davidhollander

I'd be interested in the justifications for "wholly impractical". Businesses are already quite capable of purchasing liability insurance including for pollution, so I imagine the debate is over the benefits of centralized vs. decentralized forensic services.

Regardless of where we come out on the above issue, my primary argument is that by recognizing that the existence of liability statues affects the existence of negative externalities, we recognize that we cannot make the assertion that markets cause the existence of negative externalities without first accounting for the effects of liability statutes.

>It's basic economics that the market fails to pick efficient winners and losers in industries that involve large negative externalities.

Real life is not so simple, as negative externalities can also be generated by legal frameworks such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability .

You need to examine the legal statutes governing each industry in question and develop measures of the ease at which claimants can receive compensation for damages to determine whether the observed externalities are intrinsic to the industrial process or whether the externalities are intrinsic to the legal process.

One possible hypothesis could be: since diabetes causes accelerated accumulation of AGEs, and Alzeihmer's is correlated with accelerated accumulation of AGEs, and processed food is high in AGEs, consumption of processed food is also bad.

One way to negate this hypothesis would be to show that the accumulation of exogenous AGEs is insignificant compared to the endogenous production of AGEs. I'm not knowledgeable enough on the subject to say if this has been studied.

I imagine the following are relevant concerns:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_nitrite

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrosamine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_glycation_end-product

A hot dog is going to be both high in Sodium nitrite and AGEs for example.

> I call everything that is not a truth, that is it's not 100% factually correct and 100% complete, a 'lie'. Are you confident that - outside of very narrow formalisms - you can describe anything 100% accurately?

This is an unworkable definition.

A lie is defined as a 'deliberate untruth', not an 'incidental untruth'. To tell an untruth deliberately requires the preexistence of knowledge of what is true.

If someone knows nothing, they are incapable of telling a lie.

Would you be comfortable explaining to relatives, aquantainces, and the elderly in a casual conversation:

How to install, use, and maintain linux. How to install, use, and maintain their own mail server and spam filters. How PGP works. How to setup and use thunderbird+enigimail or mutt.

Compared to visiting a URI, would doing so be more technically demanding or less technically demanding for users who have not specialized in computing? Is the proportion of society which inevitably chooses not to specialize in a computing inherently more deserving or inherently less deserving of the benefits of encryption and privacy?

I think the gap in our perspective is most likely attributable to A) how widespread we wish to see encryption used by the general public in the future, or B) our expectations of the of the technical stamina of the general public when confronted with unfamiliar tasks, rather than generational effects.

A native client without a user data sandbox doesn't solve the problem of networked applications leaking private data and spying on the user at all. The code needs to be open source, versioned, vetted, and only obtained via a trusted repository for every application the user wants to run each time it is updated. The user is no longer instantly able to access the latest version of the application by simply typing in a URI.

I don't see an architectural alternative for such services yet. You'd need a client side app sandbox which allows servers to schedule routines to run locally on secret data, without leaking back data which the server can decrypt. It would also need to be cross-platform and have the same user accessibility as the web browser.

> Government shouldn't have any business in what is ethical or moral but in what is legal

"Enforcement" is the use of force to assert an ethical and moral position. "Legal Enforcement" is the monopolistic use of force to assert an ethical and moral position. It's not possible to enforce "what is legal" on others without asserting a morality.

> I feel sorry for you USA, because you lost it and you wont get it back.

The position that the USA "lost" the policy of "health as a right" is nonsensical, because it never previously possessed it in its 236 years of existence. You might want to try a different narrative archetype.

Quite simply, Wozniak has conflated regulation of government (constitutional law) with regulation by government (statutory law) through the use of the ambiguous phrase "government regulation".

The Bill of Rights regulates the actions which government may perform upon individuals, not the actions which individuals may perform upon each other. For instance, no article of the constitution ensures that murder is illegal.

There is a difference between constitutional law, common law, statuatory law, and regulatory law. Wozniak's phrase "congressional regulation" perhaps best describes only the last two categories.

If this is a justified belief rather than a faith-based belief, you'll need to offer a refutation of Thomas Rid's "Cyber War Will Not Take Place", which holds that cyber-war is contradictory because acts of cyber-war do not fulfill the definition of acts of war: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01402390.2011.608...

I don't; to negate the position that the existence of communication surveillance agencies can be considered both beneficial and necessary for an arbitrary population by assumption.

> don't forget that we need an organization like the NSA

For those of us who have already forgotten or have never known the reason for its necessity, could you explain why? Internationally and historically, similar levels of state communications monitoring are correlated with the need for self-preservation by authoritarian regimes. There are also many modern day states which do not possess an agency directly analogous to the NSA.

This seems rather mercantilist. There are many island nations with little natural resources and little capacity for offensive intelligence gathering which are quite wealthy through trade alone.

I'm not European but my understanding was that they literally vote no against everything as some sort of protest?

Their statement if this is the correct vote you are referring to:

"Whilst we as a group voted against the ACTA Resolution on Wednesday 10th March 2010, we did so on the principle that the ACTA Treaty itself should not exist in any form. It is a catastrophic violation of individual private property. Had we voted to support the Resolution, we would be recognising the existence of such legislation and on that basis we decided not to recognise the Treaty."

http://www.ukipmeps.org/mypage_11_ExpVote.html

> WolframAlpha is one of the nearest things we have to the "advanced Artificial Intelligence" from the article; in a certain sense, it actually does create new content.

The conclusions one draws from the article is that it creates new content in the same manner as a web scraper, calculator, or printing press creates new content. Wolfram Alpha cannot be said to possess independent agency because it does not possess its own set of intrinsic preferences which it seeks to maximize. Rather the preferences are extrinsic and determined by humans, classifying it as a tool rather than agent.

> arbitrage between virtual economies

Exchange between virtual currencies is discussed somewhat in the 2009 documentary "Another Perfect World"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxZP_ur_Tvo#t=25m

Near the end they interview the CEO of a South Korean company called ItemBay.com who says it's his dream to setup such a market.

Stating failures first can also be considered analogous to input validation, preconditions, or declaring the domain for which the function is undefined. Some related discussion on here: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GuardClause

Food, food preparation, medicine, and health treatments\consultations are considered goods and services. Could you give some specific examples of things which can be said to be externally valued by a collective "we" which are neither goods nor services, the principle you are using to measure the collective value of non-goods and non-services, and the operation which allows you to relationally compare the value of non-goods and non-services to the value of goods and services?

> where we value money over people's health.

This is sort of a nonsensical statement, as money is simply an external means by which to make such relative comparisons of value between things which are good. Perhaps you meant to assert the accumulation of savings is valued over health related expenditures? Debt levels would suggest otherwise.

> Can this eliminate the callback hell that plagues the explicitly async frameworks (node.js, jquery, twisted, etc)? But what about the downside? Can you migrate the suspended coroutine to another process

No, Lua coroutines only provide language or syntax level concurrency. They make routines more stateful, which can be a benefit if you want to refer to the same local variables and scope in between yields, but do have the downside of incentivizing routines to be larger in size (although you rely on fewer of them).

Also, the use case for coroutines is really limited to expressing lists of serially occurring tasks. This can work well for request-response style applications. But if for instance, you need to be able to read from, write to, and wait for timeouts on the same socket simultaneously (say a chat room), it would be a bit silly to spawn 3 coroutines per client (or 1 with heavily branching code), and use unnecessary overhead than simply binding and dispatching function calls for events without using a coroutine.

Regarding dispatching function calls for events, this can also be done in a variety of ways without creating a soup of nested lambdas. For instance, local functions or object methods. This also avoids the instantiation of additional function values (lambdas) for each client, which doesn't really slow things down in Lua but uses up more memory.

He argues that position by repeatedly making the assertion that consumers create jobs and businesses do not:

> only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring.

>the true job creators are consumers

It's a tad nonsensical, all economic exchanges definitionally require the existence of two parties to occur, both parties are essential regardless of the good or service being traded. One can easily take the opposite position to the speaker, that production precedes consumption, because in the state of nature man must first produce and labor for his or her own survival before surplus exists with which to trade. Either way, it's not a sufficient basis for asserting normative proposals in regards to tax policy.

False dilemma fallacy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

You can't attribute the existence of "jobs" exclusively to "businesses" or exclusively to "consumers", because "trade" definitionally requires the existence of two parties.

Countries with smaller population, smaller geographical area, or more homogenous culture are at some point more comparable to individual states in the US than the United States as a whole. "Federated" isn't very meaningful relative to other metrics when making international comparisons.

For the sake of presenting the alternative perspective advocating the abolishment of involuntary schooling, I would recommend reading the following piece by Cevin Soling: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/02/27/w...

> Would anyone here know the validity or the restrictions with which the news people are constrained to tell the whole story?

Only the rules of validity that restrict all statements, such as the law of non-contradiction. Individuals such as yourself are the only agent of restriction for all sources of news.

You might enjoy the interviews of Jan Helfeld, who attempts to hold journalists and foreign policy officials to the law of noncontradiction: http://www.youtube.com/user/janhelfeld

> A first-class modern Linux distribution for the desktop

If you want a modern Linux desktop and web browser scriptable in Lua, consider installing Awesome window manager[1] and LuaKit[2] on top of the distro of your choice instead.

[1] http://awesome.naquadah.org/

[2] http://mason-larobina.github.com/luakit/

Another question pertinent to the hypothetical situation you pose: Should the FBI be able to keep the store's records of purchases made by other citizens not under investigation if they are "accidently" discovered during the process of search?

Under previous federal administrations, such information was required to be destroyed if collected. However the current administration and counter-terrorism guidelines assert that such private information may be held for 5 years, and shared between government agencies.

You missed his or her assertion of logical equivalence between Facebook and camp:

>Facebook = camp.

If Facebook is oppressive and authoritarian, and Facebook is camp, is camp oppressive and authoritarian?

The absurdity of internment camps is relevant because his or her logic does not allow one to differentiate between the actions of Facebook and the actions of authoritarian government.

I agree to the existence of economies of scale and social preference for standardization but not to your ad hominems.

Questions: Does Facebook constitute a monopoly? Is there a difference between natural monopoly and coercive monopoly? Does Facebook compete in the narrow market of personal webpages, or in one of the broad markets of information, media, or time? If Facebook is bad, is television better? If I choose not to watch the same TV series as someone, and cannot hold a conversation regarding the characters, would I be right in blaming the television manufacturer, the television channel, or the show's screenwriter? Is it possible for me to forcibly obtain social fraternity from others without also denying them their liberty?