It's not like we'd have an explosion of those other crimes as people have to be into those things for it to work. Now gang members may push it, but you have to have customers in order to run any business, even illegal ones. Evidence shows that there is not only a decrease in crime but a decrease in drug usage as well after legalization. More importantly, a substantially decrease in usage among teenagers. See: Portugal
The reality is, those people who had the "easy" life of selling drugs, now actually have to get jobs, and this also helps improve impoverished neighborhoods. The whole reason drugs are rampant in poor neighborhoods is because of how easy it is to make quick money. When your option is to work at McDonalds for $7/hour or work on the corner making some quick cash, the choices are much harder. But when the guy on the corner has to face up against walmart, he's going to lose, and thus he'll have to get a real job.
They actually look at this in Freakonomics and trace it back to abortion being legalized. Less unwanted children means less uncared for and neglected children means less problem adults. I personally don't support abortion, but preventing unwanted pregnancies clearly has a huge effect on crime rates.
If you really want to end the prison system, you have to end the war on drugs. There is simply no other way around it. The war on drugs makes criminals out of non-violent people and gives massive amounts of funding to gangs, violent criminals, and terrorists. Legalize drugs and then you have less non-violent people going to jail and being hardened by prison, and you take away power and funding to those other harmful groups. Enough said.
It gets ridiculous later in the series though when it's been running for decades. I wish marvel would do the same. Flash Thompson was in the vietnam war for god's sake.
Considering they have previously given out iPods over the $200 ticket price, I'd hope they'd do more. Granted, this may also just be an example of they weren't sure they could handle the supply side issue and delayed the program to better meet the iPad demand, but I'd hope they'd do more than just their standard affairs. Otherwise I might be taking microsoft up on their offer. I have a macbook pro, and it's lasted me 5 years, and I love it, but it's hard to drop 2 grand on a system (after warranty and screen upgrades) that I can get from Asus for $700-1000. Free iPad that I can sell helps out a lot.
My biggest hope is that they'll finally announce their back to school sale and it will be a free iPad instead of an iPod this time around, as to one up Microsoft with the free Xbox360.
Fragmentation is a small price to pay for having the option of more than one non-customizable hardware release a year.
Netflix fragmentation is mostly due to an inconsistent hardware platform and thus large variance in DRM standards that have been solved later in the devices life with Tegra 2 support being standardized. Is it fragmented, yes, but Google is doing a decent job at closing the fragmentation while still allowing users the freedom to choose from a variety of devices within different price ranges and features.
So their F*(K up means they shouldn't try to remedy the situation at all? Personally I expect Sony to do nothing, but they should do something. I was very pleased when Microsoft gave everyone a free a game for their system outage a few years ago. We buy these systems and games with the expected notion that we're going to get to use the futures. Things happen and shit breaks, I understand that, but the company SHOULD do something.
You're right, you absolutely nailed that. Congrats on being able to call yourself out like that. I have real respect for a man that can make fun of himself.
I never thought there'd be a way to look like even more of a douche than the bluetooth headset, but behold, society proves me wrong once again. Where there is a will, there is always more douchiness.
My apologies. I guesstimate that it was the complactedness of English and it's many stupid rules that are inconsistent throughout the language. Irregardlessly, if you understand my statements and your a kind human, than I am sure I have you're understanding and acceptancement.
(I imagine you're blind by now. It was a pleasure.)
I highly disagree that it was caused by deregulation. I would argue that it was government manipulation of the interest rates rather than market controlled interest rates that caused lending to occur well past it's normal stopping point. Normally market controlled interest rates rise the more lending occurs and lowers when less occurs, ensuring that over lending doesn't happen. Then the federal reserve forced the rate lower because we decided everyone should own a home and it came back and bit us in the ass. You can't blame greedy wall street bankers for being greedy wall street bankers. Notice also that most of the regulation that was removed was brought on by the left under the guise of allowing more lower income and minority families to purchase homes, but none of this over lending would have happened if interest rates had naturally risen to the 15%+ percent it should have given the amount of lending that was occurring. Central banking and planning are to blame for the housing crash, not deregulation.
Also note that we got the same rough percentage of GDP no matter what the tax rate was, around 18%. The 90s had one of the highest percentages of GDP ever at around 21% during the midst of extreme economic boom with the internet bubble despite the tax rates being lower than they had in the past. You can't look at tax revenue as a rate or as a total, you have to look at it as a percentage of GDP in order for any scope to be accurate.
America's ascension was due to the freedom of capitalism which allowed smaller companies to rise to the top with new ideas and inventions. This over regulation creates a barrier preventing the smaller businesses from competing on the same level as the mega corporations. If you want to be at the top, we need a volatile market with many competitors. Our current system prevents that from happening.
I agree with you that dollar devaluation is happening now, I was simply stating that I believe the resulting collapse will happen within the next 20 years. The budget argument isn't inherently anti-science. it's just that many of those people who are anti-science find a foothold with this argument. The budget and overspending is a major problem and those of us who are pro-science need to be in support of budget cuts, but in different places, responding with alternative cuts instead of no cuts. Those against science spending are using this real problem as leverage to accomplish their goals and the response seems to be deny/ignore the real problem so that they can't accomplish their goals of forcing ideals on society when instead we should be doing the exact same thing they're doing and finding common areas where we agree cuts have to happen. I am completely in favor of military cuts, fixing social security and medicare (the biggest cause of our financial shortcomings), ending subsidies, etc etc.
Did I say that IP and patent offices are at the heart of our problem? I was refering more to tax laws and slanted legislation that allows the biggest to prosper while hurting the smaller businesses and preventing them from ever becoming serious competitors. You're right that special interests are trying to control this regulation, which is the real heart of much of the problem. The more regulation we pass, the more they try to control it and slant it to their advantage. Eventually we will lose and they will grab a foothold. The solution is to not pass things that allow them the foothold.
The real culprit in all of this is central planning. The idea that a few select individuals in the capital have a better idea of what is best for this country over the rest society. The fewer people you give power to, the more chance they have to incorrectly stear the future by passing regulations and mandates which do more damage than the good that is intended. The perfect example of this is Al Gore in the 2000 election. He campaigned heavily on Ethanol. Years later he admitted he only did so to pick up votes in Iowa. The EU recently did a study that proved switching to Ethanol would have increased CO2 immisions significantly. Central planning is only successful when those in charge aren't wrong, misguided, or corrupt. I believe in the law of spontaneous order. If you spread the power out thin enough that society will ultimately choose the best option. No one individual or group of individuals should have the power to alter things in their self interest. Society may take longer to make the correct decision, but over time they do and they advance, because the parts of society that have the best decisions excel over those that don't.
Rome over expanded and destroyed it's currency. It wasn't that it stopped growing. It's that it grew unsustainably. There was no way that it could possibly control all that it did for too long.
I'm not against all regulation, but we most certainly overly regulate. It seems that rather than working with businesses to accomplish any griefs society may have, governments first reaction is to regulate it. The problem is that government never has to prove that it's regulations or legislation works or doesn't have any other consequential negative impacts, and if it doesn't work or does more damage than it fixes, such things are rarely ever repealed. This is my primary issue with government. In the business world, we have to prove our ideas work before anything is ever adopted by the rest of the industry, but government doesn't. It's like launching a $500 billion company without ever getting a single customer.
These regulations strangle smaller businesses while the bigger businesses help lobby and write the regulation so that it doesn't effect them, essentially creating a barrier that is most difficult to break through. If you want innovation, if you want to be a world leader, then we need a volatile market where no company is safe. Where only the best ideas survive rather than just the biggest corporations. And the only way that is going to happen is with less regulation, more competition, and no bailouts. These older companies are clinging to date structures to prolong their livelihood while preventing change from happening.
My observation is that it's much harder for country to garner it's second wind than it is it's first. We've become complacent as all we've ever known is greatness, and when that starts to slip, we don't really know what it will be like not being number. Of course, there is a lot to be said about whether or not many of these up and coming countries will be able to sustain their growth. There are many that suspect that India will not and will eventually collapse rather than establish itself permanently as a tech leader. China is much more likely to maintain it's growth, but there is a lot of question about whether the government will be able to keep it's oppressive control over the people as the nation becomes more advanced (probably not) and what effect that will have on it's growth. There is also much to note that while America may lose it's dominance as THE key player in everything, that does not mean that it will fall into irrelevance or still not be a force to be reckoned with. I propose the idea that the US will have a brief collapse, mostly due to currency destabilization within the next 20 years. With that collapse it will have the opportunity to do two things, to either continue increasing the same bureaucratic nonsense that got it into the mess in the first place, putting more regulation on things and strangling ideas, or to go back to the same low level of regulation that caused all the great prosperity in the first place.
I can't say the same for myself. I didn't subscribe to libertarian ideals until after I learned more about economics and historical precedent with foreign policy. Obviously there are still Democrats and Republicans who have interest in economics, or there wouldn't be such contrasting opinions on the subject matter. Unfortunately this study didn't survey the students before and after, but I would note that the more economic classes a student took the more likely they were to be libertarians, so I would suggest the relationship seems to suggest the classes have an influence in ideology as it is a build rather than just a jump at a certain point.
That's like saying Christians never take a biology class because they are smart enough to see through the disconnected reality of evolution. Economics has inherently nothing to do with the environment and there is nothing to say that there can't be a capitalistic society that is environmentally friendly, as such things are based in social desire, behavior and structure and not in economics. Economics is very much a science with historical precedence and consistency.
How is the term "Libertarian capitalism" even remotely contradictory? Libertarianism implies a strong belief in individual liberties and freedoms, that we are all free to choose for ourselves. Capitalism allows the consumer the freedom to choose who and which they purchase goods from. Seem like very hand in hand beliefs to me.
Now, you may disagree with Libertarian ideology, but you don't even seem to have a grasp on the fundamentals of economics. You seem to insist that the more informed someone becomes about something the more wrong their opinions are. It would be one thing if there was a sudden jump that all economics majors were libertarians or that it had the highest percentage of libertarians but it's not. There's a direct relation between each incremental economic class a person takes and the more likely to have libertarian beliefs, beginning with 1 class.
I don't know about you, but I was amazed with the terrorism discussion in season 4 when the changelings invaded earth. I was most impressed that this came BEFORE 9/11. If only every american had watched DS9, we could have avoided the patriot act and two wars.
Pandas are the perfect example of something not worth saving. There are many that suppose that pandas were on their way out as a species without our interference just because of the extreme inefficiency of their bodies. It takes an extreme amount of energy to process the bamboo it eats, not to mention the birth problems it faces with low birth rates and high infant mortality. The only reason we have rallied behind pandas is because they're cute, and maybe there is some benefit to having a cute staple animal we've saved as a rallying cry for conservation, but I'd like to think there were easier options out there.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not like we'd have an explosion of those other crimes as people have to be into those things for it to work. Now gang members may push it, but you have to have customers in order to run any business, even illegal ones. Evidence shows that there is not only a decrease in crime but a decrease in drug usage as well after legalization. More importantly, a substantially decrease in usage among teenagers. See: Portugal
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
The reality is, those people who had the "easy" life of selling drugs, now actually have to get jobs, and this also helps improve impoverished neighborhoods. The whole reason drugs are rampant in poor neighborhoods is because of how easy it is to make quick money. When your option is to work at McDonalds for $7/hour or work on the corner making some quick cash, the choices are much harder. But when the guy on the corner has to face up against walmart, he's going to lose, and thus he'll have to get a real job.
They actually look at this in Freakonomics and trace it back to abortion being legalized. Less unwanted children means less uncared for and neglected children means less problem adults. I personally don't support abortion, but preventing unwanted pregnancies clearly has a huge effect on crime rates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect
If you really want to end the prison system, you have to end the war on drugs. There is simply no other way around it. The war on drugs makes criminals out of non-violent people and gives massive amounts of funding to gangs, violent criminals, and terrorists. Legalize drugs and then you have less non-violent people going to jail and being hardened by prison, and you take away power and funding to those other harmful groups. Enough said.
It gets ridiculous later in the series though when it's been running for decades. I wish marvel would do the same. Flash Thompson was in the vietnam war for god's sake.
Considering they have previously given out iPods over the $200 ticket price, I'd hope they'd do more. Granted, this may also just be an example of they weren't sure they could handle the supply side issue and delayed the program to better meet the iPad demand, but I'd hope they'd do more than just their standard affairs. Otherwise I might be taking microsoft up on their offer. I have a macbook pro, and it's lasted me 5 years, and I love it, but it's hard to drop 2 grand on a system (after warranty and screen upgrades) that I can get from Asus for $700-1000. Free iPad that I can sell helps out a lot.
My biggest hope is that they'll finally announce their back to school sale and it will be a free iPad instead of an iPod this time around, as to one up Microsoft with the free Xbox360.
Fragmentation is a small price to pay for having the option of more than one non-customizable hardware release a year.
Netflix fragmentation is mostly due to an inconsistent hardware platform and thus large variance in DRM standards that have been solved later in the devices life with Tegra 2 support being standardized. Is it fragmented, yes, but Google is doing a decent job at closing the fragmentation while still allowing users the freedom to choose from a variety of devices within different price ranges and features.
So their F*(K up means they shouldn't try to remedy the situation at all? Personally I expect Sony to do nothing, but they should do something. I was very pleased when Microsoft gave everyone a free a game for their system outage a few years ago. We buy these systems and games with the expected notion that we're going to get to use the futures. Things happen and shit breaks, I understand that, but the company SHOULD do something.
The real criminal here is that Pakistani realtor who sold that house for $1,000,000.
You're right, you absolutely nailed that. Congrats on being able to call yourself out like that. I have real respect for a man that can make fun of himself.
No, really? I never would have guessed.
I never thought there'd be a way to look like even more of a douche than the bluetooth headset, but behold, society proves me wrong once again. Where there is a will, there is always more douchiness.
I might get a-round to replying to this one.
My apologies. I guesstimate that it was the complactedness of English and it's many stupid rules that are inconsistent throughout the language. Irregardlessly, if you understand my statements and your a kind human, than I am sure I have you're understanding and acceptancement.
(I imagine you're blind by now. It was a pleasure.)
I highly disagree that it was caused by deregulation. I would argue that it was government manipulation of the interest rates rather than market controlled interest rates that caused lending to occur well past it's normal stopping point. Normally market controlled interest rates rise the more lending occurs and lowers when less occurs, ensuring that over lending doesn't happen. Then the federal reserve forced the rate lower because we decided everyone should own a home and it came back and bit us in the ass. You can't blame greedy wall street bankers for being greedy wall street bankers. Notice also that most of the regulation that was removed was brought on by the left under the guise of allowing more lower income and minority families to purchase homes, but none of this over lending would have happened if interest rates had naturally risen to the 15%+ percent it should have given the amount of lending that was occurring. Central banking and planning are to blame for the housing crash, not deregulation.
Also note that we got the same rough percentage of GDP no matter what the tax rate was, around 18%. The 90s had one of the highest percentages of GDP ever at around 21% during the midst of extreme economic boom with the internet bubble despite the tax rates being lower than they had in the past. You can't look at tax revenue as a rate or as a total, you have to look at it as a percentage of GDP in order for any scope to be accurate.
America's ascension was due to the freedom of capitalism which allowed smaller companies to rise to the top with new ideas and inventions. This over regulation creates a barrier preventing the smaller businesses from competing on the same level as the mega corporations. If you want to be at the top, we need a volatile market with many competitors. Our current system prevents that from happening.
I agree with you that dollar devaluation is happening now, I was simply stating that I believe the resulting collapse will happen within the next 20 years. The budget argument isn't inherently anti-science. it's just that many of those people who are anti-science find a foothold with this argument. The budget and overspending is a major problem and those of us who are pro-science need to be in support of budget cuts, but in different places, responding with alternative cuts instead of no cuts. Those against science spending are using this real problem as leverage to accomplish their goals and the response seems to be deny/ignore the real problem so that they can't accomplish their goals of forcing ideals on society when instead we should be doing the exact same thing they're doing and finding common areas where we agree cuts have to happen. I am completely in favor of military cuts, fixing social security and medicare (the biggest cause of our financial shortcomings), ending subsidies, etc etc.
Did I say that IP and patent offices are at the heart of our problem? I was refering more to tax laws and slanted legislation that allows the biggest to prosper while hurting the smaller businesses and preventing them from ever becoming serious competitors. You're right that special interests are trying to control this regulation, which is the real heart of much of the problem. The more regulation we pass, the more they try to control it and slant it to their advantage. Eventually we will lose and they will grab a foothold. The solution is to not pass things that allow them the foothold.
The real culprit in all of this is central planning. The idea that a few select individuals in the capital have a better idea of what is best for this country over the rest society. The fewer people you give power to, the more chance they have to incorrectly stear the future by passing regulations and mandates which do more damage than the good that is intended. The perfect example of this is Al Gore in the 2000 election. He campaigned heavily on Ethanol. Years later he admitted he only did so to pick up votes in Iowa. The EU recently did a study that proved switching to Ethanol would have increased CO2 immisions significantly. Central planning is only successful when those in charge aren't wrong, misguided, or corrupt. I believe in the law of spontaneous order. If you spread the power out thin enough that society will ultimately choose the best option. No one individual or group of individuals should have the power to alter things in their self interest. Society may take longer to make the correct decision, but over time they do and they advance, because the parts of society that have the best decisions excel over those that don't.
Rome over expanded and destroyed it's currency. It wasn't that it stopped growing. It's that it grew unsustainably. There was no way that it could possibly control all that it did for too long.
I'm not against all regulation, but we most certainly overly regulate. It seems that rather than working with businesses to accomplish any griefs society may have, governments first reaction is to regulate it. The problem is that government never has to prove that it's regulations or legislation works or doesn't have any other consequential negative impacts, and if it doesn't work or does more damage than it fixes, such things are rarely ever repealed. This is my primary issue with government. In the business world, we have to prove our ideas work before anything is ever adopted by the rest of the industry, but government doesn't. It's like launching a $500 billion company without ever getting a single customer.
These regulations strangle smaller businesses while the bigger businesses help lobby and write the regulation so that it doesn't effect them, essentially creating a barrier that is most difficult to break through. If you want innovation, if you want to be a world leader, then we need a volatile market where no company is safe. Where only the best ideas survive rather than just the biggest corporations. And the only way that is going to happen is with less regulation, more competition, and no bailouts. These older companies are clinging to date structures to prolong their livelihood while preventing change from happening.
My observation is that it's much harder for country to garner it's second wind than it is it's first. We've become complacent as all we've ever known is greatness, and when that starts to slip, we don't really know what it will be like not being number. Of course, there is a lot to be said about whether or not many of these up and coming countries will be able to sustain their growth. There are many that suspect that India will not and will eventually collapse rather than establish itself permanently as a tech leader. China is much more likely to maintain it's growth, but there is a lot of question about whether the government will be able to keep it's oppressive control over the people as the nation becomes more advanced (probably not) and what effect that will have on it's growth. There is also much to note that while America may lose it's dominance as THE key player in everything, that does not mean that it will fall into irrelevance or still not be a force to be reckoned with. I propose the idea that the US will have a brief collapse, mostly due to currency destabilization within the next 20 years. With that collapse it will have the opportunity to do two things, to either continue increasing the same bureaucratic nonsense that got it into the mess in the first place, putting more regulation on things and strangling ideas, or to go back to the same low level of regulation that caused all the great prosperity in the first place.
I can't say the same for myself. I didn't subscribe to libertarian ideals until after I learned more about economics and historical precedent with foreign policy. Obviously there are still Democrats and Republicans who have interest in economics, or there wouldn't be such contrasting opinions on the subject matter. Unfortunately this study didn't survey the students before and after, but I would note that the more economic classes a student took the more likely they were to be libertarians, so I would suggest the relationship seems to suggest the classes have an influence in ideology as it is a build rather than just a jump at a certain point.
That's like saying Christians never take a biology class because they are smart enough to see through the disconnected reality of evolution. Economics has inherently nothing to do with the environment and there is nothing to say that there can't be a capitalistic society that is environmentally friendly, as such things are based in social desire, behavior and structure and not in economics. Economics is very much a science with historical precedence and consistency.
How is the term "Libertarian capitalism" even remotely contradictory? Libertarianism implies a strong belief in individual liberties and freedoms, that we are all free to choose for ourselves. Capitalism allows the consumer the freedom to choose who and which they purchase goods from. Seem like very hand in hand beliefs to me.
Now, you may disagree with Libertarian ideology, but you don't even seem to have a grasp on the fundamentals of economics. You seem to insist that the more informed someone becomes about something the more wrong their opinions are. It would be one thing if there was a sudden jump that all economics majors were libertarians or that it had the highest percentage of libertarians but it's not. There's a direct relation between each incremental economic class a person takes and the more likely to have libertarian beliefs, beginning with 1 class.
Is that why the more economic classes you take the more likely you are to be a libertarian?
http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/studying-economics-makes-you-more-likely-to-be-a-conservativelibertarian/
Actually I'm neuroscientist working on research at the University of Kentucky Hospital on various cures for cancer. So...there.
Still no cure for cancer....
I don't know about you, but I was amazed with the terrorism discussion in season 4 when the changelings invaded earth. I was most impressed that this came BEFORE 9/11. If only every american had watched DS9, we could have avoided the patriot act and two wars.
Pandas are the perfect example of something not worth saving. There are many that suppose that pandas were on their way out as a species without our interference just because of the extreme inefficiency of their bodies. It takes an extreme amount of energy to process the bamboo it eats, not to mention the birth problems it faces with low birth rates and high infant mortality. The only reason we have rallied behind pandas is because they're cute, and maybe there is some benefit to having a cute staple animal we've saved as a rallying cry for conservation, but I'd like to think there were easier options out there.