"You're missing the really big difference: X-rays are ionizing, terahertz radiation is not. There's a very simple solution to that problem: don't use too much power. Anyone will feel major discomfort before any sort of damage happens."
(Cough, cough.) Ahem. Microwaves are non-ionizing too, fool. But I'm using them to cook my breakfast.
""Corporations are people, my friend." - Thomas Jefferson"
Really? Can they vote? Get married? Become elected officials?
Corporations are NOT people. They were granted, by government, the privilege of acting as people in the matter of basic finance, for the sole purpose that projects too large for individuals to fund could be financed.
There was NEVER any intent that corporations would be ACTUAL people. Further, any of these privileges that are bestowed by Government cannot be basic human rights, like free speech, because rights come naturally; they are not given to us by government. Nor does government have legal authority to take them away.
There is very good evidence that terahertz waves are anything but safe!
Whereas X-rays pass through most body parts, leading to a very low rate of absorption that is also spread throughout most of the body, terahertz waves are the opposite: a minority of the radiation is reflected back to the scanner, but the majority is completely absorbed by the tissue at the depth of penetration. And because that depth is pretty specific, what you have is a very thin layer of tissue that is completely absorbing a great deal of energy from the radiation.
If you really think about that, you will change your mind about any "completely safe" claims. We need tests and more tests and double-blind tests, before it can be declared "safe", and even then we would need to wait for a long time to rule out any possible long-term effects.
"Shintos are sort of a special case, but they're barely a religion, anyway; more classifiable as a sort of organized superstition."
Um... isn't that what religion is? Organized superstition? How can you call any of them more or less "realistic" than the others?
As for intervention: how could a Church possibly be successful if it taught that God does not intervene in individual affairs? If it tried to teach that, it would have no leverage for telling people what to do!
The more Google "integrates" Android with its own services, the less it becomes an "open" system, and instead begins to resemble closed, proprietary systems like OS X and iOS.
Which means they are throwing away any competitive advantage it had over those same competitors. Even Google has been guilty of doing some pretty stupid things in recent years.
Palm did the same thing: when they changed their business model to go after smartphones, they changed everything to conform to the existing smartphone market... thereby giving away the massive competitive advantage Palm had over any other mobile operating system at the time: they tossed out handwriting recognition, screen real-estate, and popup keyboard with a shitty, tiny, manual keyboard that was a major pain in the ass to use. And old Palm apps would not work anymore.
Instead, they ended up competing with established smartphone manufacturers on their home turf, and didn't bring anything new to the table. They'd left it all at home.
And that's what Google (in a somewhat different way) is doing to Android. It's a mistake.
"It's clear you are not able to accept the fact that much of the quality of life you have right now is due to some level of government 'interference' in the free market. "
Yes, you are quite correct. I admit that I have trouble swallowing bullshit that is provably contradicted by the actual historical record.
"You offer no alternatives to the current system either."
The discussion wasn't about alternatives. I certainly do have them, as do many economists who haven't been taken in by Keynes and Government money-mongering.
I agree. This debate is concluded. I offered a source for evidence of my claims, you have not.
Further, if I were you, I wouldn't go around bragging that you studied with Laura Tyson.
She was influential in supporting GATT, which since its implementation has arguably had the opposite effect of what she predicted.
She was a board member of Kodak, which folded quite famously due to its market blunders. She has been on the board of Morgan Stanley (hardly a recommendation these days), and a member of the CFR (never a recommendation on the best of days).
In short, precisely the same kind of consistently wrong -- and likely corrupt -- person as those others who have been behind the economic MESS we have been in.
"You failed to mention if you would like to go back to the robber barons days with no regulation. "
actually done your research, you would know that the days of the "robber barons" were among the biggest economic booms in all of history. Further, the so-called Robber Barons themselves, while admittedly growing rich, stimulated the economy so much in the process we have seldom seen the equal. (Source: "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History", by Thomas E. Woods. Woods is a noted Harvard-educated historian, and unlike you, he gets his facts straight.)
More twisted history:
"You tea baggers and efficient market theorists do nothing but stand in the way of making reasonable fixes to our problems."
Fact: the more "fixes" that have been imposed by government, the worse the economy has been invariably. There is a very clear, easily visible when charted, NEGATIVE correlation.
And you sit there and tell me you "did your research". Hah. What a joke.
"Gambling, by definition, is seeking to profit from a random event that is generated SPECIFICALLY so people can bet on it."
Okay, but so what? The reasons behind it don't change the way it works, one little bit.
"The risk that the price of corn is going to go up or down has NOTHING to do with the fact there is a futures exchange."
Bullshit. Of course it does. IT'S A GAMBLE. Some people will win, and in a commodities market that means some people will lose. You are making a bet. Plain and simple.
"The futures trader is willing to assume that pre-existing risk in the interest of making money, while the farmer is happy to have someone to take that risk off their hands."
Of course. But again: the reasons behind it don't change the fact that it's essentially gambling on the part of the investors.
"The risk has always been there, but a futures exchange allows people to transfer that risk."
"Derivatives, HFT, the works all have legitimate, valuable reasons for existing."
Craps tables have reasons for existing, too, as do back-alley dice games. They all have good reasons for existing.
But if you were a bank, in which many innocent people had deposited their money, should you be allowed to "invest" it in a back-alley dice game?
The fact that there may be reasons behind them does not mean they are appropriate investments by just anybody, nor does it mean they are good for the economy. Nor does it make them "capitalism".
That *is* a bit of an oversimplification, because in most cases, the vast majority of the stock is retained by the company. So when the stock price rises, the value of the company does as well.
While contemporary economic theory has become a bit more sophisticated than old Keynesian theory (thank Grid), there is much to be said for the Keynesian idea that simply maximizing share value is equivalent to maximizing the value (and therefore buyout price) of the corporation itself.
So, no. Each time the stock sells, it produces a price signal in the marketplace. That influences what others will buy or sell for, and when you put them all together, a balance is reached. (This is essentially Adam Smith's definition of a free market.)
So if the initial public offering is a share for $10, and a few years later those shares go for $1000, then yes, "the company", that is to say the shareholders, profit indeed. Very, very much. Because "the company" owns most of that stock.
So your card analogy is false. Cards are not automatically attached to any value of the originator. They are sold as a commodity... a common, usually cheap item.
Stocks, on the other hand, are attached to the worth of the company, because the company retains the majority of the stock (if you didn't, you screwed up).
Even Adam Smith recognized that a reasonable body of antitrust laws would be necessary to keep capitalists playing within the system. Consider antitrust laws to be the "meta-rules" that keep people playing within the regular rules.
And it is also true, that when antitrust laws have been relaxed, monopolists have tended to take advantage. I do not dispute this.
But the vast majority of government regulation does not qualify as "antitrust" regulation. It is mostly interference that leads to inefficiency. Once again: antitrust regulation is now at a historic low, while other government intervention is at a historic high... and our economy currently sucks very hard.
"Friedman's school of thought has turned two generations of capitalists against healthy and necessary regulation that is needed for their own protection."
Everyday events put the lie to this assertion. There is more government regulation of markets right now than ever before in history, yet our economy is simultaneously in one of the worst positions it has ever been in history.
How do you reconcile this? Facts that are extremely easy to verify directly contradict what you say.
"Unrestrained capitalism is a force that favors monopoly as an outcome. No one wins except for the monopolist. Efficiency is the result of goverment actively regulating the economy to allow competition to flourish."
Bullshit.
It has never worked that way. If you chart government interference in the economy against the purchasing power of the dollar, since the late 1600s, the correlation is indisputable. And since one has preceded the other, while this is not proof that government interference has been the cause of the bad economy (you won't find any post hoc, ergo propter hoc here), it *IS* proof that bad economy could not be the driving cause of government intervention.
I do, in fact, have the data I mentioned. Because I don't speak about these things just off-the-cuff; I do my research first.
The more government has tried to "regulate" the economy, the worse that economy has been. Invariably. Over more than 200 years.
When the free market is allowed to work, it works. But we have over 100 years now of government and insider interference in the free markers, to the extent that they can hardly be called free anymore.
Sorry, but you can't point to a system that has been almost hopelessly corrupted, and call that evidence that the system as designed doesn't work. That's a logical fallacy.
Today's Wall Street is very, very far from a "free market".
Um, yes, I believe you did. You replied to my comment about VMs with a comment about dual-booting. Which implies that they have something significant to do with one another.
"Yes, back then we didn't have as much 'disposable computing power'."
Well, no shit. That is exactly what I stated. Thanks for agreeing with me.
"But this is about the "the lack of software freedom", and with those free OSes you always had alternatives for the DM."
What??? Your link has nothing to do with "software freedom". You just referred back to things that we have already discussed.
But wait! I think you are jumping the gun. People who wanted OEM Linux were not necessarily people who were terribly knowledgeable about it in the first place. They were simply adventurous. Should they have been expected to know about all the alternative DMs out there? Even many dedicated Linux users don't.
"They never sold well."
And from that you conclude that it wasn't tried due to customer demand?
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh... (sound of a buzzer going off). Methinks that the one does not follow from the other.
"Stock markets such as we have aren't absolutely critical to that, but they're pretty close."
Yes, but what you aren't taking into account is that Wall Street today isn't much about straight (or even legitimate) stock trading. Instead, it's money markets and derivatives, which don't fund capital projects. It all goes into fat cat pockets.
I wasn't deriding stock trading. I was blasting Wall Street. Two very different things.
"Capitalism is a method of allocating resources through the private sector and that's precisely what Wall Street does."
This is precisely where you are wrong.
That is what Wall Street was originally designed to do. That does not mean that's what it does now.
Wall Street today is little more than a Fed <-> Bank <-> Finance Company <-> Government circle jerk. While at the same time, "regular" investors get no love.
It most definitely does. But let me clarify a bit what I meant.
TRADITIONALLY, stock investment helped raise capital for large projects. (Which was also the reason for the formation of corporations: large projects could be funded that even rich individuals could not afford to undertake.)
But even given that, stock trading is still indeed gambling. There is no justification for calling it anything BUT. You put out your cash and hope it grows. But it may not. If you trade at random, given many transactions you should have about a 50/50 chance of staying even. BUT... just like a casino, there is a house advantage here too: there are usually percentages or fees charged for each transaction. So again, if you assume randomness, odds are you will actually end up in the red.
There is nothing about this scheme that differs from gambling. Not... one... single... thing.
But even aside from that, what I was getting at is: the majority of wall street investment today is in one or another form of derivative. And a derivative is, quite literally, betting on other people's bets. Unlike regular stock investment, it produces nothing, and does not finance production. It simply finances the financiers.
You can argue with me all you like about that, but it doesn't change the facts. For the most part, Wall Street today has very little to do with actual capitalism. Instead it has to do with Corporatism and Governmentism (which, put together, were defined by Benito Mussolini as "fascism"). There is very little resemblance, even superficially, to actual "capitalism" to be had there.
Slashdot Mirror
They're higher frequency than microwaves, which are used to cook food.
But no... that couldn't possibly be harmful, could it?
"You're missing the really big difference: X-rays are ionizing, terahertz radiation is not. There's a very simple solution to that problem: don't use too much power. Anyone will feel major discomfort before any sort of damage happens."
(Cough, cough.) Ahem. Microwaves are non-ionizing too, fool. But I'm using them to cook my breakfast.
The word "fact" is also misused here. I think "idea" would have been more accurate.
""Corporations are people, my friend." - Thomas Jefferson"
Really? Can they vote? Get married? Become elected officials?
Corporations are NOT people. They were granted, by government, the privilege of acting as people in the matter of basic finance, for the sole purpose that projects too large for individuals to fund could be financed.
There was NEVER any intent that corporations would be ACTUAL people. Further, any of these privileges that are bestowed by Government cannot be basic human rights, like free speech, because rights come naturally; they are not given to us by government. Nor does government have legal authority to take them away.
There is very good evidence that terahertz waves are anything but safe!
Whereas X-rays pass through most body parts, leading to a very low rate of absorption that is also spread throughout most of the body, terahertz waves are the opposite: a minority of the radiation is reflected back to the scanner, but the majority is completely absorbed by the tissue at the depth of penetration. And because that depth is pretty specific, what you have is a very thin layer of tissue that is completely absorbing a great deal of energy from the radiation.
If you really think about that, you will change your mind about any "completely safe" claims. We need tests and more tests and double-blind tests, before it can be declared "safe", and even then we would need to wait for a long time to rule out any possible long-term effects.
"Shintos are sort of a special case, but they're barely a religion, anyway; more classifiable as a sort of organized superstition."
Um... isn't that what religion is? Organized superstition? How can you call any of them more or less "realistic" than the others?
As for intervention: how could a Church possibly be successful if it taught that God does not intervene in individual affairs? If it tried to teach that, it would have no leverage for telling people what to do!
Haha! Best in Class.
The more Google "integrates" Android with its own services, the less it becomes an "open" system, and instead begins to resemble closed, proprietary systems like OS X and iOS.
Which means they are throwing away any competitive advantage it had over those same competitors. Even Google has been guilty of doing some pretty stupid things in recent years.
Palm did the same thing: when they changed their business model to go after smartphones, they changed everything to conform to the existing smartphone market... thereby giving away the massive competitive advantage Palm had over any other mobile operating system at the time: they tossed out handwriting recognition, screen real-estate, and popup keyboard with a shitty, tiny, manual keyboard that was a major pain in the ass to use. And old Palm apps would not work anymore.
Instead, they ended up competing with established smartphone manufacturers on their home turf, and didn't bring anything new to the table. They'd left it all at home.
And that's what Google (in a somewhat different way) is doing to Android. It's a mistake.
"It's clear you are not able to accept the fact that much of the quality of life you have right now is due to some level of government 'interference' in the free market. "
Yes, you are quite correct. I admit that I have trouble swallowing bullshit that is provably contradicted by the actual historical record.
"You offer no alternatives to the current system either."
The discussion wasn't about alternatives. I certainly do have them, as do many economists who haven't been taken in by Keynes and Government money-mongering.
I agree. This debate is concluded. I offered a source for evidence of my claims, you have not.
And by the way (you didn't answer, but I think I know the answer):
In the barely possible but highly unlikely event you are the "real" Vernor Vinge: I loved "A Fire Upon The Deep". Very unique premise.
Didn't care much for the prequel, though.
Further, if I were you, I wouldn't go around bragging that you studied with Laura Tyson.
She was influential in supporting GATT, which since its implementation has arguably had the opposite effect of what she predicted.
She was a board member of Kodak, which folded quite famously due to its market blunders. She has been on the board of Morgan Stanley (hardly a recommendation these days), and a member of the CFR (never a recommendation on the best of days).
In short, precisely the same kind of consistently wrong -- and likely corrupt -- person as those others who have been behind the economic MESS we have been in.
And you cite her as a mentor. Hahahahahahaha!
"Unlike you, I did do my research."
Haha. You didn't do it very well.
"You failed to mention if you would like to go back to the robber barons days with no regulation. "
actually done your research, you would know that the days of the "robber barons" were among the biggest economic booms in all of history. Further, the so-called Robber Barons themselves, while admittedly growing rich, stimulated the economy so much in the process we have seldom seen the equal. (Source: "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History", by Thomas E. Woods. Woods is a noted Harvard-educated historian, and unlike you, he gets his facts straight.)
More twisted history:
"You tea baggers and efficient market theorists do nothing but stand in the way of making reasonable fixes to our problems."
Fact: the more "fixes" that have been imposed by government, the worse the economy has been invariably. There is a very clear, easily visible when charted, NEGATIVE correlation.
And you sit there and tell me you "did your research". Hah. What a joke.
"Gambling, by definition, is seeking to profit from a random event that is generated SPECIFICALLY so people can bet on it."
Okay, but so what? The reasons behind it don't change the way it works, one little bit.
"The risk that the price of corn is going to go up or down has NOTHING to do with the fact there is a futures exchange."
Bullshit. Of course it does. IT'S A GAMBLE. Some people will win, and in a commodities market that means some people will lose. You are making a bet. Plain and simple.
"The futures trader is willing to assume that pre-existing risk in the interest of making money, while the farmer is happy to have someone to take that risk off their hands."
Of course. But again: the reasons behind it don't change the fact that it's essentially gambling on the part of the investors.
"The risk has always been there, but a futures exchange allows people to transfer that risk."
Yep. By letting others bet on it.
"Derivatives, HFT, the works all have legitimate, valuable reasons for existing."
Craps tables have reasons for existing, too, as do back-alley dice games. They all have good reasons for existing.
But if you were a bank, in which many innocent people had deposited their money, should you be allowed to "invest" it in a back-alley dice game?
The fact that there may be reasons behind them does not mean they are appropriate investments by just anybody, nor does it mean they are good for the economy. Nor does it make them "capitalism".
That *is* a bit of an oversimplification, because in most cases, the vast majority of the stock is retained by the company. So when the stock price rises, the value of the company does as well.
While contemporary economic theory has become a bit more sophisticated than old Keynesian theory (thank Grid), there is much to be said for the Keynesian idea that simply maximizing share value is equivalent to maximizing the value (and therefore buyout price) of the corporation itself.
So, no. Each time the stock sells, it produces a price signal in the marketplace. That influences what others will buy or sell for, and when you put them all together, a balance is reached. (This is essentially Adam Smith's definition of a free market.)
So if the initial public offering is a share for $10, and a few years later those shares go for $1000, then yes, "the company", that is to say the shareholders, profit indeed. Very, very much. Because "the company" owns most of that stock.
So your card analogy is false. Cards are not automatically attached to any value of the originator. They are sold as a commodity... a common, usually cheap item.
Stocks, on the other hand, are attached to the worth of the company, because the company retains the majority of the stock (if you didn't, you screwed up).
I like this Stickerboy person. He has logic on his side.
Having said that, I will amend it:
Even Adam Smith recognized that a reasonable body of antitrust laws would be necessary to keep capitalists playing within the system. Consider antitrust laws to be the "meta-rules" that keep people playing within the regular rules.
And it is also true, that when antitrust laws have been relaxed, monopolists have tended to take advantage. I do not dispute this.
But the vast majority of government regulation does not qualify as "antitrust" regulation. It is mostly interference that leads to inefficiency. Once again: antitrust regulation is now at a historic low, while other government intervention is at a historic high... and our economy currently sucks very hard.
"Friedman's school of thought has turned two generations of capitalists against healthy and necessary regulation that is needed for their own protection."
Everyday events put the lie to this assertion. There is more government regulation of markets right now than ever before in history, yet our economy is simultaneously in one of the worst positions it has ever been in history.
How do you reconcile this? Facts that are extremely easy to verify directly contradict what you say.
"Unrestrained capitalism is a force that favors monopoly as an outcome. No one wins except for the monopolist. Efficiency is the result of goverment actively regulating the economy to allow competition to flourish."
Bullshit.
It has never worked that way. If you chart government interference in the economy against the purchasing power of the dollar, since the late 1600s, the correlation is indisputable. And since one has preceded the other, while this is not proof that government interference has been the cause of the bad economy (you won't find any post hoc, ergo propter hoc here), it *IS* proof that bad economy could not be the driving cause of government intervention.
I do, in fact, have the data I mentioned. Because I don't speak about these things just off-the-cuff; I do my research first.
The more government has tried to "regulate" the economy, the worse that economy has been. Invariably. Over more than 200 years.
I take it you're not the "real" Vernor Vinge?
"How does efficient market theory explain all the millionaire and billionaire stock traders Manhattan and London?"
It doesn't, of course. But... given hundreds of years of solid evidence, it should. So... what is the difference? How did those things happen?
A few were smart. A few got lucky. Many of them already HAD family money.
Most of the rest is due to market-fixing, cronyism, insider trading, etc.
When the free market is allowed to work, it works. But we have over 100 years now of government and insider interference in the free markers, to the extent that they can hardly be called free anymore.
Sorry, but you can't point to a system that has been almost hopelessly corrupted, and call that evidence that the system as designed doesn't work. That's a logical fallacy.
Today's Wall Street is very, very far from a "free market".
"And I never implied it was."
Um, yes, I believe you did. You replied to my comment about VMs with a comment about dual-booting. Which implies that they have something significant to do with one another.
"Yes, back then we didn't have as much 'disposable computing power'."
Well, no shit. That is exactly what I stated. Thanks for agreeing with me.
"But this is about the "the lack of software freedom", and with those free OSes you always had alternatives for the DM."
What??? Your link has nothing to do with "software freedom". You just referred back to things that we have already discussed.
But wait! I think you are jumping the gun. People who wanted OEM Linux were not necessarily people who were terribly knowledgeable about it in the first place. They were simply adventurous. Should they have been expected to know about all the alternative DMs out there? Even many dedicated Linux users don't.
"They never sold well."
And from that you conclude that it wasn't tried due to customer demand?
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh... (sound of a buzzer going off). Methinks that the one does not follow from the other.
"Stock markets such as we have aren't absolutely critical to that, but they're pretty close."
Yes, but what you aren't taking into account is that Wall Street today isn't much about straight (or even legitimate) stock trading. Instead, it's money markets and derivatives, which don't fund capital projects. It all goes into fat cat pockets.
I wasn't deriding stock trading. I was blasting Wall Street. Two very different things.
"Capitalism is a method of allocating resources through the private sector and that's precisely what Wall Street does."
This is precisely where you are wrong.
That is what Wall Street was originally designed to do. That does not mean that's what it does now.
Wall Street today is little more than a Fed <-> Bank <-> Finance Company <-> Government circle jerk. While at the same time, "regular" investors get no love.
"It certainly doesn't resemble a casino."
It most definitely does. But let me clarify a bit what I meant.
TRADITIONALLY, stock investment helped raise capital for large projects. (Which was also the reason for the formation of corporations: large projects could be funded that even rich individuals could not afford to undertake.)
But even given that, stock trading is still indeed gambling. There is no justification for calling it anything BUT. You put out your cash and hope it grows. But it may not. If you trade at random, given many transactions you should have about a 50/50 chance of staying even. BUT... just like a casino, there is a house advantage here too: there are usually percentages or fees charged for each transaction. So again, if you assume randomness, odds are you will actually end up in the red.
There is nothing about this scheme that differs from gambling. Not... one... single... thing.
And just as with gambling, corruption has been (is) rampant.
But even aside from that, what I was getting at is: the majority of wall street investment today is in one or another form of derivative. And a derivative is, quite literally, betting on other people's bets. Unlike regular stock investment, it produces nothing, and does not finance production. It simply finances the financiers.
You can argue with me all you like about that, but it doesn't change the facts. For the most part, Wall Street today has very little to do with actual capitalism. Instead it has to do with Corporatism and Governmentism (which, put together, were defined by Benito Mussolini as "fascism"). There is very little resemblance, even superficially, to actual "capitalism" to be had there.