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Re:One person suffering trade offs is not conclusi (Score:4)
by Angst Badger (8636) on Sunday August 14, @05:48AM (#13314855)
There's more to it than that. Anyone remember Thorstein Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption? The basic idea, for those who haven't, is that when unnecessary overconsumption is socially sanctioned -- that is, when it becomes fashionable -- then the normal laws of supply and demands are, if not suspended altogether, then greatly modified.

There is no consumer pressure to make fuel-efficient cars because the very inefficiency and extravagance of the modern SUV is what is really being purchased by design. People want wasteful, expensive vehicles because they are fashion statements. They say, "Look at me! I have assloads of discretionary income." An Armani suit is manifestly inferior to jeans and a denim work shirt in purely practical terms, but no one buys Armani because it's practical. A twenty-dollar digital watch is a functionally better watch than a fancy Rolex, but people aren't buying Rolexes because of their chronographic accuracy.

If you want to reduce the waste of resources, you have two options: make efficiency hipper than waste, or require efficiency through regulation. To wait for simple market forces to correct the situation is to wait in vain: viewed through a purely economic lens, the market is working correctly. It is delivering what people want, which is waste.

Energy-efficiency is primarily a social problem, and only secondarily a technological or economic problem. Oh sure, in the long term, energy-efficiency is a survival problem for the human race, but humans are not very good at long-term decision-making.
--
If you can read this, you aren't the President.

Re:Feeling Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
by imsmith (239784) on Monday March 28, @12:05AM (#12062484)
Privacy is not the diametric to freedom, it is a freedom.

Privacy is the freedom to control access to information about yourself and your behavior from those who you would rather not know it because it is embarrassing, incriminating, or simply against your wishes.

Freedom is not synonymous with an open society either, in fact an fully open society is the least free (libre) arrangement of human interaction because there isn't any haven from the will of others to impose themselves or their ideas upon you. No thought may go unchecked by the group, no dream unconfirmed to the mores of the society at large.

You cleave to the idea that there is the 'truly moral' while simultaneously evoking that the 'government is us', which I find a little silly.

If the government is in fact 'us', then the tyranny of the mass is reason enough to demand and safeguard our privacy, and insist on something less than an fully open society.

If there is a 'truly moral' way of living, then there cannot be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people because it would imply either that this moral truth is known by people, thereby rendering moot the need for government at all, or that in the absence of this knowledge personally, the collective acts of a nation can be somehow conformed to a superior standard of conduct, which betrays the notion that the people are self-governing, since they do not possess the knowledge of the moral truth themselves and are instead being governed by the ideology that is external to them.

It is a logical fallacy that we are somehow "safe" from a sub-set of the population that is opposed to a particular behavior or belief and is empowered to act with authority to eliminate that behavior.

There is an enormous difference between what is moral and what is legal. Legality is the thing of government and of power. Morality is the thing of humanity and of ethics.

What is criminal today can overnight become legal, and vice versa, simply by the caprice of a majority of 538 human beings in the District of Columbia. That isn't a complaint, it is a fact. To live under the illusion that you aren't potentially a target of someone's bias, prejudice, or ideological action is really pretty foolish.

I'm sure that few people in the Arab-American or American-Islamic communities realized they would become the enemy, subject to seizure, torture, imprisonment without charge, and social stigma simply for the way the looked, who they spent time with, the books they read, or the location of their religious centers on September 10th 2001. They likely felt just as most Japanese-Americans did on December 6th 1941.

Just because what you do is "what everyone is doing" doesn't make it morally OK. It makes it popular. It was popular to ignore the Nazi rise to power and the lynchings in the deep south and the Inquisition, too. None of those are considered morally OK. Morality, when viewed through the lens of history, generally is the opposition to power being abused, not the tacit acquiescence to brutality.

Living a life shrouded in secrecy isn't an un-free life if you are doing it because you choose not to share the intimate details of your life, not because you have to. Living a life under surveillance and scrutiny by anonymous actors who believe they are above reproach and constantly on the lookout for any small breech of one of a myriad of civil and criminal laws that no one can abide by is not freedom. When everything is a crime and the enforcers pick and choose to whom and when the law will apply, that is not government by the people. When you think that what you are doing is truly morally OK, and that the government will never think you aren't, you are living a life that is not free.

Re:Cheap? Clean? when will we learn (Score:3, Interesting)
by beefo (738495) on Friday December 10, @01:47PM (#11050651)

Yeah, I know I'm ill informed. It's true. I've never worked on a tokomak or any other nuclear facility. I do know that it takes more than two degree C from ambient to make fusion happen with known methods. And the product of twenty years of operation is not well understood, there is more than one person in the nuclear field (possibly informed, and/or just crazy) that wonders what happens to materials even if the neutrons are not 'hot'. The argument that nearby materials will not get dangerous appears to be based on statistics (of course because this is all you've got). So who is looking at real failure modes (versus the ones where things get two degrees out of wack and the confinement politly disipates into a safe cloud of well behaved plasma)? Take another look at the density goals for these operations, recalculate the energy moderation outside a confinement, then let me know if you still come up with only two degrees. (I'm also pretty bad at arithmetic, so I get exponents wrong all the time, just by one or two, but hey, a few degrees of magnitude make all the difference, don't they)

Re:China also jailing journalists. (Score:2)
by ratamacue (593855) on Wednesday December 01, @12:49PM (#10962109)
China is an amalgam that has been held together by force rather than by desire

Every government is held together by force, because force is the fundamental tool and first prerequisite of government. If government were voluntary, it wouldn't be government at all -- it would be free enterprise, and it wouldn't posess the right to initiate force. Don't be fooled into thinking that the voting process removes the element of force from government.

The difference between force and voluntary association is the difference between government and everyone else. Government is the organization which holds the unique right to initiate force as a means to an end; anyone else who does so is a criminal. That is the only consistent, absolute, and universal way to define government. Always has been, and always will be. Notice I've said absolutely nothing about whether government is moral, practical, or efficient -- I've only provided the absolute definition of government.

The concept of "voluntary government" (and I put that in quotes because it cannot possibly exist) is primarily used by democratic governments as justification of their powers over the people. In reality, there is nothing voluntary about any government. If you don't comply, you will be threatened with deadly force, and if you fight in self-defense, you will face deadly force itself.

The bottom line is that the social contract theory is a logical impossibility. It states that citizens volunteer to submit to government rule. On first glance, this seems like a perfect way to justify anything government could possibly do. On closer inspection, you will find that the social contract theory claims the impossible.

Force and voluntary association are the only two possible modes of human interaction. Every single interaction you have with others throughout your life may be classified as either involuntary or voluntary association, but never both. Why? Because the two concepts are mutually exclusive and logically opposite -- a person cannot volunteer to be forced, just as you cannot force a person to volunteer. Otherwise, neither concept would have any meaning!

Either you initiate force as a means to an end, or you don't. Civilians don't; government and criminals do.

Re:1,791.38 GBP (Score:5, Interesting)
by Coryoth (254751) on Tuesday November 30, @02:45AM (#10949319)
( http://jedidiah.stuff.gen.nz/ | Last Journal: Friday November 26, @10:40PM )
There's plenty to worry about. See my sig for an attempt a non-partisan, level headed approach to looking into the economic issues the US may in fact be facing.

Jedidiah.
Elephants in the living Room: Possibilities for Economic Peril [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/~Coryoth/journal