Slashdot Mirror
Full Details of My Attempted Entrapment For Teaching Polygraph Countermeasures
George Maschke writes "In May of this year, I was the target of an attempted entrapment, evidently in connection with material support for terrorism. Marisa Taylor of McClatchy reported briefly on this in August. I've now published a full public accounting, including the raw source of the e-mails received and the IP addresses involved. Comments from Slashdot readers more technically savvy than I are welcome."
For a Soviet America! Build a revolutionary workers party with the program of Lenin and Trotsky!
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
Want to stay safe? Don't learn ANYTHING that the government doesn't explicitly approve.
If you're living in the 40s, that means avoid learning about integration.
In the 90s? avoid learning about marriage equality.
Living in 2013? Don't learn about avoiding government interrogation.
Living in 2015? Don't even THINK about avoiding surveillance.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
Well, maybe later.
I'm in a similar situation as the submitter, but I mostly just tell people how to lie to their wives (partners, etc)
I often get emails from Princes, Damsels-in-distress, penis pill pushers, and a plethora of other fake and scammy looking stuff.
I'm pretty sure it's my wife, because she can't spell worth a shit.
Is the submitter *spoken-for* ? It could just be the partner, messin' with him. I believe I can be of help.
cheers,
i say yes, please
"Two things are infinite: the Universe and human stupidity. (And I'm not sure about the Universe)".
From now on, these "lectures" will be taught world wide, except by USA. Or do you think the remaining ones will just sit and wait for the feds knock their door?
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
is already a Slashdotted site...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I have no special expertise, but this seems a little ham fisted to be agents of the state, don't you think? Seems more likely they'd go with tried and true techniques of human intelligence. I'd beware of any attractive women suddenly taking an interest, or people who appear to have money who want to support the cause, etc. And if you don't already, get a good lawyer and vet everything through him/her. Also, if the authorities do come knocking, make sure you know how to handle the situation so you don't incriminate yourself or make the situation worse (talk to your lawyer, but it amounts to keep your cool and your mouth shut).
Alpha we know its you now. Fuck off.
1) there is no such thing as a "lie detector". Polygraphs are voodoo.
2) NEVER talk to the police.
HTH,
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
either Polygraphs are bullshit or these charges should be dropped...
by setting up the sting and charging the guys for what they did, they government is admitting that it is possible to fool the polygraph
if it is possible to fool the polygraph it leaves no doubt that the polygraph is not scientific or useful
by proving these men guilty, the prosecution simultaneously proves that the lie detector is a farce and negates the logical need for the entire charade in the first place
a good lawyer could get a not guilty verdict IMHO
Thank you Dave Raggett
are turning into a police state, or at least into the velvet-gloved version of it: a surveillance state. So are certain western European states. What are we going to do about it ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
And now you've executed a denial-of-service-attack-by-proxy on your website as well, due to the /. effect.
There's one thing I'll never understand about polygraphy as a whole. Clearly, the US Government (and pretty much anyone else who uses polygraphy) must know that it's a pseudo-science and that the test cannot predict whether or not someone is lying. So why do they go through so much trouble to defend it? Surely, all of this money they're investing into the machines themselves, paying the personnel to operate and "analyze" them, and trying to shut down people who openly state that the test is a fake and can be beaten could be spent more efficiently on better background checks or other investigative measures that could produce real evidence of wrongdoing.
Some fraudster in the UK went down recently for selling dousing rods as bomb detectors to the Iraqis. There were quite a few people credulous twits in the media who went after skeptics who were against this transparent ripoff, but it took a good ten years for enough momentum to build, to get this investigated, and for the criminal who ran this, to get charged with anything.
As far as I can tell, polygraphy is just as full of woo as phrenology, and it was invented roughly around the same time. I do wonder how long it'll take for the stupidity to be debunked sufficiently hard, for the public outcry to overcome the True Believers and have this snake oil abolished?
http://www.mtv.com/videos/misc/138896/liar-liar.jhtml
typical confusing. the summary leaves me confused.
In the end, only the leftovers, the seemingly superfluous, tedious people, involved in regulations, law enforcement and taxing, the people Dent and Prefect met, survive, and are able to found a new civilisation on Earth, while the Randian Golgafrincham dies out due to an infection.
You would think that General Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, would have something better to do than troll a Slashdot comments section. Aren't there illegal wiretaps to order or surveillance records to be shredded?
You are welcome on my lawn.
What a joke you are. Marx is more relevant than ever.
True. And also it's true that five Marxes beat one Marx any day of the week.
Ezekiel 23:20
Eat the rich!!!
You're dinner, Bitch!
And I think I'll buy desert with food stamps.
In a democracy the 1% will eventually lose everything.
Oh look, an Internet Rich Guy. About as impressive and believable as an Internet Tough Guy.
Next thing you know, the Feds will be coming after me for my collection of marked tarot cards, and confiscating my 1st Edition Player's Handbook lest I share my secret spells that prevent scrying via crystal ball.
What makes you think you're in any way relevant just because you amass money?
If you're looking for someone with a misplaced feeling of entitlement, look for a mirror.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
An Attempted Entrapment
Posted by George Maschke on 3 November 2013, 1:34 pm
In May 2013, I was the target of an attempted entrapment.1 Whether it was a federal agent attempting to entrap me on a contrived material support for terrorism charge or simply an individual’s attempt to embarrass me and discredit AntiPolygraph.org remains unclear. In this post, I will provide a full public accounting of the attempt, including the raw source of communications received and the IP addresses involved.
As background, it should be borne in mind that a federal criminal investigation into providers of information on polygraph countermeasures, dubbed “Operation Lie Busters,” has been underway since at least November 2011, when an undercover U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent, posing as a job applicant, contacted Chad Dixon of Marion, Indiana for help on passing the polygraph. In December, 2012, Dixon pleaded guilty to federal charges of wire fraud and obstruction of an agency proceeding, for which he has been sentenced to 8 months in federal prison.
Doug Williams of Norman, Oklahoma, a former police polygrapher who has been teaching people how to pass polygraph examinations for some three decades and operates the website Polygraph.com, was also the target of a sting operation and in February 2013, U.S. Customs and Border Protection executed search warrants on his home and office, seizing business records. He has been threatened with prosecution but to date has not been charged with any crime.
With this in mind, I received a most curious unsolicited communication on Saturday, 18 May 2013 from <mohammadali201333@yahoo.com>. The message was sent to my AntiPolygraph.org e-mail address <lt;maschke@antipolygraph.org> and was titled “help help help please” (155 kb EML file.) The message body was blank, but there was a PDF attachment with a short message written in Persian, the language of Iran:
I know Persian, a fact of which the writer was evidently cognizant. Here is a translation:
Greetings and respect to you, Mr. George Maschke,
I am Mohammad Aghazadeh and have been living in Iraq for five years. I am a member of an Islamic group that seeks to restore freedom to Iraq. Because the federal police are suspicious of me, they want to do a lie detector test on me. I ask that you send me a copy of your book about the lie behind the lie so that I can use it, or that you help me in any other way. I am very grateful to you.
The book to which the message refers is The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 mb PDF), AntiPolygraph.org’s free e-book that, among other things, explains how to pass (or beat) a polygraph “test.” Factors that made me highly suspicious about this message include:
Why would someone who supposedly fears the police send an unencrypted e-mail acknowledging that he’s a member of an Islamic group that is trying to change the government of Iraq?
Why would such a person also provide his full name and how long he’s been in the country?
To my knowledge, there aren’t any Iranian-backed Islamic groups seeking to “restore freedom to Iraq.” In fact, Iran and Iraq have good diplomatic relations.
Why did this person ask me to send a book that is freely available on-line? Note that this message didn’t ask for a “Persian edition” of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.
I suspected the message was a likely attempt to set me up for prosecution on charges of material support for terrorism (or something similar).2 It seemed highly unlikely that the message could be genuine. Nonetheless, about half an hour after receiving the message, I provided “Mohammad Aghazadeh” the same advice I would give to anyone accused of a crime who has been asked to take a polygraph test:
Dear Mr. Mohammad Aghazadeh,
Our advice to everyone under such circumstances is not to submit to the so-called
davecb@spamcop.net
is what it's called. "It's for your own good!"
But eventually it always turns into hard fascism when the "protected" rebel and try to break the padded bars on their cells.
Did you check said pdf file?
It has metadata information, useful for detecting its origins.
From your pdf:
CreationDate(D:20120518144404-07'00'
So the computer date was off on whatever computer authored the file?
Author 'HHH' ?
If you think you know the person who authored files, you can check if he authored other pdf files and compare the author tag and creationdate to see if it matches. Having the creationdate off by one year will help in this reguard. Of course, if he had someone else create the file, this wont help at all.
Did you respond to his mail in Farsi or English?
My professional opinion is that your advice to him to refuse to take the test was 'material support' and you're screwed. Good luck.
There's no hint that the government is behind this. It looks like a squabble between to polygraph examiners.
Regardless of your interpretation of the incident, you should not have posted his name. It does not make you seem very trustworthy.
I work harder than you. I have worked harder than you. I will always work harder than you. I'm one of the poorest in my nation, yet I work harder than most of the multimillionaires.
Hard work doesn't make you rich.
Also, food for thought: the police (who work harder than you and make much less than you) are the ones who prevent the hard working poor from taking everything you have, at gun point.
About 30 years, someone I know was given a polygraph during a hiring process by a big national retail store. She was not hired.
About 10 years later, she received a letter that she was included in a class action lawsuit for that, unless she opted out. She paid little attention. Another few years passed, and she received a check for $12,000 or $15,000. I forget the exact amount.
I think pre-employment polygraphs are illegal under California Law?
> if it is possible to fool the polygraph it leaves no doubt that the polygraph is not scientific or useful
Your eyes can be fooled. Therefore they are not useful? Locks can be picked. Therefore they are not useful?
I used to work as a magician and a locksmith, so I can fool your eyes, and your locks. Now that you know your eyes can be fooled and are therefore useless, you're getting rid of them I guess?
If your eyes tell you that I just put your watch in my pocket, that's PROBABLY true. If a polygraph tells you that a stole your watch, it's probably right. Witnesses and polygraphs are about equally reliable.
Not law enforcement or tax men but Hair dressers, middle managers, business men who spout nothing but buzz words in other words idiots.
Idiots who adopted the leaf as a form of currency and then set about preventing inflation by burning down the forests around them.
The only group that was exiled inappropriately were the janitors, Telephone sanitizers to be specific..
Also the leftovers did not form a civilization they went feral breeding with the native cavemen and leaving no trace in the fossil record of their base civilization and ultimately corrupting the program of the biocomputer Earth.
Go through the source material more than once before you make claims about the political meanings of science fiction.
If the government really doesn't want people to read this guy's blog about passing lie detector tests, it should have ignored him. Or maybe it did, and in order to get us to pay attention, he is making the whole thing up? Is he willing to ... um... nevermind.
Gently reply
If some dude allegedly did something horrible and the cops were interrogating him, and they got him to agree to a polygraph and he was dumb enough to confess, I would be totally in favor of it...
I don't necessarily object to using the polygraph ever, in any circumstance...
However the majority of polygraphs are institutional polygraphs from govt, military, CIA, law enforcement, etc...they are given regularly and just like anything employees easily adapt b/c **they are bullshit**
Maybe the solution is to use them only if a person is suspected of a crime?
How they are used now is definitely ridiculous!
Thank you Dave Raggett
I miss America
Fah. I was only 14 when I did a comparative analysis of communism and capitalism. Having some background in electronics theory and associated systems approach, I was able to demonstrate that communism is always doomed, because it is not a stable economic system. All stable systems must have both positive and negative feedback loops. (The screech when you put a microphone too close to a speaker is one example of a runaway system, that finally blows something if not corrected.) The classic aphorism of communism is "too each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities". This is essentially two uncoupled, undamped systems with unlimited response - some people have "unlimited needs" and work the system; other people will be worked to death.
I later discovered that in the real world, this lack of feedback in the economic system is dealt with in two ways - feedback through the political system (corruption of various sorts, political appointments, etc.), and through the black market - a hidden ad hoc capitalist mechanism, often with a political component (bribing the officials).
So regardless of capitalism, communism is a dead end, and makes no mathematical, much less economic, sense. There is a kind of 'communism of the rich' which is analogous to what techies do with open source, and what Star Trek assumed due to the Replicator technology. It's basically, "to each according to his needs, there's plenty to go around."
While capitalism has its issues, it is a dynamic complex adaptive system where the excesses can be curbed by _reasonable_ regulation. The complaints that Marx had back in the 1800s were in response to the excesses of what was basically a post-feudal era where companies were generally owned by one, or a small set, of people with zero requirement to take into account any public opinion, and could act as feudal barons. The rise of incorporation has moved capitalism increasingly toward an economically democratic model, where every company must take into account the political and economic environment.
In practice, no communist government has resulted in 'free people', except in the sense (as an old Soviet joke goes), "we are free - to work ourselves to death"
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
My reply to both you and the parent is that IMHO most people (including Greenspan, and all of Wall Street) misinterpret Rand. If you recall, the protagonists in each of her books is a builder, not a financier. They were virulently opposed to those who used manipulation of the economic and political system for their own gains. Her books were really about the importance of the creative and technical versus the political.
I think it was Nietzche ("Man and Superman"?) who proposed the dichotomy between masters and slaves. I have always felt that he was wrong, that while those two groups may exist, there is a third group, the technical/creative, who does not want to be master and refuses to be slave.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Lawyer and sue for rights violation of your free speech.
My standard answer on Atlas Shrugged is the end of Douglas Adams' second Hitchhiker novel (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe), where Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect meet the people from Golgafrincham. Those people are the leftovers when the elite on Golgafrincham turned their planet into an Randian paradise, with the econonomical elite ruling without bounds, and an army of slave like serfs are working for them.
In the end, only the leftovers, the seemingly superfluous, tedious people, involved in regulations, law enforcement and taxing, the people Dent and Prefect met, survive, and are able to found a new civilisation on Earth, while the Randian Golgafrincham dies out due to an infection.
Just remember one thing about Atlas Shrugged: As mentioned in the preface, it's not about men as they are, it's men as they should be. We don't have any morality and ethics in business or government: In other words, instead of a Midas Mulligan we have a Jamie Dimon, instead of a John Galt we have John Boehner, instead of a Hugh Akston we have Twitter....
because this is not entrapment.
They've probably made a pretty good effort at working out what a recent immigrant from soviet Russia living on US welfare thought was wrong with the USA.
I really don't get this Rand thing. Maybe it's because some see it as a kind of home grown "wisdom" and see everything else as tainted by some form of education.
And the big railroad barons of the second half of the 19th century never would have been that big without the U.S. government financing and pre-planning the big railroad tracks and protecting the building sites with the cavalry. So much for Ayn Rand's preposition of Atlas Shrugged. The archetypes of Dagny Taggart were free-riding on government subsidaries.
So what you're saying is that the only negative feedback mechanism in communism is political intervention and the only negative feedback mechanism in capitalism is political intervention, therefore capitalism is better?
Color me unconvinced.
Instead we have to deal with reality. And reality is everything that affects us. We are not spheric cows, and we don't live in a vacuum. And you don't get far in reality by trying to breed milk providing balls.
Hmmm, a blank email with an attached PDF, which only contains text (or does it?)
So that if you refuse to do business with him on equal terms with Americans, they can sic the DOJ on you for discrimination in a public accommodation.
After all, it's illegal to refuse to do business with Mr Aghazadeh based on his religion or national origin.
No. Capitalism has a host of feedback mechanisms - supply and demand being the archetypical one. Like any good complex adaptive system, when a new 'species' (for example a new technology and resulting new market) appears, the other entities in the system dynamically adapt. This is very similar to the evolutionary ecosystems model. Political feedback, to my mind, should mainly be of the sort that prevents fish that are too big from swimming up small creeks and blocking water flow. (I know that's a really obscure analogy, but I like it.
A major distortion that exists presently is what I would consider incorrect government policies that encourage near-monopolies and effective monopolies. In the US, anti-trust laws are directed primarily at maintaining two things: preventing unfair advantage of a company's monopoly position, and maintaining a fiction of competition among two to four dominant players.
If I had my druthers, I would prevent any company with more than 10% of a market to buy or take control of any other market participant for any reason.
From my own studies of free enterprise as a CAS, it appears to me that if any company controls more than perhaps 20% of a market, or if fewer than 10 or so companies constitute a large percentage of a market, they have effectively too much monopoly power. I have not done the research in detail - I was prepared to work on the PhD in Economics and this was going to be my area of research, but I did not pursue it at that time, so these are 'back of the envelope' numbers.
Nevertheless, it's instructive to use ecosystems as an analogy. A climax forest may have only a dozen or so tree species but it is very rare for it to have as few as four or five. Aspen trees are interesting - a particular aspen grove may in fact be a single genetic individual. But the environment varies enough that this grove can not take over 100 square miles. This is because the local environment changes constantly, so the area next to the Aspen grove may be better for maple, or fir, or scrub grassland.
So to maintain the maximum diversity, and dynamic adaptability and efficiency, the role of government regulation is absolutely _not_ to provide a single market. (I.e., do _not_ normalize the laws across all jurisdictions.) That made sense when the economies of scale truly applied - it took a lot of money to build a steel mill. But economies of scale now are primarily tools of capitalist domination. If a large company is truly more competive than small companies, then this should be the case across many jurisdictions with differing local rules. Normalizing the rules across jurisdictions is unfairly (IMHO) handicapping smaller businesses, which as it happens often have lower unit costs these days than large companies. Case in point - labor productivity at a MacDonald's franchise is substantially _lower_ than at the old mom and pop hamburger joint - this is due to two things - MacDonald's already made your burger so it's faster, and every MacDonald's burger is the same - no guessing. But both of those are obsolete criteria in today's world of freely available information.
At one time, the number of jurisdictions was large, and the information flow between them was relatively slow, so this was not such a large problem. But now we are close to having a single global economic model. This puts the entire economic system at constant risk - e.g. "Too big to fail". This idea is in itself a condemnation of the legal structure we have allowed to develop. And now with the availability of incredibly fast means to rationalize markets, that legal structure is, oddly enough, a bad idea. Today we need more diverse markets, not more similar markets. And that is where the political factor comes in. Or, as I've said to many of my friends, "All decisions should be made as locally as feasible," - whether economic or political.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
The romance of the creator having to deal with the political realities. In our own minds, we are all Mozart, Tesla, and John Galt. :)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
The short version is that lie detector machines don't work, their only function is to allow the prosecution to accuse you of lying, as such you best bet is to remain silent.
Marx is more relevant than ever. ... Like Lenin taught us ...
Odd. I thought the half century of history I've just lived through had proved Marx correct and Lenin wrong (at least on those issues where they disagreed).
Does this sound like a successful phishing attempt to anyone else? They sent an email with no body text, but it had a PDF attachment?? My bet is that you got a "gift" when you opened that PDF...
How do you plan to maintain private property without murdering the millions who want to take yours? Capitalism can only be imposed by force and mass murder, because it's so completely incompatible with human nature.
Of course in real life either Capitalism or 'State Socialism' ( for lack of a better word, 'Communism' being a postulated stateless society as you should know) can be maintained with incarceration instead of murder. Force though, is always necessary.
nice trolling...precisely because eyes and locks can be fooled means that, indeed, the polygraph is bullshit...
here's why: you lock your car even though it can be picked (i love how you're a locksmith **and** magician)
if none of us locked our cars, even though locks can be picked, then you would have some kind of point...but we live in the real world here
this is analogous to a drug test, but the drug test is based on whether **a person thinks you look stoned**
no defense for how the polygraph is used...just because perception can be manipulated doesn't prove or disprove anything...it's a trolling point
Thank you Dave Raggett
He offered Mr Aghazadeh the exact, and equal level of service as he offers american customers.
Advice to refuse the polygraph, consult legal aid, and the book in english.
Mr Aghazadeh was then free to take his "business" to someone who could cater to the specificities of his particular circumstances.
You make a useful point - through most of US, if not global, history, there has been the thread of the creative, explorer, or pioneer who probably has support from investors, governments, other parties, etc. Columbus is perhaps an archetypical example - he spent something like 10 years trying to get various monarchs (Portugal, Spain, England, maybe even Italy) to fund his expedition to go West to find the East. (He was rejected several times by Isabella and Ferdinand because their advisers pointed out that his estimate of the diameter of the Earth was about 1/2 what the experts thought - they were in fact correct!) More recently, the American pioneers, and the American railroads, depended on government land grants.
Nevertheless there is a difference. All of your examples fit the mold of people who, given or finding an advantage, ran with it and created something new, or had a dream and put together the resources to make it happen. Without Columbus, Spain would not have become such a major economic and political power - it had just essentially given up rights to most of Africa and the South Atlantic to the Portuguese after a military defeat. In fact, Ferdinand and Isabella were acting as VCs, with the expectation that they would never see Columbus again, but their situation was bad enough that it was worth trying this low-cost fling. It worked out pretty well (except arguably for the folks who lived here already...)
Lots of other people had fathers who taught mathematics; lots of people have had all the right tools but never did anything with them. Heck, I'm a pretty good example - back in 1981 I came up with the idea of 3D printing (I worked in a group that built flatbed printers), and I even assembled some of the components I needed to build a prototype. But I never carried through with it. Maybe that was partly luck, and/or going a different direction, or whatever - but the fact remains that I could have created the 3D printing market 30 years ago.
IMHO Obama's assertion that "you didn't build that" was IMHO a combination of economic illiteracy, stupidity, socialist idealism, and political "big lie" technique. Sure, every "great man" has a variety of supports that made it possible. But that does not counter the principle. Taken to its extreme, you can say that Columbus was no more important than the guy who baked his breakfast the morning he left Palos de la Frontera.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I have a question about a guy I know, and your opinion on "men as they should be" with regard to him.
Basically, he spends his life doing nothing. Won't work at all. Not only that, he spends most of his time talking his friends into joining in with his no-work lifestyle. Oddly, he not only is unapologetic about this, but holds it out as some kind of personal superiority. Same attitude, same inertia, year after year with this guy. Occasionally he alludes to something "big" that's supposed to happen that will justify all of his behavior.
What's your moral opinion of this guy, from the perspective of Objectivist ethics? Is he, maybe, an immoral "moocher" parasite, or is he the highest expression of the human ideal, personified? By the way, I'm not specifying for the purposes of the question whether or not his first name is "John".
I'm beginning to think that his whole outlook is just one of posturing and psychological projection, where it makes no difference what he actually accomplished, or by what means he did it, but rather it's simply a means to "tack on" a projection of moral superiority regardless of his work or contributing circumstances. As it turns out, this also seems to be a particularly appealing thing for the wealthy to add to their sense of ego, regardless of how they got their wealth or any actual historical correspondence to any principles.
What do you think? How should I take this guy? I mean, real talk, not abstract hypothetical talk, here.
The opening line of Karl Mark's book..."From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". A succinct, compassionate, and efficient "prime directive" for any "we the people" if you ask me. Yet most adults know the devil is always in the details, for example China has dragged more people above the poverty line than the rest of the world combined in the last 40yrs, (coincidently 14yrs less than my age). China did that with a centrally planned economy. Of course they also put themselves in that the position of wide spread famine in the first place, ironically using the very same "system" of a centrally planning following a series of 5yr plans.
Frankly a 14yo's opinions on comparative politics are about as insightful and original as a 14yo's opinions on birth control, it's mostly second hand knowledge that (like the Marxist slogan above) often bears little resemblance to the real world. However you do seem to have worked out that the "free market" is actually a set of rules that form a trading system for "we the people" (eg: property law), not some magical hand righting wrongs, just a different set of rules to what we use. The system we use says that the "free" in "free market" means anyone can participate in that market, what's not so clear is whether anyone is free NOT to participate. The alcohol market is a trivial example of a non-free market since some sections of the population are prohibited from buying it, and the rest are prohibited from selling it to them.
Don't believe everything people tell you about Marx, Rand, Orwell, et al, go and read what they have to say. There's also a metric shitload of stuff on youtube from modern writers such as Hitchens, Vidal, Pinker, Feynman, Sagan, et al. I particularly like Pinker's latest stuff about the decline of violence over the last 1000yrs and I personally think the "Stanford prison experiments" will be seen as one of (if not The) most important insight into human nature to come out of the 20th century.
Don't let "being wrong" stop you from thinking, the more angles you look at, the more picture's the kaleidoscope of the real world shows you. - refer to sig.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Tons of people got thrown in jail for thinking about marriage equality in the 90s
There are no selfmade millionaires.
To be fair, a millionaire isn't a big deal any more. Most working professionals should expect to be a millionaire by retirement these days unless something goes wrong.
I hear this a lot. People tell me "everyone has to work" but what they really mean is everyone must have a job. And what they really, really mean is "I think I have to have a job, so in order for that to be fair you need one too." No, not everyone should have a job. And just because someone isn't willing to work for someone else doesn't mean they are a slacker. Take Steve Jobs as an example. He quite is job to start Apple Computer. Does that make him a slacker? Of course not. In reality, if you have an idea like that you should probably do the same. The world would be a better place if more people did.
That guy should be crucified.
My reply to both you and the parent is that IMHO most people (including Greenspan
That would be strange considering that she consulted Greenspan when writing Atlas Shrugged and they were good friends.
Although the book vehemently treats all politicians as scum, Rand herself rallied behind certain Republican politicians. In the dystopic Atlas Shrugged the 'collectivists' have already taken over the entire government and it's too late for the 'individuals' to do anything about it. If anything the book is a rallying cry for ultra-conservatives to become more involved in government to save it from the FDR-type liberals that Rand saw as incompetent tyrants who had taken over.
there is a third group
And there's a fourth group and a fifth group and so on. However, I don't believe that the difference Nietzsche's Man and Superman is that between master and slave. My interpretation was that it's more akin to the difference between animal and man. Like how there's a difference between spiders and cats. Spiders are somewhat like automatons -- they do what they do almost purely based on cause and effect. Cats, on the other hand, make good pets because they are closer to man's mental capacity -- even though they sometimes act purely upon cause/effect type stimuli (such as play with string), they also seem to somewhat have a will of their own and they are emotional creatures. Regardless, they have nowhere near the logical capacity as man.
If I understand Nietzsche correctly (which I admit is questionable), then the Superman is a man who lives up to his mental potential. Many people live their entire lives without even attempting to take advantage of their potential -- like animals they can be satisfied with mere carnal pleasure and they only use their mental potential to increase this carnal pleasure. Nietzsche asserts that we ought to esteem to be something greater than what we tend to be; in our ambitions, morals, and our ability to reason.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Just remember one thing about Atlas Shrugged: As mentioned in the preface, it's not about men as they are, it's men as they should be.
Interesting -- seems like under the premise "men as they should be", everything from pure socialism to pure laissez-faire, or from pure anarchy to pure autarchy, would work. Any system works if the actors are perfectly informed and benevolent.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
It's not entrapment.
Someone solicited him based on his own website; and offered no particular incentive. For it to be entrapment it would require an inducement sufficient to encourage an otherwise law abiding citizen to commit a crime, merely making a request of someone advertising services would not come close to qualifying.
However, he did get free advertising on Slashdot...
Burn them to the ground
Not to discount your points, but most responses to my post are likely to be a big "whoosh" unless you are quite familiar with Ayn Rand and her views.
I fed her philosophical tapeworm back on itself with my question. Most Objectivists aren't prepared to handle such questions from other (ex) Objectivists. ;)
Really? Last I checked, disarming the populace was how the English monarchy retained its stranglehold for as long as it did. The same is true with every other brutal government that has ever existed. Arms are for the elite, not the peons.
I tell you. Guy won't even do any carpentry.
You're saying locks are useless because they are used? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Locks and polygraphs can both be beaten. I say that doesn't make them useless.
> Iove how you are [were] a locksmith *and* a magician
As a kid, I got into magic. I studied the most famous magician of all, Houdini. Houdini was famous as an escape artist, he'd get out of handcuffs, locked boxes and jail cells. I studied to be like Houdini. That's how my weekend magician gigs lead directly to a short stint working as a locksmith. Fyi, almost all magicians are *and* a day job. A magic show is a 30 minute event on a Friday or Saturday. Magician's don't work 9-5 except the ONE guy with the CBS contract (Henning, Copperfield) and three in Vegas.
From locksmithing and "tricking people" (magic) I got into security, which is my long-term career.
Greenspan was often called her disciple in the 1960s, but IMHO he made an error when he moved into the financial world and tried to use his version of objectivism to manage the Fed, and the Wall Streeters. He later admitted he was wrong. Except for the impact of technological advances (such as high speed trading, and other innovations), most of Wall Street is as close to a zero sum game as any part of business, and the motivations are not creative but manipulative.
It's hard to correlate conservatism (ultra or otherwise) with objectivism, because the meaning of both conservatism and (US) liberalism continually changes.
I think the master and slave notion is right from the book - your analogy of animal and man is collinear with that so I don't disagree - but it's been about 40 years, so who knows? :) Certainly one of the apparently key requirements for slaveholders to maintain their self-image is to categorize their slaves as subhuman. To me this smacks of a weird rationalization. (Suggestion - read "Making Whiteness" - fascinating analysis of the psychosocial history of the post-Civil war South and its impact on the rest of the nation.)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
In practice, no communist government has resulted in 'free people', except in the sense (as an old Soviet joke goes), "we are free - to work ourselves to death"
From what I hear, Soviet workers didn't actually work all that hard, especially during the later years of the regime. It was more like "we'll pretend to work, and you'll pretend to pay us" (the latter being a jab towards the low salary most Soviet citizens received - apologies for explaining the joke). Living conditions were relatively equal(ly bad).
Capitalism, on the other hand, embodies the freedom to work oneself to death fairly well. Left unchecked, some companies have a way of imposing both hours and conditions that are entirely unreasonable and even deadly. Those also happen to be the same companies where it's difficult to say "no, I'm only working 10 rather than 14 hours today," or "no, I'm not painting those asbestos with lead paint."
Personally, I think a balance is ideal. You correctly noticed how a communist society will tear itself apart, but a capitalist society will similarly tear itself apart without possessing various safety nets and other socialist aspects. People need the freedom to innovate in terms of business, but they also shouldn't be going hungry if they made mistakes in their life, otherwise only the rich can innovate and society stagnates. As a society, we produce enough that the purpose of money should be for luxury, rather than necessity, aside from some unusually expensive-to-treat medical conditions (nature happens).
IMHO Obama's assertion that "you didn't build that" was IMHO a combination of economic illiteracy, stupidity, socialist idealism, and political "big lie" technique.
You make a rational, reasoned argument, then sign off with that straw man? I'm guessing you're not even taking it out of context like the GOP tried to.
The "you didn't build that" was *directly* related to the infrastructure of an entire society that enables advancement, and the idea that you contribute back to that society, in the form of jobs (like Apple doesn't), or taxes (like Apple doesn't).
I'm not saying Obama didn't fail miserably to express the sentiment clearly, but there's no "great man" that doesn't owe anything to anyone.
Those large teams of people were hired and paid by them, receiving more than their own talents procure alone without having someone to pay them for them. So yes, while 'self-made' men require paying an army to work for them, any one 'soldier' in the army receives a bonus for the boss having assembled it, and included them in it.
Speak for yourself.
I'm not an objectivist by any means, but I am familiar enough with Atlas Shrugged to know what you were trying to say. Obviously, I disagree.
George, you do realize that it's possible when you opened a foreign PDF from an unknown source you likely exposed your computer? PDF is a very common vector for targeted hacking, it's how Google's systems were compromised by the Chinese.
You should never ever open a PDF from an unknown source unless you are doing so with a dumb PDF reader that can't handle java-script, preferably a Linux or BSD based system. I would consider your system compromised unless you can confirm otherwise, and proving a negative is damn hard.
Unless it discriminates against a protected class, an employer can make whatever rules they want. If they want to fire people who wear green socks on tuesdays, they can. There is no legal requirement that things be "job related".
Now, if you were smoking weed as part of a religious observance, that might fly: religion can be (but not always is) a protected class. See for instance, Disney cast members and hijab wearing.
You're probably thinking of the BFOQ (Bona Fide Occupational Qualification).. I can discriminate against women who want to work as male strippers, for instance, because being male is a BFOQ for that job. But as long as my capricious and arbitrary restriction (weed smoking, green sock wearing,etc.) does not have a *disparate impact* on a protected class, I'm free to do it.
Now, you'll certainly run across employment law and HR types who say "oooh no, you can't do that", but that's more out of an abundance of caution, rather than an actual law or regulation.
From my own studies of free enterprise as a CAS, it appears to me that if any company controls more than perhaps 20% of a market, or if fewer than 10 or so companies constitute a large percentage of a market, they have effectively too much monopoly power.
And yet, in almost every market, we see one or two companies dominating more than half the market. By your analysis that's way, way too much monopolistic power, and it's the norm. Not very much negative feedback. It seems to me this dynamic has very much in common with communism, even though communism is a purer form so everything goes to hell in a faster and more thorough fashion.
In nature, two species can never survive in exactly the same niche, there has to be something that differentiates them. Oscillations in climate will do it, one species gets the upper hand for a while, then the other, and its stable. (This is like how its easier to balance a pole on your finger if you move you finger randomly back and forth - same principle.) Geographic diversity can help too, and animals can survive in the same fixed locality in slightly different niches that overlap. But within a particular locality, one species always dominates a particular niche. The same dynamics apply to companies. Very quickly things move towards something close to monopoly. Just a moderate amount of regulation isn't enough to fix that. And a large amount of regulation obviously isn't going to fix it either when the political system is corrupted by the same dynamics.
Looks like someone who is certain there must be a translated version either on the site or linked in a forum. I assume the Firefox visit is from the xp virtual mode of win7.
Seeing requests from a translator service like " via translate" or babelfish might make this less suspicious.
If I wrote you in Persian, I would think that a request for a book would be in that language, if it were not available on the site.
Review the conclusions, considering we don't know search history outside of what is presented. Nothing is obviously wrong. A pro needs to examine the full logs and probably other data, and likely won't find anything wrong. Of course it is harder to prove a negative, since you could have missed the one smoking gun.
there it is...polygraphs are like that...
you can't make a logical counterpoint because none exists...polygraphs are simply some person's guess if you look like you are lying based on pseudo-science and w/e bullshit they want to invent in their heads
there is absolutely **no defense for it** and it should only be used to interrogate suspects of a specific crime (in case they are dumb enough to believe it works), not ever as routine security or pre-employement tests for things like probation, FBI, law enforcement, etc...
Thank you Dave Raggett
I was only 14 when I did a comparative analysis of communism and capitalism ... I was able to demonstrate that communism is always doomed, because it is not a stable economic system ... The classic aphorism of communism is "too each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities". This is essentially two uncoupled, undamped systems with unlimited response - some people have "unlimited needs" and work the system; other people will be worked to death.
Wow, not only did you prove that communism is always doomed, you proved that FOSS does not exist ... Oh yeah, 'communism of the rich' ... right!
If you are ever asked to take a lie detector test then you should read this free pdf book: The Lie Behind the Lie Detector. It will answer all of your questions about the game that is played. Lie detectors can not read your mind and cannot tell the truth from lies.
the dichotomy between masters and slaves. I have always felt that he was wrong, that while those two groups may exist, there is a third group, the technical/creative, who does not want to be master and refuses to be slave.
As a Cyberneticist I disagree. They are all one in the same, each in different phases of existence. The master is a slave to duty. The Slave can be a master manipulator who "tops from the bottom" as they say. The dedicated and zealous creator is as the builder who labored to make great things, slaves to their evolutionarily emerged instinct to to create and explore, serving as mere slaves to the overarching master of complexity progression itself -- Without which we would have succumb in totality to entropy long ago. Everything Flows. Without chaos there could be no mutation, no progress, only crystals.
You widen your eyes: Your view is a slice of a given complexity level, slice higher and you'll find information theory describing the process whereby racial prejudice and greed are genetically beneficial -- Then you will realize why humans have nearly stopped evolving; Slice again and you may cogitate upon the emergence of complexity itself, realize the function of all life carrying out in all things, even your machines, and come to know your culture as a living entity; Yourself as a mere neuron in the network of neural network networks; The earth our body, the stars our home. At another level you'll find you don't even exist as a singular entity: You have ameobas as blood and serve as host to the digestive bacteria colonies that dictate whether you'll be fat or thin, diabetic or not -- A walking virus pustule, living only to infect others with pathogens and ideas, or to further the infection for others.
Peer deep down into the chaotic and uncertain quantum world and realize you exist at your size because it is the scale where enough complexity can first pool to form such reflective thoughts. Do NOT remain trapped in this layer of cognition -- At the eye level, where all appearances are most deceptive and of which you only appear to know best. You ignorantly thumb your nose at one group dichotomy while glibly defining another.
Mr. Bickford, it's time to grow Up.
I'll bet Columbus wouldn't have discovered a damned thing if he had to swim to America. The ship builders were pretty important. His crew was pretty important.
It truth, Columbus had a great deal of luck to thank for even surviving his voyage. Had the new world not been there he'd have starved with his crew before reaching India.
I'm not saying Obama didn't fail miserably to express the sentiment clearly, but there's no "great man" that doesn't owe anything to anyone.
Every person owes a contribution back to society.
But no "great man" owes back to society more, just because his creation turned out to be more valuable, and he was more successful in the marketplace.
Apple did contribute back to that society, by providing technology.
Apple doesn't owe taxes back to society; not at the rate that taxes are charged, anyways. Taxes are nothing more than immoral, but legalized thievery.
Apple doesn't owe jobs to society. Jobs are a resource for creators, that some but not all companies require large numbers of.
Apple's creations and technology are reward enough for society. The payment for these products is the creator's fair economic incentive.
Seeking extra "taxes" or "jobs"; in greater amounts from creators, is just a form of unfair rent-seeking created by greed.
I agree with your Master/slave catagorisation - I've always seen that as a very childish way of looking at the world. Plenty who want to be master are really just looking for a mother to wipe their bottoms for them instead of dealing with the world themselves.
Things you shouldn't learn about in 2013 because they may mark you as a potential terrorist or criminal: metal working (gun making), electronics (bomb making), chemistry (bomb making, drugs), surveillance and forensics (espionage and evasion), networking (cyber terrorism), number theory and cryptography (espionage and evasion), data mining (espionage and economic crime), image processing (espionage), mechanical and civil engineering (sabotage and terrorism), molecular biology and microbiology (bioterrorism), and probably others.
You can't do science and engineering without learning how to potentially do bad things. We have three choices: (1) we accept the fact that technology has risks and live with the occasional loss, (2) we start living in a technologically advanced totalitarian society in which technology can only be used with the blessing of government, or (3) we revert to a less technologically advanced society. But we can't have both liberty and total safety; they are incompatible. Of those, I find (2) by far the worst choice, but it's what we're headed for right now
What's particularly disconcerting is that the so-called "liberal" in the White House with credentials of Constitutional scholarship has been advancing this agenda even faster than his "conservative" predecessor, all the while bemoaning the lack of interest in STEM education and making noises about "fixing" education.
That's not an argument, that's a philosophy.
And will have been paid to build the ship ;) of course the point you're making is still valid, nobody is entirely responsible for their own achievements. The issue is that there seems to be a focus on the two extremes a) That 'great men' exist or b) that society is the cause of everyone's achievements. I strongly believe that the truth is, as is usually the case, somewhere in between: Luck, society and the influence of others play a huge part in the story of any 'great person' but their decisions and actions are what turned opportunity into reality. Trying to dismiss either sides of the equation does society no good.
Huh, sorry but I think that your "analysis" was worthless: there is a big difference between communist theory and communism-applied-in-the-real-world: there is the same difference between capitalism in theory and capitalism in the real world..
Nonsense. An American who doesn't like the tax rules in America would find it trivially easy to migrate to another country with different rules. You can't credibly choose to abide in a country, create a company in that country and use the infrastructure of that country then claim it is theft when you are asked to pay the taxes that they require.
There is an idea, the name of which I cannot recall now, based on just this. If you asked a rich person, a poor person, a white person, a woman or a catholic to write the rules, laws and taxes then what you'd end up with would probably be something that suits them better than it suits other demographics. If you asked someone to write the rules without knowing who they would be (obviously a thought experiment) then they'd want to ensure that the disabled, people from impoverished families etc were assisted (in case they ended up being in that group) and would be happy to risk sacrificing some income if they turned out to be from a well connected, wealthy family with a high chance of earning a large income.
Yes, the ship builders would have been paid for their work. But whose money paid them? It certainly wasn't Columbus' money.
"An American who doesn't like the tax rules in America would find it trivially easy to migrate to another country with different rules. . ."
Your statement is factually incorrect.
The US government requires all citizens to pay taxes regardless of where they live. If I moved to Whereverland, I would need to petition the government to accept a renunciation of my citizenship before they would accept t I was no longer liable for taxes on income earned, and spent, entirely outside the continent. They accept only a handful of these petitions (less than 1000) every year. The process is not "trivially easy".
Beyond that, ease of migration does not mean something is or isn't theft. "It would have been trivially easy for her to avoid being raped, just. . . ." No.
if they didnt do it alone, then why arent the ones who helped them also among the greats?
the great men do exist, but their existence does not preclude the existence of those who helped them get there.
likewise the existence or fact of help getting a person there, does not preclude that they were indeed "great men".
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Nonsense. An American who doesn't like the tax rules in America would find it trivially easy to migrate to another country with different rules
An absurd reply. Of course, (1) migration is never easy, AND (2) "You can go somewhere else, if you think you're treated unfairly" is the age old reply of tyrants --- even Adolf Hitler used that excuse.
If you asked someone to write the rules without knowing who they would be (obviously a thought experiment) then they'd want to ensure that the disabled, people from impoverished families etc were assisted
That means nothing, other than that humans are naturally loss-averse, and predisposed towards thievery.
You forgot to renounce your citizenship. No more taxation.
I think he's referring to the 1st world little shits who squander opportunity, refuse to take responsibility, and project their frustrations in the most pseudo-intellectual way.
Err ... one of the things he did was to make it as hard as possible for the "undesirables" to emigrate - to make it easier to round them up and kill them.
You know you're in a real tyranny if the freedom of just going somewhere else is taken away from you.
If the Americas were not there, then the climate would have been very much different. Which would have led to a very different alternate history.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You are wrong.
Cheap storage VM.
OK, this is a very controversial topic in history and I do not want to come down on one side or another but I do feel that the alternative view needs to be presented:
Are you suggesting that the Americas would not have been discovered without Columbus? Are you saying that if the Portuguese would have discovered it first (like Cabral discovered Brazil in 1500) that Portugal would have had the resources to control and exploit the entire land mass of South America, Central America and the Caribbean? Are you saying that the forces in Spanish society that allowed them to exploit the Americas (conquistadores with nothing to do after the Moors were conquered in Grenada, etc.) would have magically transferred to Portugal or England or France?
Are you suggesting that the steam engine never would have been improved without Watt? Would it have been improved somewhere else? Were the economic and social factors in Great Britain going to be transferred to France or Germany if Watt had died early?
This is a very controversial subject and I do not want to dismiss either side too out of hand. But it is very hard to come up with an example of one individual changing history. An individual might change his own personal history or family history and the history of individuals and families close to that individual but ultimately there was an underlying social, economic, political or artistic environment that had as great or even more influence on the events driving a society to change.
My reply to both you and the parent is that IMHO most people (including Greenspan, and all of Wall Street) misinterpret Rand. If you recall, the protagonists in each of her books is a builder, not a financier. They were virulently opposed to those who used manipulation of the economic and political system for their own gains. .
It was Rand who misinterpreted everyone else. Her entire body of work was borne out of need of revenge for the Bosheviks' treatment of her family. In her books, there are three types of people. The Hero figures from Whom All Blessings Flow, the Evil Parasites who appropriate and misuse those gifts, and the cyphers caught in between. Because the Bosheviks preached the doctrine of We (even if they seldom lived up to it.) Rand responded by a lifelong overcompensation to the doctrine of Me. What she forgets is that building societies has always been a cooperative event. Builders have always relied on others for capital, materials, labor, and transport as well as others scale their dreams to reality when reach exceeds grasp. Without them, they're just madmen staring at pieces of paper. Rand's writings found a ready audience for the selfish because it turns their vice into a virtue. But Galt's little valley of Paradise would founder at the moment someone asked. "Who's going to take care of the plumbing today?" Because no matter how advanced your tech gets, there's always going to be some form of menial work required to keep it running. Something that can't be automated, that will require human dirtwork. What Rand forgets or simply chooses to ignore in her elitism, is that those people matter too.
They've probably made a pretty good effort at working out what a recent immigrant from soviet Russia living on US welfare thought was wrong with the USA. I really don't get this Rand thing. Maybe it's because some see it as a kind of home grown "wisdom" and see everything else as tainted by some form of education.
It's not hard to get. It's selfishness made into a virtue, Individualism glorified to the extreme. Is it really suprising that anything combining those two would find such an audience?
Someone missed the point Douglass was making. The Golgafrinchams were not destroyed, the created a ruse to eject the non essential parts of their economy (hair dressers, phone sanitizers, etc...). You only had the B-Ark survivors accounts that Golgafrincham was destroyed and strangely enough none of them agreed on what the threat to the planet was (asteroid, disease, etc...). It has been a while but I do vaguely remember that there was a throw off line about the non B-Ark'ers being wiped out from a bug from a non sanitized phone but that was well after they had ejected the fluff from their economy.
The easiest way to shoot down Atlas Shrugged is to take the thought experiment to its extreme. What happens when John Galt gets old and dies? Shouldn't be any inheritance in that environment as you can't earn an inheritance so kids/wife wouldn't get it. No real government so it shouldn't be confiscated in the form of a death tax. Do they just bury all his gold with him? Or should the undertaker raise his prices such that everyone is taken to zero by the burial expenses? Rand never answered the what next question.
Rand's thought experiment is interesting but would fail very quickly just like any communist Utopia it provides a contrast to.
I think it is less that people misinterpret Rand, and more that they view her fictional works through the lens of her non-fiction writings. When one writes a work of fiction they have complete control over the environment and characters, the ability to bundle behaviors to demonize or elevate based off artificial archetypes. Kinda like Chick Tracs....
'Great Men' benefit far more from society then others, thus I would say yes they owe plenty back. Apple would not have the success it did if not for the society that it exists in, complete with infrastructure, education, and a well paid customer base to support its products.
Thing is, every company kinda hopes that OTHER companies will pay taxes and create jobs, while they minimize their own. It is a race to the bottom and only a certain degree of taxing and regulation keeps corporate america from imploding. Look at any country where the government is completely hands off and you find a complete decimated economy.
Part of the problem is 'creators' often feel a massive sense of entitlement, all the things society owes them but THEY own their own profits.
So regardless of capitalism, communism is a dead end, and makes no mathematical, much less economic, sense. There is a kind of 'communism of the rich' which is analogous to what techies do with open source, and what Star Trek assumed due to the Replicator technology. It's basically, "to each according to his needs, there's plenty to go around."
Indeed, so you've identified a particular scenario in which communism can work. If supply greatly outpaces demand, it makes sense.
Now, in this "rich" scenario, how does capitalism work out? And isn't automation technology bringing us ever closer to this "rich" scenario?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
And yet, in almost every market, we see one or two companies dominating more than half the market. By your analysis that's way, way too much monopolistic power, and it's the norm.
IMHO (I haven't done the rigorous analysis, but based on what work I have done) this is an example of the failure of regulation, or (equivalently) a failed legal structure for the modern context. For the last 100+ years, most legal structures have encouraged monopoly or near-monopoly, often justified by the assumed greater efficiencies that could, and admittedly did, greatly improve our standards of living. Certainly the cars we drive today and most products and services benefit from mass production. This was definitely justifiable by the need for mile-long steel mills of the first half of the 20th century. Even when car production of a single company exceeded the possible capacity of single plants, and plants began to be placed throughout the world, there was still some justification for a General Motors from a production point of view as they could use a single design and mold-making capability and distribute it across many plants. But now that can be done without being within a single corporate structure.
But for at least 20 years, perhaps 50 years, the drive for bigness has been for financial leverage, not production efficiency. That leverage encourages, and needs, the ecosystem to be the same everywhere in order to outcompete the local niche players. Which goes right to your second point, which I agree with completely, and which is why it is important to my mind to reverse the drive to normalize legal and economic structures everywhere - its primary effect is to drive local players out of the ecosystem.
With today's ubiquitous capacity for information transfer, and also 3D printing, I think small and local (two different things, but related) entities have an opportunity to make the mega corporations obsolete. The RIAA and MPAA legal fights may be examples of the dying gasps of obsolete economic structures. In sum, I think the ecosystem has just been changed. Will GM sue to prevent others from using 3D printing to replicate a tail light lens to replace a broken one from a 1967 Camaro?
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Of course there is, but the differences are outcomes of the isms. (One of my former sigs was "Your -ism is wrong" - every '-ism' is essentially an attempt to impose a rational formal structure on living systems, which are inherently arational. That doesn't make the analysis worthless, but demonstrates the relative benefit of a free enterprise system (which I agree is related to, but not quite the same as, a capitalist system. I should be more clear on that distinction and use the former instead. My bad - I tend to equate the two). A free enterprise system, as a complex adaptive system in itself, will always tend to converge toward the most 'efficient' or 'minimal error' surface in the ecosystem.
One of the more telling examples is the rise of black markets in every instance of a communist or socialist system. This is free enterprise, adapting in a variety of ways, to the ecosystem. Black markets are the economic equivalent of weeds in the pavement, or weeds in the wheat field if you prefer.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
That was a little too sharp.
I, and others, would argue that this scenario is both post-communist and post-capitalist (at least locally - who built the space ship?) both systems in the formal sense are attempts to impose a rational method of managing scarcity within an arational ecosystem. But I might argue that free enterprise, which is itself a complex adaptive system, will continue to be relevant as it adapts to this new ecosystem.
Automation may not be the correct term - the combination of ubiquitous information and 3D printing are going to take us in that direction but it's not automation in the classic sense. (As a space advocate, I'll also point that some pretty good analysis seems to demonstrate the space development has the potential to improve the world standard of living by a factor of 10 over the next 100 years. So add that into the puzzle.)
I'm presently reading "Accellerando" which is a fascinating SF book that goes from Slashdot to posthumanism, and among other things takes money, described as a 2nd derivative of a linear demand function, to an object-relational complex that incorporates all aspects of a transaction, and proposes Economics 2.0. It's a free E-Book.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
That's really a different topic, though I don't disagree with your assessment. If you haven't already, I suggest reading "Last and First Men" and the associated "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon, a friend of Einstein's IIRC.
Someone (Gould?) pointed out that the individual of a species becomes less fit as the species itself becomes more integrated. Civilization certainly has the effect of reducing the relative fitness of the individuals in it. As a case in point, some people are now arguing that human IQ has dropped since we became civilized, and similarly I as an example, might very well not have survived various illnesses and personal 'minor' disabilities without the comforts of civilization - and think about all those folks whose bad teeth have been hidden with orthodontics, to reproduce children with bad teeth.
As someone once said, "we are just mobile apartment houses for germs."
As you allude, every multicellular life form is a complex of individuals that have given up some aspects of their individuality to work together. Civilizations are just the same but exist in information space rather than gene space. And we all together constitute Terran 'Life'. When humans begin to terraform migrate into the Solar System, and if/when we build interstellar seed ships and propagate to other star systems, we will basically be doing the analogous thing to the spores of a fern or a mushroom. The individual lives (human plus all the species of life we bring with us) inside the seedship are just the cells that constitute the living part of the spore.
PS - I looked at your neural net thing, but didn't really get the gist.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Absolutely false. I'm not in favor of communism, but I'm even less in favor of Know-Nothings. And you're a paid shill anyway.
For those who care, AFAIK there have been no modern implementations of communism at the national scale that were not established violently. However, small communes (30 people or so) are commonplace and seem to work OK, and typically aren't violently established. The first Puritan colony in the Americas was a communism for the first two years; historically, most new colonies are either dictatorships or communes.
In contrast, one might note that there have also been no bloodless implementations of any other economic system that involved wholesale overthrow of the existing system in the modern era.
Ironically to your thesis, Marx considered capitalism unstable. In fact, Marx's dialectical economics considers ALL economic systems unstable, and subject to destruction from forces arising within. His predicted 'revolution' actually happened in the 20th century in the west, and was either co-opted by the Nazis in Germany, or folded back into western society in the form of labor unions. The Nazis and Fascists were socialists, but they were national socialists, in contrast to Russia. The fact that they were taken over by monsters who also believed in racial cleansing was unfortunate; they were actually playing out forces that Marx predicted. The west took them on and smashed them to a pulp, and then moved on the soviets in the form of the cold war. This was the real war of capitalism vs socialism. As a result, Russia and China now have a sort of synthesis of capitalism and socialism. The west also has socialist institutions everywhere, mostly a left over of the great depression, which one could say was a pivotal time for capitalism. Marx was predicting this sort of merger would happen.
Because of the changes that have happened since Marx, the capitalists of 1900 would reject the idea that western society is a capitalist society. They would probably consider it a socialist state. Marx, seeing our society, might have said that western society is being maintained in an unstable equilibrium where communistic impulses in the society are suppressed by a combination of propaganda, bribery, and force. He would have been right.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
A free enterprise system, as a complex adaptive system in itself, will always tend to converge toward the most 'efficient' or 'minimal error' surface in the ecosystem.
This is all well and good in pre-specified / full-information systems, where both the space of potentials and the utility surface are known. The real world isn't very much like that. Given your CAS and Sante Fe leanings, you've surely read Kauffman. Adaptive systems, under real-world constraints, are generally poised-criticality systems. i.e., they balance centralized and parallelized processes. This is, perhaps, what you mean by needing both positive and negative feedbacks, but it's quite a stretch to call such a system 'capitalism'.
Modellers have the best of intentions, and often produce valuable insights on limit case invariants, but there's a routine overreach when these conclusions are exported back to the real world from which the original enormous simplifications were derived. Setting out to model 'capitalism' or 'socialism' is a noble effort – but it's a mistake to then say that your model is capitalism or socialism. It's merely an example of how a system might behave under the constraints you've chosen as emblematic of those systems. In the framework of policy discussions, this a dangerous thing to do – because even if the limitations and technical details are known and clear to you, the modeller, the consumers of your work will falsely assume that your conclusions relate to 'capitalism' or 'socialism' in the world, which cannot be disentangled from politics, religion, failures (or adaptive heuristics, if you prefer) in human reasoning, chance resource inhomogeneities, noisy and incomplete information, inability to predict future innovations and uses (and consequently an increasing error in estimating the utility surface for increasing time horizons), etc., etc.
That said, communism in most of its theoretical forms is definitely not a better idea – and indeed, numerous socialist theorists, even prior to the rise of the USSR, warned as much. Communism was correctly predicted by socialist thinkers to lead to a red 'bureaucracy' that would utterly fail to bring about any of the advantages of socialist and collectivist societies. However, I'd quibble on the language of 'instability'. If anything, the biggest flaw in centralized schemes is too much stability – i.e., a grinding stagnation even in the face of changing circumstances, and a piling on of compounding errors and inefficiencies. To be sure, this is a recipe for disaster, but it's not really instability so much as hyper-stability, or a 'crystallization' (in Kauffman's language) – a shrinking volume of the accessible state-space with a growing energy barrier, so that the system is doomed to simply break or short-circuit when the external forcings inevitably change too much...
Err ... one of the things he did was to make it as hard as possible for the "undesirables" to emigrate - to make it easier to round them up and kill them.
At one point that was true; before Germany's conquest of Europe though -- the undesirables were encouraged to emigrate away.
What happened with The Ms. St. Louis?
The undesirables in Germany were undesirables elsewhere too; the country tried to send away the undesirables to Cuba, the US, etc... other countries refused them entry; and refused them asylum
It turns out: if you want to leave, you need to have somewhere to go
entrapment.
"In criminal law, entrapment is conduct by a law enforcement agent inducing a person to commit an offense that the person would otherwise have been unlikely to commit"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
One of the classic questions in systems philosophy is, when we talk about a system, are we talking about the system or a model of the system? (There's a term for this, I'm not expressing this correctly, it's been a while since I bandied this phraseology around, but hey.) Both are true, and yet both are false depending on your perspective at the moment. I think it was someone at Santa Fe who originally described the term complex adaptive system as a "euphemism for life" - real, messy, adaptive life. In most cases I tend to prefer to view a system as the thing itself, which I may be modeling.
The point of both positive and negative feedbacks being required for any stable system is true of all dynamic systems.
The question of where the boundaries of a system are is also dependent on the question being asked.
Whether capitalism or communism, or any other ism, IMHO "Your -ism is wrong". All -isms (even this one? :) ) are attempts to constrain some aspect of the real world into a rational, or (worse) logical, system. The real world, especially living part of it, just doesn't do that - it's fundamentally a-rational (at least the social and life components). But a CAS tends to converge toward a maximum benefit or minimum error for all environmental inputs perceived by the CAS - that's what life does. In this case, the error surface is in a space of an almost arbitrary dimensions, with dimensions appearing and disappearing continuously. So I'm arguing for the case that the CAS in question _is_ the economy & polity, not a model of it - though we certainly can construct models of it.
I was not calling the CAS capitalism, but the converse. I was referring to capitalism (really free enterprise - I'll stipulate that capitalism is just one model of free enterprise) as a less-bad model of the CAS that constitutes an economy (or a market, or whatnot) than communism. :) 'Free enterprise' a is really a better term than capitalism for this CAS viewpoint. As you note, an economy both does and doesn't contain all those influences you mention, depending on perspective. And that is why capitalism and communism both are not very good models (although the concept of satisficing which broadens the perspective regarding value, and the notion that free enterprise is a CAS, help a lot for the free enterprise case).
So, by way of agreement with your last paragraph, capitalism will tend to be 'successful' to the extent that it successfuly models a CAS. IMHO the fundamental failure of communism (as demonstrated by the simple lack of necessary feedback) is that its entire direction is the opposite direction from a CAS.
One might complain that in a pure free enterprise system, "It's a jungle out there!". And that's mostly OK, with some constraints. A jungle makes optimum use of every resource available, and also responds dynamically and rapidly to every change in the environment. I think organic gardening makes a pretty good analogic approach to how to manage an economy/polity - don't spray every bug you see, but encourage the things you want by proper provision of what they need.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I must say that while I don't consider myself sympathetic to Libertarian ideals, I find your thoughts, experiments and models very intriguing. Thank you for sharing this. As someone who is trapped in the corporate rigamarole for family and financial reasons I found your comparison of communistic centrally planned economies to corporate processes and organization and the shared dysfunctions to be enlightening.
I must also say that I agree with your assessments of the failings of our modern capitalist system and how governmental policies foster monopolies. A market based system with tougher anti-trust regulations could be a potential solution for this and one I would get behind.
On the whole however, it is not logic that makes me skeptical of this as a long term solution but my lack of faith in human nature that such a system could remain uncorrupted. Human nature is such that we present gradual entropy into such a system until it decays into corruption and dysfunction. While human beings as a class will present ignorance, greed, corruption and decay, it is certainly a safer and easier task to find a strong, intelligent, benevolent leader that can achieve all of the goals of the complex system.
Competent totalitarianism I feel is the best that human beings can hope to achieve in a world before post-scarcity. There are a number of such examples throughout history where centrally planned leadership when competent can be HIGHLY effective. Robert E. Lee and his outnumbered, outgunned army nearly winning a statistically unwinnable war. Alexander the Great, a near child, leading less than 50k phalanxes and conquering most of the known world. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt engineering and building a monumental tomb that stands to this day. The United States sending a group of men to the Moon and back.
If such an exceptional authoritarian figure had supreme power and wealth then they would be uncorruptable as there is nothing any of their subjects would have to offer them. They would be an exceptional statesmen or even an exceptional economist out of the passion of the craft. This I believe is the only hope for humanity since there is a statistical percentage if such a person were chosen at random from a pool of competent peoples to fill that role then there is a statistical liklihood that this person might be a huge success and advance humanity. Compare this to the statistical liklihood that a well regulated free market system will eventually erode into corruption, monopolistic control and entropy, 100% of the time according to human history. Only a neo-monarchy can save us.
Apple would not have the success it did if not for the society that it exists in, complete with infrastructure, education, and a well paid customer base to support its products.
Apple's success is not attributable to these things by any measure. There are plenty of other companies in various businesses, that had all these things, but no success.
every company kinda hopes that OTHER companies will pay taxes and create jobs, while they minimize their own.
Only if they are competitors; the competitor who pays more taxes will fail.
Every company has to minimize their employment costs ----- if you are in the business of selling quarters for nickels, you will go broke pretty fast.
Look at any country where the government is completely hands off and you find a complete decimated economy.
Nonsense. there are more decimated economies where the government was overly hands-on. Economies where the government was completely hands off over long periods of time are among the most successful.
It's the US government being overly hands-on that causes Apple to create fewer US jobs in the first place.
Pesky tax laws and employment regulations cause it to be fiscally irresponsible to not outsource certain jobs overseas.
The British monarchy was one of the most liberal in the world at the time and was one of the few to abandon absolutism before the Renaissance.
Not sure small and local can overcome the present situation, but one can hope. The back of the envelope thing re monopoly ownership is intriguing as well.
By weird association, reminds me of going to a dentist mid-'70s or so and reading an article on old man Honda (Soichiro Honda). Two things stood out. He'd go around to dealerships dressed in old khaki slacks, loafers, and a ratty sweatshirt to see how he got treated. Second, he decided that the owner of a company should not make more than 100 times the pay of the lowest employee. (As for the dentist, I hoped he was a better investor than tooth doctor.)
The system we use says that the "free" in "free market" means anyone can participate in that market, what's not so clear is whether anyone is free NOT to participate.
Until a few weeks ago, Americans were free not to participate in the market for health insurance. Now, not participating is illegal. (Or, if you're Chief Justice Roberts, you can consider it to be a legal but taxable activity -- just long enough to establish the constitutionality of the scheme -- and then we can all go back to saying "I absolutely reject the notion" that Obamacare is a tax.)
Obamacare supporters justify all this by saying that the free market wasn't working, because people who could afford to buy health insurance, but didn't, were getting free healthcare anyway; hence the need for an insurance mandate.
Here's the flaw in that argument. Let group B be the cancer patients who faithfully paid insurance premiums prior to their diagnosis, and group A be the cancer patients who had the means to insure their health, but chose not to.
When healthcare providers or governments, out of misplaced compassion, make the financial outcome for group A not so different from the financial outcome for group B, the incentive to buy insurance in the first place is indeed greatly eroded. Trouble is, it's not a free market that was malfunctioning and providing that perverse disincentive; it's a non-free market. A free market would rigorously enforce that the catastrophe group B insured itself against really happens to the group that chose not to insure itself against catastrophe. Those who choose not to insure their health would understand that they'd be subjecting themselves to seizure and forfeiture of their assets, no kidding, to whatever extent necessary to compensate their healthcare provider. Cautionary tales of people who gambled that they wouldn't need health insurance, and lost that gamble, would provide powerful free-market incentives to buy health insurance.
Sound harsh? It's not as harsh as the alternative Americans just acquiesced to: government coercion to buy health insurance.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Not to mention that most of the rail produced in north america was done by slave labor, or at the very least severely exploited people. Also the stealing of native lands, and wholesale slaughter of said peoples.
That and more are glossed over in these romantic simplistic idealized fiction.
Every time high speed rail is proposed, these truths are exposed, as it would be very expensive to do today. Though if you could nationalize the confiscation of land, go back to near slavery, and enforce it all with the military, while actually stealing all the capitol from the taxpayers...
"Great Men" indeed.
(2) "You can go somewhere else, if you think you're treated unfairly" is the age old reply of tyrants --- even Adolf Hitler used that excuse. ... one of the things he did was to make it as hard as possible for the "undesirables" to emigrate - to make it easier to round them up and kill them.
Err
In the early 30s the Jews were 'encouraged'* to leave voluntarily so as to further Germany's racial purity, such that 57% of the Jewish population had left by the time World War II came around. At that point it was too late and those who hadn't taken the hint (or had no means to leave earlier) became victims of the Holocaust.
"Encouraged" meaning they were forbidden from participating in many public activities, fined for the damage of Krystallnacht, sometimes attacked in public, Jewish businesses shut out of markets, etc.
What's your moral opinion of this guy, from the perspective of Objectivist ethics? Is he, maybe, an immoral "moocher" parasite, or is he the highest expression of the human ideal, personified? By the way, I'm not specifying for the purposes of the question whether or not his first name is "John".
This is a very good question, and raises further questions from me, since I'll admit I don't know enough about Objectivist theory to really figure it out. Does the man who cannily takes advantage of someone else's foolish charity acting in accordance with Objectivist principles? He is, after all, acting in his own rational self-interest. My guess, given the Nietzsche talk before, is "maybe," but he should still be pushed aside by the better, productive members of society who remove his ability to be a moocher. In an Objectivist society, he wouldn't be able to mooch.
"This is essentially two uncoupled, undamped systems with unlimited response - some people have "unlimited needs" and work the system; other people will be worked to death."
We have that in capitalism, the rich have "unlimited needs" and everyone else must work to meet them
I call bullshit...
first, don't show a damn clip from TV crime *fiction* in a science-based discussion...just fuck off with that...
2nd, don't agree with my logic then say it supports the opposite conclusion.
Polygraphs for *anything* other than a suspect in an active investigation, done by a deputized officer trained in proper interrogation, is just a subsidy for wannabes who couldn't get into Medical School (polygraphers)
Employment polygraphs, be it for the CIA, FBI, NSA, or the corner grocery are a complete waste of time and money.
Your scenario is ridiculous ("meh, you'll always have like 15 so who cares if the best one is a false positive"...fuck off)...your stats about false positives are inventions of your imagination...your logic supports the opposite conclusion
I almost hope you **are** a paid commenter or bot.....you're perpetuating a criminal enterprise
Thank you Dave Raggett
Under communism there will be free people.
Quite so, they will be free from liberty, free from plenty, free from democracy, free from justice. It will be just like pretty much every other communist country.
To get to communism we need to free the workers and put the capitalists under the workers dictatorship.
Communist "workers" dictatorships have been a bloody mess resulting in poverty and oppression pretty much everywhere they've been in power. Communism killed 100,000,000 people in the last century.
In the US, the last group that seriously pursued that goal had a similar plan in mind. You may want to pay special attention to the very bottom section of the page under "Additional links."
Perhaps you mean well, or perhaps this is simply your preferred troll, but if you are serious, you should look into this book: The Black Book of Communism - Review
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell