If you go back and read my post, you'll see that I was responding to another post. I actually support public healthcare. What I don't support are the jackasses like C64_love who don't want to pay into the system and yet will gladly avail themselves of public assistance should push come to shove. It's the inconsistency of their stance that bothers me...
I'm sorry you got worked up -- I think you misread my position, and made some assumptions too.
I believe we NEED a public option, to cover people such as yourself, and I have no problem with paying in more than I get out, if I'm lucky enough to stay healthy.
My post was in response to Commodore64_love's stance. He claims he shouldn't have to pay in at all, since he's young and healthy. My response was, ok, fine... but then you should never be eligible for any public healthcare, since you didn't pay in when you didn't need it.
And when I refer to "freeloaders", I'm not referring to people who pay in if they are able to. I'm referring to people like C64_love who don't want to pay in, and yet when push comes to shove, will avail themselves of public aid.
I hope you understand that my position is probably similar to yours, and my post was directed at C64_love as a comment on his idea that he shouldn't have to pay into public health insurance because he doesn't use it.
It's really quite funny that you keep referencing Malthus when people have been predicting a Malthusian catastrophe for about 200 years and we haven't had one yet in spite of massive population growth. The numbers, the numbers! The numbers show that we can't possibly sustain the pace that we're on! Except that the numbers always change, and we always figure out newer and better ways of doing things.
Until we don't. Just because we always have doesn't mean we always will. Your faith in confuses me, since the current situation is that the world consumes more food than it produces. Surely if we "always" figure out a way to increase food production and efficiency, this would not be the case? Or is it because increasing food production is *expensive* and therefore problematic, which is a sign that we're flirting with a Malthusian catastrophe?
No what's "wrong" is that I am being forced to pay a $950 Fine because I exercised my Pro-Choice right not to buy hospital insurance.
I have no problem with not taxing people who don't have health insurance, as long as (1) they receive no medical care they do not pay for up-front, including ambulance corps/first responders and (2) they are permanently not eligible for public health care (including medicare).
Because free-loaders like yourself (face it: if you choose not to have medical insurance, you're a free-loader; only the luck of not having extraordinary medical claims makes it otherwise) are costing ME money.
Oh, and by the way -- random capitalization and the co-opting of terms with specific other meanings just makes you look like a lunatic. Might be one of the reasons many of us consider you to generally be trolling.
As soon as you enter Congress, you are no longer allowed to belong to any party. You become one single whole group, with no allegiances to anything but your own personal beliefs, your voters back home, and the Law.
Good luck with that. We'd end up exactly as we did in the 1790s -- with a Congress separated into two groups, except we couldn't call them "parties". And even worse, it would be less transparent than the current system.
I don't know why you, a supposedly strict Constitutionalist, would want to limit the freedom of association anyway. Maybe you're just full of hot air and don't really believe what you espouse?
Good post, but the college football revenue landscape has changed dramatically (for a minority of schools) since Alesia's report (2006, using 2005 data).
TV contract revenue, the prime source of revenue for athletic programs, has more than doubled since Alesia's report -- it's through the roof (well, for domed stadiums; I guess it's over the upper bowl for open stadiums). As of 2008, 58 of 120 D-IA athletic departments were break-even or profitable (source -- note that "university" revenue in the source includes government funding, which is channeled through the university). Note that 2009 TV revenue was even higher than 2008. It's probable that over half of DI-A athletic departments are currently profitable.
Alesia's report is incomplete for some other reasons, notably the correlation between athletic programs and general alumni donations/endowments, and the local economic impact to businesses.
Plenty of American Universities offer advanced degrees in philosophy and in economics. I dunno whether Objectivism is considered a worthy specific area of study for an advanced Philosophy degree... probably depends on the University in question.
But I do know that several American universities with an Austrian-bent economics department offer doctorates in economics: Auburn, George Mason, NYU, WVU... there are more.
Total calculation gives (for 109 million tons of Ammonia/year) 75 Gigawatts/year of electricity. Double that due to process inefficiencies, and get 150 Gigawatts. Total hydropower production worldwide is 860 gigawatts.
Not sure where the 109 million tons of ammonia comes from... globally we use over a billion tons/yr of ammonia for fertilizer production.
Plus we need the phosphates and potassium, eventually we'll need to recover those, as the mines will be depleted.
If we can develop alternative energy sources, we can stop CO2, increase energy use world wide, and everything will be good. We better do all that as fast as possible.
It's a big part of the solution, as is the development of poor places, as you mention. But we've also got to change inefficient consumption habits. Consider that in addition to reduction of fecundity, another striking impact of economic development is a shift to a meat-heavy diet. This is a huge loss of efficiency (FCR -- kg of food to kg of product) for food production, depending on the meat (beef FCR = 8, chicken 2.5). Even aquaculture (fish farming), while having an FCR of 1.1, is less efficient than it seems because fish farming requires 3x the protein of terrestrial meat farming.
I agree though, that alternative energy is a key to meeting our food needs. The problem is cost. Here in the US, and in other wealthy places, we'll have enough to eat. But in poorer countries? And what kind of political instability, and economic instability, will the global food shortages cause?
I just don't think we can adapt quickly enough to stave off some kind of Malthusian impact in less developed areas. There's just not enough of an economic incentive to do so.
It's not about how much food we produce, it's about how much food we're capable of producing
Which is limited by the loss of arable land, the increasing cost of fossil fuel fertilizer, the pace at which we're depleting aquifers, etc.
With current technologies we will easily be able to keep up with global demand for a long, long time... and the technologies are improving rapidly as well.
How can you say that when we can't even keep up with *today's* demand?
If we have to dedicate more land to food production, we can and will do that.
I see that you don't understand the scope of the problem. This is not about use of arable land. Even if land were infinite (it's not), fresh water was infinite and cheaply deliverable to the needed sites (it's not), population growth was stagnant (it's not) we'd still be screwed in the next 50-100 years because modern agricultural production is highly dependent on finite sources of cheap fertilizer (natural gas, mostly).
And as for the technologies improving... are they really? To the extent needed? Most of the improvements we are seeing do not solve the intrinsic problems of limited resources (water, etc), nor do they address another fundamental problem -- the change in global consumption habits (increasing meat consumption, etc) that is increasing food demand on top of population growth.
Please, do some reading on the subject before stating simple platitudes that we all wish were true, but are nowhere close to the truth.
Gas taxes don't even cover the cost of the roads the people drive on (the space), let alone the environmental harm.
I defy you to provide a reference to a single state that covers its transportation budget (mass transit costs deducted, of course) via gas taxes. No state can currently do so.
Humans already have so much food they don't know what to do with it all, and we've had more food than we could eat since sometime around 1890.
Your facts are stale. Humans have consumed more food than we've produced for the last several years. Our global reserves of food are very low, and getting lower every year.
This will be exacerbated when we run out of cheap fossil fuels we use for fertilizer.
We'll see if Malthus can be held off another generation or two... but things aren't looking very rosy for the global food supply-demand equation right now.
Ordinary Americans have allowed themselves to become loathsome. They think religion is science, they crave circuses instead of information, they are lazy, and they let their pandering media pundits of choice think for them.
Maybe I'm fortunate... because the ordinary Americans I interact with are largely nothing like that. Then again, I have the privilege of living in a wealthy state (NJ) -- and while the state is liberal, my neck of the woods is blood red with only a sprinkling of blue.
It's natural to despise such people. They cannot be changed, improved, or made noble, but they can be milked.
I think to pity them is more natural than to despise. Unless you're a hater by nature -- but you've already established that.
Thanks mainly to consoles, games are being tailored to those with short attention spans (though they're more polite in calling them 'people with time constraints').
I think you misattribute that move. I don't have a short attention span -- I have a family, a house to take care of, and a job. I'm the definition of a time-constrained gamer. Yet it's funny -- I haven't touched a console in 4 years.
Maybe it's a shift in gaming culture, but these time-precious douchebag EA Sports-Buying Guitar Hero Fanatics are the big money and they demand social interaction and to be able to teabag a real opponent.
I think maybe you're conflating two groups. The time-constrained people tend to not want social interaction, since it detracts from their time to actually play games (that's the way it is for me, anyway). And as for teabagging and griefing? I think it's more likely to be the kiddie or college kid or general loser with too much time on their hands. Time-constrained gamers don't get their kicks from griefing or ganking -- those things take too much time.
I got a beta invite to Starcraft2 and ran into the exact same problem. Having never played the original I definitely wanted to give it a test run before purchasing. The beta doesn't include campaign mode, which is understandable, but doesn't have even the first mission of the tutorial where you learn to just move units around and what your resources are.
FWIW, if you had never played the original... then beta-testing the sequel seems pretty silly. What use woould you be as a beta-tester of the game?
Maybe you would have been a great candidate for beta-testing the tutorials. Or beta-testing the campaign mode.
Maybe I'm just being grumpy... but for you to complain, never having played the original, that the beta-test of a sequel was not noob-friendly... well, it just seems like you're barking up the wrong tree.
That's even more fun with text editors. One of these days I'm going to register an alt and start a flamewar with myself over Vi vs Emacs, just to see how many other slashdotters I can drag into it.
This community is comprised of people who have already done all the thinking they need to do; furthermore, both the *amount* and the *comparative intelligence* of the thinking of a single slashdotter surpasses the collective mental output of a medium-sized nation of Joe Sixpack, Suzie Handbag, and the other normals. We are each already are experts on any topic that could come up in an article discussion.
Your formula is one step too long for those that inhabit the nerve centers of the beast we call Slashdot.
It seems you put a lot of thought into your post -- which is wrong, for Slashdot. You should already know what to type without thinking. You, sir, are a poseur.
Gone are the days when you can charge $5000 for 3 logo concepts when some college student is happy to spend 2 hours cranking out a concept in his spare time for the chance at winning $269 - the price quoted on the 99designs logo design page.
Just wait until wannabe designers in low-wage nations like India, China, Brazil, etc (using cracked copies of design software) start entering into the process. $269 will seem overpriced.
It's like rent-a-coder... no American can earn a living doing piecework for rent-a-coder. Most would be better off working at McDonalds. Same thing's going to happen for piecework design.
Every month I get a credit to my Paypal account, it's usually $50-100 . I think I get around $1 per +5 post, and I get like $0.25 per mod point I spend on behalf of Microsoft. I get the statement that itemizes the payment in my email each month, but I never bother to read it.
Dude, if you're posting here and not getting paid, you're really wasting your time. Send me your contact info via email at slashdot_shill_127@microsoft.com, I'll sign you up for the program -- I think I get a $25 referral bonus if you maintain high karma and moderate weekly for six months.
With sports I agree, though. Playing them is more than entertainment, though.
I think that's silly. Some sports fans are led to think by watching sports, just as much as some movie viewers are led to think by watching movies (and some just get a short thrill of entertainment).
There is drama in sports... but it's largely unscripted. A player who has overcome personal hardship to excel in their sport (like a no-hitter in baseball pitched by a one-armed man); a player who fights through injury and demonstrates an indomitable will to persevere; the story of hope in the face of insurmountable odds; brotherhood and teamwork overcoming superior athletes... all these are worthy stories that are witnessed in sports. And they are unscripted in true sport, so no willing-suspension-of-disbelief is required, unlike with movies.
If you choose not to think when being a sports spectator, that is your choice. If you choose not to examine how sports inflame emotions, why they do so, and how that applies to your life in general, feel free to do so.
Your choice of medium for being provoked into thought is not universal.
I think your desire is echoed by many (myself included) but it is completely invalidated by the 24-hour news cycle.
By the time you're reporting that event that happened 12-24 hours ago, other sites are reporting on the meta-news. He-said-she-said, or further developing events related to the original news item.
You'd be hopelessly behind anyone who wants to discuss or act on the news (which, I think, are the major reasons people want news). You couldn't make any money.
It's not like people searching for news on a subject look for first-breaking story.
But if news is breaking, and people are searching for it: if you haven't published then news yet, you don't get their clicks. By the time you've published, people have seen it on the televised news or heard about it elsewhere... they no longer have the desire to search for it.
No one in role playing ever wants a real black eye.
That's not true. There are people who are into role-playing who are also into masochism. Some of them even like being marked (bruises, scarring), it's a turn-on for them.
Sure, most masochists are ashamed and don't want to be marked (or they know that being marked will affect their "normal" life). But not all...
Slashdot Mirror
If you go back and read my post, you'll see that I was responding to another post. I actually support public healthcare. What I don't support are the jackasses like C64_love who don't want to pay into the system and yet will gladly avail themselves of public assistance should push come to shove. It's the inconsistency of their stance that bothers me...
I'm sorry you got worked up -- I think you misread my position, and made some assumptions too.
I believe we NEED a public option, to cover people such as yourself, and I have no problem with paying in more than I get out, if I'm lucky enough to stay healthy.
My post was in response to Commodore64_love's stance. He claims he shouldn't have to pay in at all, since he's young and healthy. My response was, ok, fine... but then you should never be eligible for any public healthcare, since you didn't pay in when you didn't need it.
And when I refer to "freeloaders", I'm not referring to people who pay in if they are able to. I'm referring to people like C64_love who don't want to pay in, and yet when push comes to shove, will avail themselves of public aid.
I hope you understand that my position is probably similar to yours, and my post was directed at C64_love as a comment on his idea that he shouldn't have to pay into public health insurance because he doesn't use it.
Until we don't. Just because we always have doesn't mean we always will. Your faith in confuses me, since the current situation is that the world consumes more food than it produces. Surely if we "always" figure out a way to increase food production and efficiency, this would not be the case? Or is it because increasing food production is *expensive* and therefore problematic, which is a sign that we're flirting with a Malthusian catastrophe?
I have no problem with not taxing people who don't have health insurance, as long as (1) they receive no medical care they do not pay for up-front, including ambulance corps/first responders and (2) they are permanently not eligible for public health care (including medicare).
Because free-loaders like yourself (face it: if you choose not to have medical insurance, you're a free-loader; only the luck of not having extraordinary medical claims makes it otherwise) are costing ME money.
Oh, and by the way -- random capitalization and the co-opting of terms with specific other meanings just makes you look like a lunatic. Might be one of the reasons many of us consider you to generally be trolling.
You wouldn't get modded down as troll so much if you didn't, you know, troll so much.
You drag unrelated (or barely tangentially related) misguided political shit into so many discussions it's not funny.
Good luck with that. We'd end up exactly as we did in the 1790s -- with a Congress separated into two groups, except we couldn't call them "parties". And even worse, it would be less transparent than the current system.
I don't know why you, a supposedly strict Constitutionalist, would want to limit the freedom of association anyway. Maybe you're just full of hot air and don't really believe what you espouse?
Good post, but the college football revenue landscape has changed dramatically (for a minority of schools) since Alesia's report (2006, using 2005 data).
TV contract revenue, the prime source of revenue for athletic programs, has more than doubled since Alesia's report -- it's through the roof (well, for domed stadiums; I guess it's over the upper bowl for open stadiums). As of 2008, 58 of 120 D-IA athletic departments were break-even or profitable (source -- note that "university" revenue in the source includes government funding, which is channeled through the university). Note that 2009 TV revenue was even higher than 2008. It's probable that over half of DI-A athletic departments are currently profitable.
Alesia's report is incomplete for some other reasons, notably the correlation between athletic programs and general alumni donations/endowments, and the local economic impact to businesses.
Plenty of American Universities offer advanced degrees in philosophy and in economics. I dunno whether Objectivism is considered a worthy specific area of study for an advanced Philosophy degree... probably depends on the University in question.
But I do know that several American universities with an Austrian-bent economics department offer doctorates in economics: Auburn, George Mason, NYU, WVU... there are more.
Wait... were you joking?
I tried that, and failed -- but it wasn't Disney that stopped me.
For the sake of brevity, let's just say that the Minnie Mouse character is NOT anatomically correct.
Not sure where the 109 million tons of ammonia comes from... globally we use over a billion tons/yr of ammonia for fertilizer production.
Plus we need the phosphates and potassium, eventually we'll need to recover those, as the mines will be depleted.
It's a big part of the solution, as is the development of poor places, as you mention. But we've also got to change inefficient consumption habits. Consider that in addition to reduction of fecundity, another striking impact of economic development is a shift to a meat-heavy diet. This is a huge loss of efficiency (FCR -- kg of food to kg of product) for food production, depending on the meat (beef FCR = 8, chicken 2.5). Even aquaculture (fish farming), while having an FCR of 1.1, is less efficient than it seems because fish farming requires 3x the protein of terrestrial meat farming.
I agree though, that alternative energy is a key to meeting our food needs. The problem is cost. Here in the US, and in other wealthy places, we'll have enough to eat. But in poorer countries? And what kind of political instability, and economic instability, will the global food shortages cause?
I just don't think we can adapt quickly enough to stave off some kind of Malthusian impact in less developed areas. There's just not enough of an economic incentive to do so.
Economically speaking, corporations and people are both actors. Just because they are members of the same set does not make them equivalent.
Which is limited by the loss of arable land, the increasing cost of fossil fuel fertilizer, the pace at which we're depleting aquifers, etc.
How can you say that when we can't even keep up with *today's* demand?
I see that you don't understand the scope of the problem. This is not about use of arable land. Even if land were infinite (it's not), fresh water was infinite and cheaply deliverable to the needed sites (it's not), population growth was stagnant (it's not) we'd still be screwed in the next 50-100 years because modern agricultural production is highly dependent on finite sources of cheap fertilizer (natural gas, mostly).
And as for the technologies improving... are they really? To the extent needed? Most of the improvements we are seeing do not solve the intrinsic problems of limited resources (water, etc), nor do they address another fundamental problem -- the change in global consumption habits (increasing meat consumption, etc) that is increasing food demand on top of population growth.
Please, do some reading on the subject before stating simple platitudes that we all wish were true, but are nowhere close to the truth.
No they don't.
Gas taxes don't even cover the cost of the roads the people drive on (the space), let alone the environmental harm.
I defy you to provide a reference to a single state that covers its transportation budget (mass transit costs deducted, of course) via gas taxes. No state can currently do so.
Your facts are stale. Humans have consumed more food than we've produced for the last several years. Our global reserves of food are very low, and getting lower every year.
This will be exacerbated when we run out of cheap fossil fuels we use for fertilizer.
We'll see if Malthus can be held off another generation or two... but things aren't looking very rosy for the global food supply-demand equation right now.
Maybe I'm fortunate... because the ordinary Americans I interact with are largely nothing like that. Then again, I have the privilege of living in a wealthy state (NJ) -- and while the state is liberal, my neck of the woods is blood red with only a sprinkling of blue.
I think to pity them is more natural than to despise. Unless you're a hater by nature -- but you've already established that.
I think you misattribute that move. I don't have a short attention span -- I have a family, a house to take care of, and a job. I'm the definition of a time-constrained gamer. Yet it's funny -- I haven't touched a console in 4 years.
I think maybe you're conflating two groups. The time-constrained people tend to not want social interaction, since it detracts from their time to actually play games (that's the way it is for me, anyway). And as for teabagging and griefing? I think it's more likely to be the kiddie or college kid or general loser with too much time on their hands. Time-constrained gamers don't get their kicks from griefing or ganking -- those things take too much time.
FWIW, if you had never played the original... then beta-testing the sequel seems pretty silly. What use woould you be as a beta-tester of the game?
Maybe you would have been a great candidate for beta-testing the tutorials. Or beta-testing the campaign mode.
Maybe I'm just being grumpy... but for you to complain, never having played the original, that the beta-test of a sequel was not noob-friendly... well, it just seems like you're barking up the wrong tree.
That's even more fun with text editors. One of these days I'm going to register an alt and start a flamewar with myself over Vi vs Emacs, just to see how many other slashdotters I can drag into it.
1) Think. 2) Type.
Whoa there, buddy. This isn't any old forum.
This community is comprised of people who have already done all the thinking they need to do; furthermore, both the *amount* and the *comparative intelligence* of the thinking of a single slashdotter surpasses the collective mental output of a medium-sized nation of Joe Sixpack, Suzie Handbag, and the other normals. We are each already are experts on any topic that could come up in an article discussion.
Your formula is one step too long for those that inhabit the nerve centers of the beast we call Slashdot.
It seems you put a lot of thought into your post -- which is wrong, for Slashdot. You should already know what to type without thinking. You, sir, are a poseur.
Just wait until wannabe designers in low-wage nations like India, China, Brazil, etc (using cracked copies of design software) start entering into the process. $269 will seem overpriced.
It's like rent-a-coder... no American can earn a living doing piecework for rent-a-coder. Most would be better off working at McDonalds. Same thing's going to happen for piecework design.
What? You don't?
Every month I get a credit to my Paypal account, it's usually $50-100 . I think I get around $1 per +5 post, and I get like $0.25 per mod point I spend on behalf of Microsoft. I get the statement that itemizes the payment in my email each month, but I never bother to read it.
Dude, if you're posting here and not getting paid, you're really wasting your time. Send me your contact info via email at slashdot_shill_127@microsoft.com, I'll sign you up for the program -- I think I get a $25 referral bonus if you maintain high karma and moderate weekly for six months.
I think that's silly. Some sports fans are led to think by watching sports, just as much as some movie viewers are led to think by watching movies (and some just get a short thrill of entertainment).
There is drama in sports... but it's largely unscripted. A player who has overcome personal hardship to excel in their sport (like a no-hitter in baseball pitched by a one-armed man); a player who fights through injury and demonstrates an indomitable will to persevere; the story of hope in the face of insurmountable odds; brotherhood and teamwork overcoming superior athletes... all these are worthy stories that are witnessed in sports. And they are unscripted in true sport, so no willing-suspension-of-disbelief is required, unlike with movies.
If you choose not to think when being a sports spectator, that is your choice. If you choose not to examine how sports inflame emotions, why they do so, and how that applies to your life in general, feel free to do so.
Your choice of medium for being provoked into thought is not universal.
Citation, please. I think you're romanticizing human culture. I suspect that the social contract you speak of has not been so consistent.
By the time you're reporting that event that happened 12-24 hours ago, other sites are reporting on the meta-news. He-said-she-said, or further developing events related to the original news item.
You'd be hopelessly behind anyone who wants to discuss or act on the news (which, I think, are the major reasons people want news). You couldn't make any money.
But if news is breaking, and people are searching for it: if you haven't published then news yet, you don't get their clicks. By the time you've published, people have seen it on the televised news or heard about it elsewhere... they no longer have the desire to search for it.
That's not true. There are people who are into role-playing who are also into masochism. Some of them even like being marked (bruises, scarring), it's a turn-on for them.
Sure, most masochists are ashamed and don't want to be marked (or they know that being marked will affect their "normal" life). But not all...