Recent Comments:
Ron Paul's War {Political Machine Blog}
Dec 27th 2007 12:17AM Lincoln's first inaugural address, which you excerpt above is pretty clear, he intended to "preserve" the union by any means necessary, including unconstitutional ones. He goaded the South into war by insisting on maintaining Fort Sumter in what was then Confederate territory, for the purpose of provoking war. And why did Lincoln (successfully) provoke war with the South? Because secession of the South had cut off a HUGE chunk of the Federal tarriff revenue he was counting on to hand over to his friends and fromer clients in the railroad business. Lincoln did not care two cents about slaves until it became politically inevitable he do so, and even then his alleged support of the anti-slavery cause (he never freed a single slave while he lived), he even supported the original 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which would have barred the Federal government from EVER interfering in slavery. And finally, while South Carolina was probably the most radically pro-slavery state, it was the only one whose secession resolution claimed the slave issue as a primary reason for secession, the others gave state sovereignty, as promulgated by Madison and Jefferson in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves issues, against such violations as the Morrill Tarriff, as their motivating cause. The "Slave South Bad - Free North Good" story we learned from our high school history textbooks completely avoids major portions of the very complex situation that allowed Lincoln to lead the country into a bloody, needless Civil War.
Ce-Oh no he didn't, part XXXII - Sony UK boss calls US citizens "cheap people" {Engadget}
Mar 30th 2007 3:05PM Price comparisons across long periods of time are meaningless due to government currency inflation. And Ludwig von Mises disproved Marx's labor theory of value, so we are left with the subjective value theorem and the old chestnut of "supply and demand". To wit, the price at which the (downward-sloping) demand curve and the (upward-sloping) supply curve meet is the price, it is determined by what the buyers in the market are willing to pay, and has no bearing on the cost of other goods such as rent. If the price is too high, items sit on shelves unsold, if it is too low, people get shot outside Target for their PS3. In both the short run and the long run the price is set by the retailer at the level (ideally) where the marginal buyer will buy the last unit available and there are no more buyers.
Net neutrality and the FCC: what's being done to preserve it {Engadget}
Mar 30th 2007 10:38AM JR;
"Do you think DuPont would have stopped producing ozone-depleting hydroflourocarbons"
Uh, DuPont gamed the system so the ban occurred after their CFC patents expired, so that consumers would have to use THEIR PATENTED non-CFC refrigerants - yeah, the Feds really screwed DuPont there, HAHAHAHA.
"...or the Rockefellers would have stopped abusing their railroad monopoly,"
Um, the Rockefellers owned Standard Oil, and that was the "monopoly" they were accused of having. The railroads are a different, government-mediated monopoly.
"or AT+T would have split themselves up in the early 1980's, if the government had just asked them nicely?"
Uh, the government GAVE them their monopoly, and protected it for nearly 100 years, what planet have YOU been living on? And I made the point earlier that MCI and its customers (big businesses that were fed up with poor treatment and poor service by Bell Tel) and forced the government's hand on the breakup.
Your critique of laissez faire stinks on ice, and you really should abandon your feeble attempt at economic argument.
Net neutrality and the FCC: what's being done to preserve it {Engadget}
Mar 30th 2007 10:19AM JR,
Way to make two nasty, reflexive, ad hominem attacks on me in one post. Accusing me of carrying water for Big Telco / Big Cable and the Republicrat / Demoblican party really addresses the point (NOT), which is who owns the stuff is the internet made of.
But here you are, opposed to two industries (Big Telco and Big Cable) monopolizing the internet. The monopoly power they have been given comes from government regs (federal regs on telco for over 100 years, state and local regs on cable). Yet your solution, and that of every party in the "Net Neutrality" debate is to issue MORE regulations. How does this make any sense?
The only answer that will work in the long run is complete, utter deregulation and privatization of all telco and all internet. Let ISPs restrict access to non-favored content providers, and new competitors will spring up nearly overnight to bleed the offending ISPs to death. And your irrelevant blather about the government creating the internet aside, the first massive investments in fiber were made by companies such as MCI that were able to break loose of the hammerlock the Feds gave the Bell System, and this, not your precious bureaucracy, was the major development that led to the internet as we know it today.
Notice, I did NOT accuse you of being a shill for, say, Google or Yahoo, in the same way you accused me of shilling for ComCrap or Big Brother Bell.
Net neutrality and the FCC: what's being done to preserve it {Engadget}
Mar 29th 2007 2:41PM "Net Neutrality" is a bad solution to a non-problem. The article stipulates that there is very little actual regulatory action, yet most providers are mostly neutral.
The fundamental question is; Who owns the internet? Meaning , who owns the fiber, coax, servers? The answer to this suggests the answer to the question - an owner of a piece of private property should be allowed to do whatever he or she wants with it. Cases where previous government-mediated monopolies hinder the fundamental fairness of this should be investigated and corrected, but the servers, switches, and the "pipes", as Senator Stevens so ineptly (but not inaptly) put it, belong to the owners, not the government, and not to Google.
F-22 Raptors' systems crash mid-flight over Pacific {Engadget}
Mar 7th 2007 3:13PM J Ho sez;
"Should the Marine Corps still be flying Harriers and Prowlers into the year 2050?"
...As opposed to the Marine-killing V-22 Osprey? Some choice, dude, I come from a Marine family, you must not like the leathernecks very much if you want to put them in that wastefully expensive deathtrap;
http://www.libertyguys.org/home/detail.asp?ArtID=855
And that's just one example. There are literally thousands of other ways that the military-industrial-congressional complex is destroying us.
Pocket PC gets iPhone makeover {Engadget}
Mar 7th 2007 3:10PM If we all stopped buying this "Intellectual Property" nonsense, the best device would always win, hands down. IP is a way for losers to punish other losers for copying certain things, it does nothing to foster creativity, it only retards progress and engenders lawsuits.
F-22 Raptors' systems crash mid-flight over Pacific {Engadget}
Mar 1st 2007 10:16AM Frederic Bastiat, the great French economist, wrote of "What is seen, and what is not seen". What is seen is the marvelous technology, the national pride, and the profits (but relatively paltry number of jobs created) in the defense sector. What is not seen is the huge number of jobs not created, the huge number of goods not produced, and the relatively paltry profits that SHOULD have occurred in the private, consumer sector. What you are promoting is a variation of the "broken window fallacy", where a vandal breaking a window is purported to enrich everyone in the community, where in reality the opposite is true, all are made poorer. As long as people persist in such nonsense, we will continue paying the arms makers to build overpriced, billion-dollar airplanes that are of no real use whatever.
F-22 Raptors' systems crash mid-flight over Pacific {Engadget}
Feb 28th 2007 5:45PM Neither one, the F-22 and the JSF are useless, just as Gabe said. Made redundant by the end of the Cold War, they are programs in search of a mission. Rather than increase US security on net, they will simply serve as a spur to China (or India, or Pakistan, or whoever) to ratchet up their own wasteful military programs to keep up. Worse, they cost BILLIONS of dollars that the US taxpayer needs to keep just to stay even with (government-caused) inflation, and they apparently aren't even very good value for the money. Worse yet, once the military purchases a new fighter, the manufacturer sells the older planes to every willing customer, setting up a situation where, to maintain superiority, a new program is initiated and purchased. Just as the adversaries of F-22 pilots will likely be flying the discarded F-14 and F-16, the JSF jocks will be fighting "obsolete" F/A-18s, F-117s, and F-22s. This is NUTS, we all pay for this insanity and the weapons-makers clean up, see: http://www.libertyguys.org/home/detail.asp?ArtID=1509
F-22 Raptors' systems crash mid-flight over Pacific {Engadget}
Feb 28th 2007 3:14PM To restate: Lockheed Martin conned the US government into spending $70 billion and change (to date) on a "weapons system" that (according to the logic of some here) could have crashed into the ocean on the way to shoot / bomb China due to a computer glitch. It's funny and tragic at the same time, unless you are China (in which case it's probably amusing) or a US taxpayer, in which case it is drop-dead incomprehensible.
