ytilibitapmoc
Joined 16 years ago
Joined 16 years ago
Based on their posts, they appear to be positioning themselves as a "Facebook Killer" solely to take advantage of the current backlash against Facebook (considering their current funding, I would say it's working). What they are attempting to create transcends anything we currently have; the closest you might come would be if you hosted a cryptographically secured peer-to-peer server only your friends could access (once you have that, now make it easily replicable and spread it across the net).
"Reason: Is Britain irrevocably on the road to serfdom?
Hayek: No, not irrevocably. That's one of the misunderstandings. The Road to Selfdom was meant to be a warning: "Unless you mend your ways, you ll go to the devil." And you can always mend your ways.
Reason: What policy measures are currently possible to reverse the trend in Britain?
Hayek: So long as you give one body of organized interests, namely the trade unions, specific powers to use force to get a larger share of the market, then the market will not function. And this is supported by the public because of the historic belief that in past the trade unions have done so much to raise the standard of living of the poor that you must be kind to them. So long as this view is prevalent, I don't believe there is any hope. But you can induce change. We must now put our hope in a change of attitude.
I'm afraid many of my British friends still believe, as Keynes believed, that the existing moral convictions of the English would protect them against such a fate. This is non- sense. The character of a people is as much made by the institutions as the institutions are made by the character of the people. The present British institutions contribute everything to change the British character. You cannot rely on an inherent "British character" saving the British people from their fate. But you must create institutions in which the old kinds of attitudes will be revived which are rapidly disappearing under the present system.",
on the (historically) current effect of unions is priceless.
I keep wondering how long it will be until the people of the U.K. realize whose company they are in (Russia and China), pull their heads out of their @$$, and reverse course.
We are not going to achieve critical mass simply by walking away ourselves.
However using the equation and data sets from this blog post (http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2010/03/taxes-per-person.html) results in:
* Ireland: 34.0% × 39,441 = 13,409.9
* New Zealand: 36.5% × 26,625 = 9,718.1
Add to the above data that both countries score better than the United States in the Economist Intelligence Unit's "Democracy Index" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index), the Reporters Without Borders "Press Freedom Index" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_Press_Freedom_Index), and the Transparency International "Corruption Perceptions Index" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index). The only bright spot for the United States are the two indices of economic freedom: the Heritage Foundation's "Index of Economic Freedom" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom) and the Fraser Institute's "Economic Freedom of the World" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Freedom_of_the_World); wherein Ireland and New Zealand alternate in bracketing the United States.I'm beginning to think "heretic" wasn't trolling the comments.
Because the equivalent of above listed Firefox extensions are the bare minimum I require to even think about switching what web browser I use.
To get me to actually convert, you would have to add: shorter turnaround times on major security vulnerabilities, automatic spell-checker defaulting to on for all text fields, and the equivalent to Firefox's "Tab Mix Plus" and "Mozilla Archive Format" plug-ins.
And for those of you about to down-vote this comment: where are the articles pointing out the problems with HN, where are the articles showing the flaws in Lisp, where are the articles which denounce venture-capital-funded startups as the snake-oil of the modern age?
"But those positions are wrong!", the puppeteers cry. Really? Last time I checked, questioning conventional wisdom is what made the modern western world possible.