Your presupposition is that one of them WOULD have recommended such a course.
Actually, I don't presuppose anything about what they would have said.
The question asked for a specific: "a serious economist or capitalist" who made such a statement. The answer "the Austrian school would have made such a statement" does not address the question.
That answer does not address the question. The question asked for a specific "serious economist or capitalist", not a generic "school."
Is there a specific person representing this "Austrian school" who is quoted in a reliable source as saying that no action was a valid alternative?
Peter Schiff is an adherent to Austrian economics, the president of Euro Pacific Capital, and he says we should have let the banks go bankrupt. You know, like other unprofitable businesses.
Good. Unlike the earlier poster, that is an actual name, not an abstract school of ideas.
He also predicted this entire crisis (with stunning accuracy) at least 2 years ago. You know, when the democrats were supposed to do something about it?
Do note that "two years ago" the United States had a Republican president with Republican control of both houses of Congress. You can see this clearly in the graphs of spending-- the Republican president didn't veto any Republican spending bills. The Democrats didn't retake Congress until the following January.
Well, asshole, there's Thomas Sowell for starters. And I don't know whether or not any of these are of the Austrian School
Let's review the thread, shall we? I was criticizing somebody whose answer to the previous question was "the whole Austrian school of economics." I asked them to name a specific name.
So you name a bunch of names, and then say "I don't know if any these are in the Austrian school."
So, basically, your answer here seems to be "I don't know."
What about the entire Austrian school, which holds that government meddling is what caused the crisis and more meddling can only make things worse?
That answer does not address the question. The question asked for a specific "serious economist or capitalist", not a generic "school."
Is there a specific person representing this "Austrian school" who is quoted in a reliable source as saying that no action was a valid alternative?
That means, quoted recently, specificly addressing this crisis; not quotes showing they said years ago "well, in the future when the mortgage default crisis is going to cause a liquidity crisis in the world, our theoretical analysis is going to recommend that no action should be taken."
But this is surely a US invented technology... and IMHO nothing to be proud of, as it already caused famines in Africa...
According to the link you gave, "The technology was under development by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Delta and Pine Land company in the 1990s and is not yet commercially available. "
If it's never been used, how could it already have caused famines?
Note that while the headlines make it seem like they're talking about nuclear weapons technologies and high tech, the majority of these are probably violations of the ITAR laws that have little or nothing to do with weapons-- the law is so broadly written that almost anything could be "arms". Export a laptop and you're violating ITAR.
... and then, if you scroll down a little in the referenced article, this line is interesting: "Mexico seems to be the hotspot for illegal exports of firearms, including assault weapons and rifles, as well as large quantities of ammunition, the DOJ stated."
So, apparently bullets are part of this "illegal export of [US] technology"
I don't favor higher gasoline taxes--that ends up punishing lower-income people.
Well, a tax on gasoline "punishes" people precisely proportionately to how much gasoline they use-- they will get "punished" less if they use less gasoline, by any method they chose.
An excise tax based on engine displacement and vehicle size makes a lot more sense, since that encourages automakers to build more small cars to start with.
It doesn't make more sense at all. It is merely shifting the tax from the gasoline to the car. You are proposing to use engine displacement and size as proxies for gasoline usage, but it makes more sense to use gasoline usage as a proxy for gasoline usage. In the long run, it doesn't matter much how car makers chose to reduce gasoline consumption of cars-- reducing weight, reducing aerodynamic drag, reducing engine displacement, reducing engine friction, increasing combustion efficiency-- any path is fine.
I'm surprised you didn't suggest the idea of imposing an excise tax based on engine displacement and car physical size like they do in Europe and Japan. It's those taxes that made it possible for all those great small cars from Japan.
Logically, a tax on gasoline would create an incentive for more efficient cars. Nobody's willing to suggest this, though, people who do are branded "tax and spend liberals!"
Even though, at the moment, the federal gas tax doesn't even cover highway expenses-- the federal government currently is subsidizes automobiles.
It's an important result that MRO is mapping the global location of hydrated silica across Mars, but it is worth noting that we saw it first with the Spirit Rover, in the site informally tagged "Silica Valley."
It's been discussed at several recent conferences (AGU, LPSC) and was the main focus of Spirit's scientific research all through the last (Martian) summer.
That's the bizarre part. He wanted the trial done before elections, and he willingly took the stand in his own defense. That indicates that he believed he was innocent and would get off
Not necessarily. It means he believed that they couldn't prove it.
If it was easy to cast a vote with a pencil and a paper and now it's not that easy, then *it is* machine fault.
You really, really, really underestimate some people's stupidity. This is NOT a technology problem. It's a stupid people problem:
1. Remember hanging chads? You know, the thing where some people couldn't figure out that you had to poke the entire piece of paper out.
Note that the voting machine company themselves said the the machines had to be cleaned regularly, or the votes wouldn't be counted properly.
2. Remember where some people voted for multiple people on their paper ballot and were disqualified? Sure, maybe they were purposely trying to throw their vote away. More likely they couldn't figure out how to use a PENCIL properly.
You mean the famous Palm-beach butterfly ballot? The one where George Bush was the first name on the list, and to vote for him you punched the first hole, and Al Gore was the second name on the list, and to vote for him you had to punch the third hole? Yes, if you maybe call an election worker and ask-- I suppose an ordinary person might be able to figure this one out, that punching the second hole meant you're actually voting for a name on the next page of the ballot.
These machines are not "switching votes". They're just not.
Of course not. They're computers! What could possibly go wrong?
If there's a problem, it's the user. That's because the problem is always the user. Computers don't screw up, and if users claim that they do, it's because they're lusers.
And the reason that the companies won't let anybody look at their source code is to protect us. After all, it's intellectual property! If somebody saw it, they'd be able to figure out how votes are counted, and that's proprietary knowledge!
...say, why isn't this one tagged "what could possibly go wrong?"
Seems to me that the most plausible flaw is a mis-calibrated touch screen. I've had that happen on my GPS; you touch the screen in one place, and it registers you as touching a different place.
Another possible flaw is a screen that is just set too sensitive, and is registering phantom touches.
This phenomenon has been reported before; it is always blamed on voter error with no investigation.
It needs to be documented.
Everybody, if your district has electronic voting of any kind, bring your video camera (cell phone, pocket camera, PDA--whatever) in with you, and record yourself voting. If this phenomenon is happening, we need to document it.
I certainly would trust the Saturn V and its safety record over the Shuttle.
Saturn V, zero failures in the first (and only) 13 flights.
Space shuttle, zero failures in the first 24 flights, one failure, then zero failures for the next 87 flights.
If you "trust" the safety record of the Saturn as better than shuttle, this is only by an artifact of low statistics-- the Saturn V does not have a long enough flight record to say it has a better record than shuttle.
The problem is that not only does this solution not address the root cause-- increase of carbon dioxide-- it actually makes the problem worse.
Sunlight powers photosynthesis, and cutting down on sunlight reaching the surface will reduce the rate at which plants are pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Some portion of the carbon that plants remove from the atmosphere is replaced when the plants die and rot, but not a hundred percent-- some ends up sequestered.
Suppose we had such a situation as you suggest and thousands of reviewers pawed over the code making it "as good as it gets". How do you verify the code that was reviewed is the code that is running?
If the code that's reviewed is not the same as the code that's running, this is in itself evidence of fraud. You don't need to look for a back door in this case; you don't need to even know what the code that's running does, you have already shown fraud.
Making that whole system *secure*, otoh, is almost impossible, especially when it is something as large and distributed as a national voting system. If a company could actually make a completely secure voting system, they could also have a good DRM system. (Yeah, I did say "good DRM system", which shows how possible I think that is)
From Ken Thompson's essay Reflections on Trusting Trust, he says it isn't enough to check the source code, you also have to check the compiler, the output from that compiler, and I would add, in the context of a voting system, everything that is or could be in the system/network.
I would like to respectfully disagree here. Your comment can be too easily be summarized to "well, if you can't solve every possible flaw, you don't have a secure system, and so there's no point in trying, if they're all insecure anyway, any system is as bad as any other."
This belief is flawed. Even if you can't prove that there isn't any possible attack, it is nevertheless true that there are better systems and worse systems, and you don't want a worse system. Being able to check the source code-- and, better, having the source code open for anybody to look at-- is in fact a very good start. Yes, it is possible that there may be some hithertofore-unknown flaw in the compiler, and some extremely ingenious cracker might be able to find it and find a way to use it to manipulate voting results... but this is a billion times less likely than the case of some open port left accessable, or a deliberately open back door, that would be found by careful inspection of the source.
(You've misquoted Ken Thompson's conclusion, by the way. His actual conclusion was that you should never trust any program you didn't write yourself. Apparently he's never seen the programs I've written myself.)
But is it scientific to say 'I am going to do an experiment to see if the neutrino has zero mass, but my margin of error means I'll never know for sure if it really is zero'? That the the point of the post you are replying to, which you seem to have conveniently overlooked.
According to the (mis)reading of Popper that's being quoted, yes. The statement 'I am going to do an experiment to see if the neutrino has zero mass, but my margin of error means I'll never know for sure if it really is zero' indeed is scientific, because the statement "The neutrino has zero mass" is falsifiable (by the way, "falsifiable" means that it's possible to show the premise to be false; it doesn't mean that this particular experiment will show it's false). But the statement 'I am going to do an experiment to see if the neutrino has nonzero mass, but my margin of error means I'll never know for sure if it really is zero' is not scientific, because the statement "The neutrino has nonzero mass" is not falsifiable.
But it's the same experiment!
And what if the researcher phrases it "I'm going to test whether the neutrino mas is zero, or nonzero."? In that case, is the researcher scientific, and also nonscientific?
You can use http://whocalled.us/ to coordinate investigation. Even though the number is spoofed, as long as they are using it consistently it is still an identifier. As everyone shares facts they discover it's possible to find the true identity.
And whocalled will tell her that her phone number and her address are the source of the scam calls.
The call can quite easily be traced back to where it came from
Remember, in this case, the victim isn't the one getting the calls.
She might be able to have the calls of the people who call her traced, but that's not the source of the problem. It's the people who call other people using her number who she needs to know the number of.
Slashdot Mirror
Your presupposition is that one of them WOULD have recommended such a course.
Actually, I don't presuppose anything about what they would have said.
The question asked for a specific: "a serious economist or capitalist" who made such a statement. The answer "the Austrian school would have made such a statement" does not address the question.
Peter Schiff is an adherent to Austrian economics, the president of Euro Pacific Capital, and he says we should have let the banks go bankrupt. You know, like other unprofitable businesses.
Good. Unlike the earlier poster, that is an actual name, not an abstract school of ideas.
He also predicted this entire crisis (with stunning accuracy) at least 2 years ago. You know, when the democrats were supposed to do something about it?
Do note that "two years ago" the United States had a Republican president with Republican control of both houses of Congress. You can see this clearly in the graphs of spending-- the Republican president didn't veto any Republican spending bills. The Democrats didn't retake Congress until the following January.
Let's review the thread, shall we? I was criticizing somebody whose answer to the previous question was "the whole Austrian school of economics." I asked them to name a specific name.
So you name a bunch of names, and then say "I don't know if any these are in the Austrian school."
So, basically, your answer here seems to be "I don't know."
Liar. Hayek is one of the best known economists in world history, who won the Nobel Prize for showing how
Since Hayek died in 1992, he could not possibly have made any statement whatsoever about this particular crisis.
The only problem with that statement is that it isn't true.
That answer does not address the question. The question asked for a specific "serious economist or capitalist", not a generic "school."
Is there a specific person representing this "Austrian school" who is quoted in a reliable source as saying that no action was a valid alternative?
That means, quoted recently, specificly addressing this crisis; not quotes showing they said years ago "well, in the future when the mortgage default crisis is going to cause a liquidity crisis in the world, our theoretical analysis is going to recommend that no action should be taken."
But this is surely a US invented technology... and IMHO nothing to be proud of, as it already caused famines in Africa...
According to the link you gave, "The technology was under development by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Delta and Pine Land company in the 1990s and is not yet commercially available. "
If it's never been used, how could it already have caused famines?
... and then, if you scroll down a little in the referenced article, this line is interesting: "Mexico seems to be the hotspot for illegal exports of firearms, including assault weapons and rifles, as well as large quantities of ammunition, the DOJ stated." So, apparently bullets are part of this "illegal export of [US] technology"
I don't favor higher gasoline taxes--that ends up punishing lower-income people.
Well, a tax on gasoline "punishes" people precisely proportionately to how much gasoline they use-- they will get "punished" less if they use less gasoline, by any method they chose.
An excise tax based on engine displacement and vehicle size makes a lot more sense, since that encourages automakers to build more small cars to start with.
It doesn't make more sense at all. It is merely shifting the tax from the gasoline to the car. You are proposing to use engine displacement and size as proxies for gasoline usage, but it makes more sense to use gasoline usage as a proxy for gasoline usage. In the long run, it doesn't matter much how car makers chose to reduce gasoline consumption of cars-- reducing weight, reducing aerodynamic drag, reducing engine displacement, reducing engine friction, increasing combustion efficiency-- any path is fine.
I'm surprised you didn't suggest the idea of imposing an excise tax based on engine displacement and car physical size like they do in Europe and Japan. It's those taxes that made it possible for all those great small cars from Japan.
Logically, a tax on gasoline would create an incentive for more efficient cars. Nobody's willing to suggest this, though, people who do are branded "tax and spend liberals!"
Even though, at the moment, the federal gas tax doesn't even cover highway expenses-- the federal government currently is subsidizes automobiles.
It's been discussed at several recent conferences (AGU, LPSC) and was the main focus of Spirit's scientific research all through the last (Martian) summer.
"Why do you think he wanted a speedy trial?"
That's the bizarre part. He wanted the trial done before elections, and he willingly took the stand in his own defense. That indicates that he believed he was innocent and would get off
Not necessarily. It means he believed that they couldn't prove it.
If it was easy to cast a vote with a pencil and a paper and now it's not that easy, then *it is* machine fault.
You really, really, really underestimate some people's stupidity. This is NOT a technology problem. It's a stupid people problem:
1. Remember hanging chads? You know, the thing where some people couldn't figure out that you had to poke the entire piece of paper out.
"In Miami it was discovered after the election that the punch card machines in some areas had not be cleaned for eight years and the voters had difficulty dislodging the chads."
Note that the voting machine company themselves said the the machines had to be cleaned regularly, or the votes wouldn't be counted properly.
2. Remember where some people voted for multiple people on their paper ballot and were disqualified? Sure, maybe they were purposely trying to throw their vote away. More likely they couldn't figure out how to use a PENCIL properly.
You mean the famous Palm-beach butterfly ballot? The one where George Bush was the first name on the list, and to vote for him you punched the first hole, and Al Gore was the second name on the list, and to vote for him you had to punch the third hole? Yes, if you maybe call an election worker and ask-- I suppose an ordinary person might be able to figure this one out, that punching the second hole meant you're actually voting for a name on the next page of the ballot.
These machines are not "switching votes". They're just not.
Of course not. They're computers! What could possibly go wrong?
If there's a problem, it's the user. That's because the problem is always the user. Computers don't screw up, and if users claim that they do, it's because they're lusers.
And the reason that the companies won't let anybody look at their source code is to protect us. After all, it's intellectual property! If somebody saw it, they'd be able to figure out how votes are counted, and that's proprietary knowledge!
...say, why isn't this one tagged "what could possibly go wrong?"
Another possible flaw is a screen that is just set too sensitive, and is registering phantom touches.
It needs to be documented.
Everybody, if your district has electronic voting of any kind, bring your video camera (cell phone, pocket camera, PDA--whatever) in with you, and record yourself voting. If this phenomenon is happening, we need to document it.
I certainly would trust the Saturn V and its safety record over the Shuttle.
Saturn V, zero failures in the first (and only) 13 flights.
Space shuttle, zero failures in the first 24 flights, one failure, then zero failures for the next 87 flights.
If you "trust" the safety record of the Saturn as better than shuttle, this is only by an artifact of low statistics-- the Saturn V does not have a long enough flight record to say it has a better record than shuttle.
Want to reflect a lot of light back? Require all new homes to go up with white roof coverings...
wasn't that a slashdot article a month or so back?
MIT article tracker
LA times article
Christian Science Monitor Blog
Powerpoint presentation from LBL: "Global Cooling: Increasing World-wide Urban Albedos to Offset CO2," Hashem Akbari (as pdf):
Sunlight powers photosynthesis, and cutting down on sunlight reaching the surface will reduce the rate at which plants are pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Some portion of the carbon that plants remove from the atmosphere is replaced when the plants die and rot, but not a hundred percent-- some ends up sequestered.
Suppose we had such a situation as you suggest and thousands of reviewers pawed over the code making it "as good as it gets". How do you verify the code that was reviewed is the code that is running?
If the code that's reviewed is not the same as the code that's running, this is in itself evidence of fraud. You don't need to look for a back door in this case; you don't need to even know what the code that's running does, you have already shown fraud.
Making that whole system *secure*, otoh, is almost impossible, especially when it is something as large and distributed as a national voting system. If a company could actually make a completely secure voting system, they could also have a good DRM system. (Yeah, I did say "good DRM system", which shows how possible I think that is)
From Ken Thompson's essay Reflections on Trusting Trust, he says it isn't enough to check the source code, you also have to check the compiler, the output from that compiler, and I would add, in the context of a voting system, everything that is or could be in the system/network.
I would like to respectfully disagree here. Your comment can be too easily be summarized to "well, if you can't solve every possible flaw, you don't have a secure system, and so there's no point in trying, if they're all insecure anyway, any system is as bad as any other."
This belief is flawed. Even if you can't prove that there isn't any possible attack, it is nevertheless true that there are better systems and worse systems, and you don't want a worse system. Being able to check the source code-- and, better, having the source code open for anybody to look at-- is in fact a very good start. Yes, it is possible that there may be some hithertofore-unknown flaw in the compiler, and some extremely ingenious cracker might be able to find it and find a way to use it to manipulate voting results... but this is a billion times less likely than the case of some open port left accessable, or a deliberately open back door, that would be found by careful inspection of the source.
(You've misquoted Ken Thompson's conclusion, by the way. His actual conclusion was that you should never trust any program you didn't write yourself. Apparently he's never seen the programs I've written myself.)
You know, if I didn't know any better, I'd say that this was the same company as Diebold.
Oh, wait, it is ...
No, it's not; it's the other one. (Diebold is the same as "Premier Election Solutions".)
cf info at eff.org
(blackboxvoting.com isn't a bad source of info, either).
But is it scientific to say 'I am going to do an experiment to see if the neutrino has zero mass, but my margin of error means I'll never know for sure if it really is zero'? That the the point of the post you are replying to, which you seem to have conveniently overlooked.
According to the (mis)reading of Popper that's being quoted, yes. The statement 'I am going to do an experiment to see if the neutrino has zero mass, but my margin of error means I'll never know for sure if it really is zero' indeed is scientific, because the statement "The neutrino has zero mass" is falsifiable (by the way, "falsifiable" means that it's possible to show the premise to be false; it doesn't mean that this particular experiment will show it's false). But the statement 'I am going to do an experiment to see if the neutrino has nonzero mass, but my margin of error means I'll never know for sure if it really is zero' is not scientific, because the statement "The neutrino has nonzero mass" is not falsifiable.
But it's the same experiment!
And what if the researcher phrases it "I'm going to test whether the neutrino mas is zero, or nonzero."? In that case, is the researcher scientific, and also nonscientific?
You can use http://whocalled.us/ to coordinate investigation. Even though the number is spoofed, as long as they are using it consistently it is still an identifier. As everyone shares facts they discover it's possible to find the true identity.
And whocalled will tell her that her phone number and her address are the source of the scam calls.
That's not the solution... that's the problem.
The call can quite easily be traced back to where it came from
Remember, in this case, the victim isn't the one getting the calls.
She might be able to have the calls of the people who call her traced, but that's not the source of the problem. It's the people who call other people using her number who she needs to know the number of.