That $16 Billion figure has been around since at least 2001, and it has been debunked about 100 different times since then. It is a completely bogus number, and I don't believe I can trust anyone who throws figures like that around at the beginning of a "talk" on the subject.
As someone mentioned above studies have been done -- more than one, and one was completed just very recently -- and they have found that "downloaders" (not "pirates", there is a difference) are also their best customers. They buy more CDs and DVDs, and go to the theater more often than non-downloaders.
The fact is, pretty much all the actual evidence says that downloading brings in MORE money to the "content providers" than it loses.
And another study that was discussed on Slashdot here recently showed that the slump in CD sales is due to an obsolete business model, not downloading.
"The problem isn't "too many certificate authorities"."
I wasn't giving my opinion about that, I was simply quoting the study, which was discussed here on Slashdot a while back.
"There's always going to be some bad companies doing something incredibly stupid."
And I repeat: that's human error. And I dispute whether we could have a "system of trust" that is very much superior, because every time we have tried to set up a "secure" system, people have ALWAYS been the point of failure.
You can't make something foolproof, because fools are so ingenious. They will find ways to break nearly anything.
More accurately, I meant multiple certificates to the same domains. Which I agree is probably not a real problem, except I suppose for keeping things organized.
But a single cert to multiple parties... now that is another matter.
This has nothing to do with either the Roman era or the French Revolution. To call those straw-man arguments would be overly generous. Troll is more like it.
A recent evaluation showed that 80% of sites with certificates did not have them set up properly anyway.
As someone else already pointed out, browsers by default do not even warn you if a site's cert is invalid. Why? Because so many sites had invalid certs that people became intolerably annoyed at the constant warnings and just shut them off anyway.
That same study concluded that there are too many Certificate Authorities today, and they do an inadequate job of validating their customers before issuing certificates. Some CAs issued multiple certs to the same party, others actually issued the same certs to multiple parties! (Definitely a no-no.)
It's a broken system. Not because of bad design, necessarily, but because of the failures of people who administer it.
"Historical data tells approximately the same story. Everybody's health care costs have gone up by about the same percentage, regardless of country. US costs started higher, and they remain higher."
Again, irrelevant. I was referring to quality of care, not cost. At the time when care was best, Americans were also better able to pay for it, even if it did cost more than elsewhere.
To be perfectly clear about what I am saying: over a period of more than 250 years -- closer to 300 -- the purchasing power of money stayed flat for the entire time, with the exception of little bubbles around war time, after which they RETURNED to normal levels.
Economic "depressions" and recessions had far less impact on the average person, because the value of their dollars and labor were not greatly impacted for any length of time.
Today it is completely different. Every time we experience something like this, the "common man" has suffered more and more. After 250+ years of steady money, over the last 80 years our money has been devalued by more than 96%.
Those figures are completely irrelevant to what I was saying: that in the past, before government interference in the "health care industry" and it was pretty much a free-market enterprise, it was the best in the world.
We know it's dysfunctional now. That wasn't the point at all.
But what do you consider "money", and who do you consider "the private sector"? That's a meaningless metric.
First off, the Keynesian notion of the "creation" of dollars via the stock market and fractional-reserve banking has turned out to be a house of cards. Sure, when the market is doing great, and investment appears to be doing fine (INCLUDING investment is B.S. "derivatives" that really aren't worth beans), then by Keynesiaan economic scores, everything is great! The problem is that it is at exactly those times that the economy has tended to tumble. So if things are going so great, what happened?
The first problem is that this isn't REAL "money". It is treated that way, and it's measured that way. But "created" fiat dollars can disappear even faster than it is created, as we learned beyond doubt in 2008. Sorry friend, but if it can go "poof" into thin air overnight, then it's not "real" wealth by any sane standard. It's nothing but numbers in a computer.
Second, when banking and finance can take years and years of malinvestment and put it on the taxpayers' backs, then it ain't "private sector" anymore.
And third, just who the hell do you think the Fed is, anyway? Damn near ALL dollars come from "the private sector". Big deal. That doesn't mean that government economic policy doesn't influence it.
And that's what Keynesian (or proto-Keynesian) economists have been saying since the Fed was created. But they ignore the previous 300 years of history during which there was virtually no inflation, and we had the Industrial Revolution.
Inflation doesn't mean squat, except that your savings are losing money.
I happen to have a chart in front of me that shows inflation and deflation on pretty much a yearly basis from 1665 onward (admittedly, some of the earlier years are rough estimates). And also a chart that shows the purchasing power of the dollar (or dollar equivalent for similar good... again one must make adjustments for very early periods).
And I will repeat: nothing like the "Great Depression". Depressions were reported, but they had little or no impact on either inflation or the purchasing power of the dollar. Over any period of 3-5 years, inflation averaged out to almost nonexistent, and the purchasing power of the dollar remained almost completely flat. (With the exception of war time, when government printed or borrowed money to finance war. And right after the wars, the figures dropped again back to their "normal" values.
You can talk about little bubbles all you want, but since the creation of the Fed and government influence on the money supply (which is in collaboration with the Fed, this is undeniable), things have been on a STEADY downhill slide since 1913. The changes in the shapes of the graphs are not just noticeable, they are extremely dramatic.
This is not to say that we have not had some great economic times. But those were in despite of government and Fed policy, not because of it.
"The economy was better off in the early 1930s, when the grandparents and great-grandparents best known for the practice grew up?"
Don't be silly. As I already pointed out, they were "best known" for the practice simply because they had no choice. I was referring to times when people did have a choice.
In the 1800s, when times cycled from boom to depression (as in Great Depression depths) and back every generation?
Actual evidence, please. I have heard this popular assertion before, but when I have looked into the economy of the 19th century, I can find no evidence of anything even remotely resembling the great crash of 1929, which had government's and the Fed's hands all over it.
"The US health care system used to have equipment, skills and facilities that enabled giving the best level of care in the world, this is true. The problem is that it was only marginally better than everybody else, while costing four times as much as the hippie-commie-socialist-euro health care services. The level of service was definitely not four times better."
That's an easy thing to say. I'd like to see you back it up with figures.
"We need to get rid of fucking liars who intentionally misrepresent repaid loans as an aggregate figure. Can you tell me what we should do about brain dead idiots like yourself who keep repeating those lies?"
I'm not terribly surprised that this comment came from an AC. But to give the benefit of the doubt: you are saying that most of -- or even s significant amount of -- $16 Trillion in loans from the past 2.5 years have already been paid back? Really?
And no, I hate to have to tell you this, but people didn't put money under their mattresses during the depression because they thought it was a good investment. They knew that banks were a BAD investment. And the market was a shambles. They really didn't have much choice.
So that is a bad comparison. It is when people kept money under their mattresses and there WASN'T a depression, that the economy was good.
"Ummm, yes, a lowish steady inflation IS a good thing. Without it, there's no incentive to continue investing money in the economy instead of under your mattress."
That's straight Keynesian textbook-speak. But when has it ever actually happened to be true?
The economy was better off when people DID put money under their mattresses. History does not lie.
"It seems like, more often than not republican plans just happen to affect the weakest and most vulnerable."
This should be modded up half a point, because it's half-insightful.
The fact is that they do. But it ignores the question of WHY they do.
And the stock answer is: those programs were intended to benefit the weak and vulnerable, but eventually just about all of them turn out to be taken advantage of and abused by people who are NOT weak and vulnerable. That is not to say that they aren't valuable to the people for whom they are intended. But when a well-intended program becomes a piece of wasteful crap, what are you to do?
The Democrats would have us continue the wasteful crap, because it does in fact help a few people. But they lose sight of the fact that it ends up costing 10 times as much as it should.
Needy people are served far better by church and community charities than by government. They are more efficient, they take money only from those who want to give, and they give to people who are genuinely in need. If Democrats could figure out a way to make government work the same way, then by damn, I just might become a Democrat.
Right now, it looks like I'm voting any Democrats in my vicinity out of office, come 2012.
Slashdot Mirror
Because that runs straight into the opposite end of the spectrum: "too much" security.
Make it too difficult or too expensive to get certs, and nobody but large corporations will bother, resulting in just another fail.
That $16 Billion figure has been around since at least 2001, and it has been debunked about 100 different times since then. It is a completely bogus number, and I don't believe I can trust anyone who throws figures like that around at the beginning of a "talk" on the subject.
As someone mentioned above studies have been done -- more than one, and one was completed just very recently -- and they have found that "downloaders" (not "pirates", there is a difference) are also their best customers. They buy more CDs and DVDs, and go to the theater more often than non-downloaders.
The fact is, pretty much all the actual evidence says that downloading brings in MORE money to the "content providers" than it loses.
And another study that was discussed on Slashdot here recently showed that the slump in CD sales is due to an obsolete business model, not downloading.
"The problem isn't "too many certificate authorities"."
I wasn't giving my opinion about that, I was simply quoting the study, which was discussed here on Slashdot a while back.
"There's always going to be some bad companies doing something incredibly stupid."
And I repeat: that's human error. And I dispute whether we could have a "system of trust" that is very much superior, because every time we have tried to set up a "secure" system, people have ALWAYS been the point of failure.
You can't make something foolproof, because fools are so ingenious. They will find ways to break nearly anything.
They do. And I visit sites with self-signed certs, and they bitch about those, too.
There has been talk about giving the option of turning off warnings about self-signed certs. I'm not sure whether that would be a good or bad thing.
"And you believed it."
I believed it because it's true. Not absolutely, of course, but it is true for some browsers under some circumstances.
The browser I use most often will warn once, then ask you if you want to be warned again for the same domain.
In most versions of IE, it depends on what "trust" level you have assigned to a particular domain.
And with nearly all browsers, it is common for people to turn those warnings off. Because in fact they are frequent, and they are annoying.
More accurately, I meant multiple certificates to the same domains. Which I agree is probably not a real problem, except I suppose for keeping things organized.
But a single cert to multiple parties... now that is another matter.
This has nothing to do with either the Roman era or the French Revolution. To call those straw-man arguments would be overly generous. Troll is more like it.
A recent evaluation showed that 80% of sites with certificates did not have them set up properly anyway.
As someone else already pointed out, browsers by default do not even warn you if a site's cert is invalid. Why? Because so many sites had invalid certs that people became intolerably annoyed at the constant warnings and just shut them off anyway.
That same study concluded that there are too many Certificate Authorities today, and they do an inadequate job of validating their customers before issuing certificates. Some CAs issued multiple certs to the same party, others actually issued the same certs to multiple parties! (Definitely a no-no.)
It's a broken system. Not because of bad design, necessarily, but because of the failures of people who administer it.
"Historical data tells approximately the same story. Everybody's health care costs have gone up by about the same percentage, regardless of country. US costs started higher, and they remain higher."
Again, irrelevant. I was referring to quality of care, not cost. At the time when care was best, Americans were also better able to pay for it, even if it did cost more than elsewhere.
And I'm not sure if you realize this, but that's 3 wars we never should have been involved in.
And by the way: if "war" means shooting and bombing people, then it's actually more like 6.
Why should I care if the money is wasted on a useless war, or just pissed away on a toga party? It's still stupid waste.
To be perfectly clear about what I am saying: over a period of more than 250 years -- closer to 300 -- the purchasing power of money stayed flat for the entire time, with the exception of little bubbles around war time, after which they RETURNED to normal levels.
Economic "depressions" and recessions had far less impact on the average person, because the value of their dollars and labor were not greatly impacted for any length of time.
Today it is completely different. Every time we experience something like this, the "common man" has suffered more and more. After 250+ years of steady money, over the last 80 years our money has been devalued by more than 96%.
It ain't the same, man. No comparison.
I see. So the fact that the Federal "assistance" systems are failing doesn't matter?
In the long run, a system that works, even if it doesn't always work great, is still better than a system that provably doesn't work.
And why is little Bobby's family relying on the Federal government to supply the after-school program in the first place?
I'm all for kids and education and opportunities. But I like to see REAL sources for them, not inefficient and ineffective government crap.
Those figures are completely irrelevant to what I was saying: that in the past, before government interference in the "health care industry" and it was pretty much a free-market enterprise, it was the best in the world.
We know it's dysfunctional now. That wasn't the point at all.
Thank you, I will. If I am the victim of bad reporting (wouldn't be the first time), then at least I have the information to correct it.
But what do you consider "money", and who do you consider "the private sector"? That's a meaningless metric.
First off, the Keynesian notion of the "creation" of dollars via the stock market and fractional-reserve banking has turned out to be a house of cards. Sure, when the market is doing great, and investment appears to be doing fine (INCLUDING investment is B.S. "derivatives" that really aren't worth beans), then by Keynesiaan economic scores, everything is great! The problem is that it is at exactly those times that the economy has tended to tumble. So if things are going so great, what happened?
The first problem is that this isn't REAL "money". It is treated that way, and it's measured that way. But "created" fiat dollars can disappear even faster than it is created, as we learned beyond doubt in 2008. Sorry friend, but if it can go "poof" into thin air overnight, then it's not "real" wealth by any sane standard. It's nothing but numbers in a computer.
Second, when banking and finance can take years and years of malinvestment and put it on the taxpayers' backs, then it ain't "private sector" anymore.
And third, just who the hell do you think the Fed is, anyway? Damn near ALL dollars come from "the private sector". Big deal. That doesn't mean that government economic policy doesn't influence it.
And that's what Keynesian (or proto-Keynesian) economists have been saying since the Fed was created. But they ignore the previous 300 years of history during which there was virtually no inflation, and we had the Industrial Revolution.
Inflation doesn't mean squat, except that your savings are losing money.
I happen to have a chart in front of me that shows inflation and deflation on pretty much a yearly basis from 1665 onward (admittedly, some of the earlier years are rough estimates). And also a chart that shows the purchasing power of the dollar (or dollar equivalent for similar good... again one must make adjustments for very early periods).
And I will repeat: nothing like the "Great Depression". Depressions were reported, but they had little or no impact on either inflation or the purchasing power of the dollar. Over any period of 3-5 years, inflation averaged out to almost nonexistent, and the purchasing power of the dollar remained almost completely flat. (With the exception of war time, when government printed or borrowed money to finance war. And right after the wars, the figures dropped again back to their "normal" values.
You can talk about little bubbles all you want, but since the creation of the Fed and government influence on the money supply (which is in collaboration with the Fed, this is undeniable), things have been on a STEADY downhill slide since 1913. The changes in the shapes of the graphs are not just noticeable, they are extremely dramatic.
This is not to say that we have not had some great economic times. But those were in despite of government and Fed policy, not because of it.
I was going to point out the repeated paragraph as an example of unintended "backscatter".
"The economy was better off in the early 1930s, when the grandparents and great-grandparents best known for the practice grew up?"
Don't be silly. As I already pointed out, they were "best known" for the practice simply because they had no choice. I was referring to times when people did have a choice.
In the 1800s, when times cycled from boom to depression (as in Great Depression depths) and back every generation?
Actual evidence, please. I have heard this popular assertion before, but when I have looked into the economy of the 19th century, I can find no evidence of anything even remotely resembling the great crash of 1929, which had government's and the Fed's hands all over it.
"The US health care system used to have equipment, skills and facilities that enabled giving the best level of care in the world, this is true. The problem is that it was only marginally better than everybody else, while costing four times as much as the hippie-commie-socialist-euro health care services. The level of service was definitely not four times better."
That's an easy thing to say. I'd like to see you back it up with figures.
"We need to get rid of fucking liars who intentionally misrepresent repaid loans as an aggregate figure. Can you tell me what we should do about brain dead idiots like yourself who keep repeating those lies?"
I'm not terribly surprised that this comment came from an AC. But to give the benefit of the doubt: you are saying that most of -- or even s significant amount of -- $16 Trillion in loans from the past 2.5 years have already been paid back? Really?
I'd like to see that paperwork.
And no, I hate to have to tell you this, but people didn't put money under their mattresses during the depression because they thought it was a good investment. They knew that banks were a BAD investment. And the market was a shambles. They really didn't have much choice.
So that is a bad comparison. It is when people kept money under their mattresses and there WASN'T a depression, that the economy was good.
"Ummm, yes, a lowish steady inflation IS a good thing. Without it, there's no incentive to continue investing money in the economy instead of under your mattress."
That's straight Keynesian textbook-speak. But when has it ever actually happened to be true?
The economy was better off when people DID put money under their mattresses. History does not lie.
"It seems like, more often than not republican plans just happen to affect the weakest and most vulnerable."
This should be modded up half a point, because it's half-insightful.
The fact is that they do. But it ignores the question of WHY they do.
And the stock answer is: those programs were intended to benefit the weak and vulnerable, but eventually just about all of them turn out to be taken advantage of and abused by people who are NOT weak and vulnerable. That is not to say that they aren't valuable to the people for whom they are intended. But when a well-intended program becomes a piece of wasteful crap, what are you to do?
The Democrats would have us continue the wasteful crap, because it does in fact help a few people. But they lose sight of the fact that it ends up costing 10 times as much as it should.
Needy people are served far better by church and community charities than by government. They are more efficient, they take money only from those who want to give, and they give to people who are genuinely in need. If Democrats could figure out a way to make government work the same way, then by damn, I just might become a Democrat.
Right now, it looks like I'm voting any Democrats in my vicinity out of office, come 2012.