Disqus - Latest Comments for Avantos

Re: Foreign Aid to Africa? Just Say No

Moo2400 — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:05:09 -0000

Yes, I’m under the impression that we can do something as well, but that it goes more along the lines as the old saying “you can give a man a fish and feed him for a day or you can teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime.” The GMO crops would certainly be a start, though I must admit that I’m not too familiar with the exact pros and cons of them. Either way, I essentially agree with you there.

I’d be more focused on, as you said, the agricultural subsidies we use to flood these countries’ with crops at below the cost of production, thereby destroying their agricultural industry. But even then, that’s still just a piece, as I’m sure you’re aware – the other major bit of it, I think, is that we need to allow them to create some form of protectionism for their agricultural industries, unless we wish to see them in the situation the UK was in during the early 20th century, but unlike the UK, without any means to protect their own food interests. All of this just deepens the whole food crisis further.

However, going that far would require reforming many of the structural adjustment policies imposed on many of these countries by organizations such as the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, and it would also likely bring up debt relief, which is a whole other issue entirely.

Re: Foreign Aid to Africa? Just Say No

Avantos — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 01:40:14 -0000

Thanks for reading, Moo2400. I agree that this entire mess has many
aspects to it. As for helping them/welfare for us... I'm personally of
the notion that actually, we CAN help them in certain ways, such as
with free technology transfer of GMO crops to at least get their
economies out of poverty sooner and with greater efficiency.

They won't be able to develop these advanced techniques for themselves
anytime soon, and it'll end up helping us too with a greater yield of
food overall in the entire world. There won't really be "dependence"
in terms of incentive distortion, since they would have otherwise did
the same thing with inferior crops. That's a way of helping them with
the money and also helping us in the long run as well.

But in the end, we aren't really doing this for them. We're ultimately
doing this just for us (or just for our agribusiness industries),
since with all of our agricultural subsidies, we produce more than
economically rational for our country. We just dump all of these crops
in their country since we end up with no where else to put them. "The
road to hell" may be paved with good intentions, but this is basically
just expediency for us.

Re: YOU, the U.S. Taxpayer, Can't Handle the Truth: Wrong.

Avantos — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 16:18:25 -0000

I agree with your thoughts here. It's really unfortunate that in many ways, we're going headlong in a direction similar to that taken by Japan after their own mortgage bubble collapse and subsequent banking crisis.

What exactly would be the detrimental hit to investor confidence if we actually looked at the books of these banks and nationalized those that are really underwater? It's a fallacious argument to compare it to Lehman, since that was investors recognizing that these trusted institutions CAN be underwater.

Admittedly, you'll have more complicated side effects (like Lehman's prime brokerage mess), but in the end the players in the market will be willing to lend to one another, knowing that the counterparty at least is solvent. It would, it seems, actually completely unfreeze credit, instead of just thaw it, with some thread of attempted market CPR combined with it that is unlikely to succeed.

There's lobbies, yes, and there's also simply fear of failure with the riskier and cleaner route, but is that really all it is? Maybe, perhaps, it's also the psychological need to DO SOMETHING, instead of watch events play out knowing that we have to accept what consequences come.

Re: Disqus Randomly Stopped Working

Avantos — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:11:52 -0000

Never mind--it seemed it simply upgraded but I never ended up reinstalling it.

Re: Google Being Evil: Knol and Beyond

Martin — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:21:11 -0000

I would say a similar "underdog" role is filled by Apple in the Operating System market, whose products "just work" and similarly combat Microsoft's awful image with a sense of designer cool, all the while being arguably more restrictive than Microsoft. It doesn't have the market share that Google has, but I'm trying to keep it OS only. Look at the iPhone and App store, for instance. Apple doesn't license its Operating System for a reason: it sells a product, not software (a generality, but exceptions like iTunes for Windows fall within the realm of marketing and practicality). You know that they would run OS X like the iPhone OS if they thought they could get away with it. Do you see public outcry against it? Sure, a few people defect from Apple's BSD distro to another, or more commonly to GNU/Linux if they really have a problem with restriction. What percent of consumers care enough to switch to a less convenient solution (GNU/Linux) from OS X or Windows? Roughly 0.7-1.7%? A good portion of whom haven't switched from anything but HP-UX?

So 2007 was the first year there were more people in the States that cared more about complete freedom than convenience than people who are ignorant enough to still use Windows 98. The odds for this country's freedoms look dismal.

I have to think we're not the country of freedom fighters we romanticize. It takes a lot to get us to bite back, and by then it takes a lot to dig us out of the hole. I mean, last time it took the French. They have ONE aircraft carrier, guys. Is that who we're gonna call?

Re: Google Being Evil: Knol and Beyond

Avantos — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:54:05 -0000

That's a pretty good point. There's a New York Times article that discusses roughly the same thing:

"Google’s growing reach into the content business could create conflicts similar to those faced by Microsoft in its dual role as a provider of an operating system that others run their software applications on and a maker of applications..."

Overall, though, Microsoft started as the "culture" of the big corporate company. Google began, in a sense, as part of the entrepreneurial Silicon Valley counterculture (even if it was in Mountain View and not near Palo Alto). It'll take longer for Google's goodwill with the public to erode, especially with many of its subsidiaries (YouTube, Knol, etc.) not displaying Google's logo.

I think, at the moment, this outrage and worry will stay confined to media companies, bloggers, and organizations like Wikipedia. The general public doesn't really know enough about Google's moves at the moment to really judge and realize its consolidation of web properties.

Re: Fearmongering and Cell Phones

Avantos — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:17:12 -0000

quick test