Born and raised in privelage then appointed to work for Nixon as an economic advisor. Soon thereafter we had the worst economy since the depression.
I don't know if it's fair to blame the Nixon recession on conservative economics. LBJ had left Nixon with massive military spending on a war in Vietnam and new Great Society spending. And then the Arab nations began their oil boycott.
All three of these factors led to massive inflation (massive spending on the military; massive spending on domestic programs; more young people in Vietnam and fewer young people in the work force; and a rising price of oil, a key price factor in many products). In response, Nixon instituted price ceilings. NOTE: Price ceilings are not a conservative, free-market response to inflation. It is a response generally associated with the left-wing, in fact.
More specifically, blaming Ben Stein for the Nixon recession is foolish - Ben Stein was a speechwriter in the Nixon Administration, not an economic policy advisor.
The American Prospect, which says that, "Though Moore claims to have made a documentary, his examination of American gun culture presents viewers with a more heavily edited fiction than producer Brian Grazer's attempt to clean up Eminem. Whereas the rapper's movie reaches for the sort of truth mere facts cannot convey, Moore's film grabs viewers with the old demagogue's trick of using just as much factual information as is necessary to lead people toward false conclusions."
Additionally, the New York Times review was negative. The review is no longer available on their web site unless you pay to access their archives, but I saved an excerpt from it, "The slippery logic, tendentious grandstanding and outright demagoguery on display in 'Bowling for Columbine' should be enough to give pause to its most ardent partisans...though he seems to be hunting for a specific historical cause for events like Columbine, Mr. Moore, when it serves his purposes, is happy to generalize in the absence of empirical evidence and to make much of connections that seem spurious on close examination."
Neither of these, I'd like to point out, could be called right-wing. The New York Times is center-left, and the American Prospect is left-wing. They are hardly allies of the NRA.
Additionally, NPR, another organization that could hardly be called right-wing or a friend of the NRA, severely criticized Moore yesterday in its program On the Media. The lead-in to the report said:
""Armed with a rifle he got for opening a bank account, and shocking statistics like the ones you just heard, Moore had plenty of fodder. But still, he was not satisfied. To properly emphasize the point that our country is a veritable shooting gallery, Moore embellishes, grandstands, and ignores inconvenient facts. Fine, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, provocateurs gotta provoke. For the purposes of this story, a lack of countervailing viewpoints will not be faulted. The use of cliched, happy songs over images of war crimes, not once but twice, will be unremarked upon. As will the point that Michael Moore would have no career if he just called ahead for an appointment. This is a fact check, an accounting of distortions that would give pause to even the most enthusiastic fans of the movie."
Anyway, I don't know the answers to the gun violence question. Personally, I lean towards gun control, but am neither an expert nor speak with dogmatic certainty. However, I would point the original questioner the following routes:
First of all, do not trust Michael Moore's statistics. Moore makes a big deal out of the fact that Canada has as many guns as we do in the US, yet has a much lower crime rate. This is not really true. First of all, in Canada, there is 0.26 guns per capita. In the US, there is 0.62 guns per capita. Secondly, in Canada, there are much stricter gun licensing laws, particularly when it comes to personal handguns. As a result, 6.25% of Canada's guns are handguns - the kind of gun used overwhelmingly in gun violence. In America, 22.9% of guns are handguns. And as someone else noted in this thread, "Another interesting statistic is that in Canada's largest city, Toronto, it is estimated that 3 out of 4 hand guns involved in a crime are imported illegally from the US."
Additionally, I would suggest looking at the relationship between unintegrated minority groups and crime. American whites are twice as likely to be murdered than European whites - but American blacks are 14 times as likely to be murdered as European whites! Blacks, despite accounting for about 13% of the American population, account for 53% of Americans who are murdered. And there is a scale in the US - the more integrated an minority, the lower its crime rate. So Asians have a much lower crime rate than Hispanics, who have a lower crime rate than blacks.
The same pattern appears in Europe - the prisons are being filled with immigrants from Northern Africa, just like American prisons are being filled by African-Americans.
Please note that I am not saying that blacks or other minorities are inherently violent! I am merely saying that there is a natural sociological correlation between groups that are not integrated into society and groups that are more violent.
So, given this, let me propose an explanation. The difference in murder rates is due to a mix of three factors: culture, gun control policies, and immigration/social policies.
I do not know enough about the cultural explanation, but it would not surprise me if American culture were a factor.
Having easy access to guns and having far more guns than other countries is going to make a difference.
Immigration/Social Policies - America's crime rate has gone through a huge drop in the past 10 years, while Europe's has gone through a huge rise. It so happens that Europe is dealing with a large, unintegrated minority for the first time in centuries - and has done an awful job of it so far. Meanwhile, the integration of blacks and Hispanics into America, while far from complete, is progressing. I expect that we will see further drops in crime in the US, the more African-Americans are integrated into society.
But Canada has as high a percentage of immigrants as does the US. So what explains its lower crime rate? Perhaps they do a better job of integrating immigrants. And Canada does have a much more generous social welfare system. I would be very surprised if there were not a correlation between social welfare and crime.
So let's put it together. American whites have twice as high a murder rate as European whites. Couldn't much of that be attributable to the massively easier availability of handguns in the US?
On the other hand, American blacks have 7 times as high a murder rate as American whites. Couldn't much of that be attributable to America's history of slavery and Jim Crow, leading to a poverty-stricken, unintegrated black minority? Meanwhile, Canada has a much less racist history, and many fewer blacks - Canada's population is 2% black, of whom many are recent immigrants from the Caribbean, whereas America's population is 13% black, of whom most are the descendants of slaves.
Again, I am not saying that African-Americans are inherently violent. I am saying that African-Americans went through a terrible history that has made them poor and unintegrated into society. And without a good social welfare system like Canada's, some turn to crime.
I feel stupid having to ask this...but where did the "In Soviet Russia" joke get started? I've seen it in almost every thread I've read recently, but I can't remember seeing the first one - you know, the one that actually made sense in the context.:)
Thanks to anyone who can enlighten me. One must keep up with Slashdot inside jokes, after all.:)
For generations we have all been fed this lie - the American work ethic, that says to go to work for someone ELSE and work HARD, 40, 50, 60 hours a week to get by.
What the hell are you talking about? First of all, the American ideal has never been work hard for someone else and work hard. The American dream (or myth, whatever you want) has always been about striking out on your own. The yeoman farmer, the 49er, the guy who drops out of Harvard to start his own small software business, etc.
Secondly, I'm getting weary of the idea that working hard is some kind of lie that has been foisted upon us. The fact is, until very recently, people simply had to work long hours to survive. And it wasn't just exploitation by aristocrats or an unfair system - it was an economic fact of life. Production wasn't efficient enough to allow for people to work fewer hours.
Now, in the past few decades, a few lucky countries have become efficient enough to allow people to work fewer hours (Japan, Europe, America, etc.). But even then, I would not count on it simply being "We're only working hard because of a lie we're being told." Yes, workers in France and Germany work fewer hours at better conditions than American workers do. But on the other hand, France and Germany's economies have been stagnant for the past decade, while America's has been dynamic. And that's not just the bubble - America's GDP growth rate last quarter was much higher than either Germany's or France's, and is predicted to be much higher for next year as well.
As our production methods get more efficient, we can make our choice between greater production and more hours off. Europe leans towards more hours off. America leans towards greater production. Simple as that.
Personally, I am comfortable with America's choice, because I think Europe (Britain excluded) is headed toward financial crisis, and will eventually be forced to switch towards a system more like America's anyway. I am also comfortable with America's choice because there are many things we have yet to achieve, that I would like to.
But indeed, one day we will have robots to do most of our labor for us, and we'll have genetic engineering, clean energy, and all the biotech advances we could ever want, and then I'll be ready to start making the trade for fewer hours. Because at that point our production will have become extremely efficient, and we'll have attained the things I want to see society achieve.
Online publications however, just don't seem to represent the same tangible "substance" as a lump of dead tree does. I suspect this is one of the reasons that few online publications have successfully migrated to the subscription model....
We all *know* the value is in the information -- but somewhere, deep inside our heads, we're thinking "how can something that we can't touch, feel or taste be of any value?"
This is an interesting idea, and I think you may be onto something. However, for me, I think the content feels less substantial not because it is online, but because it comes out daily. Seriously. I read the National Review, Slate, the free stuff on Salon, and the Economist daily online. I read the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the Atlantic Monthly when they arrive in the mail.
Now, the latter feel more substantial to me. Partly, it's because they are - they're better magazines than the former.:) But also I suspect it's because I'm getting a slow, steady stream of articles one way, and a whole bunch of articles all at once the other way. It's like the difference between turning up the heat on the frog slowly and turning it up all the way at once.
Now, the same doesn't apply for why I prefer paper newspapers to online newspapers. In that case, it is because I can't read it while I'm eating breakfast (no laptop) and because I read much less when I read online - when I go from front to back of a print newspaper I will read articles that I would never think of looking for on a web site. I.e., I read the Metro section in the print newspaper, I do not online, because I never think that there will be something interesting in there.
Actually, I am very much anticipating the Battle of Helm's Deep. Let me give you my good reason, and then my bad reason.
The good reason is that, if I recall correctly (and I'm not positive I do), the three major battles in the Lord of the Rings are different: the Battle of Helm's Deep is about holding on with no reinforcements coming, the battle at Minas Tirith is heavy on Nazgul and is about holding out til reinforcements come, and the final battle is about dying valiantly in an effort to delay Sauron until Frodo can destroy the ring. So they do have different feels.
Anyway, the bad reason for why I am looking forward to the Battle of Helm's Deep is that I didn't really like the first LoTR movie that much. I was a huge fan of the books when I was younger (I read them, and the Silmarillion, dozens of times), but I felt that the movie lacked the sense of mystery and sadness (at the passing of the great ages of magic and elves) that the books had. To me, the magic of the written word could not be translated into the screen. I could imagine Gandalf somehow becoming more imposing, but seeing it in the movie seemed like a parlor trick rather than magic. Similarly, I could imagine Galadriel being somehow different and magical, but seeing her with a glow about her is just...too straightforward.
That being said, the one thing I loved about the movie was how beautiful it was. The scenes in that movie were astounding. And that's why I'm looking forward to the Battle of Helm's Deep.:)
Re:They're against it because he's for it?
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Don't Stymie Nanotech
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm a molecular biologist myself, so as a rule I'm all for nanotechnology. However, the fact that the libertarian nutjob who wrote the PRI article support unfettered research makes me think regulation must be needed. He thinks the constitution guarantees the right to overthrow the government through armed struggle.
Now, I am pretty far from a libertarian - in fact, I hate the fact that Slashdot message boards often have a very libertarian slant. However, that being said, Glenn Reynolds is far from a libertarian nut job. I've been reading his blog, Instapundit, for a while now, and he's not a crazy by any means. As for his paper, your summary of it makes it sound ridiculous, when in fact it is not. Simply put, he is arguing that the people's right to guns was intended by the crafters of the constitution as a way for the people to be able to maintain their liberty against an oppressive government by force if it was necessary. Given that Jefferson famously said that the tree of liberty needed to be watered by the blood of revolution every twenty years, it is not crazy to argue that the founding fathers intended for people to have funs so that they could overthrow a government that attempted to take away their freedom.
It may not be correct, but it's not an illogical argument. And Reynolds is not a nutjob, by any means.
If no movies make profit, then how do studios make profit? Surely they must, or you'd hear about it on financial news etc.
Well, I totally agree that Spiderman obviously must have made a profit, or they wouldn't be making a sequel (and an X-Men sequel, and a Hulk movie, and a new Superman movie). However, in answer to your larger question - movie studios are actually not very profitable. I read an article about this a couple years back, and basically buying a movie studio is a horrible investment. The dynamics of the industry (movies costing so much to make, basically) mean that the studios themselves are not a good ROI. Yet people invest in them for one of two reasons:
1) The glamour. People aren't always rational economic actors, or at the very least, you have to take into account that people may seek more tha money. Yes, perhaps I could make 6% profit investing in bonds, but maybe I'd rather have 3% profit but hang out with movie stars/sleep with actresses all the time.
2) Media conglomerates believe that somehow, "synergy" will eventually make the movie studios pay off. Yes, this movie studio isn't a good investment as a standalone, but maybe if I tie my magazines, TV channels, pay per view channels, and retail stores together I can make it profitable.
If you're really so concerned about your privacy, and keeping the government from knowing you oppose its policies, maybe you should stop showing up to rallies. I mean, it's one to thing to say that you're afraid that if the government can spy on you, they'll be able to know your closely-guarded political beliefs, or your secret conspiratorial meetings. But hey, if you're walking down Pennsylvania Avenue with a big sign that says "No to war with Iraq," chances are the government can figure out that you're against going to war with Iraq, even without Big Brother.:)
What makes me think Gateway is dying? Simply put, the fact that the only reason to buy Gateway vs. buying another brand of PC is their direct model and their marketing. And Dell has been beating them on both counts. Gateway has been bleeding money, while Dell has twice as much revenue and is profitable. Dell is opening new direct sale mini-stores while Gateway has been closing many Gateway stores. As for whose marketing is more successful, well, CNN covered it as one of its top stories when it leaked that Dell was thinking of retiring Steven. The only things I've ever heard about Gateway's advertising is people making fun of the talking cow for being stupid.
As for whether marketing is important in computers, I think you underestimate its importance. If marketing were unimportant in computers in general, then we'd all be using Amigas today, or perhaps Macintoshes, or BeOS. And if marketing were unimportant in the PC world, then more users would buy white box PCs, since as you put it, "People compare the (meaningless) numbers, and come up with some not entirely usefull $/MHz comparison, and then buy whatever seems best to them." On $/MHz, white box retailers don't have marketing costs and thus normally win that comparison.
But users are swayed to a great degree by marketing. And for many people, when they think of buying a PC today, they think of Dell first. And if Dell's more efficient business model can push a couple more competitors out of business, it could come to the point where when people think of buying a PC, when the average user thinks of buying a PC, he'll think of Dell, IBM, or HP (when the rich user thinks of buying a computer, he'll think of Apple or Sony, the upscale computer brands). And in that circumstance, you can easily see how it makes sense for Dell to sell peripherals too.
I think Dell's reasoning is simple - Dell wants to become as close to a monopoly in the computer market as it can. Of course, it can probably never become a monopoly - there are too many places that can make white boxes for that to happen - but it's certainly going to try to gain market share to the point where it can raise profit margins.
Look at it this way: in the PC market in the US, there are just a few big manufacturers. But IBM loses money on its PC line, so that's only going to continue as long as IBM feels that loss creates a greater profit for its consulting business down the line. HP and Compaq just merged, so those two competitors just become one, and Dell has been stealing market share from them anyway. Gateway is slowly dying. Apple is not a real threat. Sony is only one doing decently.
Dell's long term strategy is to outprice as many of their competitors as they can for a long time, until they take a huge market share and push those competitors out of the market. And at that point, many businesses and consumers would look to Dell as their one place to get all their computer needs. If that happens - with competition significantly limited - Dell can raise their prices, not just on PCs, but on other products too - like PDAs and printers, the two new markets they are entering in 2003.
So, to sum, Dell's strategy is two-pronged:
Gain market share/push competitors out of the PC market so that eventually they can raise prices (profit margins).
Attack every aspect of the PC business, with the idea that once you become the major player in the PC business, people will prefer to buy all products from you, not just their PCs from you and their PDA from vendor 2 and their printers from vendor 3.
It's a smart strategy. Dell's been run very, very well so far, I wouldn't bet against them.
Cancer is one of those "shit happens" things about life. Our bodies aren't perfect, cancer is really a product of this fact.
I am not a biologist, so I'm just wondering out loud here, but maybe someone can answer this for me:
I presume that cancer is often just one of those "shit happens" things about life. That eventually your body will break down and do something it shouldn't do - like create a malignant tumor. But since we know that smoking leads to much higher incidences of cancer, do we know how much general environmental pollution leads to cancer? I read a couple years ago that certain cancer rates had increased in the US quite a lot during the past thirty years. Now, one possibility is that people aren't dying young of infections any more, so instead they're dying old of cancer. But another thought that crossed my mind is that simply this is what happens when a generation that has grown up with lots of smog, polluted rivers, etc., grows up. And that likewise, as we lower pollution, we'll see cancer rates decline again.
Therefore, we would expect to see cancer rates increase in China and India soon, but decline in the Western world as it cleans itself up.
Anyway, just wondering if someone can fill me in on how much scientists attribute cancer development to environmental pollution. Thanks!
The other reason nobody considers "good food, lots of greens, no meat, etc." as a cure for cancer is because it is not a cure for cancer!
I see articles all the time about how eating this (broccoli, certain types of fish, etc.) or doing this (exercising, meditation, etc.) will cure, or at least lower significantly your chance of dying of cancer. And believe me, there are plenty of cancer patients and cancer clinics out there that are trying alternative methods, either for patients who don't trust drugs or who are already past help by standard treatments, whatever.
But the fact is, none of them work. If I found out tomorrow that eating vegetables was all it took to not get cancer, I would become a vegetarian. But you know what? There are plenty of vegetarians out there who have cancer.
Now, it is possible that various lifestyle choices can impact your odds of getting cancer/surviving cancer - that is very reasonable to believe. Of course, no one would be surrpised if people with balanced diets who exercised a lot survive cancer more often. But there is no simple cure for cancer like "just eat cabbage." To think that there is - and that it's just those evil public and private research institutions keeping such a cure private because they want to keep their jobs - is foolish paranoia.
I think you're exactly right. I think this decision is based on a couple factors that have nothing to do with the move from New York to Boston:
Apple has very little in the way of new products to announce for a while. Sure, there will be a PowerBook revamp soon, but let's face it, until a new PowerPC chip comes out, Apple basically has nothing that exciting to introduce. Sure, there'll be a new iApp or two, maybe some bigger monitors, or minor speed increases in existing lines, but that's hardly a very big deal.
People make such a big deal out of keynotes since Jobs came back that when there isn't anything big to introduce, there is a decent amount of bitterness in the Mac community. Jobs does not want to be in the position of creating bitterness by giving more keynotes with nothing to introduce.
Jobs has been trying to break the connection of product announcements with keynote speeches anyway. When everyone expects there to be big introductions at the keynote, people stop buying Macs before the keynotes, in case a product line is refreshed. This makes it hard for Apple to clear out inventory - why buy an iMac in June if you think a new one will be introduced in July?
MacWorld shows may no longer be as important as they used to be, anyway. Most hard-core Mac users - the kind who would pay for a ticket to the keynote, or pay to travel to New York/Boston - have Internet access and read MacCentral, MacRumors, etc. So it's not like Apple needs the convention to reach these people. Besides, this audience is basically loyal to Apple regardless of what Apple does. On the other hand, Apple does want very badly to attract new users - the switchers. The money spent attending MacWorlds may be better spent on more TV ads targetting PC users.
Yes, democracy works better than dictatorship at governing a country. But that hardly proves your implication that democracy works better than dictatorship in creating good software design. I mean, by that logic, the Oakland As would be a better team if instead of letting Billy Beane make all the personnel decisions, they let fans vote on all decisions - thereby bringing more people into the decisionmaking process and avoiding Beane "getting stuck into one fixed way of thinking."
It gets harder to learn as you get older. 10 years old absorb new concepts much more quickly than 50 year olds. There is a biological reason for this - it is not just that "old people are stubborn." Or do you think that old people are also forgetful because they're too lazy to remember?
Oh yes, very hollow definition of success. But then again, if you offered me a choice between success as in $40 billion, and success as in being part of the Open/Free source bandwagon, to be honest, I'd take the $40 billion. And that's pretty much the choice most people would make too.
Will fighting Open/Free source lead to failure? I happen to believe that eventually open software will prove more popular than Microsoft's offerings - not because they're open, but because they're cheaper. On the other hand, if Microsoft stopped fighting Open/Free source today, they lose out on all the profits they could generate until that day of failure comes. I mean, I think MS could keep selling Windows and Office, etc. for years and make huge bucks off it. Why stop now?
I've read that customer focus is really the key to his success, but how does actively fighting off Open/Free source help his customers? Clearly it doesn't, so there must be another motivater (control).
No, the motivater isn't control, it's success. Customer focus may be the key to his success, but that makes customer focus the means, and success (measured in money) the end. If the means - customer focus - started to lead to the end of everyone using Open/Free software, as you suggest, then suddenly those means are leading to failure for Microsoft (as measured in money) not success.
Therefore, he changes the means to whatever will succeed in bringing him success.
This makes no sense. As another poster points out a couple comments down, MSNBC has had plenty of nice coverage of Linux. As you point out, CNN featured a few articles on Linux ("never really saw the light of day" - I'm not sure what that means, since they were on the site). The New York Times recently had a positive editorial about Linux and has covered Linux many times in the business section. Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek have covered Linux, often in a positive manner about how it can save the enterprise money.
Yes, sometimes the articles are not great, but tech journalism is often not up to our standards as Slashdot geeks. But that doesn't mean that the other news outlets don't "have the balls to cover linux in a positive manner."
I really don't think this is a fair comparison. I'm too tired to explain myself now:-), but while I too think that the Simpsons has been crap since season 8, I don't think that the current crap Simpsons is anything like the Family Guy. I loved the Simpsons seasons 3-7, and I loved the Family Guy, and I hate the current Simpsons.
What the heck? How did this get modded up? There are a lot of companies coming out with anti-depression drugs - ever heard of prozac? The whole premise of the book Prozac Nation is that we are overmedicating and overdiagnosing depression. Anti-depressants is a very lucrative field for drug companies. As for cancer drugs, there has been a huge amount of research into cancer over the past 30 years (since the Nixon administration) and regrettably little in the way of results. This is not for lack of trying - it's just that cancer is a bear of a problem.
There's no conspiracy causing a lack of anti-depressants and cancer-fighting drugs. The fact simply is that the brain is extremely complex, and cancer is also extremely complex.
There is no way the Mac has 15-20% market share, or that Macs make up 15-20% of the number of computers accessing the Internet. Why? First of all, no browser stats pages (like Google's Zeitgeist) show Mac browsers at any more than 5% of the hits. Secondly, Mac sales have been stuck at 3-4% market share for at least 6 years. Even if Mac users use their Macs longer than PCs (and this is a very debatable point, given that many Mac users are being forced to buy new machines to use OS X, while the trend in the PC market is that users find that 3 year old machines are still plenty fast unless they are gamers), it is still hard to believe that Macs stay in use so much longer than it turns 3% sales into 15% browser share.
I am currently a PC user, but I am a former Amiga and Mac user. I am not trying to flame the Mac - I would consider buying a Mac for my next computer - but claiming 15-20% market share is just wrong.
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Poor Ben Stein.
Born and raised in privelage then appointed to work for Nixon as an economic advisor. Soon thereafter we had the worst economy since the depression.
I don't know if it's fair to blame the Nixon recession on conservative economics. LBJ had left Nixon with massive military spending on a war in Vietnam and new Great Society spending. And then the Arab nations began their oil boycott.
All three of these factors led to massive inflation (massive spending on the military; massive spending on domestic programs; more young people in Vietnam and fewer young people in the work force; and a rising price of oil, a key price factor in many products). In response, Nixon instituted price ceilings. NOTE: Price ceilings are not a conservative, free-market response to inflation. It is a response generally associated with the left-wing, in fact.
More specifically, blaming Ben Stein for the Nixon recession is foolish - Ben Stein was a speechwriter in the Nixon Administration, not an economic policy advisor.
I am holding out for the limited edition Devo iPod.
Whip it! Whip it good!
I would add to this a couple more:
The American Prospect, which says that, "Though Moore claims to have made a documentary, his examination of American gun culture presents viewers with a more heavily edited fiction than producer Brian Grazer's attempt to clean up Eminem. Whereas the rapper's movie reaches for the sort of truth mere facts cannot convey, Moore's film grabs viewers with the old demagogue's trick of using just as much factual information as is necessary to lead people toward false conclusions."
Additionally, the New York Times review was negative. The review is no longer available on their web site unless you pay to access their archives, but I saved an excerpt from it, "The slippery logic, tendentious grandstanding and outright demagoguery on display in 'Bowling for Columbine' should be enough to give pause to its most ardent partisans...though he seems to be hunting for a specific historical cause for events like Columbine, Mr. Moore, when it serves his purposes, is happy to generalize in the absence of empirical evidence and to make much of connections that seem spurious on close examination."
Neither of these, I'd like to point out, could be called right-wing. The New York Times is center-left, and the American Prospect is left-wing. They are hardly allies of the NRA.
Additionally, NPR, another organization that could hardly be called right-wing or a friend of the NRA, severely criticized Moore yesterday in its program On the Media. The lead-in to the report said:
""Armed with a rifle he got for opening a bank account, and shocking statistics like the ones you just heard, Moore had plenty of fodder. But still, he was not satisfied. To properly emphasize the point that our country is a veritable shooting gallery, Moore embellishes, grandstands, and ignores inconvenient facts. Fine, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, provocateurs gotta provoke. For the purposes of this story, a lack of countervailing viewpoints will not be faulted. The use of cliched, happy songs over images of war crimes, not once but twice, will be unremarked upon. As will the point that Michael Moore would have no career if he just called ahead for an appointment. This is a fact check, an accounting of distortions that would give pause to even the most enthusiastic fans of the movie."
Anyway, I don't know the answers to the gun violence question. Personally, I lean towards gun control, but am neither an expert nor speak with dogmatic certainty. However, I would point the original questioner the following routes:
First of all, do not trust Michael Moore's statistics. Moore makes a big deal out of the fact that Canada has as many guns as we do in the US, yet has a much lower crime rate. This is not really true. First of all, in Canada, there is 0.26 guns per capita. In the US, there is 0.62 guns per capita. Secondly, in Canada, there are much stricter gun licensing laws, particularly when it comes to personal handguns. As a result, 6.25% of Canada's guns are handguns - the kind of gun used overwhelmingly in gun violence. In America, 22.9% of guns are handguns. And as someone else noted in this thread, "Another interesting statistic is that in Canada's largest city, Toronto, it is estimated that 3 out of 4 hand guns involved in a crime are imported illegally from the US."
Additionally, I would suggest looking at the relationship between unintegrated minority groups and crime. American whites are twice as likely to be murdered than European whites - but American blacks are 14 times as likely to be murdered as European whites! Blacks, despite accounting for about 13% of the American population, account for 53% of Americans who are murdered. And there is a scale in the US - the more integrated an minority, the lower its crime rate. So Asians have a much lower crime rate than Hispanics, who have a lower crime rate than blacks.
The same pattern appears in Europe - the prisons are being filled with immigrants from Northern Africa, just like American prisons are being filled by African-Americans.
Please note that I am not saying that blacks or other minorities are inherently violent! I am merely saying that there is a natural sociological correlation between groups that are not integrated into society and groups that are more violent.
So, given this, let me propose an explanation. The difference in murder rates is due to a mix of three factors: culture, gun control policies, and immigration/social policies.
I do not know enough about the cultural explanation, but it would not surprise me if American culture were a factor.
Having easy access to guns and having far more guns than other countries is going to make a difference.
Immigration/Social Policies - America's crime rate has gone through a huge drop in the past 10 years, while Europe's has gone through a huge rise. It so happens that Europe is dealing with a large, unintegrated minority for the first time in centuries - and has done an awful job of it so far. Meanwhile, the integration of blacks and Hispanics into America, while far from complete, is progressing. I expect that we will see further drops in crime in the US, the more African-Americans are integrated into society.
But Canada has as high a percentage of immigrants as does the US. So what explains its lower crime rate? Perhaps they do a better job of integrating immigrants. And Canada does have a much more generous social welfare system. I would be very surprised if there were not a correlation between social welfare and crime.
So let's put it together. American whites have twice as high a murder rate as European whites. Couldn't much of that be attributable to the massively easier availability of handguns in the US?
On the other hand, American blacks have 7 times as high a murder rate as American whites. Couldn't much of that be attributable to America's history of slavery and Jim Crow, leading to a poverty-stricken, unintegrated black minority? Meanwhile, Canada has a much less racist history, and many fewer blacks - Canada's population is 2% black, of whom many are recent immigrants from the Caribbean, whereas America's population is 13% black, of whom most are the descendants of slaves.
Again, I am not saying that African-Americans are inherently violent. I am saying that African-Americans went through a terrible history that has made them poor and unintegrated into society. And without a good social welfare system like Canada's, some turn to crime.
I feel stupid having to ask this...but where did the "In Soviet Russia" joke get started? I've seen it in almost every thread I've read recently, but I can't remember seeing the first one - you know, the one that actually made sense in the context. :)
:)
Thanks to anyone who can enlighten me. One must keep up with Slashdot inside jokes, after all.
For generations we have all been fed this lie - the American work ethic, that says to go to work for someone ELSE and work HARD, 40, 50, 60 hours a week to get by.
What the hell are you talking about? First of all, the American ideal has never been work hard for someone else and work hard. The American dream (or myth, whatever you want) has always been about striking out on your own. The yeoman farmer, the 49er, the guy who drops out of Harvard to start his own small software business, etc.
Secondly, I'm getting weary of the idea that working hard is some kind of lie that has been foisted upon us. The fact is, until very recently, people simply had to work long hours to survive. And it wasn't just exploitation by aristocrats or an unfair system - it was an economic fact of life. Production wasn't efficient enough to allow for people to work fewer hours.
Now, in the past few decades, a few lucky countries have become efficient enough to allow people to work fewer hours (Japan, Europe, America, etc.). But even then, I would not count on it simply being "We're only working hard because of a lie we're being told." Yes, workers in France and Germany work fewer hours at better conditions than American workers do. But on the other hand, France and Germany's economies have been stagnant for the past decade, while America's has been dynamic. And that's not just the bubble - America's GDP growth rate last quarter was much higher than either Germany's or France's, and is predicted to be much higher for next year as well.
As our production methods get more efficient, we can make our choice between greater production and more hours off. Europe leans towards more hours off. America leans towards greater production. Simple as that.
Personally, I am comfortable with America's choice, because I think Europe (Britain excluded) is headed toward financial crisis, and will eventually be forced to switch towards a system more like America's anyway. I am also comfortable with America's choice because there are many things we have yet to achieve, that I would like to.
But indeed, one day we will have robots to do most of our labor for us, and we'll have genetic engineering, clean energy, and all the biotech advances we could ever want, and then I'll be ready to start making the trade for fewer hours. Because at that point our production will have become extremely efficient, and we'll have attained the things I want to see society achieve.
Not everyone has the skills to be a programmer either. Are you proposing that janitors be paid at the same wage as Unix sysadmins then?
Online publications however, just don't seem to represent the same tangible "substance" as a lump of dead tree does. I suspect this is one of the reasons that few online publications have successfully migrated to the subscription model....
:) But also I suspect it's because I'm getting a slow, steady stream of articles one way, and a whole bunch of articles all at once the other way. It's like the difference between turning up the heat on the frog slowly and turning it up all the way at once.
We all *know* the value is in the information -- but somewhere, deep inside our heads, we're thinking "how can something that we can't touch, feel or taste be of any value?"
This is an interesting idea, and I think you may be onto something. However, for me, I think the content feels less substantial not because it is online, but because it comes out daily. Seriously. I read the National Review, Slate, the free stuff on Salon, and the Economist daily online. I read the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the Atlantic Monthly when they arrive in the mail.
Now, the latter feel more substantial to me. Partly, it's because they are - they're better magazines than the former.
Now, the same doesn't apply for why I prefer paper newspapers to online newspapers. In that case, it is because I can't read it while I'm eating breakfast (no laptop) and because I read much less when I read online - when I go from front to back of a print newspaper I will read articles that I would never think of looking for on a web site. I.e., I read the Metro section in the print newspaper, I do not online, because I never think that there will be something interesting in there.
Actually, I am very much anticipating the Battle of Helm's Deep. Let me give you my good reason, and then my bad reason.
:)
The good reason is that, if I recall correctly (and I'm not positive I do), the three major battles in the Lord of the Rings are different: the Battle of Helm's Deep is about holding on with no reinforcements coming, the battle at Minas Tirith is heavy on Nazgul and is about holding out til reinforcements come, and the final battle is about dying valiantly in an effort to delay Sauron until Frodo can destroy the ring. So they do have different feels.
Anyway, the bad reason for why I am looking forward to the Battle of Helm's Deep is that I didn't really like the first LoTR movie that much. I was a huge fan of the books when I was younger (I read them, and the Silmarillion, dozens of times), but I felt that the movie lacked the sense of mystery and sadness (at the passing of the great ages of magic and elves) that the books had. To me, the magic of the written word could not be translated into the screen. I could imagine Gandalf somehow becoming more imposing, but seeing it in the movie seemed like a parlor trick rather than magic. Similarly, I could imagine Galadriel being somehow different and magical, but seeing her with a glow about her is just...too straightforward.
That being said, the one thing I loved about the movie was how beautiful it was. The scenes in that movie were astounding. And that's why I'm looking forward to the Battle of Helm's Deep.
I'm a molecular biologist myself, so as a rule I'm all for nanotechnology. However, the fact that the libertarian nutjob who wrote the PRI article support unfettered research makes me think regulation must be needed. He thinks the constitution guarantees the right to overthrow the government through armed struggle.
Now, I am pretty far from a libertarian - in fact, I hate the fact that Slashdot message boards often have a very libertarian slant. However, that being said, Glenn Reynolds is far from a libertarian nut job. I've been reading his blog, Instapundit, for a while now, and he's not a crazy by any means. As for his paper, your summary of it makes it sound ridiculous, when in fact it is not. Simply put, he is arguing that the people's right to guns was intended by the crafters of the constitution as a way for the people to be able to maintain their liberty against an oppressive government by force if it was necessary. Given that Jefferson famously said that the tree of liberty needed to be watered by the blood of revolution every twenty years, it is not crazy to argue that the founding fathers intended for people to have funs so that they could overthrow a government that attempted to take away their freedom.
It may not be correct, but it's not an illogical argument. And Reynolds is not a nutjob, by any means.
If no movies make profit, then how do studios make profit? Surely they must, or you'd hear about it on financial news etc.
Well, I totally agree that Spiderman obviously must have made a profit, or they wouldn't be making a sequel (and an X-Men sequel, and a Hulk movie, and a new Superman movie). However, in answer to your larger question - movie studios are actually not very profitable. I read an article about this a couple years back, and basically buying a movie studio is a horrible investment. The dynamics of the industry (movies costing so much to make, basically) mean that the studios themselves are not a good ROI. Yet people invest in them for one of two reasons:
1) The glamour. People aren't always rational economic actors, or at the very least, you have to take into account that people may seek more tha money. Yes, perhaps I could make 6% profit investing in bonds, but maybe I'd rather have 3% profit but hang out with movie stars/sleep with actresses all the time.
2) Media conglomerates believe that somehow, "synergy" will eventually make the movie studios pay off. Yes, this movie studio isn't a good investment as a standalone, but maybe if I tie my magazines, TV channels, pay per view channels, and retail stores together I can make it profitable.
Going to an anti-anything rally?
:)
If you're really so concerned about your privacy, and keeping the government from knowing you oppose its policies, maybe you should stop showing up to rallies. I mean, it's one to thing to say that you're afraid that if the government can spy on you, they'll be able to know your closely-guarded political beliefs, or your secret conspiratorial meetings. But hey, if you're walking down Pennsylvania Avenue with a big sign that says "No to war with Iraq," chances are the government can figure out that you're against going to war with Iraq, even without Big Brother.
What makes me think Gateway is dying? Simply put, the fact that the only reason to buy Gateway vs. buying another brand of PC is their direct model and their marketing. And Dell has been beating them on both counts. Gateway has been bleeding money, while Dell has twice as much revenue and is profitable. Dell is opening new direct sale mini-stores while Gateway has been closing many Gateway stores. As for whose marketing is more successful, well, CNN covered it as one of its top stories when it leaked that Dell was thinking of retiring Steven. The only things I've ever heard about Gateway's advertising is people making fun of the talking cow for being stupid.
As for whether marketing is important in computers, I think you underestimate its importance. If marketing were unimportant in computers in general, then we'd all be using Amigas today, or perhaps Macintoshes, or BeOS. And if marketing were unimportant in the PC world, then more users would buy white box PCs, since as you put it, "People compare the (meaningless) numbers, and come up with some not entirely usefull $/MHz comparison, and then buy whatever seems best to them." On $/MHz, white box retailers don't have marketing costs and thus normally win that comparison.
But users are swayed to a great degree by marketing. And for many people, when they think of buying a PC today, they think of Dell first. And if Dell's more efficient business model can push a couple more competitors out of business, it could come to the point where when people think of buying a PC, when the average user thinks of buying a PC, he'll think of Dell, IBM, or HP (when the rich user thinks of buying a computer, he'll think of Apple or Sony, the upscale computer brands). And in that circumstance, you can easily see how it makes sense for Dell to sell peripherals too.
Look at it this way: in the PC market in the US, there are just a few big manufacturers. But IBM loses money on its PC line, so that's only going to continue as long as IBM feels that loss creates a greater profit for its consulting business down the line. HP and Compaq just merged, so those two competitors just become one, and Dell has been stealing market share from them anyway. Gateway is slowly dying. Apple is not a real threat. Sony is only one doing decently.
Dell's long term strategy is to outprice as many of their competitors as they can for a long time, until they take a huge market share and push those competitors out of the market. And at that point, many businesses and consumers would look to Dell as their one place to get all their computer needs. If that happens - with competition significantly limited - Dell can raise their prices, not just on PCs, but on other products too - like PDAs and printers, the two new markets they are entering in 2003.
So, to sum, Dell's strategy is two-pronged:
Gain market share/push competitors out of the PC market so that eventually they can raise prices (profit margins).
Attack every aspect of the PC business, with the idea that once you become the major player in the PC business, people will prefer to buy all products from you, not just their PCs from you and their PDA from vendor 2 and their printers from vendor 3.
It's a smart strategy. Dell's been run very, very well so far, I wouldn't bet against them.
Cancer is one of those "shit happens" things about life. Our bodies aren't perfect, cancer is really a product of this fact.
I am not a biologist, so I'm just wondering out loud here, but maybe someone can answer this for me:
I presume that cancer is often just one of those "shit happens" things about life. That eventually your body will break down and do something it shouldn't do - like create a malignant tumor. But since we know that smoking leads to much higher incidences of cancer, do we know how much general environmental pollution leads to cancer? I read a couple years ago that certain cancer rates had increased in the US quite a lot during the past thirty years. Now, one possibility is that people aren't dying young of infections any more, so instead they're dying old of cancer. But another thought that crossed my mind is that simply this is what happens when a generation that has grown up with lots of smog, polluted rivers, etc., grows up. And that likewise, as we lower pollution, we'll see cancer rates decline again.
Therefore, we would expect to see cancer rates increase in China and India soon, but decline in the Western world as it cleans itself up.
Anyway, just wondering if someone can fill me in on how much scientists attribute cancer development to environmental pollution. Thanks!
The other reason nobody considers "good food, lots of greens, no meat, etc." as a cure for cancer is because it is not a cure for cancer!
I see articles all the time about how eating this (broccoli, certain types of fish, etc.) or doing this (exercising, meditation, etc.) will cure, or at least lower significantly your chance of dying of cancer. And believe me, there are plenty of cancer patients and cancer clinics out there that are trying alternative methods, either for patients who don't trust drugs or who are already past help by standard treatments, whatever.
But the fact is, none of them work. If I found out tomorrow that eating vegetables was all it took to not get cancer, I would become a vegetarian. But you know what? There are plenty of vegetarians out there who have cancer.
Now, it is possible that various lifestyle choices can impact your odds of getting cancer/surviving cancer - that is very reasonable to believe. Of course, no one would be surrpised if people with balanced diets who exercised a lot survive cancer more often. But there is no simple cure for cancer like "just eat cabbage." To think that there is - and that it's just those evil public and private research institutions keeping such a cure private because they want to keep their jobs - is foolish paranoia.
Apple has very little in the way of new products to announce for a while. Sure, there will be a PowerBook revamp soon, but let's face it, until a new PowerPC chip comes out, Apple basically has nothing that exciting to introduce. Sure, there'll be a new iApp or two, maybe some bigger monitors, or minor speed increases in existing lines, but that's hardly a very big deal.
People make such a big deal out of keynotes since Jobs came back that when there isn't anything big to introduce, there is a decent amount of bitterness in the Mac community. Jobs does not want to be in the position of creating bitterness by giving more keynotes with nothing to introduce.
Jobs has been trying to break the connection of product announcements with keynote speeches anyway. When everyone expects there to be big introductions at the keynote, people stop buying Macs before the keynotes, in case a product line is refreshed. This makes it hard for Apple to clear out inventory - why buy an iMac in June if you think a new one will be introduced in July?
MacWorld shows may no longer be as important as they used to be, anyway. Most hard-core Mac users - the kind who would pay for a ticket to the keynote, or pay to travel to New York/Boston - have Internet access and read MacCentral, MacRumors, etc. So it's not like Apple needs the convention to reach these people. Besides, this audience is basically loyal to Apple regardless of what Apple does. On the other hand, Apple does want very badly to attract new users - the switchers. The money spent attending MacWorlds may be better spent on more TV ads targetting PC users.
Yes, democracy works better than dictatorship at governing a country. But that hardly proves your implication that democracy works better than dictatorship in creating good software design. I mean, by that logic, the Oakland As would be a better team if instead of letting Billy Beane make all the personnel decisions, they let fans vote on all decisions - thereby bringing more people into the decisionmaking process and avoiding Beane "getting stuck into one fixed way of thinking."
It gets harder to learn as you get older. 10 years old absorb new concepts much more quickly than 50 year olds. There is a biological reason for this - it is not just that "old people are stubborn." Or do you think that old people are also forgetful because they're too lazy to remember?
Oh yes, very hollow definition of success. But then again, if you offered me a choice between success as in $40 billion, and success as in being part of the Open/Free source bandwagon, to be honest, I'd take the $40 billion. And that's pretty much the choice most people would make too.
Will fighting Open/Free source lead to failure? I happen to believe that eventually open software will prove more popular than Microsoft's offerings - not because they're open, but because they're cheaper. On the other hand, if Microsoft stopped fighting Open/Free source today, they lose out on all the profits they could generate until that day of failure comes. I mean, I think MS could keep selling Windows and Office, etc. for years and make huge bucks off it. Why stop now?
Repeat after me: duel between world leaders != debate.
Duels - bad.
Debate - good.
Josh
I've read that customer focus is really the key to his success, but how does actively fighting off Open/Free source help his customers? Clearly it doesn't, so there must be another motivater (control).
No, the motivater isn't control, it's success. Customer focus may be the key to his success, but that makes customer focus the means, and success (measured in money) the end. If the means - customer focus - started to lead to the end of everyone using Open/Free software, as you suggest, then suddenly those means are leading to failure for Microsoft (as measured in money) not success.
Therefore, he changes the means to whatever will succeed in bringing him success.
This makes no sense. As another poster points out a couple comments down, MSNBC has had plenty of nice coverage of Linux. As you point out, CNN featured a few articles on Linux ("never really saw the light of day" - I'm not sure what that means, since they were on the site). The New York Times recently had a positive editorial about Linux and has covered Linux many times in the business section. Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek have covered Linux, often in a positive manner about how it can save the enterprise money.
Yes, sometimes the articles are not great, but tech journalism is often not up to our standards as Slashdot geeks. But that doesn't mean that the other news outlets don't "have the balls to cover linux in a positive manner."
I really don't think this is a fair comparison. I'm too tired to explain myself now :-), but while I too think that the Simpsons has been crap since season 8, I don't think that the current crap Simpsons is anything like the Family Guy. I loved the Simpsons seasons 3-7, and I loved the Family Guy, and I hate the current Simpsons.
:)
Just my two very lame cents.
What the heck? How did this get modded up? There are a lot of companies coming out with anti-depression drugs - ever heard of prozac? The whole premise of the book Prozac Nation is that we are overmedicating and overdiagnosing depression. Anti-depressants is a very lucrative field for drug companies. As for cancer drugs, there has been a huge amount of research into cancer over the past 30 years (since the Nixon administration) and regrettably little in the way of results. This is not for lack of trying - it's just that cancer is a bear of a problem.
There's no conspiracy causing a lack of anti-depressants and cancer-fighting drugs. The fact simply is that the brain is extremely complex, and cancer is also extremely complex.
There is no way the Mac has 15-20% market share, or that Macs make up 15-20% of the number of computers accessing the Internet. Why? First of all, no browser stats pages (like Google's Zeitgeist) show Mac browsers at any more than 5% of the hits. Secondly, Mac sales have been stuck at 3-4% market share for at least 6 years. Even if Mac users use their Macs longer than PCs (and this is a very debatable point, given that many Mac users are being forced to buy new machines to use OS X, while the trend in the PC market is that users find that 3 year old machines are still plenty fast unless they are gamers), it is still hard to believe that Macs stay in use so much longer than it turns 3% sales into 15% browser share.
I am currently a PC user, but I am a former Amiga and Mac user. I am not trying to flame the Mac - I would consider buying a Mac for my next computer - but claiming 15-20% market share is just wrong.