Those scrolls were written during the IRON age. Pfft, those bronze age people were crazy, worshiping any little idea that popped into their heads. Iron age people were FAR more sophisticated. They only worshiped things that were WRITTEN DOWN. Big difference.
One should look at exactly where the money for such projects is going. If it is being used to clean up the pollution, then fine, but it it is flowing into the general fund while the "problem" goes unresolved, then it really is nothing but a tax. Remember, you get something for a fee. You get nothing for a tax (other people might get something, but it will be far less than you gave, after government costs are considered).
Actually, the government just stole the credit. As our economy developed, all the work that was formerly done for many (including women and children) for low wages, could be done by few, for high wages. This was one of the founding principles of Ford (Make the highest quality product possible for the cheapest possible while paying the highest wages possible). Those evil capitalists didn't employ child labor because tey were evil people, they needed to get a job done, and children needed to work or their families would starve, or the children would have to seek employment outside of the regular workforce as prostitutes or as workers in some other den of immorality outside of the purview of the law. The government ban on child labor came only after it had been made moot by higher wages for adults. Or do you think that the government somehow used a gun to produce enough food for the children to eat so they didn't have to work?
Workers demanded better working conditions be voting with their feet. Those factories with bad working conditions only survived so long as some other factory didn't open up with nicer conditions paying the same wage making the same product. Those who didn't improve their working conditions went out of business as they had to continually train workers to replace those jumping ship. You think government guns improved working conditions rather than just shutting down marginally productive industries?
The government had little to do with increases in wages. In fact, the opposite is demonstrably true, given the steadily increasing tax rate in this country. Hell, most people pay 30% or more of their income in taxes of various types. By placing a floor under wages, they have priced entry level workers out of jobs. By making it cheaper to buy an automatic dishwasher than to hire a human dishwasher, you have effectively fired a young man from the workforce. Honestly, what do you have against poor people? You just can't stand to let minorities get ahead in the world? You want to make it so that only those who have gone to college can get jobs, effectively locking in social and economic biases from a hundred years ago? What is wrong with you?
But then, I suppose you thought Italy under Mussolini was a paradise.
Actually, it's more like the way socialism is also working out for us, the same as it has for every other nation that has tried it. We don't have capitalism in this country, and haven't for almost a hundred years (since the federal reserve took control of monetary policy in 1913). Every president since that time has done his damnedest to take the country further down the twin roads of socialism and fascism.
But nice job of trying to pin it on capitalism. Next thing you'll be trying to tell us that Sicily is ruled by a bunch of capitalists and that capitalism caused the collapse of the USSR.
Subsidies aren't the solution to other subsidies. A more environmentally friendly solution would be to remove the subsides on the oil and coal. Let the most efficient technology stand on it's own feet.
If the conditions are reset to one in which there is no time travel, then it seems to me that the initial conditions would go back to the ones that allowed time travel in the first place. It seems to me that a more likely event is that it would decay into one where time travel is self reinforcing, but extremely limited, and probably of minimal usefulness. Think 12 Monkeys.
Other than that, it is more likely that the universe itself prevents time travel, rather than time travel being self-negating. I think that is the most likely explanation. One way to test it might be to have a sort of "Schodinger Switch" that would go off and disable the LHC once some incredibly rare even happens, like a large group of atoms ceases to exist. In order to force that to happen, you could simply pledge to continue trying to operate the LHC forever, until it becomes easier for the universe to trigger that one event (which would shut the program down permanently), that it would be for it to continue causing all of these individually rare, but adaptively nigh-impossible events. Of course, but then something nasty but far more likely, involving the wider world might happen to stop it, like a meteor impact, nuclear war, plague, or some such. Yeah, so maybe we ought to give it a few more tries, then stop it, so as not to tempt fate...
AC is right. Moving for me is not an option. I'm near the top in a very specific field, and on the verge of making a big breakthrough salary-wise. I would much rather pay $120/month as PR man suggested, which is only three times what I am paying now. If I moved to a comparable house in town my taxes would be four-five times that price, not to mention that the amount of land I have would be 20X as much in town as it is here on the fringe of town, IF I could find a plot that size. I'm not going to sell my house with all the gardens and orchards that I planted by hand that have just started producing, or the new garage that I built. If I ever move, it's going to be to a tropical paradise.
You're being dumb if you think I, or anyone else, would uproot their whole life for fast internet.
Why can't super users just pay more? I've tried very hard to get a dedicated line, cable internet, or some other wired high-speed service run out to my home in the past, and no-one has been willing to do it for any price (I even offered $1000 to cover the cost of running the wire). All I can get is wireless.
Actually, most people in prison acknowledge their guilt. Generally, if someone maintains their innocence for years and years even without hope for clemency, they are probably innocent.
Those greedy bastards, giving things away for free! Much better to not be greedy and get money for substandard products and sue anyone that doesn't buy.
It addresses the symptoms about as well as a doctor treating his patients with a chainsaw. Never mind the underlying causes, the "treatment" is leaving bloody severed extremities all over the place!.
"Separate delivery from production" doesn't solve anything.
Say we do that, and three water companies provide water to some common pool, and one water distribution company sends that water around.
What have you solved? You still have a one-company bottleneck - the distribution company - that can charge whatever it wants to deliver the utility, because the one thing you definitely don't want to do is install two identical delivery systems.
So let's look at it from a customer's perspective: Jim wants water, so he contacts the distribution company (which actually pipes the water to his house). So we can already see that Jim doesn't get to pick his distributor - only one company has pipes run to his house. Does Jim get to pick which water supplier to use? Of course not - the water comes from a common pool! Jim still has one and only one choice - the distributor. He has to take whatever price the distributor sets.
Sure, you could set up some scheme where each water company pumps whatever it wants into the pool, and Jim's usage is metered and he pays his chosen supplier based on that - but now he has to pay two bills: one to the supplier and one to the distributor, each with their own taxes, administrative fees, and so on. Furthermore, you now have possible problems where a supplier puts X gallons into the pool one day, but its customers use X+10 gallons - and this can be true for every supplier. That kind of situation is very difficult to deal with fairly (fairly to all the suppliers, that is) when multiple suppliers have to go through a single distributor. It's kind of like ISPs' attempts to charge different rates based on content, actually - and please don't tell me you think that scheme is workable.
In other words, you've made the system a lot more complicated for zero gain. "More complicated" is of course equivalent to "more expensive" in the long run, I'm sure you'll agree.
You're thinking too locally. There would be other bordering distribution companies. If the nasty evil child-raping capitalists increased costs by the amount you think they would, they would start losing customers along their periphery as other companies laid new pipe and charged less. The water producers would situate themselves in an area where they could sell to multiple distribution systems. The use of the lines is of course built into the bill. I mean, you don't pay separate bills for internet access AND bandwidth, do you? Further, as I mentioned, in areas where there is only one distribution system with no other system, there would STILL be competition from water delivery services, assuming that there weren't a bunch of regulations blocking implementation of new business models, as we have in this country. If a customer uses more than the producer produces, then the producer would buy extra capacity from some other producer. This is already how it works in many different industries.
I don't think you understand why the government grants monopolies to utilities. It's basically a paper saying "we'll let you run the monopoly on utility X as long as you don't screw over your customers by charging too much." It's not about the monopoly itself, per se, it's about protecting the customers - they do it precisely by acknowledging that it's a natural monopoly.
Besides, as I've pointed out, your competing "water suppliers" could not possibly reduce costs, and even if they could reduce the cost of water production you have given no guarantee that the customers would see the price lowered, because the distributor would be the one charging them.
Yes, and look at what that bit of foolishness has wrought practically every time it has been implemented. Crappy customer service, increased costs (often shouldered by the taxpayer at large rather than the users), and decreased quality, not to mention the barrier to innovation that it introduces.
Yes, but volunteers don't get retirement, or create other longstanding obligations on the taxpayer. It would be a simple thing for fire departments to be funded privately. They could even provide free fire service for residential neighborhoods while charging for their services on commercial buildings. The point is that there are a lot of ways to do things that don't involve having the government pay for all expenses through involuntary taxes.
Paying for capital investments like fire tracks and stations is different from paying for salaries, benefits, union fees, retirement, etc for firemen. Volunteer fire departments cost far less than government run fire departments, and could easily be run without ANY support from any government.
Power: Why is this hard? I supply power to my local utility through solar panels. It could be easily done by many different companies for profit if one merely divorced the power production business from the power delivery business. That is, have one company own the lines and lease the links to all of it's customers and the producers. Users sign contracts with power producers who agree to provide them with as much power as they desire. SImple. In this way, people who wanted to help the Earth could simply buy all of their power from green energy companies. In addition, it would free up the market such that we could look at other ways of delivering power (wirelessly, by physical delivery of charged supercapacitors or other storage media, etc).
Water: also simple. Again you divorce delivery from production. You have companies produce water and fill the reservoir (set to a minimum standard of cleanliness). Another company maintains the pipes. This also opens up the possibility of more versatile water delivery services where such things would be more effective (ie why should the city spend 2.5 million dollars running water out to the newly annexed area when it could simply hire some company to build a small reservoir and run lines through the new part of town and hire other companies to fill it, whether continuously or in batches.
Sewer is easiest of all, as there are no standards save for how clean you get it. Anyone can build a sewage treatment plant, and they will get paid according to how much sewage they treated. Sewer lines could again be owned by a different company.
But then, perhaps all of this is not the best way to handle things. Maybe we should be living in Earthships, producing our own electricity and water, and processing our own sewage rather expecting society to pick up the tab. Honestly, it's kind of disgusting that we view "society" as some generous entity from which we can take whatever we want, even if it is more than our "fair share".
Also, its foolish to think that having competition is going to increase costs in any way. If that were the case, then there would be no need for governments to grant monopolies to companies. They would be "natural". If some other company came along, they would never be able to compete on price, so they would go bankrupt, leaving us with the same status quo that we have now. You're assuming an odd sort of circumstance, where two companies come in and plant pipes to every house in a town even if they aren't a customer. That's government thinking, bub. And even if that were the case, it would just be a standoff until one or the other went out of business. You see, the neat thing about the free market is that it can overcome nearly any obstacle, using the power of men's minds. The Internet is one of the greatest examples of that. I'll let you draw your own corollaries there, but suffice it to say that the internet is largely free of regulation, and it serves the needs of society very well because of it. The extent to which it doesn't is either a matter of regulations (copyright law, etc), or a matter of time until someone figures out how to do it.
As for flying cars, ever hear of a little thing called the FAA? They are the ones that inevitably crush any startup trying to get flying cars onto the market. We would have had them twenty years ago (at least) otherwise. I saw the prototypes. They worked startlingly well, and were capable of full autopilot for both takeoff and landing, meaning that there wouldn't be any problems with human error as you put it. Their fuel consumption was equivalent to that of a large truck, but since they could go directly to their destination, they were more like the equivalent of a sedan, fuel consumption wise.
On nuclear power, tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. Why should a group of "concerned citizens" be able to block development on someone else's property? If there were an accident or a meltdow
Voluntary contributions, obviously. There were thousands and thousands of charitable organizations in this country doing great work long before the government started sticking it's nose into the private lives of its citizens.
Mod parent UP. This is not a troll by any stretch. That is exactly the purpose of government--it's not supposed to be a money grabbing machine used by politicians to dole out goodies as many seem to think it is today.
Of course, granting an exclusive contract to a bus service as happened in my city is called Fascism.
Anyone should be able to drive a big van around and take people where they want to go for money. I don't see why the government needs to be involved, or issue licenses beyond a CDL.
Slashdot Mirror
Now now, be fair.
Those scrolls were written during the IRON age. Pfft, those bronze age people were crazy, worshiping any little idea that popped into their heads. Iron age people were FAR more sophisticated. They only worshiped things that were WRITTEN DOWN. Big difference.
One should look at exactly where the money for such projects is going. If it is being used to clean up the pollution, then fine, but it it is flowing into the general fund while the "problem" goes unresolved, then it really is nothing but a tax. Remember, you get something for a fee. You get nothing for a tax (other people might get something, but it will be far less than you gave, after government costs are considered).
Actually, the government just stole the credit. As our economy developed, all the work that was formerly done for many (including women and children) for low wages, could be done by few, for high wages. This was one of the founding principles of Ford (Make the highest quality product possible for the cheapest possible while paying the highest wages possible). Those evil capitalists didn't employ child labor because tey were evil people, they needed to get a job done, and children needed to work or their families would starve, or the children would have to seek employment outside of the regular workforce as prostitutes or as workers in some other den of immorality outside of the purview of the law. The government ban on child labor came only after it had been made moot by higher wages for adults. Or do you think that the government somehow used a gun to produce enough food for the children to eat so they didn't have to work?
Workers demanded better working conditions be voting with their feet. Those factories with bad working conditions only survived so long as some other factory didn't open up with nicer conditions paying the same wage making the same product. Those who didn't improve their working conditions went out of business as they had to continually train workers to replace those jumping ship. You think government guns improved working conditions rather than just shutting down marginally productive industries?
The government had little to do with increases in wages. In fact, the opposite is demonstrably true, given the steadily increasing tax rate in this country. Hell, most people pay 30% or more of their income in taxes of various types. By placing a floor under wages, they have priced entry level workers out of jobs. By making it cheaper to buy an automatic dishwasher than to hire a human dishwasher, you have effectively fired a young man from the workforce. Honestly, what do you have against poor people? You just can't stand to let minorities get ahead in the world? You want to make it so that only those who have gone to college can get jobs, effectively locking in social and economic biases from a hundred years ago? What is wrong with you?
But then, I suppose you thought Italy under Mussolini was a paradise.
Actually, it's more like the way socialism is also working out for us, the same as it has for every other nation that has tried it. We don't have capitalism in this country, and haven't for almost a hundred years (since the federal reserve took control of monetary policy in 1913). Every president since that time has done his damnedest to take the country further down the twin roads of socialism and fascism.
But nice job of trying to pin it on capitalism. Next thing you'll be trying to tell us that Sicily is ruled by a bunch of capitalists and that capitalism caused the collapse of the USSR.
Subsidies aren't the solution to other subsidies. A more environmentally friendly solution would be to remove the subsides on the oil and coal. Let the most efficient technology stand on it's own feet.
You must be new here.
If the conditions are reset to one in which there is no time travel, then it seems to me that the initial conditions would go back to the ones that allowed time travel in the first place. It seems to me that a more likely event is that it would decay into one where time travel is self reinforcing, but extremely limited, and probably of minimal usefulness. Think 12 Monkeys.
Other than that, it is more likely that the universe itself prevents time travel, rather than time travel being self-negating. I think that is the most likely explanation. One way to test it might be to have a sort of "Schodinger Switch" that would go off and disable the LHC once some incredibly rare even happens, like a large group of atoms ceases to exist. In order to force that to happen, you could simply pledge to continue trying to operate the LHC forever, until it becomes easier for the universe to trigger that one event (which would shut the program down permanently), that it would be for it to continue causing all of these individually rare, but adaptively nigh-impossible events. Of course, but then something nasty but far more likely, involving the wider world might happen to stop it, like a meteor impact, nuclear war, plague, or some such. Yeah, so maybe we ought to give it a few more tries, then stop it, so as not to tempt fate...
AC is right. Moving for me is not an option. I'm near the top in a very specific field, and on the verge of making a big breakthrough salary-wise. I would much rather pay $120/month as PR man suggested, which is only three times what I am paying now. If I moved to a comparable house in town my taxes would be four-five times that price, not to mention that the amount of land I have would be 20X as much in town as it is here on the fringe of town, IF I could find a plot that size. I'm not going to sell my house with all the gardens and orchards that I planted by hand that have just started producing, or the new garage that I built. If I ever move, it's going to be to a tropical paradise.
You're being dumb if you think I, or anyone else, would uproot their whole life for fast internet.
Why can't super users just pay more? I've tried very hard to get a dedicated line, cable internet, or some other wired high-speed service run out to my home in the past, and no-one has been willing to do it for any price (I even offered $1000 to cover the cost of running the wire). All I can get is wireless.
Encryption used to be classified as artillery, IIRC.
Actually, most people in prison acknowledge their guilt. Generally, if someone maintains their innocence for years and years even without hope for clemency, they are probably innocent.
While effectively eliminating their right to defend themselves.
The punishment for shoplifting a $20 CD should be a day in jail AT MOST.
Right, so modifying a vehicle to run on electricity should be illegal.
Those greedy bastards, giving things away for free! Much better to not be greedy and get money for substandard products and sue anyone that doesn't buy.
It addresses the symptoms about as well as a doctor treating his patients with a chainsaw. Never mind the underlying causes, the "treatment" is leaving bloody severed extremities all over the place!.
Why do you need permission from an immortal corporation to download a work who's author has already been compensated and/or has been dead for decades?
"Separate delivery from production" doesn't solve anything.
Say we do that, and three water companies provide water to some common pool, and one water distribution company sends that water around.
What have you solved? You still have a one-company bottleneck - the distribution company - that can charge whatever it wants to deliver the utility, because the one thing you definitely don't want to do is install two identical delivery systems.
So let's look at it from a customer's perspective: Jim wants water, so he contacts the distribution company (which actually pipes the water to his house). So we can already see that Jim doesn't get to pick his distributor - only one company has pipes run to his house. Does Jim get to pick which water supplier to use? Of course not - the water comes from a common pool! Jim still has one and only one choice - the distributor. He has to take whatever price the distributor sets.
Sure, you could set up some scheme where each water company pumps whatever it wants into the pool, and Jim's usage is metered and he pays his chosen supplier based on that - but now he has to pay two bills: one to the supplier and one to the distributor, each with their own taxes, administrative fees, and so on. Furthermore, you now have possible problems where a supplier puts X gallons into the pool one day, but its customers use X+10 gallons - and this can be true for every supplier. That kind of situation is very difficult to deal with fairly (fairly to all the suppliers, that is) when multiple suppliers have to go through a single distributor. It's kind of like ISPs' attempts to charge different rates based on content, actually - and please don't tell me you think that scheme is workable.
In other words, you've made the system a lot more complicated for zero gain. "More complicated" is of course equivalent to "more expensive" in the long run, I'm sure you'll agree.
You're thinking too locally. There would be other bordering distribution companies. If the nasty evil child-raping capitalists increased costs by the amount you think they would, they would start losing customers along their periphery as other companies laid new pipe and charged less. The water producers would situate themselves in an area where they could sell to multiple distribution systems. The use of the lines is of course built into the bill. I mean, you don't pay separate bills for internet access AND bandwidth, do you? Further, as I mentioned, in areas where there is only one distribution system with no other system, there would STILL be competition from water delivery services, assuming that there weren't a bunch of regulations blocking implementation of new business models, as we have in this country. If a customer uses more than the producer produces, then the producer would buy extra capacity from some other producer. This is already how it works in many different industries.
I don't think you understand why the government grants monopolies to utilities. It's basically a paper saying "we'll let you run the monopoly on utility X as long as you don't screw over your customers by charging too much." It's not about the monopoly itself, per se, it's about protecting the customers - they do it precisely by acknowledging that it's a natural monopoly.
Besides, as I've pointed out, your competing "water suppliers" could not possibly reduce costs, and even if they could reduce the cost of water production you have given no guarantee that the customers would see the price lowered, because the distributor would be the one charging them.
Yes, and look at what that bit of foolishness has wrought practically every time it has been implemented. Crappy customer service, increased costs (often shouldered by the taxpayer at large rather than the users), and decreased quality, not to mention the barrier to innovation that it introduces.
Exactly - and that's becaus
Yes, but volunteers don't get retirement, or create other longstanding obligations on the taxpayer. It would be a simple thing for fire departments to be funded privately. They could even provide free fire service for residential neighborhoods while charging for their services on commercial buildings. The point is that there are a lot of ways to do things that don't involve having the government pay for all expenses through involuntary taxes.
Paying for capital investments like fire tracks and stations is different from paying for salaries, benefits, union fees, retirement, etc for firemen. Volunteer fire departments cost far less than government run fire departments, and could easily be run without ANY support from any government.
Power: Why is this hard? I supply power to my local utility through solar panels. It could be easily done by many different companies for profit if one merely divorced the power production business from the power delivery business. That is, have one company own the lines and lease the links to all of it's customers and the producers. Users sign contracts with power producers who agree to provide them with as much power as they desire. SImple. In this way, people who wanted to help the Earth could simply buy all of their power from green energy companies. In addition, it would free up the market such that we could look at other ways of delivering power (wirelessly, by physical delivery of charged supercapacitors or other storage media, etc).
Water: also simple. Again you divorce delivery from production. You have companies produce water and fill the reservoir (set to a minimum standard of cleanliness). Another company maintains the pipes. This also opens up the possibility of more versatile water delivery services where such things would be more effective (ie why should the city spend 2.5 million dollars running water out to the newly annexed area when it could simply hire some company to build a small reservoir and run lines through the new part of town and hire other companies to fill it, whether continuously or in batches.
Sewer is easiest of all, as there are no standards save for how clean you get it. Anyone can build a sewage treatment plant, and they will get paid according to how much sewage they treated. Sewer lines could again be owned by a different company.
But then, perhaps all of this is not the best way to handle things. Maybe we should be living in Earthships, producing our own electricity and water, and processing our own sewage rather expecting society to pick up the tab. Honestly, it's kind of disgusting that we view "society" as some generous entity from which we can take whatever we want, even if it is more than our "fair share".
Also, its foolish to think that having competition is going to increase costs in any way. If that were the case, then there would be no need for governments to grant monopolies to companies. They would be "natural". If some other company came along, they would never be able to compete on price, so they would go bankrupt, leaving us with the same status quo that we have now. You're assuming an odd sort of circumstance, where two companies come in and plant pipes to every house in a town even if they aren't a customer. That's government thinking, bub. And even if that were the case, it would just be a standoff until one or the other went out of business. You see, the neat thing about the free market is that it can overcome nearly any obstacle, using the power of men's minds. The Internet is one of the greatest examples of that. I'll let you draw your own corollaries there, but suffice it to say that the internet is largely free of regulation, and it serves the needs of society very well because of it. The extent to which it doesn't is either a matter of regulations (copyright law, etc), or a matter of time until someone figures out how to do it.
As for flying cars, ever hear of a little thing called the FAA? They are the ones that inevitably crush any startup trying to get flying cars onto the market. We would have had them twenty years ago (at least) otherwise. I saw the prototypes. They worked startlingly well, and were capable of full autopilot for both takeoff and landing, meaning that there wouldn't be any problems with human error as you put it. Their fuel consumption was equivalent to that of a large truck, but since they could go directly to their destination, they were more like the equivalent of a sedan, fuel consumption wise.
On nuclear power, tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. Why should a group of "concerned citizens" be able to block development on someone else's property? If there were an accident or a meltdow
Voluntary contributions, obviously. There were thousands and thousands of charitable organizations in this country doing great work long before the government started sticking it's nose into the private lives of its citizens.
Except with voluntary contributions, it comes voluntarily.
Or do you think the Red Cross (or the Church of Scientology!) ought to be able to deduct money straight from your paycheck?
How much you want to bet?
HINT: it was a fire engine.
Ok, cut all of those AND NASA.
*ducks*
Mod parent UP. This is not a troll by any stretch. That is exactly the purpose of government--it's not supposed to be a money grabbing machine used by politicians to dole out goodies as many seem to think it is today.
There is a word for that: Communism.
Of course, granting an exclusive contract to a bus service as happened in my city is called Fascism.
Anyone should be able to drive a big van around and take people where they want to go for money. I don't see why the government needs to be involved, or issue licenses beyond a CDL.