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The Economist On The Economics of Sharing
RCulpepper writes "The Economist, reliably the most insightful English-language news publication, discusses the economics of sharing, from OSS programmers' sharing time, to P2P users' sharing disk space and bandwidth. " True indeed (about The Economist, I have to remember to renew my subscription); one of the main supports for the article comes from Yochai Benkler latest piece, which is excellent.
as long as it is seen as a way to get people criticism instead of just as theft.
of course, the public needs to be educated about paying what they think desserves it.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
about The Economist, I have to remember to renew my subscription
/. editors have to remember to remove personal notes from the stories.
and
Most open source projects revolve around a core of developers with the odd donation of time and code from users who extend the code to suit their needs. Ditto with most P2P networks, most casual users are happy to leach whilst most of the bandwidth is provided by hardcore users. Perhaps the exception to this is Bittorrent where users are more inclinded to share fairly.
Why does the /. story have to mainly concern itself with word-of-mouth advertising about the publication rather than the article?
Sharing of information has proven very beneficial in science and there is no mention of this in the article. You'd think that this would be one of the first things that would come to mind when one thinks about innovation in ideas.
UBU
http://www.john-neal.com/
... for the flood of right-wing complaints about the "liberal media." Expect challenges to the "most insightful English-language news publication" from devotees of the Washington Times and Little Green Footballs. ;)
Pre-emptive strike: when The Economist, which is the leading voice of center-right journalism, speaks favorably of F/OSS, it's time to drop the "communism" line and come up with something else, folks.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I'm not sure presenting OSS and P2P in the same context of sharing is appropriate - sharing something you wrote yourself is one thing, sharing something some others wrote without those others' consent is another.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
I'm not saying it would be easy, but imagine if...
The CB App. What's your 20?
WooHoo!
We are the /. editors.
/. but it seems like a random system to me (especially with the amount of duplicate, fudd or bad stories)
I have no Idea how stories go from email to
Try posing a few different stories from different email accounts and see which ones get through.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Sure, the Economist has an obvious bias (free markets, privatized everything, western democracy, and modest but well-enforced government regulation). Sure, it makes mistakes (lauding Taliban, the invasion of Iraq, etc.) However, if you compare it to pretty much any other English-language press -- the BBC, any American newspaper or magazine, or (deity forbid) American television -- you will see that it stands out as the lone isle in a sea of shite.
If the only language is English, and you have any ability at all to filter editorial statements out of news stories, you should subscribe to the economist -- and I say this even though I am a registered pinko commie bastard.
The Economist is a weekly magazine with hundreds of pages of world news. I had a subscription for a couple years before I realized I just could not keep up reading it. Before I stopped subscribing I even tried skipping over those things that held little interest for me. I found it far better to let other people find the interesting things (like this article) and have them eventually posted on Slashdot where I could then read them.
It's a very interesting magazine though if you can find the time to commit to it.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Something that the article doesn't really mention, that helped explain a lot of things about corporate support of OSS, is a theory that (as far as I remember) Joel Spolsky wrote about. It's best explained by an analogy.
The analogy runs as follows. Suppose that a street has a bunch of bun vendors and a bunch of people who sell sausages to put in the buns (wow, talk about decoupled designs). People might be willing to spend $1.50 for a bun plus a sausage - nominally $1 for the sausage and $0.50 for the bun.
Now, suppose that someone in the sausage industry comes up with a way of "open-sourcing" buns - now buns are free! This happening, you've got a bunch of customers wandering around buying sausages with an extra $0.50 in their pockets. They were clearly willing to spend more on the sausage+bun combination, so maybe you can jack up your price to $1.10 or $1.20 (very unlikely you'll be able to go to $1.50).
Of course, like all simplistic analogies, this depends on a lot of assumptions. For instance, we
expect that the customer won't go off and buy something new (a 50 cent Coke, maybe).
Now, think about companies that have major OSS support. The best example is IBM - which makes its money of hardware and services. Are they the sausage vendors in this case?
I don't know if this is nonsense, but it's an interesting theory. If anyone has a good counter-argument, let's hear it. If anyone has a silly pun about "open-saucing" hot dogs, well, remember that I'm a computer scientist and can generate an enormous static charge from your keyboard to Get You.
Sharing becomes prevalent only when it 1) close to free and 2) earns kudos/buying power for the sharer. Unfortunately, in today's global society of mass production and mass distribution, this is largely impossible. What we need for sharing to regain prevalence is the rejection of the idea that it's OK that almost everything we consume comes from far, far away.
The Economist, reliably the most insightful English-language news publication
Gee, what an unbiased way to present an article for discussion.
True indeed
Coming to a conclusion in an article summary stifles discussion. Stop doing that.
This would only be a problem if everyone RTFA. However, as that is rarely a problem, there is nothing to worry about.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I consider myself a bit of a leftie, and I don't find the Economist very right wing.
Less Economist circle-jerking, more article summary please. This is one of the lamest story headers that has come down the pipe in a while. Yes, I'm sure Hemos and RCulpepper are quite refined and intellectual individuals. Thanks for rubbing our faces in the fact.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
I read the old "stone soup" story in school when I was a kid. The teacher and rest of the students didn't seem to see the inherent flaw in the story: an entire village ended up with one stinking pot of soup. Fortunately for Linux, there's plenty of "soup" to go around. Our bowl can be indefinitely replenished. It's worked, so far, because greed and the GPL have been motivating factors in furthering software development.
It should also be noted that not all sharing is good.
with some of the posts. I like the Economist (my dad has a subscription and he gives them to me when he's done), but, geez, get a room already. They've had their share of flakey opinions.
--- Ban humanity.
I don't remember the last time the Economist attacked anything as "communistic excess" -- and they're not a "tool of international corporatism" because they actually like true free markets without competition. Notice their articles on excessive executive pay, underperforming corporations, etc.
I think that you probably haven't really read too much of it.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
It seems to me that it just described that way it is without some worthwhile analyis what motivates people to share or why should be people reading economiast concerned
...), and that being selfish (wealth stocpiling, idea holding) is not way to become succesfull. and that sharing with poor does not mean beeing stupid.
Well, here are my 0.02:
Why is sharing important:
It breaks down traditional corporate moloch, it teaches that anarchy-like goal-driven structures are perfectly viable and can outperform hierarchical companies.
It teaches that inforamation must be free (both as beer and as freedom), if it isnt, there will always be ways to free it.
It practicaly demonstrates that acting selfish is not way to go (try throttling bt upload to 1kb/s, see results
All in all, its kind of hippie like philosophy crossed with viable economy (thats not based around money, but around ideas).
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
After many years of reading the Economist, I agree with their self-assessment.
Having said that, I've never been comfortable with the 1-dimensional right/left political categorizations. People and politics are far more complicated than that.
I think you're mistaking them for Forbes, maybe.
Actually, they're pretty moderate and reasonable with their analyses, they advocate market solutions for problems that a market can solve i.e. most things.
They go with the least-worst economic system (free-market with a small dash of government regulation to stop the worse excesses of capitalism) since that appears to have won the argument so far. So they obsess about what Greenspan says, but isn't that their job? That's the "Economist" bit in "The Economist".
And hindsight is a wonderful thing. Nobody else was worrying about the Taliban at the time, either.
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
Is he talking about CDMA? This really sounds odd to say it's a kind of "sharing" spectrum and compare it with open source and P2P.
We do this for fun.
I remember an Economist article which, essentially, attacked parents for the drain on productivity that they caused: time off work, annoyances to more productive non-parents, etc. The article's argument was that highly productive single people shouldn't in any way have to share the costs of society's need to raise children, right down to not having to put up with children in public spaces.
I came away with the impression that the article's author would love it if all new children were banned, and we had one glorious generation of super-high productivity before the human race died out completely. The Economist's last issue would be a glowing analysis of this golden age, sort of like Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" meets Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities".
That all said, The Economist is often worth reading, but heaven's sake, all the impressionable kiddies out there (RCulpepper, this means you) should take it with large quantities of salt.
Economies of sharing, as socialism moves forward.
:)
V1.0 - I have axe, you have club, therefore you share everything with me.
V2.0 - I am the government, therefore you share part of everything with me and I decide who to share with.
V3.0 - I have fileserver, you have connection, therefore I share everyone else's stuff with you whether they gave me permission or not.
V4.0 - I have everything you have. You have everything I have. Everyone has shared everything. Life is meaningless.
What is considered "left wing" in the US, is considered far right wing in the rest of the world.
So you'll be cancelling your subscription then :)
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
TFA draws a flawed conclusion as the final paragraph. Suggesting that superfunky microprocessors enable radio spectrum to be shared like finite but abundant beer is daft. For reliable QOS, modern information theory (should instead be/ IS) used to ensure that what expensive spectrum has been aquired is used efficiently. Eg DAB radio. For CB or the ISM band, then fine, share it - by definition.
The Economist, as someone else posted, certainly has their opinion of the world around them, like we all do. I do not always agree with their opinion, but rarely do I find what they have to say is grounded purely in ideology, without some decent reasoning and thought behind it. From what I have read, they tend to weigh each situation or leader, rather than stamping them "ok" or "not" according to whatever faction they belong to. For instance, despite being center-right in their politics, and despite supporting the war in Iraq (something I did not agree with myself), they have not spared the Bush administration criticism for making a mess of the situation.
As to the "right wing propagandistic tool of international corporatism". Wow, good line if it's some sort of attempt at ironic hip retro-sixties radical leftism, but it doesn't have much to do with...well, reality.
The Economist supported Kerry, after all, in the US elections. They have been quite positive about Linux for a long time. They are being sued by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's right wing leader, because of their scathing attacks on his corruptness. This is hardly the sort of independant thoughts and writing that one would expect from a "propogandistic tool".
This works untiol SCO shows up and claims ownership of the lentils found in every bowl served, and demands that each soup-eater pay them $699.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
No, Kerry represents sustainable international corporatism. Bush represents unsustainable international corporatism, robbing the public worldwide for a few of his friends. If you can't get how right-wing America has become, that a corporate tool like Kerry is seen as left, then you've got no business throwing around words like "well reasoned".
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This has been bugging me for a long time - communism is not a bad thing if you can find a setting in which it works. The Internet is the first such setting, to my knowledge. Any software offerred for free, is part of the new communism - the good kind, the kind where it actually reaches its ideal phase.
The US government slapped such a negative connotation to the word "communist" during the Cold War, a connotation that belongs to "socialist". Not one of the countries we were against during the cold war was ever a really communist state, because a real communist state is impossible in this world.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
The Economist's "socially left wing" views are limited to "the public should provide minimal services to ensure a tranquil consumer class". I don't disagree, but I'm not "left-wing" myself.
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No, I've been reading it for over 15 years. Their articles are mostly in the category of "stress relief" - harmless editorials that give their readers the sense that they've got a conscience, without harming the machine. Otherwise we'd see some effects of their rhetoric, increased (truly) free markets of leveled competition, reduced exec pay, the death of underperforming corporations, etc. I think you haven't read Manufacturing Consent.
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Oh really? Have you not read any of their articles making suggestions about how European countries should tinker with their welfare systems to ensure the sustainability of their welfare states? Socialism is hardly part of the stereotype of the right-wing international corporatism. Without expressing their opinion about whether or not they agree with socialistic welfare safety-nets, they say "this is what the people of these countries want, these are the benefits of the system, these are the problems with the system, and these are some of the ideas that might help sustain the system and perpetuate the founding idea/ideals of the system".
Further on we get "experts" who incidentally are never identified in the story (unless it happens to be Kip Viscusi who isn't quoted as saying such a thing):
My point here is how did a claim like this, without supporting evidence of any kind, slip through the editing process? Especially, given how perfect the Economist is claimed to be by some of the extravagant sibling replies? And this isn't the first time nor the last where I saw serious bias (usually pro-business, pro-globalism, or pro-EU) or unwarranted claims made in Economist stories, it's just a story for which I have a ready link.
The Economist is an excellent journal, but I don't consider it superior (as a business/economics news source) to say the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times both which exhibit some of the same flaws as the Economist. And as far as online news sources go, I prefer the Dismal Scientist instead (though they have this weird fixation on central banks and a US focus that gets embarrassing sometimes).
This article is entirely about Open Source, not P2P? P2P is not sharing, it's merely allowing someone to duplicate your file collection. Sharing involves giving up something, such as work time (Open Source) or processor time (SETI).
No, actually the European welfare systems pay for a lot of corporate job security. Where do you think that welfare money goes? It goes to corporations. And it underwrites the subsidy of European labor, rather than force European corporations to pay wages for those labor infrastructure costs. Now, I support those systems, too. But I'm a capitalist, too. So covering those systems with the "socialist" buzzword doesn't really change their essential role in efficient capitalism.
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Here, you can borrow mine...
Lots of people worried about the Taliban, because they were known to be a tool of the Pakistani ISI secret police, the latest wave of CIA-created murderers to "make order" in Afghanistan. You and I might not have, because we don't have our own Central Asia bureau. But the Economist was in on it, in their role of peddling thugs to the better-educated masses.
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I'll continue to read them for free in airport lounges, laughing out loud at their transparent cons, while the suits around me shuffle nervously when I'm amused by their dismal science.
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Are we to take your word for it that communism will work if given the proper setting, when all previous attempts to achieve communism failed? By definition, communism does not allow for capitalism to coexist with it. You can have one, but not the other. To call the Internet "the new communism" is to portray the term "communism" as something other than inherently all-encompassing.
Also, the US government (and quite a few others that were threatened by the Soviet Union) didn't slap the term "communist" on the USSR. It was in 1918 that the Bolshevik Party changed its name to Russian Communist Party of the Bolsheviks. So the misnomer started with the would-be communists themselves, who were already trying to con people into believing that their attempt at communism was successful.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"The characteristics of information--be it software, text or even biotech research--make it an economically obvious thing to share. It is a "non-rival" good: ie, your use of it does not interfere with my use." How exactly is information a "non-rival" good??? Sharing info can interfere with someone else's life... Maybe sharing absolutely original info can be non-rival good...but sharing unrestricted info has legal implications right? You cannot just join another company and share your previous company's trade secrets, can you? One can argue that it was this free sharing that interfered with the proprietary SW of corporations...
"The characteristics of information?be it software, text or even biotech research?make it an economically obvious thing to share."
Step carefull around the ravenous wolves.
I will quote my sources on the explanation for these journalistic positions:
[In response to an anonymous reporter's question "Why do you rob banks?"]:
"Because that's where the money is." - Willie Sutton
[from the bottom of the current Slashdot page in which I'm submitting this post]:
"I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem. -- Ashleigh Brilliant"
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"News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"
One of those is incorrect. Plz fix, kthx, bye.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Uh, there's always the potential "loss" of the credit for other discoveries based on that knowledge. Think Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of DNA; "competitors" saw her crucial photograph and some unpublished work, and she's never really gotten some credit she deserved. Even when you're formally releasing whatever information you have, by publishing it, there's a certain loss in that sense -- of control, or something close to it.
The scientific method transcends those petty human "losses" in a larger sense, but they sure do affect how people within the scientific world behave. People are very conscious of the tradeoffs between sharing information and withholding it.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Your brain doesn't work. You hear you're being insulted, for good reason, and you just start complaining. Fascism is government by and for corporations. Criminal complicity shouldn't even need explanation. So the meaning of "corporate tool" is clearly beyond your ability to appreciate, especially if all you've got is misusing the term "troll", and complimenting me with the term "professional" when you're trying to be nasty. As for "sums", I note that your opening phrase hangs in the page just below "by Anonymous Coward". You're practically an "Economist"!
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The trick is to pause before each article long enough to recollect what has been going on there, then skim the article to see what's changed. Do NOT get bogged down in reading every word. For instance, an article on Nigeria appears every few issues. Don't read it word for word. Recollect that they have a "new" president who has promised to eliminate corruption, that there are problems in the boonies with locals extorting money from the pipeline operators, etc. Then skim the article with that in mind. Usually it's just an update ... new ministers making more promises about corruption, some stats to back it up or refute it, more stats on pipeline problems ... you can finish an entire issue in just a couple of hours that way :-) It's not as satisfying as reading every word, but it gets you thru an issue in a reasonable time. I have to choose between skimming and cancelling the subscription.
Infuriate left and right
Actually it would be The Financial Times.
Am I the only one who thinks that the article is completely void of substance?
The author barely even mentions what Open Source is, does not analyse the reasons for Open Source, and gives two-three obvious explanations. Then he attempts to compare Open Source programming with file sharing and SETI@Home. It is wrong to compare these two examples since they're based on unused resources. Spare time is not an unused resource.
The last time I check distributing goods which you don't own the rights to has nothing to do with the open source movement. The OSS movement is sharing resources which the party has full ownership over, however the distributing music is mostly distributing goods to which the user has no rights. Is it me or do people compare everything to OSS in order to get their paper recognized. All publicity isn't good publicity. This is slanderous and furthermore hardly speaks of the economic impact of the OSS and distribution of music. Joe
Math
This left-wing/right-wing stuff getting thrown about is confusing! Why can't people just say "economically conservative and socially liberal"? That way, it's not a phrase dependent on location.
Nobody else was worrying about the Taliban at the time, either.
Well, gee, with the collusion of apathy and cheerleading amongst news sources, it becomes difficult for the common man to become educated enough about things like future Talibans in order to become concerned.
The American CIA is similarly insulated from public worry. People commonly go about their lives utterly unconcerned about the documented offenses of this agency. In part, that's because of the press blackout.
The old sentiments are quite correct on this matter: Without a free (or diverse) press, our democracies simply cannot function.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I read the Guardian Weekly. Quite basic news. Real insights are in the Z - Magazine If you're up for a subscription, subscribe here. The Economist mostly offers straightforward right-wing myths and propaganda. Quite easy to spot, so Hemos surprise me.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
The problem is that most people who are in the middle consider The Economist fair. It's generally people way out on either side politically that suggest The Economist is unfair. Knowing what I do of you from your history, it seems you are one of those people. No flame, mind you, but your politics are not... centrist.
For most of the people doing reviewing, the Economist is really very fair and reasonable in its reporting.
Is it possible you are just politically marginalized, and that your views differ significantly from the rest of ours?
Is there a publication you recommend? That isn't filled with lunatic fringe ravings? Seriously, I would like to try it.
No, it's not. There is more to "the rest of the world" than Europe, so when you mean "Europe" say "Europe".
Moderation -1
100% Troll
TrollMod can't handle the truth about spies, so labels me the Troll.
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But I don't agree with that point in the least.
Communism is all about the "common good" and giving to the collectivity. OSS and free-sharing knowledge is just what Science has been for a very, very long time. It's sharing knowledge freely with one another, so that knowledge can grow. It's not giving blindly to the collectivity. Big difference. I surely would hope nobody (nobody decent, at least) would claim that Science is communism.
Actually, most harsh defenders of industrial IP rights "against" OSS and patent-free stuff are the ones who act more for the "collective good" in mind, even if that's not their primary intend. They are defending the rights of their company, or sometimes a whole industry, sometimes in a forceful mamner: to me, that closely looks a lot more soviet-like than the spirit behind OSS. They also are often the ones who stole stuff from others: but in a legal way. All you have to do is patent it first - even if you didn't invent it.
" What is considered 'left wing' in the US, is considered far right wing in the rest of the world."
Somehow, I doubt that. What you're doing is moving the entire US political spectrum entirely into the right wing, which is very inaccurate. I've encountered born-and-bred Americans who were so far left they see Communism as "centrist." However, I agree that roughly 2/3s of US population is Conservative. But, then again, we've always been different than Europeans.
I noticed this in one of my law school classes. The professor, who is on the left, praised the "progressive" system of government in Europe. He lamented about the medievel "jury" system and why we needed to adopt the civil system of Europe. Something did not seem quite right about that, and then I realized that the "progressive" legal system in much of Europe preceded the Anglo jury system. Joan d'Arc was tried under that system. Very progressive.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
I agree. There are many articles in which they make no secret of their fondness for free markets, but they don't do the US Republican thing of applying it across the board. The Economist openly discusses ways of doing business that do not fall into the free market model on a regular basis. However there are some issues, like Hugo Chavez and Venezuela, where the authors do seem to show almost vitriolic hatred for the man; but these are the exceptions to the rule.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
It's a pity, but at least it means that in an Economist article you can usually identify the compulsory editorial slant bit and discount it. And the Economist has a chance of perceiving how FOSS and the prevention of governments from allowing software parents have beneficial free-market implications. But just one day I would like an Economist article which, say, admits how limited protectionism can have benefits for the environment or the protection of the rights of the poor in some countries.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Politically, I've got a lot in common with most people I meet. But we often differ in our comprehension of the real politics. Most people voting for Bush, for example, are getting the exact opposite of what they think they're asking for. The same is also true, to a lesser extent, in a different direction, of (for example) Kerry. Everyone is "politically marginalized", except the few who retain actual power in our world - that's how oligarchy works, and the plutocratic form we've got today.
You've got the kind of "fair" that means "inoffensive". Then there's the "fair" that means "accurate in representation and evaluation of the actual situation", which can be very offensive, especially in our high-stakes world. I find the former to be a euphemism, and the latter to be rare, fleeting. After a lifetime gaining wisdom about the unreliability of all media outlets, I am most hopeful about using the Internet "as a whole" (or just access to my broadly separated cross-sections of it) to find accuracy. Accuracy requires interactivity for greater confidence. So I search (with multiple search engines) across many websites. I rely on reality's natural advantage of vastly interconnected consistency, over media's comparatively rudimentary spin control. Skepticism, requirements of corroboration, and easily seeing the big picture of global exploitation are all tools in getting closer to the truth. It's not so easy to stay on top of the news, but we're just getting some asymmetric advantages against the manufactured media machine. Automation and popularization promise much more efficient education, especially as P2P systems reduce the power of centralized "official" publishers. Until then, it's DIY.
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There was no monopoly on ushering in the Taliban mafia.
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As I understand it, "liberal" once meant simple "freedom", even in political terms. In the US it came to mean "freedom from corporate oppression" back in the mid-to-late 19th century, when the workers were heavily victimized by powerful rich factory owners (who were often not all that readily distinguishable from the government.)
Later, that became associated with fighting for other sorts of freedom, such as civil rights for minority groups.
The association of "liberal" with "poor and minority groups" has led the term somewhat away from its original meaning. Over time, it's become associated with improving the lot of poor people even where they're not activily being oppressed but merely poor: welfare, medical care, affirmative action, etc.
Liberals argue that the causes of poverty are side-effects of less obvious rights violations by rich people and companies. They'd argue that a company which employs many people in a town has an obligation to those people to continue to employ them, even when that factory is no longer profitable. That obligation by the company is the right of the people.
I wouldn't say that the Economist is "all for" corporate tyranny. They'd say that a factory which isn't profitable cannot employ those workers because there simply is no money to pay them. That strikes them as simple level-headedness: you cannot pay workers from nonexistent money.
But they do hold the company responsible for its non-economic externalities. If the company is dumping cadmium into the water and poisoning those workers, even if it's proftable for the company it is wrong to do so. Simple economics will not prevent that, so they recommend well-chosen and well-enforced government regulation.
I often find myself disagreeing with them. Their notion of free-market capitalism often assumes frictionless changes that are untrue. If a company moves a factory from Flint, Michigan to Bangladesh, yes, I suppose it does improve the US economy by allowing Americans to purchase the goods more cheaply, thus freeing up their capital for investment in other things.
But the people of Flint, Michigan don't realize those improvements directly; they don't immediately acquire programming skills and move to San Francisco to get better jobs. Nor do they disappear. Even if the simple "invisble hand" argument works for the good of the country as a whole, it can cause vicious harm in microeconomic terms, and those are externalities which shouldn't be ignored.
I can think of a lot of other examples of successful sharing in meatspace. Just a random off the top of my head list, not extensive:
Food banks, share surplus food around, everything from surplus garden produce to hunters harvested game meat to "normal" food so it gets used and not wasted
Seed banks, many gardeners share seeds with each other, helps to maintain long term biodiversity and a hedge against catstrophic failures with bioengineered seeds possibly in the future
Volunteer fire departments, obvious good advantages there
Not for profit "thrift" stores, allow folks to donate useful but surplus items so they can be reused by other people cheaply instead of contributing to landfill mess
Orgs that do work like Habitat for Humanity, besides sharing labor to help folks out immediately by providing affordable to them shelter, down the road it's psychologically good to have children raised in decent homes and not in slumlord run cheap no win rental housing. hard to put an exact economic price on that, but I would bet it's pretty useful for society as a whole
Normal neighborly collaborative work, the concept of the "barn raising" is still there all over. Everything from Joe down the block is a good mechanic and helps his neighbors out to neighbors helping neighbors with community watch or shared child care, etc. Still alive and well all over.
Community free concerts, still a phenomenon practiced all over, most any weekend across the US you can go find free music and art that is "shared"
and etc etc
I would imagine there are way more examples of "sharing" that go on voluntarily that don't make it into the raw economic figures but contribute to the basic over all health of the economy and society.
I read the initial opinion section, and the letters, then the US news. Those are the parts that get me what I don't read in my daily paper and the online news feeds. Then I'm afraid I skip over Europe and Latin America and Asia and read the science and glance at the arts.
If I have time I go back and skim the headlines of the rest, and read the articles on rare occasions. I'm ashamed to admit that I really don't much care about the workers strike in Bolivia or the folding of the soccer teams in Albania. I realize that makes me a bad person.
I live in Massachusetts, that most liberal of states (Barney Frank is my congressional representative) and even I don't know a single person who sees Communism as "centrist".
I don't even know more than a handful of people who are for either socialized medicine or organized labor, two bulworks of liberalism.
By either current world standards, or US standards of the last 70 years, even "lefties" in the US are very, very far to the right.
"Politically, I've got a lot in common with most people I meet"
Doubtful. The politics you have expressed are far from mainstream. More likely they think you're a kook who starts political arguments. Maybe they are afriad of being shot down by someone who talks too much and listens way too little.
Your perception of reality is not qualitatively better than anyone else's. I sense in you the same thing I sense in people just like you, that others "don't see the truth".
The problem with this, is that you don't see the truth either.
You are marginalized, but try to avoid that by suggesting everyone is. That is not true.
"Skepticism, requirements of corroboration, and easily seeing the big picture of global exploitation"
Nicely said. Now, are you an honest skeptic, or a nay-sayer and anti-globalist who calls himself a truth seeker? Why do you think you can see it while the rest of us can't?
"After a lifetime gaining wisdom about the unreliability of all media outlets"
ALL OF THEM? Come on, why the hyperbole? I mean apart from being the major component in your debate style? Why claim to be a truth seeker, then rely on lies?
I had been reading the Economist for several years, but it didn't dawn on me what a difference it made until I took a taxi ride and inquired about the driver's accent --- he was from Nigeria, I think, and we spent the rest of the ride (10-15 minutes) talking about Nigerian politics, and I was flat amazed at how much I knew without realizing it (I think he was too :-). That convinced me to keep the subscription going.
The value of the Economist is just absorbing general knowledge, not the specific details. What matters about the Nigerian example is that things are better, but still not good, it is no longer a dictatorship, but it is still corrupt. The exact stats and names don't matter.
Infuriate left and right
I believe in freedom, human rights, personal accumulation of wealth, honesty and integrity. I demonstrate it in my personal and business affairs, and I have had a great deal of success. I further believe that people are evolved to live in our current generally mild ecology, and damaging it with pollution is bad for us. I believe that corporations are constructs that work against most of those principles, and mass media owned by them generally serve that agenda. That puts me in agreement with most Americans on the issues, and most people globally who've heard of them, or considered their own personal versions in their own lives. That's why it's called "common sense".
OK, you start off solicitous, then devolve into calling me a liar. Let's be frank: you've decided you disagree with me. Your approach is pretty typical of rightwing gamesters, who are totally committed to your foregone, selfserving conclusions, and engage in "discussion" with the strategy of discrediting their chosen opponent, regardless of the merit of the facts. Drop the pretense. Your corporate comrades have succeeded in coopting the mediasphere, even the language, flinging words like "elite" and "hate" at opponents like masters of newspeak. But it doesn't work on me. BTW, I note that I've had my fair share of capitalist success by harnessing the global banking/media industries. I'm no martyr to the truth, but I'm no liar. You should examine your own baseless position before you come out swinging at me.
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make install -not war
If you want, you can be concerned about North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, or China, which regularly threatens its democratic neighbor Taiwan with invasion, or Russia, which is rapidly sliding back toward dictatorship, or some of the Soviet satellite states, whih aren't so much states as collections of tribes, or Saudi Arabia, which may be heading toward revolution, or Syria, which may be harboring the next 9/11-style terrorists, or much of Africa, where the world's next great plague may emerge, or places like Zimbawe, where a dictator is busy looting the state and destroying wealth.
Point of this long laundry list of (relatively) obvious potential threats is that we don't know from what quarter problems will arise, and even the mythical CIA can't predict what will be the next big problem, let alone news sources. No man can perceive what the future will hold. Some of issues listed above may escalate, but most will probably peter out into nothing.
Answer carefully.
--- Ban humanity.
For a lot of open source project's and P2P networks it's not the case that developers and users are really sharing fairly.
Most open source projects revolve around a core of developers with the odd donation of time and code from users who extend the code to suit their needs. Ditto with most P2P networks, most casual users are happy to leach whilst most of the bandwidth is provided by hardcore users. Perhaps the exception to this is Bittorrent where users are more inclinded to share fairly.
It's not greed, since it's about sharing.
I don't know what to call it, fear of leeching or something?
To sum it up: When you share, if you constantly think about if everybody else is sharing as much as you, you'll end up not sharing.
Period.
When you share, you share.
If people leech, don't bother.
If they spam or hog resources, limit the resources with technical solutions, but you still don't bother.
This is the truth of sharing. The more you give, the more you get. Karma is absolute truth, but you don't give a damn about it. If you do, you get in trouble. If you analyse it all, you will stop the process itself.
So what if you share more than the next guy for some times? If you think about it, worrying about who is on top is really capitalism.
Strange thought, huh?
If you happen to have more / willing to share more, for some time, then just think what an opportunity!
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Professor Benkler's article refers here to Slashdot...
/. 'ers actually agree with sharing their "intellectual goods" when responses are written on company time. An IT professional making $60,000 a year is paid $.50 per minute (hourly liberties taken). If it takes that person 10 minutes to author content for Slashdot they are in effect making a company donation of $5.00. The shareable good is actually paid for by the company who itself hopes the salary investment in the employee returns a greater ROI. For example, receiving valuable IT experience worth more than what the employee is paid and perhaps less expensive than an outside contractor. But the ten minutes is still brought to us by the company.
In this case, the "shareable good" involved is
the time, education, and effort of the users who participate. It is combined
with a public good--existing information--to form what is also itself a
public good--a topical news and commentary source.
The question tho' is whether the employers of many
I am not opposed to the OSS model but I would like to see more analysis of its true economic cost as I was always taught "there is no such thing as a free lunch." The fact that it does seem to produce a superior product is all the more reason to better understand its true costs.
Professor Benkler's 10/22/2004 article is a good read. Thanks for posting a reference to it.
Hopefully this was worth more than $.02
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources.
In the case of programmers and open source, it is easy to explain. By taking control of the programming environment (i.e. by developing open source operating systems), the software community is organizing to expand their productivity in a way that the corporate environment has always refused to do.
Companies have always routinely forced programmers to adopt the tools and software language that the companies aquire at the least cost. The efficency of the programmer's skills has always been a secondary consideration.
For example, a programmer spends five years mastering C++. Then the company they work for goes bankrupt. In the next job, that company uses Z-- as the development language. The new company judges the programmer to be second rate until they have mastered this new language.
After forty years of having to learn arbitrary new software development systems and tools, the software development community has said, "Enough!". "Now, we will develop the software envirnment, languages, and OS. And you will use it. And it will be free so you can't use the argument that it would cost too much to implement".
They have had to do this in their own best self interest because companies will always be changing the software development environment when this environment is bought and sold as a product.
Everyone originally went to Microsoft because they promised standardization at an acceptable cost. But that is no longer the case in a global network.
For The Economist to claim that the software developers of open source are not acting in their best lnng-run interest is naive of them.
It's really everywhere: parents share their experience with their children, friends rely on each others advice, gouvernments may (or may not) listen to their advisors, pointy-haired bosses listen (but may act contrary to) expert advice from employees.
Sharing is what turns individuals into societies, a pre-requisite for cultural achievements far beyond what a single person could achieve.
-- Nuggets: Your free SMS search engine for the UK
The Economist is brought to you buy the same people who think labor unions are evil, privatization always works (they never mention it only works for the rich), and the WTO/IMF/WorldBank unholy triad deserves to enslave poor countries with massive loans OK'd by bribed leaders.
If you want the facts, read
The Ecologist
If you went to law school, one would hope that they would've taught you how to build a proper argument.
In your first point, you're attacking a general statement with a particular one. The fact that you know a certain number of people with fringe opinions doesn't say anything about the spectrum of American politics in general.
In your second point, it's at best 'guilt by association' and at worst simply ignorant of how the legal systems in most of Europe actually work. (And of course they do work. If they didn't, they would have been reformed. After all, all European nations are democracies, and it's not like their concept of 'justice' is fundamentally different.)
Apart from that, as an american living in europe (for the last 15 years), and having been around, I would concur with the grandparent poster. The political spectrum of the US is shifted to the right of most of the (democratic) world. In general.
This all depends on the issue. When it comes to moral conservatism, the USA is certainly to the right of most of the western world. Except perhaps parts of Switzerland. Fiscal conservatism is another issue, but I'd put the USA to the right there too. Although it's kind of hard to label the current government as 'fiscally conservative'. I'd classify it as 'South-American-military-junta-style'.
(E.g. characterized by low taxes, heavy military spending, big contracts to the friends of those in charge and a whopping foreign debt.)
If corporations are enemies of freedom and human rights, what would you propose? I also think you should define your use of "corporation" more finely. I don't think corporations as entities for conducting businesses are inherently evil. I know the small corp I created for consulting is certainly not evil. And on that note, when I think of a corporation like H-E-B (a small grocery store chain) or Linksys, I don't really think of them as being threats to freedom or human rights. If you are referring to specific corporations that you meet your claims (and we all know these companies exist) then you should limit your attacks to those.
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources.
In the case of programmers and open source, it is easy to explain. By taking control of the programming environment (i.e. by developing open source operating systems), the software community is organizing to expand their productivity in a way that the corporate environment has always refused to do.
Companies have always routinely forced programmers to adopt the tools and software language that the companies acquire at the least cost. The efficiency of the programmer's skills has always been a secondary consideration.
For example, a programmer spends five years mastering C++. Then the company they work for goes bankrupt. In the next job, that company uses Z-- as the development language. The new company judges the programmer to be second rate until they have mastered this new language.
After forty years of having to learn arbitrary new software development systems and tools, the software development community has said, "Enough!". "Now, we will develop the software environment, languages, and OS. And you will use it. And it will be free so you can't use the argument that it would cost too much to implement".
They have had to do this in their own best self interest because companies will always be changing the software development environment when this environment is bought and sold as a product.
Everyone originally went to Microsoft because they promised standardization at an acceptable cost. But that is no longer the case in a global network.
For The Economist to claim that the software developers of open source are not acting in their best long-run interest is naive of them.
Because there's no reason why you can't be *both* economically conservative and socially liberal. In fact, I'd say that's not too far from where I am politically. I'm generally supportive of careful fiscal planning by gov't (i.e. I don't want them to go on a tax-and-spend spree), but I'm very much in favour of things like a national health service free at the point of consumption.
"The Economist, reliably the most insightful English-language news publication"....
As a good Brit would say: "Utter rubbish"
The truth is that corporations do not act -- only individuals act. Yet corporations cannot be punished as individuals could be punished for serious crimes -- thrown in jail, executed for capital crimes, etc. A person can be held liable for more than their net worth. A corporation cannot. Yet corporations can shield people from personal responsibility to society and the law. That is the problem.
That's a pretty good list. My point revolves around speculation about how many people can come up with such a list and for what reasons. I can only posit that you are the exception that tests the rule.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
You make a good point. But haven't we seen some headway in personal accountability? In the past year it seems like there have been quite a few trials of CEO's. And isn't reforming the corporation a better option than trying to eliminate it? Something would have to replace it.
The only solution I see is to make stockholders personally legally liable for actions of the corporation. Right now, stockholders cannot be held liable for more than the value of their stock.
Hey its not my fault modders are on crack?
Now I'm placing wager odds on weither moders are going to -1 flamebait this post, or +1 funny.
Any takers?
Of course, Ferengi social constructs as to clothing and wimmyn.... hmmmmm maybe we can work out some sort of compromise here.....
That's about what I meant when I said the scientific method got past the human side -- it works to allay those problems, eventually.
But you have to admit that, for her and her "competing" people at Cambridge, the free sharing of information wasn't completely free and freaky and in the general public interest only. It's totally possible that, if she'd been freer sharing her information, the structure of DNA would have been known earlier because lots more people would have been involved, at Cambridge at elsewhere. Why do you think she wasn't freely passing all her research around? Because there was a potential cost to her career.
The people working on the Dead Sea Scrolls have been criticized a ton for withholding information. Scientists who sign up to work with certain NASA missions sign exclusivity agreements for publishing some of the results. There are lots of examples of this. There's a tension in scientific ranks over when to publish. It's plainly not "free as in beer."
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Truly classic "I didn't quite read that" response from an AC...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
It is, in my view, inevitable that no matter what your starting conditions are, the socio-economic progress will lead to convergence of all systems to communism, a more advanced one than traditional capitalism or (horror!) information society.
Many people still don't realise it, but our world is changing. And it doesn't take a genius to understand where we are going. Combine MIT's 'Fab Labs' (not the implementation, the idea), nanotechnology and sharing and you get sharing for physical goods. Add to that AI and robotics and you don't even need to share, because everyone basically has everything he needs. Which is, in very simple terms, what communism is about.
In about 5-10 years it will be possible to have personal manufacturing plants - first for some limited classes of products, then for pretty much everything. That would bring sharing of designs, often "illegal", but always beneficial to people. It is likely to be combined with open source leading to even more efficiency and choice.
Then in about 15-20 years robots will become a very significant part of the workforce, with construction robots, transportation robots, loading/unloading and various other robots. Not sure how it will work out, but clearly this will lead to 1) greater wealth for some and 2) demand to do something so that even the unemployed people could share the wealth. It might be possible that robots could be produced using personal manufacturing plants, in that case the capitalist economy will quickly collapse, as capital (robots) will become in a sense free (there still be energy and resources issues). That might be when the new communism, finally succeeds.
Finally, in 20-30 years nanotechnology will succeed in producing its Holy Grail - the universal assembler. This would bring sharing to its ultimate triumph, as information would finally be the only thing of value and at the same time the information will finish becoming free, in the process freeing us, the humans. This will also end the short communist era, as we humans quickly become self-sufficient. That would be the culmination of the new communism, which will then gradually disappear, as humans move into posthuman state.
In 2030 our current debates about sharing and whether it's stealing or not will probably seem rather funny.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
This does apply to just more than Europe though. In Canada our Conservatives are seen similar to that of the Democrats in the US.
Yeah, it's amazing that people still use the "liberal media" cliche every time reality doesn't support conservative gospel. Maybe they don't know that 95% of American mass media is owned by seven big corporations, or they think guys like Rupert Murdock who run those outfits are flaming liberals. Or they just don't think period. I'm guessing number 3.
Economists believe everything we do is rooted in self-interest the way Freud believed everything we do is rooted in sex. People with a religious devotion to a single idea often have trouble seeing the truth. They have their hammer, and everything looks a nail.
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources... The reason often seems to be that writing open-source software increases the authors' prestige among their peers or gains them experience that might help them in the job market, not to mention that they also find it fun.
Yeah, not to mention that they also find it fun. The pure pleasure of accomplishment and the satisfaction of doing something for others is hard for pointy haired economists to grasp, but I think these are they primary reasons people write oss. But then I got a D in Econ 101, re-took it from a different prof and got a C. So what could I possibly know about human nature?
Historical context:
In the days before canning armies would starve when on the move, unless they could steal food from villages that they passed. If they did, the villagers would starve.
So, three soldiers show up in a village... of course the villagers don't know that there are only three, and they don't know that they CAN'T just steal all their food. So they pretend that they've already been robbed, and don't have any left. The stone soup is a con game to allow people to safely contribute without being robbed blind.
One reason that potatoes were so valuable is that they could be left in the ground until you were ready to dig them up. This made it quite difficult for an army to just march through and steal your entire food supply, leaving you to starve to death. And to death is NOT a figure of speech, but rather a frequent fate of the villages that were robbed.
In this context the story makes perfect sense. The villagers had time to make sure that they were safe. The soldiers didn't have to split up into small(er) ambushable groups. The locations of the villagers food remained secret. Nobody was forced to contribute more than he could spare. Etc.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
The structure that is a corporation is a threat to human rights because it isn't human, and has rights - too abusable a construct for humans to compete with. Corporations should not have the same rights as a person, as they do currently. They should be explicitly inferior to humans when rights are at issue, as in a court. The humans who compose the corporation should have the same rights as any other humans, and the same liabilities. Of course they have more rights of control of their own property, the corporation, than outside people, but their corporate actions must be accountable as their personal actions. Corporations aren't even held to the laws of governance on which they're theoretically founded: when acting outside the scope in their charter (granted by the state in which they're incorporated), they can be dissolved by a court, especially when commiting a crime outside that scope, or even within it, or even just operating outside it. But corporations can't be arrested, incarcerated, executed - but they can lie, cheat, steal and kill. When a corporation as a collective entity is found to have committed a crime, say making dangerous products, publishing fraud, breaking any of their many finance rules, the people who executed those policies, like the executives, directors, and shareholder officers, if not the shareholders themselves (depending on whether they're in a control loop), should all be subject to penalties that reflect their actions, or their omissions despite their responsibility. Until corporations have less rights than humans, while they have more power and less accountability, shielding some humans under their organization, they'll remain the first-class citizens in America, while humans are second class.
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make install -not war
Also, the article you've linked to does go on to talk about Kip Viscusi of Harvard, and it doesn't take a lot of thought to conclude that if you wanted to know where they're coming from you should look up some of Viscusi's publications. For example:
This doesn't look like the best-written Economist article I've ever seen, but it's not quite that egregious either. Maybe you need a better "experts say" example.
Maybe everyone should have their own corporation then so that they can have the same protections. Your statement that "corporations can't be arrested, incarcerated, executed - but they can lie, cheat, steal, and kill" is almost silly. The corporation cannot think on it's own. It is not self-aware. Any damage inflicted on this world by a corporation is committed by the hand or instrument of individuals. My view, and that of most conservatives, is that individuals are responsible for their own actions. And if they break the law they should be punished accordingly. To think that getting rid of corporations would eliminate all these ills you speak of is very silly. I assure you that people who don't give a damn about the environment don't need a corporation to hide behind to screw it up. Everyone driving their monster SUVs or flying their private jets are doing that on their own and by personal choice.
I have several corporations that cover most of my activities. After I had my first successful one, I saw the light, and got with the program. But I don't like the freedom to infringe other people's rights that my corporations offer. I don't take advantage of them, and I'd like to take them away from the people who do. Not the corporations, but their protection of people from liability for their actions. Corporations are good, but so far they're too good for their owners, and bad for everyone else.
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make install -not war
In my country, the government provides heavy disincentives that make car sharing difficult, although hitchhiking used to be a common form of car sharing. Food sharing is quite common. In my town one of the food sharing groups does some bike sharing. Food sharing examples: lecture is free, comes with free pizza. Food banks and food pantries.
Pot-luck dinners. Setting an extra plate at dinner.
Beer nuts. Bread not bombs.
Moderation 0
30% Insightful
30% Overrated
10% Flamebait
Who would have thought Slashdotters would be so deeply divided over allegiance to as dismal a magazine as The Economist? The economists.
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make install -not war
But, corporations offer unique protections so they, to use your example, can dump toxic chemicals and be fined only after a long trial and procedural, which a corporation can then hold in statis in court for years. An individual, caught dumping, say arsenic into a river, will be immediately arrested or fined.
Corporations have all the advantages of being treated, by the law, as an individual with none of the inherent liabilities. Individuals are responsible for their actions, and that's what makes corporations so infuriating at times, people hide behind them and use them to defend their actions.
As for SUV and (?) private jet ownership, this is an entirely different problem, I think, that comes from the bizarre inability to see connections between say that smog bank over LA and their 10-mile-to-the-gallon CXT.
Humans are not that bright, and in large anonymous groups, we are downright dangerous. The key is to relate to the individual always, and not to the herd.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
Clearly this is why you now read /.
But couldn't a wealthy individual just do the same? What would you propose to replace corporations? And I think people do know their vehicles cause an environmental problem. They just don't care.
Very insightful comment.....
Wanted : A Signature.
I use several different search engines, and I always take a scientific "disprove it" attempt before even believing, let alone quoting, anything I read on the Net. And I make sure I've got an accountable person behind any statements I'm making actual decisions based on. And behind all that is my firewall of never totally believing anything I haven't verified with my own senses, and even keeping my own fallability foremost in my mind. That's probably good enough for the kind of accuracy I require in my "amateur" capacity.
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make install -not war
Corporations don't have to be evil to do harm. Business (especially big business) simply does not have the interests of the general public in mind , and they have the power to do what they like. (Dow Chemical anyone)?
/. Where I practice my html.
Logic, macros, and more
People do care, they just haven't made the connection between their bling-bling laden pimped out H2 and their kid's asthma. We're dumb. Dumb, and dangerous and yet perfectly capable of great intelligence and grace if we'd just put down the Big Gulp, throw the cellphone out the window, turn off Howard Stern on XM radio and start thinking about the fuckin' world for two goddamn minutes.
There are 6.7 billion of us, how the hell are we going to sustain everything when all of us want 4 TVs, 2 cars, and endless amounts of processed cheese food?
Sigh, maybe most people don't care; I wish they did. As for corporations, I'm not suggesting replacing them, but altering their legal status in some ways. Wealthy individuals are just as dangerous, but at least they can be prosecuted.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
Perhaps you should contemplate the difference between the GPL and the BSD license. And note that while both are popular, the GPL is more popular.
Not everybody might agree with me, but I see the GPL as a political tool. It is a license that shows the hybris behind the idea that you can own information and knowledge. It is really copyright turned back on itself, therefore humourously called copyleft.
GPL do what public domain and BSD cannot, namely form a competition against proprietary and closed source software. This is the design principle behind the GPL, and the other two "licenses" (why do we need a license anyways?), cannot do this.
I like to think the GPL is popular because most of these people who are knowledgeable about computers, feel deep down inside themselves that copyright and restrictions do not serve the higher goal of developing better programs. There is already competition between open- and free software, while standards and source helps bring interoperability on levels that closed source cannot easily match. These people do not want to support a world with strict IP-laws and companies selling snake oil to its customers, holding them ransom and hostage over time.
I suspect you disagree with me, because you brought up the BSD-license. That's okay: You want to share it all with everybody, which is a perfectly laudable goal. While I prefer the GPL because I want to contribute to an alternative to proprietary software, without accidentally supporting it.
You might also call the GPL a platform for forced-sharing, but I see it mostly as a political weapon against corporate appropriation of our culture and science.
Now you might mistake me for a leftist, but I also think proprietary software should exist as long as it can support itself. Obviously, numerous advancements have been made from that avenue that would otherwise be lost. But to protect its monopoly through stricter laws and draconian enforcements, I do not support.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Individuals don't have the interest of the general public in mind either. And based on their wealth can do many things to harm the world. And I would add that governments have done more harm than corporations. (the Holocaust anyone)?
And tell me. How far would Nazism have gotten in Germany if corporate industry in Germany were not so willing to fall into line behind Hitler? Corporate business liked Hitler because he transformed the German economy to favor them (and they didn't think that the free Jewish slave labor was so bad either)
Logic, macros, and more
I'm sure that the structure of corporations in 1930's Germany is very different than it is in the modern day US. It sounds like you want to return to a pre-industrialized society because people can't be trusted with technology. But if you don't like that example, how about Stalin and the 30 million his government killed in the gulag?
What did the Republicans in congress do about terrorism before 9/11? Complain about the Democrats wanting to spend more money fighting terrorism.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Why can't we just say that powerful entities whether governmental or non-governmental are prone to abuse that power. In this sense, history doesn't matter. Its kind of like saying nuclear weapons aren't really that dangerous since the most they have ever killed are in the thousands while conventional war has killed many more.
Simply to say, I don't trust business simply because, as things are set up now, its not their job to look out for the public's interest, while, at least in theory, the role of the government is precisely to look out for the public's interest (that is the theoretical justification outline in, for example, social contract theory). Open up today's newspaper and you will see what I mean. keyword: asbestos, Wisconsin
Logic, macros, and more
Actually, yes I do. Since the main point is that US residents are somehow more risk irrational than say, UK residents. The really good parts are secondary, eg, Viscusi's excellent discussion of why people perceive risks differently.
Since taxes are extracted by force, they are not an example of sharing.
Otherwise, I agree with your post. The sharing of information goes way back, as do the efforts to prevent it by the vested interests. Recall the horror that some groups professed when the Christian scriptures were translated into the vernacular that just anyone could read!
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics