ja30278

Regarding "a": I don't see a refutation of the idea anywhere in your response.

Regarding "b: No. But driving the competitor out of business assumes that you're doing the same task more efficiently (with fewer people), which is theoretically better for the economy as a whole, since it means that the same goods/services are produced at less cost, and frees up labor for other things.

Regarding "c": How exactly would we be worse off as a society in this context? Replace "dig holes" with "pick up litter" or some other menial but necessary task, and it looks like a net win to me. You expend the same money, but actually get some small societal return on your investment. Can you actually argue that welfare recipients _ought_ to be idle?

Regarding "d": Aren't higher taxes and greater difficultly in obtaining starting capital "drags on efficiency"?

Regarding "e": Imagine you have a brilliant idea on how to produce, market, and sell widgets. To get started, you need new equipment, a storefront, and some working capital. How do you obtain these things? If someone lent you the capital to get started, and you created a new business as a result, are they not (at least tangentially) engaged in a 'productive' activity?

The 'usual bugaboo' is 'entitlements', which includes Medicare and Social Security, and is roughly $1.6 trillion.

I don't agree with the money we're pissing away in the Middle East either, but you can't honestly call social services a 'tiny minority' of that budget.

There may not be tons of excess profits, but there are certainly tons of efficiencies to be gained by eliminating the print/ship/warehouse model of distribution.

I simply don't accept the argument that ebooks can't be sold drastically more cheaply than paper books. To me, there's no reason for the publisher to exist at all (not that the various functions they provide don't need to be done, just that they don't need to be provided by a single large entity).

Not to mention that, as sold, Ebooks represent a drastically _worse_ value than paper books. They aren't lendable, they're often linked to a single device, and the right to read them can even be revoked remotely. Publishers are offering a worse product for nearly the same price, while simultaneously crying poor.

Do you think that cost of labor has any connection to prices, which , in aggregate, creates the cost of living in any particular place?

In other words: higher minimum wage = higher prices = higher 'cost of living'

As a thought experiment, would you support making the minimum wage $1000/hr. If not, why not?

Honestly, the concept of a 'minimum wage' is one of the stupidest things I can imagine.

silly aside, but did anyone else notice that the following sentence appears twice?

"Veteran observers of trade between the countries suggest that Google, and the U.S. generally, has little leverage to press China to back down on Internet censorship or other issues."

Seems like something a good copy editor would catch.

sshhh..remember the first rule of usenet

Especially when they are trivially easy to create. [shameless plug] I created an appengine variant ( http://symlinkd.com ) in about a day, including a simple update api and per-handle history [/shameless plug]

I think the underlying point of his comment was that it was silly to consider the dog an officer...having a silly idea enshrined in law doesn't make it less silly.

Can you name 3 profitable, growing, unionized industries?

Not to mention the paternalistic relationship it implies. If I don't care for the terms of an employment contract, I won't work under it. If no business in my industry offers terms I consider favorable, I can start my own business. If that's impractical, or I'm unwilling to do it, I should change professions entirely.

It's odd, but as I've gotten older I've _really_ started to hate graffiti...for every undiscovered artistic genius practicing art 'outside the mainstream', there are 5000 ignorant 'X was here' messages uglify-ing the landscape.

Paper is cheap enough that there isn't a need to vandalize your surroundings in order to express yourself. If you absolutely _must_ paint mural size graphics, do it on the walls inside your house.

Also, get off my lawn.

It's a reference to the old roach motel slogan: "Roaches check in, but they can't check out".

In this case, referring to the fact that Facebook doesn't exactly go out of their way to provide you with the ability to 'take your data and leave'. Can you get an easy dump of all of your comments? Your friends' contact info? Your photos?

It's been taken up by a new maintainer, and works remarkably well (though I'm not sure I'd trust 'real' data to it). I've run it on a media server at home for the better part of a year, across hardware upgrades and linux installs, and so far, so good.

I'm sure I'll be in the minority here, but doesn't that seem to stretch the meaning of 'your own property'? I mean, if you can't even cut the trees down, what exactly makes it 'yours'? (aside from the privilege of paying takes on it)

I like CSS, but every time I see an article bragging about a new technique for accomplishing something that _should_ be simple, I lose the faith a little bit.

Can't we just give up and add '<tabset>' and '<tab>' tags to html and call it a day. At the very least, we could stop abusing the poor <ul> tag.

in a word: no. Rights and responsibility are 2 sides of the same coin. Since there isn't really a good test for responsibility (unless you're willing to have marriage or land ownership be qualifications for voting), then age is all we've got as a marker for responsibility. Probably unfair to a great many responsible children, but better than the alternative.