ultimately force the end of Communism, since it was untenable as a governmental system (because it assumes the leaders will be altruistic instead of corrupt). You might have read the "manifesto", but you probably didn't read enough about communism. In real communism there's no more need for "leaders". You're right about the corruption, but no country of those claiming to be socialist/communist really was communist; by their structure of economy and state they were state-capitalist. Which was one of the reasons for their demise, because instead of being content with their ability to self-sustenance they unnecessarily engaged in international competition. But the main reason for the economic demise of the Eastern Bloc was, of course, the arms race, which devastated those countries' wealth and finally could not be held up any longer.
I can't tell for sure what he might be "implying" - what he's expressing, though, is that when broaching the issue at an exhibition, the truth should not become glossed over. Are you, though, by declaring that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not wrong, implying it was right to hide the gory details from the public?
It's not him, it's you "invoking" it, only to discredit a perfectly valid and, in its potential to clarify, useful analogy. Just like "Godwin's Law" seems to usually get "applied" these days.
Your're wrong. Before early capitalism started off, e.g. for people working on farms, working time was overall significantly lower, and the salary, measured in quality and quantity of food they got, was significantly better. I don't know whether you might read German or whether the book was translated to English (I believe it wasn't yet), but "Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus" by Robert Kurz, a detailed history of capitalism since the beginnings, gives those facts and supports them with links to scientific sources. Even bond-slaves routinely had better living conditions than the working class in capitalism, until western, mid-20th century social standards were reached.
No, it wasn't "fine", but capitalism quickly became worse. Only technological and medical progress, along with social progress which had to be fiercely fought for, helped, at times. Now, leaving the golden days of the 20th century behind, technological progress has become the motor for deterioration, since it produces more and more unemployment and thereby poverty.
Even before the schism with IBM, MS was busy about FUDing OS/2 in public. And something which I seldom see referred to when talk goes about MS and OS/2, which was testified in one of the earliest antitrust suits against MS before US courts, was MS threatening to stop licensing Windows to IBM hardware if they'd continue actively pushing OS/2 onto the mass market. That must have been around the time when one of Germany's largest computer store chains actually offered PCs preloaded with OS/2 Warp 3 for a while. Since Windows had already gained a significant market share, IBM succumbed. It was not just IBMs awkwardness in marketing that defeated success, it was MS already having the market power to blackmail a company like IBM.
As a matter of fact, Serenity Systems Inc. are still continuing to support and enhance OS/2 in the shape of their eComStation product, with whatever support by IBM there may remain (after "IBM standard support" for OS/2 was discontinued on December 31, 2006) for them as OS/2 licensees. Since February, eComStation 2.0 Beta 4 is available for subscribers of their "Software Subscription Services for eComStation". (On a side note, at this time I'm still running a small-business internet server, a workgroup file and print server and a desktop workstation on OS/2 aka eCS and I'm still quite happy with them.)
Re:What about piracy psycology though?
on
Piracy Economics
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· Score: 1
I'm suggesting that he develop a business model that allows him to be compensated for his work upfront Like how?
There is _no_ exchange of value Wrong. You now receive the benefits of not having to rewrite the functions contained within libpng. You are avoiding development expense, which has value (although it's cost avoidance and not direct value creation) While I, for one, would readily embrace a society without the need so sell something, be it one's workforce, for one's welfare, it seems a rather strange and not very success-prone concept of commerce where the manufacturer of products already regards the mere lowering of production costs as the return.
Society fails to adapt to free information culture
on
Piracy Economics
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· Score: 1
You're quite right stating "not all piracy is good".
But people saying "information wants to be free" (and ought to) have a point, too.
On one hand, we surely won't get a world of legally "free information", unless society changes quite dramatically, into a state where the economic powers cannot successfully demand the restrictive legislation we're seeing these days.
On the other hand I always wonder why fighters for "free information" don't see the that your guy's mains of subsistence would need to be separated from his success in selling himself and his products, in order to make "free information" socially feasible. Why not let society pay him for his good work, which he then would distribute freely through the various channels? Which would be
The "free information" culture is not communism, as some already like to think, but it would indeed require a more communism-like society in order to not become actually harmful to more and more people earning their living from "information".
Re:So Rape is good
on
Piracy Economics
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· Score: 2, Informative
You seem to severely misunderstand what "unequal" means in a semantic connotation. When two terms are labeled "unequal", it says their meanings are "not always equal". It does not say their meanings were "always unequal". So you're right only in one aspect - your polemic constitutes a really bad case of "rationalization" indeed. Which is not saying a thing about the "piracy" issue, though.
capitalism, which is the natural state of society in the absence of any aggressive use of force
people would begin to feel the effects of eliminating all the incentives for productive labor and saving The old capitalist dogma, based on nothing but ideology. Mankind has survived and progressed fine before captalism emerged, with periods of a lot less pressure to do things. You're batantly denying the fact, by the way, that there never was more "aggressive use of force" than through capitalism, starting with governments forcibly taking away the populace's self-sustenance after the bourgeoisie succeeded feudalism, culminating in the first industrial revolution. As stated in another post, there is no such human nature as being productive only under massive pressure. Enough periods, cultures and societies indicate it, and so does modern psychology and neurology.
It is always enlightening to see that, by apologists of the prevailing system of unjustness and mischief, only a scientifically unsubstantiated belief in a world and a humanity that cannot change is considered somehow mature, while world and humanity are changing all the way at a speed never experienced before, only hindered by the world's structures of power - and only to some amount by themselves - to turn the changes to a healthier direction. Human nature does not in the least stand in the way of a kinder system, and to that account there indeed exist major scientific results, as the research in psychology by Erich Fromm, and recent neurological research backing Fromms theories up. Ten year olds, all of them?
Some see it as nothing more than a job. So some do. But none of your argument proves that this was the rule rather than the exception anywhere on this planet.
even with the oustanding social programmes in Germany and the Netherlands, there is still quite a large workforce in the prostitution scene. Of course, that could be one of those exceptions not withstanding No exception at all. You might simply have overlooked that the crumbling social security systems in Germany and the Netherlands can no longer disguise the fact that poverty has always been there, and is more and more increasing, even within those rich western countries. The prostitution business there is nearly exclusively recruiting from the lowest social classes and has always done so. Such prostitutes come both from within their own countries and increasingly from Eastern European countries where social problems still are a lot worse, and the "employment situation" is nearly never an equitable one. Prostitution by free will is clearly the exception there, not the rule, and prostitution is widely regarded as a severe form of exploitation. Even though, on paper, prostitutes nowadays have the status of regular workers both in Germany and the Netherlands, in order to at least try to ensure a minimum amount of worker's rights.
So another person that's wanting to apply their morality on someone else. Sex work is one of the oldest professions Your indifference to one of the world's biggest humanitary problems does not make it better. You're clearly not seeing that even your own words indicate that many women who live below the standards of those you were talking about come to prostitution only as a last resort, while they'd never even think about it under economically secure conditions. And, exceptions notwithstanding, prostitution has always been that way, in any place on the globe. It may well be, though, that in regions where the "normal" exploitation of human workforce has long since aggravated into sexual exploitation as a mass phenomenon, that a general attitude of resign sets in, as noone sees a chance to alleviate the situation, which has already become too commonplace.
Want proof? Count prostitutes in places where prostitution is such a mass phenomenon, introduce adequate social welfare there, count prostitutes four weeks thereafter.
No wonder believers in a "free market" like to draw such "conclusions". But talking about world-wide social minimum standards does of course not mean minimum wages without minimum social security, while you're implying it would simply mean abolishing sweat shops implying ex-workers starving to death.
Trying to describe "western-run sweat-shops" as the great new saviour for third-world countries, just because their exploitation is slightly less brutal than that of "local ones" (I won't take that as a proven rule either), is simply cynical.
a law demanding that goods may not be imported, if they were manufactured under conditions that would not be acceptable in the destination country ... would only have a possible effect if your country's imports had a significant share of the other country's exports. Not speaking of the difficulties in overseeing those conditions in every country yours is importing from...
lets make full employment compulsory Why that? Because, as technological progress continues, less and less people's work will ever be needed again to produce what this planet's economy wants to produce?
so that nobody in the world is poor Which only sounds infeasible for those who insist that the current system of "distributing" the world's wealth is in order. The world's wealth as an absolute value would actually be more than adequate for no single human being having to remain poor.
One good thing about globalization is that in time it will teach more and more western believers in capitalism that the 21st century state of their world-ruling religion is going to make them, too, poorer and poorer, while the only ones remaining to accumulate more and more wealth will be those who can profit from the gaps of living standards between nations and world regions. Everyone else will, in the long run, be on the losing side, environment included. For which the steadily increasing unemployment even in the core nations of industrialization, over the whole of at least the last three decades, is merely one indication.
It's not so much environmental laws, it's the low wages which generate manual jobs in countries like China, where, by the way, unemployment is an even greater problem than in the western world, and so is the pressure on people to get any jobs there are, even if it's going to ruin their health and shorten their lives drastically.
And regarding both environmental and social standards it would be rather short-sighted to further lower our western standards only to be more competitive to countries which are even more exploitative towards both environment and populace. Instead, efforts should go in the direction of installing world-wide minimum standards in both regards...
Probably because the internet changed one-to-one piracy into a one-to-many operation, and you all proved to them that the consumers' cries of "trust us" couldn't be believed. I think you're quite right with the 1:1/1:n assumption, but the other issue is more complex. True, "pirating" software always was illegal, and always was done anyway. But, in many cases "pirated" software was not causing real losses, because a large amount of the "pirates" would never have even thought of using the software at all if it hadn't been available "for free". On the other hand, being "for free" to crowds taking the legal risk of illegally copying it was an exceptionally valuable advertising for many a product that became really big later on. I'm quite actually convinced that many software vendors, in the long run, profited more from pirating than they lost.
The same is true for music, by the way, and has been true since the times of vinyl record players and tape recorders, when the music industry already tried to label "home taping" as something near capital offense.
but we need to consider the human memory. Do we really 'forget' things? Yes, we do - and more than that, even as long as we do remember, memory is not really fixed. As far as I understand (and if I remember correctly!) what I read about it a couple of months ago, memories in fact change slightly each time we recall them, by recalling them.
Which makes especially old memories a lot less reliable than we used to think. Which also is the basis for the phenomenon of people recreating their memories to what they want to remember. When someone strongly believes in a factually wrong memory of a certain event, even if he had been there and seen it as it happened, it may well be because at some point in time, after remembering and slightly changing the memory in a desired direction often enough, he might simply have no other memory left of the event.
The old East German SED, became the PDS after re-unification Not quite - the PDS emerged out of the SED after most of the SED's hard core leaders were thrown out or went by themselves. And yes, the PDS/WASG did gain seats last election - but apart from an early statutory phrase there's not a whiff of communism left in it. They've actually decided to declare commitment to private enterprise and market economy, and politically their positions are more like what the then moderately left-wing Social Democrats, one of Germany's two big mainstream parties, used to represent two decades ago and earlier.
From a socialist/communist perspective, the problem is: While you're still required to earn money by submission to exploitation through a regular job, while the capital owns the means of production and controls everything about your job, by using your spare time to produce things without getting money for it, you're doing things for free which could and should actually earn yourself a living.
Working for free producing whatever you feel like would be socialist/communist only if society/community would provide you with everything you need *without* your still having to do a regular job.
There is no right within the wrong, as T. W. Adorno used to say: unfortunately, it's impossible to have "a little bit of socialism/communism" in a world with its master conditions determined by capitalism. Free software is not socialism/communism (a fact that some will pity and others acclaim...).
Disney hasn't been capitalist (in the sense of participating in a free market economy) since [...] Right, but isn't the lack of a real "free market economy" what constitutes real-world capitalism? (Without commenting here on how desirable a completely "free market economy" might be in the first place.)
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I can't tell for sure what he might be "implying" - what he's expressing, though, is that when broaching the issue at an exhibition, the truth should not become glossed over. Are you, though, by declaring that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not wrong, implying it was right to hide the gory details from the public?
It's not him, it's you "invoking" it, only to discredit a perfectly valid and, in its potential to clarify, useful analogy. Just like "Godwin's Law" seems to usually get "applied" these days.
Your're wrong. Before early capitalism started off, e.g. for people working on farms, working time was overall significantly lower, and the salary, measured in quality and quantity of food they got, was significantly better. I don't know whether you might read German or whether the book was translated to English (I believe it wasn't yet), but "Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus" by Robert Kurz, a detailed history of capitalism since the beginnings, gives those facts and supports them with links to scientific sources. Even bond-slaves routinely had better living conditions than the working class in capitalism, until western, mid-20th century social standards were reached.
No, it wasn't "fine", but capitalism quickly became worse. Only technological and medical progress, along with social progress which had to be fiercely fought for, helped, at times. Now, leaving the golden days of the 20th century behind, technological progress has become the motor for deterioration, since it produces more and more unemployment and thereby poverty.
As a matter of fact, Serenity Systems Inc. are still continuing to support and enhance OS/2 in the shape of their eComStation product, with whatever support by IBM there may remain (after "IBM standard support" for OS/2 was discontinued on December 31, 2006) for them as OS/2 licensees. Since February, eComStation 2.0 Beta 4 is available for subscribers of their "Software Subscription Services for eComStation". (On a side note, at this time I'm still running a small-business internet server, a workgroup file and print server and a desktop workstation on OS/2 aka eCS and I'm still quite happy with them.)
Wrong. You now receive the benefits of not having to rewrite the functions contained within libpng. You are avoiding development expense, which has value (although it's cost avoidance and not direct value creation) While I, for one, would readily embrace a society without the need so sell something, be it one's workforce, for one's welfare, it seems a rather strange and not very success-prone concept of commerce where the manufacturer of products already regards the mere lowering of production costs as the return.
You're quite right stating "not all piracy is good".
But people saying "information wants to be free" (and ought to) have a point, too.
On one hand, we surely won't get a world of legally "free information", unless society changes quite dramatically, into a state where the economic powers cannot successfully demand the restrictive legislation we're seeing these days.
On the other hand I always wonder why fighters for "free information" don't see the that your guy's mains of subsistence would need to be separated from his success in selling himself and his products, in order to make "free information" socially feasible. Why not let society pay him for his good work, which he then would distribute freely through the various channels? Which would be
The "free information" culture is not communism, as some already like to think, but it would indeed require a more communism-like society in order to not become actually harmful to more and more people earning their living from "information".
You seem to severely misunderstand what "unequal" means in a semantic connotation. When two terms are labeled "unequal", it says their meanings are "not always equal". It does not say their meanings were "always unequal". So you're right only in one aspect - your polemic constitutes a really bad case of "rationalization" indeed. Which is not saying a thing about the "piracy" issue, though.
It is always enlightening to see that, by apologists of the prevailing system of unjustness and mischief, only a scientifically unsubstantiated belief in a world and a humanity that cannot change is considered somehow mature, while world and humanity are changing all the way at a speed never experienced before, only hindered by the world's structures of power - and only to some amount by themselves - to turn the changes to a healthier direction. Human nature does not in the least stand in the way of a kinder system, and to that account there indeed exist major scientific results, as the research in psychology by Erich Fromm, and recent neurological research backing Fromms theories up. Ten year olds, all of them?
Want proof? Count prostitutes in places where prostitution is such a mass phenomenon, introduce adequate social welfare there, count prostitutes four weeks thereafter.
No wonder believers in a "free market" like to draw such "conclusions". But talking about world-wide social minimum standards does of course not mean minimum wages without minimum social security, while you're implying it would simply mean abolishing sweat shops implying ex-workers starving to death.
Trying to describe "western-run sweat-shops" as the great new saviour for third-world countries, just because their exploitation is slightly less brutal than that of "local ones" (I won't take that as a proven rule either), is simply cynical.
One good thing about globalization is that in time it will teach more and more western believers in capitalism that the 21st century state of their world-ruling religion is going to make them, too, poorer and poorer, while the only ones remaining to accumulate more and more wealth will be those who can profit from the gaps of living standards between nations and world regions. Everyone else will, in the long run, be on the losing side, environment included. For which the steadily increasing unemployment even in the core nations of industrialization, over the whole of at least the last three decades, is merely one indication.
It's not so much environmental laws, it's the low wages which generate manual jobs in countries like China, where, by the way, unemployment is an even greater problem than in the western world, and so is the pressure on people to get any jobs there are, even if it's going to ruin their health and shorten their lives drastically.
And regarding both environmental and social standards it would be rather short-sighted to further lower our western standards only to be more competitive to countries which are even more exploitative towards both environment and populace. Instead, efforts should go in the direction of installing world-wide minimum standards in both regards...
"Poisoning" simply seems to be referring to "high" - which is not so far out, given the behavioral disorders resulting from it...
The same is true for music, by the way, and has been true since the times of vinyl record players and tape recorders, when the music industry already tried to label "home taping" as something near capital offense.
Which makes especially old memories a lot less reliable than we used to think. Which also is the basis for the phenomenon of people recreating their memories to what they want to remember. When someone strongly believes in a factually wrong memory of a certain event, even if he had been there and seen it as it happened, it may well be because at some point in time, after remembering and slightly changing the memory in a desired direction often enough, he might simply have no other memory left of the event.
From a socialist/communist perspective, the problem is: While you're still required to earn money by submission to exploitation through a regular job, while the capital owns the means of production and controls everything about your job, by using your spare time to produce things without getting money for it, you're doing things for free which could and should actually earn yourself a living.
Working for free producing whatever you feel like would be socialist/communist only if society/community would provide you with everything you need *without* your still having to do a regular job.
There is no right within the wrong, as T. W. Adorno used to say: unfortunately, it's impossible to have "a little bit of socialism/communism" in a world with its master conditions determined by capitalism. Free software is not socialism/communism (a fact that some will pity and others acclaim...).