The name of the band is "The Who", not "Who". And the question is phrased very strangely-- think about what it would sound like if you walked up to somebody and asked, "The Beatles sang 'Penny Lane'?" That kind of short-form yes/no question only makes sense when you're seeking confirmation of something just mentioned. Finally, I'm guessing you don't use the same intonation you would normally use when asking a question of that form, since it would give away the "trick".
In summary, your trick question is bad, and you should feel bad.
Wouldn't you need to prove somebody is a terrorist before you can prove he lied when he said he wasn't one? Seriously, what am I missing-- lower burden of proof or something?
Wouldn't it be easier for people whose first language isn't English to parse '2009-02-02' than '2009-Feb-02'? And I don't think it's ambiguous: not only does YYYY-MM-DD make more sense, but also people who do put the year first always use that format, in my experience. I don't think I've ever seen anyone write a date in YYYY-DD-MM form.
If you want such things to exist, they need to be socialized... Media companies are propaganda machines.
I'm amazed you can say such things with a straight face. However bad private media companies may be, as propagandists they pale in comparison to governments. And the worst instances of "private" propaganda just happen to align with the interests of the governments under which those companies operate, by some strange coincidence.
We're already partway there with standard user permissions: as long as you're not running as root/Administrator, malicious or buggy software can't mess with your system files without your permission.
Of course, this doesn't prevent, say, an installer that otherwise legitimately neeeds administrator priviliges from accidentally erasing your hard drive.
And besides, users' most important files are usually the ones they create themselves-- files to which any apps they run will have complete access!
SELinux is one solution, but it's way too technical for the average user. More academically, there are capability-based systems like Coyotos (recently discussed as a possible replacement kernel for GNU Hurd-- stop snickering back there!).
Anyway, I agree with you that we need this, but doing it in a user-friendly way is a hard problem. And it needs to be very user-friendly, because people generally don't understand or value security very much and therefore have a low tolerance for security-related annoyances.
If you want workers to earn more or work in better conditions than the market dictates, then what you want is charity, not business. In that case I suggest that you donate your own time and money, rather than trying to force businesses to donate theirs.
Besides, why do you think these workers choose to work where they do? Because they're the best jobs available! If these companies hadn't been profit-seeking, they wouldn't have bothered to outsource, and the workers we're talking about would be even worse off than they are now.
A garbage-collecting ship like the Toy Box is not likely to be feasible for anything other than the largest debris pieces. You would have to expend huge amounts of energy to match velocities with each little group of debris, and you wouldn't get much useful scrap from them. The wiki page you mention actually discusses this briefly.
Personally, I can't stand GEB's Achilles-Tortoise dialogues. They just get on my nerves somehow; as a result I haven't been able to enjoy the book as much as I had hoped. Perhaps if I'd read it as an adolescent, like you did, I would have found those exchanges more engaging.
We simply cannot be competitive as a nation with a "weak" federal government in concert with "strong" state governments.
Why is being "competitive as a nation" a worthwhile goal? Why not let the states be "competitive" as states? In fact, that's kind of the point: if you don't like your current state, you can move to another one with different laws. If the states don't have enough power to differ significantly from one another, that doesn't work so well.
The wording of this amendment is intentionally vague. If it was overly strict, the constitution would quickly become irrelevant as the times changed. For example, what if the constitution was formed when people thought radio was a novelty and they included "the federal government should not regulate radio".
Uh, no. The wording is about as clear as it could be: the only powers the federal government has are the ones the Constitution explicitly grants it. By default, the federal government has no power. There would be no point in trying to list every single thing it is not allowed to do. The Bill of Rights was just tacked on to make doubleplus sure that the government wouldn't do certain things that governments are notorious for; in fact, some of the founders argued against including it because they feared it would lead to the misinterpretation you advocate!
The fundamental problem with this issue is that the business model is forced to work based on the good will of the buyers.
Which business model, exactly? Your failure to imagine a functional alternative doesn't mean that none exists. In fact, we know of several that work pretty well already: in music, fans pay to attend live concerts; in software, programmers from around the world donate their spare time to collaborate on shared, open source code. Is it really such a stretch to imagine that we might get along pretty well without, as Bruce Schneier put it, "trying to make water not wet"?
So really, we need to face up to the fact that we need a culture that says "you don't deserve it just because you can't pay for it or don't want to pay for it."
This has nothing to do with "deserving" anything. It's about the enforcement of certain government-granted monopolies. These monopolies were a terrible idea to begin with, but this fact is only now becoming apparent with the arrival of the information age.
What we are seeing is that many people will not voluntarily submit to schemes of artificial scarcity. Whether this constitutes a failure of morals is irrelevant, and complaining about it is futile. The current situation cannot last long, and there are only two options in the long run:
a) Submit to totalitarianism, which is the only way the government might be able to control the flow of information enough to enforce copyright.
b) Get rid of copyright. Reform would provide only a temporary respite, since it's the concept of copyright itself that is broken.
So that country may want to forego cheap US corn in order to allow itself to grow its own corn industry and perhaps grow other corn-related industries as well.
But why should they, when they can get the corn cheaper elsewhere? Should they waste resources just so they can have an inefficient corn industry?
And it's not as though relying on foreign-grown food is particularly risky. The world market is large, and if one seller goes away or raises its prices, another will just step in to fill its place. It's the same reason I don't feel particularly worried about not growing my own food.
When one poor, desperate country starts to get wealthy, corporations will simply move to the next one, and let the first stay wealthy.
Fixed that for you. Yes, the rate of growth will slow, but the economic growth that has already taken place is not going to magically disappear when those jobs move elsewhere. Were that the case, what would have happened to the United States by now, given all the jobs that have already been outsourced from it?
Businesses seek out the cheapest labor, which is usually found in places with the lowest standard of living. This induces economic growth, which raises the standard of living. In this way, outsourcing enriches the poorest places in the world, while at the same time providing cheaper goods and services for first-world economies. Remind me again how this is a bad thing?
You're kidding right? Do you think economic data going back centuries is not enough?
It is not enough. You do not seem to understand how the scientific method works: you come up with a hypothesis that explains some phenomenon, then you design an experiment that is capable of falsifying that hypothesis. Such an experiment needs to have controls, and needs to be repeatable. Looking at historical data fails on both counts; as a result, you can justify almost any macroeconomic hypothesis by looking at the data in a certain way.
The gangsters of the roaring 20's, Enron, Tyco, The S&L scams in the 80's, the CDS markets, and the list goes on and on as to the plentiful examples of why the government MUST step in with regulations to protect investors and consumers.
Doesn't the fact that these kinds of examples continue to crop up show that the government is not very good at preventing them? See, for example, Bernie Madoff and the $50 billion ponzi scheme that the SEC failed to recognize for over ten years, even though they've been getting warnings about him since at least 1999.
This is in sharp contrast to the chicago school which uses actual economic data to make actual predictive price models using real statistics which say "on this day, the price of gas should be, with a margin of 2% error, $X", and are correct enough to be used in decisions at the corporate and state level.
Oh? Please point out some Chicago school economists who are currently making such predictions, so we can see just how accurate they are. And if they can predict such small details, then certainly they must have seen the current financial situation coming, right? Unlike the Austrians...
its methods consist of post-hoc analysis, and do not generate testable implications; they argue this approach fails the test of falsifiability....
Please explain how to falsify Keynesianism. In fact, nearly all of macroeconomics is non-falsifiable right now, because we lack the capability to run the necessary experiments. Indeed, there is reason to believe we will never gain that capability, due to the nature of human actors.
In either case, as long as we are unable to properly test macroeconomic hypotheses using the scientific method, macroeconomics is not a science, and should not be treated as one.
Oh, and it's nice how you cut out the words "Critics of the Austrian school contend that" from the front of that sentence. The part about "post-hoc analysis" is almost exactly the opposite of the truth: the Austrian school uses a priori analysis from first principles to derive general laws of human action that apply no matter the circumstances.
That gives Austrianism a predictive power that applies consistently in the long run, but not as much in the short run, given the complexity of large economies. In contrast, more "scientific" macroeconomic schools of thought claim to be able to predict the short run, but they are consistently wrong and can only keep adjusting their models to "predict" what has already happened.
Example of there the government produces something worthwhile: the road network. They produced it, and it basically works year in, year out and the country would fall to pieces without it.
The roads work, but that doesn't mean they work well. Traffic jams, potholes, "orange cone season", and of course high maintenance costs... there is a lot of room for improvement. Private roads might do better, but we'll never know as long as the government keeps doing a passable job with "free" (taxpayer) money.
In many countries, governments run a significant fraction of the school system as well.
And look how well that's going in the U.S.! The situation may be better in other countries, but this example is ambiguous at best.
Example of big business failing miserably: Enron...
And then Enron went bankrupt, and doesn't exist anymore. Can you say that about most failed government projects?
...the current financial crisis.
The current financial "crisis" was ultimately caused by the Federal Reserve's foolhardy policy of keeping interest rates artificially low, which encouraged malinvestment. Those malivestments eventually came to light and are now being systematically purged by the market (or would be, if not for various ill-advised government bailouts).
In some cases, the government can do a better job, in some cases they foul up. In some cases businesses do a better job. In some cases they foul up.
This is certainly true, but the point in question was that in general, governments produce worse goods and services than do private businesses. The reason is simple: private businesses have a very powerful and direct incentive to efficiently produce what consumers want, namely profit. The profit motive occasionally produces "bad" behavior as well, but its overall effect is overwhelmingly positive.
In contrast, the only incentives government agencies have to produce good products are the extremely indirect incentives that arise from the popular vote. Those incentives are easily overwhelmed by special-interest lobbying and other forms of corruption, or simply by the human nature of bureaucrats.
No, he didn't. This myth of Hoover being "laissez-faire" is completely unfounded; see, for example, this article by Murray Rothbard. His harmful interference included signing disastrous bills like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the Revenue Act of 1932. In Hoover's own words:
We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action...
The US economy didn't recover until WWII rendered it the SOLE FUNCTIONING ECONOMY in the world.
If by that you mean that the war had an even worse effect on most other major economies than it had on that of the U.S., you may be right. If, on the other hand, you are saying that the war actually helped the U.S. economy recover, then you are falling for the broken window fallacy.
Slashdot Mirror
The name of the band is "The Who", not "Who". And the question is phrased very strangely-- think about what it would sound like if you walked up to somebody and asked, "The Beatles sang 'Penny Lane'?" That kind of short-form yes/no question only makes sense when you're seeking confirmation of something just mentioned. Finally, I'm guessing you don't use the same intonation you would normally use when asking a question of that form, since it would give away the "trick".
In summary, your trick question is bad, and you should feel bad.
Wouldn't you need to prove somebody is a terrorist before you can prove he lied when he said he wasn't one? Seriously, what am I missing-- lower burden of proof or something?
Wouldn't it be easier for people whose first language isn't English to parse '2009-02-02' than '2009-Feb-02'? And I don't think it's ambiguous: not only does YYYY-MM-DD make more sense, but also people who do put the year first always use that format, in my experience. I don't think I've ever seen anyone write a date in YYYY-DD-MM form.
I see you've never used Amazon's EC2 Console on FF3/Mac.
If you want such things to exist, they need to be socialized... Media companies are propaganda machines.
I'm amazed you can say such things with a straight face. However bad private media companies may be, as propagandists they pale in comparison to governments. And the worst instances of "private" propaganda just happen to align with the interests of the governments under which those companies operate, by some strange coincidence.
And you wish to socialize them further?
We're already partway there with standard user permissions: as long as you're not running as root/Administrator, malicious or buggy software can't mess with your system files without your permission.
Of course, this doesn't prevent, say, an installer that otherwise legitimately neeeds administrator priviliges from accidentally erasing your hard drive. And besides, users' most important files are usually the ones they create themselves-- files to which any apps they run will have complete access!
SELinux is one solution, but it's way too technical for the average user. More academically, there are capability-based systems like Coyotos (recently discussed as a possible replacement kernel for GNU Hurd-- stop snickering back there!).
Anyway, I agree with you that we need this, but doing it in a user-friendly way is a hard problem. And it needs to be very user-friendly, because people generally don't understand or value security very much and therefore have a low tolerance for security-related annoyances.
In fact, I think it is interesting to note that while music and video are subject to much pirating, books have remained relatively pirate proof.
That's probably just because reading books on a computer screen sucks. Once e-book readers become common, you'll see a lot more book piracy.
Attempting to use legal means to change this is akin to passing laws against gravity, and both will enjoy equal success.
I believe the preferred analogy is trying to make water not wet.
If you want workers to earn more or work in better conditions than the market dictates, then what you want is charity, not business. In that case I suggest that you donate your own time and money, rather than trying to force businesses to donate theirs.
Besides, why do you think these workers choose to work where they do? Because they're the best jobs available! If these companies hadn't been profit-seeking, they wouldn't have bothered to outsource, and the workers we're talking about would be even worse off than they are now.
A garbage-collecting ship like the Toy Box is not likely to be feasible for anything other than the largest debris pieces. You would have to expend huge amounts of energy to match velocities with each little group of debris, and you wouldn't get much useful scrap from them. The wiki page you mention actually discusses this briefly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Personally, I can't stand GEB's Achilles-Tortoise dialogues. They just get on my nerves somehow; as a result I haven't been able to enjoy the book as much as I had hoped. Perhaps if I'd read it as an adolescent, like you did, I would have found those exchanges more engaging.
You see, law enforcement isn't supposed to be making a profit from other people's crimes whether you agree with those crimes or not.
So who gets the money from speeding tickets?
We simply cannot be competitive as a nation with a "weak" federal government in concert with "strong" state governments.
Why is being "competitive as a nation" a worthwhile goal? Why not let the states be "competitive" as states? In fact, that's kind of the point: if you don't like your current state, you can move to another one with different laws. If the states don't have enough power to differ significantly from one another, that doesn't work so well.
The wording of this amendment is intentionally vague. If it was overly strict, the constitution would quickly become irrelevant as the times changed. For example, what if the constitution was formed when people thought radio was a novelty and they included "the federal government should not regulate radio".
Uh, no. The wording is about as clear as it could be: the only powers the federal government has are the ones the Constitution explicitly grants it. By default, the federal government has no power. There would be no point in trying to list every single thing it is not allowed to do. The Bill of Rights was just tacked on to make doubleplus sure that the government wouldn't do certain things that governments are notorious for; in fact, some of the founders argued against including it because they feared it would lead to the misinterpretation you advocate!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy
The fundamental problem with this issue is that the business model is forced to work based on the good will of the buyers.
Which business model, exactly? Your failure to imagine a functional alternative doesn't mean that none exists. In fact, we know of several that work pretty well already: in music, fans pay to attend live concerts; in software, programmers from around the world donate their spare time to collaborate on shared, open source code. Is it really such a stretch to imagine that we might get along pretty well without, as Bruce Schneier put it, "trying to make water not wet"?
So really, we need to face up to the fact that we need a culture that says "you don't deserve it just because you can't pay for it or don't want to pay for it."
This has nothing to do with "deserving" anything. It's about the enforcement of certain government-granted monopolies. These monopolies were a terrible idea to begin with, but this fact is only now becoming apparent with the arrival of the information age.
What we are seeing is that many people will not voluntarily submit to schemes of artificial scarcity. Whether this constitutes a failure of morals is irrelevant, and complaining about it is futile. The current situation cannot last long, and there are only two options in the long run:
a) Submit to totalitarianism, which is the only way the government might be able to control the flow of information enough to enforce copyright.
b) Get rid of copyright. Reform would provide only a temporary respite, since it's the concept of copyright itself that is broken.
It is time to pick sides. Which will you choose?
I'll probably get some disagreement on the last one, but I've seen it in both English and Japanese and I much prefer the English version.
Which did you see first?
Wow, your anecdotal evidence about an Apple Store in Canada has totally convinced me!
So that country may want to forego cheap US corn in order to allow itself to grow its own corn industry and perhaps grow other corn-related industries as well.
But why should they, when they can get the corn cheaper elsewhere? Should they waste resources just so they can have an inefficient corn industry?
And it's not as though relying on foreign-grown food is particularly risky. The world market is large, and if one seller goes away or raises its prices, another will just step in to fill its place. It's the same reason I don't feel particularly worried about not growing my own food.
When one poor, desperate country starts to get wealthy, corporations will simply move to the next one, and let the first stay wealthy.
Fixed that for you. Yes, the rate of growth will slow, but the economic growth that has already taken place is not going to magically disappear when those jobs move elsewhere. Were that the case, what would have happened to the United States by now, given all the jobs that have already been outsourced from it?
Businesses seek out the cheapest labor, which is usually found in places with the lowest standard of living. This induces economic growth, which raises the standard of living. In this way, outsourcing enriches the poorest places in the world, while at the same time providing cheaper goods and services for first-world economies. Remind me again how this is a bad thing?
You're kidding right? Do you think economic data going back centuries is not enough?
It is not enough. You do not seem to understand how the scientific method works: you come up with a hypothesis that explains some phenomenon, then you design an experiment that is capable of falsifying that hypothesis. Such an experiment needs to have controls, and needs to be repeatable. Looking at historical data fails on both counts; as a result, you can justify almost any macroeconomic hypothesis by looking at the data in a certain way.
The gangsters of the roaring 20's, Enron, Tyco, The S&L scams in the 80's, the CDS markets, and the list goes on and on as to the plentiful examples of why the government MUST step in with regulations to protect investors and consumers.
Doesn't the fact that these kinds of examples continue to crop up show that the government is not very good at preventing them? See, for example, Bernie Madoff and the $50 billion ponzi scheme that the SEC failed to recognize for over ten years, even though they've been getting warnings about him since at least 1999.
This is in sharp contrast to the chicago school which uses actual economic data to make actual predictive price models using real statistics which say "on this day, the price of gas should be, with a margin of 2% error, $X", and are correct enough to be used in decisions at the corporate and state level.
Oh? Please point out some Chicago school economists who are currently making such predictions, so we can see just how accurate they are. And if they can predict such small details, then certainly they must have seen the current financial situation coming, right? Unlike the Austrians...
its methods consist of post-hoc analysis, and do not generate testable implications; they argue this approach fails the test of falsifiability....
Please explain how to falsify Keynesianism. In fact, nearly all of macroeconomics is non-falsifiable right now, because we lack the capability to run the necessary experiments. Indeed, there is reason to believe we will never gain that capability, due to the nature of human actors.
In either case, as long as we are unable to properly test macroeconomic hypotheses using the scientific method, macroeconomics is not a science, and should not be treated as one.
Oh, and it's nice how you cut out the words "Critics of the Austrian school contend that" from the front of that sentence. The part about "post-hoc analysis" is almost exactly the opposite of the truth: the Austrian school uses a priori analysis from first principles to derive general laws of human action that apply no matter the circumstances.
That gives Austrianism a predictive power that applies consistently in the long run, but not as much in the short run, given the complexity of large economies. In contrast, more "scientific" macroeconomic schools of thought claim to be able to predict the short run, but they are consistently wrong and can only keep adjusting their models to "predict" what has already happened.
Source A makes claim X
There is something objectionable about Source A
Therefore claim X is false
Have a good day.
Example of there the government produces something worthwhile: the road network. They produced it, and it basically works year in, year out and the country would fall to pieces without it.
The roads work, but that doesn't mean they work well. Traffic jams, potholes, "orange cone season", and of course high maintenance costs... there is a lot of room for improvement. Private roads might do better, but we'll never know as long as the government keeps doing a passable job with "free" (taxpayer) money.
In many countries, governments run a significant fraction of the school system as well.
And look how well that's going in the U.S.! The situation may be better in other countries, but this example is ambiguous at best.
Example of big business failing miserably: Enron...
And then Enron went bankrupt, and doesn't exist anymore. Can you say that about most failed government projects?
...the current financial crisis.
The current financial "crisis" was ultimately caused by the Federal Reserve's foolhardy policy of keeping interest rates artificially low, which encouraged malinvestment. Those malivestments eventually came to light and are now being systematically purged by the market (or would be, if not for various ill-advised government bailouts).
In some cases, the government can do a better job, in some cases they foul up. In some cases businesses do a better job. In some cases they foul up.
This is certainly true, but the point in question was that in general, governments produce worse goods and services than do private businesses. The reason is simple: private businesses have a very powerful and direct incentive to efficiently produce what consumers want, namely profit. The profit motive occasionally produces "bad" behavior as well, but its overall effect is overwhelmingly positive.
In contrast, the only incentives government agencies have to produce good products are the extremely indirect incentives that arise from the popular vote. Those incentives are easily overwhelmed by special-interest lobbying and other forms of corruption, or simply by the human nature of bureaucrats.
Hoover obeyed your wishes.
No, he didn't. This myth of Hoover being "laissez-faire" is completely unfounded; see, for example, this article by Murray Rothbard. His harmful interference included signing disastrous bills like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the Revenue Act of 1932. In Hoover's own words:
We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action...
The revisionism surrounding Hoover is much like what's happening with Bush the Younger: for some reason, people stubbornly believe him to be pro-market, despite the fact that federal expenditures have risen dramatically during his administration, as have federal regulations.
The US economy didn't recover until WWII rendered it the SOLE FUNCTIONING ECONOMY in the world.
If by that you mean that the war had an even worse effect on most other major economies than it had on that of the U.S., you may be right. If, on the other hand, you are saying that the war actually helped the U.S. economy recover, then you are falling for the broken window fallacy.