Actually, cartels, price-fixing, collusion, etc are exactly what you get if you had a truly "free" market.
How do you know that? The closest thing to free market was probably Hong Kong and it didn't end up with a handful of monopolies or cartels controlling everything. In fact quite the opposite, lots of small companies and aggressive competition in every industry.
There is actually a mechanism in free market that prevents price fixing: competition. Say two companies make the same product and the competition is purely on price. They decide to hell with competition, let's fix prices. Company A is the most efficient one, its cost for making the product is $7/unit, company B's cost is $9. The lowest price company B will be able to agree to is say $10 (to break even and make a bit of profit). At that price each company gets 1/2 of the market. Say total market for the product is 200,000 units per year, so each company sells 100,000 units. Company A net profit is $300,000. Now the company A is thinking: how about if I break from the cartel and price my product at $9? I will out-price the other company and drive it out of business and capture the entire market. Now my sales are 200,000 units and my profit is $400,000.
By staying in the cartel, company A is giving up $100K/year! How long do you think those "greedy" businessman will remain willing to subsidize their less efficient competition by staying in a cartel with them?
So your claim that only government regulation can prevent price fixing is bogus. In reality, cartels, where they do form, are very unstable and always subject to scenarios like the one above.
Socialism by dictionary definition involves state ownership of the means of production so there is no real socialism in the world today except in a handful of weirdo countries like North Korea, Cuba and Belarus. When the right in the US accuse someone of being socialist they mean that they sort of lean towards the bigger government involvement in x as opposed to leaving x to the free market. So if you take it literally, it doesn't make sense. I personally would prefer if people used the word statist instead of socialist to describe people like Obama.
When you take a trip down from your fantasy fairy land into reality you'll realize that a person with financial security and general liberty to pursue their interests (which may come from money or from political influence or usually both) actually IS more free and more happy than a hungry beggar digging through trash or a political prisoner who is tortured daily. Inner freedom my ass.
I just viewed it. Its pretty awesome actually. Since you can't view it (?) let me describe it for you. When fully zoomed out, Budapest appears is a (pretty small) city in the distance and most of what you see is the surrounding countryside. Then with a very smooth zoom you keep zooming towards the city, until you see very clearly individual buildings and even people in the windows. Can you show me a Flash example of something like that?
The two rovers may be the greatest achievement of mankind to date.
I vote for curry as number one, that's easy. Then it gets a bit harder but I suspect there is a looong list of mankind's achievements ahead of a robot stuck on Mars.
a) Any kind of a large purchase order like this in a private company will have to be approved by senior management, in this case the head of IT who is at most one or two layers away from the board. So, very close to the people whose money he is spending and who hired him for that position. In addition, he is likely to be a large shareholder himself. By contrast a government agency has a fixed budget approved by a congressional committee and there is no sense of ownership or a reason to be extremely careful with it, other than to avoid screwing up in a major and public way which might get you a slap on the wrist since it is next to impossible to fire you.
b) Companies have to earn their money. When they run out, they go bust (recent bailouts notwithstanding). When the government runs out of money it keeps on spending, by printing more, borrowing more or taxing more. In all cases the money is obtained by force. Somebody who has to work hard to earn their money is always more careful with it than somebody who gets it regardless.
The publicity hardly helps. I wonder if any of the organizations called will know what's going on and use the opportunity to mess with the contestants.
Where did the roads over which your materials came to you come from? How were the purchasing contracts enforced? How was robbery prevented so you kept the money to purchase your materials? Any man receives great value by living as part of a civilized society. If one does not recognize that, he is truly blind.
I paid for all of those services. I pay my share of road building and maintenance, law enforcement etc through taxes. Those are just costs of production. I pay for them just as I pay for the materials to make my shoes. It doesn't make any difference that in some cases I pay them through the government (who then forwards it to contractors, policemen, judges) and in other cases I pay directly to the providers of the service. I do not receive anything from the society that I do not pay for. So why again does the society get to own a share of what I produce as my "venture partner"?
Let's not get carried away just yet. Ripping off the government is the standard practice in all industries (you know the saying "good enough for government work") because the customer who is spending other people's money is never as careful as when they are spending their own. This is just a tip of the iceberg.
It would be nice if people realized that you do need to actually understand something before you criticize it. She does not demonize people who fail (through bad luck or otherwise). Her point is that failure is not morally superior to success and that those who fail at something do not have the right to enslave those who succeed simply their need is greater - the essence of forced redistribution of wealth. The *right* is the issue here, nobody has anything against charity. If you have a friend who was unlucky in some way, then, if you call yourself his friend, you should help him. He doesn't have the right to take something by force simply because he needs it. By the way, it is very revealing of the confused and frightened collectivist mentality when people think that their course in life is determined primarily by luck.
Anything a person who dwells in civilization produces is the result of a partnership between that person and the society in which they live, without which their production (to some small or large degree) would be either impossible or less. Therefore, logically, the fruits of that production also logically belong in part to that person and in part to society.
Even though it sounds plausible before you actually spend a second thinking about it, what you said is actually pure nonsense. Can you make one concrete example to back up what you said? If I make a pair of shoes by paying to learn how to do it, then buying the materials and then putting in my time and labor to make them, and then sell them, how are you entitled to a share of that? If you mean something nebulous like I benefit from the combined knowledge of the human race then those people who made contributions that you are basing yours on already got paid for theirs. You are only getting paid for your contribution on top of theirs. Why would you need to share anything?
It's not about redistributing what's yours; it's about your partner in a venture getting their cut.
Nonsense can be put in seductive way but it doesn't make it any less nonsense. Ever thought about a job writing campaign slogans for a political party? "Partner in a venture getting their cut"... what a clown you are.
One piece of data for those thinking China is just about to take over: China GDP per capita $6,500 (slightly better than Namibia, slightly worse than El Salvador). by comparison USA: $46,000. As far as living standards go, China has a looong way to go and some major transformations on the way. Selling off your population as cheap labor force is only gonna take you so far. You pretty soon have to deal with the fact that the increasingly well off population starts demanding certain things that a totalitarian government is not well suited to provide. Planned economy can never compete with a true capitalist economies and pretty soon the communist party will have to either allow true economic liberty (as opposed to piecemeal like now), which inevitably will lead for demands for political liberty, or it will resist the change and stifle China's growth and cause more political problems for itself. Yoda: I see a great disturbance in China the moment meteoric growth slows down.
Your post should be modded funny. China's growth has only started when and to the extent to it opened it's economy to capitalism. It's nothing to do with central planning. It's to do with selling off its vast population as a cheap labor force for capitalist (initially mostly Western, Japanese and Taiwanese, and more recently Chinese) companies.
Btw, sure you can accomplish a specific goal in the short term if you turn a nation of 100 million into 100 million slave laborers dedicated to that goal, and sacrifice a few million lives in the process, but that strategy ain't gonna work for long. Can't believe there are still Stalin apologists around today.
I'm glad this at least got modded Funny rather than Insightful. So what would it be like if any government of the moment had the power to change the constitution easily like in some other countries? President won't sign some law - easy, change the constitution to remove the veto power. Supreme Court making some inconvenient ruling - easy, change the constitution to get around it. President is stil thirsty for power after two terms are up - easy, change the constitution to allow a third term. Take a look at Russia, Belarus etc for example. The US Constitution is not perfect, though as far as constitutions go it's pretty damn good and farsighted, but its value lies in it being above the government and very difficult to change. Nation of laws, not men.
Then why did he, assuming he was the same as just about every other author out there, send his manuscripts to the publishers and beg for them to take him on, while they had to turn down 50 submissions for every one they print? Why didn't he just publish them himself? The reason is simple: marketing (note: marketing != advertising). Don't get me wrong, I hope we are moving away from that model, but this idea that publishers are raping authors without giving anything in return is belied by the simple fact that authors are voluntarily tripping over themselves to offer their work to publishers.
What's more impressive is that many people were happy to stump up $10 for a 100k text file
What's more impressive is that people don't understand that you are paying for the author's effort in writing the book and for the publisher's effort in marketing the book, not for the number of bits involved. Is your favorite paper book equally valuable to you as the same amount of blank paper?
...if the books are 200 pages long each. Or it can hold 500 books if they are 2000 pages long each. In other words it either holds a dump truck full of books, or a Volkswagen full of books. Hope that makes it clear for the non-technical readers out there.
And if you are a liberal and an environmental lobby shill then you don't see anything wrong with these leaps of faith:
There is some evidence that Earth is warming => Warming is man made => There are specific policies (mostly involving taxes and increased government control of economy) that will be effective in stopping it => Anybody who disagrees is (insert an insult from the Democrat election campaign "desperate tactics" handbook: nutcase, corporate shill, violent, racist)
If it's not for something illegal today, it'll be for something illegal tomorrow, or simply something the police think might be possibly illegal.
I think it's clear that riding a motorcycle at 127mph in traffic while doing wheelies is pretty fucking illegal. What the police department did about the recording is very wrong but that's a separate issue. The initial traffic stop was completely justified and the guy should lose his license if not worse. Don't make him into some kind of innocent victim.
I like to know when I'm being recorded, thank you very much. The problem here is the ridiculous idea that a police officer in a public place has the same right to privacy as two people involved in a private telephone conversation.
On a side note I can't figure out who is the biggest asshole involved in this: the motorcyclist himself for doing 127mph on a public road while weaving between cars and doing wheelies, the cop for briefly pulling a gun and immediately putting it back into the holster, or the Maryland State Police for going after the guy. I vote for the Maryland State Police, with the motorcyclist himself in close second and the cop in third place.
From TFA (by the wonderfully unbiased outfit called TorrentFreak):
We're not trying to argue that the majority of the torrents are legit...
Are you? My whole point was, who cares about this study (or about far more ludicrous claim that 80% of torrents are legal by one of the Pirate Bay founders). The reality is that the vast majority of torrents are illegal. Are you disputing that?
The only thing that surprises me is that there are people who think that it makes any difference whether it's 99.7% or only 98% (or whatever) of torrents that are illegal. We all know that vast majority of them are illegal so why pretend otherwise?
Slashdot Mirror
What a great opportunity for a company C to come into the market and sell it for $10 and take all the customers.
Actually, cartels, price-fixing, collusion, etc are exactly what you get if you had a truly "free" market.
How do you know that? The closest thing to free market was probably Hong Kong and it didn't end up with a handful of monopolies or cartels controlling everything. In fact quite the opposite, lots of small companies and aggressive competition in every industry.
There is actually a mechanism in free market that prevents price fixing: competition. Say two companies make the same product and the competition is purely on price. They decide to hell with competition, let's fix prices. Company A is the most efficient one, its cost for making the product is $7/unit, company B's cost is $9. The lowest price company B will be able to agree to is say $10 (to break even and make a bit of profit). At that price each company gets 1/2 of the market. Say total market for the product is 200,000 units per year, so each company sells 100,000 units. Company A net profit is $300,000. Now the company A is thinking: how about if I break from the cartel and price my product at $9? I will out-price the other company and drive it out of business and capture the entire market. Now my sales are 200,000 units and my profit is $400,000.
By staying in the cartel, company A is giving up $100K/year! How long do you think those "greedy" businessman will remain willing to subsidize their less efficient competition by staying in a cartel with them?
So your claim that only government regulation can prevent price fixing is bogus. In reality, cartels, where they do form, are very unstable and always subject to scenarios like the one above.
Socialism by dictionary definition involves state ownership of the means of production so there is no real socialism in the world today except in a handful of weirdo countries like North Korea, Cuba and Belarus. When the right in the US accuse someone of being socialist they mean that they sort of lean towards the bigger government involvement in x as opposed to leaving x to the free market. So if you take it literally, it doesn't make sense. I personally would prefer if people used the word statist instead of socialist to describe people like Obama.
Just last week Reid said that Obamacare as it stands is just the first step and that we will have the public option sooner or later.
When you take a trip down from your fantasy fairy land into reality you'll realize that a person with financial security and general liberty to pursue their interests (which may come from money or from political influence or usually both) actually IS more free and more happy than a hungry beggar digging through trash or a political prisoner who is tortured daily. Inner freedom my ass.
no one is able to view it
I just viewed it. Its pretty awesome actually. Since you can't view it (?) let me describe it for you. When fully zoomed out, Budapest appears is a (pretty small) city in the distance and most of what you see is the surrounding countryside. Then with a very smooth zoom you keep zooming towards the city, until you see very clearly individual buildings and even people in the windows. Can you show me a Flash example of something like that?
The two rovers may be the greatest achievement of mankind to date.
I vote for curry as number one, that's easy. Then it gets a bit harder but I suspect there is a looong list of mankind's achievements ahead of a robot stuck on Mars.
a) Any kind of a large purchase order like this in a private company will have to be approved by senior management, in this case the head of IT who is at most one or two layers away from the board. So, very close to the people whose money he is spending and who hired him for that position. In addition, he is likely to be a large shareholder himself. By contrast a government agency has a fixed budget approved by a congressional committee and there is no sense of ownership or a reason to be extremely careful with it, other than to avoid screwing up in a major and public way which might get you a slap on the wrist since it is next to impossible to fire you.
b) Companies have to earn their money. When they run out, they go bust (recent bailouts notwithstanding). When the government runs out of money it keeps on spending, by printing more, borrowing more or taxing more. In all cases the money is obtained by force. Somebody who has to work hard to earn their money is always more careful with it than somebody who gets it regardless.
The publicity hardly helps. I wonder if any of the organizations called will know what's going on and use the opportunity to mess with the contestants.
Where did the roads over which your materials came to you come from? How were the purchasing contracts enforced? How was robbery prevented so you kept the money to purchase your materials? Any man receives great value by living as part of a civilized society. If one does not recognize that, he is truly blind.
I paid for all of those services. I pay my share of road building and maintenance, law enforcement etc through taxes. Those are just costs of production. I pay for them just as I pay for the materials to make my shoes. It doesn't make any difference that in some cases I pay them through the government (who then forwards it to contractors, policemen, judges) and in other cases I pay directly to the providers of the service. I do not receive anything from the society that I do not pay for. So why again does the society get to own a share of what I produce as my "venture partner"?
Let's not get carried away just yet. Ripping off the government is the standard practice in all industries (you know the saying "good enough for government work") because the customer who is spending other people's money is never as careful as when they are spending their own. This is just a tip of the iceberg.
It would be nice if people realized that you do need to actually understand something before you criticize it. She does not demonize people who fail (through bad luck or otherwise). Her point is that failure is not morally superior to success and that those who fail at something do not have the right to enslave those who succeed simply their need is greater - the essence of forced redistribution of wealth. The *right* is the issue here, nobody has anything against charity. If you have a friend who was unlucky in some way, then, if you call yourself his friend, you should help him. He doesn't have the right to take something by force simply because he needs it. By the way, it is very revealing of the confused and frightened collectivist mentality when people think that their course in life is determined primarily by luck.
Anything a person who dwells in civilization produces is the result of a partnership between that person and the society in which they live, without which their production (to some small or large degree) would be either impossible or less. Therefore, logically, the fruits of that production also logically belong in part to that person and in part to society.
... what a clown you are.
Even though it sounds plausible before you actually spend a second thinking about it, what you said is actually pure nonsense. Can you make one concrete example to back up what you said? If I make a pair of shoes by paying to learn how to do it, then buying the materials and then putting in my time and labor to make them, and then sell them, how are you entitled to a share of that? If you mean something nebulous like I benefit from the combined knowledge of the human race then those people who made contributions that you are basing yours on already got paid for theirs. You are only getting paid for your contribution on top of theirs. Why would you need to share anything?
It's not about redistributing what's yours; it's about your partner in a venture getting their cut.
Nonsense can be put in seductive way but it doesn't make it any less nonsense. Ever thought about a job writing campaign slogans for a political party? "Partner in a venture getting their cut"
One piece of data for those thinking China is just about to take over: China GDP per capita $6,500 (slightly better than Namibia, slightly worse than El Salvador). by comparison USA: $46,000. As far as living standards go, China has a looong way to go and some major transformations on the way. Selling off your population as cheap labor force is only gonna take you so far. You pretty soon have to deal with the fact that the increasingly well off population starts demanding certain things that a totalitarian government is not well suited to provide. Planned economy can never compete with a true capitalist economies and pretty soon the communist party will have to either allow true economic liberty (as opposed to piecemeal like now), which inevitably will lead for demands for political liberty, or it will resist the change and stifle China's growth and cause more political problems for itself. Yoda: I see a great disturbance in China the moment meteoric growth slows down.
Your post should be modded funny. China's growth has only started when and to the extent to it opened it's economy to capitalism. It's nothing to do with central planning. It's to do with selling off its vast population as a cheap labor force for capitalist (initially mostly Western, Japanese and Taiwanese, and more recently Chinese) companies.
Btw, sure you can accomplish a specific goal in the short term if you turn a nation of 100 million into 100 million slave laborers dedicated to that goal, and sacrifice a few million lives in the process, but that strategy ain't gonna work for long. Can't believe there are still Stalin apologists around today.
I'm glad this at least got modded Funny rather than Insightful. So what would it be like if any government of the moment had the power to change the constitution easily like in some other countries? President won't sign some law - easy, change the constitution to remove the veto power. Supreme Court making some inconvenient ruling - easy, change the constitution to get around it. President is stil thirsty for power after two terms are up - easy, change the constitution to allow a third term. Take a look at Russia, Belarus etc for example. The US Constitution is not perfect, though as far as constitutions go it's pretty damn good and farsighted, but its value lies in it being above the government and very difficult to change. Nation of laws, not men.
Then why did he, assuming he was the same as just about every other author out there, send his manuscripts to the publishers and beg for them to take him on, while they had to turn down 50 submissions for every one they print? Why didn't he just publish them himself? The reason is simple: marketing (note: marketing != advertising). Don't get me wrong, I hope we are moving away from that model, but this idea that publishers are raping authors without giving anything in return is belied by the simple fact that authors are voluntarily tripping over themselves to offer their work to publishers.
What's more impressive is that many people were happy to stump up $10 for a 100k text file
What's more impressive is that people don't understand that you are paying for the author's effort in writing the book and for the publisher's effort in marketing the book, not for the number of bits involved. Is your favorite paper book equally valuable to you as the same amount of blank paper?
it can hold the equivalent of 5,000 books
...if the books are 200 pages long each. Or it can hold 500 books if they are 2000 pages long each. In other words it either holds a dump truck full of books, or a Volkswagen full of books. Hope that makes it clear for the non-technical readers out there.
And if you are a liberal and an environmental lobby shill then you don't see anything wrong with these leaps of faith:
There is some evidence that Earth is warming => Warming is man made => There are specific policies (mostly involving taxes and increased government control of economy) that will be effective in stopping it => Anybody who disagrees is (insert an insult from the Democrat election campaign "desperate tactics" handbook: nutcase, corporate shill, violent, racist)
If it's not for something illegal today, it'll be for something illegal tomorrow, or simply something the police think might be possibly illegal.
I think it's clear that riding a motorcycle at 127mph in traffic while doing wheelies is pretty fucking illegal. What the police department did about the recording is very wrong but that's a separate issue. The initial traffic stop was completely justified and the guy should lose his license if not worse. Don't make him into some kind of innocent victim.
I like to know when I'm being recorded, thank you very much. The problem here is the ridiculous idea that a police officer in a public place has the same right to privacy as two people involved in a private telephone conversation.
On a side note I can't figure out who is the biggest asshole involved in this: the motorcyclist himself for doing 127mph on a public road while weaving between cars and doing wheelies, the cop for briefly pulling a gun and immediately putting it back into the holster, or the Maryland State Police for going after the guy. I vote for the Maryland State Police, with the motorcyclist himself in close second and the cop in third place.
Thanks. People like you are setting new standards for pointless pedantry, even for slashdot. Please continue your good work.
From TFA (by the wonderfully unbiased outfit called TorrentFreak):
We're not trying to argue that the majority of the torrents are legit...
Are you? My whole point was, who cares about this study (or about far more ludicrous claim that 80% of torrents are legal by one of the Pirate Bay founders). The reality is that the vast majority of torrents are illegal. Are you disputing that?
The only thing that surprises me is that there are people who think that it makes any difference whether it's 99.7% or only 98% (or whatever) of torrents that are illegal. We all know that vast majority of them are illegal so why pretend otherwise?