putting someone in prison also sends sends a message - and IMO in this case it would be very appropriate.
Let's imagine you're a judge of not particularly strong moral fiber and offered kickbacks, are you more likely to take them if the possible penalties involve (a) community service, or (b) hard time?
it's a prison - their job is to lock people up - how do you make a private prison without paying them for locking people up? and before you say flat fee - what happens when the prison is full and you need another one?
The problem is most certainly that it was commercially operated. Prisons are right up there on the list of things that should never be privatized with soldiering and compliance auditing.
They built a gallows in Delaware to execute an inmate. Death by hanging was still on the books, and the inmate got to choose, he figured the state wouldn't have the stomach for such an outdated method of execution. He figured wrong.
Society can protect it's citizens just fine by handing out life sentences. It's cheaper, more humane, and there might even be room too if we stopped locking people up for minor drug offenses.
Ok, according to the science - lethal injection can be horribly agonizing - if it's done wrong. People who brought the SCOTUS case were suing Kentucky which had absurdly lax procedures, which could lead to improper administration of the drugs - which would be horribly painful.
The thing with most modes of execution, whether hanging, beheading, firing squad, or lethal injection, is that if it's done right, you don't experience any pain. Do it wrong, and it's torturous.
So, what happens when you flinch right before someone yells fire, and the bullet catches you in the shoulder instead of the head/chest, or for whatever reason the bullet doesn't hit the right part of the brain (people have survived being shot in the head)?
One more question - so you're afraid of needles, but not bullets?
I agree with your assessment that the music label's business model is dead (or at least mortally wounded), but I disagree with your analysis that it is parasitical business. The way the entire economy works is that a business sells something that someone wants, even if they could do it themselves. As long as it employs someone to do something and gets someone else to pay for it, it is creating value. It's only parasitical if it forces people to pay for something neither they, nor the society as a whole wants.
The allies hands might not be squeaky clean, but that's mostly a result of how much war sucks. If you really want to blame the west for something I'd point to the treaty of Versailles, which in my opinion was the direct cause of WWII. As far as fighting "along side" the soviets, it was essentially a matter of necessity. The main reason Stalin died of old age while Hitler's army was crushed was that Stalin played better politics. Either way, I don't consider a short lived alliance to be a tacit acceptance of Stalin's methods - after liberating most of western Europe (which was really the only goal of the European theater) the allies weren't in any position to challenge an eastern power which had just demonstrated it's willingness to, as another poster put it, defeat it's enemies by drowning them in soviet blood. By the time the allies were in a position to challenge the Kremlin they had developed nuclear arms which changed the calculus considerably. It's interesting to consider what would have happened had nuclear weapons been impossible or impracticable to build - my guess is Europe and America would have burned itself back to the stone ages, and either the Chinese or the Japanese (depending on how the Pacific theater went between Iwo Jima and Tokyo) would be the lone 21st century superpower.
Also, the Germans aren't merely accused today, they've been accused, tried, and found guilty. History might be written by the victors, but your post is dangerously close to holocaust denialism.
if you can't feed the black hole, it can't produce energy. if you can feed the black hole, that means upon losing containment it will grow exponentially with a non-trivial initial growth rate.
true - but if you have a stable black hole you risk the chance of losing containment... which could be bad...
If you have an unstable black hole you risk not feeding it enough and having it evaporate, or feeding it too much and having it become stable. If it evaporates you have to dedicate significant energy to getting another one going. I don't know what the energy balance would look like, but I'd think constantly having to pop new black holes would significantly decrease the effective conversion rate.
If we had space ships in non-earth orbit, it would be a great idea, I'd rather not try to make a stable black hole that could collide with earth.
no doubt. But as I'm sure you're aware this is a particularly contentious issue with politically motivated peer reviewed articles on both sides. At the very least the question isn't settled, and citing sources doesn't make it true.
Had I said Obama is more of a classical conservative than Bill Clinton, it would have been even more confusing. This one is particularly sticky because the very word conservative refers to an earlier era. So as the status quo changes so does what it means to be a conservative.
It's sort of like how modern art no longer actually means that the art is modern.
First, let me say that I think the patent system is in desperate need of reform, especially in the area of IT. That said, I think patents have done a great deal of good in the field of medicine and pharmaceuticals. For my second caveat, let me add that the pharma companies do a great number of indefensible things, I'm not in anyway under the impression that big pharma has clean hands.
But here are the facts: Drugs require enormous resources to develop, once you have a drug developed it requires even more enormous resources to test. Finally once a drug goes off patent the generics eat the original inventors lunch because they don't have to support an R&D infrastructure (which is as it should be.) Simply stated, I don't see anyway anyone would develop new drugs without patent protection. (Academia could do it now, but they don't, IMO because there already isn't a sufficient profit motive.)
Surely, this has some negative side effects, like the emphasis on maintenance as opposed to curative drugs, and the practice of overdeveloping families of drugs that do the same thing because it's easy and lets you get a new patent, but taken as a whole, I think modern medicine would not be where it is today without the patent system.
I always get a chuckle when someone goes off about the evils of government in one sentence and praises the constitution the next. It's almost as if the latest libertarian craze is that no government can possibly solve any problems except a government strictly adherent to the constitution. Look, I'm a big fan too, but some people around here seem to thing it's a freaking religious text, and the specter of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are destined to come back and destroy the golden calf of the interstate commerce clause.
If, instead of building an idol you had paid attention in history class, you might have noticed that the constitution is riddled with flaws that have been corrected since it's very inception in order to maintain a stable society. I think states rights sound like a good idea too (in the not-racist-codeword way), but how are states, which are themselves constitutionally obligated to balance their budgets, supposed to help get us out of the current (or past or future) recession? Before you say that balanced budgets would not have resulted in a recession take a look at California.
Obama isn't a classical liberal, just like the GOP aren't classically conservative. On the modern US political spectrum Obama is more liberal than Bill Clinton.
FDR's spending wasn't the only thing that ended the great depression, but it sure helped.
If you're about to go to the old well that it was WWII that actually got us out of the depression, I'd like to point out that we don't seem to be on the verge of, and we don't want another world war. If that was the solution, it offers nothing that can be leveraged to the current situation.
The worst thing the government could do right now would be to cut spending and/or raise taxes to try to spend down the debt. The second worst thing the government could do is nothing. The next better thing is cut taxes, better yet is targeted stimulus checks. Finally getting in to the realm of good ideas, the government can spend (borrowed) money on projects that make the lives of it's citizens easier, like health care and job creation (even make-work). The absolute best thing the government can do is invest in things we want anyway, and will provide long term value (in excess of the original cost), like highways, bridges, spending on an electrical grid, and education.
Fortunately, this current recession isn't as deep as the depression, so we won't require the same level of stimulus spending regardless of whether that spending was spurred by the WPA or WWII.
A good investment (roads) doesn't become a bad investment if the government makes it, or if one has to borrow to make it. Now is the time for government to invest in our future.
In a down economic climate governmental borrowing is good economics. In general pay-as-you-go is ok (though it shouldn't kill good projects). You won't get any arguments from me that our defect is too high, but now is not the time to worry about deficits - unless you're either (a) looking for a new great depression, or (b) looking to sabotage the ruling political party.
Let's say you have a project that you know will generate revenue, say a toll road (really a regular road will do, but you can count the receipts from a toll road.) The problem is, you don't have the capital to pay for it up front. Is borrowing a large sum upfront to guarantee an asset that will provide a great ROI acceptable?
Apply that principle to bridges, airports, education, alternative energy, and the power grid, and you have the beginnings of a good stimulus. Then add items that will cost you more in the long run if you don't do them than the upfront investment, like universal health care and the bailing out of the automakers, and you can get a lot of (borrowed) money flowing quickly - once the economy is clicking again you can work on paying off those wise investments.
It's not clandestine anything. It's a bogus bill so that King can go back to his constituents in 2010 and assure them that he's doing everything he can to protect women in gyms from pervs with camera phones.
If through some remarkable cashing in of political capital this bill ever sees the light of day, I'll bet you'll see both the devise manufacturers (who don't like required features) and/. calling members of congress to tell them what a bone headed idea this is.
-->What does cruel and unusual punishment mean to you?
where are they going to get the money? As you know they're going to borrow it and drive up the deficit.
The kicker is that this is a good thing (this time). When we're in tough economic times you don't want your government to go all spendthrifty on you. Spending money stimulates the economy and increases tax revenues, and you can actually lose less money than if you were to have a moratorium on government spending. If the government doesn't spend and the economy further deteriorates decreased tax revenues over a longer period of time can cost more than upfront spending.
Of course, no one can know in advance where the sweet spot is, but right now I'd err on the side of spending more.
Don't be fooled, Obama is a liberal, not a Clintonian blue dog. He might not be as liberal as many would like, but he's not pay-as-you-go uber alles.
From where I sit, in good economic times you pay down your debt (that would have been from '90-'99 and '03-'07) and in bad times the government becomes the spender of last resort. I wouldn't count on it, but if we're lucky we'll see surpluses before Obama gets out of office even with his massive spending. Remember, it's possible, even if it doesn't look particularly likely right now, that some of those bailouts will pay dividends.
Today the problem is the paradox of thrift. Banks are finding it necessary to be thrifty, consumers are being thrifty out of fear, and that all drives the current economic downward spiral. Sure, over leveraging is more than a little to blame for the mess, but now that we're in it, the best way out is through spending.
The trick is, once we're again on stable financial ground to spend and borrow the right amount of money. The ability to spend and borrow is, in itself, not inherently bad.
P.S. are you from French Guiana, or a fan of the decidedly luxurious and unthrifty porsche?
Slashdot Mirror
putting someone in prison also sends sends a message - and IMO in this case it would be very appropriate.
Let's imagine you're a judge of not particularly strong moral fiber and offered kickbacks, are you more likely to take them if the possible penalties involve (a) community service, or (b) hard time?
it's a prison - their job is to lock people up - how do you make a private prison without paying them for locking people up? and before you say flat fee - what happens when the prison is full and you need another one?
The problem is most certainly that it was commercially operated. Prisons are right up there on the list of things that should never be privatized with soldiering and compliance auditing.
watch it, the slashdot libertarian crowd is going to hammer you.
Didn't you know, privatizing always makes everything better.
They built a gallows in Delaware to execute an inmate. Death by hanging was still on the books, and the inmate got to choose, he figured the state wouldn't have the stomach for such an outdated method of execution. He figured wrong.
Society can protect it's citizens just fine by handing out life sentences. It's cheaper, more humane, and there might even be room too if we stopped locking people up for minor drug offenses.
Ok, according to the science - lethal injection can be horribly agonizing - if it's done wrong. People who brought the SCOTUS case were suing Kentucky which had absurdly lax procedures, which could lead to improper administration of the drugs - which would be horribly painful.
The thing with most modes of execution, whether hanging, beheading, firing squad, or lethal injection, is that if it's done right, you don't experience any pain. Do it wrong, and it's torturous.
So, what happens when you flinch right before someone yells fire, and the bullet catches you in the shoulder instead of the head/chest, or for whatever reason the bullet doesn't hit the right part of the brain (people have survived being shot in the head)?
One more question - so you're afraid of needles, but not bullets?
The 1% of people use way more than 1% of the bandwidth.
I agree with your assessment that the music label's business model is dead (or at least mortally wounded), but I disagree with your analysis that it is parasitical business. The way the entire economy works is that a business sells something that someone wants, even if they could do it themselves. As long as it employs someone to do something and gets someone else to pay for it, it is creating value. It's only parasitical if it forces people to pay for something neither they, nor the society as a whole wants.
The allies hands might not be squeaky clean, but that's mostly a result of how much war sucks. If you really want to blame the west for something I'd point to the treaty of Versailles, which in my opinion was the direct cause of WWII. As far as fighting "along side" the soviets, it was essentially a matter of necessity. The main reason Stalin died of old age while Hitler's army was crushed was that Stalin played better politics. Either way, I don't consider a short lived alliance to be a tacit acceptance of Stalin's methods - after liberating most of western Europe (which was really the only goal of the European theater) the allies weren't in any position to challenge an eastern power which had just demonstrated it's willingness to, as another poster put it, defeat it's enemies by drowning them in soviet blood. By the time the allies were in a position to challenge the Kremlin they had developed nuclear arms which changed the calculus considerably. It's interesting to consider what would have happened had nuclear weapons been impossible or impracticable to build - my guess is Europe and America would have burned itself back to the stone ages, and either the Chinese or the Japanese (depending on how the Pacific theater went between Iwo Jima and Tokyo) would be the lone 21st century superpower.
Also, the Germans aren't merely accused today, they've been accused, tried, and found guilty. History might be written by the victors, but your post is dangerously close to holocaust denialism.
Then you haven't been paying attention. link (2007 gross profits $194.20 million)
Of course implementing solutions would entail actually running prisons and not just shuttling tax money to friends of people in high places.
if you can't feed the black hole, it can't produce energy.
if you can feed the black hole, that means upon losing containment it will grow exponentially with a non-trivial initial growth rate.
yes.
until the orbit decayed.
which might happen sooner than we might like.
true - but if you have a stable black hole you risk the chance of losing containment... which could be bad...
If you have an unstable black hole you risk not feeding it enough and having it evaporate, or feeding it too much and having it become stable. If it evaporates you have to dedicate significant energy to getting another one going. I don't know what the energy balance would look like, but I'd think constantly having to pop new black holes would significantly decrease the effective conversion rate.
If we had space ships in non-earth orbit, it would be a great idea, I'd rather not try to make a stable black hole that could collide with earth.
no doubt. But as I'm sure you're aware this is a particularly contentious issue with politically motivated peer reviewed articles on both sides. At the very least the question isn't settled, and citing sources doesn't make it true.
I'm afraid the ships already sailed on this one.
Had I said Obama is more of a classical conservative than Bill Clinton, it would have been even more confusing. This one is particularly sticky because the very word conservative refers to an earlier era. So as the status quo changes so does what it means to be a conservative.
It's sort of like how modern art no longer actually means that the art is modern.
First, let me say that I think the patent system is in desperate need of reform, especially in the area of IT. That said, I think patents have done a great deal of good in the field of medicine and pharmaceuticals. For my second caveat, let me add that the pharma companies do a great number of indefensible things, I'm not in anyway under the impression that big pharma has clean hands.
But here are the facts: Drugs require enormous resources to develop, once you have a drug developed it requires even more enormous resources to test. Finally once a drug goes off patent the generics eat the original inventors lunch because they don't have to support an R&D infrastructure (which is as it should be.) Simply stated, I don't see anyway anyone would develop new drugs without patent protection. (Academia could do it now, but they don't, IMO because there already isn't a sufficient profit motive.)
Surely, this has some negative side effects, like the emphasis on maintenance as opposed to curative drugs, and the practice of overdeveloping families of drugs that do the same thing because it's easy and lets you get a new patent, but taken as a whole, I think modern medicine would not be where it is today without the patent system.
I always get a chuckle when someone goes off about the evils of government in one sentence and praises the constitution the next. It's almost as if the latest libertarian craze is that no government can possibly solve any problems except a government strictly adherent to the constitution. Look, I'm a big fan too, but some people around here seem to thing it's a freaking religious text, and the specter of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are destined to come back and destroy the golden calf of the interstate commerce clause.
If, instead of building an idol you had paid attention in history class, you might have noticed that the constitution is riddled with flaws that have been corrected since it's very inception in order to maintain a stable society. I think states rights sound like a good idea too (in the not-racist-codeword way), but how are states, which are themselves constitutionally obligated to balance their budgets, supposed to help get us out of the current (or past or future) recession? Before you say that balanced budgets would not have resulted in a recession take a look at California.
semantics.
Obama isn't a classical liberal, just like the GOP aren't classically conservative. On the modern US political spectrum Obama is more liberal than Bill Clinton.
That's hardly a consensus position.
FDR's spending wasn't the only thing that ended the great depression, but it sure helped.
If you're about to go to the old well that it was WWII that actually got us out of the depression, I'd like to point out that we don't seem to be on the verge of, and we don't want another world war. If that was the solution, it offers nothing that can be leveraged to the current situation.
The worst thing the government could do right now would be to cut spending and/or raise taxes to try to spend down the debt. The second worst thing the government could do is nothing. The next better thing is cut taxes, better yet is targeted stimulus checks. Finally getting in to the realm of good ideas, the government can spend (borrowed) money on projects that make the lives of it's citizens easier, like health care and job creation (even make-work). The absolute best thing the government can do is invest in things we want anyway, and will provide long term value (in excess of the original cost), like highways, bridges, spending on an electrical grid, and education.
Fortunately, this current recession isn't as deep as the depression, so we won't require the same level of stimulus spending regardless of whether that spending was spurred by the WPA or WWII.
A good investment (roads) doesn't become a bad investment if the government makes it, or if one has to borrow to make it. Now is the time for government to invest in our future.
no i don't.
In a down economic climate governmental borrowing is good economics. In general pay-as-you-go is ok (though it shouldn't kill good projects). You won't get any arguments from me that our defect is too high, but now is not the time to worry about deficits - unless you're either (a) looking for a new great depression, or (b) looking to sabotage the ruling political party.
Let's say you have a project that you know will generate revenue, say a toll road (really a regular road will do, but you can count the receipts from a toll road.) The problem is, you don't have the capital to pay for it up front. Is borrowing a large sum upfront to guarantee an asset that will provide a great ROI acceptable?
Apply that principle to bridges, airports, education, alternative energy, and the power grid, and you have the beginnings of a good stimulus. Then add items that will cost you more in the long run if you don't do them than the upfront investment, like universal health care and the bailing out of the automakers, and you can get a lot of (borrowed) money flowing quickly - once the economy is clicking again you can work on paying off those wise investments.
It's not clandestine anything. It's a bogus bill so that King can go back to his constituents in 2010 and assure them that he's doing everything he can to protect women in gyms from pervs with camera phones.
If through some remarkable cashing in of political capital this bill ever sees the light of day, I'll bet you'll see both the devise manufacturers (who don't like required features) and /. calling members of congress to tell them what a bone headed idea this is.
-->What does cruel and unusual punishment mean to you?
FWIW New York is losing a house seat in 2010. This seat is one of the top 3-4 most likely to be eliminated.
where are they going to get the money? As you know they're going to borrow it and drive up the deficit.
The kicker is that this is a good thing (this time). When we're in tough economic times you don't want your government to go all spendthrifty on you. Spending money stimulates the economy and increases tax revenues, and you can actually lose less money than if you were to have a moratorium on government spending. If the government doesn't spend and the economy further deteriorates decreased tax revenues over a longer period of time can cost more than upfront spending.
Of course, no one can know in advance where the sweet spot is, but right now I'd err on the side of spending more.
Don't be fooled, Obama is a liberal, not a Clintonian blue dog. He might not be as liberal as many would like, but he's not pay-as-you-go uber alles.
From where I sit, in good economic times you pay down your debt (that would have been from '90-'99 and '03-'07) and in bad times the government becomes the spender of last resort. I wouldn't count on it, but if we're lucky we'll see surpluses before Obama gets out of office even with his massive spending. Remember, it's possible, even if it doesn't look particularly likely right now, that some of those bailouts will pay dividends.
Maybe last year.
Today the problem is the paradox of thrift. Banks are finding it necessary to be thrifty, consumers are being thrifty out of fear, and that all drives the current economic downward spiral. Sure, over leveraging is more than a little to blame for the mess, but now that we're in it, the best way out is through spending.
The trick is, once we're again on stable financial ground to spend and borrow the right amount of money. The ability to spend and borrow is, in itself, not inherently bad.
P.S. are you from French Guiana, or a fan of the decidedly luxurious and unthrifty porsche?