There is one problem with that definition, and it is intentional. It inserts a clause that is completely irrelevant to the economic system we call "capitalism"
There is absolutely no reason for the phrase "for profit" in the definition. The appropriate definition of the system we call capitalism is "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners, rather than by the state." The purposes to which the private owners put a country's trade and industry are entirely up to them.If they use that control for profit, that is fine, if they use that control to benefit others,that is also fine. The key thing that makes it capitalism is that trade and industry are controlled by private individuals.
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Actually, the only thing that was important was that the chairman of IBM personally KNEW Bill Gates' mother. That was the reason IBM was willing to give the contract to Bill Gates. The reason IBM was willing to give out such a favorable contract was multitude, but the one that speaks to Bill Gates' lick is the fact that they were under investigation by the Justice Department for anti-competitive monopoly practices, the same Justice Department which had recently broken up AT&T.
You are assuming that the person had ten minutes to spare and/or that this was the only change needed before the deadline. I am not a programmer, but I shared an office with one.
Further, when I started my current job, the people running the IT Department were big believers in degrees. One of them was just finishing his Masters degree. Shortly after he finished it we had a Departmental team building meeting where the alcohol flowed freely. He griped about how throughout his Masters degree studies they spent a lot of time making sure that students thoroughly understood a particular approach, one that he said no one actually used anymore, while at the same time barely mentioning the approach that everyone actually uses. He interacted with numerous vendors, that interaction was his basis for his claim.
As a general rule I will take the guy who learned it by doing the job over the guy who learned it in the classroom every day.
Umm, you do realize that Microsoft is a software company, right?
They had no ability to install a reset button on the computer...and by the time they had the market dominance to insist that manufacturers install one every manufacturer already did.
A business rule that had been modified a number of times by requests from the business;
And right there is where you are misunderstanding this. Not only was the rule changed a number of times, but the programmer was almost certainly asked to implement the change on the fly ("We need this new rule in place by Monday."). Further they were almost certainly never given the time to go back and fix the kludge they had created to get it out the door ("Why are you working on that? It works. We have this other project that we need finished. Work on it. You can go back to that later.")
And, BTW, needing the new rule in place by Monday was often a real requirement, failing to meet that deadline might cost the company significant fractions of their yearly revenue.
If two fresh faced rookie developers with next to no experience walk in off the street one with a certificate that he has been made to work like a donkey for four years to acquire a certain basic skill level by a trusted training provider while all the other one has is his ability to radiate confidence and recite the mantra 'I taught myself to code, degrees are useless, trust me I'm an expert'. I know who I'm going to hire.
That is all well and good, but what does your comparison between the handful of people who have gotten trained to program at a technical school with the many more numerous self-trained programmers have to do with a discussion comparing the many people with University degrees in Computer Science to the numerous self-trained programmers.
There are few technical schools which work students like a donkey, but there are no universities which do.
You are mistaken. Not only do restrictions on campaign advertising violate the First Amendment, the laws they are written do the reverse of their claimed purpose. The restrictions on campaign advertising are mostly written into "campaign finance reform" laws (or regulations created to enforce those laws), which were promoted as a way to get money out of politics...often with the argument that getting money out of politics would make it easier to remove incumbents from office. The result of all of our campaign finance reform laws has been to increase how much it costs to get elected and to make it harder for an incumbent to get voted out of office.
That is an interesting theory, considering that left-wing antisemitism predates the creation of the modern state of Israel by quite a few years. You might want to read Karl Marx's book "On The Jewish Question". The only claim I have seen making the case that Karl Marx was not an anti-Semite says that he was not saying that Jews were evil...just that self-identifying as Jewish was evil.
This is the problem we have today...people who do not have a clue. In 1960, the average per capita daily caloric intake of developing nations was approximately 300 calories (starvation). In the year 2000, the average per capita daily caloric intake of developing nations was approximately 2,000 calories. That sure looks like "all boats rising" to me.
There are a lot of factors behind that, but your post points out two of the biggest problems in our society today: First, people who have no idea what things were like in the past. Second, people who are more concerned with doing something about the people who are "too rich" than with doing something about the people who are too poor.
"Too rich" is in quotations because that is a purely subjective judgment, while "too poor" is not because it is something that can be measured objectively...even if what objective measurement you choose is subjective. Is "too poor" not being able to afford a car? Or, is it not being able to afford to get enough to eat? I think we can all agree that the latter is "too poor", but one can legitimately argue for setting the bar somewhat higher. No matter where one sets the bar, there is an objective standard against which it can be measured. Of course, it gets more complicated when we attempt to assign that standard to specific people...some people do not have enough to eat because they spent their money foolishly (not everyone who does not have enough to eat, just some of them).
That is true, but the further removed they get from the days when you HAD to do business with them, the less clout they have. IBM used to be THE computer company. Now they are a glorified Cray Computing.
This sort of behavior works great for companies...until it doesn't anymore. When it stops working the companies which relied upon it start to fade away. IBM once relied on a similar lockin strategy. When they lost it, they began to fade. They are only still around because they had so many real assets (as in real estate).
The sentence from the article which set off my "put this in the maybe column" reaction was this one "Only 1 to 2 percent of the collected DNA was human," When combined with my knowledge from other sources that, in general, DNA older than 10,000 years is unrecoverable makes me wonder how reliable these DNA tests were. The final thing which keeps this in the "maybe" column is the fact that the central argument for the Clovis people being from Europe is that there are tools with similar design features to the distinctive "Clovis" tools in Europe, but not in Asia.
So, 3 people in Okinawa lived to be over 100 years old and only 1 did in the rest of Japan?
Your statement "3 times as many people in Okinawa live to be over 100 years old than in the rest of Japan." carries no useful information. What is the life expectancy for Okinawa vs the rest of Japan vs people of Okinawan descent living in the U.S.
I do not know specifically about people from Okinawa, but the life expectancy for people of Japaneses descent living in the United States is higher than the life expectancy for the people of Japan.
They're a waste of time for me, as I am able to read and comprehend faster than any video can present the information.
While that is true, my objection to videos is that it is easier to mislead with a video. I will give two examples. First, in "Bowling from Columbine" there is a video of a Charlton Heston speech with a cut away to a sign from the audience in the middle...except that it was not A speech, it was two separate speeches. The cut away to the sign was so that the audience would not notice that he was wearing a different shirt in each part of the "speech". They seamlessly combined the audio of Charlton Heston speaking from both speeches with no break in the audio to hint that it was not all one speech. In written text, you would need to put some ellipses in, or some other indication of a break and people would expect you to tell them where the speech occurred. Then if you did not state that it was two separate speeches, they would, rightly, call you out for lying. In the video version, Michael Moore claimed it was an innocent oversight.
A second example was my first exposure to Alex Jones, now of InfoWars. A friend, knowing I am conservative, sent me a couple of videos from Alex Jones. I watched the first one and at one point there is ongoing audio over various video clips. The video clips LOOKED like they were related to what was being said in the audio...and if they were they lent great credence to what was otherwise a suspect idea. Well, I happened to know what the video clips actually were and knew they had nothing to do with the audio. Just as in Bowling for Columbine the video was designed to make you interpret the audio in a way contrary to what logic would dictate.
I did not look into this, but at least one report said that most of the money was on McGregor even though the betting odds favored Mayweather. If that is true, it smells fishy to me. Generally, when the majority of the betting money is on one side, the odds for that side improve so as to encourage enough people to bet on the other side so as to cover the money the bookies need to pay out if the side with more money bet on it wins. Apparently, that did not happen here, suggesting that the bookies knew something no one else did.
You are correct that there is only one water pipe into my house. I own it.
I am glad that you brought up AT&T. The original AT&T acquired their monopoly because the government wanted there to be a single telephone company. At the time the government intervened, natural market forces were causing telephone companies to standardize on one interface which they all agreed upon. But the government did not like that there were hundreds of telephone companies (too hard to control). So, they passed a rule, which appeared to be in everybody's interest, but actually served to force almost all phone companies to sell out to AT&T. It was set up to leave a few local companies in areas which were only modestly profitable so as to appear as if AT&T becoming a monopoly was just the result of market forces.
I hate to have to tell you this but MOST jobs were automated before you were born. As a result, no one has done them, except as entertainment, in decades and in some cases centuries.
As an example, a simple medieval style shirt used to cost about $3,000 to make at today's minimum wage..
It takes about 7 hours of fairly hard work to sew that shirt by hand.
It takes about 7 times as long, or about 49 hours, to weave the cloth to sew into that shirt, again, by hand.
It takes 7 times THAT, or about 399 hours, to spin the thread used to weave the cloth sewn into that shirt.
That means, without factoring in the time it took to obtain the raw materials, it takes 399 hours to make a shirt
That means that at minimum wage it costs almost $3,000 to make a shirt without automation and without counting the cost of materials.
NO, you are the one who thinks there is a problem with sacrificing your bodily autonomy.
However, how does caring for a child not require you to sacrifice your body without your consent, when you do not, legally, have the option to just walk away?
Even putting the child up for adoption requires you to take some actions. BTW, even if there is a categorical difference relative to sacrificing bodily autonomy before and after a child is born, the time to make that decision is BEFORE the child is conceived.
Exactly what housing developer is going to buy land outside of Hill City, KS?
AS for your claim that there is nothing corporations do that co-ops couldn't accomplish is true...except that history shows that co-ops rarely do so.
More importantly, I was responding to someone who asked the difference between large government-owned plots and large corporate-owned plots. The fact of the matter is that history teaches us that government-owned farming leads to starvation and depletion of the land (the same result you claim for corporate owned farming). That same history teaches us that corporate-owned farming (which is not my preferred arrangement) results in the land being kept productive. Corporations consider the land an asset and work to keep it productive. Your example of ethanol mandates exactly shows how government intervention actually encourages the rise of large corporations. Yes, those corporations lobby the government for mandates and subsidies (and many private farmers do as well), but it is those mandates, and other government subsidies, which make corporate farming ever more viable. Those mandates and subsidies make monoculture farming more profitable than traditional multi-crop farming. I grew up with multiple relatives who were farmers and I remember them discussing the relative profitability of various crop mixes and how government subsidies encouraged farmers to grow less than optimal crops on their land.
Have you ever cared for a baby? I am going to guess not. What exactly is being used in the care for that child if not your body? Are you trying to say that you do not have to sacrifice sleep to care for a baby? You set arbitrary distinctions and then call me stupid for not seeing them as absolutes.
That is easy. When the large government-owned farm plots do not raise any food, the government allocates more money to the project. When large corporate-owned farm plots do not raise any food, the corporation sells off the land.
Slashdot Mirror
There is one problem with that definition, and it is intentional. It inserts a clause that is completely irrelevant to the economic system we call "capitalism" There is absolutely no reason for the phrase "for profit" in the definition. The appropriate definition of the system we call capitalism is "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners, rather than by the state." The purposes to which the private owners put a country's trade and industry are entirely up to them.If they use that control for profit, that is fine, if they use that control to benefit others,that is also fine. The key thing that makes it capitalism is that trade and industry are controlled by private individuals. --
Actually, the only thing that was important was that the chairman of IBM personally KNEW Bill Gates' mother. That was the reason IBM was willing to give the contract to Bill Gates. The reason IBM was willing to give out such a favorable contract was multitude, but the one that speaks to Bill Gates' lick is the fact that they were under investigation by the Justice Department for anti-competitive monopoly practices, the same Justice Department which had recently broken up AT&T.
You are assuming that the person had ten minutes to spare and/or that this was the only change needed before the deadline. I am not a programmer, but I shared an office with one.
Further, when I started my current job, the people running the IT Department were big believers in degrees. One of them was just finishing his Masters degree. Shortly after he finished it we had a Departmental team building meeting where the alcohol flowed freely. He griped about how throughout his Masters degree studies they spent a lot of time making sure that students thoroughly understood a particular approach, one that he said no one actually used anymore, while at the same time barely mentioning the approach that everyone actually uses. He interacted with numerous vendors, that interaction was his basis for his claim.
As a general rule I will take the guy who learned it by doing the job over the guy who learned it in the classroom every day.
Umm, you do realize that Microsoft is a software company, right?
They had no ability to install a reset button on the computer...and by the time they had the market dominance to insist that manufacturers install one every manufacturer already did.
A business rule that had been modified a number of times by requests from the business;
And right there is where you are misunderstanding this. Not only was the rule changed a number of times, but the programmer was almost certainly asked to implement the change on the fly ("We need this new rule in place by Monday."). Further they were almost certainly never given the time to go back and fix the kludge they had created to get it out the door ("Why are you working on that? It works. We have this other project that we need finished. Work on it. You can go back to that later.")
And, BTW, needing the new rule in place by Monday was often a real requirement, failing to meet that deadline might cost the company significant fractions of their yearly revenue.
If two fresh faced rookie developers with next to no experience walk in off the street one with a certificate that he has been made to work like a donkey for four years to acquire a certain basic skill level by a trusted training provider while all the other one has is his ability to radiate confidence and recite the mantra 'I taught myself to code, degrees are useless, trust me I'm an expert'. I know who I'm going to hire.
That is all well and good, but what does your comparison between the handful of people who have gotten trained to program at a technical school with the many more numerous self-trained programmers have to do with a discussion comparing the many people with University degrees in Computer Science to the numerous self-trained programmers.
There are few technical schools which work students like a donkey, but there are no universities which do.
You are mistaken. Not only do restrictions on campaign advertising violate the First Amendment, the laws they are written do the reverse of their claimed purpose. The restrictions on campaign advertising are mostly written into "campaign finance reform" laws (or regulations created to enforce those laws), which were promoted as a way to get money out of politics...often with the argument that getting money out of politics would make it easier to remove incumbents from office. The result of all of our campaign finance reform laws has been to increase how much it costs to get elected and to make it harder for an incumbent to get voted out of office.
That is an interesting theory, considering that left-wing antisemitism predates the creation of the modern state of Israel by quite a few years. You might want to read Karl Marx's book "On The Jewish Question". The only claim I have seen making the case that Karl Marx was not an anti-Semite says that he was not saying that Jews were evil...just that self-identifying as Jewish was evil.
Does it matter where people got the calories from?
This is the problem we have today...people who do not have a clue. In 1960, the average per capita daily caloric intake of developing nations was approximately 300 calories (starvation). In the year 2000, the average per capita daily caloric intake of developing nations was approximately 2,000 calories. That sure looks like "all boats rising" to me.
There are a lot of factors behind that, but your post points out two of the biggest problems in our society today: First, people who have no idea what things were like in the past. Second, people who are more concerned with doing something about the people who are "too rich" than with doing something about the people who are too poor.
"Too rich" is in quotations because that is a purely subjective judgment, while "too poor" is not because it is something that can be measured objectively...even if what objective measurement you choose is subjective. Is "too poor" not being able to afford a car? Or, is it not being able to afford to get enough to eat? I think we can all agree that the latter is "too poor", but one can legitimately argue for setting the bar somewhat higher. No matter where one sets the bar, there is an objective standard against which it can be measured. Of course, it gets more complicated when we attempt to assign that standard to specific people...some people do not have enough to eat because they spent their money foolishly (not everyone who does not have enough to eat, just some of them).
That is true, but the further removed they get from the days when you HAD to do business with them, the less clout they have. IBM used to be THE computer company. Now they are a glorified Cray Computing.
This sort of behavior works great for companies...until it doesn't anymore. When it stops working the companies which relied upon it start to fade away. IBM once relied on a similar lockin strategy. When they lost it, they began to fade. They are only still around because they had so many real assets (as in real estate).
The sentence from the article which set off my "put this in the maybe column" reaction was this one "Only 1 to 2 percent of the collected DNA was human," When combined with my knowledge from other sources that, in general, DNA older than 10,000 years is unrecoverable makes me wonder how reliable these DNA tests were. The final thing which keeps this in the "maybe" column is the fact that the central argument for the Clovis people being from Europe is that there are tools with similar design features to the distinctive "Clovis" tools in Europe, but not in Asia.
So, 3 people in Okinawa lived to be over 100 years old and only 1 did in the rest of Japan? Your statement "3 times as many people in Okinawa live to be over 100 years old than in the rest of Japan." carries no useful information. What is the life expectancy for Okinawa vs the rest of Japan vs people of Okinawan descent living in the U.S.
I do not know specifically about people from Okinawa, but the life expectancy for people of Japaneses descent living in the United States is higher than the life expectancy for the people of Japan.
They're a waste of time for me, as I am able to read and comprehend faster than any video can present the information.
While that is true, my objection to videos is that it is easier to mislead with a video. I will give two examples. First, in "Bowling from Columbine" there is a video of a Charlton Heston speech with a cut away to a sign from the audience in the middle...except that it was not A speech, it was two separate speeches. The cut away to the sign was so that the audience would not notice that he was wearing a different shirt in each part of the "speech". They seamlessly combined the audio of Charlton Heston speaking from both speeches with no break in the audio to hint that it was not all one speech. In written text, you would need to put some ellipses in, or some other indication of a break and people would expect you to tell them where the speech occurred. Then if you did not state that it was two separate speeches, they would, rightly, call you out for lying. In the video version, Michael Moore claimed it was an innocent oversight.
A second example was my first exposure to Alex Jones, now of InfoWars. A friend, knowing I am conservative, sent me a couple of videos from Alex Jones. I watched the first one and at one point there is ongoing audio over various video clips. The video clips LOOKED like they were related to what was being said in the audio...and if they were they lent great credence to what was otherwise a suspect idea. Well, I happened to know what the video clips actually were and knew they had nothing to do with the audio. Just as in Bowling for Columbine the video was designed to make you interpret the audio in a way contrary to what logic would dictate.
I did not look into this, but at least one report said that most of the money was on McGregor even though the betting odds favored Mayweather. If that is true, it smells fishy to me. Generally, when the majority of the betting money is on one side, the odds for that side improve so as to encourage enough people to bet on the other side so as to cover the money the bookies need to pay out if the side with more money bet on it wins. Apparently, that did not happen here, suggesting that the bookies knew something no one else did.
You are correct that there is only one water pipe into my house. I own it.
I am glad that you brought up AT&T. The original AT&T acquired their monopoly because the government wanted there to be a single telephone company. At the time the government intervened, natural market forces were causing telephone companies to standardize on one interface which they all agreed upon. But the government did not like that there were hundreds of telephone companies (too hard to control). So, they passed a rule, which appeared to be in everybody's interest, but actually served to force almost all phone companies to sell out to AT&T. It was set up to leave a few local companies in areas which were only modestly profitable so as to appear as if AT&T becoming a monopoly was just the result of market forces.
For the most part, in pre-industrial Europe only the well to do wore clothing derived from animal skins.
As an example, a simple medieval style shirt used to cost about $3,000 to make at today's minimum wage..
That means, without factoring in the time it took to obtain the raw materials, it takes 399 hours to make a shirt
NO, you are the one who thinks there is a problem with sacrificing your bodily autonomy.
However, how does caring for a child not require you to sacrifice your body without your consent, when you do not, legally, have the option to just walk away?
Even putting the child up for adoption requires you to take some actions. BTW, even if there is a categorical difference relative to sacrificing bodily autonomy before and after a child is born, the time to make that decision is BEFORE the child is conceived.
Exactly what housing developer is going to buy land outside of Hill City, KS?
AS for your claim that there is nothing corporations do that co-ops couldn't accomplish is true...except that history shows that co-ops rarely do so.
More importantly, I was responding to someone who asked the difference between large government-owned plots and large corporate-owned plots. The fact of the matter is that history teaches us that government-owned farming leads to starvation and depletion of the land (the same result you claim for corporate owned farming). That same history teaches us that corporate-owned farming (which is not my preferred arrangement) results in the land being kept productive. Corporations consider the land an asset and work to keep it productive. Your example of ethanol mandates exactly shows how government intervention actually encourages the rise of large corporations. Yes, those corporations lobby the government for mandates and subsidies (and many private farmers do as well), but it is those mandates, and other government subsidies, which make corporate farming ever more viable. Those mandates and subsidies make monoculture farming more profitable than traditional multi-crop farming. I grew up with multiple relatives who were farmers and I remember them discussing the relative profitability of various crop mixes and how government subsidies encouraged farmers to grow less than optimal crops on their land.
Have you ever cared for a baby? I am going to guess not. What exactly is being used in the care for that child if not your body? Are you trying to say that you do not have to sacrifice sleep to care for a baby? You set arbitrary distinctions and then call me stupid for not seeing them as absolutes.
That is easy. When the large government-owned farm plots do not raise any food, the government allocates more money to the project. When large corporate-owned farm plots do not raise any food, the corporation sells off the land.
It also means that the COURTS control the purse strings, not Congress.