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SSSCA Hearings Postponed Under Heavy Opposition
Concerned Citizen writes "Both the EFF and WIAFLW are reporting that the "Senate Commerce Committee's hearings on the
Security Systems Standards and Certification Act
(SSSCA or DMCA-2) which had been originally schedule for today (Oct. 25, 2001) have been postponed due to mounting
opposition, particularly from those in the tech community." Senator Fritz Hollings has yet to reschedule a hearing (it's likely that he won't), and has also indicated that he would consider modifying the bill."
As above, now is the time to write/call/email your senator. If the pressure is kept up they are much more likely to drop the bill permenantly. This could be a very good thing.
Not looking that much, while this bill has been buried it does appear that where the USSR wanted the state to control everything the US wants large companies to control everything. The end result is similar with the average Joe or Joeski having zero power and rights.
Keep vigalent for your freedoms, or slowly they will disappear.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Let's face it. Within a few years the profession of 'programmer' will be protected by law, and any practicing programmer will have to be certified by a recognised educational establishment and/or Microsoft. Programming for fun will be allowed only for personal reasons. Any software intended for commercial use will have to confirm to the appropriate certification act.
If this sounds outlandish, think about how we construct buildings. Why should software developers be treated differently than architects and engineers?
(This is a leading question, but one I think will be asked by parties seeking to regulate the IT domain).
My blog
These guys are not as stupid as we would like to believe they are. It is very VERY likely that the beginning forms of this bill were so restrictive that no one in their right mind would pass it. The second and third phases as it is scaled back and becomes only slightly more palatable are the ones that we really have to look out for. They may end up making "compromises" that are still unacceptable to the public but are the exact effect they were after all along.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
Yep. All that's left is the "eternal vigilance" part.
Which is where Americans usually drop the ball.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
with the recent passing of the Anti-Terrorism bill, it's almost suspicious that congress would even think of dropping a bill like this one. Even more suspicious is the fact that it's the CORPORATIONS that are pushing them to drop it!!
Does this seem a little backwards to anyone else?
I have a suggestion, how about burning the bill.
What piffle.
Has it gotten to the point that every cover sheet to every submitted bill or piece of legislation needs to have the Constitution attached?
Seriously, we have warning/information labels on everything else, why not make it mandatory?
A Constitutional EULA of sorts.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
with the main difference that in a communist system, you pay taxes to government, which in theory would flow back to the people. in a corporate-run world, taxes go to corporations (=profits), which does not flow back to the public. Obviously, both these scenarios are extremes.. and extremes almost never work.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Excellent news... looks like :)
a) the big boys (corps) have come in and had a word in their ear, or
b) all your letters and lobbying of representatives has worked... I'm with the former
I would add another possibility:
c) All the librarians through the ALA have, as always, raised their common voices against a law that offends Freedom of Speech and the Right to Knowledge..
Yes, librarians are a long-time deffenders of our rights. Just check who is against DMCA, filters in internet access (CIPA) and other pitifull, rights-basher laws.
So next time you go to a library to check p0rn from a free computer, please be quiet. That lady with funny glasses that "Shssss!"'s you all the time is on your side. on the Freedom side.
From the SSSCA:
Sec. 104: Adoption of Security System Standards
[Summary: The private sector has 12 months to agree on a standard, or the Secretary of Commerce will step in. Industry groups that can participate: "representatives of interactive digital device manufacturers and representatives of copyright owners." If industry can agree, the secretary will turn their standard into a regulation; if not, normal government processes apply and NTIA takes the lead.
So what happens if the industry agrees on a standard "nothing"?
Does that refer to the thousands of /.ers who've spent the last weeks emailing and faxing their representatives, or to "IBM, Intel, Microsoft and others" though? WIAFLW suggests the latter (unfortunately). Forget the /. lobbying group that people have been proposing - what about a /. charity to donate campaign funds to representatives who promise to vote sensibly... :-)
They'll just rename it the "USA is Brave and Proud and the Flag it Purty Act of 2001". It will pass in a week.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
These days, mail has become a problem, at least temporarily. And I assume that congress is still all spammed out in email and fax.
What is left is phone calls, visiting their office in your local district, while dropping off a hand delivered letter, etc. Or visiting their offices in DC if you are making a trip.
This is getting to be a headache.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The second and third phases as it is scaled back and becomes only slightly more palatable are the ones that we really have to look out for.
Exactly. The coming discussions are the more important ones. Now is the time to step up the pressure. With the outrageous bill seemingly out of the way, it is time to focus on the one that has a chance of passing.
If we start to relax because "well, at least the SSSCA isn't going to pass," we're going to get stuck with something almost as bad.
Write your senator! Keep up the pressure! Defeat the SSSCA and its bastard children!
OK, so who's my senator anyway?
-- If any of the above made sense, I assure it was purely by accident.
Only someone who violates the law "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" can be convicted.
So the solution here is not to do it for profit. It seems to me that open sourced freeware would be excluded from this law. This would include DeCSS since it has no commercial advantage nor private financial gain.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
Why, I thought they thought this was their best shot at outlawing Linux?
This isn't an exactly great bill for microsoft either.
First off, if they support this, it'll add more fuel to the fire for a harsher sentance in the antitrust lawsuit(Judge: so you agree on government interference, a few months ago you didn't?).
Then there's the international issue. Do you think a "security enabled" windows is going to sit well with the the EU(they tend to side with the consumer)? So they either have to make another version to disable it(costing lots of money) or risk losing losing european business.
So, basically this is foresight on the part of microsoft. The minute they agree to, "the government can tell us how to run our business", they open a door they might not be able to close.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
I suspect they objected becuase they want *their* standard of DRM enacted. Since their standard doesn't have overwhelming market share at this point there is a danger that some other scheme will be adopted. Hence, it's objection.
Also note that the bill doesn't require a single system to be adopted. Therefore, an e-book reader could have a different scheme than a handheld PDA. Since MS doesn't have (AFAIK) multiple protection schemes on the drawing board I suspect that is part of their reasoning behind their opposition.
In any event I am confident MS would back such a bill if they had a DRM or security system in place that dominated the market. After all, the proposal as intially written exempted monopoly status as a condition of protection.
hmm.. I dont agree with you on government being inefficient per se. IMO, the main goal of a corporation is to shift as much money as possible towards said corporation. The money has to come from someone(the proverbial "rest"). So rest gets less money, corporation gets more. Oh well.. you're not leaning to any of the extremes, I guess we could still stand in the same room without bashing eachother's head in ;) We both seem to agree that extremism is bad..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I would like to think that too, but I doubt it. I suspect that this original language was drafted specifically to draw out the opposition that has occured. Now the "compromise" bill, which will contain 87.645% of the provisions of the original, will be rammed through.
sPh
In ancient times, there were hiring freezes directed specifically at IT departments. As a workaround, the non-IT departments would build their own "renegade" IT capability, using non-IT job titles to keep everything under the radar. The concept of using stealth techniques to avoid corporate policy can be applied to hardware, networks, software, and people. Some of these same techniques would be used to work around whatever dumb laws we might be stuck with.
IT is a very cyclical industry. When the job market is lousy, employers can require a Master's degree for an entry-level programmer and make it stick. When the job market is hot, the same employers will pay premium salaries and resort to door-to-door begging in pursuit of college dropouts.
We treat IT people diffently from architects, engineers (or even electricians), because when engineers make mistakes, people die. When IT people make mistakes, they call it Microsoft.
Any attempt to regulate the software development industry will fail because of...
They could try certifying the products instead of the people, but that will fail also. What would they do about the billions of lines of "uncertified" code already out there? Grandfather it? How does anyone know the difference between that code and new, uncertified code?
When Congress talks about regulating the industry, employers who fear higher costs will scream loudly and defeat the legislation. Any initiative that threatens to reduce the supply of cheap programmers or raise the cost of software development will never see the light of day. Not even Sen. Hollings would try a stunt like this.
It's the tech companies that are opposed to this. As I said elsewhere, the tech companies are opposed to this, and the "content" companies support it. It's BSA vs MPAA and RIAA. The people who make software and programming tools could be severely damaged by this bill, the movie/record companies would be helped by it. There's a major battle shaping up here between the two sides. One good thing about the Microsoft antitrust case is that it made the tech industry aware of just how important it was to lobby government.
Best Slashdot Co
You forgot to call me socialist european..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Please take a moment to learn who your senators and representatives are, figure out how to e-mail them (if you can, otherwise let them know you'd like to), and KEEP IN TOUCH. These people are there to represent YOU. They need to be made aware that issues like this affect you in very negative ways, and many are not technical enough to fully understand the ramifications of certain pieces of legislation. It's up to us to educate them.
I have no doubt in my mind that those of us that did end up writing to congress ended up being most of what this "opposition" was.
Not too astonishing; MS is Harmful, not Evil.
They haven't (to date) been nearly as obnoxious about patents as they could have been, and they're generally reasonable about this sort of thing. If they weren't so hypercompetitive and locked-in to the vision of software as a product they'd be quite tolerable.
"Why should software developers be treated differently than architects and engineers?"
Well, umm... maybe because architect's creations can collapse and kill people, and engineers' creations can explode and kill people, where the newest Adventure clone can... umm... it can crash. Or it might not print out my score properly! OH NO!! THE HORROR!!!
Now if someone's writing software to control an airplane's engine or a dump truck's brakes, then I agree it must have certification. Unfortunately, legislation like what we're seeing will ensure low quality software in these critical systems. No one can reverse-engineer or check up on Microsoft's "DumptruckBrakesXP", so it can be certified and then page fault in traffic. Crunch.
Just some food for thought.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
But the big worry, methinks, is how long it will remain so. The Brussels institutions are still being defined, and I'm sure that many dream of it becoming like Washington, D.C. -- a place to lobby and bargain for legislation.
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
I posted this open letter to my representatives on the topic of SSSCA, and included anecdotal review of why DMCA shouldn't have been passed.
It includes Scope, Civil, Business, Technical, and Motivational issues against anything that even smells like SSSCA.
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Just avoid the UK... over there you can now be detained for an unlimited amount of time without being charged with a crime.
And you people think civil liberties are under attack in America!
You could go to Ireland... wait, no. Refusing to answer police questions is considered an admission of guilt in Ireland. Damnit!
Maybe America isn't so bad?
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
Silly person. You don't want it discussed in committee, because if it gets pigeonholed, it'll never get to the floor and no one will ever vote on it.
What the committee wants is for the copyright interests to come up with something that won't get massacred during the hearings, and again before the full Senate. They won't be able to, so basically, this bill is probably gone.
Yaay!
Of course, watch closely for a new bill with a different acronym and more obfusticated language to pop up soon.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
I don't know if you are serious are not, but I am going to assume you are.. I don't think I would have ever thought of that lol.. Do they really have that much of a voice?
I am serious, indeed.
And, yes, the librarians have that much voice. In fact, SunSite/Metalab/iBiblio (is the same thing; they change anmes every other year or so, because they change sponsors) is actually an on-line library. They host, for example the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) . and many more goodies.
And of course they have a big voice over the Congress. Where do you think the Congressman get their p0rn? At the Library of Congress, off course!
Well, maybe not. But it is a funny thought.
Just send a fax - ideally from a piece of paper so it has your signature at least, which looks more personal than a mass fax mailing.
per se (adv.) Of, in, or by itself or oneself; intrinsically.
[Latin: per, per + se, itself - per itself]
This matches the use perfectly when read as "I don't agree with you on government being inefficient in itself"
Baah!! There is not a finite amount of money in the country!!! ARGH!!!!
I'd like to beat the shit out of the economics teacher who keeps telling people this.
You didn't hear it in Economics? Well, that's a relief.
Companies don't hoard cash. In fact, hoarding cash is STUPID. The goal of a corporation is to be as profitable as possible, and that meaans they have to do something with all those dollars they have in the bank, where they're only earning a shitty 2% or so.
Like, pay them to more employees as they expand. Or, give them to the R&D dept (Xerox PARC anyone?) so they can come up with cool stuff to sell. Or, reinvest them in the market so they can get a high rate of return, which allows other companies to use the dollars to hire people and make more cool stuff.
Successful companies create wealth. They make more people wealthier than they were. They don't take money out of the system and fill a pool with it so the board can swandive in hundreds. Economics is NOT a zero-sum game.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
However, if everyone is playing a positive-sum game, and one player plays against everyone else in a zero-sum manner, that one player can capture all the wealth in the system and keep it for himself.
In business school, the first semester you take intermediate micro. Then starting with the second semester, they say, "OK, now you know how competition works. Here is how you will undermine competition to capture the entire market for yourself."
I will leave you to fill in the examples.
sPh
Just as an FYI about 50% of both Congress and Senate are members of the American Bar Association, as were the outgoing President and her husband. Separation of powers, my huge hairy arse.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
But the economy of the US as a whole can't be undermined by a single entity in a zero-sum manner. Even Standard Oil and AT&T were creating wealth even as they were hopping up and down on their competitors and making little squishy noises.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
Knowing the /. crowd this has probably already been posted, so forgive the redundancy, but for any who are unaware there is an anti-SSSCA petition here. It was at about 18,000 signatures when I signed. (wouldn't it be interesting if we could get it slashdotted?)
Make sure you get word to the Senator that because of his willingness to be a mouthpiece for Disney and friends, you will not be voting for him next term, and that you will do your best to actively lobby against him.
Then get a bunch of other people to send the same kind of thing to him.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Currently mail directed to Congress and other parts of the government is being shipped away from DC. They are planning to irradiate the mail before returning it to DC. I understand that quite a bit of it is headed for Ohio. Not sure where else it might be going, or how long the process will take. It's quite possible that it could take weeks for mail to get to DC.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Whichever position he takes on the bill, it'd be really easy to roast him over the coals for how the bill's blatant cluelessness interferes with it, and since much of Alaska's economy depends on oil, that should get his attention.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I can already hear the drool from the lips of Rational/Clearcase sales reps from a thousand miles away.
wont work. look at how corperations have lost 30 Trillion dollars to "hackers" this year alone. 30 Trillion... I just heard that number on CNBC.. Insurance companies and our government take these numbers as fact.... Scary... In all actuality the average "cracker" costs a company about $500.00 in overtime and software patches. All the rest is pure lies to cover their butts for other failures.
Sorry, I dont care what company you are unless the cracker broke in and stole your secret designs to the next furby and sold it to an asian company that then flooded the market with your product, you lost nothing in that break in.
It's Security directors and CTO's making up the multi billion dollar lies to justify their overpaid existance.
Now we have to battle stupid laws based on the lies from corperate heads. For shame.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Of course, you could look at it like I do, and if every copy of a CD really is worth 20$, then all the pirates are really wealth creators, just like corps...
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
They could outlaw non-DRM content (actually devices that can play/record it) by saying allowing non-DRM recording/playback would allow someone to use legacy analog equipment or some similiar workaround (microphone to speaker, or anything of that sort) to record a DRM "protected" (restricted) work in a non-restricted medium. If there is no such thing as a non-restricted medium, then there is no risk of a work not being restricted by DRM.
This would make it illegal to allow consumers to record un-"protected" content - just like Sony mini-disc where even if you own the copyright, recording from the analog inputs creates an SCMS limited disk.
At the very least the work would be labeled with the "infringer"'s key/id (one can imagine a law saying recording devices must be registered with the person's identity recorded - if contraband content labeled with that ID gets out - they arrest and imprison the person associated with that ID) and not-usable by others or at least severely limited - by both technology and legal penalties.
There could also be a new felony created - receipt of unauthorized music - i.e. it would be illegal to posses music with a creator label other than yourself or a "licensed" (by RIAA) music content provider.
This has the added "benefit" the distribution of music in competition with the RIAA would be illegal.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
First of all if you think corporations are efficient it's obvious you have never worked for a big one. Most large corporations I know are horribly inneficient with clueless management.
"The real difference is: when a corporation gets really big and it is no longer in your best interest to "support" them with your hard earned dollars, you can choose not to."
Actually maybe you can't. Most corporations have interests in other corporations. So you want to boycott phillip morris but in order to do that you have to stop buying nabisco products too. Who knows all the products that phillip morris has their hands into? Certainly not your average consumer.
In the end the consumer gets screwed no matter what. All thos charitable contributions, political bribes, dividends etc are all passed on to the consumer. The consumer can't boycott the corporations because the corporation is like the terrorists cells. They are diffuse and spread themselves amongs markets. Look at how many things MS is into? How are you going to boycott MS?
War is necrophilia.
" Baah!! There is not a finite amount of money in the country!!! ARGH!!!!"
Well yes and no.
No there is not a finite amount of money (they can allways print more right?). Also money can flow in and out of the country.
The important thing to remember is that the economy grows at the expense of natural resources. In fact economy is nothing more then taking natural resources and turning them into products and services. Even in a pure service model (I get you groceries you pay me $20) natural resources are consumed (I ate, I drove, I wore clothes, I have a house, I shit, I wipe my butt with paper). While some resources are renewable I can think of no resource that is being used at or below the rate of replenishment.
The so called rising tide argument allways fails to take this simple fact into account. They pretend that money is springing into this universe from some other universe and the economy of the world is growing without consequence. Alas it's not true.
So on a micro scale it's a zero sum. Since I am not allowed to print my own money I have to convince someone else to give it to me and that someone else now has less money. And on a macro scale it's a zero sum because as the economy grows we have less trees, less oil, less land, less fertile soil, less clean water and less clean air worldwide. Logging, mining etc get shifted around some but worldwide it's an inevitable march downhill.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
War is necrophilia.
By that rationale, a perfect copy of a Rembrandt would be worth as much as the original.
Millions of perfect copies devalue the entire market... that's why RAM prices have steadily and dropped. Were you around when it cost $15 for an individual 256K DRAM chip? now it's +-$25 for 256MB! If RAM was rare and hard to make, it would still be expensive.
Every copy of a CD ought to cost $9 or so. If you flood the market, however, they end up being worth about $0.
How the recording industry is still selling CD's is beyond me.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
To begin with, this is a complete shift in the discussion, which was: the job of a corp. is to get more money, and the effect of that is that Joe Schmo has less, such that the more money the corps have, the less the people have.
That, of course, is nonsense.
Now, onward: You're right! We take out more oil than we put back. Same thing with the other fossil fuels. The solution to this is, of course, to kill enough people that the tide turns back.
Maybe you have a better solution?
Natural resources fuel the economy, but they do not equal the economy. Your statement that economic growth has consequences is true, but completely off-point. In fact, that statement has absolutely nothing to do with the 'rising tide' argument. The consequence of a growing economy actually proves the argument FOR the 'rising tide'!
Yes, you're right. We're burning through resources at quite a rate. That has little to do with whether our economy grows, though , or whether a growing economy creates wealth for all involved. Look at the computer industry. It has created wealth far in excess of the value of the resources it has consumed. It has contributed to the reduction in use of natural resources while increasing the quality of life for those involved and generating new revenue streams for companies that would never have existed. Imagine if Amazon.com were doing its business only in the physical world. Imagine the electric bills alone! Not to mention the waste in wharehoused, unsold books.
On a micro scale, it's not a zero sum. If you deliver groceries promptly and with skill, I migh trecommend you to others, and because of your demand, you might start charging more for the service. We've just created wealth, i.e. you're using the same resources but getting more money. Maybe if you get popular enough, you might hire me to help! More wealth.
On a macro scale, it basically works the same way. We're not talking about dollar bills. If you were allowed to print your own money, you'd be decreasing your wealth because the dollar would be worth less. It's not a zero sum game because the economy, while dependant on resources, is not equivalent to them. Your argument, while possibly true, is completely off-point.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
"Now, onward: You're right! We take out more oil than we put back. Same thing with the other fossil fuels. The solution to this is, of course, to kill enough people that the tide turns back. "
Well certainly that's one solution. And in the end it might be the only solution I don't know. Personally I think it won't matter whether we kill the people or the people die out of starvation or whatnot but at the current rate of consumption of natural resources (not just oil but also soil, bacteria etc) you are bound to crash sooner or later.
having said that we can certainly try other things first. We could try shrinking the economy and living simpler. I know no american will ever give up their individually wrapped palstic straws or fritos for the long term survival of the planet but maybe if we educate we could convince some people that they can do without them. We could certainly try to be more efficient in our use of materials and of course we could recycle more aggresively. Maybe it won't put us in a positive balance but it would slow the burn rate.
Now your examples of groceries and amazon are examples of greater efficiencies (more wealth created with fewer natural resources) and certainly we need to foster those kinds of innovations but those books are still made out of paper and those books still have to be shipped in trucks etc. We should take it to the next step and convert them to pure electronic format and deliver them via the internet. We will never get rid of manufacturing and we probably will never get back to sustainability but like I said we need to slow the burn rate. Eventually we will run out of clean air, clean water, oil, trees, plankton, fish, arable soil or something. Already we are losing fauna and flora at an amazing pace it remains to be seen how long the ecosystem can go on before it crashes catastraphicly.
BTW my point is certainly not off-point. My point is exactly this. No discussion of economics is complete without taking the consumption of natural resources into account. Yet I have never ever heard any economist raise these points. They (much like your original post) pretend that money comes into this world from another dimention where there is an infinate amount of it. Everybody can be millionaires whoo hoo!. There is not an infinite amount of it and everybody can't be millionaires. There are not enough natural resources to make everybody a millionaire.
War is necrophilia.
We're consuming bacteria at a faster rate than it's being replenished? Come on, man! Gimme a break here.
Your arguments are really flimsy here... giving up Fritos won't help the planet. Ceasing consumption of non-sustenance food items might help a bit, but you're right in that people won't do something that drastic. I don't think you've thought this through very well. What happens to all the people who work in the junkfood industry, and all the people all over the world that get affected by the ripples of its disappearance? Eventually, you bump a whole group of people down into social welfare of some sort, which is hugely wasteful and probably a worse drain on the environment than if they were still working for Frito-Lay (or Frito Shipping, Inc., or 7-11, or its shareholders, including that 80-yr old retired guy who lives off his Frito shares and gets kicked out of his retirement center, or the broker who recommended them before the industry dried up in a matter of months, or all the people who listened to him, etc.). Do you get the point here? As for the straws, I'd rather that than have the guy who just wiped his nose on his hand give me an unwrapped one; poor example selection.
If we shrink the economy enough, we could be China! Wait, N. Korea hardly uses any resources at all... there's a perfect model.
More efficiency is certainly better, but you can't just do this stuff by fiat. What, should we ban books on paper? Where do you get the money to make sure everyone has an electronic reader? You can't be suggesting that you only get to read if you can afford the proper device... you have to take this stuff out to it's logical end. You have to consider ALL the ramifications, not just the parts that seem to support your opinion.
Actually, you're going to have to shift your focus away from the 'environment' altogether; I'll get to that in a second.
Run out of plankton? You've got to be joking. Plankton makes up (and this is only a slightly informed guess) like half the biomass on the planet, and a great amount of the total photosynthesis that occurs. If we warm up the oceans, we get MORE plankton, not less. More photosynthesis! More oxygen and less carbon dioxide! There's a downside here?
Now, let me skip past eco-catastrophe and come back to that momentarily... I've got to cover the economics thing.
If, as you say, efficiency = using fewer resources to achieve the same or better return, than economists talk all the time about consumption of natural resources. Get some economist to talk about International Paper and you'll hear loads of talk about consumption of resources. Talk to any competent Director of Finance in Arizona or south/west Texas or New Mexico or Southern CA and you'll see that water consumption is high on the list of worries.
No economist would ever suggest that everyone could be a millionaire. That would make a million effectively the same as zero. No one is saying that there is infinite money, either. What I (and most economists) am saying is that more for me does not necessarily (or even very often) equal less for you. This is why resources!=money. $.03 worth of wood pulp might only be worth slightly more if it's made into toilet paper, but it's worth LOTS more if it's made into a share of eBay stock (BTW, currently at about $53). Resources don't equal money, and consumption of resources doesn't equal economy. You can burn through tons of resources and not be worth much at all (think PG&E) or exactly the opposite (think AOL). Money (and wealth) is a human intellectual construct, and consumption of resources is just a factor, like lots and lots of other factors, and is often not applicable and rarely quantifiable.
Now, eco-doom: this planet has already survived a catastrophe humans would be very hard pressed to replicate. There is no danger of the ecosystem disintegrating around us, nor will there ever be unless we decided to nuke the everlasting fuck out of ourselves, and even then it's pretty likely that the planet will straighten out eventually.
What you want to be worried about is if people are going to be able to survive. The fact is, we're just organisms like all the rest. We're incredibly successful at adapting and using our surroundings, which is why we aren't stuck on an island somewhere evolving into marsupials to survive. Everything on the planet consumes resources, and usually they consume more than they put back, just like us. People are certainly capable of consuming so much that there isn't enough left to support the population. This is also exactly like other organisms, except that we fill a LOT of ecological niches and we tend to affect the environment across a much much wider range than your average apex predator. Luckily, even basic environmental systems are extremely complex and frequently possessing of a high redundancy level. Really, though, on an environmental level, we aren't too much different from any other apex predator group, and the results of overusing our resources are therefore rather predictable.
The thing is, we don't like it when masses of humans start kicking off, because we're possessing of a soul and we're humans and all that. So, we innovate like a motherfucker to keep the race expanding. Incidentally, that's exactly like every other race on the planet. We're just much better at it because we seem to keep coming up with kick-ass solutions, and so we don't have to wait on evolution to save what's left of us.
So it's perfectly reasonable to wonder if we're going to expand past our ability to survive, but since we're a lot more like a pride of lions than a hive of bees, we aren't really built to think about 'humanity' on a survival level. It's likely that practically nothing proactive will be done about it on a global scale; we aren't really programmed to care about the pride in Somalia as long as the home range is still bountiful. IMHO, we're going to figure out how to double the lifespan of a human before we start really running out of resources, and THAT is a bigger concern than anything else. Let yourself start projecting what'll happen to the economy if the average worker lives to be 160 and the birthrate stays the same, and you'll REALLY get freaked out.
None of this, however, has much of anything to do with the US economy and whether or not +1 for me is -1 for you (which it's not).
Whatever happened to JonKatz?