NO, in an ideal capitalist society you have people producing enough products to meet the needs and wants of those that produce different products. What makes capitalism special is that it is the most efficient means of determining what products will satisfy the needs and wants of the most people.
The problem with all alternatives to capitalism is that they are based on the assumption that some individual or group is capable of determining the relative value of various goods and services, yet those relative values depend so many variables that it is impossible for any individual or group to accurately calculate that. The only entity that can determine what the relative value of various goods and services is to any given individual is that individual.
Groupon is a great idea for the right businesses. I am not sure what those are, but I can give some ideas. They would be businesses that thrive from people discovering them and considering them a place to return to. So, for example, restaurants: Groupon is not going to be particular beneficial for national chains, but they will be good for independent restaurants that have the right ambiance.
If you buy a share of Apple stock, you will never make a profit from it (at least as long as Steve Jobs is alive) until you sell it. Apple does not give out dividends. There are times when investing in a company that does not give out dividends can be a wise investment. Apple is not in one ofthsoe times. Right now investing in Apple is the same as investing in a particular hand of poker (a rather good hand, but how do you know that one of the other players is not holding a royal flush?).
No, capitalism does not depend on waste. The mistake you are making is the one that many government economists made which resulted in this mess. All capitalsim depends on is each individual acting in their own best interest. There are certain things that people need (food, clothing, shelter). There are other things that people want. The first question is this, is it more efficient for me to produce everything I need and want or am I better off if I specialize in one thing and trade it with others who are more efficient at producing the other things I need/want. The answer is the latter. On a very basic level, a small village is better off if one person specializes in making clothes, another specializes in making tools and yet another (or more than one) specializes in growing food. Even if they are all equally good at each of those tasks, someone who specializes in one of those tasks will be more efficient at it than if they each do all of them. If one person in the village does not produce anything that anyone else in the village wants, no one else in the village will give them anything that they produce so that individual will have to produce all of their own needs leaving them with less than everyone else. On the other hand, if someone is the only one who produces something that everyone else in the village wants, but cannot produce enough for everyone, they will be able to get more of the things they need/want from those who produce those things.
That is why copyright should be for a set length of time, possibly extendable. I personally favor something on the order of 20-30 years with 5-10 year extensions that can be purchased as it expires, with each extension costing some increased amount over the previous extension (I would favor some kind of logarithmic increase, but am open to discussion).
The correct comparison would be if your dad was a builder and he built lots of houses, but if anyone wants to add an addition to any of those houses they have to pay you a fee.
Additionally, voting could be made even more relevant if votes were allowed to be transferred - not among candidates but among voters. If I can't expect to ever know enough about issue x to vote correctly on it, maybe I should be entitled to allow person y to vote on my behalf on issue x alone.
This is known as representative democracy, which is what we have. For the most part in the U.S., you don't vote on issue X, you vote on candidate Y because you believe that candidate Y will do the research and vote the way you would like on issue X (for most issues).
And that brings us back to my original point, how many people are capable of understanding the cryptography well enough to know that the system is secure and the votes are not being gamed? Nowhere near the majority. With traditional paper ballots, most people are capable of watching to see that the system is honest. They probably won't, but they can.
Both Comcast and Verizon are inappropriate for small businesses yet continue to grow in popularity due to their heavy marketing and low cost.
Contact your local bell,...
OK, if we want to do away with anonymous voting. How likely do you think it would be that people would accept everyone being able to know how they voted?
Governor Walker took it as a mandate because it is one of the things he campaigned on. And by the way, he is only doing this for public employees. Why should public employees be allowed to unionize?
So, basically, politicians who want to do what the voters want are "fascists". You apparently think it is a good idea to use government money to slant elections in the favor of Democrats. I have news for you, we are already in real trouble. Our governments are spending more money than they are receiving in taxes. Public sector workers have better job security, better pay, and better benefits than private sector workers.
Online voting, if it were done right, would give me much more confidence than any number of safeguards you might put on a physical chain of custody.
No, it wouldn't because fewer people would understand how the safeguards in question work. With a "paper trail" verified election, most people can understand how the verification works. Not only that, but most people would be capable of monitoring at least a local election to see whether it was fixed. They probably wouldn't, but they could. With electronic voting (online or otherwise) a much maller group is capable of examining the verification process and determining if it actually verifies anything.
I have never understood the emphasis on voter turnout. It is more important to have voters who understand (and care about) the issues being voted on than it is to have a large number of voters. Making it easier to vote does not improve the responsiveness of government to the voters, it actually does the reverse.
Of course if one examines the other policies supported by the "make it easier to vote" groups, one quickly realizes that they want a larger number of poorly informed voters.
The state should perform the following roles in society: enforcing basic law and order and contracts, and providing for the common defense. The state should play a very minimal role in economic activity (enforce contracts, prosecute fraud). Economic activity should involve no more coercion than necessary to ensure that people are not entering into exchanges fraudulently. The only power the state has is the pwoer of coercion.
So, no, the state should not have the power to tell me that I cannot buy a product that I wish to buy, unless that product is solidly proven to be detrimental to the public good.
A great example of the government overreaching is laws which outlaw the sale of traditional incandescent light bulbs. If the alternatives are truly superior, the market will gradually replace incandescent light bulbs with them. The fact that the market has shown no signs of doing so, indicates that in the judgement of most people the alternatives to incandescent light bulbs are inferior in one or more ways.
Yes, they could do what you said, but they won't. Unlike patent trolls, you have to do more to profit from holding copyright on some work than just holding the copyright and then suing those who violate it (although that is something that would need to be addressed, ther would need to be some sort of database where one could go to check if a work was still under copyright). In order to profit from a copyrighted work, you need to make it available and spend money morketing it. That means that corporations are going to look at their copyright portfolio and only pay to extend copyright on those works they think are worth spending the money to market.
I would say that the U.S. should have bilateral copyright treaties, rather than a multinational one. The biggest advantage of bilateral treaties is that it would be much easier to pressure countries that do not actually enforce IP law. Admittedly that would require much more work for the various government organizations involved in negotiating/approving/enforcing the treaties, but hopefully that would result in them being busy doingsomething useful rather than having time to look around for ways to interfere in people's lives.
The references at the link you gave appear to be primarily projections of savings based on observed behavior and then projecting how much energy would be consumed with that behavior at the same time if it was still light at that time rather than actual studies of changes in behavior as a result of changes in DST (or whatever the locals choose to call the time shift). That is, they observed that certain behaviors occur later in the day, therefore they conclude if we shift the clock so that it is still light at that time, people will use less energy while doing these behaviors. However, they does not address the question as to whether shifting the clock so that it is still light at a later hour will cause people to shift their behaviors to even later in the day.
The thing is that corporations will only invest a certain amount into maintaining copyright on works that are not generating any income. And that is the key, the renewal cost must be high enough that corporations will not be willing to spend it on "wait and see" products. As a general rule, corporations will not spend much money on items that cannot be clearly shown to have a positive impact on the bottom line. As a matter of fact, most corporations will not spend money on items that do not have a Return On Investment above a certain percentage (different companies have different ROI levels, but the minimum I know of is what they can get if they invested that money into government bonds).
I could go with that, but I think it would be harder to get passed into law than some variation on my idea (especially considering the Berne Convention).
I think that if you want to fix copyright law, your best bet is to talk about various ideas on discussion boards (such as slashdot) and get behind the idea that seems to you to have the best chance to actually get passed that is an improvement over current law. Once the improvement has been passed, give it a couple of years to see how it works out. If it hasn't fixed the problem you supported it to fix, start working on the next option. Actually, that is true of just about every issue.
Well, that explains why your schools rate better than ours, the kids who don't want to be there whose parents don't care, aren't there to be tested. Personally, I think that if the states in the U.S. took that approach it would measurably improve the education that most public school students get, even if you continued to factor in those students who didn't go to school.
That is actually part of the reason I liked the Watchmen movie too: the "good" guys themselves are quite loathsome and easy to dislike and thus sets quite a different tone for the whole movie. I actually really hope for more movies and books like that.
Well, now I know why Watchmen did not do very well. Most people want to go to movies for escapism. They want to like the protagonists and dislike the antagonists. I agree with that. When I read or watch fiction, I want to like the protagonist. He/she does not have to be "stainless, righteous, wonderful and adorable", but they do need to be likable and overall a better person than the antagonist.
Personally, I would like to see copyright of somewhere around 30 years with purchasable extensions of 5-10 (actually, I would go with a base copyright of 10-15 years, with the initial extension being for a very nominal amount). Each time you pruchase an extension to copyright the cost of that extension goes up. There are aguments aginst it, but I think it is something you could make very difficult for corporations to mount a public relations campaign against. This would allow a company like Walt Disney to keep control of business critical IP. On the other hand, if the price was set right, they wouldn't be able to afford to sit on the products and only release them every 20 years or so.
This was suggested by the Lighter Later campaign [lighterlater.org] of last year. Basically by having brighter evenings the country saves a lot on electricity and heating etc.
The problem is that there is no evidence that does indeed happen. As a matter of fact a couple of recent studies in the U.S. indicate the reverse. A few years back several states (I believe it was Indiana and Arizona, but I'm not sure) that previously had not used DST, switched to the same DST as the majority of the country. There was enough advance warning that someone decided to study the effects of the change. They discovered that electricity usage rose after the switch to DST.
The market is collective action. However, you seem to be talking about one group (perhaps the majority) forcing their priorities on everybody else. That is usually what people mean when they use the term "collective action". They aren't talking about free will and choice, they are talking about the opposite. So, the answer to your question is, no
It is certainly possible that a group of people can pool their resources and take collective action in order to encourage the market to behave in a certain way. That is you are free to get together with a bunch of people and all of you pool your money to invest in alternative energy, that is collective action, but that is just part of the market. On the other hand, I think that by "collective action", you mean a bunch of people getting together and lobbying Congress to improve GE's bottom line by outlawing traditional incandescent lightbulbs.
Is there some law of nature I'm not aware of that states that we must burn all possible oil and coal available before moving to other energy sources? Are the laws of the market unavoidable laws of God, that must be obeyed? Or does human choice and free will play a role? Are we slaves to the laws of the market? Or are we conscious beings, who use the free market as a tool to improve our lives?
The law of nature is that we will use the product that is the most efficient way to meet the need. Currently oil and/or coal is that product. As to what role human choice and free will play, that is what sets the market. The market is the product of human choice and free will.
Slashdot Mirror
NO, in an ideal capitalist society you have people producing enough products to meet the needs and wants of those that produce different products. What makes capitalism special is that it is the most efficient means of determining what products will satisfy the needs and wants of the most people.
The problem with all alternatives to capitalism is that they are based on the assumption that some individual or group is capable of determining the relative value of various goods and services, yet those relative values depend so many variables that it is impossible for any individual or group to accurately calculate that. The only entity that can determine what the relative value of various goods and services is to any given individual is that individual.
Groupon is a great idea for the right businesses. I am not sure what those are, but I can give some ideas. They would be businesses that thrive from people discovering them and considering them a place to return to. So, for example, restaurants: Groupon is not going to be particular beneficial for national chains, but they will be good for independent restaurants that have the right ambiance.
If you buy a share of Apple stock, you will never make a profit from it (at least as long as Steve Jobs is alive) until you sell it. Apple does not give out dividends. There are times when investing in a company that does not give out dividends can be a wise investment. Apple is not in one ofthsoe times. Right now investing in Apple is the same as investing in a particular hand of poker (a rather good hand, but how do you know that one of the other players is not holding a royal flush?).
No, capitalism does not depend on waste. The mistake you are making is the one that many government economists made which resulted in this mess. All capitalsim depends on is each individual acting in their own best interest. There are certain things that people need (food, clothing, shelter). There are other things that people want. The first question is this, is it more efficient for me to produce everything I need and want or am I better off if I specialize in one thing and trade it with others who are more efficient at producing the other things I need/want. The answer is the latter. On a very basic level, a small village is better off if one person specializes in making clothes, another specializes in making tools and yet another (or more than one) specializes in growing food. Even if they are all equally good at each of those tasks, someone who specializes in one of those tasks will be more efficient at it than if they each do all of them. If one person in the village does not produce anything that anyone else in the village wants, no one else in the village will give them anything that they produce so that individual will have to produce all of their own needs leaving them with less than everyone else. On the other hand, if someone is the only one who produces something that everyone else in the village wants, but cannot produce enough for everyone, they will be able to get more of the things they need/want from those who produce those things.
That is why copyright should be for a set length of time, possibly extendable. I personally favor something on the order of 20-30 years with 5-10 year extensions that can be purchased as it expires, with each extension costing some increased amount over the previous extension (I would favor some kind of logarithmic increase, but am open to discussion).
The correct comparison would be if your dad was a builder and he built lots of houses, but if anyone wants to add an addition to any of those houses they have to pay you a fee.
Additionally, voting could be made even more relevant if votes were allowed to be transferred - not among candidates but among voters. If I can't expect to ever know enough about issue x to vote correctly on it, maybe I should be entitled to allow person y to vote on my behalf on issue x alone.
This is known as representative democracy, which is what we have. For the most part in the U.S., you don't vote on issue X, you vote on candidate Y because you believe that candidate Y will do the research and vote the way you would like on issue X (for most issues).
And that brings us back to my original point, how many people are capable of understanding the cryptography well enough to know that the system is secure and the votes are not being gamed? Nowhere near the majority. With traditional paper ballots, most people are capable of watching to see that the system is honest. They probably won't, but they can.
Both Comcast and Verizon are inappropriate for small businesses yet continue to grow in popularity due to their heavy marketing and low cost. Contact your local bell, ...
Verizon would be his local bell.
OK, if we want to do away with anonymous voting. How likely do you think it would be that people would accept everyone being able to know how they voted?
Governor Walker took it as a mandate because it is one of the things he
campaigned
on. And by the way, he is only doing this for public employees. Why should public employees be allowed to unionize?
So, basically, politicians who want to do what the voters want are "fascists". You apparently think it is a good idea to use government money to slant elections in the favor of Democrats. I have news for you, we are already in real trouble. Our governments are spending more money than they are receiving in taxes. Public sector workers have better job security, better pay, and better benefits than private sector workers.
Online voting, if it were done right, would give me much more confidence than any number of safeguards you might put on a physical chain of custody.
No, it wouldn't because fewer people would understand how the safeguards in question work. With a "paper trail" verified election, most people can understand how the verification works. Not only that, but most people would be capable of monitoring at least a local election to see whether it was fixed. They probably wouldn't, but they could. With electronic voting (online or otherwise) a much maller group is capable of examining the verification process and determining if it actually verifies anything.
I have never understood the emphasis on voter turnout. It is more important to have voters who understand (and care about) the issues being voted on than it is to have a large number of voters. Making it easier to vote does not improve the responsiveness of government to the voters, it actually does the reverse.
Of course if one examines the other policies supported by the "make it easier to vote" groups, one quickly realizes that they
want a larger number of poorly informed voters.
The state should perform the following roles in society: enforcing basic law and order and contracts, and providing for the common defense. The state should play a very minimal role in economic activity (enforce contracts, prosecute fraud). Economic activity should involve no more coercion than necessary to ensure that people are not entering into exchanges fraudulently. The only power the state has is the pwoer of coercion.
So, no, the state should not have the power to tell me that I cannot buy a product that I wish to buy, unless that product is solidly proven to be detrimental to the public good.
A great example of the government overreaching is laws which outlaw the sale of traditional incandescent light bulbs. If the alternatives are truly superior, the market will gradually replace incandescent light bulbs with them. The fact that the market has shown no signs of doing so, indicates that in the judgement of most people the alternatives to incandescent light bulbs are inferior in one or more ways.
Yes, they could do what you said, but they won't. Unlike patent trolls, you have to do more to profit from holding copyright on some work than just holding the copyright and then suing those who violate it (although that is something that would need to be addressed, ther would need to be some sort of database where one could go to check if a work was still under copyright). In order to profit from a copyrighted work, you need to make it available and spend money morketing it. That means that corporations are going to look at their copyright portfolio and only pay to extend copyright on those works they think are worth spending the money to market.
I would say that the U.S. should have bilateral copyright treaties, rather than a multinational one. The biggest advantage of bilateral treaties is that it would be much easier to pressure countries that do not actually enforce IP law. Admittedly that would require much more work for the various government organizations involved in negotiating/approving/enforcing the treaties, but hopefully that would result in them being busy doingsomething useful rather than having time to look around for ways to interfere in people's lives.
The references at the link you gave appear to be primarily projections of savings based on observed behavior and then projecting how much energy would be consumed with that behavior at the same time if it was still light at that time rather than actual studies of changes in behavior as a result of changes in DST (or whatever the locals choose to call the time shift). That is, they observed that certain behaviors occur later in the day, therefore they conclude if we shift the clock so that it is still light at that time, people will use less energy while doing these behaviors. However, they does not address the question as to whether shifting the clock so that it is still light at a later hour will cause people to shift their behaviors to even later in the day.
The thing is that corporations will only invest a certain amount into maintaining copyright on works that are not generating any income. And that is the key, the renewal cost must be high enough that corporations will not be willing to spend it on "wait and see" products. As a general rule, corporations will not spend much money on items that cannot be clearly shown to have a positive impact on the bottom line. As a matter of fact, most corporations will not spend money on items that do not have a Return On Investment above a certain percentage (different companies have different ROI levels, but the minimum I know of is what they can get if they invested that money into government bonds).
I could go with that, but I think it would be harder to get passed into law than some variation on my idea (especially considering the Berne Convention).
I think that if you want to fix copyright law, your best bet is to talk about various ideas on discussion boards (such as slashdot) and get behind the idea that seems to you to have the best chance to actually get passed that is an improvement over current law. Once the improvement has been passed, give it a couple of years to see how it works out. If it hasn't fixed the problem you supported it to fix, start working on the next option. Actually, that is true of just about every issue.
Well, that explains why your schools rate better than ours, the kids who don't want to be there whose parents don't care, aren't there to be tested. Personally, I think that if the states in the U.S. took that approach it would measurably improve the education that most public school students get, even if you continued to factor in those students who didn't go to school.
That is actually part of the reason I liked the Watchmen movie too: the "good" guys themselves are quite loathsome and easy to dislike and thus sets quite a different tone for the whole movie. I actually really hope for more movies and books like that.
Well, now I know why Watchmen did not do very well. Most people want to go to movies for escapism. They want to like the protagonists and dislike the antagonists. I agree with that. When I read or watch fiction, I want to like the protagonist. He/she does not have to be "stainless, righteous, wonderful and adorable", but they do need to be likable and overall a better person than the antagonist.
Personally, I would like to see copyright of somewhere around 30 years with purchasable extensions of 5-10 (actually, I would go with a base copyright of 10-15 years, with the initial extension being for a very nominal amount). Each time you pruchase an extension to copyright the cost of that extension goes up. There are aguments aginst it, but I think it is something you could make very difficult for corporations to mount a public relations campaign against. This would allow a company like Walt Disney to keep control of business critical IP. On the other hand, if the price was set right, they wouldn't be able to afford to sit on the products and only release them every 20 years or so.
This was suggested by the Lighter Later campaign [lighterlater.org] of last year. Basically by having brighter evenings the country saves a lot on electricity and heating etc.
The problem is that there is no evidence that does indeed happen. As a matter of fact a couple of recent studies in the U.S. indicate the reverse. A few years back several states (I believe it was Indiana and Arizona, but I'm not sure) that previously had not used DST, switched to the same DST as the majority of the country. There was enough advance warning that someone decided to study the effects of the change. They discovered that electricity usage rose after the switch to DST.
The market is collective action. However, you seem to be talking about one group (perhaps the majority) forcing their priorities on everybody else. That is usually what people mean when they use the term "collective action". They aren't talking about free will and choice, they are talking about the opposite. So, the answer to your question is, no It is certainly possible that a group of people can pool their resources and take collective action in order to encourage the market to behave in a certain way. That is you are free to get together with a bunch of people and all of you pool your money to invest in alternative energy, that is collective action, but that is just part of the market. On the other hand, I think that by "collective action", you mean a bunch of people getting together and lobbying Congress to improve GE's bottom line by outlawing traditional incandescent lightbulbs.
Is there some law of nature I'm not aware of that states that we must burn all possible oil and coal available before moving to other energy sources? Are the laws of the market unavoidable laws of God, that must be obeyed? Or does human choice and free will play a role? Are we slaves to the laws of the market? Or are we conscious beings, who use the free market as a tool to improve our lives?
The law of nature is that we will use the product that is the most efficient way to meet the need. Currently oil and/or coal is that product.
As to what role human choice and free will play, that is what sets the market. The market is the product of human choice and free will.