Posts by tussock
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Re: Yoof crime policy.
Pay young folk full benefits if they're out of work and out of school, and minimum wage if they're in work. 14+ will do just fine, it's a huge waste of everyone's time and effort to keep kids in school that aren't interested in the learning, and poverty along with social rejection is a huge stimulus for crime.
Give the kids that stay in school a partial benefit, in place of all the tax breaks their parents currently get. Obviously, make sure every 13 year old has the full range of life skills needed to make a good decision there, budgeting, diet and basic health, sex ed, drug ed, and so on.Invest strongly in free adult education for those who realise their mistake and want to do more later on. Free university too, for everyone with a UE equivalent, and free polytech for those with a School C. Full benefits for everyone who's still passing most of their courses.
Bring back local licensing trust monopolies, as the booze on every corner for private profit is a curse that hurts youth more than anyone, especially the children of our plague of social alcoholics. See also rules around the spread of addictive gambling machines.
Mostly though, catch the small time crooks before they get the idea they'll get away with everything they do; putting whatever money it takes in to track down near every burglary, robbery, theft, and assault. Don't sweat the punishment, it's mostly irrelevant anyway, getting caught early and often is what works. Restorative justice FTW, taggers repainting walls and such.
Gentle tax increases on the rich folk may be required, but they'll live.
There'll still be youth crime, just like there'll still be adult crime, and vanishingly rare horrors will still make for great press. Such is life.
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Or, you know, ignore it all and hope for the best, promise to get tough on those you've failed, and shut all the youth away wherever they'll make the least noise lest anyone notice them. Letting the wee buggers vote's not a bad idea either.
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under the piracy model I should be able to sneak out the door without leaving a tip and hold my head up high, right?
People are amazingly bad with analogies.
Piracy, in terms of coffee shops and their employees is like ... you stay home and make your own coffee with these fancy new machines people sell that let you make good coffee at home; while ignoring the weird old law that says you have to pay some dude in a shop to do it for you, and even inviting your friends around for a cup.
Respect for the law? Not all laws are equally worthy of respect, especially the ones that are out of touch with how most people live their lives.
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Oh, and from the department of when I go to bed thinking about stuff, I wake up thinking about it too, ....
1. Wanting the world to fit how you expect to make money.
2. Expecting to make money off how the world wants to be.One of those concepts is sensible.
Sony BMG above have well and truly jumped the shark, that's just all kinds of anachronistic. -
robbery, dude, enough with the "theft" story, it's called breach of copyright. As I said, there's plenty of other ways to ensure performers and writers get paid than trying to regulate the non-commercial creation of digital copies of art out of existence.
ipods come with 40 GB drives, enough for about 700 albums, or 1400 if you get the bigger drive. More music than you'll listen through in a year. Thousands more in a couple years, a lifetime's listening on your hip. Everyone I know with an ipod has it full, all the time, delete stuff they haven't ever listened to to make room for more stuff they may well never listen to. I can assure you none of them paid thousands of dollars for that privilege, they just share the things they like with the people they like.
That's the market. People want huge databases. They want the entire works of someone their friend said had this one song with a bit that went "doop-de-doo", especially their rare early stuff. They want every song they listened to as a kid, and everything they just heard on the radio, or at the pub. They want to share it all with their friends, especially the stuff they like.
There's huge money to be made off that, because it's far more desirable than anything that's come before it. Just not at $2 a song.
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What, I can't put a quote in a quote now? Pfft. It's bad enough the comments don't thread, but now I discover I can't even pretend they do. Ah well.
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<quote>RB: James is funny, leave him be.
Wot, no telling off for me? Are all my efforts in vain?</quote>
Sorry K-dog. You da man, but your posts have too much going for them for me to even hint you should ease up. I feel your pain regarding Hoagland, badastronomy.com being my lead on that nonsense.
And hey, who's bad mouthing FISSION, it's what powers the plate tectonics and Rotorua, dude. The core heat's not all that big, but we'd not be here without it.
Shame about the nuclear waste though, DU does indeed have a seriously long half-life, and does bad things to the birth defect rates in Iraq and amongst returned servicemen in the US.But returning to the idea of the essential unity of all conspiracy theory, couldn't the following [...] have equally come from any number of characters on the radical Left?
The political spectrum's a circle, man. Or a donut. Maybe a sphere. Either way, people who don't like the NWO, they don't have to agree on everything.
I'm still stuck on Huckabee's idea that angels grab the bullets that come out of his rifle barrel and direct them into the hearts of the deer he shoots. I mean, how do they do that when it's spinning so fast? 8]
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RB: James is funny, leave him be.
The National Journal article is pretty silly too, the best critique of the lancet study being that it was misreported in media headlines, much like all statistical data is. Error bars are there for a reason, and that study had some big-ass error bars.
Kinda like how political poll trends aren't necessarily so once you account for error margins. The media want stories more than facts though, so it will always be.
Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.
That's a neat trick, the climate being independent of the properties of the gasses that it's composed of. I wonder what mechanism they've proposed to increase the planet's heat radiation by precisely the same amount as it should be reduced by the physical properties of increased CO2.
The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.
We measure all that, very accurately, and it can't explain the changes that we've also measured very accurately. CO2 concentrations can, and are comfortably within the bounds of expectations. Bigger than the normally reported lower bounds, smaller than the runaway upper bounds.
Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change. Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man’s influence on nature is a drop in the ocean.
Oh, good grief. Someone who thinks CO2 warming is from the heat of the fire that created it. Fsck that's ignorant in a discussion of global climate.
So who knows?
You don't. Most other people do.
And of course there is the fact that warmer climates and more CO2 have some very positive effects, so [...]
The rate of change matters. That's why the suggestions aren't to stop all CO2 output and rebury what's been released, but limit it's output rate to levels that we think the human world can afford to manage, that leaves the wild room to avoid mass extinctions.
Thus, "Climate change", rather than "global warming".
I hope that cooler, more sensible heads prevails on GW.
I hope that a few rationally cautious heads take over and actually do something. Vote Obama. Vote Green. Etc.
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Oops, ignore that, they're $'s, not 5's. Damn lossy compression.
Obama, $117 per vote.
Edwards, $48 per vote.
Clinton, $113 per vote.And yes, they're not really votes, I know. Still, I need a measure I can understand, and that's close enough. Edwards has far more support than donors, perhaps he used more than TV advertsiing? Full figures anywhere?
Huckabee, $29 per vote.
Romney, $200 per vote.Huckabee's got it going on. I mean, he surely couldn't win. But then, neither could George W. Bush both times. <shrug>
Near 30 million between those that matter, which is a little less crazy. More or less ten times what would be spent here on an entire year's electoral advertising for the whole country, which is not much bigger than Iowa.
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Wow. TV advertising for Iowa caucus by leading three democrats was approximately $170 million dollars, covering 600,000 registered democrats ($280 per head), only 40% of whom turned out ($700 per head for them).
Proportion of votes came within 10% of the proportion of advertising, with Clinton behind in votes to dollar ratio, but Edwards fairly close to Obama.
Just, wow. Those guys need some advertising limits. That shit's crazy.
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Robbery: viable alternatives.
There's endless combinations of laws that might build a commercial structure around the production of art without limiting the non-commercial copying of the same. One example follows.
Trademark laws could be extended to prohibit the commercial use of authors and bands names without paying a fee, protecting the artist's name rather than the copies and permutations of particular tunes. Automatic fee structures could be put in place as they are for various things already.
Clarify the laws that prevent you claiming someone else's work as being your own (essentially the case around trademarks and commercial purposes already).
All of a sudden the Rolling Stones classics can be played by any fool, copied by anyone, but their own recordings can only sold or used for commercial purposes as "Rolling Stones", which in turn bags the Stones a fee, for some number of years before old works fully enter the public domain, for free classic radio and golden oldies pubs.
Because fees are fixed and compulsory, it's just as cheap to pay the Stones as it is to pay a ripoff, which would improve elevator and shop muzak no end.Give a small compulsory cut of band revenue to songwriters. Done.
There's all sorts of musical art has died under the current system, documentaries are being killed before they start, songs that mix from dozens of popular tunes can't exist, songs that give new life to 20 year old classics are extremely rare. We get a single studio recording of each song, without variation, maybe a mix or two of a top single, maybe one or two covers in ten years. Live stuff mostly can't be aired or sold, a cool new riff will only be heard at the one concert it was played, because copies are illegal.We get lip-syncing at concerts rather than variation on the radio. It's the opposite of creativity, it should have died in the 80's, but copyright law killed all the innovation, and keeps it hidden away in low-quality amateur jams.