He didn't say that the US had greater mobility. He said that the story shown in The Pursuit of Happyness showed it was still POSSIBLE for upward mobility to come about through hard work and ingenuity, but questioned how common that was, considering he had spent time in inner city schools and saw the conditions.
It doesn't have to be a legal or official reason for people to feel like they can't get ahead. It can be as simple as seeing what others expect of you and looking at how other people get out. And these days, most people who climb economic strata are in the entertainment industry or sports world. And sadly, most of those positions are unattainable. What matters is seeing people in the upper middle class, or just a little bit above your situation. That's executives, private practice doctors, corporate attorneys, etc. And that isn't attainable for anyone who doesn't come from a difficult background. It's hard enough to get a job when you don't have money or a good education, it's a thousand times harder to get into management.
Anyone who hands their music to another company and sells them the rights to sell copies, publish and do whatever with it has already relinquished those rights. If maintaining your rights is more important to you than having people actually hear your music, then do what actual professional artists do and only sell one copy to a private owner or museum.
First, no, it's not something you can buy. You buy rights to listen to it. You can buy a CD, and you can steal a CD, but you don't steal what's on the CD because it's intangible.
And it's even less than stealing when it's a digital copy, because then nothing has been lost. They only lose the POTENTIAL of having a sale. Which is not the same as taking away an actual product. You can't shoplift a download, and when you get a copy of it, the other person doesn't lose theirs. So no, it's NOT stealing. If I took a picture of a billboard with Mickey Mouse on it and looked at it whenever I wanted to, would you consider that to be stealing, too?
Agreed. I think he tries to interpret the research into something it's not. In truth (Not a doctor), it's not that everyone is predisposed to these problems, only ones with certain brain chemistry that make them less likely to have instincts like preservation of the species. It's not even that those people are predisposed, brain chemistry can change halfway through your life. But to argue that all criminals and sociopaths are driven by brain chemistry and not by a lifetime of abuses both real and perceived is factually incorrect.
Also, I don't buy every CD I listen to, but that wouldn't change regardless of whether I downloaded it or not. The only difference is that this way, I can actually support the artists I really enjoy, rather than the ones I see featured in the record store or like the 20 second clips of on Amazon or AMG. I don't buy many CDs that I never actually listen to anymore. And many of the ones I do buy, I would have never bought if I hadn't downloaded it and had time to digest it. In what way, shape or form is this NOT a superior model?
What happens in the instance where you would like to torrent an artist's new CD, but they don't tour, or won't be playing in your area, or maybe they're not the type of artist or band who sells t-shirts? In that case, do you do without their album?
Any artist will tour and/or sell merchandise. If they don't, they have plenty of money and don't necessarily need anyone to buy their album. Artists affiliated with a major label will have tremendous costs to recoup that will net them almost no money from selling CDs, and artists that release an album themselves or are with a label that gives them a decent percentage of CD sales won't be established enough to not hustle. But in any case, if an artist only makes less than a dollar when I buy a CD (and I'm pretty sure it's considerably less), then how is my buying a CD going to make much difference at all? The war on "piracy" is not about supporting the artists, it's about supporting the recording industry and the music marketing industry. And I would rather not support them one bit. Maybe if more people stopped supporting them, artists would wake up and learn exactly how much they don't need a giant corporation to support their art.
I don't know much about the law, but if she was able to use Due Process to claim that she can't be charged much more than what costs were actually incurred by the plaintiff, wouldn't that also put an end to lawsuits where someone slips on the floor somewhere and sues for several thousand dollars?
And if so, wouldn't the purists on the Supreme Court leap at the chance to sidestep tort reform laws to put a stop to that kind of thing?
I don't appreciate being lumped into one solid mass of negative opinion. I'm a liberal. I agree that Saddam should be executed, but also think that having the verdict come out now causes the entire trial to lose credibility. Not to mention that this WILL make him a martyr, and that's solely a result of the way that the Iraqi war has been botched beyond recognition.
Also, while Saddam is being executed for crimes committed over a decade ago, there's a genocide going on in Sudan at this very moment. Pakistan is (or was for a long time) harboring the number one threat to our security, Osama Bin Laden. And that's not even mentioning the thousands of innocent Iraqis that have died as a result of this war, far more than Saddam himself murdered. So to say that this sends a message that killing innocent people will get you executed is sadly mistaken. What this actually does is tell other murderous dictatorships that if they don't have weapons of mass destruction to defend themselves, they stand a good chance of being invaded, so what difference does it make whether they cooperate with the UN or USA or not?
Give me a fiscally responsible, small government, pro-life candidate who supports the war on terror (appeasers need not apply) and I'll consider voting for them.
How can the government possibly be small if they involve themselves with personal issues rooted in subjective morality like a woman's reproductive rights, and how can an open-ended war on an intangible opponent be considered fiscally responsible? Either you have a government that maintains the right to curb liberties as they see fit and can spend billions of dollars on something that will never see any returns, or you can have a government that conserves money and doesn't interfere in the private lives of its citizens.
I don't think the war on terror is a bad idea, and I have never seen any quote from any Democratic party member saying so, either. The problem is that Bush is wasting all our money, our resolve, and our international credibility on a war that didn't have much to do with terror in the first place.
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He didn't say that the US had greater mobility. He said that the story shown in The Pursuit of Happyness showed it was still POSSIBLE for upward mobility to come about through hard work and ingenuity, but questioned how common that was, considering he had spent time in inner city schools and saw the conditions. It doesn't have to be a legal or official reason for people to feel like they can't get ahead. It can be as simple as seeing what others expect of you and looking at how other people get out. And these days, most people who climb economic strata are in the entertainment industry or sports world. And sadly, most of those positions are unattainable. What matters is seeing people in the upper middle class, or just a little bit above your situation. That's executives, private practice doctors, corporate attorneys, etc. And that isn't attainable for anyone who doesn't come from a difficult background. It's hard enough to get a job when you don't have money or a good education, it's a thousand times harder to get into management.
Anyone who hands their music to another company and sells them the rights to sell copies, publish and do whatever with it has already relinquished those rights. If maintaining your rights is more important to you than having people actually hear your music, then do what actual professional artists do and only sell one copy to a private owner or museum.
First, no, it's not something you can buy. You buy rights to listen to it. You can buy a CD, and you can steal a CD, but you don't steal what's on the CD because it's intangible. And it's even less than stealing when it's a digital copy, because then nothing has been lost. They only lose the POTENTIAL of having a sale. Which is not the same as taking away an actual product. You can't shoplift a download, and when you get a copy of it, the other person doesn't lose theirs. So no, it's NOT stealing. If I took a picture of a billboard with Mickey Mouse on it and looked at it whenever I wanted to, would you consider that to be stealing, too?
Agreed. I think he tries to interpret the research into something it's not. In truth (Not a doctor), it's not that everyone is predisposed to these problems, only ones with certain brain chemistry that make them less likely to have instincts like preservation of the species. It's not even that those people are predisposed, brain chemistry can change halfway through your life. But to argue that all criminals and sociopaths are driven by brain chemistry and not by a lifetime of abuses both real and perceived is factually incorrect.
Also, I don't buy every CD I listen to, but that wouldn't change regardless of whether I downloaded it or not. The only difference is that this way, I can actually support the artists I really enjoy, rather than the ones I see featured in the record store or like the 20 second clips of on Amazon or AMG. I don't buy many CDs that I never actually listen to anymore. And many of the ones I do buy, I would have never bought if I hadn't downloaded it and had time to digest it. In what way, shape or form is this NOT a superior model?
I don't know much about the law, but if she was able to use Due Process to claim that she can't be charged much more than what costs were actually incurred by the plaintiff, wouldn't that also put an end to lawsuits where someone slips on the floor somewhere and sues for several thousand dollars?
And if so, wouldn't the purists on the Supreme Court leap at the chance to sidestep tort reform laws to put a stop to that kind of thing?
I don't appreciate being lumped into one solid mass of negative opinion. I'm a liberal. I agree that Saddam should be executed, but also think that having the verdict come out now causes the entire trial to lose credibility. Not to mention that this WILL make him a martyr, and that's solely a result of the way that the Iraqi war has been botched beyond recognition. Also, while Saddam is being executed for crimes committed over a decade ago, there's a genocide going on in Sudan at this very moment. Pakistan is (or was for a long time) harboring the number one threat to our security, Osama Bin Laden. And that's not even mentioning the thousands of innocent Iraqis that have died as a result of this war, far more than Saddam himself murdered. So to say that this sends a message that killing innocent people will get you executed is sadly mistaken. What this actually does is tell other murderous dictatorships that if they don't have weapons of mass destruction to defend themselves, they stand a good chance of being invaded, so what difference does it make whether they cooperate with the UN or USA or not?