Maybe this is the fundamental problem: that, as a society, we have collectively decided that we shouldn't have to worry about government.

This begets two problems. First, the exact problem you're complaining about: that not enough money gets spent on things, because people don't think they should have to worry about it, but they also don't want to pay more in taxes so that the government can pay someone competent to worry about it for them.

Second, you end up with the people who have more time on their hands (generally, the people with more money), or who care significantly more (generally, the people at the various fringes), being the ones who are most involved in government. The latter of those leads to divisiveness, and the former leads to monied interests having a disproportionate say.

So, in the end, I kind of agree with you that it would be nice not to have to worry about these things. They're the sort of thing that a well-run government should take care of on its own. But the way we as a society think about and treat our government has been pushing it in a direction for a few decades that would inevitably lead to just this kind of outcome.

Dan Aris

The re-election rate has much more to do with gerrymandering than anything else. Stop letting Congresscritters choose who is allowed to vote them back into office, and you'll see some significant changes.

Guess what? That's not possible.

If you live in a society with a government, you are benefiting from the services that government provides whether you like it or not. Their army, their police, the roads they build, the laws they make protecting the air and water...you literally cannot take a breath without benefiting from the services the government provides.

You say you want a place where people can be "free to live"? Let me tell you what that would end up like.

Within a generation, it would go one of two ways: Either it would be an absolute shithole that no one would ever actually want to go to, because too many people joined it who just wanted to do whatever the hell they wanted and screw the rest of the universe, or a body would emerge that functioned as a government. And if that body wanted to be able to provide anything meaningful to the people of the Free State beyond conflict mediation, it would have to be paid somehow. Donations might work for a little while, but I guarantee that wouldn't last.

Humans in groups naturally gravitate towards some form of governed society. It's just part of the way we're wired. Yes, I dare say something like the Free State project could probably work for a while—with small groups of people who voluntarily put themselves in that situation, and a way to screen out people who just want to mess everything up because they don't think anyone can stop them. But the reason I say "within a generation" is because these sorts of Utopian societies have been tried before, and they have invariably collapsed because the children didn't choose to be there, and don't all agree with the way they're set up.

Dan Aris

So apparently, according to Eric Schmidt himself, they're planning on doing things at the shareholder meeting that they shouldn't be doing:

Naturally, the rules apply to what everyone else should be telling Google, not what Google should be telling everyone else. Because, as we all know, Google isn't evil! So we should just trust them, as if they were a "trusted friend."

Yep. Sounds like the kind of behaviour I expect from my "trusted friends," all right.

Dan Aris

Oh, well, yes, that's obvious.

I was more or less meaning that we as a society should start demanding something better, rather than that there was any good reason for Big Pharma to change their ways.

Dan Aris

As someone who actually lives in the US....

No. No, there isn't. Political involvement here is quite low, and the odds of not being able to find sufficient volunteers to count votes and keep the other guys honest in a large number of precincts—especially more rural ones—are very, very high.

As a for instance, it would not surprise me in the least if the voting district where I used to live (a couple of years ago) couldn't muster more than 2-3 volunteers total.

Dan Aris

Then perhaps what we need is to find better ways of curing mental illness—ways that don't depend on potentially very dangerous pharmaceuticals, discovered almost purely through trial and error, that have serious, unpleasant, well-known side effects, and require you to pay the pharmaceutical industry for the privilege of continuing to live a normal life, for the rest of your life.

Dan Aris

So there's less methane being released. OK, that's good and all--but it still doesn't address the several other really important problems with fracking.

Like the fact that the toxic chemicals they use to force apart the shale layers are a) basically unknown, b) often left down there, and c) known to be contaminating groundwater in some instances. Or the fact that the gas companies come in, tear up the countryside, create an ecological disaster, make vast amounts of money, and then, when they decide it's no longer worth their time--they just pack up and leave. And the local communities get to deal with the mess for the next 100 years or so.

The basic problem is that there's insufficient regulation here. Preventing companies from exploiting natural resources for tremendous profit while leaving behind a horrific environmental mess--and, in general, preventing privatized profits with socialized costs--is precisely what regulation is best for. The market not only will not deal with these issues, it cannot. It has no way of taking account of the externalities associated with hydrofracking.

Put in place some good common-sense regulation of hydrofracking, with enough teeth to make it actually mean something, and then we can talk about allowing it to happen within 100 miles of my house.

And yes, I live in the northernmost extension of the Marcellus shale in upstate NY, so this issue does affect me personally.

Dan Aris

Unless you can derive entertainment from it. Then it can pay for itself.

Dan Aris

Fair enough. I was reading it as, "the entirety of some schools of fundamentalism," rather than "some types of people who are fundamentalists," which appears to have been your meaning. :-)

Dan Aris

That's a nice fairy tale, too.

Actually, for most of them, they either haven't actually read large parts of the Bible, or they actually do believe that it's literally true, but you have to interpret it right. So in that case, they would almost certainly believe the "executive summary" explanation someone upthread gave.

It may be fun to believe that every single fundamentalist is actually a hypocrite and knows that the things they profess are untrue, but it's really about as stupid a belief as the one that the Bible is literally true in every detail.

Dan Aris

This makes an important assumption: that it's feasible for you to hop carriers and shop around for the best rates.

In the area where I live, only Verizon has reliable coverage everywhere. AT&T can mostly manage to keep you connected, but (so people who've used them tell me) they often drop out, and the data speed, in practice, isn't as good.

So there's really no point in my trying to get my phone unlocked.

Dan Aris

No, it really is more than that.

My wife, who, until a few years after we started going out, had never used anything but Windows, was forced temporarily to use a Windows laptop instead of her MacBook a year or two after we got married. It was only a week or two, but she was just about tearing her hair out by the end.

The single biggest frustration of hers (that I can recall 5-6 years later) was the insistence on MDI, even in non-Microsoft programs. She hated having Photoshop stick a useless gray background between her and her desktop.

Dan Aris

Was it talking about America vs the world, or America vs the West? Because in my (admittedly limited and mostly American) experience, there's a lot more difference between, say, the average East Asian's perspective on life in general and an American's than between an average German's and an American's.

Dan Aris