I wonder why they would show you ads for something you've already bought though. It seems counterproductive and like a waste of money, but if it's becoming pervasive it must work or it makes no sense for everyone to do it.
Maybe the people who don't use some form of ad blocking really are that stupid.
I would say the difference is that these Nordic countries have decided as a society that they want to support people like themselves and their families.
Even if a population is racially and culturally heterogeneous, I suspect that if there's a strong external enemy that it would override infighting among the subgroups. I don't know how well that applies in the case of Cuba, etc. though as there were a lot of people that tried to flee Cuba for the U.S. and Venezuela has seen a large outflux of people in the last year. However, I think the U.S. is too diverse for a common enemy like that to exist.
Another explanation is that the U.S. might just be too damned big. The Scandinavian countries are quite a bit smaller. About 40% of U.S. states have more people than Denmark, Norway, or Finland and about 20% of states are bigger than Sweden. I suspect that even if you did have a racially homogenous population, that it would start to drift culturally once you reach that size, especially given the wide variety in geography.
Depending on how you want to define socialism, you can get a pretty broad collection of countries. In the long run I suspect that Marxist ideologies tend to result in countries like North Korea or Venezuela, but not all socialist systems are necessarily Marxist ones. I've simply never heard of any country which has tried what might be coined as "free market socialism" and it's not something that would have a lot of overlap on the Venn diagram with other forms of socialism.
I'm just curious what the hell it's supposed to mean as the examples I give above seem odd. The first doesn't seem as though it would be what most socialists would consider a socialist system. The second seems to work, but it's still strange. It would essentially be everyone working for state owned (but not necessarily state run or centrally planned) companies (and free to choose their own line of work) and free to purchase as they choose, but only after the government uses a 100% (or near enough) tax rate to give everyone the same amount of money to engage in commerce as they will. I just don't see that being particularly stable if people can immigrate and emigrate freely. Maybe it works if the country doing it is a very tight cultural group such that people are very reluctant to leave and it's not welcoming to outsiders so most don't want to join.
I'd really need to hear what your definition of socialism actually is to square it with the notion being compatible with (or as you later suggest required for) a market (I'm assuming you mean a free one, or one that is reasonably so) economy. Otherwise I suspect you're guilty of choosing your definition of socialism post priori so that you can find one that doesn't look like a miserable failure.
Private exchange doesn't make sense if you have communal ownership. Maybe you're envisioning something like all private companies being employee owned (i.e., you can't hold stock if you don't work there and if you work there you must hold stock) but I don't think that's ever been tried. It's almost like a guild system, only with multiple competing guilds. This system also says nothing about personal income tax or social safety nets either as you could just as easily use this system regardless of how that's handled.
The only other thing you could possibly mean is that everyone acts as a capitalist agent, but the government takes most or all of their earnings. Essentially you seem to have private exchange in name only up since as soon as you make an exchange whatever benefit you gained from it becomes communally controlled. I suppose that works if you have a group of people that like playing free market just for the sake of playing free market. It would be a bit like playing Monopoly endlessly, only with real money that you never get to keep since just goes back in the tray. I don't know if there's a group of people on the planet weird enough to play by those rules. Maybe if the group were entirely self-selecting, but to suspect it on a population level for any ethnic group is suspect at best.
Actually, Norway has been quite good about avoiding the temptation of spending like drunken sailors from that fund. Also, social democracies aren't Marxist. They're capitalist systems with a high tax rate and a strong social safety net. If you look at economic freedom ratings Norway (and other Scandinavian countries) are comparable to the U.S. as opposed to the countries that follow some form of Marxist philosophy (Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea). Those Scandinavian countries even have lower corporate tax rates than the U.S. as well.
Hopefully their attempts at integration result in them ruining both services to the point that people go elsewhere. I recall a fairly large revolt when Google tried to shackle YouTube users with their own social network, although I don't think anyone really used that social network.
However, I suspect that it doesn't really matter what they do. The next generation is going to want to find a new social network precisely so they can get the fuck away from their parents, teachers, and relatives. It doesn't matter if it's better or worse, every new generation doesn't want to keep listening to their father's rock and roll.
Moving energy by power line would have to be cheaper, or at least no more expensive. If it weren't, you'd expect to see far more people getting their power by dumping petrol into a generator attached to their house as opposed to connecting to the power grid. As you suggest, if this were a cheaper way of doing things, more people would be doing it.
However, that's not the point. The reason that electric cars result in savings has little to do with the costs of moving the fuel around. Instead it has to do with the efficiency limitations of internal combustion engines. Electric motors can operate much closer to 100% efficiency so even though gasoline is a good way to store energy, an internal combustion engine wastes a lot of it. If battery technology were better or less expensive for today's performance levels, you'd see even more people moving to electric cars. Essentially you pay more up front for savings over time, which can depend quite a lot on the price of oil or electricity.
It's not quite that simple. If you let anything onto your platform and some of it is really bad, there's a risk that you scare off a lot of customers as people lose trust. It's the same reason that a store will try to stock a lot of brands, but won't put out anything utterly terrible as it eventually reflects on them for carrying poor products and people will go to a different store. Maybe it works in the short term to do this, but not everyone is aiming to maximize gains in the next quarter at the expense of next year or even farther down the road.
Crypto currencies (and everything that surrounds them) are rife with scams right now, which isn't wholly unexpected when you have something that most people don't understand well and are only doing because they think they will get rich quick from doing it. Just because the new gold rush is digital doesn't mean the rest of it should be expected to play out differently.
Looks like a useless study in that it doesn't measure piracy, only traffic to websites that the study monitored. Of course blocking some of those websites should reduce the traffic to them, but that doesn't mean that people aren't going to other websites that aren't being monitored or aren't getting their pirated media in other ways.
Of course if your study showed that blocking websites did fuck all in terms of preventing piracy it would be a lot harder to justify doing it.
but now as only 25% are paying union dues... the union can't afford good lawyers etc... The union doesn't have the power to demand higher wages, or better work environment etc... things start getting worse for everyone, inside and outside the union.
Why doesn't this create pressure in the other direction then? Wouldn't these people who used to be in the union start thinking back to all of this extra stuff that the union got them and join back up, bringing the membership rate back up and recreating the original set of circumstances you've described? The only way that doesn't happen is if the former union workers get to keep more of their money than the union was able to increase their wages in compensation.
Even that's a little pie in the sky though. A union can raise wages as high as they can successfully argue, but it's not the company that ultimately pays the workers. Its the customers who buy the company's products that are really paying those wages. They have no particular loyalty to that company or its workers and will gladly buy from a competitor that offers lower prices. Unions aren't immune to slitting their own throats through greed any more than company management is.
I do my banking with a credit union, but I can understand the allure of a nation wide chain bank to some people. I don't use ATMs much (maybe once every three years) but any that I do use are going to require a fee, where as banking with one of the big banks typically means free ATM service in some locations. The interest earned on savings accounts isn't as good, but if you have enough money for it to really matter you're better off having a lot of that invested in other ways.
Beyond that and a few other things though, I'm far happier with the customer service and other perks that a credit union offers. I'm sure you can get great treatment from the big banks if you're sufficiently wealthy, but you can get that at a credit union even if you're peasant tier.
I'm somewhat skeptical of your claim of 60 comments at -1. Currently there are not even half as many visible to me, although a lot of what is here is at -1. Though I'd say that anyone with mod points probably wouldn't have much of a problem doing that themselves. So if you're to be taken at face value, the mods would have deleted over 30 comments, but for some reason left several remaining that are terrible trolls or otherwise shit posts to moderate down. That does not make much sense.
I'd say low minimum wage cost me at least $10k/yr, and I've got coworkers hired post 2008 who lost closer to $20k to it.
It does no such thing. Money is a commodity like any other and its value is relative to its supply. Otherwise we'd be able to increase the minimum wage to $10,000 per hour and everyone would be incredibly wealthy. Hopefully you can see from that example that flaw in your reasoning. If you can't, please tell me exactly what the minimum wage should be raised to solve all of these problems. It doesn't matter what you set it to as increasing the number doesn't correspond to any increase in wealth. Doubling the number of dollars in the world doesn't make the world twice as wealthy, it makes dollars worth half as much.
If you really want to know why your wages aren't going up, I'd start by looking at simple matters of supply and demand. Assuming you work in a technology field, I suspect that H1-B Visas are doing a lot to decrease wages your wages as companies do not need to bid as high for your services because there are more people to fill those jobs and therefore less need to pay higher prices.
If you wonder why wages have not increased in a general sense after accounting for inflation since the 50's, a large part of it is due to the supply of labor increasing as more and more women entered the workforce over those decades and growing immigration (legal or otherwise) numbers that have expanded the labor supply significantly. Just as with any other commodity, increases in availability result in decreases in price.
In most environments there are several to dozens of different species of mosquitoes (many of which don't bite humans) so removing one will mean that it is supplanted by other types. Also, there's very little concern over mosquitos having a knock-on effect up the food chain. When this was previously studied, researchers were far more concerned with bats (as most birds don't get much of their food from mosquitoes) and found that even among bats, mosquitoes only constituted a tiny part of their diet.
This type of solution is preferable to most other forms of mosquito control (okay it's not as cool as the laser) in that unlikely spraying insecticides, this approach only targets the specific type of mosquito that we want to eliminate whereas spraying kills all manner of different types of insects, including many that are of no harm to us. Using chemicals like DDT allowed us to eliminate malaria, but we realized that there were some high costs to that.
Okay, so what does this good filter get out of it? It sounds like you have some knowledge and a bit of common sense about you, so why not start this curation website up yourself? I suspect that in answering why you haven't done so already and don't have any intention to do so presently, you'll have answered exactly why this website doesn't exist. But setting aside needing a wide variety of expertise across all manner of different fields, it still doesn't solve the part of the problem that deals with whether or not the people running the project can execute effectively and that's hard to do for anyone that doesn't have a track record of success or a good résumé.
And as soon as someone does start something like this up, the incentive to pervert it becomes too great and the likelihood of it being rendered useless increases. Once someone has a service designed to funnel money to select projects, it would be really great to try to hoodwink a group of people into investing in your kickstarter. What this means is that you can't have just one of these types of sites, much like you can't have a single news paper, rating agency, etc. without a lot of care and consideration to prevent impropriety.
Maybe you can get that kind of thing in safety critical situations where the government has decided to fund it through tax dollars, but you're basically asking for what would require a large group of volunteers to spend a lot of their time for relatively little compensation. They would have to value good Kickstarters getting funded a lot more than their time (as well as having the moral fiber to remain objective) in order to do this. Maybe there are enough people in the world like you to make this happening, but if you want to see it, you're better off starting it yourself than waiting around for someone else to make it happen.
The problem is that neoliberal free market capitalism isn't exactly delivering flowers and unicorns in many situations either.
I'd argue that it's enriching the rest of the world at an alarming rate. Since China and India moved towards market economies, poverty has been eliminated at a staggering rate. I think the problem is that people like to compare the reality of free markets to the utopian promise of collectivism. Free markets don't look appealing because they only promise that total wealth generated will tend towards the maximal, not that everyone will be wealthy. Marxist doctrines always promise a great equity, but when you look at the results it fails utterly. It's not that the idea itself is bad, but it won't work for human beings due to our nature.
If you want to account for negative externalities, you need to make sure that there's someone who actually owns those things which will suffer negative externalities. Having the government do it doesn't work as they're not as good at caring about environmental damages as an individual person is. As bizarre or counter intuitive as it might seem its a better system in practice. A great example is private hunting operations in Africa that do a better job of conserving wildlife and protecting it from poachers. When your livelihood depends on an animal, you'll spend much more of your effort protecting it. A government will continue to exist whether or not the animal lives or dies.
but throwing one's hands in the air and saying we just have to sit around and let the invisible hand slap us repeatedly in the face is just a form of ideological fundamentalism.
People have some kind of view of "the invisible hand" as some kind of sky fairy or omnipotent presence like its the god of capitalism. It's none of those things. It's like the description of how the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. We understand that the internet isn't some conscious being making that choice. Rather it's the result of individual people acting in a certain way. In this case, the invisible hand is a whole bunch of individual people all trying to act in their own best interests to get what they want. If you want the market to do something, you need to get the individual people playing in it to all (or in large) want something. Outside intervention to the contrary is treated as damage that people route around in one way (black markets being an easy example) or another.
Even in a very limited domain what you're asking is almost impossible since the curators not only need to understand what is being proposed and hot it would position itself in the market, but also have a very intimate knowledge of the people who are proposing it. You're essentially asking for an oracle and probably one that can't be deceived by hucksters using Kickstarter to enrich themselves.
However, even If what you're suggesting were actually possible, no one would give that away for free on the internet. Instead you'd be an angel investor and have 90% of your long shot investments pay off handsomely instead of only 5%.
Centrally planned economies and government subsidies often go horribly wrong in all kind of unintended ways. Let's stop subsidizing anything instead of thinking ourselves wise and just spending the subsidies elsewhere. It sounds good in theory, but once you legitimize a practice you have to remember that some of the people who will be deciding what to subsidize in the future will not sure your beliefs or may be quite opposed to them.
I don't know whether this is an actual issue as opposed to some anti-wind hit piece, but there's a much easier solution assuming that this is an actual problem. Add the cost of the eventual decommissioning into the tower when it's being constructed. If that makes it completely unviable financially then amortize the cost over the lifetime of the tower and have part of the turbines production be set aside to pay for its decommissioning.
This reminds me of a story an old teacher once told me. One of his relatives had once remarked to his young son that he shouldn't do anything mischievous such as putting the cat in the microwave. This was obviously meant to be a bit of jest, but fortunately the cat was removed from the microwave before it was seriously harmed.
I've always taken this to mean that when you're discussing evil (I'm not going to say pornography is evil, but it's probably not wise to show a six year old a video of an orgy so I'm generalizing here) with a person that you should only do so on a level that they already understand. Otherwise you're just giving them ideas.
Really? Then please start with your banking information, medical history, and preferences in pornography.
Information doesn't want anything. It's inanimate. People might want certain information to be free, but there's some information that they'd only prefer see the light of day after the heat death of the universe renders such a thing impossible.
I don't think there are too many people who would buy this for gaming. For the $700 price on this thing, you could almost build your own gaming PC with comparable specs. I'd say that this mainly looks to be for people who do video production and want to be able to have additional performance when at their desk. They just tack on the extra bit about gaming in the hopes that people assign more value to the product even though it's not something that they'll really use it for. The number of people who would buy this just for gaming could probably be counted on one hand.
The latest Playstation and Xbox consoles have GPUs that are pretty similar to a Radeon 580, so if you wanted the cheapest option, you'd just buy a console assuming you're not bothered by a lack of PC-only titles, which since we're talking about gaming on a Mac is clearly not the case.
Isn't there a potential conflict of interest with regard to investing in any company then as there's always a possibility of passing laws that will impact that company? Any company at all will be affected by tax laws, so if you're taking the point of view to the extremes (not that you should) it seems that this creates a situation where the government is unable to invest in anything since there is always some conflict of interest.
That aside, you'd simply just need to put another entity in charge of the investment that has no ties to the legislative body in either direction. That person (or group of people more likely) has the same information as other investors and if changes in Irish law make investing in companies that derive most of their revenue from coal a worse choice than some alternatives, then the divestment occurs naturally.
This seems rather meaningless as Ireland divesting does nothing to the companies if someone else is willing to buy Ireland's holdings. It's worse if this means that Ireland will see a lower return as a result.
If governments want to be serious, they should remove subsidies for fossil fuels. In many countries there would be a much quicker move to alternative sources of energy if the government weren't giving fossil fuel companies special tax breaks or other forms of government largesse. But if, even after doing all of that, the best return on investment is still in those fossil fuel companies, it's idiotic to ignore the opportunity.
Also, I suspect that a good many of the large energy companies that are currently heavily involved in extracting fossil fuels will still be big energy companies after the world moves passed fossil fuels. I'm not sure that the arbitrary line in the sand that Ireland has drawn is particularly useful.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder why they would show you ads for something you've already bought though. It seems counterproductive and like a waste of money, but if it's becoming pervasive it must work or it makes no sense for everyone to do it.
Maybe the people who don't use some form of ad blocking really are that stupid.
I would say the difference is that these Nordic countries have decided as a society that they want to support people like themselves and their families.
It could be that the populations of those countries are largely homogeneous. There was a study that found that trust in government was much lower in racially heterogeneous areas (PDF warning) when examining communities in the U.S.
Even if a population is racially and culturally heterogeneous, I suspect that if there's a strong external enemy that it would override infighting among the subgroups. I don't know how well that applies in the case of Cuba, etc. though as there were a lot of people that tried to flee Cuba for the U.S. and Venezuela has seen a large outflux of people in the last year. However, I think the U.S. is too diverse for a common enemy like that to exist.
Another explanation is that the U.S. might just be too damned big. The Scandinavian countries are quite a bit smaller. About 40% of U.S. states have more people than Denmark, Norway, or Finland and about 20% of states are bigger than Sweden. I suspect that even if you did have a racially homogenous population, that it would start to drift culturally once you reach that size, especially given the wide variety in geography.
Depending on how you want to define socialism, you can get a pretty broad collection of countries. In the long run I suspect that Marxist ideologies tend to result in countries like North Korea or Venezuela, but not all socialist systems are necessarily Marxist ones. I've simply never heard of any country which has tried what might be coined as "free market socialism" and it's not something that would have a lot of overlap on the Venn diagram with other forms of socialism.
I'm just curious what the hell it's supposed to mean as the examples I give above seem odd. The first doesn't seem as though it would be what most socialists would consider a socialist system. The second seems to work, but it's still strange. It would essentially be everyone working for state owned (but not necessarily state run or centrally planned) companies (and free to choose their own line of work) and free to purchase as they choose, but only after the government uses a 100% (or near enough) tax rate to give everyone the same amount of money to engage in commerce as they will. I just don't see that being particularly stable if people can immigrate and emigrate freely. Maybe it works if the country doing it is a very tight cultural group such that people are very reluctant to leave and it's not welcoming to outsiders so most don't want to join.
I'd really need to hear what your definition of socialism actually is to square it with the notion being compatible with (or as you later suggest required for) a market (I'm assuming you mean a free one, or one that is reasonably so) economy. Otherwise I suspect you're guilty of choosing your definition of socialism post priori so that you can find one that doesn't look like a miserable failure.
Private exchange doesn't make sense if you have communal ownership. Maybe you're envisioning something like all private companies being employee owned (i.e., you can't hold stock if you don't work there and if you work there you must hold stock) but I don't think that's ever been tried. It's almost like a guild system, only with multiple competing guilds. This system also says nothing about personal income tax or social safety nets either as you could just as easily use this system regardless of how that's handled.
The only other thing you could possibly mean is that everyone acts as a capitalist agent, but the government takes most or all of their earnings. Essentially you seem to have private exchange in name only up since as soon as you make an exchange whatever benefit you gained from it becomes communally controlled. I suppose that works if you have a group of people that like playing free market just for the sake of playing free market. It would be a bit like playing Monopoly endlessly, only with real money that you never get to keep since just goes back in the tray. I don't know if there's a group of people on the planet weird enough to play by those rules. Maybe if the group were entirely self-selecting, but to suspect it on a population level for any ethnic group is suspect at best.
Actually, Norway has been quite good about avoiding the temptation of spending like drunken sailors from that fund. Also, social democracies aren't Marxist. They're capitalist systems with a high tax rate and a strong social safety net. If you look at economic freedom ratings Norway (and other Scandinavian countries) are comparable to the U.S. as opposed to the countries that follow some form of Marxist philosophy (Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea). Those Scandinavian countries even have lower corporate tax rates than the U.S. as well.
Hopefully their attempts at integration result in them ruining both services to the point that people go elsewhere. I recall a fairly large revolt when Google tried to shackle YouTube users with their own social network, although I don't think anyone really used that social network.
However, I suspect that it doesn't really matter what they do. The next generation is going to want to find a new social network precisely so they can get the fuck away from their parents, teachers, and relatives. It doesn't matter if it's better or worse, every new generation doesn't want to keep listening to their father's rock and roll.
Moving energy by power line would have to be cheaper, or at least no more expensive. If it weren't, you'd expect to see far more people getting their power by dumping petrol into a generator attached to their house as opposed to connecting to the power grid. As you suggest, if this were a cheaper way of doing things, more people would be doing it.
However, that's not the point. The reason that electric cars result in savings has little to do with the costs of moving the fuel around. Instead it has to do with the efficiency limitations of internal combustion engines. Electric motors can operate much closer to 100% efficiency so even though gasoline is a good way to store energy, an internal combustion engine wastes a lot of it. If battery technology were better or less expensive for today's performance levels, you'd see even more people moving to electric cars. Essentially you pay more up front for savings over time, which can depend quite a lot on the price of oil or electricity.
Any plans to model some after R'lyeh or the dungeons beneath Toledo?
It's not quite that simple. If you let anything onto your platform and some of it is really bad, there's a risk that you scare off a lot of customers as people lose trust. It's the same reason that a store will try to stock a lot of brands, but won't put out anything utterly terrible as it eventually reflects on them for carrying poor products and people will go to a different store. Maybe it works in the short term to do this, but not everyone is aiming to maximize gains in the next quarter at the expense of next year or even farther down the road.
Crypto currencies (and everything that surrounds them) are rife with scams right now, which isn't wholly unexpected when you have something that most people don't understand well and are only doing because they think they will get rich quick from doing it. Just because the new gold rush is digital doesn't mean the rest of it should be expected to play out differently.
Looks like a useless study in that it doesn't measure piracy, only traffic to websites that the study monitored. Of course blocking some of those websites should reduce the traffic to them, but that doesn't mean that people aren't going to other websites that aren't being monitored or aren't getting their pirated media in other ways.
Of course if your study showed that blocking websites did fuck all in terms of preventing piracy it would be a lot harder to justify doing it.
but now as only 25% are paying union dues... the union can't afford good lawyers etc... The union doesn't have the power to demand higher wages, or better work environment etc... things start getting worse for everyone, inside and outside the union.
Why doesn't this create pressure in the other direction then? Wouldn't these people who used to be in the union start thinking back to all of this extra stuff that the union got them and join back up, bringing the membership rate back up and recreating the original set of circumstances you've described? The only way that doesn't happen is if the former union workers get to keep more of their money than the union was able to increase their wages in compensation.
Even that's a little pie in the sky though. A union can raise wages as high as they can successfully argue, but it's not the company that ultimately pays the workers. Its the customers who buy the company's products that are really paying those wages. They have no particular loyalty to that company or its workers and will gladly buy from a competitor that offers lower prices. Unions aren't immune to slitting their own throats through greed any more than company management is.
I do my banking with a credit union, but I can understand the allure of a nation wide chain bank to some people. I don't use ATMs much (maybe once every three years) but any that I do use are going to require a fee, where as banking with one of the big banks typically means free ATM service in some locations. The interest earned on savings accounts isn't as good, but if you have enough money for it to really matter you're better off having a lot of that invested in other ways.
Beyond that and a few other things though, I'm far happier with the customer service and other perks that a credit union offers. I'm sure you can get great treatment from the big banks if you're sufficiently wealthy, but you can get that at a credit union even if you're peasant tier.
I'm somewhat skeptical of your claim of 60 comments at -1. Currently there are not even half as many visible to me, although a lot of what is here is at -1. Though I'd say that anyone with mod points probably wouldn't have much of a problem doing that themselves. So if you're to be taken at face value, the mods would have deleted over 30 comments, but for some reason left several remaining that are terrible trolls or otherwise shit posts to moderate down. That does not make much sense.
I'd say low minimum wage cost me at least $10k/yr, and I've got coworkers hired post 2008 who lost closer to $20k to it.
It does no such thing. Money is a commodity like any other and its value is relative to its supply. Otherwise we'd be able to increase the minimum wage to $10,000 per hour and everyone would be incredibly wealthy. Hopefully you can see from that example that flaw in your reasoning. If you can't, please tell me exactly what the minimum wage should be raised to solve all of these problems. It doesn't matter what you set it to as increasing the number doesn't correspond to any increase in wealth. Doubling the number of dollars in the world doesn't make the world twice as wealthy, it makes dollars worth half as much.
If you really want to know why your wages aren't going up, I'd start by looking at simple matters of supply and demand. Assuming you work in a technology field, I suspect that H1-B Visas are doing a lot to decrease wages your wages as companies do not need to bid as high for your services because there are more people to fill those jobs and therefore less need to pay higher prices.
If you wonder why wages have not increased in a general sense after accounting for inflation since the 50's, a large part of it is due to the supply of labor increasing as more and more women entered the workforce over those decades and growing immigration (legal or otherwise) numbers that have expanded the labor supply significantly. Just as with any other commodity, increases in availability result in decreases in price.
That's child's play now. You haven't really made it as a despised company until you have some nutter try to shoot up your headquarters.
In most environments there are several to dozens of different species of mosquitoes (many of which don't bite humans) so removing one will mean that it is supplanted by other types. Also, there's very little concern over mosquitos having a knock-on effect up the food chain. When this was previously studied, researchers were far more concerned with bats (as most birds don't get much of their food from mosquitoes) and found that even among bats, mosquitoes only constituted a tiny part of their diet.
This type of solution is preferable to most other forms of mosquito control (okay it's not as cool as the laser) in that unlikely spraying insecticides, this approach only targets the specific type of mosquito that we want to eliminate whereas spraying kills all manner of different types of insects, including many that are of no harm to us. Using chemicals like DDT allowed us to eliminate malaria, but we realized that there were some high costs to that.
Okay, so what does this good filter get out of it? It sounds like you have some knowledge and a bit of common sense about you, so why not start this curation website up yourself? I suspect that in answering why you haven't done so already and don't have any intention to do so presently, you'll have answered exactly why this website doesn't exist. But setting aside needing a wide variety of expertise across all manner of different fields, it still doesn't solve the part of the problem that deals with whether or not the people running the project can execute effectively and that's hard to do for anyone that doesn't have a track record of success or a good résumé.
And as soon as someone does start something like this up, the incentive to pervert it becomes too great and the likelihood of it being rendered useless increases. Once someone has a service designed to funnel money to select projects, it would be really great to try to hoodwink a group of people into investing in your kickstarter. What this means is that you can't have just one of these types of sites, much like you can't have a single news paper, rating agency, etc. without a lot of care and consideration to prevent impropriety.
Maybe you can get that kind of thing in safety critical situations where the government has decided to fund it through tax dollars, but you're basically asking for what would require a large group of volunteers to spend a lot of their time for relatively little compensation. They would have to value good Kickstarters getting funded a lot more than their time (as well as having the moral fiber to remain objective) in order to do this. Maybe there are enough people in the world like you to make this happening, but if you want to see it, you're better off starting it yourself than waiting around for someone else to make it happen.
The problem is that neoliberal free market capitalism isn't exactly delivering flowers and unicorns in many situations either.
I'd argue that it's enriching the rest of the world at an alarming rate. Since China and India moved towards market economies, poverty has been eliminated at a staggering rate. I think the problem is that people like to compare the reality of free markets to the utopian promise of collectivism. Free markets don't look appealing because they only promise that total wealth generated will tend towards the maximal, not that everyone will be wealthy. Marxist doctrines always promise a great equity, but when you look at the results it fails utterly. It's not that the idea itself is bad, but it won't work for human beings due to our nature.
If you want to account for negative externalities, you need to make sure that there's someone who actually owns those things which will suffer negative externalities. Having the government do it doesn't work as they're not as good at caring about environmental damages as an individual person is. As bizarre or counter intuitive as it might seem its a better system in practice. A great example is private hunting operations in Africa that do a better job of conserving wildlife and protecting it from poachers. When your livelihood depends on an animal, you'll spend much more of your effort protecting it. A government will continue to exist whether or not the animal lives or dies.
but throwing one's hands in the air and saying we just have to sit around and let the invisible hand slap us repeatedly in the face is just a form of ideological fundamentalism.
People have some kind of view of "the invisible hand" as some kind of sky fairy or omnipotent presence like its the god of capitalism. It's none of those things. It's like the description of how the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. We understand that the internet isn't some conscious being making that choice. Rather it's the result of individual people acting in a certain way. In this case, the invisible hand is a whole bunch of individual people all trying to act in their own best interests to get what they want. If you want the market to do something, you need to get the individual people playing in it to all (or in large) want something. Outside intervention to the contrary is treated as damage that people route around in one way (black markets being an easy example) or another.
Even in a very limited domain what you're asking is almost impossible since the curators not only need to understand what is being proposed and hot it would position itself in the market, but also have a very intimate knowledge of the people who are proposing it. You're essentially asking for an oracle and probably one that can't be deceived by hucksters using Kickstarter to enrich themselves.
However, even If what you're suggesting were actually possible, no one would give that away for free on the internet. Instead you'd be an angel investor and have 90% of your long shot investments pay off handsomely instead of only 5%.
Centrally planned economies and government subsidies often go horribly wrong in all kind of unintended ways. Let's stop subsidizing anything instead of thinking ourselves wise and just spending the subsidies elsewhere. It sounds good in theory, but once you legitimize a practice you have to remember that some of the people who will be deciding what to subsidize in the future will not sure your beliefs or may be quite opposed to them.
I don't know whether this is an actual issue as opposed to some anti-wind hit piece, but there's a much easier solution assuming that this is an actual problem. Add the cost of the eventual decommissioning into the tower when it's being constructed. If that makes it completely unviable financially then amortize the cost over the lifetime of the tower and have part of the turbines production be set aside to pay for its decommissioning.
This reminds me of a story an old teacher once told me. One of his relatives had once remarked to his young son that he shouldn't do anything mischievous such as putting the cat in the microwave. This was obviously meant to be a bit of jest, but fortunately the cat was removed from the microwave before it was seriously harmed.
I've always taken this to mean that when you're discussing evil (I'm not going to say pornography is evil, but it's probably not wise to show a six year old a video of an orgy so I'm generalizing here) with a person that you should only do so on a level that they already understand. Otherwise you're just giving them ideas.
Information wants to be free.
Really? Then please start with your banking information, medical history, and preferences in pornography.
Information doesn't want anything. It's inanimate. People might want certain information to be free, but there's some information that they'd only prefer see the light of day after the heat death of the universe renders such a thing impossible.
I don't think there are too many people who would buy this for gaming. For the $700 price on this thing, you could almost build your own gaming PC with comparable specs. I'd say that this mainly looks to be for people who do video production and want to be able to have additional performance when at their desk. They just tack on the extra bit about gaming in the hopes that people assign more value to the product even though it's not something that they'll really use it for. The number of people who would buy this just for gaming could probably be counted on one hand.
The latest Playstation and Xbox consoles have GPUs that are pretty similar to a Radeon 580, so if you wanted the cheapest option, you'd just buy a console assuming you're not bothered by a lack of PC-only titles, which since we're talking about gaming on a Mac is clearly not the case.
Isn't there a potential conflict of interest with regard to investing in any company then as there's always a possibility of passing laws that will impact that company? Any company at all will be affected by tax laws, so if you're taking the point of view to the extremes (not that you should) it seems that this creates a situation where the government is unable to invest in anything since there is always some conflict of interest.
That aside, you'd simply just need to put another entity in charge of the investment that has no ties to the legislative body in either direction. That person (or group of people more likely) has the same information as other investors and if changes in Irish law make investing in companies that derive most of their revenue from coal a worse choice than some alternatives, then the divestment occurs naturally.
This seems rather meaningless as Ireland divesting does nothing to the companies if someone else is willing to buy Ireland's holdings. It's worse if this means that Ireland will see a lower return as a result.
If governments want to be serious, they should remove subsidies for fossil fuels. In many countries there would be a much quicker move to alternative sources of energy if the government weren't giving fossil fuel companies special tax breaks or other forms of government largesse. But if, even after doing all of that, the best return on investment is still in those fossil fuel companies, it's idiotic to ignore the opportunity.
Also, I suspect that a good many of the large energy companies that are currently heavily involved in extracting fossil fuels will still be big energy companies after the world moves passed fossil fuels. I'm not sure that the arbitrary line in the sand that Ireland has drawn is particularly useful.