You are confusing basic society with socialism. Its in a societies own best interest to take nominal care of all its members. That's not socialism. It's simply a pragmatic method of increasing over all happiness, reducing disease, reducing crime, increasing employment, increasing productivity, etc. Taken to an extreme it can become socialism, but basic health care is no more extreme than public education or a centrally run military.
Actually, if your read some commonly used definitions of socialism, what you described IS socialism. It just isn't what the American right has made out socialism to be - i.e. a synonym of Stalinism.
Something as basic as teaching your children to share rather than snatch could be considered socialism. In fact, in their early years children are taught many socialist ideals - sharing, caring for those less fortunate, not being greedy - and then they become adults and suddenly get told 'right, every man for himself! grab what you can!'. I think the dissonance of this could be the cause of a great deal of malaise in the young (although I've no evidence for this right now; I literally just thought of it).
As a European (British) I can honestly say, wtf? British people aren't questioning the NHS, recently they were busy defending it from viscous and inaccurate attacks by US news channels and one deranged fringe conservative politician whose views were disowned by his own party.
Most Europeans don't worship their government in any way, which is WHY European governments offer such services - in order to justify their existence. We see far more unquestioning loyalty (from the supporters of the party in power anyway) from Americans than we do over here you know.
Despite the common view of monolithic state healthcare in Europe, there are many different systems. France and the UK, for instance, have quite different healthcare systems, and AFAIK both populations are quite attached to their own model. Asking them to subscribe to a common one might be like asking them to speak a common language.
The reason Americans are viewed as a monolithic nation in a way Europe is not (yet) is because frankly, the US has been a tight federal union for since the end of the civil war, with a single language and a single national identity. The EU in its present form only came into being in the 1990s.
Furthermore, largely because of the common language, there is a US-wide media industry in the way there isn't in the EU. We can talk about Fox News and CNN being 'American news channels' but you can't talk about BBC News 24, or France 24 as being 'European news channels' in the same way.
The perception of America as a fully unified country is perhaps not correct but it is certainly understandable I think.
It has a serious, and might I saw, rather obvious flaw
If the activation of the LHC created some kind of cataclysmic event which would some fuck up time to the extent of violating causality, and if the universe does indeed have causality as a boundary condition, then there are far more probable ways of averting the fatal collision than screwing up several tonnes of magnet months before the high energy firings were scheduled to take place.
The universe could simply induce a sufficient e/m force to stop the proton beams colliding. It wouldn't take much, on a cosmic scale, and would be a far more likely outcome than an entire macroscopic object being foobared just to protect the continuity of the universe.
Why? One lab result (not yet repeated AFAIK) does not represent a workable magnet technology. The magnets at CERN didn't even use the highest temperature available at the time of their design in any case; so it obviously doesn't follow that 'the higher temperature the superconductor, the better the magnet'
Enough with the LHC bashing, please. Europe is taking a lead in particle physics, and unsurprisingly being at the absolute bleeding edge comes with some technical pitfalls.
Its more his demon spawn that is kicking up a stink about the BBC these days (theres a clear division of labour; big evil goes after Google and little evil goes after the Beeb).
Basically, the BBC sets the standard for journalistic quality in the UK. Other TV news can't afford to go to sensationalist and downmarket because there will always be the BBC there, not having to please advertisers, showing them up with decent quality news. Bluntly, the BBC is the reason UK TV news isn't like American TV news.
But it is under threat from the Murdoch machine; The BBC is a journalistic Rome, and Bill O'Reilly and Glen Beck are the emotionally unstable visigoths at the gates...
Take a look at his personal history... dripping with lies and bastardry and very short of stupidity. Its unlikely he is as dumb as he wants you to think he is.
The middlemen also take their cut of course - a cut which counts as economic activity but doesn't actually produce anything or provide a real service. This isn't just lefty paranoia about 'exploiters' either, its a recognised phenomenon - I believe economists call it 'rent seeking'
Don't turn this into blanket gerontophobia please. Plenty of old people understand and use the internet perfectly well. In fact, I think Murdoch is in command of his faculties and does understand the internet (he can afford to have the very best people explain him to it, after all) - I think he is just being damn greedy. He isn't being stupid, he is counting on everyone else being stupid - a strategy that has served him well with business ventures such as Fox News and The Sun.
Professional reporting is dead, and nowhere demonstrates this more elegantly that Fox News.
Precisely because its expensive to send out correspondents to do real reporting, big media has stopped doing it. Having Bill O'Reilly throw a tantrum at some unsuspecting guest is cheap and grabs ratings.
Consider the recent turmoil after the Iranian election; twitter contained almost as much information as the big news outlets (who were, in some cases, reporting what was on twitter). How many of them actually had guys on the ground in Iran? I can't think of a single one, because it would be expensive and dangerous work. So the news sites did what the rest of us did and looked on twitter. If they do that, then why are they needed?
True. The 'move towards paid content' he describes is the movement he wants to start. Enclosure is exactly the right analogue; men like him have always made money by setting themselves up as middlemen, not adding to the system but simple charging for access to part of it that was previously free.
I've become convinced that long government/corporate/thinktank documents exist so as to conceal unpleasant information. For example, the notorious 'Rebuilding Americas Defences' document bleats on about nothing for ages before it gets to "wouldn't another Pearl Harbor be awesome" and "lets make ethnically-targeted biological weapons".
The total cost of the ATV programme amounts to 1 billion [euro] for development, including the Jules Verne prototype, and 800 million [euro] for an additional six spacecraft, to be launched at 18-month intervals. The total of seven ATVs will cover operating needs from 2007 to 2018.
I'll save you the maths; that is 257 million euros (about 378 million dollars) per ATV including development costs.
Seeing as a Falcon 9 launch is set to cost over 49 million dollars,
http://spacex.com/falcon9.php
and like the Falcon 1 its price might go up if it requires further development, your claim of 'ten times as much' is clearly bollocks from the get go. Consider also that the ATV carries 8 times as much cargo as the Dragon capsule:
...means the Dragon wouldn't even be as cost efficient as the ATV if it costs nothing to develop and build each unit.
Seeing as the ATV is already in service, there is no economic benefit to introducing another resupply craft that delivers less cargo per unit cost. Contrary to the propaganda of Europe=bloated government US=dynamic private industry, it is the Dragon capsule that is a prestige project and the ATV that is an economically viable one.
NASA is not holding back 'private' space development - it is helping them. Who do you think turned up and told Scaled Composites how to make fuel tanks that didn't kill their employees on the ground? Who do you think did the groundwork for VASIMR? Who do you think is providing the launch facilities for the SpaceX Falcon 9? Your libertarian drivel doesn't hold up under even the slightest examination.
Their disadvantage is that they have to carry their working fluid with them. To get into orbit you need to gain over 8km/s of horizontal velocity and to do that you want to get above the majority of the atmosphere ASAP - so you quickly leave the area where you could snatch any external substance to use for propulsion.
Space elevators are not an automatic fix either - electric motors require power and to carry the kind of power supply that could lift you up a distance equal to about 5 times the diameter of the Earth would give you much the same engineering problems as a rocket.
Another randroid on slashdot. This is getting old...
This is the same kind of math used by proponents of President Obama's healthcare socialization package. If you will, it's also the same math used to justify the Soviet command economy.
Right, because everyone who doesn't agree with you is a Stalinist. Any system of organisation differing from your conception of unrestrained capitalism is the fucking Soviet Union. This is what us non-retarded people call a 'false dichotomy'
On paper, eliminating profits saves money for the hypothetical society. In reality, however, eliminating profit also eliminates self-interest, which very effectively stagnates or degrades the enterprise... be it at the level of a single supermarket, or the economy of the wealthiest country on Earth.
And this little gem is called a 'non sequitur' in a language that it is nearly impossible to make money by learning. The idea that profit=self-interest=motivation is a pathetically simplistic view of humankind, only held by economists, psychopaths, and teenage boys.
The reason why this doesn't work, is because you need several things to get something accomplished. You need the WILL to start it... the RESPONSIBILITY to see it through, and the MEANS to get it done. Socialism helps with the means... but not the will. Capitalism helps with the will, by accepting man as the egotistical bastard he is, and appealing to the basest of desires: greed.
YOU might be an egotistical bastard, however scientific study of the human race doesn't indicate there is any factual basis whatsoever to your teenage misanthropy.
But nothing helps with responsibility. For as long as clerks with 1-inch fingernails will 1-finger-type endless requisition forms to get anything done in large organizations (which includes companies as well as governments) with zero interest or concern for what they are doing, waste will reign supreme.
This is called a 'straw man' - drawing a caricature of what you think everybody who isn't in your objectivist book club must believe and strive for. It is idiotic. Also, its quite sexist - but from a randroid that is not at all surprising. Yes I know Ayn Rand was a women. No that doesn't stop her having contempt for women.
At least in private enterprise, this is somewhat moderated by the need for more profit. A government bureaucracy, on the other hand, is like entropy. It spontaneously expands, and this can only be reversed locally, at an even greater cost to the entire system.
And we finish off with an appeal to authority - the authority of science. By making a cringeworthy attempt to link your stupid ideas to thermodynamics, you attempt to imply that the bullshit you spew is some kind of natural law. It is not. Its just the opinions of a small, sad little boy.
The idea that the private sector is more efficient is not taken seriously by anyone who understands how its ruined every public service it has touched. How its externalised its losses to make itself look like it actually gets things done. How it has buried technologies such as manned interplantery travel and civilian supersonic flight. How it fucked up the banking system and then milked the public purse and went back to business as usually, paying off the greed sociopaths who caused the mess in the first place to the tune of billions.
It only 'saves money' because the private sector has the option of shifting its losses onto the public sector or other private companies, and thus appearing to be more economically efficient. The public sector, because of its obligations in a democratic society, can't do this.
The primary provider of resupply missions? Really? Ever heard of the ATV?
There is already a publicly-funded European resupply vessel, that has already flown successfully once, and has more capabilities that the unproven Dragon capsule that SpaceX intends to fly on the unproven Falcon 9 rocket. The ATV is also, apparently, popular with the astronauts as its shirt-sleeve environment is one of the quietest parts of the ISS when it is docked.
But hey, you go right ahead and pretend the world outside the US doesn't exist. Go and pretend that the 'competitive' private corporation isn't producing an inferior resupply solution. Go ahead and pretend the only reason they are getting a contract for it is because the government wants to subsidize industry in its own country.
The parent is not insightful, the parent sounds like a randroid. Pretending that NASA is some how 'in the way' of dynamic private space entrepreneurs is utter horseshit; NASA spits out science and technology (including the groundwork for VASIMR) in every direction. The only thing keeping the private space industry half a century behind the public space industry is the concept of private industry itself.
'Competition' is not magic. It doesn't make things work, not banks nor rockets.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if your read some commonly used definitions of socialism, what you described IS socialism. It just isn't what the American right has made out socialism to be - i.e. a synonym of Stalinism.
Something as basic as teaching your children to share rather than snatch could be considered socialism. In fact, in their early years children are taught many socialist ideals - sharing, caring for those less fortunate, not being greedy - and then they become adults and suddenly get told 'right, every man for himself! grab what you can!'. I think the dissonance of this could be the cause of a great deal of malaise in the young (although I've no evidence for this right now; I literally just thought of it).
European democracies are 'slave states'? Get your head out of Ayn Rands arse and grow up.
As a European (British) I can honestly say, wtf? British people aren't questioning the NHS, recently they were busy defending it from viscous and inaccurate attacks by US news channels and one deranged fringe conservative politician whose views were disowned by his own party.
Most Europeans don't worship their government in any way, which is WHY European governments offer such services - in order to justify their existence. We see far more unquestioning loyalty (from the supporters of the party in power anyway) from Americans than we do over here you know.
That is a fairly good point actually.
Despite the common view of monolithic state healthcare in Europe, there are many different systems. France and the UK, for instance, have quite different healthcare systems, and AFAIK both populations are quite attached to their own model. Asking them to subscribe to a common one might be like asking them to speak a common language.
The reason Americans are viewed as a monolithic nation in a way Europe is not (yet) is because frankly, the US has been a tight federal union for since the end of the civil war, with a single language and a single national identity. The EU in its present form only came into being in the 1990s.
Furthermore, largely because of the common language, there is a US-wide media industry in the way there isn't in the EU. We can talk about Fox News and CNN being 'American news channels' but you can't talk about BBC News 24, or France 24 as being 'European news channels' in the same way.
The perception of America as a fully unified country is perhaps not correct but it is certainly understandable I think.
It has a serious, and might I saw, rather obvious flaw
If the activation of the LHC created some kind of cataclysmic event which would some fuck up time to the extent of violating causality, and if the universe does indeed have causality as a boundary condition, then there are far more probable ways of averting the fatal collision than screwing up several tonnes of magnet months before the high energy firings were scheduled to take place.
The universe could simply induce a sufficient e/m force to stop the proton beams colliding. It wouldn't take much, on a cosmic scale, and would be a far more likely outcome than an entire macroscopic object being foobared just to protect the continuity of the universe.
Why? One lab result (not yet repeated AFAIK) does not represent a workable magnet technology. The magnets at CERN didn't even use the highest temperature available at the time of their design in any case; so it obviously doesn't follow that 'the higher temperature the superconductor, the better the magnet'
Enough with the LHC bashing, please. Europe is taking a lead in particle physics, and unsurprisingly being at the absolute bleeding edge comes with some technical pitfalls.
Because big media never publishes bullshit or false rumours. Oh, wait a minute...
Its more his demon spawn that is kicking up a stink about the BBC these days (theres a clear division of labour; big evil goes after Google and little evil goes after the Beeb).
Basically, the BBC sets the standard for journalistic quality in the UK. Other TV news can't afford to go to sensationalist and downmarket because there will always be the BBC there, not having to please advertisers, showing them up with decent quality news. Bluntly, the BBC is the reason UK TV news isn't like American TV news.
But it is under threat from the Murdoch machine; The BBC is a journalistic Rome, and Bill O'Reilly and Glen Beck are the emotionally unstable visigoths at the gates...
Do not underestimate the Emperor, or suffer your fathers fate you will....
Looking at those girls, the first word that comes to mind is not 'expensive'...
Take a look at his personal history... dripping with lies and bastardry and very short of stupidity. Its unlikely he is as dumb as he wants you to think he is.
The middlemen also take their cut of course - a cut which counts as economic activity but doesn't actually produce anything or provide a real service. This isn't just lefty paranoia about 'exploiters' either, its a recognised phenomenon - I believe economists call it 'rent seeking'
Don't turn this into blanket gerontophobia please. Plenty of old people understand and use the internet perfectly well. In fact, I think Murdoch is in command of his faculties and does understand the internet (he can afford to have the very best people explain him to it, after all) - I think he is just being damn greedy. He isn't being stupid, he is counting on everyone else being stupid - a strategy that has served him well with business ventures such as Fox News and The Sun.
Professional reporting is dead, and nowhere demonstrates this more elegantly that Fox News.
Precisely because its expensive to send out correspondents to do real reporting, big media has stopped doing it. Having Bill O'Reilly throw a tantrum at some unsuspecting guest is cheap and grabs ratings.
Consider the recent turmoil after the Iranian election; twitter contained almost as much information as the big news outlets (who were, in some cases, reporting what was on twitter). How many of them actually had guys on the ground in Iran? I can't think of a single one, because it would be expensive and dangerous work. So the news sites did what the rest of us did and looked on twitter. If they do that, then why are they needed?
True. The 'move towards paid content' he describes is the movement he wants to start. Enclosure is exactly the right analogue; men like him have always made money by setting themselves up as middlemen, not adding to the system but simple charging for access to part of it that was previously free.
Damn right artists urine is sold. There are some scary 'fans' out there
I've become convinced that long government/corporate/thinktank documents exist so as to conceal unpleasant information. For example, the notorious 'Rebuilding Americas Defences' document bleats on about nothing for ages before it gets to "wouldn't another Pearl Harbor be awesome" and "lets make ethnically-targeted biological weapons".
Why let facts get in the way of a bit of Euro-bashing?
http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/166091670.html
I'll save you the maths; that is 257 million euros (about 378 million dollars) per ATV including development costs.
Seeing as a Falcon 9 launch is set to cost over 49 million dollars,
http://spacex.com/falcon9.php
and like the Falcon 1 its price might go up if it requires further development, your claim of 'ten times as much' is clearly bollocks from the get go. Consider also that the ATV carries 8 times as much cargo as the Dragon capsule:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Vehicle
...means the Dragon wouldn't even be as cost efficient as the ATV if it costs nothing to develop and build each unit.
Seeing as the ATV is already in service, there is no economic benefit to introducing another resupply craft that delivers less cargo per unit cost. Contrary to the propaganda of Europe=bloated government US=dynamic private industry, it is the Dragon capsule that is a prestige project and the ATV that is an economically viable one.
NASA is not holding back 'private' space development - it is helping them. Who do you think turned up and told Scaled Composites how to make fuel tanks that didn't kill their employees on the ground? Who do you think did the groundwork for VASIMR? Who do you think is providing the launch facilities for the SpaceX Falcon 9? Your libertarian drivel doesn't hold up under even the slightest examination.
The fruits of his labours? I didn't realise this guy invented plasma technology all on his own.
Rockets are pretty efficient actually.
Their disadvantage is that they have to carry their working fluid with them. To get into orbit you need to gain over 8km/s of horizontal velocity and to do that you want to get above the majority of the atmosphere ASAP - so you quickly leave the area where you could snatch any external substance to use for propulsion.
Space elevators are not an automatic fix either - electric motors require power and to carry the kind of power supply that could lift you up a distance equal to about 5 times the diameter of the Earth would give you much the same engineering problems as a rocket.
Right, because everyone who doesn't agree with you is a Stalinist. Any system of organisation differing from your conception of unrestrained capitalism is the fucking Soviet Union. This is what us non-retarded people call a 'false dichotomy'
And this little gem is called a 'non sequitur' in a language that it is nearly impossible to make money by learning. The idea that profit=self-interest=motivation is a pathetically simplistic view of humankind, only held by economists, psychopaths, and teenage boys.
YOU might be an egotistical bastard, however scientific study of the human race doesn't indicate there is any factual basis whatsoever to your teenage misanthropy.
This is called a 'straw man' - drawing a caricature of what you think everybody who isn't in your objectivist book club must believe and strive for. It is idiotic. Also, its quite sexist - but from a randroid that is not at all surprising. Yes I know Ayn Rand was a women. No that doesn't stop her having contempt for women.
And we finish off with an appeal to authority - the authority of science. By making a cringeworthy attempt to link your stupid ideas to thermodynamics, you attempt to imply that the bullshit you spew is some kind of natural law. It is not. Its just the opinions of a small, sad little boy.
The idea that the private sector is more efficient is not taken seriously by anyone who understands how its ruined every public service it has touched. How its externalised its losses to make itself look like it actually gets things done. How it has buried technologies such as manned interplantery travel and civilian supersonic flight. How it fucked up the banking system and then milked the public purse and went back to business as usually, paying off the greed sociopaths who caused the mess in the first place to the tune of billions.
It only 'saves money' because the private sector has the option of shifting its losses onto the public sector or other private companies, and thus appearing to be more economically efficient. The public sector, because of its obligations in a democratic society, can't do this.
The primary provider of resupply missions? Really? Ever heard of the ATV?
There is already a publicly-funded European resupply vessel, that has already flown successfully once, and has more capabilities that the unproven Dragon capsule that SpaceX intends to fly on the unproven Falcon 9 rocket. The ATV is also, apparently, popular with the astronauts as its shirt-sleeve environment is one of the quietest parts of the ISS when it is docked.
But hey, you go right ahead and pretend the world outside the US doesn't exist. Go and pretend that the 'competitive' private corporation isn't producing an inferior resupply solution. Go ahead and pretend the only reason they are getting a contract for it is because the government wants to subsidize industry in its own country.
The parent is not insightful, the parent sounds like a randroid. Pretending that NASA is some how 'in the way' of dynamic private space entrepreneurs is utter horseshit; NASA spits out science and technology (including the groundwork for VASIMR) in every direction. The only thing keeping the private space industry half a century behind the public space industry is the concept of private industry itself.
'Competition' is not magic. It doesn't make things work, not banks nor rockets.