My understanding is that the majority of libertarians would say: no, insider trading should not be a crime, as it does not involve the use of force. Government should exist to protect citizens from being deprived of life and property by force, and therefore the criminal statutes should reflect that. At worst insider trading would be a contractual violation, and hence subject to a civil court case. And if you have not signed a contract prohibiting insider trading, then an insider would have freedom to act as they wish. Some would go further and argue that insider trading is actually a good thing, as it lets outsiders gain some insight as to what is actually going on inside a company, ie. in itself, insider trading it is a form of information sharing that communicates useful information to people outwith the company.
I have never once heard a good argument why that should be the case, while "Greek state", "English state", "Finnish state", "Chinese state", "Russian state", "Arab state" and a whole bunch of other nation states, none of which have their legitimacy questioned, are fine.
Because you are comparing apples and oranges. e.g. There is no such thing as an "ethnic English state", and if you did propose that England should be a nation for only white people, then you would be called a racist. In fact, some groups such as British National Party do call for a "Britain for indigenous people" in their constitution - they propose removing all Muslims, Jews, blacks, immigrants etc. "voluntarily" then by force. I'm sure you can appreciate the historic parallels between these stated goals and those of the Nazi Party in 1930s Germany, and we all know how that ended. The aim of an ethnically pure nation is not a noble one.
(investors will go for the company that broke the cartel and has higher profits)
The real world is not so simple. The company that left the cartel will not necessarily have higher profits, it may not have the resources to increase production (which is what selling at a lower cost would require to be more profitable), and it exists in a complex network of interdependent business entities, including the other members of the cartel, all of which can (and indeed, may be contractually obligated to) enforce penalties against, or not deal with, the cartel breaking company. One example:
Zaire Incident
Zaire was not satisfied with CSO’s sales
conditions
Decided to sell on the industrial diamond free
market
De Beers responded by flooding the market with
similar diamonds at below market prices
Zaire came back to De Beers to ask for
readmission into cartel
– De Beers accepted and offered even worse terms http://are.berkeley.edu/~sberto/DeBeersDiamondIndustry.pdf
The reason why diamonds are so expensive isn't the result of De Beers, but rather the governments of the western world refusing to sell diamonds unless they are certified as "conflict free"
You're joking, right? The cost of compliance with the Kimberley Process is insignificant compared to the cost of the diamonds involved. Here is what the regulation requires: each shipment of diamonds must be sealed and accompanied by a Kimberley Process Certificate. That's it. The charge for package sealing and certificate is low - e.g. UAE charges about $90 US. That is $90 for a single certificate that accompanies a package of diamonds worth hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of US dollars. It's insignificant.
I'd love to know where in Europe you are because you certainly aren't in the UK. I can only think of a few test sites that have fibre to the home here.
Virgin Media owns and operates its own fibre-optic cable network, the only national cable network in the United Kingdom. As of 31 December 2010 it had a total of approximately 4.8 million cable customers, out of 25 million households in UK. That's 19% of UK households hooked up with Virgin cable.
Virgin Broadband in cabled areas is marketed as "fibre optic broadband". It is a FTTN network, where fibre optic trunk lines are used to connect the area's headend to cabinets on the street.[citation needed] It is not a fibre to the home service like Verizon FiOS; instead, the link between the cabinet and the customer uses DOCSIS 3.0 over coaxial copper cable.
Okay, so it's FTTN not FTTH, but the copper only goes a few tens of meters from cabinet to household, which means you could easily push 1 gigabit over it. The fastest current service is 100mbit.
Anthony Watt's work in photographing the locations of the various weather stations used to create the temperature record and discovering them located in places like parking lots.
Investigated by "instrumental temperature record skeptic" Richard Muller, who finally concluded that the instrumental temperature record was in fact ok... Following his reversal, deniers now say that Muller was never a "true skeptic" because he accepted some tenets of global warming, completely missing the point that he was skeptical about the temperature record and he named Watts's survey as part of the reason for his skepticism:
A careful survey of these stations by a team led by meteorologist Anthony Watts showed that 70% of these stations have such poor siting that, by the U.S. government's own measure, they result in temperature uncertainties of between two and five degrees Celsius or more. We do not know how much worse are the stations in the developing world. - Richard Muller
But apparently being skeptical of the instrumental temperature record (ala Watts) is no longer enough to make you a "true skeptic" - you have to be all in, and deny everything, or else you aren't a real skeptic anymore.
the hockey stick will create a hockey stick of any random data.
climategate emails and the various inquiries into practices at UAE CRU
You mean, the leaks and practices that have been investigated by several different independent science groups, all of which concluded that there was no fraud? The "discredited" researchers who have been backed by every science journal that has commented on the matter?
The big difference between other countries that have conqured land and Israel is that the population of the Occupied Territories have no political representation within Israel. Every other democratic nation that has conquered land has integrated the population of that land as citizens, given them the vote, human rights etc. The U.S. did it with native indians, and they did it with Mexicans in California and Texas when they annexed those territories from Mexico. The UK gave all of the population in Northern Ireland the vote, and the same legal rights. Spain gives the Basque people citizenship, legal rights and representation in the national government. Israel is uniquely different in giving no representation or legal rights to the population of its occupied territories. "No taxation without representation" - remember that? Israel controls taxation of millions of people in Gaza and the West Bank, and yet the people that are taxed are not considered to be citizens, have no legal rights, and have no representation in Israeli politics.
lets see, for hundreds of years longer, we have been doing this to the native americans ('indians').
No, the U.S. stopped its war on native americans a long time ago, and integrated them as citizens. If Israel had done the same thing to the conquered Palestinian population then the two situations may be comparable, but they haven't. Your naive idea that native americans didn't turn to violence is completely wrong - the native americans *did* turn to violence in an attempt to defend their territory, but they were wiped out by an army with superior technology. If those native american resistance groups were still active today, then they would be called terrorists and insurgents.
The big surprise for me was seeing that browsers consume significantly more memory on OS/X than Windows. Look at the "-39, 2min" test for Firefox: 225MB for Windows, 717MB on OS/X. How can the same code, doing the same memory deallocations, do this? Or do the browsers implement different memory management algorithms for different operating systems? Or is the test broken? Even Safari seems to have significantly lower memory usage on Windows than OS/X. What's going on there?
Perhaps the situation is different for Raspberry Pi, since their manufacturers will be presumably using a lot of automation, but in general the big financial advantage of Chinese manufacturing isn't tax, it is the cost of the people. Chinese factory workers do about 320-400 hours a month for $200. That's $0.50 to $0.60 US per hour, a unbeatable figure compared to U.S. or European salaries. (And to preempt the replies - I'm not saying these work conditions, salary etc. are fair and that Westerners should work for $0.50/hr, I am just pointing out why the situation is the way that it is)
local electronics labourers don't get paid much at all (~£7/hour for SMT work)
And electronics labourers in China get paid about £0.40/hour. About 5% of the cost of the British guy. It would be nice to having a manufacturing base in the West, but economically it isn't realistic anymore.
Once again, no they didn't already do this - they auctioned off the beta development boards. I was talking about auctioning off boards from the first manufacturing batch - the one the summary referred to as "in production". Not the beta boards.
No, they auctioned off the the beta development boards. I was talking about auctioning off boards from the first manufacturing batch. Perhaps you should concentrate on improving your reading comprehension before you start criticising others?
You can conclude that manufacturing is cheaper in China, and that due to this many corporations have shifted their manufacturing there, and so Chinese factories are now bigger and more numerous, leading to increased production capacity... oh, and the cost of shipping small, light goods is dirt cheap. But we knew this already.
$25 is under valued given the demand that there is for this device. They should consider auctioning some percentage of the first batch on ebay, and then use the extra profits to fund further development. I know plenty of people who would happily bid up to $75 if given the chance.
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Hermann Goering
Of course, Goering was speaking in a time of conscripted armies... people are happier nowadays to send others to war. The systematic problem is that there is a huge profit to be made from war, and so the people who would profit will find ways to drag the country to war. The vast majority of people have nothing to gain from war. Smedley Butler proposed several ways to fix the system:
1. Making war unprofitable
2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it
3. Limitation of militaries to self defence
Interesting ideas. There was another interesting proposal that I once saw on slashdot: insist that every war must be fully funded ie. when a war is declared, then an immediate tax must be enacted to pay for all of running costs, and for all of the long term medical and care costs of all the soldiers who are injured. I suspect that would make the war cheerleaders think twice.
Iraqi crude oil production jumped to the highest level in at least 20 years, or more than 3 million barrels a day, said Hussain al-Shahristani, deputy prime minister for energy affairs.
Iraq holds the fifth-biggest natural-gas reserves in the Middle East and the world’s fifth- largest crude deposits, according to BP Plc data that include Canadian oil sands.
“Iraq’s crude production will rise to 3.4 million barrels a day by the end of next year, and exports will rise to 2.6 million barrels a day, including 175,000 barrels from fields in the northern Kurdish region, next year from a current average of 2.2 million barrels of oil a day,” he said.
How much Iraqi oil were U.S. corporations getting access to before the invasion? How much after?
Not all TVs, but if they license it cheap enough to OEMs, then there are plenty that would incorporate the software. I doubt companies like Samsung really want to maintain software updates for their old TV sets - updates that cost money and don't generate any revenue, because their users expect updates for free. Samsung, Sony etc. are already shipping Linux on their TV sets. It makes sense for the engineering around the Linux component to become standardised and the associated expenses to be spread across multiple manufacturers.
Computer hardware changes a lot faster than the display components.
It's a good point, but people said the same thing about the iMac and it didn't put buyers off.
manufactures would LOVE for you to buy an Integrated device with TV today
Yup, integrate a computer and people will be more likely to upgrade faster to get newer software. Replacement rates for TVs are 10-15 years, it would be good news for the industry to cut this to 48 months or less. Those old TVs will still be useful - even if some of the incorporated closed protocols become non-functional the open ones will still work, so you will still be able to run your own DNLA server and view streams without a settop box.
the only product Apple arguably could have been accused of having a monopoly on was portable music players, where there were plenty of competitors in the market.
Of course - with Apple there is no monopoly at 70%+ of a market, but if Google gets 65% of a market, then it has a monopoly!
Google search U.S. market share: 65.6% Nov 2011 [bloomberg.com]
Google search global market share: 69.7% q2 2010 iPad U.S. tablet market share: 82% May 2011 iTunes U.S. digital music market share: 66.2% q3 2010 iPod U.S. mp3 player market share: 76% July 2010
you can't even suggest that Google has a monopoly on web search around here without getting pounded with downmods.
monopoly
The exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service.
The exclusive possession, control, or exercise of something: "men don't have a monopoly on unrequited love".
Google has lower market share in search than many Apple products do in their respective categories (figures latest I can find for each product):
Google search U.S. market share: 65.6% Nov 2011 Google search global market share: 69.7% q2 2010 iPad U.S. tablet market share: 82% May 2011 iTunes U.S. digital music market share: 66.2% q3 2010 iPod U.S. mp3 player market share: 76% July 2010
It seems to me that Google does not have a monopoly in search; it would be a funny monopoly that had 30% to 35% of the market controlled by its competitors. But if you insist that they do, then you should also say that Apple has various monopolies in its respective markets, and should similarly be subject to anti-trust scrutiny.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding is that the majority of libertarians would say: no, insider trading should not be a crime, as it does not involve the use of force. Government should exist to protect citizens from being deprived of life and property by force, and therefore the criminal statutes should reflect that. At worst insider trading would be a contractual violation, and hence subject to a civil court case. And if you have not signed a contract prohibiting insider trading, then an insider would have freedom to act as they wish. Some would go further and argue that insider trading is actually a good thing, as it lets outsiders gain some insight as to what is actually going on inside a company, ie. in itself, insider trading it is a form of information sharing that communicates useful information to people outwith the company.
I have never once heard a good argument why that should be the case, while "Greek state", "English state", "Finnish state", "Chinese state", "Russian state", "Arab state" and a whole bunch of other nation states, none of which have their legitimacy questioned, are fine.
Because you are comparing apples and oranges. e.g. There is no such thing as an "ethnic English state", and if you did propose that England should be a nation for only white people, then you would be called a racist. In fact, some groups such as British National Party do call for a "Britain for indigenous people" in their constitution - they propose removing all Muslims, Jews, blacks, immigrants etc. "voluntarily" then by force. I'm sure you can appreciate the historic parallels between these stated goals and those of the Nazi Party in 1930s Germany, and we all know how that ended. The aim of an ethnically pure nation is not a noble one.
(investors will go for the company that broke the cartel and has higher profits)
The real world is not so simple. The company that left the cartel will not necessarily have higher profits, it may not have the resources to increase production (which is what selling at a lower cost would require to be more profitable), and it exists in a complex network of interdependent business entities, including the other members of the cartel, all of which can (and indeed, may be contractually obligated to) enforce penalties against, or not deal with, the cartel breaking company. One example:
Zaire Incident
Zaire was not satisfied with CSO’s sales conditions
Decided to sell on the industrial diamond free market
De Beers responded by flooding the market with similar diamonds at below market prices
Zaire came back to De Beers to ask for readmission into cartel
– De Beers accepted and offered even worse terms http://are.berkeley.edu/~sberto/DeBeersDiamondIndustry.pdf
The reason why diamonds are so expensive isn't the result of De Beers, but rather the governments of the western world refusing to sell diamonds unless they are certified as "conflict free"
You're joking, right? The cost of compliance with the Kimberley Process is insignificant compared to the cost of the diamonds involved. Here is what the regulation requires: each shipment of diamonds must be sealed and accompanied by a Kimberley Process Certificate. That's it. The charge for package sealing and certificate is low - e.g. UAE charges about $90 US. That is $90 for a single certificate that accompanies a package of diamonds worth hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of US dollars. It's insignificant.
I'd love to know where in Europe you are because you certainly aren't in the UK. I can only think of a few test sites that have fibre to the home here.
Virgin Media owns and operates its own fibre-optic cable network, the only national cable network in the United Kingdom. As of 31 December 2010 it had a total of approximately 4.8 million cable customers, out of 25 million households in UK. That's 19% of UK households hooked up with Virgin cable.
Virgin Broadband in cabled areas is marketed as "fibre optic broadband". It is a FTTN network, where fibre optic trunk lines are used to connect the area's headend to cabinets on the street.[citation needed] It is not a fibre to the home service like Verizon FiOS; instead, the link between the cabinet and the customer uses DOCSIS 3.0 over coaxial copper cable.
Okay, so it's FTTN not FTTH, but the copper only goes a few tens of meters from cabinet to household, which means you could easily push 1 gigabit over it. The fastest current service is 100mbit.
Anthony Watt's work in photographing the locations of the various weather stations used to create the temperature record and discovering them located in places like parking lots.
Investigated by "instrumental temperature record skeptic" Richard Muller, who finally concluded that the instrumental temperature record was in fact ok... Following his reversal, deniers now say that Muller was never a "true skeptic" because he accepted some tenets of global warming, completely missing the point that he was skeptical about the temperature record and he named Watts's survey as part of the reason for his skepticism:
A careful survey of these stations by a team led by meteorologist Anthony Watts showed that 70% of these stations have such poor siting that, by the U.S. government's own measure, they result in temperature uncertainties of between two and five degrees Celsius or more. We do not know how much worse are the stations in the developing world. - Richard Muller
But apparently being skeptical of the instrumental temperature record (ala Watts) is no longer enough to make you a "true skeptic" - you have to be all in, and deny everything, or else you aren't a real skeptic anymore.
the hockey stick will create a hockey stick of any random data.
Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong
climategate emails and the various inquiries into practices at UAE CRU
You mean, the leaks and practices that have been investigated by several different independent science groups, all of which concluded that there was no fraud? The "discredited" researchers who have been backed by every science journal that has commented on the matter?
The big difference between other countries that have conqured land and Israel is that the population of the Occupied Territories have no political representation within Israel. Every other democratic nation that has conquered land has integrated the population of that land as citizens, given them the vote, human rights etc. The U.S. did it with native indians, and they did it with Mexicans in California and Texas when they annexed those territories from Mexico. The UK gave all of the population in Northern Ireland the vote, and the same legal rights. Spain gives the Basque people citizenship, legal rights and representation in the national government. Israel is uniquely different in giving no representation or legal rights to the population of its occupied territories. "No taxation without representation" - remember that? Israel controls taxation of millions of people in Gaza and the West Bank, and yet the people that are taxed are not considered to be citizens, have no legal rights, and have no representation in Israeli politics.
lets see, for hundreds of years longer, we have been doing this to the native americans ('indians').
No, the U.S. stopped its war on native americans a long time ago, and integrated them as citizens. If Israel had done the same thing to the conquered Palestinian population then the two situations may be comparable, but they haven't. Your naive idea that native americans didn't turn to violence is completely wrong - the native americans *did* turn to violence in an attempt to defend their territory, but they were wiped out by an army with superior technology. If those native american resistance groups were still active today, then they would be called terrorists and insurgents.
The big surprise for me was seeing that browsers consume significantly more memory on OS/X than Windows. Look at the "-39, 2min" test for Firefox: 225MB for Windows, 717MB on OS/X. How can the same code, doing the same memory deallocations, do this? Or do the browsers implement different memory management algorithms for different operating systems? Or is the test broken? Even Safari seems to have significantly lower memory usage on Windows than OS/X. What's going on there?
Perhaps the situation is different for Raspberry Pi, since their manufacturers will be presumably using a lot of automation, but in general the big financial advantage of Chinese manufacturing isn't tax, it is the cost of the people. Chinese factory workers do about 320-400 hours a month for $200. That's $0.50 to $0.60 US per hour, a unbeatable figure compared to U.S. or European salaries. (And to preempt the replies - I'm not saying these work conditions, salary etc. are fair and that Westerners should work for $0.50/hr, I am just pointing out why the situation is the way that it is)
local electronics labourers don't get paid much at all (~£7/hour for SMT work)
And electronics labourers in China get paid about £0.40/hour. About 5% of the cost of the British guy. It would be nice to having a manufacturing base in the West, but economically it isn't realistic anymore.
Once again, no they didn't already do this - they auctioned off the beta development boards. I was talking about auctioning off boards from the first manufacturing batch - the one the summary referred to as "in production". Not the beta boards.
Why are you against people voluntarily giving more money than asked for to a charity? And why are you so angry? You need to chill out bro.
No, they auctioned off the the beta development boards. I was talking about auctioning off boards from the first manufacturing batch. Perhaps you should concentrate on improving your reading comprehension before you start criticising others?
No, they auctioned off the the beta development boards. I was talking about auctioning off boards from the first manufacturing batch.
You can conclude that manufacturing is cheaper in China, and that due to this many corporations have shifted their manufacturing there, and so Chinese factories are now bigger and more numerous, leading to increased production capacity... oh, and the cost of shipping small, light goods is dirt cheap. But we knew this already.
$25 is under valued given the demand that there is for this device. They should consider auctioning some percentage of the first batch on ebay, and then use the extra profits to fund further development. I know plenty of people who would happily bid up to $75 if given the chance.
What do you think breaking away from the union would do to that economy?
It depends on what agreements are put in to place. Free trade does not, in itself, require political union.
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Hermann Goering
Of course, Goering was speaking in a time of conscripted armies... people are happier nowadays to send others to war. The systematic problem is that there is a huge profit to be made from war, and so the people who would profit will find ways to drag the country to war. The vast majority of people have nothing to gain from war. Smedley Butler proposed several ways to fix the system:
1. Making war unprofitable
2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it
3. Limitation of militaries to self defence
Interesting ideas. There was another interesting proposal that I once saw on slashdot: insist that every war must be fully funded ie. when a war is declared, then an immediate tax must be enacted to pay for all of running costs, and for all of the long term medical and care costs of all the soldiers who are injured. I suspect that would make the war cheerleaders think twice.
the oil we never actually got, of course: Iraq's production has gone down since the invasion
Really? Iraq Oil Output Has Reached a 20-Year High, Shahristani Says:
Iraqi crude oil production jumped to the highest level in at least 20 years, or more than 3 million barrels a day, said Hussain al-Shahristani, deputy prime minister for energy affairs.
Iraq holds the fifth-biggest natural-gas reserves in the Middle East and the world’s fifth- largest crude deposits, according to BP Plc data that include Canadian oil sands.
“Iraq’s crude production will rise to 3.4 million barrels a day by the end of next year, and exports will rise to 2.6 million barrels a day, including 175,000 barrels from fields in the northern Kurdish region, next year from a current average of 2.2 million barrels of oil a day,” he said.
How much Iraqi oil were U.S. corporations getting access to before the invasion? How much after?
On all TVs? I think that unlikely.
Not all TVs, but if they license it cheap enough to OEMs, then there are plenty that would incorporate the software. I doubt companies like Samsung really want to maintain software updates for their old TV sets - updates that cost money and don't generate any revenue, because their users expect updates for free. Samsung, Sony etc. are already shipping Linux on their TV sets. It makes sense for the engineering around the Linux component to become standardised and the associated expenses to be spread across multiple manufacturers.
Computer hardware changes a lot faster than the display components.
It's a good point, but people said the same thing about the iMac and it didn't put buyers off.
manufactures would LOVE for you to buy an Integrated device with TV today
Yup, integrate a computer and people will be more likely to upgrade faster to get newer software. Replacement rates for TVs are 10-15 years, it would be good news for the industry to cut this to 48 months or less. Those old TVs will still be useful - even if some of the incorporated closed protocols become non-functional the open ones will still work, so you will still be able to run your own DNLA server and view streams without a settop box.
Not enough land, see http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c31/page_245.shtml
the only product Apple arguably could have been accused of having a monopoly on was portable music players, where there were plenty of competitors in the market.
Of course - with Apple there is no monopoly at 70%+ of a market, but if Google gets 65% of a market, then it has a monopoly!
Google search U.S. market share: 65.6% Nov 2011 [bloomberg.com]
Google search global market share: 69.7% q2 2010
iPad U.S. tablet market share: 82% May 2011
iTunes U.S. digital music market share: 66.2% q3 2010
iPod U.S. mp3 player market share: 76% July 2010
you can't even suggest that Google has a monopoly on web search around here without getting pounded with downmods.
monopoly
The exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service.
The exclusive possession, control, or exercise of something: "men don't have a monopoly on unrequited love".
Google has lower market share in search than many Apple products do in their respective categories (figures latest I can find for each product):
Google search U.S. market share: 65.6% Nov 2011
Google search global market share: 69.7% q2 2010
iPad U.S. tablet market share: 82% May 2011
iTunes U.S. digital music market share: 66.2% q3 2010
iPod U.S. mp3 player market share: 76% July 2010
It seems to me that Google does not have a monopoly in search; it would be a funny monopoly that had 30% to 35% of the market controlled by its competitors. But if you insist that they do, then you should also say that Apple has various monopolies in its respective markets, and should similarly be subject to anti-trust scrutiny.