If it makes you feel better I don't really think of this as a right/left issue anymore.
If you look at the past decade you see George W. Bush spent money like crazy (on defense AND social programs) and President Obama is looking to keep up with him. So really there's very little difference between right and left when it comes to taking your money. The only difference is former President Bush borrowed money (which will some day increase your taxes in the future) while President Obama wants to take it outright (increasing your taxes now)
I really think we're coming into a time where people of all parties have to start looking for candidates who have fiscal responsibility as part of their platform. Because, to my eyes, Libertarianism isn't incompatible with either parties platform (it incorporates the lower taxes/private sector component of the right with the social equality goals of the left).
When done tactically, government spending can lead to smaller government. The long term goal for much of the right's spending agenda is to create an environment where the government is forced to become smaller via debt fueled program slashing. Defense spending is particularly good for this, because there is abundant rhetoric for attacking someone who reduces (i.e. "cuts") defense funding.
To me that makes no sense. The way I see it there are two reasons for small government.
First Reason: To save money. But in this sense the plan obviously fails because to even get to the point of spending cuts we have to use all our Government's available financial resources.
Second Reason: To empower the Private Sector. But if the Government has gotten to the point where they've exhausted the majority of their financial resources they are going to be forced to levy high taxes to compensate. That places a burden on businesses and makes them look to incorporating in other countries (just as most look to incorporate out side of California now). So it doesn't empower the private sector it all but destroys it.
Given the two points above I don't see how your thesis makes sense. It seems that you're so focused on small government that you've forgotten the reasons you'd want it in the first place.
You've mistaken me for my argument a bit there. The right's fiscal philosophy is based on the idea that people who earn money deserve to keep it. People who don't earn money shouldn't be re-appropriated money from those who do. In the long term that is achieved by having a smaller, less expensive government.
It is not the case that the government must raise taxes when they exhaust their resources, the other option--the desirable outcome from small government advocates--is that they slash services and oversight to an extent that is politically impossible under other circumstances.
Politics is not motivated purely by reason, but also by the different parties are motivated by philosophical ideals.
I would like to tell the Pirate Bay the same thing everybody has told us for the past 10 years. They should go out and find a new business model, one that doesn’t involve profiting from stolen property…What everybody who steals music should realize is that e-looting is not a victimless crime. Everyone who does it is hurting themselves. They are killing the music.
I wish the author of the article had addressed this quote more directly. "E-looting" is in no way "killing the music". It's not a crime, anymore than singing a familiar melody (that's under copyright) is an e-looting crime.
At least in the US, copyright law is unconstitutional. Read the copyright clause: there's no mention of treating the intangible as "property", nor is there granted the right to transfer "ownership". Far from it. Read Jefferson's letters on the subject, and you'd find he was very much on the side of the "pirates".
Just because you wrote a song doesn't mean I can't sing it. I can't imagine who died and told these guys that they deserved big cash for songs, but it's not true.
110 Supreme Court Justices seated since the Copyright Clause was enacted along with the Constitution in 1787, versus Kubrick from Hacker News. I wonder who's right about whether copyright law is constitutional.
This is a completely bald-faced appeal to authority, and it's not even a very good authority: it costs much less for Big Media to keep 110 decision-making people quiet over the years (through downward pressure from the other parts of government lobbied into agreement with them) than the amount they make while doing so; however, it costs much too much to convince the entire public of their side. In a democracy, if the public disagrees with a law, it's not really a law, no matter what the legislators say.
Appeal to authority is not always wrong. In terms of "Is it Constitutional?", the Constitution itself says the Supreme Court decides. Citing the Supreme Court on the question of whether something is constitutional isn't an "appeal to authority fallacy", it's just plain correct, whether or not it is also an "appeal to authority".
And as near as I can see, tptacek is correct in the citation. It may be vague but it is substantially correct; if it were unconstitutional to treat copyright as a property right, it would have been ruled so sometime in the last 200 years, instead of becoming the foundation of the system.
It's an appeal to authority in an argument about authority. The question kubrick set up wasn't "is copyright law right" or "sensible" or "practicable"; it's "is it constitutional". The answer: yes.
So the law is within the bounds of common sense when it defines the copyright period as the life of the author plus 99 years? The constitution says a copyright is granted for a limited time to encourage artists to create. How is Walt Disney going to be encouraged to create another Mickey Mouse when he's been dead for 40 years?
I used to write with lots of caveats and such. I had to stop.
Was it because it was hard to read? No. It was because it didn't matter.
It doesn't matter how much you water your prose down with caveats and exceptions and criteria and clauses, it turns out that there's still a percentage of people who won't read them and still flame you. It doesn't matter how humble a tone you strike, some people think you're being arrogant simply because you have an opinion.
It's really not worth gumming up prose with exceptions, because English doesn't have the requisite level of precision anyhow.
Of course, I don't follow this principle 100% either, but I've stopped stroking out about it. Better to say something clearly and be misunderstood than say something muddled and still be misunderstood.
I agree: caveats can be distracting. I'm not at all suggesting that, for instance, the 37 Signals boys start adding cavaets.
I'm suggesting that they stop constantly posting articles that say, in essence, "Hey, world, you're doing it all wrong and we know how to do it right and you should take your cue from us. There's only one Right Way and we have a lock on it." You know, like when they cap on startups because "building a business" is The Better Way. As opposed to a different pursuit altogether.
You're right, they're not equal. But sounding arrogant -- on purpose -- is still kind of a dickly thing to do. It's I'm-making-up-for-a-small-penis behavior, and the world needs less of it.
Shouldn't he wait until the cost comes down and settles a bit before he bothers writing a whole screed about the expense? It's like decrying the HDTV as not worth the money -- they're over $10,000 each! Or, they were, a few years ago.
Well, obviously the price of SSDs will change in the future, but the question is whether they are a good idea for server workloads now, not in 2 or 3 years.
The paper says "For each workload, we also calculated
the break-even capacity/dollar at which the best [SSD cache]
solution would equal the cost of a disk-based solution." Their results tell you exactly how cheap SSDs need to get before they're worth using. Given that SSDs have improved 5x-10x on several metrics since this paper, they are already suitable for some workloads.
Also, the paper finds that for many of their workloads performance effectively does not matter so SSDs will only be cheaper if they are cheaper per GB than disks, which will probably never happen. They're not saying that SSDs are too expensive; they're saying that SSDs will always be too expensive. It's not clear to me that this conclusion is correct, but it is interesting.
The idea that the split infinitive is bad comes from a fixation in the 18th century that Latin (long dead even at that time) was a somehow superior language. You can't split infinitives in Latin (or most of its descendents). "To sleep" in Latin is dormire. That includes the concept of "to", so there's no way to say "to soundly sleep". You'd have to put it as "to sleep soundly," and so automatically, that's the "correct" form in English, too. English is an inferior language to Latin, right?
Same story with ending a sentence with a preposition, dangling participles, and other taboos: there may be nothing fundamentally wrong with it, but you couldn't or didn't do it in Latin. Ergo, it's bad.
The real fault is the attempt to make functional language into hard science. It's not. Language was not invented by god. It's a human construct, and using it is nearly an art.
Good advice? Useful. Sure, don't over-explain. But don't bother getting into an argument with someone about whether a word in a sentence was truly necessary. People who do those kind of things have lost perspective.
You're right that the first sentence is more informative. Among its other problems, it's too informative. It's like saying that pi is 3.27394 rather than 3.14.
Judgement call. "Too" informative? Perhaps for people who prefer brief sentences. For god's sake, stay the hell away from Faulkner.
I slowed when I got to Guy Kawasaki (interested in startups but with no direct experience, contrary to popular belief) and cringed when I saw Scobleizer (same story as Guy), and stopped flat when I got to Seth Godin. Seth's got interesting things to say on occasion, but to real startup work, he's all but useless.
Stop fucking spending my money on bullshit and you won't have to create new taxes.