And nowhere does it say in the Constitution how much money should be spent on defense. The constitutional requirement would be met if a single dollar in taxes would be collected, and a single person would be paid a dollar to stand guard somewhere on a border. Weird how these arguments work, isn't it? Once you go beyond satisfying the letter of the law, you immediately get into a grey area where Planned Parenthood is covered by life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and buying GM is covered by regulating commerce.
The government's role is defined by the incredibly flexible and badly defined human language. The constitution means exactly what you and I want it to mean. Welcome to a democracy (and no, a republic is a superset of democracy, not something different).
Just as long as I get to control who and where every single of my dollars go. First item on the board: you're not getting a single of my pennies, not even indirectly.
See how that works? The reason that I don't pay more than my required share is free-loaders like you, who are happy to take everyone's money, but aren't willing to contribute.
Feel free to point out where I went wrong, including where my summary assessment of the quoted statement is incorrect. Unless, of course, you were aiming to be the definition of irony...
I rarely pull out the corporate shill card, but I'm pretty sure you neatly fit the category: someone who supports a corporate benefit that directly conflicts with the benefit of society in general - bonus if the UID is near 2M. Let me explain to you why I think that, and it is primarily because you ask a lot of leading questions where your hoped for answer is in conflict with reality.
The engines that brought us basically all music from the 1950s until today are going away, and there isn't really any replacement.
Wrong. Those engines were radio and pressed media. They didn't go away, they were replaced by a better distribution medium: the Internet.
Your comments about publicly supported music ring true in the jazz and classical genres. I doubt if we're going to see subsidies to support music in other areas because there are no education bodies with an interest in that.
Wrong. The most common education bodies teach guitar (local music shops), and the big music departments cover everything from medieval string music to jazz to grunge rock to avant-guarde atonal music. The educational support is broad and deep, as is the demand for music. The only place where demand is narrow and shallow is in the big record labels. If it doesn't fit the Justin Bieber/Britney Spears template, it gets buried.
Another thing is, even if (according to another poster) I own a computer so I should be able to produce music at just as high quality as anyone has ever produced, if I'm burning CD-Rs and handing them out at shows for $5, what does that really do for music in our cultural consciousness?
And this is why they teach you to always answer your rhetorical questions, just in case someone doesn't follow your lead. I'll tell you what it does for our cultural consciousness: it enriches it. If the record is good, I'll pass it to my friends. Hey, listen to this! This guy/girl rocks. They'll pass it around. They'll buy the next record, evangelize it as well, go to shows - the whole nine yards. If they don't like it, it quietly dies. Will that person make billions from that one record? Probably not - and there is no reason that anyone should make billions from a one time activity.
Is an album great if no one ever hears it?
Let me turn the question around: in the age of instant world-wide distribution, is an album bad if no one wants to hear it or distribute it? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. Otherwise, it would get distributed.
Perhaps, but what has it done for us? What has it done for us versus what could have been done?
This means that your next questions have been answered already as well: it's completely irrelevant what could have happened, because a lot of people decided not to move the record into our general cultural consciousness. That's the definition of an item not being culturally relevant.
Music doesn't change the world by osmosis, it has to enter many millions of ears.
Correct. And the Internet makes sure that everyone can put music into many millions of ears. What has changed from the past 50 years - and where the past 50 years were a complete historical aberration - is that there aren't any more a few dozen people who control what music reaches the ears of millions of people. And it scares the living daylights out of these people, because their jobs have permanently disappeared. Instead, music is back where it should be: in the public consciousness, where it floats to the top based on how many people distribute it.
In short: your entire premise actually goes against the text that you're promoting. The last 50 years were a complete destruction of music as a cultural phenomenon, and were instead the age of music as an industry. The Internet is changing that, and I hope to God that you find a job that doesn't have "destroy culture to monetize it" in its job description.
Agreed. I'm of the mind that a right is something which requires action to deny, but exists without any intervention by others. The right to free speech, for example, exists naturally: you can say whatever you want until someone comes along and coerces you to stop.
It's a good perspective, and actually something I'd like to see emphasized more when these types of discussions come up: a right is something that exists without anyone else being around, a social good is something that will benefit society in general if supported by others. Both are good to have, but it makes it difficult to have an honest discussion about either if people keep mixing the terms.
Here's the thing: TBL might be wrong about web access being a right, but he is damn right about web access becoming the next library access: a fundamental change in how knowledge gets transferred, and a fundamental change in how a society works and grows. Think about how knowledge was transferred before the printing press made public libraries possible: high priests lorded over knowledge, decided what the unwashed masses deserved to know, and proceeded to amass huge riches by turning knowledge into power (and make no mistake, being able to read the bible at that time was power).
The Comcasts and ATTs of this world are already hard at work at turning the Internet into a fancy TV: see ATT's move towards data caps that make its own offerings a near unbeatable value. Want to know what the world would look like with content providers in charge of Internet access? It will be exactly like monks and priests being in charge of book access: a stagnant era of haves and have-nots.
Quite frankly, fuck that. At this point, I really don't care whether Internet access is a natural right or a social good. The greatest advancement since paper and the printing press is being stolen away right from under our noses, and it has to stop. The debate around the semantics of a right vs a good is a small distraction in the greater discussion of how to prevent quarterly bonus distribution from wrecking the greatest thing humanity has going for itself.
Then why aren't they cutting defense spending, shelving the TSA or defunding the FBI? Yep, because the want more of specific government services, and less of others. It just so happens not everyone agrees with their specific distribution of service reduction. Nice try demonizing the opposition though.
Sorry that you got your feathers ruffled, but I had the same exact first impression. "Not another story about a grandfather who solved xyz but was suppressed by big bad corp abc." It sounds like your granddad was the real deal - but the odds weren't good that he was. That's the drawback of the internet: when anyone can be everyone, you really don't know who anyone is or who is lying and who isn't.
Then your atheist friends aren't very sharp. Intelligent design requires an omnipotent, eternal entity - aka God. Intelligent design requires a deity in its thesis.
You're correct that survival does not imply progression. Neither does complexity. Progression in the sense of improving something requires a value judgment, which makes it an entirely arbitrary decision. Progression in the sense of merely something changing requires no value judgment, but also means much less than you imply.
As for your AI example, you're implying that something happens in a few decades that took billions of years to happen without outside influence. I'd look for an intelligent designer at that point as well - although you might be surprised to find out what was and what wasn't designed. Finally, your AI example also merely indicates that it is possible for something to be intelligently designed and become intelligent itseld (assuming strong AI will actually happen). It does not show that intelligence is not possible without an intelligent designer. Your basic logic class will show you that.
True. The problem is that his metric is wrong. The easiest way to deal with a pesky endangered animal that is blocking your development has now become to actually kill it even more. Once it goes below the specified threshold, it's put on the not-worth-saving list, and you can merrily go on developing.
The proper metric is how important a particular species is to its local environment. Think keystone species like Krill, wolves, Killer Whales or Tuna. The problem is that this is difficult - how do you measure importance? How do you know you measured something right, or at all? The response to this is that of caution: if we don't know which ones to save, we'll try to save as many as we can, and hope we pick right.
I normally don't reply to ACs, but Atlas Shrugged? Really? That's your reply? The overwrought musings of a philosophical dilettante who couldn't write a concise scene if it sat in her lap, took her pen and held it for her?
Man, either trolls are a dying art, or someone hasn't graduated from High School yet.
Who said it was OK what Charlie Rangel is doing, or what Geithner did or what Biden is doing? No one did. You can put away the straw man. This is about a two-bit political hack who is bitching about the fact that making three times the state average is not enough, yet thinks that others making much less still make too much.
Here's the problem: the way that this is progressing, each person will pay exactly the cost of their medical services + administrative overhead. This is not insurance anymore, this is just paying someone to move bills and paperwork around.
Prevention does enter into it, and it means that insurance companies will be able to work more effectively towards it. But it also means that insurance rates will go up to make each individual profitable, or at least make the individual statistically profitable. As statistics improve and long-term health prediction improves, each individual will be asked to pay more and more of the cost that they generate. This is great if you're rich, where you're doing that already anyway. It blows if you're poor.
Thank you, someone finally gets it. Maybe you could have word with all the analysts who consider the Nexus a massive flop on Google's part. They just don't understand that the point of the Nexus isn't to make a profit, it's to establish a standard implementation that makes Android a viable competitor to the iPhone. Because Google knew that at some point, Apple would want to create their own ad network on the iPhone, and Google would be cut off from that. Apple did, but by then, Android had established itself as a viable competitor to the iPhone, and the threat to Google's core revenue was dramatically lessened.
If anything, Google should be the gold standard for how to grow a company through long-term strategic investment. Youtube? Turned out brilliantly. Android? Same. There have been flops along the way (Wave), but the successes are responsible for keeping Google from becoming a Yahoo.
Or it could be that you missed the entire point of the article. The point of the article is that the only product that Google really cares about is search, and that everything else is just filler that doesn't even have to be bring in any revenue on its own. From that perspective, the analogies are actually quite illuminating.
Your posting history makes that statement a flat out lie.
I make well under $250,000/yr and I can't afford a new electric car
Who said about having to buy a new car? There are used cars, there are hybrids, there are efficient compact cars, there is selling your car.... There are many different ways of dealing with this issue.
Yet, for some reason, the amount of money I spend towards taxes will increase.
Yet, for some reason, the government has no control over how much you pay in gas taxes. That decision is solely, 100% yours. The same as with your smokes. If you're unhappy about how much you pay in cigarette taxes, buy less of those.
It seems to me you're merely complaining about the fact that you might have to change your lifestyle to maintain certain goals. I'm sorry that the world is a dynamic place where things change. And if you think that Obama could possibly exert enough control to guarantee that not a single one of your expenses that somehow involve the government will ever go up - you're just as deluded as the poor woman who thought that Obama would personally save her house from foreclosure.
Somehow though, you don't strike me as deluded. Merely as blinded by team colors.
While there is no need anymore to live next to the factory, there are immense benefits to live next to the supermarket, the school, a business center with locksmiths, plumbers, etc. Furthermore, living bunched together reduces environmental problems because there are many economies of scale to be achieved (travel being just the most obvious of them).
Dilution is very well a mitigation for pollution, but it certainly is not a solution. Living farther apart from each other might reduce the amount of pollution found in one place, but the increase in logistics to support a thinly distributed population increases the overall amount of pollution generated. Does one cancel out the other? I don't know, but the problem of pollution is definitely not solved by just spreading out.
Try Seoul. Try Frankfurt. Try Tokyo. Big cities have been done successfully, Americans just don't understand them. The main reason is that the American still includes a house with a picket fence and a yard. Of course that doesn't work after certain population densities are reached. The solution to this is to understand that there's nothing magical about owning a house.
You missed the part where this is in response to a decrease in the amount of tax revenue collected from the gas tax - i.e., a decrease in the effective gas tax. But that would get in the way of a good ol'fashioned Anti-Obama rant.
Then put a tax on electricity that covers that. But we can't have that! That would kill business!
Here's the cold, hard reality: infrastructure costs money. Lots of it. Businesses profit tremendously from a well-maintained infrastructure. We already measure gasoline consumption, electricity, etc. It's a cinch to add a percent to the cost of an already existing transaction. The end-result is exactly what we want: the heaviest users pay the most. Compare that to a mileage metering scheme, which doesn't exist, requires new infrastructure, creates whole new ways of cheating and will be a nightmare to administrate. How do you compare an empty 18-wheeler with a fully loaded one? What about land-trains? What a car with a trailer? Without? Fully loaded? Single occupant?
I don't understand this fascination that Americans have with tap-dancing around energy taxation by creating nightmarish regulatory pretzelworks. It doesn't work. But I guess it caters to the class of people who have a religious opposition to visible taxation.
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And nowhere does it say in the Constitution how much money should be spent on defense. The constitutional requirement would be met if a single dollar in taxes would be collected, and a single person would be paid a dollar to stand guard somewhere on a border. Weird how these arguments work, isn't it? Once you go beyond satisfying the letter of the law, you immediately get into a grey area where Planned Parenthood is covered by life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and buying GM is covered by regulating commerce.
The government's role is defined by the incredibly flexible and badly defined human language. The constitution means exactly what you and I want it to mean. Welcome to a democracy (and no, a republic is a superset of democracy, not something different).
Just as long as I get to control who and where every single of my dollars go. First item on the board: you're not getting a single of my pennies, not even indirectly.
See how that works? The reason that I don't pay more than my required share is free-loaders like you, who are happy to take everyone's money, but aren't willing to contribute.
Feel free to point out where I went wrong, including where my summary assessment of the quoted statement is incorrect. Unless, of course, you were aiming to be the definition of irony...
Interesting perspective, coming from someone who doesn't know what a democracy or a republic actually is.
I rarely pull out the corporate shill card, but I'm pretty sure you neatly fit the category: someone who supports a corporate benefit that directly conflicts with the benefit of society in general - bonus if the UID is near 2M. Let me explain to you why I think that, and it is primarily because you ask a lot of leading questions where your hoped for answer is in conflict with reality.
The engines that brought us basically all music from the 1950s until today are going away, and there isn't really any replacement.
Wrong. Those engines were radio and pressed media. They didn't go away, they were replaced by a better distribution medium: the Internet.
Your comments about publicly supported music ring true in the jazz and classical genres. I doubt if we're going to see subsidies to support music in other areas because there are no education bodies with an interest in that.
Wrong. The most common education bodies teach guitar (local music shops), and the big music departments cover everything from medieval string music to jazz to grunge rock to avant-guarde atonal music. The educational support is broad and deep, as is the demand for music. The only place where demand is narrow and shallow is in the big record labels. If it doesn't fit the Justin Bieber/Britney Spears template, it gets buried.
Another thing is, even if (according to another poster) I own a computer so I should be able to produce music at just as high quality as anyone has ever produced, if I'm burning CD-Rs and handing them out at shows for $5, what does that really do for music in our cultural consciousness?
And this is why they teach you to always answer your rhetorical questions, just in case someone doesn't follow your lead. I'll tell you what it does for our cultural consciousness: it enriches it. If the record is good, I'll pass it to my friends. Hey, listen to this! This guy/girl rocks. They'll pass it around. They'll buy the next record, evangelize it as well, go to shows - the whole nine yards. If they don't like it, it quietly dies. Will that person make billions from that one record? Probably not - and there is no reason that anyone should make billions from a one time activity.
Is an album great if no one ever hears it?
Let me turn the question around: in the age of instant world-wide distribution, is an album bad if no one wants to hear it or distribute it? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. Otherwise, it would get distributed.
Perhaps, but what has it done for us? What has it done for us versus what could have been done?
This means that your next questions have been answered already as well: it's completely irrelevant what could have happened, because a lot of people decided not to move the record into our general cultural consciousness. That's the definition of an item not being culturally relevant.
Music doesn't change the world by osmosis, it has to enter many millions of ears.
Correct. And the Internet makes sure that everyone can put music into many millions of ears. What has changed from the past 50 years - and where the past 50 years were a complete historical aberration - is that there aren't any more a few dozen people who control what music reaches the ears of millions of people. And it scares the living daylights out of these people, because their jobs have permanently disappeared. Instead, music is back where it should be: in the public consciousness, where it floats to the top based on how many people distribute it.
In short: your entire premise actually goes against the text that you're promoting. The last 50 years were a complete destruction of music as a cultural phenomenon, and were instead the age of music as an industry. The Internet is changing that, and I hope to God that you find a job that doesn't have "destroy culture to monetize it" in its job description.
Agreed. I'm of the mind that a right is something which requires action to deny, but exists without any intervention by others. The right to free speech, for example, exists naturally: you can say whatever you want until someone comes along and coerces you to stop.
It's a good perspective, and actually something I'd like to see emphasized more when these types of discussions come up: a right is something that exists without anyone else being around, a social good is something that will benefit society in general if supported by others. Both are good to have, but it makes it difficult to have an honest discussion about either if people keep mixing the terms.
Here's the thing: TBL might be wrong about web access being a right, but he is damn right about web access becoming the next library access: a fundamental change in how knowledge gets transferred, and a fundamental change in how a society works and grows. Think about how knowledge was transferred before the printing press made public libraries possible: high priests lorded over knowledge, decided what the unwashed masses deserved to know, and proceeded to amass huge riches by turning knowledge into power (and make no mistake, being able to read the bible at that time was power).
The Comcasts and ATTs of this world are already hard at work at turning the Internet into a fancy TV: see ATT's move towards data caps that make its own offerings a near unbeatable value. Want to know what the world would look like with content providers in charge of Internet access? It will be exactly like monks and priests being in charge of book access: a stagnant era of haves and have-nots.
Quite frankly, fuck that. At this point, I really don't care whether Internet access is a natural right or a social good. The greatest advancement since paper and the printing press is being stolen away right from under our noses, and it has to stop. The debate around the semantics of a right vs a good is a small distraction in the greater discussion of how to prevent quarterly bonus distribution from wrecking the greatest thing humanity has going for itself.
Then why aren't they cutting defense spending, shelving the TSA or defunding the FBI? Yep, because the want more of specific government services, and less of others. It just so happens not everyone agrees with their specific distribution of service reduction. Nice try demonizing the opposition though.
Sorry that you got your feathers ruffled, but I had the same exact first impression. "Not another story about a grandfather who solved xyz but was suppressed by big bad corp abc." It sounds like your granddad was the real deal - but the odds weren't good that he was. That's the drawback of the internet: when anyone can be everyone, you really don't know who anyone is or who is lying and who isn't.
Then your atheist friends aren't very sharp. Intelligent design requires an omnipotent, eternal entity - aka God. Intelligent design requires a deity in its thesis.
You're correct that survival does not imply progression. Neither does complexity. Progression in the sense of improving something requires a value judgment, which makes it an entirely arbitrary decision. Progression in the sense of merely something changing requires no value judgment, but also means much less than you imply.
As for your AI example, you're implying that something happens in a few decades that took billions of years to happen without outside influence. I'd look for an intelligent designer at that point as well - although you might be surprised to find out what was and what wasn't designed. Finally, your AI example also merely indicates that it is possible for something to be intelligently designed and become intelligent itseld (assuming strong AI will actually happen). It does not show that intelligence is not possible without an intelligent designer. Your basic logic class will show you that.
True. The problem is that his metric is wrong. The easiest way to deal with a pesky endangered animal that is blocking your development has now become to actually kill it even more. Once it goes below the specified threshold, it's put on the not-worth-saving list, and you can merrily go on developing.
The proper metric is how important a particular species is to its local environment. Think keystone species like Krill, wolves, Killer Whales or Tuna. The problem is that this is difficult - how do you measure importance? How do you know you measured something right, or at all? The response to this is that of caution: if we don't know which ones to save, we'll try to save as many as we can, and hope we pick right.
Government is NOT supposed to be secular.
Uh, don't you mean "Government is NOT supposed to be religious"? Secular: being separate from religion.
There's a higher standard for the hard sciences than for the soft sciences. Physics and Biology can be tested, Religion and 9/11 theories less so.
I normally don't reply to ACs, but Atlas Shrugged? Really? That's your reply? The overwrought musings of a philosophical dilettante who couldn't write a concise scene if it sat in her lap, took her pen and held it for her?
Man, either trolls are a dying art, or someone hasn't graduated from High School yet.
Isn't the regulation of an electronic communications medium the entire reason the FCC exists?
*Googles "Defund FCC"*
Oh. Right. Never mind.
I'll take a shot: Have you heard of Obamacare?
AKA, Romneycare? When you're doing nothing but parroting talking points, it means it's too late to look in the mirror.
Who said it was OK what Charlie Rangel is doing, or what Geithner did or what Biden is doing? No one did. You can put away the straw man. This is about a two-bit political hack who is bitching about the fact that making three times the state average is not enough, yet thinks that others making much less still make too much.
What's with the Microsoft shills recently? Seems that someone's been paying good money to a sucky PR agency.
Here's the problem: the way that this is progressing, each person will pay exactly the cost of their medical services + administrative overhead. This is not insurance anymore, this is just paying someone to move bills and paperwork around.
Prevention does enter into it, and it means that insurance companies will be able to work more effectively towards it. But it also means that insurance rates will go up to make each individual profitable, or at least make the individual statistically profitable. As statistics improve and long-term health prediction improves, each individual will be asked to pay more and more of the cost that they generate. This is great if you're rich, where you're doing that already anyway. It blows if you're poor.
Thank you, someone finally gets it. Maybe you could have word with all the analysts who consider the Nexus a massive flop on Google's part. They just don't understand that the point of the Nexus isn't to make a profit, it's to establish a standard implementation that makes Android a viable competitor to the iPhone. Because Google knew that at some point, Apple would want to create their own ad network on the iPhone, and Google would be cut off from that. Apple did, but by then, Android had established itself as a viable competitor to the iPhone, and the threat to Google's core revenue was dramatically lessened.
If anything, Google should be the gold standard for how to grow a company through long-term strategic investment. Youtube? Turned out brilliantly. Android? Same. There have been flops along the way (Wave), but the successes are responsible for keeping Google from becoming a Yahoo.
Or it could be that you missed the entire point of the article. The point of the article is that the only product that Google really cares about is search, and that everything else is just filler that doesn't even have to be bring in any revenue on its own. From that perspective, the analogies are actually quite illuminating.
I don't mean to rail on Obama,
Your posting history makes that statement a flat out lie.
I make well under $250,000/yr and I can't afford a new electric car
Who said about having to buy a new car? There are used cars, there are hybrids, there are efficient compact cars, there is selling your car.... There are many different ways of dealing with this issue.
Yet, for some reason, the amount of money I spend towards taxes will increase.
Yet, for some reason, the government has no control over how much you pay in gas taxes. That decision is solely, 100% yours. The same as with your smokes. If you're unhappy about how much you pay in cigarette taxes, buy less of those.
It seems to me you're merely complaining about the fact that you might have to change your lifestyle to maintain certain goals. I'm sorry that the world is a dynamic place where things change. And if you think that Obama could possibly exert enough control to guarantee that not a single one of your expenses that somehow involve the government will ever go up - you're just as deluded as the poor woman who thought that Obama would personally save her house from foreclosure.
Somehow though, you don't strike me as deluded. Merely as blinded by team colors.
While there is no need anymore to live next to the factory, there are immense benefits to live next to the supermarket, the school, a business center with locksmiths, plumbers, etc. Furthermore, living bunched together reduces environmental problems because there are many economies of scale to be achieved (travel being just the most obvious of them).
Dilution is very well a mitigation for pollution, but it certainly is not a solution. Living farther apart from each other might reduce the amount of pollution found in one place, but the increase in logistics to support a thinly distributed population increases the overall amount of pollution generated. Does one cancel out the other? I don't know, but the problem of pollution is definitely not solved by just spreading out.
Try Seoul. Try Frankfurt. Try Tokyo. Big cities have been done successfully, Americans just don't understand them. The main reason is that the American still includes a house with a picket fence and a yard. Of course that doesn't work after certain population densities are reached. The solution to this is to understand that there's nothing magical about owning a house.
You missed the part where this is in response to a decrease in the amount of tax revenue collected from the gas tax - i.e., a decrease in the effective gas tax. But that would get in the way of a good ol'fashioned Anti-Obama rant.
Then put a tax on electricity that covers that. But we can't have that! That would kill business!
Here's the cold, hard reality: infrastructure costs money. Lots of it. Businesses profit tremendously from a well-maintained infrastructure. We already measure gasoline consumption, electricity, etc. It's a cinch to add a percent to the cost of an already existing transaction. The end-result is exactly what we want: the heaviest users pay the most. Compare that to a mileage metering scheme, which doesn't exist, requires new infrastructure, creates whole new ways of cheating and will be a nightmare to administrate. How do you compare an empty 18-wheeler with a fully loaded one? What about land-trains? What a car with a trailer? Without? Fully loaded? Single occupant?
I don't understand this fascination that Americans have with tap-dancing around energy taxation by creating nightmarish regulatory pretzelworks. It doesn't work. But I guess it caters to the class of people who have a religious opposition to visible taxation.