants everywhere on the internet. I don't see this in person, face-to-face most days, at least not yet.
People can't enter the market if the product is trademarked, patented, and copyrighted.
Others more articulate than I have already addressed your points, and I'd like to basically agree with them.
I can have it both ways, I do have it both ways, and I want to keep having it both ways! I like a free market, with controls to prevent obvious abuses such as price-fixing, monopoly abuse, false advertising, fraud, product safety, etc. Kind of like the system I enjoy now, although I'd make certain changes given the chance.
There are plenty of things a local business can offer that an online-only one cannot. Things like same-day service, personal interaction, security of having an actual store to bring your broken crap back to, free handjob with purchase, the possibilities are endless. I think the entrepreneurial spirit can find a way to keep local businesses rolling. If you want to have a crap store with nothing to justify your high prices (compUSA I'm looking at you) you DESERVE to go out of business.
They have a monopoly on their signed artists. If you want the latest piece of crap by Vanilla Ice or whoever is popular these days, you've gotta pay the RIAA or don the eyepatch.
I don't like popular music, and I don't respect it, but surely you have to agree that musicians aren't interchangeable.
If you have a cafe that plays music, you have to pay the RIAA. There are a lot of tentacles in a lot of pies. I support independent artists, but still recognize RIAA labels as a monopoly.
You must be late for class a lot.
America had really bad environmental problems and robber baron abuse that led to our current laws. You might be interested in reading up on burning rivers, The Jungle, treatment of miners and railroad workers, etc. Our system was broken in a spectacular way, a very free-market way. We have monopoly laws because of numerous entrenched successful monopolies. Read up on company towns, Standard Oil, etc. It wasn't some paranoid fantasy about things that could happen.
I don't know why you're talking about the Soviets and complaining about government monopolies. We're talking about private business.
In my experience, small businesses are nimble enough to survive. It is the huge corporate stores I see dying. I cheer every time a best buy, compusa, k-mart, etc. bites the dust. Amazon's competition is barnes and noble, borders, etc. who already killed off the weak small bookstores. I'd wet my pants with delight if barnes and noble went under thanks to amazon. It broke my heart to watch the megacorps drive independant record stores, bookstores, coffeshops, retail stores, groceries, etc. out of business. If the internet can return the favor, I say why not?
My neighborhood is full of thriving small businesses that I cheerfully support. They all have something to offer that doesn't translate well to an online-only model. There's even a growing independent computer shop that seems to live on fixing non-technical people's machines. I bought a power supply there last month for a few bucks more than I'd pay online with shipping. I was grateful to have my machine running again the same day.
I don't see any reason to prop up stupid ugly identical chain retail stores. Let the internet kill them.
The jobs point is hopeless. Jobs have been lost since the dawn of time because of technological and political changes. I've lost 2 jobs because of this. I don't like it, but you can't stop it. Trying to stop it is expensive and counterproductive. Maybe these people could get jobs delivering for UPS and the post office, or 1st level customer service and tech support.
I strongly disagree about your second point. I think it is more efficient for people to order online in most cases than to go to the store. You avoid the extra trip in a car, the resources to chill/heat/light/staff the store. The mailman comes by anyway, he just needs a bigger truck. The goods are shipped over long distances already, impact on roads, gas, rail would be nothing at all.
If online retailers can provide the same thing for 24% less then we should have very few brick and mortar retailers.
Grocery stores would still exist, as would convenience stores. Clothing shops might do OK since people like to try things on. There are always impulse/emergency items, in many categories. I can see the need for a handful of electronic/computer retailers in a large city.
Can you give me a good reason we should prop up an obsolete business model besides nostalgia or personal preference?
The way I've shopped in the last 10 years is: Online comparison/research. Online purchase unless shipping is more expensive than local, I want an easy return, I need to touch/smell/hear/taste the item first, or I'm in a big hurry.
I always assumed that eventually everyone would adopt this model of shopping and we'd see a massive collapse of brick-and-mortar retailers. Retailers that are smart will be able to adapt. Lots of opportunities, like partnering with an online retailer, offering amenities that aren't possible online, etc.
This legal attempt would make the rest of the market more like the RIAA's market.
Some other monopolies (or near so) are phone, internet, TV, etc.
It's called the lottery mentality. That's what happens when you don't teach people math and statistics. It's also why people are terrified of child molesters and terrorists and find nothing daunting about driving angrily while talking on their cellphone for 2 hours a day.
I am not a tidy person, but my office is often worse than any of those pictures. My house is easily 10,000 times worse than any of those pictures. No stacks of shelves and boxes 12 feet high, no overflowing totes full of tangled wires. Do I need to post pictures of my computer room to give the internet a standard of what a cluttered room looks like?
The reasons I don't like to watch video on cc's website:
Their website is an ugly, flash-infested, huge, slow, horrible, mouse-only trainwreck. It makes me feel dirty to use it. The Pokemon website is less embarrassing.
You can only watch segments. I want to kick back for 15 minutes and watch the whole show without mousing around every 2 minutes!
It doesn't let you download for mobile devices.
It doesn't allow fullscreen.
I've got friends in the Colorado Rockies that have well water and periodically have some bacterial problems. They drink bottled unless it gets boiled first.
Exceptions aside, the vast majority of bottled-water drinkers live in areas with 100% safe tap water. In 90%+ of North America, aside from extreme rural areas and occasional exceptions, tap water is safe.
For best health, I only use 100% organic solvents.
I suppose a bit of cheerleading for your favorite manufacturer or platform is understandable. If the manufacturer does well you're more likely to have access to resources for your own machine, even if it is obsolete. The funny thing is that there are more Commodore and Atari resources now than I ever had back when the machines were current!
I guess I'm not a very good nerd. I grew up with Commodore, but that didn't stop me from buying an Atari ST when I started using MIDI a lot. I had no problem getting a PC when that was what I was being paid to work on. Despite learning Unix in school I use Windows quite often, although I have linux boxes too.
Um, death to extremists!
Well, that's the crux of the matter. You can have a surveillance society, where everything everyone does is analyzed and judged and people will still molest children. Only now, those molested children have to suffer in a repressed thoughtcrime environment. Most children are molested by someone they know. No way to stop that by passing laws.
There is something fishy about child molestation anyway. I think it's weird that you are better off killing a kid than molesting the kid. You're better off killing a kid than having kiddie porn. Seems out of whack to me. I think killing someone is the worst thing that you can do to them.
The whole problem with freedom is that people will do things that we don't like. Freedom of speech means we have to put up with the KKK, NAMBLA, and John Tesh. I like the idea of giving everyone freedom and if they do something that hurts someone, they are punished. I don't like preventative laws. You are punishing everyone, and you'll never remove all risk.
Freedom is so important to me I would die for it. I think it is important enough to put up with all the risks inherent in life, too. The trick of trying to legislate yourself into safety is that you will never be safe. Even if we were all shackled in cages from birth there would still be crime and premature death. There's a tradeoff where you can give up some freedom for some safety. I think we should err on the side of freedom. A crass way to look at it is this: a few extra crimes are committed on the one hand. On the other hand we have millions living in a free state.
Google might have done this on purpose. If they play their cards right it could change everything, and to Google's advantage.
I think that legislating morality is a trap, and that liberty and the pursuit of happiness should be near the top of our priorities. I think the USA should be very far away from a Sharia-type legal system. I make no claims that a fascist nanny-state would be unconstitutional. We live in one now. No matter how many things we ban we will never be 100% safe, and we'll keep passing more and more draconian laws. I think this direction is a mistake for our country, and I'll do what I can to change that. It won't be easy. A lot of citizens are risk-obsessed fear junkies, forever fixating on unlikely terrible things. Begging to give up their rights, be told what to do, and won't somebody please think of the children.
Some people would prefer to live in a police state with strict laws about everything. Those people have been dominating politics for some time. I think if/when it progresses so far that it is too late to change things a lot of those people will be sorry. The locked-down rigid rules will be so detailed and vast that nobody will like all of them, but they'll have to live by them. Punishment for violation will be swift and drastic. We already imprison a horrific percentage of our populace and if we continue to criminalize everything we'll all live in a virtual prison. Land of the free, it was nice while it lasted.
Sadly, most of the world seems to be heading in that direction. China and India, the future of this planet to no small extent, have abysmal human rights. Africa is a nightmare. Lots of Europe is already a surveillance-hungry ban-happy control freak's paradise. Then we have the spectre of a resurgence of Islam, spreading the very opposite of liberty.
I liked it better when the US was a beacon of freedom instead of a place police states get good ideas from. I remember when we tried to be different from our enemies, now we seem determined to out-do them in oppression.
If you like all of these developments you have my congratulations. Your ideals are ascendant and successful. Please try to keep in mind, though, eventually the laws will become constrictive even to you.
I understand people are different, but I don't understand how anyone could think that tolerance and minding your own business are bad things. It seems so obvious that if more people would focus on their own life, family and friends instead of controlling the actions of strangers the world would be a finer place. Oh well, I accept that there are people who feel that way. I don't have to like it.
Wow, reading this whole thread was painful. On the chance you're honestly not understanding this, I'll try. We have a case of fuzzy semantics clouding things.
When people complain about "legislating morality" they are generally referring to Puritanical/Islamic type of laws. Laws banning obscenity, alcohol, sexuality, etc. Secular laws regarding murder, theft, etc. are held to be different because there is an obvious victim and lack of consent.
Certainly many of our secular laws have moral components, but resistance comes for laws that are made for little other benefit than a moral one.
Trying to legislate a purely moral framework is problematic. For one thing, there are many conflicting moral codes. You run the risk of needless fascism and crazy outcomes like stoning a woman for being raped. Lots of people think that moral codes are more meaningful if applied personally and voluntarily, and this obviously handles the whole differing moral codes problem as well.
There, hopefully now you understand that there is a perspective that believes that attempts to "legislate morality" are misguided. I don't demand that you agree with this opinion, but I hope you can recognize that it exists and I hope you can understand how a person could have this opinion in good faith.
I think maybe a key difference between camps is the issue of consent. An authoritarian approach does not consider consent relevant, morality is morality. A hand-off approach considers consent to be key to most laws.
That's an optimistic prediction. I think it's more likely that if Roe vs Wade is overturned the Christian right will push even harder. Abortion would be restricted, then banned with exceptions, then banned outright, then punishable by death, then they'd ban birth control, then they'd ban the HPV vaccine, sex ed, who knows what crazy thing they'd think up. I'm glad they're stuck on abortion (given such meddlesome people must exist) because that gives them less time to focus on even more invasive nightmares.
Very few "pro-lifers" care about the babies. If they did care, they'd support birth control and sex ed, which reduce the demand for abortions and improve the babies lot in life. But they don't. They absolutely loathe sex ed and birth control. I think it's because they hate and fear sex, and the abortion fixation is a way to try to make people who like sex pay. Same thing with the opposition to HPV vaccine. Blatant "make the fornicators pay" baloney. It's going to cost countless lives of innocent women. How pro-life is that?
Please put
tags at the end of lines. Pressing the Enter key doesn't work here!
Nobody can read that horrible mess.
Actually, we are referred to by most of the world as (after we translate) United Statesians. Spanish for USA is Los E.E.U.U. French is Les Etats-Unis. Most languages don't even specify America in their term for the US of A. Therefore, most people don't even have the word America in mind when saying their local term for the USA. Some Americans seem to really get bothered by this, but it doesn't make sense to me at all. Germans don't get all pissed off that we don't call them Deutschlanders.
I like the BBC model too. I don't think an ad-immersed society is the best way to do things. One idea I've had is that maybe we need to go back to the dawn of television. Chesterfield could make a show with a modern-day Groucho Marx. No ads necessary, people download the show or give it to their friends and it's free advertising for Chesterfield! The best shows would become the most popular, and some lame propaganda show that's basically an infomercial would have the popularity of a 4am tuesday timeslot. I think it makes a lot of sense. Instead of Toyota giving a bunch of networks money for stupid ads totaling $200 million they'd make 40 $5 million shows that happen to have macho guys towing shit. You could even have compatible products pool their resources: Towing shit while drinking Coors and smoking Chesterfields!
Let's face it, US TV can't get any worse. Why not give a different model a try? It'd even work for movie-level budgets.
Mankind has made it to the Moon with thousands of years of ethanol-induced brain damage.
You might be thinking of methanol, that is only fun once or twice.