The point that you keep missing - I still don't know if that's deliberate ignorance or not - is that the AC was referring to the fact that without the NHS, he wouldn't have ACCESS to doctors. Something that is very different from doctors not existing, but that has the same impact for him.
I'm sure the next thing you're going to trot out is that it's his own fault that without the NHS, he wouldn't have had the money for a doctor. I mean, infants should be personally responsible for their health care, right? And if they aren't, they should definitely pay for the sins of their clearly worthless parents.
Shareholders and board don't do anything in a corp. Executives might be known, but they have minions to blame stuff on. Ever heard of being invisible in a group? It's not that you're actually invisible, it's just that it becomes exponentially harder to identify who is responsible for what as the group grows.
You present a false dichotomy AND a strawman. In one sentence. Clever. To spell it out for you: Doctors existing does not imply access to doctors. NHS doctors existing does imply access.
99% all solutions for pollution in existence today have come from the labor of private individuals,
Citation needed.
Are you suggesting that the government has a "magic" power plant does not pollute that private industry is incapable of using?
Strawman.
What is this thing that the government has that you think private industry is incapable of possessing?
Rhetorical question, based on complete ignorance of the reason behind government.
The strictest socialist government
Citation needed that that is China (on multiple levels).
in the world is also the world's worst polluter,
Citation needed.
while most free market companies promote their 'green initiatives' without force from the government.
Citation needed.
Because they think it will help promote their public image which will result in more profit.
Citation needed.
The solution to smog did not jettison as a projectile from a government gun, but though talented engineers in private companies.
Citation needed.
At least with private industry polluting there is recourse if their actions have harmed you.
Citation needed.
Can you say the same about the government?
Rhetorical question, based on complete ignorance of how government works.
Wow, that was fun. You made every factual statement up out of whole cloth, and are ignorant of the most basic premises behind government AND private enterprise.
I'm sad to say, but you're a shining example of what passes for a Libertarian in the US: Ignorant and full of strawmen and rhetoric based on ignorance.
Spotify, which is yet another streaming music service.
They're being sued the original streaming service, right? The one that had the original idea, original implementation, based on never-before seen algorithms, data structures and math? Right?
Hulu,
See above.
Rovio,
See above.
Come up with something new, and you have far fewer patent problems.
Wrong. Come up with something new, and hope that you have deeper pockets than anyone threatened by your patent.
I have four issued software patents myself, all in areas where the existing technology didn't work but mine did.
Unless you used new math, you copied many, many ideas while creating your software. The only reason no one has sued you over those patents is because they're either not used, not in areas anyone cares about, or no one cares that you have the patents.
The Economist, Public Radio... we might be reaching a tipping point regarding patent trolls. When CNBC starts covering the idiocy of patent trolls, I'll know that the end of the insanity is near.
In other words, there needs to be the option to have your nickname default to be the visible "name" of your account. Problem solved. I have no idea why Google isn't going that route.
But we aren't speaking of a particular behavior or process. We're speaking of Earth and our societies on it. Those can change (and are changing) without undue hardship or drama.
Of course. If we assume that things will change without undue hardship or drama and that everything will be solved without issues, of course there won't be a problem. You might want to look up the begging the question fallacy, or assuming the outcome.
Solar power and energy storage doesn't exist?
You clearly don't understand the issue with baseline power. Please come back when you do.
Every time you employ a third party, you are paying the amount that they have to charge to a) do the job you want, b) do lots of other jobs for other people, c) hiring people to do all those jobs permanently, pay pensions, h&s, etc. and d) make a profit and expand their own business. Do it yourself, and you save all of d) and quite a bit of the others to get exactly what you want.
Read up on opportunity cost and comparative advantage. I.e., Econ 101 stuff. Classic example: you're a lawyer, and can type 100 words a minute. Your secretary can type only 60 words a minute. Does that mean you should fire your secretary and type up your own memos, calendar appointments and follow-up letters? Of course not, because doing secretary work costs you the money you could make doing lawyer work in that time, and only saves you the cost of a secretary.
Employing third parties is the proper way to growth. Not employing third parties is the sign of a control freak at the helm and a company in a death spiral.
But it is a simple matter of changing relevant infrastructure and institutional behavior so that the US government spends less.
Requiring changing relevant infrastructure and institutional behavior is the definition of a behavior/process being unsustainable.
Why should we assume otherwise? There's a thousand watts per square meter of sunshine which is many orders of magnitude more than humanity needs to sustain itself.
Let me overstate your assumption: overpopulation is not a problem because we'll just invent a warp drive and colonize other planets. You're assuming the existence of something that doesn't exist (large scale, cost-efficient solar power generation able to generate 100% of baseload requirements) to declare something to not be a problem.
That is assuming that the non-renewable resources we're using up will be 100% replaced at some point in the future by renewable resources. Furthermore, it also assumes that the non-recyclable output we're producing will not change the carrying capacity of the earth in the future, and that the recyclable output we're producing does not overwhelm the recycling capacity of current systems. In other words, you're assuming a point on a development curve to be a stable state.
All three points are either wrong or currently unknown. As a result, it is not possible to say that the current earth is an example of a planet with the carrying capacity of 7 billion humans. To make the analogy to a current event: just because the US economy is currently capable of supporting the budget deficit doesn't mean that it can support it indefinitely.
Even worse than regulation, though, is the utter lack of capital to invest in start-ups and small businesses.
Judging by the insane amount of money being poured into social companies, I'd say that the problem is not the lack of capital, but the lack of vision of most VCs. Most VCs just run after the latest flavor of the month ($1.3 billion valuation for AirBnB? really??), and most definitely shy away from industries they don't understand. Since a lot of VCs are clustered in Silicon Valley, guess what gets funded. It certainly isn't steampunk dragons. Unless, of course, they're delivered over the Internet.
I'm glad someone else heard that show. I'm thinking that if the problem of patent trolling has reached the rather staid waves of public radio, there's a chance that it might gain some serious traction in the broader population.
Because ID is one of the few concepts being presented as science that is not and can never fall under science. Furthermore, every single proponent of ID is either ignorant of the facts they are advancing, or actively lying about them.
It calls into question his credibility, which means that I will not read his claims carefully and check all his footnotes. Instead, I'll wait for someone more serious to "blow a gaping hole" into global warming models.
I really wish the people at the Heartland Institute are right. I really do. I'd hate to witness major migrations because farming conditions dramatically change across the globe. But I also really, really wish they'd drop the sensational language (alarmist models, etc), because I'd able to actually take them seriously. Not to mention that I also would like to see them actually properly quote the papers they reference. For example, the abstract in this particular paper is actually far less strong than what the venerable James Taylor says.
Abstract: "The sensitivity of the climate system to an imposed radiative imbalance remains the largest source of uncertainty in projections of future anthropogenic climate change. Here we present further evidence that this uncertainty from an observational perspective is largely due to the masking of the radiative feedback signal by internal radiative forcing, probably due to natural cloud variations. That these internal radiative forcings exist and likely corrupt feedback diagnosis is demonstrated with lag regression analysis of satellite and coupled climate model data, interpreted with a simple forcing-feedback model. While the satellite-based metrics for the period 2000–2010 depart substantially in the direction of lower climate sensitivity from those similarly computed from coupled climate models, we find that, with traditional methods, it is not possible to accurately quantify this discrepancy in terms of the feedbacks which determine climate sensitivity. It is concluded that atmospheric feedback diagnosis of the climate system remains an unsolved problem, due primarily to the inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in satellite radiative budget observations. "
James Taylor: "New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism"
Then please move to Cyprus. Or are you saying that you like all the social stability and safety that the Swiss regulations buy you? Like, for example, the various minimum wage agreements hashed out between trade unions and employers in various sectors of the economy, and enforced by the government?
Number 1, just moving taxes to the state level (or even the county/city level) is not going to fix the budget problem. It just means someone else is responsible for it. Number 2, a significant number of states manage to have a balanced budget only because of help from the federal government for infrastructure, health care, education and security. Increasing their budgets while reducing their revenue is going to make the problem worse. Number 3, there is the implicit assumption here that a more local government is more accountable and more transparent, which is nonsense. That is a feature of the people who are in government, not of how many people vote for each representant. Number 4, local governments are actually at higher risk to be inefficient, because now it only takes a few hundred morons to band together to ruin everything. Granted, you also have a higher chance of having an effectively run government, just because you have a small enclave of smart, responsible people working together for the greater common good. But it certainly isn't a guarantee that smaller is better.
Finally, the mantra that government should be more local. How much more local should be? You mention that you have 60 times more influence at the city level than at the county level. Shouldn't the city then get the majority of your taxes? But how do you then build something like the Hoover dam? Pursue criminals across city lines? Well, you could have cities in various counties band together until they get enough money to build something like a dam, or set up a unified police force that that agrees to share information, tools and prosecutions... and now you're right back where you started off: moving things up government chain, because there are huge economies of scale that can't be accessed by city governments.
Not to mention: if you move the government power to small entities like city or even state governments, how do you deal with corporations whose profits exceed the state's revenue and completely dwarf that of county or city governments?
Yes, government isn't always better when it's bigger. But it also certainly isn't always better when it's smaller. The real problem is that the devil is in the detail, and a lot of people can't or refuse to understand that. Then we get shit like some party ideologues holding America's AAA credit rating hostage in order to advance their sophomoric ideas.
The point you're missing is that $40 Billion doesn't even buy you the government of a small state like Norway or Belgium. It buys you the government of a state like Vietnam. And putting things at the state level doesn't mean squat. Who suddenly pays for the much larger state budget? The same taxpayer who was paying the federal government. Except now, you're doing it with less economies of scale and less standardization.
That's a great idea to turn the US into a Banana Republic.
Ah, the classic libertarian/randian fallacy: that everything you achieve in life is 100% due to your own actions, and no one else's. If that were truly the case, you could live like a king in the various places in the world that lack anything like a central government. I'm still waiting for you to move to any one of them and fulfill your dream (hint: Switzerland is not it. It's pretty much the opposite of it).
Slashdot Mirror
Ignorant AND stupid. Libertarian indeed.
The point that you keep missing - I still don't know if that's deliberate ignorance or not - is that the AC was referring to the fact that without the NHS, he wouldn't have ACCESS to doctors. Something that is very different from doctors not existing, but that has the same impact for him.
I'm sure the next thing you're going to trot out is that it's his own fault that without the NHS, he wouldn't have had the money for a doctor. I mean, infants should be personally responsible for their health care, right? And if they aren't, they should definitely pay for the sins of their clearly worthless parents.
Libertarians, I swear.
Shareholders and board don't do anything in a corp. Executives might be known, but they have minions to blame stuff on. Ever heard of being invisible in a group? It's not that you're actually invisible, it's just that it becomes exponentially harder to identify who is responsible for what as the group grows.
You present a false dichotomy AND a strawman. In one sentence. Clever. To spell it out for you: Doctors existing does not imply access to doctors. NHS doctors existing does imply access.
99% all solutions for pollution in existence today have come from the labor of private individuals,
Citation needed.
Are you suggesting that the government has a "magic" power plant does not pollute that private industry is incapable of using?
Strawman.
What is this thing that the government has that you think private industry is incapable of possessing?
Rhetorical question, based on complete ignorance of the reason behind government.
The strictest socialist government
Citation needed that that is China (on multiple levels).
in the world is also the world's worst polluter,
Citation needed.
while most free market companies promote their 'green initiatives' without force from the government.
Citation needed.
Because they think it will help promote their public image which will result in more profit.
Citation needed.
The solution to smog did not jettison as a projectile from a government gun, but though talented engineers in private companies.
Citation needed.
At least with private industry polluting there is recourse if their actions have harmed you.
Citation needed.
Can you say the same about the government?
Rhetorical question, based on complete ignorance of how government works.
Wow, that was fun. You made every factual statement up out of whole cloth, and are ignorant of the most basic premises behind government AND private enterprise.
I'm sad to say, but you're a shining example of what passes for a Libertarian in the US: Ignorant and full of strawmen and rhetoric based on ignorance.
Spotify, which is yet another streaming music service.
They're being sued the original streaming service, right? The one that had the original idea, original implementation, based on never-before seen algorithms, data structures and math? Right?
Hulu,
See above.
Rovio,
See above.
Come up with something new, and you have far fewer patent problems.
Wrong. Come up with something new, and hope that you have deeper pockets than anyone threatened by your patent.
I have four issued software patents myself, all in areas where the existing technology didn't work but mine did.
Unless you used new math, you copied many, many ideas while creating your software. The only reason no one has sued you over those patents is because they're either not used, not in areas anyone cares about, or no one cares that you have the patents.
The Economist, Public Radio... we might be reaching a tipping point regarding patent trolls. When CNBC starts covering the idiocy of patent trolls, I'll know that the end of the insanity is near.
In other words, there needs to be the option to have your nickname default to be the visible "name" of your account. Problem solved. I have no idea why Google isn't going that route.
But we aren't speaking of a particular behavior or process. We're speaking of Earth and our societies on it. Those can change (and are changing) without undue hardship or drama.
Of course. If we assume that things will change without undue hardship or drama and that everything will be solved without issues, of course there won't be a problem. You might want to look up the begging the question fallacy, or assuming the outcome.
Solar power and energy storage doesn't exist?
You clearly don't understand the issue with baseline power. Please come back when you do.
Every time you employ a third party, you are paying the amount that they have to charge to a) do the job you want, b) do lots of other jobs for other people, c) hiring people to do all those jobs permanently, pay pensions, h&s, etc. and d) make a profit and expand their own business. Do it yourself, and you save all of d) and quite a bit of the others to get exactly what you want.
Read up on opportunity cost and comparative advantage. I.e., Econ 101 stuff. Classic example: you're a lawyer, and can type 100 words a minute. Your secretary can type only 60 words a minute. Does that mean you should fire your secretary and type up your own memos, calendar appointments and follow-up letters? Of course not, because doing secretary work costs you the money you could make doing lawyer work in that time, and only saves you the cost of a secretary.
Employing third parties is the proper way to growth. Not employing third parties is the sign of a control freak at the helm and a company in a death spiral.
But it is a simple matter of changing relevant infrastructure and institutional behavior so that the US government spends less.
Requiring changing relevant infrastructure and institutional behavior is the definition of a behavior/process being unsustainable.
Why should we assume otherwise? There's a thousand watts per square meter of sunshine which is many orders of magnitude more than humanity needs to sustain itself.
Let me overstate your assumption: overpopulation is not a problem because we'll just invent a warp drive and colonize other planets. You're assuming the existence of something that doesn't exist (large scale, cost-efficient solar power generation able to generate 100% of baseload requirements) to declare something to not be a problem.
That is assuming that the non-renewable resources we're using up will be 100% replaced at some point in the future by renewable resources. Furthermore, it also assumes that the non-recyclable output we're producing will not change the carrying capacity of the earth in the future, and that the recyclable output we're producing does not overwhelm the recycling capacity of current systems. In other words, you're assuming a point on a development curve to be a stable state.
All three points are either wrong or currently unknown. As a result, it is not possible to say that the current earth is an example of a planet with the carrying capacity of 7 billion humans. To make the analogy to a current event: just because the US economy is currently capable of supporting the budget deficit doesn't mean that it can support it indefinitely.
Even worse than regulation, though, is the utter lack of capital to invest in start-ups and small businesses.
Judging by the insane amount of money being poured into social companies, I'd say that the problem is not the lack of capital, but the lack of vision of most VCs. Most VCs just run after the latest flavor of the month ($1.3 billion valuation for AirBnB? really??), and most definitely shy away from industries they don't understand. Since a lot of VCs are clustered in Silicon Valley, guess what gets funded. It certainly isn't steampunk dragons. Unless, of course, they're delivered over the Internet.
You're mistaking a point on a curve for a stable state.
Remember: whether there exists a real patent that actually does predate whatever Google is doing with WebM has no bearing on whether lawsuits will be filed. See also http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack.
Because for some reason, people hate the gas tax even more than CAFE standards. I never understand why.
I'm glad someone else heard that show. I'm thinking that if the problem of patent trolling has reached the rather staid waves of public radio, there's a chance that it might gain some serious traction in the broader population.
Since even the paper says the exact opposite of what the Heartland fundie says, can I then assume that you believe everything you actually said?
Because ID is one of the few concepts being presented as science that is not and can never fall under science. Furthermore, every single proponent of ID is either ignorant of the facts they are advancing, or actively lying about them.
It calls into question his credibility, which means that I will not read his claims carefully and check all his footnotes. Instead, I'll wait for someone more serious to "blow a gaping hole" into global warming models.
I really wish the people at the Heartland Institute are right. I really do. I'd hate to witness major migrations because farming conditions dramatically change across the globe. But I also really, really wish they'd drop the sensational language (alarmist models, etc), because I'd able to actually take them seriously. Not to mention that I also would like to see them actually properly quote the papers they reference. For example, the abstract in this particular paper is actually far less strong than what the venerable James Taylor says.
Abstract:
"The sensitivity of the climate system to an imposed radiative imbalance remains
the largest source of uncertainty in projections of future anthropogenic climate change.
Here we present further evidence that this uncertainty from an observational perspective is
largely due to the masking of the radiative feedback signal by internal radiative forcing,
probably due to natural cloud variations. That these internal radiative forcings exist and
likely corrupt feedback diagnosis is demonstrated with lag regression analysis of satellite
and coupled climate model data, interpreted with a simple forcing-feedback model. While
the satellite-based metrics for the period 2000–2010 depart substantially in the direction of
lower climate sensitivity from those similarly computed from coupled climate models, we
find that, with traditional methods, it is not possible to accurately quantify this discrepancy
in terms of the feedbacks which determine climate sensitivity. It is concluded that
atmospheric feedback diagnosis of the climate system remains an unsolved problem, due
primarily to the inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in
satellite radiative budget observations. "
James Taylor: "New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism"
Go fuck yourself with a chainsaw, James Taylor.
A sociopath, or anti-social person, is one who would demand that others contribute to one's benefit through the use of violence.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Then please move to Cyprus. Or are you saying that you like all the social stability and safety that the Swiss regulations buy you? Like, for example, the various minimum wage agreements hashed out between trade unions and employers in various sectors of the economy, and enforced by the government?
What he's saying is most taxes should be local.
But should it, really? And how local is local?
Number 1, just moving taxes to the state level (or even the county/city level) is not going to fix the budget problem. It just means someone else is responsible for it. Number 2, a significant number of states manage to have a balanced budget only because of help from the federal government for infrastructure, health care, education and security. Increasing their budgets while reducing their revenue is going to make the problem worse. Number 3, there is the implicit assumption here that a more local government is more accountable and more transparent, which is nonsense. That is a feature of the people who are in government, not of how many people vote for each representant. Number 4, local governments are actually at higher risk to be inefficient, because now it only takes a few hundred morons to band together to ruin everything. Granted, you also have a higher chance of having an effectively run government, just because you have a small enclave of smart, responsible people working together for the greater common good. But it certainly isn't a guarantee that smaller is better.
Finally, the mantra that government should be more local. How much more local should be? You mention that you have 60 times more influence at the city level than at the county level. Shouldn't the city then get the majority of your taxes? But how do you then build something like the Hoover dam? Pursue criminals across city lines? Well, you could have cities in various counties band together until they get enough money to build something like a dam, or set up a unified police force that that agrees to share information, tools and prosecutions... and now you're right back where you started off: moving things up government chain, because there are huge economies of scale that can't be accessed by city governments.
Not to mention: if you move the government power to small entities like city or even state governments, how do you deal with corporations whose profits exceed the state's revenue and completely dwarf that of county or city governments?
Yes, government isn't always better when it's bigger. But it also certainly isn't always better when it's smaller. The real problem is that the devil is in the detail, and a lot of people can't or refuse to understand that. Then we get shit like some party ideologues holding America's AAA credit rating hostage in order to advance their sophomoric ideas.
The point you're missing is that $40 Billion doesn't even buy you the government of a small state like Norway or Belgium. It buys you the government of a state like Vietnam. And putting things at the state level doesn't mean squat. Who suddenly pays for the much larger state budget? The same taxpayer who was paying the federal government. Except now, you're doing it with less economies of scale and less standardization.
That's a great idea to turn the US into a Banana Republic.
I earn mine, earn yours
Ah, the classic libertarian/randian fallacy: that everything you achieve in life is 100% due to your own actions, and no one else's. If that were truly the case, you could live like a king in the various places in the world that lack anything like a central government. I'm still waiting for you to move to any one of them and fulfill your dream (hint: Switzerland is not it. It's pretty much the opposite of it).
And yet, you voted with your feet to go to Switzerland, land of regulation and regulation-loving people. Again, please don't vote.