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HP's Dunn Stepping Down
XJHardware writes "Yahoo news is reporting that Patricia Dunn is stepping down from the chair of HP." From the article: "Hurd will retain his existing positions as chief executive and president and Dunn will remain as a director after she relinquishes the chair on Jan. 18. 'I am taking action to ensure that inappropriate investigative techniques will not be employed again. They have no place in HP,' Hurd said in a statement. Dunn apologized for the techniques used in the company's probe, which included 'pretexting' in which private investigators impersonated board members and journalists to acquire their phone records."
This really isn't a surprise if HP wanted to hold together as a company. This damage may be deeper than you think as their Head of Global Operations, Giles Bouchard is leaving by October 31st. It doesn't indicate what his reasons are but he's been working there for two years, why now? Will we see others follow or will Dunn's resignation stop others from jumping ship?
My work here is dung.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned. But in my day we called it 'lying'.
So calling the phone company and pretending to be somebody else to get their records is called Pretexting??? I kinda thought that was called fraud. As for Dunn stepping down, the buck stops here, and if she can't keep control of her ship, then she would step down. Of course, it's probably a case of Nixonitis, i.e. everybody does it, but HP got caught.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
I left HP, Boise during the disaster that was Carly.
Her "I-came-up-from-the-mailroom" speech was enough to make most in the Departmental LaserJet Division to wretch. But, at least she didn't go all Richard Nixon on everyone and send out eaves-dropping goon squads.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
When you hit the cover of Newsweek as a shining example of corporate misbehaviour, it's safe to say your days are numbered.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Urr, isn't this just stating the obvious since she's the one responsible for the inappropriate techniques in the first place. Or at least, she signed off on them in some fashion. Isn't this a little like a thief retiring from thievery so that no more robberies will be committed?
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Why is it that I get a visit from the police when I do some good ole' social engineering and get caught? And this woman gets a seat as a director?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
It's badPR when your CEO gets arrested for wire fraud...
Best Slashdot Co
dunn will still be around, and hurd just changes chairs. the only things of note is the board meetings over the phone were chaired by the lead lawyer for the outfit that hired the pretexters in the first place, and hurd made a nice little "never again" speech.
HP is going to be roiled hard over this when the state and feds get done. there will be new law, and pretexting is going to be outlawed. HP is going to stain like a cheap rug when Congress is done with them.
since HP can't clean up their own house, they will be distracted and owly, and they're on a slide. the sharks are in the water, and they're snapping at everything.
if you own the stock, dump it. I'm not buying HP anything. you shouldn't either. they have now proven that they are untrustworthy with your information and secrets at the top.
buncha weasels run the joint now. your father's HP is long gone.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I guess you can say his time at HP is... DUNN for! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha... sigh.
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
Have the phone companies, or any other company that deals with customer's sensitive data is to mail the report to the person's mailing address along with a letter saying that you asked for this data to be sent, from a phone call on this date, from such-n-such phone number.
They should then refuse, 100% to fax or email the information out.
Change of address? Certainly, after we send out a letter confirming your address change.
Just like when I change my address (or do anything else) with my 401(k), IRAs, and banking.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
At least she did the right thing there.
I don't know if it was a King Richard II thing ("Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?") or if it was a cold-blooded decision ("Commander, tear this ship apart, and bring me the passengers... ahem, I mean, dig up anything and everything you can on whoever seems a likely target."), but either way there was no way that HP could have kept any customer or shareholder faith with her remaining at the helm.
What I find interesting is that the Justice department is checking this "pretexting" business out. Are they interested in prosecuting it... or duplicating it?
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
At least the slimy mofo George Keyworth who was blabbing to the press got his name slimed.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Thank you, that is all.
The CEO is now the chairman of the board. While
Hurd was probably exasperated, and rightly felt
he had to take the reigns to prevent further
damage to his company, the post-Enron concept
of an independent board has just taken a big
step backward. In the long run this is bad
for shareholders (not just HP shareholders).
Dunn: "Now, just give me my 'agreed-upon compensation that will pay the salary for 100 people over a lifetime' and I'll be gone."
... our new UNIX-replacing daemon overlords!
crushing a woman simply because she is powerful. Well, and amoral. Illegal, too.
Anyway, it's just the establishment putting someone down just because they are female and criminal.
Perkins quit when he heard about the spying and lying. He held his fire, then he outed Dunn and the board. The company was supposed to disclose why Hackborn quit when he did. And the board should have disclosed the investigation started by Dunn as well as the results of the investigation.
I agree that the rest of the board, including Hackborn, has some responsibility. But how to get rid of them? I usually withhold my votes, but the big institutions usually vote for the boards.
Best regards.
100% Overrated
/Forgive-off-topic
To the person who wasted an admin point on that post: please read the instructions on mod points. There are plenty of good posts in this thread for you to push up instead of wasting one on a post that wasn't meant to be that big a deal anyhow. Seriously, why?
When I have mod points, and when I use them, I always go to older news articles in the same day, browse for good posts that made it late into the thread, and try to push them up. I think that better fits the intension of the system.
Wasting a point on a post that had no points to start with is not good.
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Enough of this "pretexting" mumbo jumbo. It's "lying", fraud. Just because an exec does it doesn't require a euphamism to protect them from punishment like a mere human would get. They're not royalty who must be referred to with a "royal we" or "your highness". Their problems aren't "issues".
They're criminals. If anything, their crimes are worse, because they have more power and do more damage, while requiring more trust.
--
make install -not war
I find out that people won't calling what they did by the proper name:
LYING
Pretexting? It sounds so much nicer, like what a kid would do to talk to their friends on a cell phone. And I blame the press for buying into it and reporting it rather than saying "Patricia Dunn lied to the phone company to fraudulently obtain phone records".
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
moral: don't pick your women in a bar... or through an executive recruiter.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Two people hardly makes for a useful sample, and ethics know no gender or educational background. Since the overwhelming majority of such decisions are made by males, you might as well ask why so many companies have problems with men. Like HP's, for example, who had a male board member leaking information to the press. What's HP's problem with men?
Good point. If the company supplied the SSN's of the board members to the investigators, I'd expect some criminal action against the company.
Best regards.
Is HP still based out of Oregon? If so then identity theft is what they should nail them for. Oregon has some very harsh anti identity theft laws.
A friend in an Oregon insurance office had a computer stolen. Because the computer contained customer's personal data the police went after the thief mostly as identity theft because the those penalties were higher then the ones for breaking and entering and for theft!
So maybe now GNU/Hurd will finally be Dunn...
Y
Whoever said that was a fool, not a wise man. Capitalism has never been anything to do with right, wrong, good or evil, it's about self interest. It's human nature and will happen no matter what type of society we have. What do you propose as an alternative?
Deleted
Does anyone know whether Steve Balmer ever engaged in pretexting?
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Ha-ha! [/nelson]
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
A corporate officer? Going to jail? What are you, some kind of communist?
Look what happened the last time we put a corporate officer in jail, he had a heart attack. Your jealousy of the rich & powerful is overwhelmingly hateful in its magnitude.
Won't somebody think of the CEOs, oh the horror of it all!!!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
close, the idiotic federal government apparently thought it needed an important sounding new word
There ought to be a law... There is!
Pretexting: Your Personal Information Revealed
When you think of your own personal assets, chances are your home, car, and savings and investments come to mind. But what about your Social Security number (SSN), telephone records and your bank and credit card account numbers? To people known as "pretexters," that information is a personal asset, too.
Pretexting is the practice of getting your personal information under false pretenses. Pretexters sell your information to people who may use it to get credit in your name, steal your assets, or to investigate or sue you. Pretexting is against the law.
How Pretexting Works
Pretexters use a variety of tactics to get your personal information. For example, a pretexter may call, claim he's from a survey firm, and ask you a few questions. When the pretexter has the information he wants, he uses it to call your financial institution. He pretends to be you or someone with authorized access to your account. He might claim that he's forgotten his checkbook and needs information about his account. In this way, the pretexter may be able to obtain personal information about you such as your SSN, bank and credit card account numbers, information in your credit report, and the existence and size of your savings and investment portfolios.
Keep in mind that some information about you may be a matter of public record, such as whether you own a home, pay your real estate taxes, or have ever filed for bankruptcy. It is not pretexting for another person to collect this kind of information.
There Ought to Be a Law -- There Is
Under federal law -- the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act -- it's illegal for anyone to:
* use false, fictitious or fraudulent statements or documents to get customer information from a financial institution or directly from a customer of a financial institution.
* use forged, counterfeit, lost, or stolen documents to get customer information from a financial institution or directly from a customer of a financial institution.
* ask another person to get someone else's customer information using false, fictitious or fraudulent statements or using false, fictitious or fraudulent documents or forged, counterfeit, lost, or stolen documents.
The Federal Trade Commission Act also generally prohibits pretexting for sensitive consumer information.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
I'm neither prejudiced, bitter nor negative...I have tremendous hope in life ...
You definitely picked an appropriate slashnick.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
Why is it that I get a visit from the police when I do some good ole' social engineering and get caught? And this woman gets a seat as a director?
She disclosed their social security numbers and other info but did not commit the fraud herself and claims ignorance. We'll see what the AG does about that but the fall guy "investigator" will be nailed. When someone asks you to do something wrong, just say no.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
From the linked gsa.gov website:
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
At least the slimy mofo George Keyworth who was blabbing to the press got his name slimed.
I'd love to know just what he "leaked" and why you hate him for doing it. The nearest I can tell from reading the Wikipedia, the "leak" was about Fiorina's $42,000,000 severance package which has two HP investors suing HP for violating their own payment caps. If that's all there is, Keyworth is a whistle blower. If you know something, I'd love to hear it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
[telephone rings]
"Hello?"
"Hello, this is Sergei Brin, owner of Google."
"Why, hello Mr Brin. What a surprise! I just had an interview with Google. I thought it went well, but those were some tough questions!"
"Yes. Er... Look, I am calling to let you know personally that Google is a terrible place to work."
"It is?"
"Yes... um... The 'Do No Evil' slogan is nonsense. We do plenty of evil."
"Really?"
"Oh yes. Evil like you can't believe. And, um, we're not nearly as visionary as the people at Microsoft. Have you ever worked there? Wonderful place."
[pause] "This is Steve Ballmer, isn't it?"
"NOOOOOOOOOO!" [sound of crashing furniture]
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Capitalism gives an incentive for this sort of selfishness that leads to a culture where they believed this was okay for them to do. Sure, such actions could occur under other philosophies; the point is that capitalism provides no disincentive for this behavior.
:(){
If only I had points...
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
There are TWO issues here, and I fear that one of them is being overshadowed by the other. It is not at all clear that they are unequal in magnitude, at least from the point of view of a HP shareholder, or even a board member.
One of the members of the board was leaking company information, and in a way that exposes HP to punitive action by the SEC.
Leaking a company's moral wrongdoings (whistleblowing) is one thing -- a valuable service to all stakeholders, but leaks that expose corporate strategy to competitors prematurely, are used to manipulate stock prices for personal gain, or expose the company to legal action because of potential for the former are no virtue.
Frankly, unless the leaking involves whistleblowing, I think that companies should have some legal recourse against the journalists to help them find the leaks. The existance of which would've prevented the need for the phone-record mining.
I'm not saying we should reduce condemnation of what amounts to identy theft, but we should step up the condemnation on what amounts to stock manipulation.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
...Dunn hired a third-party who subcontracted an individual who fraudulently collected the phone records.
IMO, Dunn and the third-party should be convicted of conspiracy to commit fraud (or something, anything, just to give the bitch some jail time), and should be forced to hand over the name of the individual who collected the phone records in order to charge him with fraud.
Dunn knew how the phone records were collected. Perkins called her on it. And CERTAINLY the third-party knew what the individual was going to do.
:(){
The problem is that you mentioned capitalism, as though you were saying something distinctive about it, or that different economic systems might not have powerful people who think they can get away with being assholes.
Imagine if I went to the zoo and dropped 16-ton weights on all the animals. They all died. Then I said, "The problem with parrots is that they fail to resist a 16-ton weight." It sounds like I'm talking about parrots, but parrots actually have nothing to do with it. The real issue is the 16-ton weight.
Instead of "the ills of capitalism" it would have been more precise and less silly to say something along the lines of "the ills of human nature" or "some people are such assholes" or "power corrupts".
Some of the ills of capitalism is that people are mortal, there is evil in the world, and we still don't have "Mr. Fusion" under the hoods of all our cars. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Dunn, Fiorina. Wall Street is probably just sexist. Or maybe it's a fact that men manage companies better. Or maybe misguided thinking elevates inadequate people to positions they aren't qualified for merely for the sake of filling some quota of diversity.
What? This isn't anything to do with capitalism, it's the political system and the law.
So what's your suggestion to replace capitalism, because it's going to have to force people to part with their goods and services somehow.
Deleted
Bullshit, the rich stole the means of producion (natural resource) from the people, fenced them off, and only then worked them and claimed that working them was justification for stealing them in the first place. Kind of like if I stole a bike, painted it, then claimed it was mine because I had worked on it. They are only more productive because they control more resources. Love the way you gloss over inherited wealth, which is most of it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
he stepped down because if the SEC finds out he knew about an internal board level leaker on his watch, he'll be guilty of security fraud for not disclosing. There's potential for insider trading where the leaker is telling tails outside offical channels. He's a much bigger fish to fry. Dunn is just a boss doing her duty a little to zealously.
Are you from Europe? If so, that may explain things - in the US, there aren't that many rich families that can just inherit all their wealth to live. It is even considered bad form to leave your kids with enough that they don't have to work - Bill Gates and Warren Buffet being the best known examples.
From a purely economic standpoint, what you describe is not really true in most societies. On average, 80% of the profit gained from an activity goes to the workers. This has been true for as long as we have data to measure (which is actually a lot further than I would have thought - several centuries of good data at least). In fact, this was the data that really disproves the underpinning of socialism - the division of profit between capital providers and workers has not changed in all the years we have information about.
There is an interesting theory as to why this is true - essentially, 80% of the value is created by the workers. That means if you give the workers more than 80%, the capital providers lose money until they are no longer capital providers. On the other hand, if the capital providers keep more than 80% then the rest of the market passes them by, and again they are no longer capital providers.
Many people in the US go from lower class to middle class, and from middle class to upper class, and from upper class to elite all the time! I am a good example of that, as is a man I know that went from the projects to being a multimillionaire. There is no conspiracy keeping you down - just work for what you want in a way that will get you what you want, and use your head!
If there really was a conspiracy, I would recommend getting to know those on the "inside". That way you could join in or subvert. The fact is, there is no conspiracy - anyone that works hard enough gets to the top. And at the top, you are taking 20% from a lot of overall profit!
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So spying on the rank-and-file employees is OK, but do it to the members of the board, who in all likelihood sit on many other boards of major corporations, and suddenly it's like, "oh. my. gosh! haw cud they doo thaat?"
On the other hand, Dunn had to be pretty stupid to piss off the members of the board, who in all likelihood sit on the boards of many other major corporations. Suddenly, Congress itself is investigating. Yes, those people have that kind of juice.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Folks like you get their way, in a few years it'll be "say hello to 1929" and then before you know its "say hello to 1939" again.
Could you be more condescending? Not everyone that works hard enough can get to the top. I can see why you would believe that, though. It worked for you. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth and all that. Why, if it weren't true, then maybe you aren't the superior being you like to think of yourself as. Maybe you just got lucky. That's a bitter pill to swallow, so I can see how you would want to hold on to your comfortable illusions. The fact is, there are a hell of a lot more smart hard working people than their are places at the top. I've worked hard all my life, and I'm damn smart, but I've had shit for luck, one setback after another. This happens. This is the real world, not happy capitalist dream land, and if you can't see that, you're deliberately blinding yourself to the truth, for the reasons I mentioned above.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...I can still get ink refills for my HP printer/scanner/copier...I don't care. :)
Sugapablo
...is it any time anyone criticizes capitalism, it turns into "what's your suggestion?" Since I can come up with no better substitute, I should be disqualified from performing a critique?
I purposely avoided saying that we need something better. The point is that capitalism focuses on the profit motive. The profit motive drives corporations to do whatever they need to do to make a buck. This puts the dollar above and beyond morals and ethics. Thus the government needs to step in and regulate in an attempt to put morals and ethics back into business, which only works occasionally due to the fact that the government also subscribes to $ > morals/ethics.
Nowhere does capitalism punish an evil entity. But capitalism, which focuses on the profit motive, certainly does start to give people with shitloads of money the idea that they can get away with anything. Most of them do.
:(){
Sure, avoiding the public backlash is nice, but the only reason this is even a problem is because it made the news. If no one talked about it, Dunn wouldn't have had to step down. Therefore it's actually the press and the public that is responsible for this. Capitalism did jack and shit to dissuade them from their unethical actions. They had a shit load of money, and money was at stake, so they spent some money to try and figure out who was leaking.
The ethics of the situation were less important than the potential loss of money - capitalism is directly related to their decision.
:(){
Well, this IS an election year, and the President is a global lame duck. From the parent statement, "...10 more who did far worse go free..." During these elective times, nothing says yum like a mess of "Caught Red Handed Corporate Leaders." I'm certain the FBI, SEC, and DHS can supply the cooking ingredients, all they need is a HINT of "Evidence".
Bullshit, the rich stole the means of producion (natural resource) from the people, fenced them off, and only then worked them and claimed that working them was justification for stealing them in the first place. Kind of like if I stole a bike, painted it, then claimed it was mine because I had worked on it. They are only more productive because they control more resources. Love the way you gloss over inherited wealth, which is most of it.
1895 on line 1. They're going on and on about a whole shipment of missing rhetoric; want me to take a message?
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
I agree that not everyone that works hard gets to the top - but I disagree that people that both work hard and work smart do not get themsleves at least near the top. Yes, it does take luck to be a Microsoft rather than a small company, but either one is the top as far as I am concerned. If you are having bad luck, then examine what is making your luck. Some things are unavoidable - I started a company that was heavily airline dependant 2 months before 9/11... it didn't work out so well. But a lot of it isn't - think about what you control, rather than the stuff you can't.
Good luck - I hope you make millionaire!
(Just to be clear, I do not agree the the AC above me - at least not with how he said it. You do make your own luck, but sometimes even that is by knowing when to quit.)
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Smart ass comments are often used to cover up the fact that one has no valid counter argument. Does your mind just shut off when you hear the words "means of production?" Can you refute the notion that property is theft? What gives you the right to fence off a piece of property in the first place? These are still legitimate questions to which I have seen no satisfactory answer. Maybe you can be the first to come up with a good counter argument. Or maybe all you can do is make smart ass remarks that add nothing to the discussion. The fact that this line of reasoning is just as valid today as it was in 1895 is kind of sad, though. Means that not a lot has changed since then.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I thought this was called "social engineering" at one time. The weakest link in an IT system were the human administrators. You could sweet talk them into breaking the system.
Thanks, I really appreciate it, but the fact that you point out the obvious things like "if you are having bad luck, then examine what is making your luck," still makes me feel as though you are talking down to me. You are assuming I'm not smart enough to have figured that out and done it. Which probably comes from an ingrained belief that anyone who does do that will succeed, so obviously I must not have known to try that.
I'm not complaining about my life, I'm not poor, I have my health, and I have a wife and family that I love. It's just that I can empathize with people who's position is worse than mine, and I can see how inherently unfair the system is, precisely because I have had such bad luck. I'm sure if the system had worked for me, I never would have questioned it. I just think we can make things more equitable, that we can make the world more just and fair, and I honestly believe that the people who most vehemently defend our current system realize, perhaps subconsciously, that they have an unfair advantage in this system and are loath to change it because they know they would not do so well in a system that was really fair.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Quote from the article: "... Dunn will remain as a director after she relinquishes the chair on Jan. 18."
What's the message here? Do something unacceptable, and you can still be a director, you just can't be the Chairperson?
I can remember when HP was a good company. Now when I try to install HP products, it is common that I get error messages... during installation.
Heh, well I have a good life, wife and family - though not really health. I agree that the system in unfair, but everything I have experienced leads me to believe it is very nearly the best possible system. If it was more fair, I believe there would be a net loss in happiness. I'm really not trying to talk down to you, but it is really a paradigm shift that most people need - to not look at what happened to you, but only to look at what you did that caused it. Toyota (I think) had an interesting program along these lines - Ask why 6 times. The production line stopped. Why? The bolt broke and I had to fix it. Why? 0.1% of all bolts break. Why? Because that is the spec in the contract. Why? Because it was industry standard language. Why? Because no-one had thought that one broken bolt per thousand would cost more than 100,000 bolts would!
I don't believe in unfettered capitalism, but I think almost everyone has but too many restraints on it. I actually like the way the US economy works, and Bill Gates doesn't make me feel inadequate.
But anyway - what would you change? How would you make it more fair? (The one change I would make is 100% estate taxes over $1M - though again, this law is completely unenforceable for the same reasons that the Kenedys pay no estate taxes!)
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Estate tax is a good place to start, but I'm an old school anarchist of the Proudhon variety, and I believe that property is theft. Not personal property, but natural resources. There is no justification for fencing off land and taking away other people's freedom to use it. You have to have labored over something before you have a right to call it your own, and you have to own something before you have a right to keep others from using it. Therefore, no one has any justification in holding natural resources as their own.
I have not come up with the perfect solution to this dilemma. As Proudhon also, less famously said, property is also the only real protection against tyranny and is inherently anarchistic because it respects no king or lord. I feel their are two choices, Proudhon's idea of communal control of resources or some form of distributarianism. In communal control there is the plus that the process of deciding on how to use resources is democratic, but without a strong constitution and a system of checks and balances this can lead to a tyranny of the majority. With distributarianism, everyone owns their little portion of the means of production, but who arbitrates this ownership, and how do we ensure that the means are distribuited equitably.
There are many problems with the free market as a system of arbitration. It requires perfect information on the part of all actors to work efficiently. It can not correctly value the costs and benefits of externalities. It does not operate efficiently where the marginal cost of entry into markets is very high (commonly known as a monopoly.) It has no negative feedback cycle to prevent a runaway accumulation of wealth by a few people. The more wealth one has, the easier it is to make more by using your wealth to game the system and ensure their isn't a level playing field. The free market can not think ahead and come up with solutions. It can only say what isn't working, not what might work better, and if what might work better is locked out due to any of the previously mentioned root causes of market failure, we will be stuck with what we have.
We have a system that expects and rewards selfishness. So much so that even though the majority of people have been shown in modern economic experiments to favor fairness and reciprocity over personal gain, they will act selfishly rather than cooperatively because that is what the system rewards. In fact, the system gives free reign to screw over the naturally cooperative (and this is a large part of the reason behind my "bad luck." I'm too nice and too trusting, and I am not willing to sell out that part of myself just to get ahead.)
Remember, your friends, relatives and acquantences are not a random sample of the population. You have probably not met the legions of people for whom the system has not worked, despite their best efforts, so it is no stretch for you to think of those people in the abstract sense, and to believe that they had all the opportunities that you did. It's just easier to think that they are where they are because they are lazy than to feel like you have to change the whole system.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I will see your Gates and Buffets and raise you with...
du Pont, Johnson, Lerner, Walton, Hostetter, Chambers, Anthony, Johnson, Dorrance, Marcus, Magness, Macmillan, Icahn, Lindner, Pohlad, Wang, Johnson, Gates, Koch, Feeney, Schwab, Weber, Spangler, McCaw, Carlson, Ziff, Sun, Geffen, Duffield, Koch, Rockefeller, Washington, Ziff, Newhouse, Fisher, Tyson, Hall, Bren, Fisher, Hamilton, Bronfman, Johnson, Gaylord, Broad, Haas, Gore, Blaustein, Busch, Smith (Dave), Brown, Hillenbrand, Hixon, Mead, Alfond, Bancroft, Gottwald, Hughes, Mellon, Schwan, Searle, Stuart, Smith (Byron), Horvitz, Jordan, Scripps (E.W.), Rockefeller, Pitcairn, Pulitzer, Gund, Weyerhaeuser, Temple, Upjohn, Haebler, Campbell, Norris, Bacardi, Clapp, Reed, McGraw, Cayre, Belfer, Lilly, De Young, Hoiles, Jenkins, Donnelley, Collier, Nordstrom, Dayton, Meijer, Lykes, Idema, Mennen, Chandler, Davis, Mellon, Schwan, Searle, Stuart, Smith (Byron), Horvitz, Jordan, Scripps (E.W.), Rockefeller, Pitcairn, Pulitzer, Gund, Weyerhaeuser, Temple, Upjohn, Sarofim, Mars, Geballe, Perdue, Lennon, Field, Soros, Lucas, Roberts, Moore, Getty, Simmons, Helmsley, Huizenga, Walton, Hillman, Kravis, Perot, Van Beuren, Getty, Scripps, Taylor, Cooke, Stephens, Vogel, Goodnight, Sorenson, Moran, Cargill, Van Andel, Pritzker, Jannard, Walton, Kroc, Tu, Sall, Abele, Mars, Macmillan, Louis Family, Simplot, Walton, Kluge, Huntsman, Jamail, Haas, Albertson, Murdoch, Tuchman, Troutt, Kerkorian, Goldsbury, Rockefeller, Tisch, Ellison, Bass, Lauder, Stern, Skaggs, Wexner, Crown, Rich, Cargill, Harbert, Pictet, Ingram, Davis, Malone, Anselmo, Greenberg, Dell, Bloomberg, Fribourg, Arison, Smith, Mellon, Allen, Keinath, Haas, Nicholas, Anschutz, Knight, Tisch, Lauren, Hearst, Hunt, Rowling, Rainwater, Devos, Scaife, Goldman, Bechtel, Pritzker, Haas, Ziff, Turner, Dedman, Bass, Galvin, Goizueta, Perelman, Lauder, Walton, Zell, Johnson, Newhouse, Lefrak, Bass, Hubbard, Bechtel, Spielberg, Ballmer, Levine, Redstone, Buffett, Schwartz, Waitt, Frist, Macmillan, Annenberg, Macmillan, Wrigley, Ford, Davidson, Hewlett, Rockefeller...
I can go on and on. Do you want some more?
Most people in US are rich because they were born rich. Yeah, some do go up and down the classes, but those are exceptions not rules.
Hmm, Gates and Buffet are the exception, not the rule. The Bush family is a prime example: this is a family from which the current living generations are all born in wealth. Especially with abolishing the so-called 'death tax' by the same family, the next 10 generations are saved from actually doing an honest days work in their lives. They will simply not run out of money! There are many more of such families in the US, and each have an interest (and the money and power) to keep it that way. Currently the US is breeding a new aristocracy, in which a founder of the family in some distant past made his great fortune, and subsequently, many generations profit from it. American dream?
but natural resources
Actually, that is my number 2 - I think estate taxes are a little more important, but what I would propose is that all land/mineral rights/etc be owned by the state. Instead of taxes, you pay to use those rights (everyone would pay rent to the government, for example). Unfortunately, it has many of the same basic problems - those that have resources would expend those resources to bend the government to protect their resources. Well, that and you would never get buy in from everyone!
requires perfect information on the part of all actors to work efficiently.
Not totally true - it perfect information would give perfect results, presumably, but the key fact is that it gracefully degrades. Where the information is worst you are no worse off than any other system, and where the information is best you are much better off - excluding monopolies, as you rightfully point out. In general, though, even monopolies tend to be short lived - see Microsoft's impending doom (or if you don't believe that one, look at DeBiers, etc.). If abused successfully they can greatly extend their lives, but in the end they fail.
no negative feedback cycle to prevent a runaway accumulation of wealth by a few people
This is probably our biggest point of difference, in that I would say that this is a desirable feature in an economic system. If someone has been shown to be successfull at making stuff, make it easier for them to try to make even more stuff. This is going from the principle that you get money by making an output that society values more than the sum of the inputs - and then you haggle over how the difference will be split (and of course, long term society wins because you die and it doesn't!). As I have stated elsewhere, when Bill Gates makes another billion it doesn't really have a downside to society (because if that money were to be evenly distributed instead it would only cause inflation, not value creation) and it doesn't really have much upside to Bill Gates (he cannot buy anything now that he couldn't have bought yesterday). But it does drive Bill to create more value - and more importantly, it gives him the power needed to cause real changes (like his recent medical work). As I say, I see this as an important part of society.
the system gives free reign to screw over the naturally cooperative
Sounds like you work for big corps - I think that is a mistake for people that are hard working (with some exceptions). A large corporation exists to shield people from their mistakes. That means that people that make fewer mistakes on average (or that perform better, or whatever) have to suplement the efforts of the more marginal workers. I am a strong believer in small companies - I've started 8 now. The first couple failed, and failed badly - but the fourth one stayed up (and that's what you'll get son - the strongest castle in these isles!)... I'm too nice and too trusting, hmmm - do you need a job? Like rockets? Really, this depends a lot on who you work for. There are many sharks, but there are many nice people too.
Remember, your friends, relatives and acquantences are not a random sample of the population.
Too right! I had a professor once exclaim "You know what the worst place to do a market survey is? YOUR HEAD! You are not normal!" But hopefully talking with others can bridge the gulf of my lack of knowlege.
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Um - you realize both Buffet and Gates were in your rebuttable?
Anyway, as I have said elsewhere, who cares about billionaires - look at the multimillionaires around you, and see what they did. You can't emulate someones birthplace, so find someone else to emulate.
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I do agree with you - I think the estate tax should be nearly 100%. I also think that if and when the US has an aristocracy the same people that made the US great are going to move on and make another place great.
My point is merely that they will still use a capitalistic economy in that new place.
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I can make the same list with multimillionaires, there will just be tens of thousands instead of just hundreds.
I look at all the multimillionaires and vast majority of them are graduates of the finest universities in the country (mostly Ivy Leagues) which they could not have attended without years of private schooling and the fundings and backings of their parents. Just look at the percentage of Ivy League students whose parents also went to Ivy League, it is pretty damn high.
And when they graduate, they end up working for their parent's company or friends of their parent's who find them a nice cushy positions.
Sure, there are many entrepreneurs as well, but they also didn't have to knock down on hundreds of VC's trying to get funding. They already had trust fund for that.
They will all be left with millions which will be millions more than I ever will see from my parents (of from my job).
And do you think those kids will have ANY problem getting into ANY university in the world? I think not.
When they graduate, do you think they will be sending out resumes? PUHLEEZE. Bill or Warrent will make a few phone calls and multitude of executive positions will be available for their choosing (if they decide not go in their family business). They will probably be offered multitude board positions. How many job offers did I get without many rounds of interviews and applications?....umm... NONE!
Even in the most democratic and open society like ours, there is still a class system. It might not be as brightly drawn as other cultures, but it is there noless.
First point: you are right, and this is the hardest part in designing any system! How do you prevent concentration of power. First, everything should be decided by choice and contract. No coercion. But we do have to have laws that keep people from taking away other people's choices unjustly. And I see taking natural resources as a kind of choice theft. Our system of representative democracy provides a good blueprint for a system of checks and balances, but for continued good functioning it needs an educated and involved populace.
Second point: I am talking here about the issue addressed in the well known economic paper that was published in 19790, "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" by George Akerlof. Basically, the problem is thus: Buyers and sellers of used cars do not have equal access to information about those cars. Sellers have a motive to overstate the value of their cars, therefore buyers must assume that all used cars are less valuable than stated. This drives down the market value of used cars, which in turn drives the sellers with higher quality cars out of the market, making the problem even worse.
Third point: nobody creates value on their own. They are part of a system. Leaders have no value without followers. Innovators have the cushion of security needed to innovate precisely because the majority of people don't innovate but just do what worked for their ancestors. By overvaluing certain systemic functions such as leadership or innovation, the system encourages people who would not naturally drawn to those roles to do them even though they aren't suited to them. You can't have a system that is all leaders and innovators, it wouldn't work.
As for giving the people wo are good at what they do more control, I agree. excellence should be rewarded, and in fact this fits with most people's sense of fairness. If someone was producing something of value in a system of democratically controlled resources, do you not think that people would vote to give that person greater control?
I work for the state. 'nuff said? But I have been screwed over by small business owners who I thought were my friends, too.
People like you, who work hard, take risks, are good and decent, and provide opportunities for other should be rewarded. I can't stress this enough. I'm not a communist in that regard. But there should be limits to the amount of money and power that anyone is allowed to accumulate, and I wuold put that limit squarely at the point that one person's power and money compromises another person's ability to be free to make their own best choices.
I love rockets. I'm a network admin by trade, specializing in Linux, clusters, HA systems, IBM BladeCenter & VMWare. I do have a job, and it's not bad for being a state job. I've seen worse run IT departments in private companies, actually. I actually wish I had more to do, and a manager who was more involved and gave me a little more direction. As it is, I have a lot of leeway but little satisfaction.
The reason I converse is not to prove I'm right, but rather to find out if.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's too late - what's Dunn is done. /rimshot
Solomon
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
True, those advantages exist - but parents always want to make things better for their children, which is a Good ThingTM. That is one of the perks of making it that far. The difference, as Warren Buffet says, is that you should leave your children enough money so that they can do anything, but not enough money so that they can do nothing. I totally agree with that sentiment. (Would you admit to anyone that Paris Hilton was your daughter? Yada!)
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Here is my conspiracy theory. They hired Mrs. Dunn, told her they had leaks on the board. She accepted the position, taking orders from some one else. She will be well paid for taking some slack on this whole ordeal. Everyone will walk, except the company that was hired, they will go out of business, HP will blame them that it was their fault. Mrs Dunn will retire, she is ready to, she's been fighting cancer for far too long now, ready for some R&R on HP's money. Just my imagination here but stranger things have happened.
You going to lionize him for this, too?
From you link:
On the chip front, although HP and Intel have had a long relationship involving their collaboration on the Itanium chip, delays by Intel have created frustration in the HP camp, the source said. As a result, HP may use Intel's archrival Advanced Micro Devices as a cattle prod of sorts to the chip giant, the source noted. "We plan to use AMD's Opteron more and more," the source said.
Lionize? No. I asked you to justify calling him "slime" who deserves to be fired. The above, an anonymous threat to Intel over obvious and public technical failure, does not do it for me. You can mumbo jumbo it all up by calling that "proprietary information" but you can't call it a serious offense or even pin it to Keyworth. Anyone who'd have bet money on an anonymous report like that is crazy, so what harm could it have done? Companies talk about switching suppliers all the time when they are not engaging in illegal trusts to drive out competition. You will have to do better than that.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Many in here seem to be dedicated to mocking Patricia Dunn using variously insulting names of her. It might be justified or not, but many replies display the posters seeing only one side of the story, and only with a single interpretation: Private investigation company impersonated HP board members et al to gain their private information from AT&T, the investigation was requested by Dunn, so she is evil.
Having spent a few hours reading all about the case from CNET News.com, I try to explain to you the whole story in a bit more detail but leaving out everything non-critical. I start with quoting the article HP chairman: Use of pretexting 'embarrassing', bold emphasis mine:
I don't doubt any of the claims above. Companies depend on their ability to do great business before everyone else is doing the same, so everyone involved in upper-level management understands that keeping certain things secret is critical to the company. So does every major shareholder, ie. the people who actually own the company.
Now if leaking one single time certain small details about the company could have negative impact, that's small compared to what HP has faced. Like the above citation shows, there had been repetitive leaks for a while already, and they weren't small ones either: HP outlines long-term strategy.
When a company cannot decide when to publish this kind of information, it is in serious trouble. HP wasn't ready to publish any of this yet, but someone sitting in HP board of directors made it all public ahead of time. Maybe some parts were never intended for anyone outside the board to know. Read the article to get a view on what the press got to publish.
The leaks were a serious problem for HP, so I bet Patricia Dunn as the chairman of the board was put under a lot of pressure to solve the case. She succeeded in that, but to her misfortune, wasn't able to get it done in a manner that would be legal and wouldn't cause major heat from the media (CNN has been keeping the flame up a big time, probably wanting a payback for Reporter's records accessed in HP probe).
In the process board member Tom Perkins resigned, and stated afterwards that "I did not resign from the board for frivolous reasons, but because HP was standing into dangerous waters--waters hazardous with both illegal and unconscionable governance practices--and because my advice was being ignored". CNET's articles try to draw a picture of him having resigned simply because he suspected immoral and/or illegal methods to have been used in the probe, but somebody replying in a previous Slashdot story on the subject claimed that he got only mad because it was among his duties to solve the whole leaking case and Dunn had thus stepped on his toes. Haven't seen a link to any data backing that up though so I wouldn't encourage making any judgments yet.
Whether or not us non-experts in corporate management decide to take an opinion or anot
I believe that property is theft.
Thanks for admitting that, so there's no need to take you seriously.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Can you refute the notion that property is theft?
Can you refute the notion that the moon is made of green cheese? Your assertion, your burden of proof.
The fact that this line of reasoning is just as valid today as it was in 1895 is kind of sad, though.
Well, you're sort of right about that at least. It was bullshit when the first wave of socialist misanthropes dreamed it up, and it's bullshit today. The biggest difference between them and you, is that they couldn't predict the havoc their followers would wreak, whereas you know the track record of socialism (about 100 million dead), and you still spew it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
All she *really* had to do was put a consent form in front of each chair at the board meeting and tell them that anyone who didn't consent to a release of phone records would be assumed to have resigned. Keyworth would either have been forced to resign to protect his phone records or give permission to be caught leaking to the press.
Socialism as a philosophy isn't responsible for 100 million dead. Now who's making up statistics (yes, I was, so I'll admit it here rather than reply to three seperate posts.) Communism can certainly be held responsible for a large number of deaths, but the two are not the same. And I'm neither, I'm an anarchist, like Proudhon, who was the earliest critic of Marx, by the way. You may want to learn a little about history before disdainfully dismissing anyone's philosophy, if only to figure out why it's wrong and better refute it. Or maybe you're just the ad hominem type. Or the type who has found the One True Path and can tolerate no deviance from it.
I gave a good explanation as to why property is theft, and you did nothing to refute my explanation, so we'll try this again. Firstly, I'm talking about real property: land, natural resource, etc. I'm not talking about the fruits of your labor, things you worked on. Those are yours. As I said, I'm no communist. But no one owned any land before some smart guy got the idea of fencing it off, so everyone had the opportunity to use it in a shared fashion. In order to mix your labor with land and have a legitimate right to call it yours, you need to exclude others from it, thus the act of mixing your labor necesarily happens before you have a legitimate claim. It is the same as me stealing a bike, painting it, and calling it my own because I worked on it.
Now, we come to the heart of the argument. The people who you exclude from your property are only getting one thing in exchange for the agreement not to trespass, and that is that you will uphold their claims to property as well. The whole notion of property can only be based on this agreement, justification by so-called natural rights just doesn't fly. I have the natural right to do anything that's in my power to do, including killing you and taking your land. I won't kill you because that is the ultimate choice theft, I have taken away all your possible choices. Owning property is a lesser crime, it takes away the choice to use that property, but it takes it from everyone.
So what do all the non-property holders get in exchange for their agreement not to use your property? Nothing. So they have no ethical reason to honor your request. The only reason they have is the threat of force, and that's not a very good justification in my book.
I see two possible solutions to this dilemma. One, a system that distributes an equitable amount of real property to everyone, so everyone is a party to the contract. Two, a system of democratic control of property where everyone is a party to the contract. To me, these are the only ethical ways of dealing with the issue of scarcity in regards to real property.
I've stated my case as clearly as possible. If you think I am wrong-headed here, I ask that you provide a clear argument as to why. As I stated, I'm not an idealist, and if you can provide a convincing argument, I will change my tune in a heartbeat. I've done it before when I've seen that my reasoning is flawed, and I'm sure I'll do it again. So I ask you, where have I gone wrong in my thinking?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You should get that knee looked at, it's jerking pretty hard there. I picture you getting to that line and steam coming out of your ears. First, you realize I'm talking about real property, not personal property, right? And I provide a decent argument as to why real property is theft, which I note you haven't actually tried to refute on its merits, but simply dismissed. Perhaps you have no way of refuting my argument, but can't stand to admit that? Ah, well, you can always lug out the trusty ad hominem, can't you? That'll refute anything! I bet all ten far right conservatives with an IQ under 90 who read slashdot are saying, "Yeeehaw! Y'all done showed him!"
You'll have to do better than that if you want to impress anyone intelligent, right, left or center. Look at my fans list. Like it or not, lots of people here take me seriously. Maybe this bastion of commies and lefties is not really the placed for you, hmmm? Maybe you'd be more comfortable on a site like freerepublic.com, where everyone thinks like you do and pointless ad hominems rule? Obviously you aren't someone who likes having their ideology questioned or their assumptions challenged, and you have a very narrow and limited view of what is considered normal and acceptable discourse, so a site like that would be perfect for someone of your level of intellectual development.
See? Two can play at the ad hominem game, and quite frankly, I think I play it better. But if you'd rather to have a rational discussion, I'll be waiting.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Both of your solutions require "a system" of control -- either explicit ("democratic control of property") or implicit ("distributes an equitable amount...") -- which requires substantial input (definitions of "equitable", of "everyone", of "contract"), output (the control, including assignments with regard to which property is used how, when, and by whom), and internal beauracracy.
So, would these systems themselves own property? (But "property is theft", you say!) If not, where would such a system exist, how would it conduct its business, exert its influence (control and police property boundaries as required), etc.?
Who would make the decisions on behalf of the systems' inner workings -- who would decide who gets to vote on "democratic control" issues (children? fetuses? really smart chimpanzees?), for example, and how they vote? An "elite" of some sort? And who would elect and subsequently oversee those elite? Meanwhile, would those elite get special favors, such as particularly valuable property? If so, would that be "equitable" or "ethical"? If not, what would be the incentive for anyone to put themselves in such a position, if it was policed to a greater extent than the "common man", but yielded no extra benefits?
In fact, how would any such system balance the desires of person X to trade his property with person Y, given that X prefers Y's property even though X's property might actually be larger, because X's is in a desert and Y has oceanfront property in Boca Raton, FL? (Well, that pertains to your first system, which distributes property "equitably", even though you seem to believe "property is theft" -- so would everyone be a thief in that system?)
Or, taking the second system, what about people (or even animals) who would simply refuse, for whatever reason, to participate in the system you've proposed? Would they, or would they not, be "fenced off" from the property "claimed" by the collectivist system you propose? If fenced off, isn't that the same as the property that is "theft" in your view, except insofar as the "owner" is a faceless corporate amalgamation you call "a system of democratic control"? If not fenced off, how valuable would the collective's property be if anyone or anything outside the system could use, exploit, even plunder the property?
And when you say "these are the only ethical ways of dealing with the issue of scarcity in regards to real property", why do you believe any particular human being's definition of "ethics" should determine how an entire planet's land mass is distributed among the humans who populate it? And, why do you believe real property is "scarce"? If each and every person presently on this planet was given one whole acre of land, how big would that collective land mass be measured in terms with which we might be more familiar:
That is, which of the above is the smallest that still contains six to seven billion acres of land?
Finally, are you aware of any experiments that put your approaches into practice? How do they work, how well do they work (how inclusive, ethical, etc. are they in practice), and how long have they been working? Are they serving as examples for others to try out? Do they require violence to enforce rules? Is the property collectively owned more, or less, productive than that owned by capitalists?
I know there are a lot of questions here, but I think they naturally arise due to your proposal to replace each and every socioeconomic, political, and religious system on the planet with your idea(s).
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
Private real property requires system of control as well. It needs enforcement by state power to be effective, otherwise we are talking about the tyranny of the strong. You gloss over my main point, that is, private property entails choice theft. Non-property holders have no stake in a system of private property ownership.
The systems I mention would not own property but would manage it on behalf of it's true owners, the people of the world, collectively. I don't have the answers as to where it would exist or how it would exert its influence, as these issues would be decided by the people who's interests are being represented.
Every stakeholder in the system would participate in the decision making process, but exactly how and to what degree isn't up to me, but the citizens of planet earth. Not fetuses or chimpanzees, but even smartass humans would be allowed to vote in these matters, or the system would not be fair and equitable. You are using loaded questions to cast unwarrented aspersions without explainign how our current system doesn't produce the same unwanted outcomes.
As for how the syetm would balance individual desires, that is up to the participants in such a system to decide. Individual ownership of natural resources is theft, not a system of collective control, because a collective system vests control in everyone rather than only property owners.
As for your next set of questions, I will pose one of my own. What choice do non property owners who do not wish to participate in our current system have?
In my proposal, property would be fenced off from those not wanting to participate, because those who want a system of private ownership of natural resources are thieves who are stealing those resources from the rest of us. But I would advocate for a distributed, bottom up style of control where individual groups could take their collective share of property and choose to mediate control through a free market system.
I don't believe any particular person or small group's definition of ethics should be imposed on everyone. But that is what is happening now.
New Hampshire contains nearly six billion acres of land. Your point is moot, though, because if natural resources weren't scarce they wouldn't have any value in our current system.
The Mondragon Collective in Spain is perhaps the best example of a system somewhat similar to mine put into practice on a large scale, although there are admitedly some differences. I leave it up to you to look it up and research it if you are interested.
It should be noted that private property ownership requires violence to enforce it's rules.
Now, how about you answer a question, as neither you nor anyone else I've discussed this with has been willing or able to refute my major points. Just one question, but it is a big one. On what basis do you justify private ownerhsip of natural resources?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Socialism as a philosophy isn't responsible for 100 million dead.
Rather more than that actually, but it's in that ballpark. About 30M for Stalin, 77M for Mao, etc. This is why I hold people like you in such utter contempt, just like the holocaust deniers.
As I said, I'm no communist.
Communist, fascist, parlor-pink, all you looters are the same to me. Go to hell, goto Cuba, take your pick.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Learn your history, you freak. I'm an anarchist, the commies hate us as much as they hate the capitalists. Why do you think Trotsky got an icepick in the ear? You have no idea what you're talking about, it's all just "looters who want to take mah propuh-tie!" to you, isn't it?. You're the looter, you fascist propertarian. I'm sure as far as your concerned the whole rest of humanity can go to hell, as long as you've got yours. Selfish sociopathic git. Society made you what you are, it gave you everything you have, including the language you so blithely use to disparage it. Without society you'd be no more than a starving animal. You owe society a debt that can't be measured. So you can take your propertarian nonsense and stick it up your fat ass, you smirking chimp. I tried to have a civil conversation with you and figure out where you disagreed with me, but it appears that all you are capable of is hooting and flinging feces. You obviously aren't smart enough to bother with.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You seem to have misunderstood the thrust of my questions. I was not saying the present system is better or more desireable than your proposed system.
I was simply asking how your proposed system could, or would, actually work in practice, such that it accomplishes what you say it would.
Your answers failed to address most or all of the questions. For example, saying the citizens of planet earth would decide what is equitable or would vote in an equitable way utterly fails to address, to name just one concern, how that takes into account those citizens who would not agree with the majority decision regarding "equity".
There are many other practical problems with your proposal that perhaps you could address as well, if you had been willing and able to lay a foundation for how the system actually worked. (For example, if two people to whom land was previously "equitably" distributed privately chose to exchange some portion of the shared land for some other benefit they considered tangible but that wasn't "equitably distributed" by your proposed System, wouldn't that mean that real property itself was no longer "equitably distributed"? How would your system detect and correct this?)
But it was worth a try anyway. Note that, in the future, if you don't like being asked allegedly "loaded" questions about your proposed systems to correct some cosmic imbalance you perceive exists in the universe, you shouldn't post commentary that strongly suggests you have already formulated reasonable answers to them.
Also, you are probably aware that there are plenty of places on planet earth right now where people interested in "owning" (in a practical, if not legal, sense) some real property and living out their lives can go -- places where they would daily gather fruits and nuts, or perhaps hunt local game, for survival, though have little or no access to what some might call the fruits of modern civilization (which is substantially, if not entirely, based on notions of real-property ownership by individuals and corporations that you certain consider unethical).
Yet there is hardly any stampede of people towards such places. Indeed, from what I've read on the subject, people who try them out with the best of intentions usually end up fleeing them later.
This is among many reasons why I accept, despite reservations about "inequitability" and more-serious ones about the violence that seemingly is necessary to support it, our present property-ownership system. It allows individuals (and corporate entities, which I view as legal fictions vis-a-vis an individual human being's God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) to cooperate and/or compete for whatever sorts of property they most value at any given time in their lives -- real, intellectual, monetary, equities (shares in for-profit corporations), and so on.
Like you, I've long considered ways to improve or replace the system with something better. But I have been unable to do so, because I can't come up with one that assures global equity of property distribution across an entire populace that satisfies everybody, from those who believe children are property of parents (that is, a child that is born is not suddenly given an equal "share" of land that is accordingly taken away from others in some piecemeal, perhaps rather destructive, fashion, but only shares in what the parents already "own" under a system as the parents see fit) to those who are zealous advocates of animal rights (who do not accept that any human or collection of humans has any more "rights" to a piece of land than any animal, from primates on "down" the Darwinian ladder, to the extent the advocate accepts th
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
This is a particularly telling quote, because nowhere did I say that those who didn't want to participate would necessarily all be "those who want a system of private ownership of natural resources". Yet you define all non-participants as "thieves", apparently even if they merely want, but do not necessarily have, private property. (Was your wording intentional?) So they are thieves because they are outside your system and do not therefore share a stake in your property -- which is why I posed the problem in the first place.
If that's true, then the word "thief", as you use it, has little or no utility when it comes to defining desireable outcomes. A "thief" in your view would be either someone who believes in private property ownership under any system other than yours or does not wish (or is not able) to participate in your system, regardless of their views.
So I must dismiss any pertinence of the term "thief", which you insist on continually throwing around, as it has little or no value in constructing a system. Which leaves us with the question of how to handle the problem of non-participation in any system that purports to justify itself based on "equity", vis-a-vis the question of whether non-participants are, by virtue of the existence and predominance of that system, inherently disadvantaged either in relation to the system's nonexistence (difficult to assess) or when compared to those who do participate in the system (which becomes a matter of the system either being truly equitable or not).
In fact, if you look at even entirely voluntary systems controlling infinitely reproducible, and thus basically ephemeral resources, such as software, you'll see that it's often the case that people can and will disagree with a system that controls a thing even while agreeing with the basis (reason) for that system. For example, many people agree with the ideal of free software (GNU, GCC, Apache, etc.), but it happens, often enough to be worth pondering, that "turf wars" and even splits occur within the development and/or support communities (GCC versus EGCS comes to mind). And this is over software that is freely distributable, not over limited real property, where the stakes are presumably so much higher.
What you have done in your quote, however, is flat-out state that anyone who does not accept your particular system for equitable property distribution and thus wants to opt out as a participant is also someone who goes against your goals for such equity -- which might or might not be true -- and thus is a "thief".
Regardless of whether it's true (after all, there's no point in trying to divine the motivations of any "outsider", and certainly no fence you wish to construct will be able to do that), what your response illustrates is that you are, in fact, in favor of inequitable ownership of real property, at least in the case where the "owner" is a corporate entity of some sort, and you are in favor of fencing off that real property so only those who make up that corporation get to enjoy it, regardless of whether that fencing-off results in a larger-scale inequity. (Yes, I realize that you would further qualify your favoring such inequity only when the corporate owner implemented your system, but what's the utility of that, if you don't represent a nearly-unanimous view among all mankind?)
It's at that point that I wonder just how your system is different from what we have today, if you accept that any individual person is also legitimately considered a "corporate interest" insofar as he or she has an "identity" within the larger collective s
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
Learn your history, you freak.
Good advice, which you should take. Start with Stalin's persecution of the "kulaks", and be sure you look up the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and the Killing Fields while you're at it.
I'm an anarchist,
Oh sure: an anarchist who wants the state to go grave robbing for him because you hate inheritance so much.
I'm sure as far as your concerned the whole rest of humanity can go to hell,
No, I'm opposed to socialism. Weren't you paying attention?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I know all about Stalin, the cultural revolution and the killing fields. Tyrrany under the guise of communism, but that is communism's natural end-point. I'm opposed to communism and any kind of coercive use of power. Protection of private property requires a large amount of state sponsored coercive power. I'm not proposing any kind of top-down, imposed structure, merely advocating for a structure that people could adopt locally, and that would scale well through federation. I'm also stating, that as protection of privately held natural resources requires the threat of state sponsored violence, no anarchist federation need respect the property claims of private holders.
Either you weren't paying attention or I was not stating my position clearly. In any case, I'm glad we seem to have moved beyond invective so we can get to the real meat of the issue.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm opposed to communism and any kind of coercive use of power.
This does not gybe with your desire to rob the dead.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I don't know where you get the idea that I want to rob the dead. I feel that people who fence off natural resources are robbing the living. Wanting to take back what was stolen from you is not robbery, it's justice.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I don't know where you get the idea that I want to rob the dead.
From your statements advocating the death tax, of course.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Oh, please. It's income no different from any other. Just because you happen to be related to someone, why should you not have to pay taxes when they give you something? If your employer gives you a bonus, you pay taxes on it, even though he already payed taxes on it when he earned it. When someone related to you gives you a gift, you pay taxes on it (or you should, if you aren't a filthy, selfish tax cheat.) Why should it be any different when someone dies and leaves something to you.
Robbing the dead, that's hilarious. Do you take all your talking points straight from Faux News?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Do you take all your talking points straight from Faux News?
Does the standard snotty condescension ever work for you?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Hey, I tried being nice with you, you started the bad vibes. Whatever, I apologize, this is obviously a hot button issue with you, and I'm done trying to piss you off purposefully. Shooting fish in a barrel isn't fun. Damn, there I go again.
Come on, I'm just putting out my ideas here, if you don't agree that's fine. I'm not advocating armed insurrection, and it's not like me and my army of anarchist anti-propertarians are going to come and steal your stuff. If enough people agree with my way of thinking, then things will change, and I'm sorry for whatever pain that might cause the minority, but as I have tried to base my philosophy on a moral foundation of "Don't take away the choices of others," I kind of think the pain that the minority would be feeling would be the pain of having their own unfair advantage taken from them, so I wouldn't lose sleep over it.
But come on, how likely is that? Unless something goes seriously wrong with the system the way it is, there will never be enough people advocating for radical change to make a difference, and if the system does go seriously wrong, then that's a pretty damn good time for radical change, don't you think?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Hey, I tried being nice with you
Bullshit.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Okay, what do you call this? I was honestly seeking your input to help me see where I had gone wrong in my thinking, and you replied with more inflammatory condescension. But whatever. Look, either you want to have a discussion about these issues or you want to fling insults. I'm down with either, but you can't have it both ways. I'm open to changing my ideas if they are proven wrong, are you?
I can see how you might be threatened by the things I am saying. It may sound like I'm saying, "Let's go after jcr and take everything he's worked hard for all his life." I'm not. This is a really hard issue to discuss, because I believe that our current system isn't fair or just, and you probably think the opposite. But unless you are in the wealthiest 10%, I'm not advocating coming after your property. I wasn't clear about that, and maybe I overstated my case. I tend to get a little inflammatory at times, I admit that.
I'll also admit that maybe my answers aren't perfect. That's why I want to discuss them, not to prove my ideas are right, but to find out where they aren't and strengthen them. If you can recognize that, however misguided I am, I have good intentions, I'll be happy. I don't want to screw over anyone who doesn't deserve it. But some people do deserve it. I feel that crazy, power hungry people have risen to positions of power and dominance in our current system, and I would like to see that rectified. Perhaps you don't see it that way, but I can hope that you can at least admit that other people do see it that way, and perhaps there is some small sliver of truth in our position.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I can see how you might be threatened by the things I am saying.
Threatened? Not at all. Your side lost. Maybe you heard about it, it made all the papers in the mid-80's.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Please, I'm not a communist. That wasn't my side that lost. You keep harping on that. Is that straw man the best argument you can come up with? We anarchists have as much reason to hate the communists as anyone. You know why Leon Trotsky got the ice pick through the ear, right? Lumping all left leaning thinkers together with the communists just shows how uneducated you are.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Please, I'm not a communist.
I'm supposed to care how you pinkos subdivide yourselves? The free world defeated you. Go cope.
You know why Leon Trotsky got the ice pick through the ear, right?
Of course I do. Despite all their rhetoric about wanting to help the working man, pinkos are autocrats at heart, and there's only room for one head thug. This is why HItler attacked Stalin, why Stalin murdered millions of his own people, and why Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, and every other leftie thug who got into power made a habit of murdering anyone who got too much attention on their own. Can't have rivals in the wolf pack, after all.
Lumping all left leaning thinkers together with the communists just shows how uneducated you are.
On the contrary: it shows that I'm not falling for your shell-game bullshit.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."