1. Angels and Demons
2. Deception Point
3. The Da Vinci Code
4. Digital Fortress
I mostly concur. I personally would switch two and four, just because I found Deception Point really fucking boring. Da Vinci was a rehash of A & D, and tried to be too serious. A & D was a fantastic novel, so long as you remeber it is pulp crap and not literary genius. It is fantastically entertaining, and that's what good stroies are supposed to be, first and foremost.
For the most part I agree that blaming the congressmen for acts of congress is more politically productive, but I would submit that your view that this is separate from the executive's legislative agenda (and rest assured, it has one) is simplistic at best.
Part of what makes the Republican party so scary (besides the wacko puritan crazies that overran it about 25 years ago) is that it boasts a strong party loyalty amongst members of congress in a system that franly doesn't encourage it. Admittedly there are outliers like Ron Paul in the House and Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snowe in the Senate but they are truly anomalies in an otherwise placid sea of party line voters. Part of that loyalty comes directly from executive strong-arming, particularly threats of not helping to fundraise for reelection (which can be crippling for a congressman). To say that Bush and his team bear no blame for the legislation coming out of their congressional colleage's collective asses is missing the forest for the trees. Especially when Mr. Gonzales is quoted in TFA as relating this legislative agenda to combatting terrorism. He's an executive officer, no doubt about it.
There is something to be said about politicians being bought and paid for, and particularly with legislation like this the largest pressure comes from industry lobbyists, but when you follow the money it also inevitably leads back to party and president (for the ruling party).
Now, ultimately, you are right in that focusing on Bush takes the attention off of some Members of Congress who richly deserve some democratically-imposed term limits, and because the picture is more complicated than you make it out to be, many of them will slip thorugh the cracks looking cleaner than they ought to. And that is a tragedy.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the immigration debate just dismantling this political regime as many MCs find themselves in a damn'd if ya do/dam'd if ya don't situation. It seems like the first time in a while that the republican stranglehold on the politcal consciences of its own MCs is breaking as they look to their own necks first.
Ah well, at some point "scarcity of resources" will catch up with us and we'll all start killing each other over what's left. Something to look forward to.
Start? We've been doin' that for a looooong time. Relative scarcity is a function, usually, not of the total amount of a resource, but rather the limitations of the means to access it, and shortages due to tech (and exclusive control and other reasons) has been killing people in wars for a long damn time. Iraq is but a most recent example.
...Unless of course you meant start killing each other in the sense of neighbors beating each other to death with broken axe handles to steal scraps of food killing each other; then yeah, I suppose we have a little while longer to wait.
And that heritage has been repeatedly invoked here in Southern Rhode Island, where the local communities are looking to restore the 'Brothel Laws' in order to make students' lives miserable. While one-hundred-and-fifty years ago this may have been the reason for these laws, their current incarnation has nothing to do with such a purpose (though the anachronistic name has unfortunately stuck).
Anything that happens in public space is potentially viewable by anyone, ergo it is in the public domain and there is no expectation fo privacy. So far, so good.
Now, how would you feel if every square inch of this public space was being constantly monitored by closed-circuit cameras whose feeds are reviewed by police officers? I know how I would feel. Not so hot about it, to say the least. Now is the monitoring technically invading the privacy of anyone? As far as the law is concerned, no. It is still a violation of the dignity of human beings? You bet. Psychologically, it is wearying to be constantly surveilled, and even though a police officer feasibly could not be looking at every camera all the time, the potential for active surveillance would likely cause the average human being to develop some serious nervous conditions.
It is a comparable (though not, admittedly, a completely analogous) situation where you have a public space that is intended to be social (facebook, myspace, etc.) that is being effectively surveilled by an official party, there is a powerful chilling effect and takes away some of the value of that space.
Now, admittedly, the examples so far were of idiots who were practically bragging about wrongdoing, but as these spaces are more effectively surveilled and being used for things they were not originally intended (such as employers looking for info about employees), the social value of the spaces will erode as people modulate their behavior to be less honest as they have their eye upon the possibility of other consequences for their career or for avoiding brushes with the law.
I thought it was a tendency to ignore personal hygeine, common social cues, politeness, or other socialization protocols. Or perhaps a tendency to act supercilious, cloistered, aloof, and superior. Maybe it is simply because they willfully belong to a subculture that extols virtues others find bizarre, even abhorrent?
...not that there's anything wrong with that. Some social rules are silly, most people are stupid and deserve to be looked down upon, and explaining every little thing to them can be wearying. Socializing with the normies can feel a little like forming a significant relationship with a vacuum cleaner. And just perhaps the culture in the main is vapid, uncouth, and extols virtues that surpress tendencies of independant or intricate thought.
So no, the restriction of the sale of Grand Theft Auto to a minor is in no way analogous to the restriction of the sale of a Bible...unless there exists somewhere a Church of the Holy M-Rating.
Are you kidding? The Bible, had it been published today (in game form), would have been rated AO, never mind M. We could play Gut the Canaanite and then pin the phallus on King Solomon's concubines.... I think that the proper way to consider the analogy is not "OMG teh Bible might convert my heathen childs!!!11!" as parent suggested, but rather simply compare by content, or by medium for that matter, in order to see just how arbitrary the lines our culture draws really are. We care about depictions of murder, rape, and other anti-social behavior most when they are in games, less so when in movies, least in books. And if they happen to appear in famous books (e.g Bible, Qur'an, anything by Shakespeare) then we encourage children to be exposed. Now, I'll be the first to admit that there are probably qualitative differences in the way different media impact behavior, but still, content is content and if what people are really objecting to is violence and sex, then they need to look more closely that the holy corpus of their own society.
The SC has ruled (on more than one occasion) that a person cannot lawfully evade filling out an accurate Tax statement, ergo it is compelled and not volunteered, ergo it is not admissable against you in criminal proceedings not involving tax evasion.
I dub thee SPOILER of Parties, THIEF of Joy, KILLER of the Almighty Buzz! Talk about killing idle dreams of beautiful and nihilistic destruction. Seriously!
Why do all people think about economic problems in this abstract world where everyone starts from an equal original position? Some competitors have advantages over others; if an arbitrary restraint is imposed (like, say, an emissions tax or mandatory reduction), it will affect the members of that particular industry unequally. Now, (and this is the real key), if your goal is to encourage the growth of jobs tangential to the industry, then the last thing you want to do is impose a blanket restriction which will overall act to reduce the total number of competitors. It is a general (though not hard and fast) rule that two companies of equivalent product volume employ more people than one company with twice the product volume. Thus, any cause that has the effect of either driving away or driving under the competitive field hurts overall employment.
So you impose an 'earth tax' (or some other catchy name) on imports have their origin in countries which don't adhere to similar conservation laws.
Which is a great idea, until you realize how monumentally unfair that standard would be for developing nations. Nations like the United States, for example, can by virtue of messily developing early, have the luxury of cutting emissions and sinking one part of the economy in favor of another (or in this case, creating one from whole cloth, which is why I mentioned Keynes in this context). And that whole arrangement in turn assumes full labor mobility (which is absurd) and instant specialization of labor (also absurd).
BTW, I agree that first-world protectionism serves mainly to screw developing nations; I just think your idea would do pretty much the same. As you pointed out, capital moves only when conditions are not in equilibrium, but as you well know, by virtue of there being developing nations, conditions will never be in sufficient equilibrium to nullify the strong incentive that a firm feels when regulations start becoming pricey. The easiest cost to cut is usually labor in this whacked-out era of free capital mobility.
Say you implemented the most draconian of green laws. This would mean all these companies had to spend money to get up to code. This would mean they'd have to hire people internally to find out and implement what needs to be done, and hire externally to get it done. They might have to hike prices up a bit, but there would be many, many new jobs created.
Sane Universe with Capital Mobility Controls: Firm goes belly up, no more jobs, no more money.
The Real World: Firm flees to Mexico, no more jobs, no more money.
Now, I'm not saying this is all a bad thing, necessarily; I tend to agree that there are more important things in life than a healthy national economy...and my habitat is certainly up there on the list. I'm just saying that functional economies (which, while not the most important thing, are still very important) can only stand so much regulatory strain before they either break or become catastrophically inefficient. If capital cannot flee, prices will rise until the firm cannot compete with competitors and will become insolvent. If it can flee, it will to greener pastures. If Keynesian economics worked in all situations, we would all just sit around building pretty widgets all day, rich and happy as clams. Obviously, things are a little more complicated.;)
That's why I pointedly said 'most classes of cases'. In Brown, the court was using a higher standard of scrutiny because of the suspect class, e.g. race, involved. The court uses a higher standard of scrutiny when it is no longer reasonable in the broadest possible sense to assume legislative competence and when the subject matter provokes a high natural likelihood of infringing constitutional guarantees, such as (in Brown and all subsequent civil rights cases) when basically all-white legislatures are making laws regarding black folks' civil rights.
In an intellectual property case, there is no way the courts will find any reason to apply a high level of scrutiny. It is simply not terribly likely that fundamental constitutional rights are being stripped, no matter how subjectively awful a particular copyright regime is.
Couldn't they find that the patent and copyright laws, as implemented by the other branches of government, or individual patents for that matter, are not constitutional because they don't meet the aims set out in the US constitution? Not that I believe for an instant that they would decide so...
Not really, no. In American jurisprudence there is a presumption of the competence of the legislature for most classes of cases; all the government must show is that the legislation bears some rational relation to any legitimate governmental purpose. The Constitution grants the Congress power to regulate intellectual property and the reasons for that power, but a legislative schema that exists under that delegated power need not actually 'work', legislating 'stupidly' is not the same as legislating 'unconstitutionally'.
...with open meetings laws here in Rhode Island, I can tell you that the lead time is not just for informative purposes, but also for a person with standing to bring a challenge in court to the act of closing the meeting; a concerned person who has standing can attempt to get an emergency injunction preventing the meeting from going forward if he or she asserts that the meeting was closed improperly. I'm not sure about the federal guidelines, but if they are anything at all like Rhode Island's, then the feds can't close a meeting for just any old reason; there are guidelines, and if someone asserts that those guidelines are being violated and they are being harmed by that violation, it makes a huge amount of sense that they can seek remedy.
Aren't they the phones that were in "V for Vendetta"?
Proof if anyone needed it that product placement works. Consumer culture is devilishly scary, sometimes.
And it is articles like this, all of them, that assure us of the perpetuity of Joe being dumb. If there was perhaps an incentive for Joe being smarter...but, no, instant gratification is so much more marketable.
The easy and obvious counterargument to the 'you have nothing to hide' line is to point out that it should not be required of a citizen to explain their daily actions on the basis that they look suspicious, as we each do a dozen things every day that could seem out of context to be nefarious or at least odd. The trick is to convince those who actually write this legislative crap.
Somebody ought to surveille every member of Congress for a week or so, and then e-mail them pointed questions about the footage (even if there is nothing untoward, innocuous actions can look suspicious, and of course that's the whole point), and then cc the footage and the questions to a local news outlet...that'd dampen the legislative hankering for citizen surveillance tout suite.
Nah, it falls under the 'educational' exemption, so long as we all have a discussion forum afterwards in which we discuss the utter retardedness of the situation.
I imagine that it would shorten lifespan considerably, because the body would have to spend a great deal more resources building muscle, bone breaks would be far more common (and skeletal distortion would occur much earlier in life) and the heart muscle would be under much more strain. After several thousand generations (assuming it's possible) maybe selection would favor adaptions that make those conditions more survivable, but I'm dubious; I think the attrition rate would be very high.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Angels and Demons 2. Deception Point 3. The Da Vinci Code 4. Digital Fortress
I mostly concur. I personally would switch two and four, just because I found Deception Point really fucking boring. Da Vinci was a rehash of A & D, and tried to be too serious. A & D was a fantastic novel, so long as you remeber it is pulp crap and not literary genius. It is fantastically entertaining, and that's what good stroies are supposed to be, first and foremost.
For the most part I agree that blaming the congressmen for acts of congress is more politically productive, but I would submit that your view that this is separate from the executive's legislative agenda (and rest assured, it has one) is simplistic at best.
Part of what makes the Republican party so scary (besides the wacko puritan crazies that overran it about 25 years ago) is that it boasts a strong party loyalty amongst members of congress in a system that franly doesn't encourage it. Admittedly there are outliers like Ron Paul in the House and Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snowe in the Senate but they are truly anomalies in an otherwise placid sea of party line voters. Part of that loyalty comes directly from executive strong-arming, particularly threats of not helping to fundraise for reelection (which can be crippling for a congressman). To say that Bush and his team bear no blame for the legislation coming out of their congressional colleage's collective asses is missing the forest for the trees. Especially when Mr. Gonzales is quoted in TFA as relating this legislative agenda to combatting terrorism. He's an executive officer, no doubt about it.
There is something to be said about politicians being bought and paid for, and particularly with legislation like this the largest pressure comes from industry lobbyists, but when you follow the money it also inevitably leads back to party and president (for the ruling party).
Now, ultimately, you are right in that focusing on Bush takes the attention off of some Members of Congress who richly deserve some democratically-imposed term limits, and because the picture is more complicated than you make it out to be, many of them will slip thorugh the cracks looking cleaner than they ought to. And that is a tragedy.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the immigration debate just dismantling this political regime as many MCs find themselves in a damn'd if ya do/dam'd if ya don't situation. It seems like the first time in a while that the republican stranglehold on the politcal consciences of its own MCs is breaking as they look to their own necks first.
Start? We've been doin' that for a looooong time. Relative scarcity is a function, usually, not of the total amount of a resource, but rather the limitations of the means to access it, and shortages due to tech (and exclusive control and other reasons) has been killing people in wars for a long damn time. Iraq is but a most recent example.
...Unless of course you meant start killing each other in the sense of neighbors beating each other to death with broken axe handles to steal scraps of food killing each other; then yeah, I suppose we have a little while longer to wait.
But of course with the shotgun you had to quite literaly be up the guy's ass.
And that heritage has been repeatedly invoked here in Southern Rhode Island, where the local communities are looking to restore the 'Brothel Laws' in order to make students' lives miserable. While one-hundred-and-fifty years ago this may have been the reason for these laws, their current incarnation has nothing to do with such a purpose (though the anachronistic name has unfortunately stuck).
Anything that happens in public space is potentially viewable by anyone, ergo it is in the public domain and there is no expectation fo privacy. So far, so good.
Now, how would you feel if every square inch of this public space was being constantly monitored by closed-circuit cameras whose feeds are reviewed by police officers? I know how I would feel. Not so hot about it, to say the least. Now is the monitoring technically invading the privacy of anyone? As far as the law is concerned, no. It is still a violation of the dignity of human beings? You bet. Psychologically, it is wearying to be constantly surveilled, and even though a police officer feasibly could not be looking at every camera all the time, the potential for active surveillance would likely cause the average human being to develop some serious nervous conditions.
It is a comparable (though not, admittedly, a completely analogous) situation where you have a public space that is intended to be social (facebook, myspace, etc.) that is being effectively surveilled by an official party, there is a powerful chilling effect and takes away some of the value of that space.
Now, admittedly, the examples so far were of idiots who were practically bragging about wrongdoing, but as these spaces are more effectively surveilled and being used for things they were not originally intended (such as employers looking for info about employees), the social value of the spaces will erode as people modulate their behavior to be less honest as they have their eye upon the possibility of other consequences for their career or for avoiding brushes with the law.
I thought it was a tendency to ignore personal hygeine, common social cues, politeness, or other socialization protocols. Or perhaps a tendency to act supercilious, cloistered, aloof, and superior. Maybe it is simply because they willfully belong to a subculture that extols virtues others find bizarre, even abhorrent?
...not that there's anything wrong with that. Some social rules are silly, most people are stupid and deserve to be looked down upon, and explaining every little thing to them can be wearying. Socializing with the normies can feel a little like forming a significant relationship with a vacuum cleaner. And just perhaps the culture in the main is vapid, uncouth, and extols virtues that surpress tendencies of independant or intricate thought.
Just a theory. Or maybe I'm just kidding ;).
Are you kidding? The Bible, had it been published today (in game form), would have been rated AO, never mind M. We could play Gut the Canaanite and then pin the phallus on King Solomon's concubines.... I think that the proper way to consider the analogy is not "OMG teh Bible might convert my heathen childs!!!11!" as parent suggested, but rather simply compare by content, or by medium for that matter, in order to see just how arbitrary the lines our culture draws really are. We care about depictions of murder, rape, and other anti-social behavior most when they are in games, less so when in movies, least in books. And if they happen to appear in famous books (e.g Bible, Qur'an, anything by Shakespeare) then we encourage children to be exposed. Now, I'll be the first to admit that there are probably qualitative differences in the way different media impact behavior, but still, content is content and if what people are really objecting to is violence and sex, then they need to look more closely that the holy corpus of their own society.
The SC has ruled (on more than one occasion) that a person cannot lawfully evade filling out an accurate Tax statement, ergo it is compelled and not volunteered, ergo it is not admissable against you in criminal proceedings not involving tax evasion.
I dub thee SPOILER of Parties, THIEF of Joy, KILLER of the Almighty Buzz! Talk about killing idle dreams of beautiful and nihilistic destruction. Seriously!
Why do all people think about economic problems in this abstract world where everyone starts from an equal original position? Some competitors have advantages over others; if an arbitrary restraint is imposed (like, say, an emissions tax or mandatory reduction), it will affect the members of that particular industry unequally. Now, (and this is the real key), if your goal is to encourage the growth of jobs tangential to the industry, then the last thing you want to do is impose a blanket restriction which will overall act to reduce the total number of competitors. It is a general (though not hard and fast) rule that two companies of equivalent product volume employ more people than one company with twice the product volume. Thus, any cause that has the effect of either driving away or driving under the competitive field hurts overall employment.
Which is a great idea, until you realize how monumentally unfair that standard would be for developing nations. Nations like the United States, for example, can by virtue of messily developing early, have the luxury of cutting emissions and sinking one part of the economy in favor of another (or in this case, creating one from whole cloth, which is why I mentioned Keynes in this context). And that whole arrangement in turn assumes full labor mobility (which is absurd) and instant specialization of labor (also absurd).
BTW, I agree that first-world protectionism serves mainly to screw developing nations; I just think your idea would do pretty much the same. As you pointed out, capital moves only when conditions are not in equilibrium, but as you well know, by virtue of there being developing nations, conditions will never be in sufficient equilibrium to nullify the strong incentive that a firm feels when regulations start becoming pricey. The easiest cost to cut is usually labor in this whacked-out era of free capital mobility.
Sane Universe with Capital Mobility Controls: Firm goes belly up, no more jobs, no more money.
The Real World: Firm flees to Mexico, no more jobs, no more money.
Now, I'm not saying this is all a bad thing, necessarily; I tend to agree that there are more important things in life than a healthy national economy...and my habitat is certainly up there on the list. I'm just saying that functional economies (which, while not the most important thing, are still very important) can only stand so much regulatory strain before they either break or become catastrophically inefficient. If capital cannot flee, prices will rise until the firm cannot compete with competitors and will become insolvent. If it can flee, it will to greener pastures. If Keynesian economics worked in all situations, we would all just sit around building pretty widgets all day, rich and happy as clams. Obviously, things are a little more complicated. ;)
In an intellectual property case, there is no way the courts will find any reason to apply a high level of scrutiny. It is simply not terribly likely that fundamental constitutional rights are being stripped, no matter how subjectively awful a particular copyright regime is.
As usual, IANALBIPOOSD, and YMMV.
Not really, no. In American jurisprudence there is a presumption of the competence of the legislature for most classes of cases; all the government must show is that the legislation bears some rational relation to any legitimate governmental purpose. The Constitution grants the Congress power to regulate intellectual property and the reasons for that power, but a legislative schema that exists under that delegated power need not actually 'work', legislating 'stupidly' is not the same as legislating 'unconstitutionally'.
IANALBIPOOSD. YMMV.
...with open meetings laws here in Rhode Island, I can tell you that the lead time is not just for informative purposes, but also for a person with standing to bring a challenge in court to the act of closing the meeting; a concerned person who has standing can attempt to get an emergency injunction preventing the meeting from going forward if he or she asserts that the meeting was closed improperly. I'm not sure about the federal guidelines, but if they are anything at all like Rhode Island's, then the feds can't close a meeting for just any old reason; there are guidelines, and if someone asserts that those guidelines are being violated and they are being harmed by that violation, it makes a huge amount of sense that they can seek remedy.
The 7th only guarantees a jury trial in civil actions. You were thinking of the due process protections of the fifth, sixth, and fourteenth.
Aren't they the phones that were in "V for Vendetta"? Proof if anyone needed it that product placement works. Consumer culture is devilishly scary, sometimes.
With rubber bullet kisses! / baton courtesies! / service with a smile!
And it is articles like this, all of them, that assure us of the perpetuity of Joe being dumb. If there was perhaps an incentive for Joe being smarter...but, no, instant gratification is so much more marketable.
The easy and obvious counterargument to the 'you have nothing to hide' line is to point out that it should not be required of a citizen to explain their daily actions on the basis that they look suspicious, as we each do a dozen things every day that could seem out of context to be nefarious or at least odd. The trick is to convince those who actually write this legislative crap.
Somebody ought to surveille every member of Congress for a week or so, and then e-mail them pointed questions about the footage (even if there is nothing untoward, innocuous actions can look suspicious, and of course that's the whole point), and then cc the footage and the questions to a local news outlet...that'd dampen the legislative hankering for citizen surveillance tout suite.
You sound so...reasonable. I'm intrigued by your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. ;)
Nah, it falls under the 'educational' exemption, so long as we all have a discussion forum afterwards in which we discuss the utter retardedness of the situation.
What people take responsibility for their actions? That's unpossible!
I imagine that it would shorten lifespan considerably, because the body would have to spend a great deal more resources building muscle, bone breaks would be far more common (and skeletal distortion would occur much earlier in life) and the heart muscle would be under much more strain. After several thousand generations (assuming it's possible) maybe selection would favor adaptions that make those conditions more survivable, but I'm dubious; I think the attrition rate would be very high.