Let the poor get even poorer education, let the poorest be locked out of education entirely, let the rich monopolize the best resources, let the wealth gap grow even more obscenely.
That's an extremely narrow-minded assumption of what competition in education would do. The government currently has a monopoly on education; how is this different than a corporation having a monopoly? Because the government can be "supervised" by "the public"? Puh-lease.
Competition would breed various forms of education, creating niches where there currently are none. (If the government is giving away education--even if it's crappy--there's no incentive for profit-based solutions.) In the absence of government-provided education, free alternative methods such as television-based, commercial-financed education would be available to anyone with a TV. Who knows what else a free market in education would produce; information is increasingly getting cheaper due to the advances in technology and the growth of the Internet further driving down the costs of potential alternative education services and methods.
The worst thing about government-provided education is its one-size-fits-all approach. It's a pity that the government mandates what can be taught and how it can be taught; I and many others I know barely graduated because government schooling simply wasn't the best method for us.
And if I may add a point of clarification, you can akin the giant megacorp (i.e., Wal-Mart) in a free market as slower and less adept than the fledgling startup who tends to be more flexible and quick.
The power hierarchy of bureaucracy that exists in the megacorp is the manifestation of the market's self-regulation.
Market power tends to concentrate over time, simply because it's always more profitable to combine in order to dominate a market than to continue struggling in a state of pure competition and commodity pricing. So you can do away with anti-trust laws and regulation and such, but what you'll end up with isn't "free-market capitalism"; it'll be more like corporate feudalism.
Without government protection, economics tends to enforce a built-in regulation on the size of businesses. When corporations no longer have legal entity status, individuals--not abstract groups--are held accountable for their actions.
Imagine Wal-Mart or Ford as a proprietorship rather than a corporation. The sheer size of these organizations would be tough if not impossible when the company is owned by one or several individuals who all have personal, as well as business, stake in the actions of the company.
In essence, it is our laws--not market capitalism--which create corporations (in the legal sense) that cause corporate feudalism.
In a severe food shortage, yes, the price of food shoots up. People who can afford it continue to eat well (albeit at the expense of other things), but others starve.
You're interpreting it completely wrong.
Let's take a hypothetical natural disaster. Electricity is down obviously, so people need batteries.
The local stores are flooded with people wanting batteries, creating a shortage. If the prices didn't increase with demand, you would have people "starving" of batteries because the first person to get to the store would buy them all up.
But the prices will increase. The store owner wants to take advantage of the situation, so he increases the price of batteries from $2 to $20 for a two-pack. Now the first person that gets there will buy only one or two packs because he wants to use his money for other things like food and other supplies. This allows more people the ability to buy batteries despite the fact the cost has went up 1000%.
The same goes for any commodity, including food. When there is a shortage, the prices increase. The wealthy will always do well, but proportionally inverse in price to the supply of food allows more people to eat, even though they have to pay more.
There seems to be a built-in regulation in economics; there's nothing holy about it for the same reason there's nothing holy about gravity: it's simply how things work.
It's not perfect, but I would say it's better than anything involuntary central management (e.g., government) can do. Will the poor hurt more than the more affluent during times of crisis? Absolutely, but that will happen with or without government help. The cure is for the system to return to equalization, nothing else; you can use government to (try and) force it or you can let the market work things out. History and economic principle tells me, more often than not, the market will be more efficient.
Who cares what philosophers have to say on the subject of science? I would imagine anyone who isn't so arrogantly narrow-minded as to reject alternative ideas.
Philosophy is the art of ideas and perspectives. Science happens to be one of those perspectives. To assume that there aren't other equally valid perspectives in addition to science is intellectual sloth.
The main reason that science has essentially replaced philosophy as a means of discovering new truths is exactly BECAUSE science is falsifiable, whereas philosophy depends entirely on consensus and popularity. Science never replaced philosophy, in part because science IS a subset of philosophy. Science is falsifiable in that it is self-evaluating. It's like using an instrument made for calibration to calibrate itself. I suggest you look into the philosophies of science and epistemology.
Any application that ran under R5 will run, eventually if not already, on Haiku R1. So right off the bat you have a significant pool of programs. This included things like PHP, Abiword, GIMP, GTK+, Qemu, Firefox, Quake, VLC, etc. A good place to search for programs available for BeOS R5 is BeBits.
As far as taking a Linux/BSD application and porting it to BeOS/Haiku: it mainly depends on the application at hand.
Some programs will recompile with no modifications needed, or with only trivial modifications needed. Other programs will use 3rd party libraries which haven't yet been ported, so those would have to be done before the application that depended on them can be ported. Haiku, like BeOS, implements much of POSIX, so there are quite a few Linux/BSD programs out there that can ported with minimal effort.
That said, Haiku is pre-alpha quality software. Not only that but it's the reimplementation of a nearly-decade old OS (R5 was released in early 2000), so many programs that used to support BeOS no longer do. We're in much better shape now in the atmosphere of widely popular open source and cross-platform software, but don't expect to get your Linux experience out of Haiku quite at this point.
Well, I have to respectfully disagree. I feel that it would be better off for the Haiku concepts to be integrated into an existing operating system (Linux, or one of the BSDs, perhaps) rather than having those developers go out and attempt to create another operating system from whole cloth. Haiku's concepts belong more readily to a platform that targets the desktop. Linux is a great OS and has made great progress on the desktop, to be sure, but BeOS's concepts make more sense to integrate into a modular microkernel rather than monolithic one. In fact, early on there was intense debate over which kernel to use and Haiku was not the only open source project to recreate BeOS--there were at least two or three more, one of which aimed to implement the BeAPI on Linux. That project soon died.
That said, don't worry--the rare fruits that come from the Haiku project will most certainly trickle into other open source OSes.
As an example to all, I'll fire up qemu this afternoon and install haiku on my trusty old thinkpad. If 100./'ers did it and provided feedback to the project, it's a benefit to all. Very true, though I recommend using VMware's free VMware Player instead of qemu. It's available on both Windows & Linux and performs about a million times better (for running Haiku, at least).
Listen you ignorant fuck. I was saying that the reason people call him a kook is because they listen to other people not Ron Paul himself. Maybe that's what you meant, but what you actually wrote is--verbatim--What makes him a kook..., implying he indeed is a kook. And last time I checked, being a kook is never the fault of someone else--so I still don't agree with your premise.
And yeah, I did read the entire comment before responding. Most intelligent individuals understand that meaning oftentimes gets lost in the medium, but there was no chance of me deciphering your self-contradictions; most of us haven't evolved ESP abilities yet.
My advice? Take two Valium, and step away from the computer for a few hours. Next time someone misunderstands you, arguably at your own fault, please have the tact to not snap like a stressed twig.
Ron Paul is a kook because, like all kooks, not because of his good ideas, but because of his bad. And his bad ideas are *really* bad. Specifically he wants to dismantle pretty much the *entire federal government*. Utter misinformation. He wants to downsize government, sure, but to say he basically wants to "dismantle" the "entire" federal government is hogwash.
For example, he doesn't, in principle, believe in the welfare state, but he accepts the reality that you can't toss people out onto the street who have been dependent on it their entire lives. He doesn't believe the government should be in the business of providing retirement options, but instead of abolishing the Social Security Administration he wants to give youngsters like me the opportunity to opt out.
He wants to abolish the IRS, the FDA, and the EPA. I can't take anyone seriously who thinks that we can run a nation of 300 million without those 3 institutions or something equivalent. Have you ever critically thought about this, or did you just glance at this fact and write it off instantly?
The IRS? Go back to 2000 spending, and a 1% excise tax would be all the revenue the federal government would need.
The FDA? 100,000 people died from not having beta blockers in time, whereas only a few hundred people died from the deadliest "snake oil" in pre-FDA history. Great idea the FDA, but in practice it literally protects ourselves to death.
The EPA? California has shown states can do better themselves.
Still think chaos would ensure without these "vital" agencies? I honestly can't take anyone seriously who thinks the country can't run itself without the Conceit of the Anointed at the helms.
First of all, the fed printing more money isn't the only, or even primary, source of inflation *contrary* to what Ron Paul has been spouting off about. If oil prices, food prices, or consumer good prices rise, we get inflation because consumers spend more money for the same goods, and employers become obliged to pay those consumers higher wages, which raises the price of consumer goods, etc, ad infinitum. Prices won't increase universally without inflating the money supply. Suppose we take out fiat currency and replace it with gold. Now instead of having an arbitrary value with which to measure costs, we have something of inherent value. For the price of oil to increase, for instance, the price of gold would have to decrease. Because the supply of gold is more or less fixed, its inherent value won't go down unless something spectacular happens... like discovering an ungodly goldmine. Prices would truly be relative to one another.
Inflation can also happen because of a trade imbalance, which is a big part of what is driving up inflation right now. This imbalance is caused by a lack of true free trade. If people could buy and sell across international borders like we can across state borders, there would be no significant deficits.
What makes him a kook is all the exaggerations we have seen from his supporters And that's where any rational person stopped reading; that's where you stopped making sense. You call guy A a kook because of guy B, despite the fact guy A has never met guy B.
motorists being forced off the road and into buses. GOOD. That's the whole point of congestion charges. I am a motorist There are no buses or trains or any other mass transit anywhere near where I live and commute from. Maybe with people like you bitching (justifiably) about higher transit costs, alternatives will pop up.
BTW, here's a good video which is relevant to this discussion: http://reason.tv/video/show/6.html
We should be capable of deciding what are the goals for mankind, especially those we cannot realise as individuals. Why should I have to pay more taxes to finance your pet project? Because the Conceit of the Anointed has given you superhuman powers to see what's best for everyone despite their own wishes?
UbuntuDupe hit the nail on the head; this is a prime example of the Broken Window Fallacy. Please consult said economic allegory before responding next time.
The Constitution says nothing about Internet privacy, so Ron Paul would leave that issue to local control or the free market. Not quite. According to the 4th Amendment to the Constitution (emphasis mine):
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. So see, the Constitution actually specifically protects our privacy from the government. Unless, of course, you're trying to argue that this amendment is irrelevant simply because it doesn't specifically list "the Interwebs" as an area of security.
there is a HUGE difference between allowing me to pay more for higher bandwith to my house so I can download your website as fast as the bandwith you paid for allows and both of us getting charged to get the bandwith we already paid for prioritized so we can actually use it. they want to charge you so that once it gets past your link and on to the backbone of the net it doesn't get the brakes slammed slowing it back down. Who do I buy the bandwidth from for my Web site that you're accessing? Why, it's that very same backbone that's supposedly going to throttle our connection. That's not going to happen if there's competition between backbone providers. Just like you are willing to pay for a faster service from your provider, I--the site owner--am willing to pay my provider to get a faster service that isn't throttled based on content.
Because consumers (site owners, hosting providers, and end-users at home) demand non-tiered access--whether that's to a site or to an end-user--pressure will be on the backbone providers. End-users, hosting companies, and site owners alike won't stand for it. If I'm Google, and my provider is tiering all access to me because they've been paid a bribe by Microsoft, I pick up my business and take it to a backbone who won't do that. If, on the other hand, it's not my backbone doing the tiering but a partner backbone, the clients of said backbone are going to bitch when their connections to Google are slower than they are to, say, Yahoo.
The toll operator looks inside the truck, sees an Amazon package, wants to force the truck to take the slow lanes unless Amazon pays a toll in addition to the toll UPS is paying. Should that be allowed? Depends on whether or not the toll road is privately owned. If it is, then it's no one's business but Amazon and the toll road owner. If it's a public road, then I think we can all say: no.
But your analogy is a bit flawed. The UPS consumer who will receive the package is like you or I at home at our computer; we know not nor care what UPS had to do to get it to our doorstep, as long as they charge us the amount agreed upon. How do you fit that into your Internet analogy? I suppose you could say UPS is like your local ISP, whereas the trunk providers are the toll road owners.
And here is where it boils down to: assuming there isn't a local monopoly* on high speed Internet access in your area, your ISP is going to do whatever it is they can to please the consumer; if the consumer wants non-tiered** Internet access, they will either a) demand it and get it, b) go to a provider who will meet the demand, or c) do nothing because non-tiered access isn't, for whatever reason, enough for them to complain or switch providers.
*More often than not, competition is forbidden due to the local government giving a local company, or a "city-owned" company, a monopoly on high-speed Internet access. Don't like the service? Tough shit--get satellite or go without.
**Non-tiered from the end-user's perspective. If you're capped, and you most certainly are, it doesn't matter if access is tiered at a higher level than the cap your provider imposes on you, so you'll have virtually non-tiered access.
I think he was referring mainly to taxes on individual income. The US federal government would still have plenty of income on excise taxes and tariffs.
Because so many nerds are oblivious to society, and libertarianism is a very oblivious political philosophy. It starts off with assuming anarchy, and then replaces any occurence of 'violence' with 'money'. I think you need to go brush up on your libertarianism a bit more. May I suggest Healing Our World by Mary Ruwart.
Never mind that a libertarian society would inherit an old system in which people already have, or don't have a lot of money. Every read libertarian I've ever talked with has been ready to explain how those at the bottom of the system would be able to climb the ladder of affluence, and how those that couldn't (handicapped, etc.) would still be able to live a decent life. You may debate the utility of such arguments all you want, but don't have the audacity to presume libertarians have not thought about those less-fortunate and how they would be impacted by a libertarian system.
Never mind that people would like to be able to _trust_ certain institutions a tad beyond 'I've paid them'. I'm assuming you argue for government, and in that case, you're arguing for institutions that are paid for (via tax dollars). Government work is a service, and no one will provide that service out of the kindness of their heart; would you perform your job for your employer for free? As for trust, well, that can't be bought (or coerced for that matter). I wouldn't trust the business anymore than the government, but in the case of the business I can go to the competitor if I'm not pleased with my service or product.
Never mind that people expect all sorts of emotional things from leaders that money won't ever be able to buy. Money buys government, so in that case, I'd agree wholeheartedly. Your faith in government and simultaneous lack thereof in competition is quite vexing.
Not at all. Libertarianism leaves a power vacuum, into which large corporations would be only too happy to become the authorities. Large corporations probably wouldn't exist in a society where government doesn't give special privileges to certain businesses.
Well, here's an idea. Instead of letting that lot decide things for you, how about becoming part of that lot and influence them with some good ideas? Why should I be compelled to join that lot's game when I don't agree with their premise in the first place?
The same unswerving naive belief -- in their case it's just blind belief in the free market and the invisible hand of capitalism instead of peace and love. It's easy to attack an ideological extreme. Some libertarians are quite moderate, while others are a bit more extreme. Just as with liberals and conservatives, we're not the same.
Tell that to a musician trying to sign up with a major label Last time I checked, you didn't need a license to operate a guitar.
or a label trying to get radio time without some level of bribery, And this has to do with government regulation because... ? The FCC? No one's forcing you to get your music through radio.
Or to a food supplier trying to import past the government subsidies. Trade tariffs affect other industries as well.
And, despite the perpertual complaints, schooling is pretty good too, it gives you what you're willing to take from it (though I'd prefer an education to a schooling any day). One size never fits all, especially when it comes to education. People learn in different ways.
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It's funny because most historians paint the New Deal as having helped the Great Depression, when in fact no such consensus exists among economists.
Let the poor get even poorer education, let the poorest be locked out of education entirely, let the rich monopolize the best resources, let the wealth gap grow even more obscenely.
That's an extremely narrow-minded assumption of what competition in education would do. The government currently has a monopoly on education; how is this different than a corporation having a monopoly? Because the government can be "supervised" by "the public"? Puh-lease.
I suggest you read Chapter 10 of Healing Our World .
Competition would breed various forms of education, creating niches where there currently are none. (If the government is giving away education--even if it's crappy--there's no incentive for profit-based solutions.) In the absence of government-provided education, free alternative methods such as television-based, commercial-financed education would be available to anyone with a TV. Who knows what else a free market in education would produce; information is increasingly getting cheaper due to the advances in technology and the growth of the Internet further driving down the costs of potential alternative education services and methods.
The worst thing about government-provided education is its one-size-fits-all approach. It's a pity that the government mandates what can be taught and how it can be taught; I and many others I know barely graduated because government schooling simply wasn't the best method for us.
And if I may add a point of clarification, you can akin the giant megacorp (i.e., Wal-Mart) in a free market as slower and less adept than the fledgling startup who tends to be more flexible and quick.
The power hierarchy of bureaucracy that exists in the megacorp is the manifestation of the market's self-regulation.
Market power tends to concentrate over time, simply because it's always more profitable to combine in order to dominate a market than to continue struggling in a state of pure competition and commodity pricing. So you can do away with anti-trust laws and regulation and such, but what you'll end up with isn't "free-market capitalism"; it'll be more like corporate feudalism.
Without government protection, economics tends to enforce a built-in regulation on the size of businesses. When corporations no longer have legal entity status, individuals--not abstract groups--are held accountable for their actions.
Imagine Wal-Mart or Ford as a proprietorship rather than a corporation. The sheer size of these organizations would be tough if not impossible when the company is owned by one or several individuals who all have personal, as well as business, stake in the actions of the company.
In essence, it is our laws--not market capitalism--which create corporations (in the legal sense) that cause corporate feudalism.
In a severe food shortage, yes, the price of food shoots up. People who can afford it continue to eat well (albeit at the expense of other things), but others starve.
You're interpreting it completely wrong.
Let's take a hypothetical natural disaster. Electricity is down obviously, so people need batteries.
The local stores are flooded with people wanting batteries, creating a shortage. If the prices didn't increase with demand, you would have people "starving" of batteries because the first person to get to the store would buy them all up.
But the prices will increase. The store owner wants to take advantage of the situation, so he increases the price of batteries from $2 to $20 for a two-pack. Now the first person that gets there will buy only one or two packs because he wants to use his money for other things like food and other supplies. This allows more people the ability to buy batteries despite the fact the cost has went up 1000%.
The same goes for any commodity, including food. When there is a shortage, the prices increase. The wealthy will always do well, but proportionally inverse in price to the supply of food allows more people to eat, even though they have to pay more.
There seems to be a built-in regulation in economics; there's nothing holy about it for the same reason there's nothing holy about gravity: it's simply how things work.
It's not perfect, but I would say it's better than anything involuntary central management (e.g., government) can do. Will the poor hurt more than the more affluent during times of crisis? Absolutely, but that will happen with or without government help. The cure is for the system to return to equalization, nothing else; you can use government to (try and) force it or you can let the market work things out. History and economic principle tells me, more often than not, the market will be more efficient.
Philosophy is the art of ideas and perspectives. Science happens to be one of those perspectives. To assume that there aren't other equally valid perspectives in addition to science is intellectual sloth. The main reason that science has essentially replaced philosophy as a means of discovering new truths is exactly BECAUSE science is falsifiable, whereas philosophy depends entirely on consensus and popularity. Science never replaced philosophy, in part because science IS a subset of philosophy. Science is falsifiable in that it is self-evaluating. It's like using an instrument made for calibration to calibrate itself. I suggest you look into the philosophies of science and epistemology.
Any application that ran under R5 will run, eventually if not already, on Haiku R1. So right off the bat you have a significant pool of programs. This included things like PHP, Abiword, GIMP, GTK+, Qemu, Firefox, Quake, VLC, etc. A good place to search for programs available for BeOS R5 is BeBits.
As far as taking a Linux/BSD application and porting it to BeOS/Haiku: it mainly depends on the application at hand.
Some programs will recompile with no modifications needed, or with only trivial modifications needed. Other programs will use 3rd party libraries which haven't yet been ported, so those would have to be done before the application that depended on them can be ported. Haiku, like BeOS, implements much of POSIX, so there are quite a few Linux/BSD programs out there that can ported with minimal effort.
That said, Haiku is pre-alpha quality software. Not only that but it's the reimplementation of a nearly-decade old OS (R5 was released in early 2000), so many programs that used to support BeOS no longer do. We're in much better shape now in the atmosphere of widely popular open source and cross-platform software, but don't expect to get your Linux experience out of Haiku quite at this point.
That said, don't worry--the rare fruits that come from the Haiku project will most certainly trickle into other open source OSes.
And yes, if you find bugs please report them: http://dev.haiku-os.org/
And yeah, I did read the entire comment before responding. Most intelligent individuals understand that meaning oftentimes gets lost in the medium, but there was no chance of me deciphering your self-contradictions; most of us haven't evolved ESP abilities yet.
My advice? Take two Valium, and step away from the computer for a few hours. Next time someone misunderstands you, arguably at your own fault, please have the tact to not snap like a stressed twig.
For example, he doesn't, in principle, believe in the welfare state, but he accepts the reality that you can't toss people out onto the street who have been dependent on it their entire lives. He doesn't believe the government should be in the business of providing retirement options, but instead of abolishing the Social Security Administration he wants to give youngsters like me the opportunity to opt out. He wants to abolish the IRS, the FDA, and the EPA. I can't take anyone seriously who thinks that we can run a nation of 300 million without those 3 institutions or something equivalent. Have you ever critically thought about this, or did you just glance at this fact and write it off instantly?
The IRS? Go back to 2000 spending, and a 1% excise tax would be all the revenue the federal government would need.
The FDA? 100,000 people died from not having beta blockers in time, whereas only a few hundred people died from the deadliest "snake oil" in pre-FDA history. Great idea the FDA, but in practice it literally protects ourselves to death.
The EPA? California has shown states can do better themselves.
Still think chaos would ensure without these "vital" agencies? I honestly can't take anyone seriously who thinks the country can't run itself without the Conceit of the Anointed at the helms. First of all, the fed printing more money isn't the only, or even primary, source of inflation *contrary* to what Ron Paul has been spouting off about. If oil prices, food prices, or consumer good prices rise, we get inflation because consumers spend more money for the same goods, and employers become obliged to pay those consumers higher wages, which raises the price of consumer goods, etc, ad infinitum. Prices won't increase universally without inflating the money supply. Suppose we take out fiat currency and replace it with gold. Now instead of having an arbitrary value with which to measure costs, we have something of inherent value. For the price of oil to increase, for instance, the price of gold would have to decrease. Because the supply of gold is more or less fixed, its inherent value won't go down unless something spectacular happens... like discovering an ungodly goldmine. Prices would truly be relative to one another. Inflation can also happen because of a trade imbalance, which is a big part of what is driving up inflation right now. This imbalance is caused by a lack of true free trade. If people could buy and sell across international borders like we can across state borders, there would be no significant deficits.
What a piece of work you are...
UbuntuDupe hit the nail on the head; this is a prime example of the Broken Window Fallacy. Please consult said economic allegory before responding next time.
Technically, it's supposed to be a constitutional republic. But I'm just splitting hairs. ;)
Because consumers (site owners, hosting providers, and end-users at home) demand non-tiered access--whether that's to a site or to an end-user--pressure will be on the backbone providers. End-users, hosting companies, and site owners alike won't stand for it. If I'm Google, and my provider is tiering all access to me because they've been paid a bribe by Microsoft, I pick up my business and take it to a backbone who won't do that. If, on the other hand, it's not my backbone doing the tiering but a partner backbone, the clients of said backbone are going to bitch when their connections to Google are slower than they are to, say, Yahoo.
But your analogy is a bit flawed. The UPS consumer who will receive the package is like you or I at home at our computer; we know not nor care what UPS had to do to get it to our doorstep, as long as they charge us the amount agreed upon. How do you fit that into your Internet analogy? I suppose you could say UPS is like your local ISP, whereas the trunk providers are the toll road owners.
And here is where it boils down to: assuming there isn't a local monopoly* on high speed Internet access in your area, your ISP is going to do whatever it is they can to please the consumer; if the consumer wants non-tiered** Internet access, they will either a) demand it and get it, b) go to a provider who will meet the demand, or c) do nothing because non-tiered access isn't, for whatever reason, enough for them to complain or switch providers.
*More often than not, competition is forbidden due to the local government giving a local company, or a "city-owned" company, a monopoly on high-speed Internet access. Don't like the service? Tough shit--get satellite or go without.
**Non-tiered from the end-user's perspective. If you're capped, and you most certainly are, it doesn't matter if access is tiered at a higher level than the cap your provider imposes on you, so you'll have virtually non-tiered access.
I think he was referring mainly to taxes on individual income. The US federal government would still have plenty of income on excise taxes and tariffs.