Posts by Mike VandeVelde

fantasy worlds

So then, if we simply abolish corporate income tax, then all products would sell for $0 and everyone would have a job and all government deficits would be eliminated? Who's living in a fantasy world? Idiot.

"spent on puffing it that could have been spent on making it a better product, or a cheaper one"

++

Capitalism was more efficient than communism (measured by stockpiles of nukes / subs / tanks / bombers / battleships / fortresses) for a period of time. Capitalism lasted a little longer than communism, but eventually it too collapsed - crush asphyxiated under the ever growing burden of corporate armies of advertisers and lawyers and bankers and lobbyists and multi million dollar executives.

Re: seems reasonable

If I rent a house to someone and they indulge in naughty activities there, am I legally responsible?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2012/03/09/calgary-landlord-growop-woes.html

Re: UK-Ireland-Holland-Bermuda

That's what "free trade" is all about, ain't it great?!

Because if a corporation doesn't like the local tax rate / regulations, they can just pack up and leave and set up shop in another country, you know the globalized free market. Just like if I'm a farmer in Mexico and I don't like the local wages, I can just pack up and leave and move to a country where the wages are better... right? Oh. Only the money flows freely, if the people flowed freely and wages equalized in a gloabl free market that would make obscene profits harder to come by and we just can't have that now can we.

Also nice how if a corporation is doing business, or even just planning on doing business, and a government changes or implements a regulation that might have an effect on future income, well with all these free trade deals it's getting more and more common that the corporation can sue the government to make up for the lost profits, because obviously if they planned on making that much money then that's guaranteed to be what would have happened if that pesky public health department / whatever hadn't got their fingers in and made the work less "efficient". Just like if government introduces a new user pay fee for service, or makes me go out and get a helmet to ride my bicycle or get a hands free device to drive with my cell phone, well that gives me a good legal case to recover my lost income.... right? Oh. I see, totally different, right.

Tariffs are protectionist and protectionism is baaaad mkay. Yay free trade! So now if I order something online from out of country, when it gets here there won't be any surprise tax / duty / brokerage fees to pay extra? Oh.

Corporations are persons. No they're not they're overlords with way more rights than the pathetic useless human parasites who should be thankful to have a chance to suckle at corporate tits.

hah never seen that before

500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

If you see them, show them this information:

J7hHB-byybsXtyljedqC4GDx8l3X.....

http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/photos/20-awesome-404-error-pages

"I am going to be hated for this comment."

... or simply ignored because of being totally empty of any useful or interesting content, and in a dickish way. Keep it up. Or not.

I always thought that with all the billions of dollars worth of gear that we are piling up around the solar system, that someone should be having a think about how possible it is that any of it is / could be useful for when there are eventually boots on the ground. A wound down Curiosity could be retrieved and stripped of scientific instruments and used for a dune buggy and / or to ferry supplies around. How many square meters of solar panels are lying around waiting to be dusted off and hooked to something useful? Maybe this drill could be used to bore wells for drinking water (if there is ice under there)? If there are any minor modifications that could be made to the tools we are sending there to make them more useful as ingredients for future human assembled what nots for the colony, and possibly save on what needs to be shipped along with those humans, well I hope someone is considering that kind of thing. Just a thought, it's all awesome anyway :-)

ps Unless these things are meant to end up as some sort of heritage sites? Would anyone be offended by recycling the Apollo landers into parts of a moonbase? What if it was China doing it? What are the rules for salvage on the *extremely* high seas? Would those still be considered property of the USA?

Re: Forces me to revert to IE when I need those YouTube moment.

http://www.youtube.com/html5/

hip hip hoor... wait what?

Yes, because the hairy pale people from Europe during the renaissance are no different from cave men back in the stone age (excepting the magnitude of their brutality), right? Is that what you are trying to celebrate?

They were first as in here before France, England, Spain, etc. What part of that can you not understand? The guy who won the gold medal in the 100m dash isn't really first because you saw that guy training cross the finish line *days* earlier??

So in 50 years when the Chinese come to save us from wage slavery and topple our ridiculous sham of a democracy for us, you will kiss the ground in front of whatever mandarin the emporer appoints and be happy to have your offspring lifted from savagery, right? After all, people are people, progress marches on, and so on and so forth. If they wage horrible biological warfare on us, outlaw speaking English, forcibly take our children off to be civilized in boarding schools, make only token efforts to prosecute crimes against us and execute whole towns upon simple accusation of a crime by one of us, and all around treat us as sub human, well that will all be water under the bridge right? Nothing that hasn't happened before, who would we be to complain? Gah.

Re: I usually disagree with pretty much everything you have to say

If it drives Andrew into a fit, I usually assume it's something I might like. If Andrew says it's great, I usually go over it with a fine tooth comb to see where the catch is. Just kidding, it's all light entertainment ;)

So doing something to copyright to ease access to orphan works is just like invading Iraq. That's "analysis" for you! Some kind of Godwin's law for the 21st century? Thanks for that 8-D

"and the UK ISPs want to know why they shouldn't get some licence-fee cash."

Does the BBC connect to the internet for free? I'd like to hear more about that, if there is a free connection available then where do I sign up?

"The people using service like Netflix that use a lot of bandwidth should be the ones paying for the bandwidth they use."

Sure, and they do. Unless you know of somewhere offering free internet connectivity, see above.

What's the difference between me and Google? So much data to transfer, so fast. The ISPs get in betweeen, and should charge whatever it takes to carry the traffic, with a little left over for network improvements. Why is that so hard?

My eyes have always glazed over whenever someone says "well they (usually content providers) are getting blah blah blah so they should pay". If they aren't paying, then explain how because I would also rather not pay. But nobody ever explains that part, so it's hard to get to the end of a story like this witout falling asleep. But I force myself to, because anyone who thinks I'll suffer anything like global corporation A making some sort of a deal with global corporation B to have my bits turn into second class citizens can fuck right off, so I try to keep my eyes open.

Re: So, the bird is the word

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WNrx2jq184

Re: Open your wallets

It also has to do with the crown corporation BC Hydro being forbidden to build any more of its own new power stations. Instead small scale hydro is put in place by private companies, and BC Hydro signs lengthy contracts at inflated rates to purchase the power. I think there are something like $40 billion of those contracts lined up already.

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Hydro+awash+private+power/6605915/story.html#ixzz1uZzivKep"

http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/6835-bc-hydro-in-extreme-financial-peril-due-to-campbell-private-energy-policy.html

Go capitalism!!

Re: So what's the solution?

My only regret is that I have but a single thumbs up to bestow!

The line seems to be that if there was an epidemic of common sense and all legislation regarding intellectual "property" was repealed world wide tomorrow, that all creativity would cease altogether immediately and we would spiral down into a dark and boring world devoid of any progress or entertainment value.

What a huge load of horseshit. How did we get to where we are today then? Only by the good graces of the "Intellectual Property Industry" in places like ancient China, Egypt, Greece, Persia, India, Rome?

I've always said, and I'll say it again: even if you penalized people for singing songs and telling stories and drawing pictures and inventing things, guess what it would be just like the unwinnable war on drugs, people would still do all of those things.

Anybody claiming that we would all be harmed by the total annihilation of American Idol, Backstreet Boys, Big Brother, Harry Potter, Survivor, 100s of millions of dollars to tell a story that was originally told with a 50c comic book or even more astounding Battleship, etc etc ad nauseum, well I'll bet you've got some "prime" real estate or a used car to sell as well.

I'll bet you a trillion dollars that I'll still be able to go down to the pub and see a live band, or go see a play at the theatre, or go down to the gallery and see some art, or find someone to tell me a story I haven't heard before. Or even more specifically be able to hire someone to create a logo for a business, or take photographs at a wedding, or sculpt a big ass statue of yours truly.

So toss a fucking match on it all already. This is a new age, if you have something to say you can send it around the world and back at the stroke of a key press, so get all the arthritic pablum rationing dinosaurs out of the god damn way. Whatever we end up with can't possibly be half as retarded as what we have right now.

"Green Peace boat burning gallons of diesel"

yeah look at all the smoke belching out of the thing, they recruit people for direct action and they end up shovelling coal into it:

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/about/ships/the-rainbow-warrior/

retard.

Re: Learns How Much Enegery You Are Using

My power company says its all rainbows and unicorns:

http://www.bchydro.com/news/conservation/unplug_this_blog/2011/home_area_networks.html

"valuable tools for the police, or for searching collapsed buildings in rescue operations."

Seems like the mantra of a developing Skynet. Don't worry meatbags, these new additions to the hive are only being created for your benefit.

Given how many earthquakes there are, and then how many buildings collapse in those earthquakes, and how many of those buildings have people in them, and how many of those people become trapped, and then how many of those trapped people could possibly be saved, you could count the lives saved annually by these new tiny flying kill-bots in the handfuls, maybe. Meanwhile on the battlefield...

Also reminds me of the old copyright saw: just because there are possible non infringing legitimate uses for your technology, that doesn't mean that it is good / allowed to exist.

still with the capitalism === democracy

"Please name one." Maybe I could if the leader of the free world hadn't been so bloodthirstily burning down villages around the world in order to save them.

"Yes, it's called a "one-party" system, the complete opposite of democracy." It's different than pluralistic democracy, but it is not the opposite of democracy. In the opposite of democracy the king appoints governors and doesn't even bother pretending to let common people vote.

"WIth Communism you have no choice, indeed not agreeing with "the state" is usually going to mean prison time (if you're lucky)." The USA has more people in prison than any other country. Explain how the House Un-American Activities Committee fits into your worldview of communism = dictatorship and capitalism = freedom to vote for who you choose.

"If you didn't notice, the Berlin Wall fell because the people in the Communist countries got tired of not having choices." It might have also had something to do with the USSR bankrupting itself trying to maintain some semblance of competitiveness with the totally insane level of mililtary spending in the USA. Do you think history will be as kind in describing the fall of the USA-Mexico wall, where the misery and death is an order of magnitude higher?

I won't mention my opinion of your strong points, or lack of them.

WHY people are searching for what they are searching

I'm searching for something so that I can find it. If you put a bunch of moving flashing lights in my way, I will think about searching some other way. Even if you put an ad up for exactly the perfectly right thing every time someone looks at your page, you will get a sale from maybe 5 in a million of your visitors instead of 1 in a million. Either way you end up with 999,995+ visitors who suffer varying episodes of annoyance for your efforts and nothing much else. People think if they just tweak the formulas a little bit all of a sudden being advertised at will be a desireable experience or something...

The question we products have to answer is just how much we will put up with being considered a product.

I look at an item in the store, and it occurs to me how things like people pondering strategies for advertising campaigns, bankers working on tweaking a few more points out of all the money they create out of thin air, various seats of government with the cesspool of coutiers that always follow, managers striving for total situational awareness and control, sundry executive level parasites, and I wonder what the $19.99 I'm looking at would be without any of all that - maybe $4? And I wonder what the goal of the game played between free market and planned economies was? Which one was nimble and which one was bogged down with bureaucracy and layers of people adding no value and grunts at the bottom with motivation deficiencies? What exactly did capitalism win? The prize for being the most inneficient soul crushing minutely monitored war hungry dog eat dog inform on your neighbour way of life going? Grumble grumble get off my yard etc...

even tho

even if it was smooth sailing, its still extra hassle dumped on me for nobodys benefit except the publisher and steam. i dont know why you feel happy about doing them any favours beyond handing over your money? whos the simple one here? im not worried about complexity, thanks.

baically the box physically came from a store, it got to my house and i took the disc out, and i expected to install it and play it. i did not expect to be expected to become close friends with a 3rd party such as steam. *IF* i wanted to go online and play multiplayer, i would have nothing to complain about if steam was an option for that, like gamespy or something, in addition to what should be the basic requirement of being able to fire up my own host without asking anyone elses permission, and if steam are all that great i might even come to prefer them over other options. but i feel like i got invited out to dinner by a friend only to realize they are setting me up on a blind date with some marketer or banker or something, and before we can sit down to eat i have to agree in writing to futher dates. even if painfully attractive, my friend crosed a line and i dont much like those kinds of people anyway. my corn flakes are pissed in, we are off on the wrong foot, i am demotivated, not likey to turn out well for anyone involved. there are better ways to go about things.

a crime against humanity

The people of the world got together and we all shared all of our culture. It was beautiful, anyone could get access to practically everything ever created, it could hardly have been improved on. Then the Recording Industry Ass. of America marshalled their forces and declared war on culture. Grandmothers were bankrupted for "stealing" music. RIAA rented politicians who made it more and more of a crime to posess an "unauthorized" recording of a performance. People of the future will look back on this time and shake their heads. The good fight carries on, splintered and underground, but totalitarianism can't win in the end. The internet is based on sharing, the World Wide Web is all about sharing, people instinctually share, often even when it costs (as it certainly *doesn't* when talking about digitized data). Some people think sharing is communist and that communism for some reason is evil. Mostly those people are the people who have more. Those people are losing, those people will lose.

If you went back 25,000 years, and told the cavemen sitting around the campfire to stop singing that song because its your song and you worked hard to create it so they have to give you 3 furs each time they perform it, you would have been banished from the tribe, and they would have laughed and kept singing "your" song. As it was and will and should be.

Your art has no value unless you share it. And once you share it, it's not yours anymore.

RIP Napster.

magically flying goods

if you take the $0.007 (or whatever) of fuel used to get my can of peas onto the store shelf, and increase that to $0.0071 (or whatever) with harsh regressive carbon taxes, I'm not going to starve. But thanks for thinking about me.

Then let's go to darkest Africa and you show me the store with the shelves with the truck pulling up to the back to unload. I assume you picture the rest of the planet to be like your neighbourhood, but so much poorer. For the average earthling (<$2/day), the lucky ones (ie not among the tens of thousands who starved to death today) get their groceries by walking down to the village market to see what the local beasts of burden have dragged in from the fields today. Put a 10,000% carbon tax on and the millenia will continue to pass by as normal.

There are 2 (NEED MOAR):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0RuR3FREFw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lrk2BE4Tqc

Holy shit I would hunt down and kill every one of you to get to see a full feature length amount of this awesomeness. As for another version of WoW, even with a Star Wars skin on it - meh. I guess I would probably try it out if it was free. Galaxies was kind of neat, but not enough to pay a monthly subscription for, glad I didn't since they murdered the thing anyway.

Cookie cutter quests on rails are BORING. It should be totally player driven. I want the fat slob in his mothers basement who's been playing 20 hrs a day for 6 months and built up a Hutt empire the likes of which has never been seen before to have a guy in a cantina where a noob like me can sign up and get marching orders to join a campaign to burn down Mos Eisley on his whim. Or something like that. I want to be able to join the Stormtroopers and work up to being a company leader and then just decide to mutiny and take my men out to be mercenaries for hire, and I want that to piss off whatever guy is battalion commander and for him to hire an assassin to take me down. Or whatever the hell anyone wants. Anything else might as well be single player.