BitGeek

Because environmentalists have never cared one whit about science.

The 70s they were predicting eminant ice age, now they're predicting global warming, in another 20 years it will be back to ice age.

Its always been about political ideology and controlling people- bending them to their will- and never about science. Even in the 1970s nuclear power was known to be safe.

Hell, a coal plant spreads more radioactivity than a nuclear plant. (Cause coal contains radioactive substances naturally.)

The bottom line is, what gives you the right to tell people how they have to run their restaurant? And to use violence to enforce it?

You quickly throw out the market, (and claim to understand economics? LOL!) but the reality is- if people preferred it, the restaurants were non-smoking.

Most people, however, don't feel the need to force others to comply with their whims, using violence. Unfortunately, those who do join the government.

And of course, no counter arguments.

Just modding down.

The cowardly way of those who know they cant' defend their position.

Because I worked there, and I saw first hand the way that company is run. I've worked for a wide variety of companies, including what is now HP and Microsoft, a number of startups and a number of medium sized companies. I'd rank Amazon as the worst company I've worked for, and even Microsoft was a bit better (there's on startup between the two in the rankings for the suckiest environments).

Amazon is a very employee hostile place- all advancement is due to politics. Unless you have a good manager (and there are a few, mostly engineer who have been there a very long time) you can't advance unless you play really vicious politics-- and I mean, sabotaging others work kind of vicious. The people they bring in as managers (because they claim engineers don't want to be managers) are people who have no management skill.

I may have had one of the worst- his only training was in "criminal justice" and he clearly thought he was a prison guard... he'd regularly chew out the whole team for failing to do things that he didn't even understand weren't our responsibility (or in once case something we had actually done, but some other manager had told him we hadn't and of course he knew absolutely nothing about software so he had no way of knowing whether we'd done it or not.)

Maybe microsoft is that bad now- it was heading in this direction when I worked there...but Amazon was the worst place I ever worked. (And I worked for an educational startup where all of management was gradeschool teachers who also didn't understand technology and treated us like grade schoolers... and this company had trouble making payroll... but being belittled is much better than being verbally abused in my book.)

No, you don't understand economics, and you concede this point when you use the phrase "mainstream economics"... this is a common tactic of socialists to try and cover the fact that they are substituting political ideology for economics.

Economics is a science. ITs not uncommon for those who will not make a scientific argument to instead knock down strawmen, as you just have.

Of course, you threw out enough buzzwords that those who don't look too close will believe you made a counter argument.

"small"? The world has been under assault by these "small" (read socialist) people for the last 108 years... they've managed to murder 100 million people at least in that time period.

they are not getting some buro-cratic power-- they have been exercising the scyth arm for over a century.

Nobody complained when the nazis took over germany or publicly under soviet rule, but eventually both of these tyrannies were overthrown.

This is not a reason to support tyranny!

OH MY GOD! I am amazed at the level to which liberals talk about science while rejecting the very foundations of science. (Carbon is not bad. The payroll tax doesn't influence employers, it influences employees-- employees are the ones who pay the tax.)

What we lack is people who understand economics, or have any sense of history-- the "progressive" tax system is what is keeping people poor. A flat tax and no social security would have eliminated poverty in the US 50 years ago, and probably we'd have most of our manufacturing jobs still too...though environmentalist inspired regulation and rampant union violence might have been enough alone to drive it overseas.

The amazing thing to me is how much liberals talk about helping the poor (And conservatives talk about "freedom") while advocating policies that do the opposite, and attacking anyone who actually advocates what they claim to support....

I've long wondered if this was simply because these people have been so deluded that they thinkg up is down and left is right... or if they really actually have another agenda and these causes (poverty and freedom) are just excuses to advocate policies that they know make the problems worse.

The 19th century should have taught you all that socialism and communism will not decrease poverty and will ultimately result in the slaughter of millions of people... and yet you can't turn around without hearing some liberal talk about "global warming" and "externalities" without understanding the first bit of economics... and advocating totalitarian laws to bring about their "dictatorship of the proletariat".

Why do so many people talk about "negative externalities" when they don't even understand basic economics? Its like some liberal ideological center picked up a phrase, told people some vague idea of what it meant, and then got people to advocate it as a justification for ideas whose economic underpinnings having nothing to do with what they think they do.

The bottom line is, your attempt to internalize externalities is proof that you don't know what you're talking about because externalities by definition cannot be internalized.

All this liberal economics is just like that last wave of liberal economics that resulted in 100 million deaths over the period from 1900-2000, only it isn't united under a common term like "socialism" or "communism" but it amounts to the same-- totalitarianism sold as being "good for you".

The ironic thing is, the entity that causes the most pollution (in every country) is that countries government... and the entity causing the most energy waste is generally the government as well.

It never ceases to amaze me how people are so willing to put guns and violence behind their political ideologies. This is probably because they don't realize that is what they are doing-- but every law is backed up by a guy holding a gun and pointing it at someone who breaks it.

ARe you willing to go to someone's house, and take his incandescent light bulbs and shoot him if he resists? You think that's Moral?

Cause that's what this law does, and it is no more moral if you advocate someone else doing it even if you are unwilling to do it yourself.

Yeah, cause bureaucracies are so caring. I notice that I've been modded down... I guess anyone not goosestepping along will not be tolerated.

Interesting, my comments about Rails, ERlyweb and WebObjects were deleted, and my title was re-written.

Typical, government will stick a gun in people's face just to make them be "politically correct". Nevermind the consequences (or the chicks who will no longer hatch because the heat source that powers the incubators is no longer around... or the farmer who goes out of business because he can't afford to buy thousands of new incubators... etc.)

Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.

Steve's a nice guy and I enjoy reading his rants, but there's one thing he's wrong about: Amazon. A horrible, horrible company, where bright engineers are managed by horrible horrible idiots and nothing is done very well... Amazon doesn't believe in having engineers do management so they hire people with no skills other than asskissing (its the most political work environment I've ever seen) to manage engineers-- thus you have the joyful experience of having someone who knows absolutely nothing about programming telling you that you're doing something wrong based on a misunderstanding of something he overheard someone else say about a whole other programming language.

There are a few decent engineers who make it thru the incompetance filter (amazon calls this "Raising the bar") and become managers, and obviously steve wored for one. But the vast majority of people managing engineers at Amazon are non-engineers. And the managers managers are even worse- paper pushers whose primary goal is their own personal advancement-- not the product, not the quality of the work and certainly not hte profitability of the company.

Worst environment for engineers, ever.

They are providing value- they risked their own capital to speculate on a domain name that might be valuable in the future... just like anyone who buys swampland hoping to drain it. They took risk, they identified a customer for their property, etc. All these things add value.

They aren't holding intellectual property hostage. And by the way, when is personal gain evil? Do you go to work each day primarily to benefit other people, rather than yourself:?

They are providing added value, they registered a domain that someone else didn't think of.

The problem here is, that you regret not registering it, and so you, rather than accepting blame for your own failure, are blaming the person who was smarter or faster than you.

Back in the 1990s, I looked up USWeb.com. I almost registered it, but was on the fence, then went back three days later to register it and found that it had been taken the day after I thought of it-- and that company became a big company eventually before the bust.

Were they holding my intellectual property hostage? No.

Where does this sense of entitlement come from? IT reminds me of people who build a house in a neighborhood and then complain because a walmart gets built nearby... as if they think they somehow have property rights in the land that walmart bought. LOL.