Just think, in a few more years, as the value of the dollar drops, India, china, Costa Rica, etc, will start outsourcing to us, since we are so cheap. These will be your bosses! There's far too much totally bogus mainstream "economic theory". Currency is a piece of paper that has subjective value, just like every other good and service is a thing with subjective value. Every currency in the world is *losing* value, is being inflated, is being counterfeited with no real limit on its supply. First realize, the dollar is only losing value more rapidly than the Euro, the Euro isn't gaining any value against all other goods and services not money.
That said, real goods and services (that are not currency) will always have the exact same value no matter what side of any imaginary line they reside. A Sears Tower in Chicago is the same as a Sears Tower in Paris for all those who value a Sears Tower building (independent of location). Just because the dollar is massively inflating doesn't mean Chicago is going to trade its Sears Tower to the French for a 90% of a Sears Tower in Paris. All trade whatsoever, including trades of "money", only occurs because that which is received is valued more than that which is given away in exchange.
So in sum, the value of CS skills in America has nothing to do with the value of the dollar.
All the mainstream theory you hear about "trade deficits" and "declining/rising imports/exports" is 100% totally wrong politically manipulative bullshit. "Outsourcing" is nothing more than a red herring. No trade whatsoever, no matter who the parties are, nor what the goods/services are, no matter where imaginary boundary lines are inserted, only occurs because both sides are increasing their wealth from that trade. There's never any deficit from any trade. The exact same good and services exist in the world after the trade as before the trade; only the world is net wealthier after the trade. If you were to force the reverse of all the trades which occurred or use force to prevent those trades which are allegedly causing "deficits" to not occur, you would only be causing poverty, causing a net poorer society to exist.
Company A and Person You both increase their value from trading money for work. Now Company A and Person I both increase their value from trading money for work. The only difference is Company A benefits *more* by trading with Person I than trading with Person You (assuming quality remains the same); the net created value remains the same. What you used to get from trading with Company A is now more savings for Company A and a lesser (but still wealth increasing) paycheck for Person I. "Outsourced" is just equivalent to "undercut", "underbid" by someone else on another side of some imaginary line, which is just equivalent to wealth increasing trade occurring between different parties at different terms.
Why would there ever be any deficit from any trade? It's a ridiculous notion even on its face. Trade is voluntary, and either side always has the choice to not do the trade, and they won't do the trade, unless the trade benefits them both. This is how the division of labor increases in complexity, by definition enriching not just one neighborhood, not just one city, not just one State or Province, not just one Nation, but the entire World.
If you don't want off the books political manipulation, a pay cut for unrealistic too expensive pension retiree benefits, don't let the government manipulate the money supply. No subjective value for any thing is constant set in stone (independent even of its supply), and eventually a critical mass of people will subjectively value all the fiat paper currencies of the world as worthless paper. The sooner they all collapse, the better will be the long term real economic growth consequences. It's no different than the hot potato nobody wants to be left holding when the music stops game children play. And of course those who create the new money first benefit at everybody else's expense. It's nothing but plain old counterfeiting no matter if those claiming to be educated economists are too dumb to fall for a price stability excuse. Prices are information, they are *supposed* to change to send accurate information.
you are granted the "right" to use their "service" and if they have posted on their website the terms of service, you'd better read and agree to them before you use the service. Otherwise you might have agreed to something you didn't intend. Even then, it doesn't necessarily imply a valid contract. I can state: reading or quoting this ToS, any and all content included and/or related there of, binds the user to compensate me $1 BILLION per each additional use, as tracked and recorded.
You can't shout from a public soap box that continuing to listen or use the shouted content binds somebody for continuing to listen. Publicly open websites, publicly open business stores, cannot contractually bind anyone, no matter what bullshit their lawyers spew. And in fact, if they attempted to enforce those terms, they might very well be liable for fraud, extortion, etc. I'd dare suspect there are "reasonable" standards applicable such that your bank account cannot be emptied due to small print pretend licenses, pretend contracts.
Getting out of bed isn't rewarded because it's a completely self-beneficial task.
As is also all creation and invention. All creation and invention would still occur precisely because such creation and invention is worth more to those who create and invent than not creating and not inventing. The invention is valuable in and of itself! Invention would not cease to be valuable if artificial scarcity monopoly distribution protection was removed. The incentive remains exactly the same incentive for the invention. The only thing which is removed from eliminating imaginary property protection is a mafia control incentive, which has been illicitly negatively combined with the incentives to creation and invention.
It's not compensated because it lends no benefit to others. It's the gateway to a person achieving further useful work and collecting another paycheck doing their actual work, so people do it, but the act itself creates nothing.
If other people didn't get out of bed, there would be no division of labor, there would be no trade, and the world would be net poorer. So getting out of bed does indeed benefit others.
There is an incentive, and the only legal way to come into possession of a copy is to pay the owner.
According to what laws? According to the illegal and unconstitutional Copyright Laws which impose excessive fines and grant unlimited contemporary exclusive distribution monopolies?
copyright, the other big affront, primarily protects the specific and unique presentational elements, while allowing-- via Fair Use and First Amendment rights-- the right to retransmit valuable information.
When I build a house next door to your house, does that give me ownership of your house? No. Copyright takes public domain "imaginary property" and puts a private claim on it. We see this in musical lyrics and movie dialogue with public domain words. This is an "illegal" (according to those who decry copying ideas created by others) copying of the imaginary property created by others. There are no *unique* "presentational elements" that are not on some level or in some way copying the ideas of others. Therefore, the claims are bogus, invalid, illegal. The claims are only granted at the net wealth expense of a poorer society, in an arbitrary manner, and incorporating public domain ideas into private ownership claims. Copyright claimants are figuratively selling public domain Brooklyn Bridges. Don't you think if two private parties actually did a contractual exchange of the Brooklyn Bridge, it would be illegal fraud, and invalid?
An idea need not be copied verbatim in a given form of expression in order to be propagated.
Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not mathematically true. If the idea isn't exactly copied, it's not the exact same idea. Not to mention, meaning is amorphous. Is it the same musical piece if you speed up the tempo? The meaning claim cannot be circumscribed, cannot be contained, cannot be owned, cannot be controlled, cannot be limited.
To say it must be is just the laziness of someone unwilling to do the legwork of polishing their own presentation, and unwilling to compensate someone who can.
Why should you compensate someone who himself doesn't compensate, by definition cannot compensate, those who created ideas he copies? He can seek a reciprocal voluntary compensation contract, without resorting to violent thug government imposed artificial scarcity interference in the affairs of a free people, that trespass on the real property of others by such rules, as they limit the manner in which the property of others may be shaped. Not to mention, a presentation on different real property (by definition of being copied) is a strictly different presentation, and all sorts of teeny tiny amendments can change the original presentation.
A person can discuss meaningful content-- the lyrical style of a musical artist, for instance-- while respe
If you don't want anyone knowing about something, keep it as a trade secret. But then you have no recourse when another researcher arrives at the same discovery independently. And doesn't that then imply the invention is obvious?
Don't forget, the Copyright Laws themselves are illegal and unconstitutional. They impose excessive fines by pre-determined government statute for civil trials. The copyright term length is also not contemporary limited. The RIAA has no legitimate legal Law backing up their claims. It's nothing more than intimidation and extortion based on fear and belief in a non-existent illegitimate enforcer, to steal even more real property from citizens than they already have through bribery and corruption of the government of the US.
It's reasonable to want to get paid for your novel inventions or your creative output. Is it reasonable to want to get paid for getting up out of bed and awakening in the morning? Is it reasonable to want others to pay for copying you getting up out of bed and awakening in the morning?
There are no mandated government artificial scarcity incentives to get people to get up out of bed and awake in the morning, yet there is no shortage of people getting up out of bed and awakening in the morning. The incentive to invent and create doesn't diminish with the absence of government enforced scarcity, and it certainly wastes plenty of energy and resources on inefficient enforcement and stifled haphazard arbitrarily "allowed" innovation.
If a creation is valuable then there is by definition an incentive for somebody to pay for it, if that's the only way they could come into possession of the creation.
Hence, the assumption of alleged incentives of government enforced artificial scarcity monopoly causing more things to be created of more value than would occur in the absence of copyright, is false. We could probably say 99% of creative things are copied generic formulaic drivel; things like "rock music", "science fiction novels", "A to B by means of C functions", "professor lectures", etc. It's entertaining. But so are comedians entertaining. And comedians don't need to use violence to prevent others from copying their jokes to earn a living.
All education occurs precisely by 100% copying. Prohibiting copying by any marginal amount can only lead to a less educated society. A less educated society innovates less than a more educated society. Also, if creative works really really truly have positive wealth value, any individual creator benefits many times more by having free access to the creative works of all others than she receives from her creation alone. Therefore, as population N increases, the greater the real economic wealth benefit to all from an absence of prohibitions or restrictions on copying. The more stuff which is copied, by definition the wealthier the society.
Perhaps the very first prehistoric cave person to harness fire qualified for contributing more than he himself received from others by copying (though even that would be doubtful). But since then, even the greatest contemporary geniuses haven't come close to producing or creating more than they themselves have copied by standing on the shoulders of giants. And therefore, government restrictions on copying are causing society to be net less wealthier and net less innovative than it otherwise would be in the absence of restrictions on copying. QED./Claim to the Nobel Prize in Economics Committee for Demonstrating the positive economic wealth benefits from eliminating "imaginary property" government artificial scarcity interference.
You said that copying IP does not always cause a loss of sale, but there are plenty of times that it does. And at that point, it IS basically stealing. There isn't a person alive that does not copy the ideas of others. "Imaginary property" is as ridiculous a claim as if I were to claim ownership of the letters of the alphabet. Yet authors have no moral problem copying letters and words they themselves didn't create. Neither should anybody have a moral problem copying anything whatsoever.
Start writing your books in gibberish that is only understood by you. Stop copying words, letter, phrases, names you yourself didn't create and then maybe you will get nearer to having a more sound case (though you would still be copying others, even if you remained silent).
It's everybody's Free Speech First Amendment right to copy everything and anything they want to. And it's nobody's business whatsoever what people do on and to their own private property. Stop trespassing. Stop trying to use government force to control the eyes, ears, and minds of others.
There are ways in which it is different, but as somebody who HAS written and published books, So you feel you can "rip off" the art and business model of others by writing words on paper, by converting thoughts to symbols, by selling bound pages with words? How convenient you excuse yourself from your "stealing" label.
See, "imaginary property" proponents have no worthy moral, ethical, or economic argument whatsoever. The only thing you have is a might is right the government says it's the law claim to violent authority enforcement. So spare us the pseudo justification.
You couldn't even stick to a 14 year exclusive distribution monopoly compromise, and had to go and steal the progress of art bargain to your contemporaries with an absolutely obscene extension to a lifetime plus seventy years. No sympathy whatsoever for such abusive greedy mind tyrants. All those who claim "imaginary property" in their New Emperor's Clothes get exactly what they deserve everytime somebody copies their stuff. Grow up, or leave your bothersome behavior to taunting your little sister waiving your finger an inch away from her face whilst claiming "I'm not touching you". It's less childish behavior than making "imaginary property" claims which actually do touch the real physical property of others.
That pretty much negates beliefs of all kinds, since it's impossible to "know" something. One can only have ideas about things. That's actually epistemologically incorrect. All knowledge whatsoever derives from either/or full set/empty set possibilities. To claim otherwise, would necessitate that you believe everything you say to be meaningless gibberish to be ignored. It is inescapable *knowledge* that something is either here or it is not here, that something exists or it does not exist. It's epistemologically impossible for something to both exist and not exist at the same time.
That said, plenty of religious superstition and outright politically motivated fraud is masquerading itself under the name of science: anthropogenic global warming is a perfect example of absurd anthropomorphic *belief*, which I myself have *proven*, and expect Nobel Prizes for Peace and Climatology for said demonstrations. There are also plenty of topics in physics which are entirely mystical unproven beliefs (hyped with the Bequeathed Title: "Theory"), such as the speed of light being the limit for the speed of all matter, along with quantum physics claims that the same object deterministically exists (rather than a probability of discrete locations) simultaneously in different places (yeah right, that's why CPU's have different speeds).
And this will *always* necessarily be the case by definition of humans not being omniscient. Many things are unknown, and plenty of "scientists" make completely bogus bullshit claims about things they cannot demonstrate. Climatologists will be the poster children for precisely this forthcoming "revelation". And the backlash will be the fault of those who should have known better failing to publicly slam the likes of the anthropogenic "global warming" fraudsters. Too bad too many scientists publicly exhale their theoretical smoke at the public, like the idea of "parallel universes".
I can understand the company not wanting specific details on the construction of the machine and the software it runs to be made public, Then that company should be barred from conducting business with the State or municipality for the service of counting votes in exactly the same way that any individual who attempted to contract to hand count votes totally in private secrecy without any oversight whatsoever would be barred from conducting business with the State or municipality for the purpose of tallying and releasing official vote counts. Sequoia has violated State and Federal Election Laws; it's immaterial if the State of New Jersey negligently or maliciously was the counter party to the Contract. The Contract itself is plainly illegal, and injunctions, seizures, and financial freezes of all Sequoia assets and voting machines should be undertaken immediately.
Also bring up Federal Election Fraud charges against the Executives because they have synthetically absconded with the ballots and counted them in private secrecy with no oversight. For all the Law cares, Sequoia was recipient to a Mafia Contract to walk into a polling place with guns and take the votes to another location to be counted in secrecy.
If you live in New Jersey, GTF on it. This is a slam dunk case, and will be copied nation-wide by all of us against all closed source code vote counting machines. Contact your local District Attorneys. I wish I could be there to see the faces of the CEO and executives of Sequoia when they lose their (probably multi million dollar) contract. Of course they were probably also paid some obscene remuneration amount for simple monkey code in the 5-6 figure per actual hour of work range to copy the same code to each machine. Also investigate the ties between the Executives of Sequoia and any State of New Jersey politicians. Might be able to end a couple government careers as extra bonus.
That's why there must minimally always be a paper receipt that is stored in the official count. If the eVoting machines tally votes in real time, they must print out a paper receipt to be inserted into another official tally machine. And the source code must be open source, independently inspected by volunteer poll workers in the hours before the machine starts real time tallies.
So 1 hour before the poll opens, pre-determined stacks of ballot receipts are fed through the machine, and the counts verified for the fictional test candidates. After the poll closes, another sealed pre-determined stack of ballot receipts is fed through the machine and again verified. And of course, the actual vote receipts are kept in the secure box. Every person will be able to see the filled in bubbles and corresponding politician name as they insert their paper receipt ballot into the counter.
No voting without paper computer printed receipts. No adding without open source code. This is basic basic code which already exists for vending machines, for SAT test scoring machines, bank currency note counter machines, black jack deck shuffling/counter machines etc. There's nothing which could even be proprietary patented.
Open source can undercut these proprietary vendors, eliminate the need for private contractors to oversee close source code, saving States and Counties millions of dollars in unnecessary election vote counting costs.
How about we also add security cameras to record the "backroom" monitor vote tally as it occurs in real time and also add a security camera to record the filling in of ballot forms (without recording faces). The ballots should be recorded at all times. And how about we also open up polling places to web cams, so every citizen can real time watch the polling place during poll hours/counting. These rooms should be as secure as casino counting rooms.
The State of New Jersey signed licensing terms that does not allow an independent party to review the code. The state should not violate that contract. And thus, the State of New Jersey violated its own laws (and so did Sequoia), and possibly Federal Statutes as well, regarding independent poll observers and independent verification of vote tallies. By definition of it being closed source proprietary code, it's illegal. Goodbye Sequoia contract, at a minimum. Rinse and repeat for every State and County. This is going to be a huge victory for open source, and a huge blow against "imaginary property". Just an appetizer before the RIAA goes down.
This is a perfect wedge to drive between open and closed source code. All closed source code in government election counting is *illegal*. It's no different then if say Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic Party, was allowed to take paper ballot boxes to his home and count them in private, in secret, and then release the totals with no supervision, or independent observers or verification.
Mark my words, this is the beginning of the end for closed source code in government elections. Here is the perfect opportunity for open source. It's the *only* legal possibility.
No double standard, just outright criminal fraud, including abuse of Copyright statutes. Sue the corporation for damages, including having them pay for recounts and re-votes.
This is a perfectly clear example of how Copyright is nothing but a transgression against the First Amendment rights of ordinary citizens. Bring a class action suit bankrupting Sequoia for fair use violations against every citizen in the State of New Jersey. $150,000 per citizen should be fair. Also establish a precedent against all proprietary software systems being used in elections processes; make laws requiring open source transparency for all voting machines. Sue on the basis that poll observers cannot verify the vote counts under non open source systems. Take some of the settlement/judgment money to begin a nation-wide marketing campaign hiring Patrick Stewart: "If it's not Open Source, It Suks!" on behalf of bringing every voting district in the United States into compliance with codes and statutes mandating poll worker observers (that means access to the code to any and all citizens). As it is, ballots are being *illegally* counted by secret closed source code. Slap injunctions on every silly little state and country stupid enough to purchase closed source vote counting code.
Yes, and parodies are themselves copyrighted, owned by those who created the parodies, not owned by the RIAA companies who made the originals. This is why the RIAA has $150,000 per infringement liability for every BritneySpearsSux.mp3 they download/upload that is not their original content. Could be some citizen's creation or could be a GrandTheftAuto cutscene. They have no way of knowing until after they download/upload (in the stream) the file. That's why I confidently claim the RIAA has already infringed more copyrights at $150,000 per infringement than their member companies have assets to cover the fines. And *millions* of individuals can easily troll big company police like the RIAA who download their copyrighted creations "by accident". How many different songs and file creations are simply titled "Love"? Whoops, the RIAA downloaded my copyrighted.mp3 greeting card which I had licensed to Hallmark and not their Jennifer Love Hewitt song in a P2P stream? That'll be $150,000, wham, bam, Thank You SiRIAA.
Yes, file sharing is knowledge, education, and free speech itself. It's horribly embarrassing for for the academic integrity of a lot of American Universities that have been complicit in the RIAA's McCarthy-ist campaign of fear. We need to dig up some explicitly mentioned files that are pure public domain educational material in RIAA drag net letters to Universities? What? They didn't mention any evidence of infringement and just demanded the release of confidential student identities? It might be well worth while naming some of these Universities in counter suits (they got resources and will settle), and sludging their reputations for failing to stand up for fair use and freedom of information. But one result of legitimate academic discovery being entangled and targeted by the RIAA will serve as a huge PR campaign victory.
Is the RIAA spying on student academic presentations merely because of the title of the file? If you want to talk about cultural phenomenons, don't you have a fair use evidentiary right to locate and present supporting documentation for purely academic freedom informational purposes? And what if you were studying the phenomenon of P2P itself? Are you night entitled to look at every file available on every P2P network if you are a student! We should not stand by while they bad mouth the United States of America!
It's impossible for the internet to not become a legal minefield by definition as every original file is copyrighted no matter who creates it. Even the most minor policing attempts will expose these companies with big resources targets to millions of copyright trolls. This is why, I've said before, copyright is already de facto dead, because even those who benefit the most from it, will lose many times more than they could ever make from copyright monopolies to accidental downloading and uploading of files they have no way of knowing in advance contain what content.
How many BritneySpearsSux.mp3 type parodies (or content owned by non RIAA members) has the RIAA and MediaSentry already downloaded/uploaded? Likely far more than they have billions in assets to pay out $150,000 per infringement penalties. The best offense against copyright law is to use the bought laws against those who bought them. They will be utterly crushed, lose all their money, and end up in jail for RICO violations.
MAXIMUS: A people should know when they are conquered. At the first signal release the catapults. We'll use the cavalry to cut off the retreat.
MAXIMUS: At my signal, unleash hell.
A pipe and a wire aren't the same thing. Among other things, a broken power line presents a small local problem with few long term consequences, whereas a broken pipe presents a much larger problem, as it dumps pollution directly into the environment, and exposes the entire segment of pipe to fire risks. All the more reason not to have a centralized government monopoly created pipe system. And indeed, natural gas is delivered by such a pipe system, and we occasionally hear stories of pipes and houses blowing up. With a consumer privatized "last mile" pipe system, any number of companies can connect into to the network at any number of random divisional node entry points. A network is a network, whether it's pipes, wires, tubes, or cables -- the principles of economic delivery will hold for them all.
And there are massive security risks from a centralized grid power system. We've seen massive power outages encompassing 25% of North America. Whole neighborhoods routinely lose power during storms. This wouldn't happen if power was decentralized and shipped to individual customers in commoditized storage units.
But city politicians needed to pay off unionized construction voters with make work projects of massively inefficient digging up of streets and erecting of tentacles of utility control. That gasoline isn't delivered by pipe shows that it's far cheaper and safer to not undertake a tentacle monopolized network system. They say the internet "routes around censored control like it was damage". Local power companies and other utility providers damage whole cities, and even States like California, to lock out competition.
Also, you can nearly instantly take nearly all the energy out of an electrical grid of arbitrary size, something that isn't at all possible with fluid fuels. Hence more centralized control, ala Total Recall air pumping style. And we still hear of people being electrocuted by downed power lines. And natural gas *is* a flammable fluid fuel.
It's centralized governments designing cities like they were building defenses for ancient siege warfare, copying the Roman plumbing and aqueduct systems, along with the never old Mafioso skims and control of the populations living in cities. And government already harnesses fear of terrorist attacks on those systems. It's real easy to build switches anywhere along power and internet line and cable systems. And switches exist in the plumbing system as well. There's no good reason to let one monopoly corporation or local government manage those systems. The socialists and government intervention oligarchs had centuries of continually getting it wrong with massive amounts of citizen dissatisfaction for the majority of utility customers (all the while erroneously blaming "the market" for ideological purposes of seizing further centralized power and functions -- see the push for universal health care). They're getting crappy service and price gouged, not by free market corporations, but by government granted monopolies to corporations in exchange for a sharing of the power and wealth kickbacks.
The costs of inefficient utility infrastructure are outsourced and hidden in the form of corporate profits, themselves obscured by funky accounting of costs and inflated management salaries. But the fact that gasoline isn't delivered by pipe should make us highly suspicious that such a tentacle infrastructure delivery system is massively economically inefficient. And it will get ever more so inefficient as technology innovates better decentralized storage and delivery mechanisms.
You still haven't explained what it is about the current regulatory environment that is stopping a motivated capitalist from distributing power in giant batteries. Don't think the tentacle line network isn't subsidized. Who knows, this could be a business opportunity to be the next Exxon or Marathon.
My personal speculation would be that it would be a great deal more expensive than the government imposed status quo, so no one is bothering. I highly doubt it. If that was true, it should be in the gasoline companies interest to get rid of their entire tanker fleet and truck drivers, and build tubes to deliver gasoline to every single gas station or every single residence.
As far as the power distribution stuff, I'm pretty sure that private companies are perfectly capable of negotiating easements and building redundant power lines and power plants, but they simply don't because the number of people that would switch over to their system would never be justified by the increases in efficiency that they would expect. That's solely because the network delivery infrastructure was built under a subsidized monopoly grant model. If every end consumer owned their "last mile" of pipe new competition could constantly enter the market merely by building a new power plant factory and hooking up that power plant factory to the consumer privately owned network. They would deliver power and maintenance service the private pipes. You see this at many colleges and universities which have their own power plants and infrastructure. So people would switch into competing infrastructure systems, companies would switch into competing on privately consumer owned infrastructure systems. The People can confiscate and privatize these current networks, as the monopoly corporations have already reaped many time the cost of subsidized infrastructure investment. This would bring about true market competition in areas that are highly monopolized; and we would see vast improvements in price, quality, and service.
Government shouldn't intervene for the sake of intervening. Anytime we can show by reason and economic analysis a solid justification to let free trade occur, government interference should be reduced, as it leads to a net wealthier society with more competition, lower prices, and higher quality.
Oh sure, it was "privately" owned by corporations, without any piece of the network, the "last mile", being privately owned by consumers. Individual consumers were denied such license, couldn't compete with the government interference subsidies given to the monopoly corporations. The government didn't give every citizen land grants to build a railroad infrastructure either in the 19th century. They created Robber Barons to confiscate public and private land to build a monopoly railroad network. This gave politicians money and power to go along with the money and power bequeathed to monopoly corporations.
Once you understand this, Congressmen referring to the internet as "a series of tubes" makes perfect sense. It was supposed to be the latest example of monopoly tentacles giving power and money to politicians and corporations.
What exactly is it about the government imposed monopoly that is preventing your giant battery scenario? Are the giant battery capitalists unable to build their own power stations(or for that matter, buy power off the grid), are they unable to buy batteries, are they unable to interface with standard household electrical systems? Is it just a stupid idea? Well this would probably make for a masterpiece work on the economic evolution of power networks in the 19th and 20th centuries, but government mandates by law specific companies who may provide power and the method by which they may provide power. It's regulated. Why would companies who were granted tentacles monopolies to gouge want to compete on a free market? Why would governments who get power and money from tentacle monopolies want there to be free market competition?
We could ask physicists and electrical engineers about the efficiency of energy delivery by cables. We could ask economists about the economic efficiency of building and maintaining underground and overground wire tentacles. If it's so efficient then why isn't Gasoline pumped by tube into every Garage or Gas Station? Why aren't exclusive monopoly State Grocery Stores the sole procurers and deliverers of food? And when is the last time you saw a real time price meter for those power commodities the way you do for gasoline?
A Power Grid system where none of the pieces of the grid are privately owned benefits politicians and corporations at the expense of consumers. Government grants the monopoly, exactly as they did for Railroads and land grants in the 19th century, creating the Robber Barons. It's the exact same old scam of creating a monopoly that gives political power to politicians and corporations, the aristocracy. The death of AOL was the first "tube" battle victory for consumers in centuries.
Here's a simple question for you to answer: would you rather buy a house that comes with power pre-attached, or would you rather buy a house, buy a connector, wait for others to buy similar connectors, wait for someone to determine that there's enough of a market there to service you and your neighborhood, then build the power infrastructure necessary to deliver that power to you? People started off providing their own power by chopping their own wood. Companies could and did deliver fire wood. They didn't build monopoly tentacle tubes to deliver pieces of firewood to individual consumer residences. It was purely because of government interference that a monopoly tentacle system was built rather than a private evolving network of (real) tubes, pipes, cables, wires. Governments got paid and bamboozled their citizens into thinking they were getting something they wouldn't have gotten anyway, for much cheaper and higher quality. And then politicians have a source of power along with the corporations; and they control people.
The Houses would have been built with all necessary "last mile" connectors, no matter whether it was a tube, a pipe, a wire, or a cable. And you could even today have ordered your power from Green Sources. Subdivision construction teams would have built all the necessary infrastructure in exactly the same way as houses are built with wires and plumbing in the walls.
And no one else would. Instead, everyone else would much rather plug into the central electrical system that started when power plants had to be centrally located, and where economies of scale and ownership of lines created natural monopolies almost immediately. No, they were wholly artificial government created monopolies caused by government interference in the free market, where government usurped choices away from individuals and granted monopolies to power companies. Politicians got paid by corporate bribes and elected by fooled citizens who thought they were getting something (not knowing it was far worse in terms of pricing and quality than what would have evolved in a free market).
Maybe we can have twenty million different, parallel networks so that people can have some choice. Where are things going to homerun into? You can't use the CO up the street because it belongs to the local telco, so you have to build your own central office. No, there would only be one network that anyone and everyone could connect into. The "last mile" would be privately owned by every consumer in exactly the same way every suburban house with a drive way owns their own drive way. You are free to contract with all sorts of businesses to connect their services up to and on your drive way. Internet delivery would be absolutely no different. Every house on a block connects to a node, every block in a subdivision connects to a node, every subdivision in a town connects to a node. Internet service providers can build their own private cables to connect to the privately owned cables owned by consumers. And every consumer can contract with a different service provider that connects into the network, and contracts to service the lines of their individual customers as needed. As the network grows and becomes bigger, there's ever more incentive for further future competition, simply because all "last mile" connections are privately owned.
Who is supposed to build the infrastructure? If I already have power, why do I want you to have power? Take a look a gas stations sprawled across the country. There's a perfect free market solution to all power needs. The power station can sell efficient recyclable fuel cell generators which on average cover a month of typical power usage. If you need more, you can buy bigger or buy more. If you need less you can buy less or buy smaller. We don't see Gasoline Pipes connected to every house with a tap on the outside of the house to fill your car, now do we? And there aren't Tubes connected to houses to deliver every consumer item, such as food and furniture. That would be a ridiculous waste of unnecessary infrastructure. It's far simpler and efficient for people to go out and buy their stuff from competitive grocery stores and drive it back home themselves or have it delivered by the store. This model can work for everything which is currently tied by cable and wire tentacles to monopoly corporations.
It's really easy to stand up on a soap box and decry government regulation long after that regulation has gotten things to the point where they are at. You mean a mess of inefficient high priced low quality monopoly services?
I'm all for shrinking the size of government, but the reality of the situation is that human beings are naturally inclined to build and horde power of all kinds. Without the government there to establish some framework, people simply won't work together and the biggest, strongest, best positioned bully will control all of the resources. So Bill Gates goes into the local grocery stores, buys all the food, and Seattle starves to death? Bill Gates couldn't afford to even buy as small a piece of land as Manhattan. There's no reason to horde when there's abundance. Do you buy 100 laptops for your personal use? And we have an abundance of energy, water, food, and building materials that can be delivered much more efficiently by expanding the power of the free market, and dissolving government monopolies where it's feasible and by definition increases net society wealth (thus paying for itself). Water companies, natural gas companies, cable companies, power companies, can be made to over competitive services simply by privatizing the "last mile" for all tubes, pipes, wires, cables. We didn't need government to falsely justify continuing bribery payoffs under the guise of infrastructure incentives which would have existed regardless of government interference.
No, monopolies only exist because of government interference in the market place, without exception. Government regulation *requires* that consumers be shackled to corporate tentacles, such as in the form of power lines and cable lines.
Homeowners could have easily paid market rate for power grid connector nodes, cable nodes that connect just like plumbing to a centralized neighborhood or city node, at which point businesses can compete to connect to that node and deliver. Thus, many individual companies could compete to deliver content/power while taking on the servicing of individual user lines as part of the service contract. Government kickbacks, bribery by corporations, resulted in government interference in the free market and the resulting corporate monopolies. And as the private home owners all paid for their "last mile" lines when their homes were built (with switches that can allow an infinite number of possible companies to hook their lines individually to all choices of consumer lines) the bargaining power and incentives for competition would constantly grow with more infrastructure rather than shrink the way it does now.
Power never had to be delivered by tentacles tied between consumers users and corporate deliverers. Giant batteries could have easily been recharged at competitive power stations similar to where gas is bought, or it could have been serviced and billed like private corporation garbage pick up. And it likely would be a helluva lot cheaper to not have to maintain thousands of miles of lines as well (not to mention far more terrorist and hacker proof as it was decentralized). The lines are only there so corporations can charge monopoly rates because government regulations required power to be delivered that way.
If you socialists would drop your outdated government interference ideology, which by definition causes poverty through higher prices and lower quality at every instance of interference with free trade, we could work to dissolve the government interference in the free market which is granting corporate monopolies.
Any other government monopolies or interferences in the free market you need me to solve, such as government interference in the health care and education markets resulting in ever higher prices and lagging quality?
Make the *public* spectrum airwaves limited, renewable, at auctioned market rates. Let's see NBC bid $0 for the spectrum NBC is granted at public expense. Yes, these broadcasters have truly robbed the citizens of the USA by paying far under market rate for the public spectrum they broadcast through.
So every 5 years, the contract is up, just like say the NFL broadcast rights contract for NBC expires, and all companies are free to bid for NBC's spectrum at market rate. Do this to the telecommunications cell phone spectrum as well. No more free (as in millions of times less than true market value) pirated spectrum for the corporations.
If they want RIAA-style War, we should welcome it. And then show them the meaning of being crushed by competitive economic market forces.
And if NBC bids any positive amount greater than $0 for broadcast spectrum, they are nothing but lying hypocrites, proving by their market actions, that incentives to deliver content are alive and well.
So opening the NBC broadcast spectrum 5 year lease covering the period 2009-2013 for competitive bids. Do I hear $1?
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That said, real goods and services (that are not currency) will always have the exact same value no matter what side of any imaginary line they reside. A Sears Tower in Chicago is the same as a Sears Tower in Paris for all those who value a Sears Tower building (independent of location). Just because the dollar is massively inflating doesn't mean Chicago is going to trade its Sears Tower to the French for a 90% of a Sears Tower in Paris. All trade whatsoever, including trades of "money", only occurs because that which is received is valued more than that which is given away in exchange.
So in sum, the value of CS skills in America has nothing to do with the value of the dollar.
All the mainstream theory you hear about "trade deficits" and "declining/rising imports/exports" is 100% totally wrong politically manipulative bullshit. "Outsourcing" is nothing more than a red herring. No trade whatsoever, no matter who the parties are, nor what the goods/services are, no matter where imaginary boundary lines are inserted, only occurs because both sides are increasing their wealth from that trade. There's never any deficit from any trade. The exact same good and services exist in the world after the trade as before the trade; only the world is net wealthier after the trade. If you were to force the reverse of all the trades which occurred or use force to prevent those trades which are allegedly causing "deficits" to not occur, you would only be causing poverty, causing a net poorer society to exist.
Company A and Person You both increase their value from trading money for work. Now Company A and Person I both increase their value from trading money for work. The only difference is Company A benefits *more* by trading with Person I than trading with Person You (assuming quality remains the same); the net created value remains the same. What you used to get from trading with Company A is now more savings for Company A and a lesser (but still wealth increasing) paycheck for Person I. "Outsourced" is just equivalent to "undercut", "underbid" by someone else on another side of some imaginary line, which is just equivalent to wealth increasing trade occurring between different parties at different terms.
Why would there ever be any deficit from any trade? It's a ridiculous notion even on its face. Trade is voluntary, and either side always has the choice to not do the trade, and they won't do the trade, unless the trade benefits them both. This is how the division of labor increases in complexity, by definition enriching not just one neighborhood, not just one city, not just one State or Province, not just one Nation, but the entire World.
If you don't want off the books political manipulation, a pay cut for unrealistic too expensive pension retiree benefits, don't let the government manipulate the money supply. No subjective value for any thing is constant set in stone (independent even of its supply), and eventually a critical mass of people will subjectively value all the fiat paper currencies of the world as worthless paper. The sooner they all collapse, the better will be the long term real economic growth consequences. It's no different than the hot potato nobody wants to be left holding when the music stops game children play. And of course those who create the new money first benefit at everybody else's expense. It's nothing but plain old counterfeiting no matter if those claiming to be educated economists are too dumb to fall for a price stability excuse. Prices are information, they are *supposed* to change to send accurate information.
You can't shout from a public soap box that continuing to listen or use the shouted content binds somebody for continuing to listen. Publicly open websites, publicly open business stores, cannot contractually bind anyone, no matter what bullshit their lawyers spew. And in fact, if they attempted to enforce those terms, they might very well be liable for fraud, extortion, etc. I'd dare suspect there are "reasonable" standards applicable such that your bank account cannot be emptied due to small print pretend licenses, pretend contracts.
Getting out of bed isn't rewarded because it's a completely self-beneficial task.
As is also all creation and invention. All creation and invention would still occur precisely because such creation and invention is worth more to those who create and invent than not creating and not inventing. The invention is valuable in and of itself! Invention would not cease to be valuable if artificial scarcity monopoly distribution protection was removed. The incentive remains exactly the same incentive for the invention. The only thing which is removed from eliminating imaginary property protection is a mafia control incentive, which has been illicitly negatively combined with the incentives to creation and invention.
It's not compensated because it lends no benefit to others. It's the gateway to a person achieving further useful work and collecting another paycheck doing their actual work, so people do it, but the act itself creates nothing.
If other people didn't get out of bed, there would be no division of labor, there would be no trade, and the world would be net poorer. So getting out of bed does indeed benefit others.
There is an incentive, and the only legal way to come into possession of a copy is to pay the owner.
According to what laws? According to the illegal and unconstitutional Copyright Laws which impose excessive fines and grant unlimited contemporary exclusive distribution monopolies?
copyright, the other big affront, primarily protects the specific and unique presentational elements, while allowing-- via Fair Use and First Amendment rights-- the right to retransmit valuable information.
When I build a house next door to your house, does that give me ownership of your house? No. Copyright takes public domain "imaginary property" and puts a private claim on it. We see this in musical lyrics and movie dialogue with public domain words. This is an "illegal" (according to those who decry copying ideas created by others) copying of the imaginary property created by others. There are no *unique* "presentational elements" that are not on some level or in some way copying the ideas of others. Therefore, the claims are bogus, invalid, illegal. The claims are only granted at the net wealth expense of a poorer society, in an arbitrary manner, and incorporating public domain ideas into private ownership claims. Copyright claimants are figuratively selling public domain Brooklyn Bridges. Don't you think if two private parties actually did a contractual exchange of the Brooklyn Bridge, it would be illegal fraud, and invalid?
An idea need not be copied verbatim in a given form of expression in order to be propagated.
Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not mathematically true. If the idea isn't exactly copied, it's not the exact same idea. Not to mention, meaning is amorphous. Is it the same musical piece if you speed up the tempo? The meaning claim cannot be circumscribed, cannot be contained, cannot be owned, cannot be controlled, cannot be limited.
To say it must be is just the laziness of someone unwilling to do the legwork of polishing their own presentation, and unwilling to compensate someone who can.
Why should you compensate someone who himself doesn't compensate, by definition cannot compensate, those who created ideas he copies? He can seek a reciprocal voluntary compensation contract, without resorting to violent thug government imposed artificial scarcity interference in the affairs of a free people, that trespass on the real property of others by such rules, as they limit the manner in which the property of others may be shaped. Not to mention, a presentation on different real property (by definition of being copied) is a strictly different presentation, and all sorts of teeny tiny amendments can change the original presentation.
A person can discuss meaningful content-- the lyrical style of a musical artist, for instance-- while respe
Don't forget, the Copyright Laws themselves are illegal and unconstitutional. They impose excessive fines by pre-determined government statute for civil trials. The copyright term length is also not contemporary limited. The RIAA has no legitimate legal Law backing up their claims. It's nothing more than intimidation and extortion based on fear and belief in a non-existent illegitimate enforcer, to steal even more real property from citizens than they already have through bribery and corruption of the government of the US.
There are no mandated government artificial scarcity incentives to get people to get up out of bed and awake in the morning, yet there is no shortage of people getting up out of bed and awakening in the morning. The incentive to invent and create doesn't diminish with the absence of government enforced scarcity, and it certainly wastes plenty of energy and resources on inefficient enforcement and stifled haphazard arbitrarily "allowed" innovation.
If a creation is valuable then there is by definition an incentive for somebody to pay for it, if that's the only way they could come into possession of the creation.
Hence, the assumption of alleged incentives of government enforced artificial scarcity monopoly causing more things to be created of more value than would occur in the absence of copyright, is false. We could probably say 99% of creative things are copied generic formulaic drivel; things like "rock music", "science fiction novels", "A to B by means of C functions", "professor lectures", etc. It's entertaining. But so are comedians entertaining. And comedians don't need to use violence to prevent others from copying their jokes to earn a living.
All education occurs precisely by 100% copying. Prohibiting copying by any marginal amount can only lead to a less educated society. A less educated society innovates less than a more educated society. Also, if creative works really really truly have positive wealth value, any individual creator benefits many times more by having free access to the creative works of all others than she receives from her creation alone. Therefore, as population N increases, the greater the real economic wealth benefit to all from an absence of prohibitions or restrictions on copying. The more stuff which is copied, by definition the wealthier the society.
Perhaps the very first prehistoric cave person to harness fire qualified for contributing more than he himself received from others by copying (though even that would be doubtful). But since then, even the greatest contemporary geniuses haven't come close to producing or creating more than they themselves have copied by standing on the shoulders of giants. And therefore, government restrictions on copying are causing society to be net less wealthier and net less innovative than it otherwise would be in the absence of restrictions on copying. QED.
Start writing your books in gibberish that is only understood by you. Stop copying words, letter, phrases, names you yourself didn't create and then maybe you will get nearer to having a more sound case (though you would still be copying others, even if you remained silent).
It's everybody's Free Speech First Amendment right to copy everything and anything they want to. And it's nobody's business whatsoever what people do on and to their own private property. Stop trespassing. Stop trying to use government force to control the eyes, ears, and minds of others. There are ways in which it is different, but as somebody who HAS written and published books, So you feel you can "rip off" the art and business model of others by writing words on paper, by converting thoughts to symbols, by selling bound pages with words? How convenient you excuse yourself from your "stealing" label.
See, "imaginary property" proponents have no worthy moral, ethical, or economic argument whatsoever. The only thing you have is a might is right the government says it's the law claim to violent authority enforcement. So spare us the pseudo justification.
You couldn't even stick to a 14 year exclusive distribution monopoly compromise, and had to go and steal the progress of art bargain to your contemporaries with an absolutely obscene extension to a lifetime plus seventy years. No sympathy whatsoever for such abusive greedy mind tyrants. All those who claim "imaginary property" in their New Emperor's Clothes get exactly what they deserve everytime somebody copies their stuff. Grow up, or leave your bothersome behavior to taunting your little sister waiving your finger an inch away from her face whilst claiming "I'm not touching you". It's less childish behavior than making "imaginary property" claims which actually do touch the real physical property of others.
That said, plenty of religious superstition and outright politically motivated fraud is masquerading itself under the name of science: anthropogenic global warming is a perfect example of absurd anthropomorphic *belief*, which I myself have *proven*, and expect Nobel Prizes for Peace and Climatology for said demonstrations. There are also plenty of topics in physics which are entirely mystical unproven beliefs (hyped with the Bequeathed Title: "Theory"), such as the speed of light being the limit for the speed of all matter, along with quantum physics claims that the same object deterministically exists (rather than a probability of discrete locations) simultaneously in different places (yeah right, that's why CPU's have different speeds).
And this will *always* necessarily be the case by definition of humans not being omniscient. Many things are unknown, and plenty of "scientists" make completely bogus bullshit claims about things they cannot demonstrate. Climatologists will be the poster children for precisely this forthcoming "revelation". And the backlash will be the fault of those who should have known better failing to publicly slam the likes of the anthropogenic "global warming" fraudsters. Too bad too many scientists publicly exhale their theoretical smoke at the public, like the idea of "parallel universes".
Also bring up Federal Election Fraud charges against the Executives because they have synthetically absconded with the ballots and counted them in private secrecy with no oversight. For all the Law cares, Sequoia was recipient to a Mafia Contract to walk into a polling place with guns and take the votes to another location to be counted in secrecy.
If you live in New Jersey, GTF on it. This is a slam dunk case, and will be copied nation-wide by all of us against all closed source code vote counting machines. Contact your local District Attorneys. I wish I could be there to see the faces of the CEO and executives of Sequoia when they lose their (probably multi million dollar) contract. Of course they were probably also paid some obscene remuneration amount for simple monkey code in the 5-6 figure per actual hour of work range to copy the same code to each machine. Also investigate the ties between the Executives of Sequoia and any State of New Jersey politicians. Might be able to end a couple government careers as extra bonus.
That's why there must minimally always be a paper receipt that is stored in the official count. If the eVoting machines tally votes in real time, they must print out a paper receipt to be inserted into another official tally machine. And the source code must be open source, independently inspected by volunteer poll workers in the hours before the machine starts real time tallies.
So 1 hour before the poll opens, pre-determined stacks of ballot receipts are fed through the machine, and the counts verified for the fictional test candidates. After the poll closes, another sealed pre-determined stack of ballot receipts is fed through the machine and again verified. And of course, the actual vote receipts are kept in the secure box. Every person will be able to see the filled in bubbles and corresponding politician name as they insert their paper receipt ballot into the counter.
No voting without paper computer printed receipts. No adding without open source code. This is basic basic code which already exists for vending machines, for SAT test scoring machines, bank currency note counter machines, black jack deck shuffling/counter machines etc. There's nothing which could even be proprietary patented.
Open source can undercut these proprietary vendors, eliminate the need for private contractors to oversee close source code, saving States and Counties millions of dollars in unnecessary election vote counting costs.
How about we also add security cameras to record the "backroom" monitor vote tally as it occurs in real time and also add a security camera to record the filling in of ballot forms (without recording faces). The ballots should be recorded at all times. And how about we also open up polling places to web cams, so every citizen can real time watch the polling place during poll hours/counting. These rooms should be as secure as casino counting rooms.
This is a perfect wedge to drive between open and closed source code. All closed source code in government election counting is *illegal*. It's no different then if say Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic Party, was allowed to take paper ballot boxes to his home and count them in private, in secret, and then release the totals with no supervision, or independent observers or verification.
Mark my words, this is the beginning of the end for closed source code in government elections. Here is the perfect opportunity for open source. It's the *only* legal possibility.
No double standard, just outright criminal fraud, including abuse of Copyright statutes. Sue the corporation for damages, including having them pay for recounts and re-votes.
This is a perfectly clear example of how Copyright is nothing but a transgression against the First Amendment rights of ordinary citizens. Bring a class action suit bankrupting Sequoia for fair use violations against every citizen in the State of New Jersey. $150,000 per citizen should be fair. Also establish a precedent against all proprietary software systems being used in elections processes; make laws requiring open source transparency for all voting machines. Sue on the basis that poll observers cannot verify the vote counts under non open source systems. Take some of the settlement/judgment money to begin a nation-wide marketing campaign hiring Patrick Stewart: "If it's not Open Source, It Suks!" on behalf of bringing every voting district in the United States into compliance with codes and statutes mandating poll worker observers (that means access to the code to any and all citizens). As it is, ballots are being *illegally* counted by secret closed source code. Slap injunctions on every silly little state and country stupid enough to purchase closed source vote counting code.
Yes, and parodies are themselves copyrighted, owned by those who created the parodies, not owned by the RIAA companies who made the originals. This is why the RIAA has $150,000 per infringement liability for every BritneySpearsSux.mp3 they download/upload that is not their original content. Could be some citizen's creation or could be a GrandTheftAuto cutscene. They have no way of knowing until after they download/upload (in the stream) the file. That's why I confidently claim the RIAA has already infringed more copyrights at $150,000 per infringement than their member companies have assets to cover the fines. And *millions* of individuals can easily troll big company police like the RIAA who download their copyrighted creations "by accident". How many different songs and file creations are simply titled "Love"? Whoops, the RIAA downloaded my copyrighted .mp3 greeting card which I had licensed to Hallmark and not their Jennifer Love Hewitt song in a P2P stream? That'll be $150,000, wham, bam, Thank You SiRIAA.
Yes, file sharing is knowledge, education, and free speech itself. It's horribly embarrassing for for the academic integrity of a lot of American Universities that have been complicit in the RIAA's McCarthy-ist campaign of fear. We need to dig up some explicitly mentioned files that are pure public domain educational material in RIAA drag net letters to Universities? What? They didn't mention any evidence of infringement and just demanded the release of confidential student identities? It might be well worth while naming some of these Universities in counter suits (they got resources and will settle), and sludging their reputations for failing to stand up for fair use and freedom of information. But one result of legitimate academic discovery being entangled and targeted by the RIAA will serve as a huge PR campaign victory.
Is the RIAA spying on student academic presentations merely because of the title of the file? If you want to talk about cultural phenomenons, don't you have a fair use evidentiary right to locate and present supporting documentation for purely academic freedom informational purposes? And what if you were studying the phenomenon of P2P itself? Are you night entitled to look at every file available on every P2P network if you are a student! We should not stand by while they bad mouth the United States of America!
How many BritneySpearsSux.mp3 type parodies (or content owned by non RIAA members) has the RIAA and MediaSentry already downloaded/uploaded? Likely far more than they have billions in assets to pay out $150,000 per infringement penalties. The best offense against copyright law is to use the bought laws against those who bought them. They will be utterly crushed, lose all their money, and end up in jail for RICO violations. MAXIMUS: A people should know when they are conquered. At the first signal release the catapults. We'll use the cavalry to cut off the retreat. MAXIMUS: At my signal, unleash hell.
And there are massive security risks from a centralized grid power system. We've seen massive power outages encompassing 25% of North America. Whole neighborhoods routinely lose power during storms. This wouldn't happen if power was decentralized and shipped to individual customers in commoditized storage units.
But city politicians needed to pay off unionized construction voters with make work projects of massively inefficient digging up of streets and erecting of tentacles of utility control. That gasoline isn't delivered by pipe shows that it's far cheaper and safer to not undertake a tentacle monopolized network system. They say the internet "routes around censored control like it was damage". Local power companies and other utility providers damage whole cities, and even States like California, to lock out competition. Also, you can nearly instantly take nearly all the energy out of an electrical grid of arbitrary size, something that isn't at all possible with fluid fuels. Hence more centralized control, ala Total Recall air pumping style. And we still hear of people being electrocuted by downed power lines. And natural gas *is* a flammable fluid fuel.
It's centralized governments designing cities like they were building defenses for ancient siege warfare, copying the Roman plumbing and aqueduct systems, along with the never old Mafioso skims and control of the populations living in cities. And government already harnesses fear of terrorist attacks on those systems. It's real easy to build switches anywhere along power and internet line and cable systems. And switches exist in the plumbing system as well. There's no good reason to let one monopoly corporation or local government manage those systems. The socialists and government intervention oligarchs had centuries of continually getting it wrong with massive amounts of citizen dissatisfaction for the majority of utility customers (all the while erroneously blaming "the market" for ideological purposes of seizing further centralized power and functions -- see the push for universal health care). They're getting crappy service and price gouged, not by free market corporations, but by government granted monopolies to corporations in exchange for a sharing of the power and wealth kickbacks.
The costs of inefficient utility infrastructure are outsourced and hidden in the form of corporate profits, themselves obscured by funky accounting of costs and inflated management salaries. But the fact that gasoline isn't delivered by pipe should make us highly suspicious that such a tentacle infrastructure delivery system is massively economically inefficient. And it will get ever more so inefficient as technology innovates better decentralized storage and delivery mechanisms.
Government shouldn't intervene for the sake of intervening. Anytime we can show by reason and economic analysis a solid justification to let free trade occur, government interference should be reduced, as it leads to a net wealthier society with more competition, lower prices, and higher quality.
Oh sure, it was "privately" owned by corporations, without any piece of the network, the "last mile", being privately owned by consumers. Individual consumers were denied such license, couldn't compete with the government interference subsidies given to the monopoly corporations. The government didn't give every citizen land grants to build a railroad infrastructure either in the 19th century. They created Robber Barons to confiscate public and private land to build a monopoly railroad network. This gave politicians money and power to go along with the money and power bequeathed to monopoly corporations.
Once you understand this, Congressmen referring to the internet as "a series of tubes" makes perfect sense. It was supposed to be the latest example of monopoly tentacles giving power and money to politicians and corporations.
We could ask physicists and electrical engineers about the efficiency of energy delivery by cables. We could ask economists about the economic efficiency of building and maintaining underground and overground wire tentacles. If it's so efficient then why isn't Gasoline pumped by tube into every Garage or Gas Station? Why aren't exclusive monopoly State Grocery Stores the sole procurers and deliverers of food? And when is the last time you saw a real time price meter for those power commodities the way you do for gasoline?
A Power Grid system where none of the pieces of the grid are privately owned benefits politicians and corporations at the expense of consumers. Government grants the monopoly, exactly as they did for Railroads and land grants in the 19th century, creating the Robber Barons. It's the exact same old scam of creating a monopoly that gives political power to politicians and corporations, the aristocracy. The death of AOL was the first "tube" battle victory for consumers in centuries.
The Houses would have been built with all necessary "last mile" connectors, no matter whether it was a tube, a pipe, a wire, or a cable. And you could even today have ordered your power from Green Sources. Subdivision construction teams would have built all the necessary infrastructure in exactly the same way as houses are built with wires and plumbing in the walls. And no one else would. Instead, everyone else would much rather plug into the central electrical system that started when power plants had to be centrally located, and where economies of scale and ownership of lines created natural monopolies almost immediately. No, they were wholly artificial government created monopolies caused by government interference in the free market, where government usurped choices away from individuals and granted monopolies to power companies. Politicians got paid by corporate bribes and elected by fooled citizens who thought they were getting something (not knowing it was far worse in terms of pricing and quality than what would have evolved in a free market).
No, monopolies only exist because of government interference in the market place, without exception. Government regulation *requires* that consumers be shackled to corporate tentacles, such as in the form of power lines and cable lines.
Homeowners could have easily paid market rate for power grid connector nodes, cable nodes that connect just like plumbing to a centralized neighborhood or city node, at which point businesses can compete to connect to that node and deliver. Thus, many individual companies could compete to deliver content/power while taking on the servicing of individual user lines as part of the service contract. Government kickbacks, bribery by corporations, resulted in government interference in the free market and the resulting corporate monopolies. And as the private home owners all paid for their "last mile" lines when their homes were built (with switches that can allow an infinite number of possible companies to hook their lines individually to all choices of consumer lines) the bargaining power and incentives for competition would constantly grow with more infrastructure rather than shrink the way it does now.
Power never had to be delivered by tentacles tied between consumers users and corporate deliverers. Giant batteries could have easily been recharged at competitive power stations similar to where gas is bought, or it could have been serviced and billed like private corporation garbage pick up. And it likely would be a helluva lot cheaper to not have to maintain thousands of miles of lines as well (not to mention far more terrorist and hacker proof as it was decentralized). The lines are only there so corporations can charge monopoly rates because government regulations required power to be delivered that way.
If you socialists would drop your outdated government interference ideology, which by definition causes poverty through higher prices and lower quality at every instance of interference with free trade, we could work to dissolve the government interference in the free market which is granting corporate monopolies.
Any other government monopolies or interferences in the free market you need me to solve, such as government interference in the health care and education markets resulting in ever higher prices and lagging quality?
Make the *public* spectrum airwaves limited, renewable, at auctioned market rates. Let's see NBC bid $0 for the spectrum NBC is granted at public expense. Yes, these broadcasters have truly robbed the citizens of the USA by paying far under market rate for the public spectrum they broadcast through.
So every 5 years, the contract is up, just like say the NFL broadcast rights contract for NBC expires, and all companies are free to bid for NBC's spectrum at market rate. Do this to the telecommunications cell phone spectrum as well. No more free (as in millions of times less than true market value) pirated spectrum for the corporations.
If they want RIAA-style War, we should welcome it. And then show them the meaning of being crushed by competitive economic market forces.
And if NBC bids any positive amount greater than $0 for broadcast spectrum, they are nothing but lying hypocrites, proving by their market actions, that incentives to deliver content are alive and well.
So opening the NBC broadcast spectrum 5 year lease covering the period 2009-2013 for competitive bids. Do I hear $1?