You probably don't believe the MS FUD and PR bullshit, so why are you believing the Nike one????
Because it's true. You describe lots of problems third world workers face, but what you don't mention is that Nike didn't cause those problems. Those countries were poor long before Nike arrived on the scene, and would even poorer if Nike were to close it's "sweatshops" and produce shoes elsewhere.
it's fine to sympathize with how bad conditions are in the third world. But don't blame Nike for those conditions. They are providing jobs that --while we may not think they're good-- are better than most other jobs in the country. It hardly makes sense to demonize Nike for providing jobs for poor people just because they didn't improve conditions enough. Those people would be worse off without Nike, not better.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the quote is "That's the sort of English up with which we will not put," the point being to make fun of the rule that sentences shouldn't end with prepositions.
Why shouldn't companies be allowed to test their employees for conditions that would lead to higher health care cost and exclude those it feels are too expensive to cover? What is served by foisting these costs on to employers?
I still think there's a basic contradiction here, though. If you're right that:
Unemployment might rise in areas high in worker-unfriendly industry, though, as those companies cut back on jobs due to increased cost per employee. But if the widget industry is worker-unfriendly, they'll find that they have to improve working conditions if they want to keep widget production at the same level.
and look at the OSHA regs, it's pretty tame.
Then why is OSHA needed at all? Won't a bit of employee pressure accomplish the same things that OSHA does without all the paperwork and lawyering?
Secondly, you have to take into account not just the people who get better conditions but also the people who lose their jobs outright. You said:
pay cuts only go so far before you hit minimum wage.
What happens when they hit minimum wage? Do you think they just shrug and pay extra? Not a chance. If the marginal productivity of an employers workforce falls below minimum wage, he'll stop hiring workers. You might not see it immediately, because he has to keep his factory going, but in the long run driving the marginal value of workers' labor below the minimum wage will increase unemployment.
The bottom line is that some employers are going to be evil OSHA regs or not. And the evil ones are going to be the ones who will work the hardest to get around OSHA regs for the majority of employers that aren't evil, OSHA is more of a headache than anything else. They'd probably adopt many safety measures voluntarily if asked, and filling out OSHA forms to prove that they've complied is a general waste of everyone's time.
You can't have it both ways. If OSHA regs are cheap and painless, most employers will adopt them voluntarily. If they are difficult and expensive, then it might not be in the best interests of workers to force employers to implement them.
One final point. Comparing coal mines in 1800 to anything today is a straw man. A hell of a lot of things have changed between then and now. Today you couldn't get workers to work in those conditions even if they were legal. This has nothing whatsoever to do with government regs. It's just a result of progress. When you can work for $7/hour at McDonald's why risk your life in the mines? Conditions in mines (And everywhere else) were improving long before OSHA came on the scene.
Well, have you ever worked a crappy job? Have you ever been an unskilled worker in a high-unemployment area? There are a great many people who can't just get up and move to a new job.
Not immediately. Not all at once. But ultimately companies that treat their employees well have a competitive advantage over those that don't. It might be that 90% of employees stay, but the other 10% is enough to punish them economically.
I'm not saying this will magically wipe out abuses over night. I am saying, however, that nothing the government does is going to work any better. If there are significant ecnoomic advantages to abusing workers, employers will find a way to do it OSHA or no.
Keep in mind also that there's no free lunch. Justified or not, an employer counts OSHA compliance costs as part of the cost of hiring an employee. If those go up, he's going to offer correspondingly less when he hires new people, and the rest of the industry will do the same. So ultimately workers pay for it either way.
It's nice to imagine that employers will just swallow the higher costs and go their merry way, but as you said, some employers are bastards. And if they have to spend money to improve conditions, they're going to pass those costs on to their employees.
And because every other employer is being forced to do the same, the same will be true of them, meaning you're basically just forcing employees to pay for their own better conditions. But they could do that already. You're not really benefitting them.
There are no free lunches. In the long run, all costs to businesses get passed on to either consumers or workers. Companies' top priorities are to make a profit. I don't want to repeal OSHA because I believe employers will treat their employees right out of the goodness of their hearts. I want to eliminate OSHA because it doesn't improve things for workers even if employers are all evil bastards.
Wouldn't it have been better if we could have skipped the (dangerous, unpleasant, life-threatening) things people had to do to get the government regs in place?
It would have been nice if we could have skipped the whole industrial revolution and gone straight from agriculture to e-commerce. It would be nice if everyone had a 30-hour per week desk job and made six figures. It would be nice if no one had to work at all.
But in the real world, people are poor. And poor people sometimes choose to take what seems to us desperate measures to get ahead. If you outlaw child labor in those countries, you take away a source of income for desperately poor families. In many cases that means that the children you care so much about are going to starve, or at least have to skip even more meals than they already do. Is that what you want? How does it benefit those kids to tell them they can't work if their familiies are depending on that income to survive?
It's easy for us to sit in our comfy suburban houses and poo-poo those poor people who are forcing their kids to work. But those people are not all heartless monsters. They care about their kids every bit as much as we care about ours. And it probably breaks their hearts to see their kids working long hours.
But the solution is not to force those families even farther into poverty. The solution is to figure out why there are still desperately poor countries and help parents raise their standards of living so they don't have to rely on their kids' labor. Once that happens, child labor will disappear by itself. Until that happens, banning it will only lead to children working in black-market sweatshops that are even worse than the ones they are in now.
The problem is that OSHA can't just wave a magic wand and make employers protect their workers. They have limited agents, and at a reasonable cost they can force only a small percentage of employers to comply with the law. You can sue employers after the fact, but often this will simply encourage employers to hire more lawyers rather than improve conditions.
If employers don't care about safety and employees don't care enough to switch jobs, then OSHA is mostly an annoyance. They can make employers fill out paperwork. They can force the provision of specific equipment or prohibit specific tasks, but ultimately OSHA doesn't have the time, information, or resources to force employers to be safe.
At the same time, the costs are enourmous. Because OSHA is not omniscient and doesn't have the resources to be everywhere all the time, they force a great deal of compliance costs on employers. From the perspective of most employers, OSHA is an impediment to doing their jobs. You have to fill out forms, buy new equipment to comply with regulations, go through complex procedures every time there is an injury or safety problem, etc. The employer might already be running a safe shop, but still be forced to jump through OSHA's hoops. Or he might be running an unsafe shop, and is simply cleaning up those areas that OSHA absolutely demads while ignoring far greater safety hazards that are not covered by OSHA regulations.
OSHA doesn't necessarily make workplaces safer. It simply makes people fill out paperwork claiming that they are safer. But in the process, you give free reign to lawyers, ambitious bureaucrats, and cynical employees who work the system to their own advantage. Forcing employers to buy new keyboards or slow down the pace of work has dubious value from a safety standpoint, but I can guaruntee you that it will open up a flood of lawsuits, waste lots of managers' time, and reduce productivity accross the board.
Keep this in mind too: If safety measures are cheap and painless, most employers will adopt them voluntarily. They don't cost much and they help retain employees. If they are expensive, then if you impose them by force of law, employers will just take that as a cost of hiring someone and offer them correspondingly less money. In neither case do employees benefit. It might appear that they benefit-- they get new safety features appearantly for free-- but the costs are either going to come out of their next raise, or out of future jobs not created for other workes.
So I don't believe that a world without OSHA would be substantially less safe than the world we have now, and even if it would, those who don't like it do have choices.
Lasty, I take the position that non-compliance will cost more, in the long run.
Then why do we need OSHA at all? Employers will discover this for themselves and implement these safety standards voluntarily. At most we would then need an informational campaign informing employers of this fact.
At the dawn of the industrial revolution, some factories in England were working children 16 hours a day, 6 days a week. Somehow I don't think a "please stop" ended this practice.
But neither was government regulation the primary cause. Even if child labor laws were repealed today, few if any children would be required to work significant hours. The reason is twofold. First, most families are much better off than they were back then. In many cases the alternative was work 16 hour days or starve. That's no longer true.
Secondy, children just don't make very good workers. When the jobs available were simple assembly-line piecework, children could be made useful. Today most of those jobs are performed by machines.
So perhaps child labor laws caused children to stop working sooner than they otherwise would have, but government intervention is not required to prevent employer abuse of employees. Ultimately, there's one reason and only one reason employers treat their employees well-- because they know they'll leave if they don't.
OSHA's regulations will do little more than politicize the employer-employee relationship. If an employee really cares about ergonomics he can buy ergonomically correct equipment himself or agree to take lower pay in exchange for better conditions. If an employee really doesn't care about it, he's not going to use it even if employers do pay for it. Ultimately, it should be up to the employee to decide if ergonomic measures are worth the cost.
If I want to choose to destroy my body, that's my right. It's not like I don't have a choice of jobs, and the same is true of most people who sit in front of computers for a living. Most of them are not menial laborers, and they can find better conditions if they want to. It's absurd to pretend that employees are helpless victims being forced into jobs that give them debilitating injuries. You choose your job, and if you don't like one, you're free to take another.
On the other hand, OSHA's regulations offer infinite potential for mischief. One disgruntled employee could, for example, fake a RSI and force a whole office to undergo OSHA-mandated redisigns of their workplaces. Or over-zealous bureaucrats can force workers to adopt dubious safety measures even the employees themselves want. This is the government we're talking about, and governments are crawling with lawyers. The moment you give them the power to dictate working conditions, they will use that power in unexpected and harmful ways.
The above combined with the compliance costs of these regulations make them clearly not worth adopting. I for one am hoping that President Bush cancels them on taking office.
I guess my question is: why are monopolies inevitable? If we had a government that simply enforced property rights, how would companies coerce others to use their products? Are you saying that government is intrinsically corrupt and will always serve the special interests no matter what? If not, then what policies do you think will lessen the tendency? If so, then isn't the last thing you want an even larger and more powerful government?
It's called "the great Libertarian offer," although you might not be able to order it in time for the election. The basic ideas are also at his web site, to: www.harrybrowne.org
At the federal level, most of them would be. Harry Browne has a whole book on what he'd do, so it can't be summarized to easily, but the basics are:
* Sell of unneeded government assets. There are trillions of dollars in mineral reserves, land, old military bases, etc that the government has no Constitutional business owning. Browne estimates this would bring at least 5 trillion in.
* Use the proceeds to pay down the national debt and buy private retirement anuities for those currently dependent on social security. For younger workers, free them from the social security tax so they can afford to save for retirement.
* Cut most government programs. Return the money saved to taxpayers by ending the income tax. The Constitutional functions of the government would be funded by excise and sales tax.
* End corporate welfare. This fits in with the above, but it deserves some emphasis, as it's one of the biggest costs to the Federal government.
* Repeal regulatory agencies whose primary effect is to protect large firms from competition by harrassing their competitors, such as the FDA, ICC, EPA, OSHA, etc.
* End the drug war. Free federal prisoners convicted of non-violent drug crimes.
* End US imperialism abroad. The Browne administration will oversee an orderly withdrawal of our troops from foreign nations. Stop bullying other countries, bombing their cities, propping up their dictators, and giving their rebels weapons. Cut the military to the size needed for a purely defensive military force.
There's much more, obviously, but those are the high points. A Libertarian government would be about 10% of its present size, with most of its current functions handled by the states or the private sector. I think you'd see much more rapid growth, much more rapid progress for the poor and disadvantaged, much less corporate power over government, less threat of terrorism abroad, less drug-war-fueled crime, and many other benefits.
I understand the concern, but I think you have the cause and effect reversed. Corporate power isn't the opposite of government power. They are one and the same thing. Corporations get the power *through government.*
Your example of the media is an excellent one. The media are among the most heavily regulated industries in the nation. The government has effectively monopolized the cable market, and has given billions in free spectrum to broadcast journalists. Corporations are now pushing for limiting "pirate" radio stations.
The other thing to keep in mind about the media is: what's the alternative? Having the government run the media would be even worse, and corporations are always going to conspire to use the power of government to their advantage. Ultimately, the only way to prevent corporations and/or government from using the media to their own advantage is for consumers to be alert to the biases they hold. If that doesn't happen, there's no way we can prevent the monied interests from using their power to disadvantage the rest of us.
In terms of the broader issue of monopolies and market power, I think you'll find that in most cases monopolies are created by the government. This is true in the cases of public utilities, phone, cable, and to a lesser extent trucking, taxi service in many states, pharmaceutical companies, and many others. Regulatory agencies like th FDA, ICC, and EPA exist primarily to protect the interests of the big firms in the industries they regulate.
If you look at purely free markets, history does not bear out your position. A good example is Standard Oil. They had about an 85% market share in 1890. At that point they had driven the price of oil down by an order of magnitude. They certainly tried to monopolize their industry after that, but in fact their market share *declined* from 85% to about 65% by the time of the breakup in 1910 or so.
In other words, Standard Oil was certainly big and powerful, but without the help of government, they were unable to take or keep a monopoly on the industry, and in the process of trying, they drove down prices and benefited consumers immensely.
Contrast this with AT & T, which in the 1920's was in the same position. Their telephone patent had expired, and they were losing market share to smaller competitors. They lobbied for more government regulation of their industry, and effectively achieved a government-imposed monopoly. Had the government left them alone, they might still have a large market share, but there would likely not be the regional monopolies in local service we see today.
The pattern is the same in virtually any industry you pick-- those with the most government interference show the greatest concentrations of economic power. Nor should this be surprising. As leftists like to point out, our politicians are bought and paid for by special interests. Why, then, should we be surprised when government interference ends up helping rather than hurting those special interests?
Sadly, too many Libertarians (especially online) make really bad arguments.
Those Libertarians who have thought about the issues in some depth and read more than Atlas Shrugged have a much more nuanced world-view than simply believing that everyone needs to look out for himself and ignore others.
Libertarianism is a political theory, not a philosophical one. It holds only that Big Government is destructive of society, not that individual shouldn't help one another.
The choice is not between cooperation and selfishness. The choice is between voluntary relationships and coercive ones. Voluntary relationships promote harmony, and progress. Coercive means lead to strife and special interest wrangling.
Indeed, one of the strongest arguments for libertarianism is that Big Government destroys the good will and cooperative spirit that voluntary relationships promote.
There are of course many other reasons-- government programs are inefficient, threatening to civil liberties, benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, and many other bad things. But please don't dismiss Libertarianism because of the stupidity of a handful or Randroids. An idea is not responsible for the intelligence of its adherents.
Certainly, accepting this doesn't make one whit of difference to us isolated here in our own reality. But that's not the point really
It's precisely the point. We are creatures of limited knowledge, and so we must consider things from our own perspective. We can fantisize about meta-universes in which we can see people who can't see each other, but we will never occupy such a position, and so there's no point in taking those fantizies seriously. In the real world we must take reality as we see it.
And of those potential individuals, every life that can be lived by them, is indeed lived somewhere.
This is a bald assertion, and one that you can't possibly prove.
We can infer, from the measurements we make, other facts about the universe for which we do not possess evidence of a more direct nature.
Sure. That's what I meant by "tools to extend them." But our perceptions are still ultimately limited, and the information we recieve is still bound by our five senses. You might be able to build an immensely complicated collider to detect subatomic particles, but the output is still read in through your eyes.
The problem with the alternate universes hypothesis or anything like it is that we have no means of testing it either directly or indirectly. There is no way to test the proposition "there exist specific things that we cannot observe through any means," yet that is essentially what the alternate universe hypothesis says. Since universes by definition don't interact with one another, there's no way anyone in this universe can gain meaningful information about any other. No amount of deductive logic can ascertain facts without any empirical data. All reasoning ultimately rests on the observation of the senses to have any meaning.
the sine qua non of life in any form is a structure that can encode information in a stable and consistent manner but with the flexibility to react and adapt to its environment
I mostly agree with this. I just think people are a little too quick to assume that our form of life (or approximations thereof) are the only forms possible. It may be that the range of suitable-entropy universes is still pretty narrow, but there are certainly more options than just the precise values that we have here.
I suspect that your reaction is symptomatic of the spirit of the times we live in, where so many now glibly reject the scientists' assertion of an objective reality
I must admit I'm a bit puzzled by this, as I consider it to be quite the opposite. It is the "parallel universe" hypothesis that is not grounded in objective reality. It is a poetic, intuitive, and ultimately groundless assertion. I accept the existence of an objective reality. Indeed, I think the existence of objective reality must go hand in hand with the rejection of claims not grounded in reality.
For something to be grounded in reality, it must on some level be grounded in the evidence of the senses. Otherwise there is no rational basis for separating the true from the false. The multiverse hypothesis has no grounding in empirical evidence, and is therefore an unscientific and non-empirical hypothesis. It is the multiverse that is "cozy and New-Agey." It's plausible and sounds good, but it can never be proven or disproven.
The question for me is: do I want smaller government?
If the answer is yes, then it's stupid to support anyone who doesn't also want smaller government. Harry Browne and Howard Phillips are the only Presidential candidates who have proposed reductions in government programs. Voting for anyone else isn't just a vote for the lesser of two evils. It's a vote that will continue to take us in the wrong direction.
Harry Browne won't win this year. So you don't have to worry about him implementing his more radical proposals. But voting for him is the only way you can send the clear message that you want smaller government.
As for the extremeness of his proposals, let me point out that incrementalism doesn't work when it comes to getting smaller government. If a candidate ran on a platform of cutting various government programs by 10% and eliminating a few of them, he would attract the ire of the special interests that depend on those programs without offering any substantial tax relief to the taxpayers. Only a single, decisive stroke in the opening months of a presidential term has any chance of bringing about major reductions in government.
Not only that, but any government programs you leave reduced but still in place will quickly grow back to their former size the next time a D or R takes office. A partial cut of the SS tax can easily be re-instated in the next election. It is much harder to do so if people are used to keeping every dollar they earn.
If smaller government is what you want, you need to vote for a candidate who supports it. Even if you think Harry Browne does go to far, it's still better to go in the right direction than to continue supporting those who are making the government bigger. And given that he's not going to win, his getting a lot of votes will primarily cause his ideas to get put on the table more often, something that can only do good regardless of whether you ultimately support his positions.
If the number of universes is likely to be much greater than 1, do we have any reason to assume it is finite at all?
I generally agree with this analysis if we assume that the multiverse exists and the only question is how many universes it contains. My only problem is that that's not a very good assumption. It's intellectually satisfying that there would be other universes with different properties, but there is no direct evidence for it. The only "evidence" we have is the fact that we think it would make sense for them to exist.
Human beings are creatures of limited knowledge. We can only percieve those things that amenable to our five sense and the tools we build to enhance them. When making factual statements, therefore, we have to restrict them to things that are detectable by the five senses or tools that extend them. Otherwise there is no arbiter of what is right or wrong.
We might think that it is shockingly implausible that there be only one universe and that it happens to have properties that are conducive to life. But this reflects only our opinions. To turn this into a factual statement we would need to find some way to directly observe those other universes. Until then it is just idle speculation.
So *if* we assume that there are many universes with the values of those magic numbers randomly distributed among them, then it's a good guess that there are a whole lot of them. But until we find direct evidence that that assumption is correct, the question remains fundamentally unanswerable.
2.They are not connected, but there are enough universes that it's not surprising one of them is like this one.
3.The universe we live in was intentionally, intelligently designed with the properties it has.
The more basic point I made, though, was that two and three are from our perspective indistinguishable from simple random chance. Unless you can either give me a way of communicating directly with God or of viewing alternative universes, there is no way, even in theory, to distinguish your second and third cases.
So I think the correct response is to note that this is interesting, look for connections, but if none are forthcoming, we should recognize that we don't have an explanation and probably never will.
It's not clear to me what it means to say that alternate universes "exist" if there's no chance that this universe will ever interact with them. If they are completely undetectable and have no influence on the phenomena we can see, what does it mean to say that they exist? And even if they do exist in some philosophical sense, what's the point of arguing about whether they exist if we can never resolve the question?
But the claim is not just that the universe would be different in some arbitrary way, it would be different in a way that leads to a largely undifferentiated universe with no chance for anything complex to develop. Unless you can fit that into your definition of life, his point stands.
This is true to an extent. However, I doubt anyone has (or for that matter even could) predict all possible permutations of changing those variables. It might be that the aspects of the universe that we consider important would cease to be interesting, but that other aspects would become complex under some permutations. Or it might be that there are other combinations that allow for sufficient complexity for life to emerge.
Light is light. A photon is a photon. They happen to have some particle-like properties and some wave-like properties. It doesn't perfectly fit either.
Light is no more "really" a wave than it's "really" a particle. It's light-- a unique phenomenon for which "wave" and "particle" are imperfect approximations.
With that said, i think you're right. We don't need to invoke magical alternative universes to explain interference patterns. It makes for a nice story, but it has no necessary relationship with reality.
First, there's the problem of selection bias. We have a sample size of precisely 1. If other universes exist, we have no way of observing them and seeing if the exhibit the same properties. So for all we know the other universes did happen and we just happen to be in the one that produced us. There's no cosmic mystery there.
The analogy of the 21 guns missing fails because we are able to observe the causal process before and after, and we have some experience that guns are supposed to hit. We have no such information about the origins of the universe. For all we know, there is some underlying interconnectedness to the 6 numbers that make it inevitable that they take the values they take.
Secondly, we have no way of knowing that our form of life is the only one possible. A universe with different constants might not produce us, but it might very well produce other things that fit a more expansive definition of life. If you're going to make expansive statements about the "multiverse," it's absurd to act like Carbon-based human life is the only possible kind.
More fundamentally, our knowledge is limited by our perceptions. We will almost certainly never know what happened "before" the Big Bang. And unless there is some radical change in physics as we understand it, we will never be able to observe other dimensions in the "multiverse." Therefore, this sort of pseudo-philosophical musings, while interesting, are never going to reach any closure. You can always posit the existence of multiverses and extra dimensions and invisible unicorns. But if you have no evidence for their existence, they are no more than musings.
Engineering is all about tradeoffs. If you're designing an airplane or the power system for a hospital, you can't afford any errors under any circumstances, so you over-engineer everything and spend most of your resources on the debugging to make absolutely sure there are no bugs.
If you're writing a word processor, you don't want to lengthen your development cycle by a month to fix a problem that only affects 1 in 100000 users. You don't want to double the price of your product so you can chase down the last few bugs that causes poor formatting of certain files.
In the tradeoff between bug-fixes and cost/time, you choose based on how mission-critical an app is. You'd be crazy to use Red Hat 7 to run an airplane. But if you're running someone's desktop machine, it's just fine.
It's just not possible to iron out all bugs without astronomical cost. To make that the standard would cripple the industry and make us wait twice as long for already-delayed software. In most cases I'm willing to accept buggy software with new features. If you aren't, stick with an older version. But don't demand that the rest of us be prevented from seeing a release until all bugs are released to your satisfaction.
If that happened, you'd realize how they bought off all the politicians
As opposed to Netscape and Sun, who lobbied like hell to get the DOJ to go after them? I don't like lobbyists, but Microsoft would be foolish to ignore the government now that it has shown that it's not willing to stand by and let the free market take its course. If Microsoft's competitors are willing to use the law to beat them, why shouldn't they fight fire with fire?
Microsoft was largely apolitical prior to the antitrust case. They believed that they could focus on their products and not worry about political lobbying. The antitrust case proved them wrong, and has prompted them to spend extra to make up lost ground. So they buy up representatives.
One of the biggest costs of the antitrust case may be the politicization of our industry. The Federal government is a 600-poung gorilla. Once it gets involved in high tech, it's not going to leave. And it's a far greater threat to innovation that Microsoft could possibly be.
So even if Microsoft did do some sleazy things, it's far more important that the computer business remain unpoliticized than that we get a futile breakup. The more companies use the law to win after losing in the marketplace, the more we will come to resemble every other industry, in which those with the most money have the most influence, and innovation and small businesses are squashed.
So if I post an opinion different from that of the majority of slashdotters, I'm a troll? How does that attitude promote open debate? If everyone is expected to conform to the anti-Microsoft orthodoxy, what's the point of even having a discussion system? Why not just incorporate the official slashdot line into the text of the story and forget about any messy discussions or disagreements?
The link you gave seems to be just a picture of the front cover. I'm not about to go out and buy the magazine just to refute your post. Besides, I doubt it talks in detail about the economics or history of antitrust law, which is what I'm most interested in.
Hint: it does not apply when two products have always been sold together.
I.E. has pretty much always been bundled with Windows. And Apple *has* sold hardware without Mac OS (A/UX, for example) and Mac OS without hardware (cloners) I don't see a difference.
Besides, why should that distinction be legally relevant? Are you saying that Microsoft would have been just fine if they had chosen to integrate IE into Windows from the start rather than allowing it to be downloaded separately?
In any event, the purpose of a forum like this is to discuss ideas. I'm sure others have hashed out most of the arguments on both sides elsewhere, but if slashdot participants don't have the opportunity to peruse those materials online it doesn't contribute much to the discussion. If the Wired article does such a good job of refuting the points I made, then surely you can briefly sumarrize those refutations for me.
Microsoft is excercizing its rights under the law. They have every right to mount a vigorous defense of the actions.
Personally, I don't blame them. Antitrust law is so vague and fluid that there's pretty much no way they could obey it and still be competitive. Antitrust law is continually twisted to fit the circumstances of whoever the current victims are. The defendent is then asked to come in and prove that they didn't do things that weren't considered crimes when they did them.
Antitrust law applies a new set of rules to companies once they cross a magic threshhold into the realm of "monopoly." There is no clear definition of what constitutes a monopoly, and in practice the determination is entirely determined by what the judge determines is the "relevant market," for which there are no clear or consistent guidelines.
Microsoft hasn't done anything that other companies haven't done many times before. Apple, for example, clearly has a monopoly on operating systems for PowerPC computers. Not only that, but they have a monopoly on Mac OS hardware as well. In other words, they are "tying" their hardware to their software. How is that any diferent from what Microsoft is doing?
The only difference I can see is that Microsoft has a larger market share. This seems to me a ridiculous basis on which to make law. Equality before the law is fundamental to our system of justice, and I see no reason why a large company should be held to a different set of rules than small companies are.
Antitrust law should be repealed. They are arbitrary, over-reaching, and vague. They change with every company, court, and prosecutor. And ultimately they serve only to protect incompetent companies from more capable competition. This can be seen in all the major antitrust cases-- Brown shoe, Standard Oil, Alcoa, etc. Market forces will inevitably erode monopolies that are inefficient. No government intervention is needed, and in practice it only makes things worse.
Slashdot Mirror
You probably don't believe the MS FUD and PR bullshit, so why are you believing the Nike one????
Because it's true. You describe lots of problems third world workers face, but what you don't mention is that Nike didn't cause those problems. Those countries were poor long before Nike arrived on the scene, and would even poorer if Nike were to close it's "sweatshops" and produce shoes elsewhere.
it's fine to sympathize with how bad conditions are in the third world. But don't blame Nike for those conditions. They are providing jobs that --while we may not think they're good-- are better than most other jobs in the country. It hardly makes sense to demonize Nike for providing jobs for poor people just because they didn't improve conditions enough. Those people would be worse off without Nike, not better.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the quote is "That's the sort of English up with which we will not put," the point being to make fun of the rule that sentences shouldn't end with prepositions.
Why shouldn't companies be allowed to test their employees for conditions that would lead to higher health care cost and exclude those it feels are too expensive to cover? What is served by foisting these costs on to employers?
Um, Dennis Green (coach of the Vikings) is black.
I still think there's a basic contradiction here, though. If you're right that:
Unemployment might rise in areas high in worker-unfriendly industry, though, as those companies cut back on jobs due to increased cost per employee. But if the widget industry is worker-unfriendly, they'll find that they have to improve working conditions if they want to keep widget production at the same level.
and look at the OSHA regs, it's pretty tame.
Then why is OSHA needed at all? Won't a bit of employee pressure accomplish the same things that OSHA does without all the paperwork and lawyering?
Secondly, you have to take into account not just the people who get better conditions but also the people who lose their jobs outright. You said:
pay cuts only go so far before you hit minimum wage.
What happens when they hit minimum wage? Do you think they just shrug and pay extra? Not a chance. If the marginal productivity of an employers workforce falls below minimum wage, he'll stop hiring workers. You might not see it immediately, because he has to keep his factory going, but in the long run driving the marginal value of workers' labor below the minimum wage will increase unemployment.
The bottom line is that some employers are going to be evil OSHA regs or not. And the evil ones are going to be the ones who will work the hardest to get around OSHA regs for the majority of employers that aren't evil, OSHA is more of a headache than anything else. They'd probably adopt many safety measures voluntarily if asked, and filling out OSHA forms to prove that they've complied is a general waste of everyone's time.
You can't have it both ways. If OSHA regs are cheap and painless, most employers will adopt them voluntarily. If they are difficult and expensive, then it might not be in the best interests of workers to force employers to implement them.
One final point. Comparing coal mines in 1800 to anything today is a straw man. A hell of a lot of things have changed between then and now. Today you couldn't get workers to work in those conditions even if they were legal. This has nothing whatsoever to do with government regs. It's just a result of progress. When you can work for $7/hour at McDonald's why risk your life in the mines? Conditions in mines (And everywhere else) were improving long before OSHA came on the scene.
Well, have you ever worked a crappy job? Have you ever been an unskilled worker in a high-unemployment area? There are a great many people who can't just get up and move to a new job.
Not immediately. Not all at once. But ultimately companies that treat their employees well have a competitive advantage over those that don't. It might be that 90% of employees stay, but the other 10% is enough to punish them economically.
I'm not saying this will magically wipe out abuses over night. I am saying, however, that nothing the government does is going to work any better. If there are significant ecnoomic advantages to abusing workers, employers will find a way to do it OSHA or no.
Keep in mind also that there's no free lunch. Justified or not, an employer counts OSHA compliance costs as part of the cost of hiring an employee. If those go up, he's going to offer correspondingly less when he hires new people, and the rest of the industry will do the same. So ultimately workers pay for it either way.
It's nice to imagine that employers will just swallow the higher costs and go their merry way, but as you said, some employers are bastards. And if they have to spend money to improve conditions, they're going to pass those costs on to their employees.
And because every other employer is being forced to do the same, the same will be true of them, meaning you're basically just forcing employees to pay for their own better conditions. But they could do that already. You're not really benefitting them.
There are no free lunches. In the long run, all costs to businesses get passed on to either consumers or workers. Companies' top priorities are to make a profit. I don't want to repeal OSHA because I believe employers will treat their employees right out of the goodness of their hearts. I want to eliminate OSHA because it doesn't improve things for workers even if employers are all evil bastards.
Wouldn't it have been better if we could have skipped the (dangerous, unpleasant, life-threatening) things people had to do to get the government regs in place?
It would have been nice if we could have skipped the whole industrial revolution and gone straight from agriculture to e-commerce. It would be nice if everyone had a 30-hour per week desk job and made six figures. It would be nice if no one had to work at all.
But in the real world, people are poor. And poor people sometimes choose to take what seems to us desperate measures to get ahead. If you outlaw child labor in those countries, you take away a source of income for desperately poor families. In many cases that means that the children you care so much about are going to starve, or at least have to skip even more meals than they already do. Is that what you want? How does it benefit those kids to tell them they can't work if their familiies are depending on that income to survive?
It's easy for us to sit in our comfy suburban houses and poo-poo those poor people who are forcing their kids to work. But those people are not all heartless monsters. They care about their kids every bit as much as we care about ours. And it probably breaks their hearts to see their kids working long hours.
But the solution is not to force those families even farther into poverty. The solution is to figure out why there are still desperately poor countries and help parents raise their standards of living so they don't have to rely on their kids' labor. Once that happens, child labor will disappear by itself. Until that happens, banning it will only lead to children working in black-market sweatshops that are even worse than the ones they are in now.
The problem is that OSHA can't just wave a magic wand and make employers protect their workers. They have limited agents, and at a reasonable cost they can force only a small percentage of employers to comply with the law. You can sue employers after the fact, but often this will simply encourage employers to hire more lawyers rather than improve conditions.
If employers don't care about safety and employees don't care enough to switch jobs, then OSHA is mostly an annoyance. They can make employers fill out paperwork. They can force the provision of specific equipment or prohibit specific tasks, but ultimately OSHA doesn't have the time, information, or resources to force employers to be safe.
At the same time, the costs are enourmous. Because OSHA is not omniscient and doesn't have the resources to be everywhere all the time, they force a great deal of compliance costs on employers. From the perspective of most employers, OSHA is an impediment to doing their jobs. You have to fill out forms, buy new equipment to comply with regulations, go through complex procedures every time there is an injury or safety problem, etc. The employer might already be running a safe shop, but still be forced to jump through OSHA's hoops. Or he might be running an unsafe shop, and is simply cleaning up those areas that OSHA absolutely demads while ignoring far greater safety hazards that are not covered by OSHA regulations.
OSHA doesn't necessarily make workplaces safer. It simply makes people fill out paperwork claiming that they are safer. But in the process, you give free reign to lawyers, ambitious bureaucrats, and cynical employees who work the system to their own advantage. Forcing employers to buy new keyboards or slow down the pace of work has dubious value from a safety standpoint, but I can guaruntee you that it will open up a flood of lawsuits, waste lots of managers' time, and reduce productivity accross the board.
Keep this in mind too: If safety measures are cheap and painless, most employers will adopt them voluntarily. They don't cost much and they help retain employees. If they are expensive, then if you impose them by force of law, employers will just take that as a cost of hiring someone and offer them correspondingly less money. In neither case do employees benefit. It might appear that they benefit-- they get new safety features appearantly for free-- but the costs are either going to come out of their next raise, or out of future jobs not created for other workes.
So I don't believe that a world without OSHA would be substantially less safe than the world we have now, and even if it would, those who don't like it do have choices.
Lasty, I take the position that non-compliance will cost more, in the long run.
Then why do we need OSHA at all? Employers will discover this for themselves and implement these safety standards voluntarily. At most we would then need an informational campaign informing employers of this fact.
At the dawn of the industrial revolution, some factories in England were working children 16 hours a day, 6 days a week. Somehow I don't think a "please stop" ended this practice.
But neither was government regulation the primary cause. Even if child labor laws were repealed today, few if any children would be required to work significant hours. The reason is twofold. First, most families are much better off than they were back then. In many cases the alternative was work 16 hour days or starve. That's no longer true.
Secondy, children just don't make very good workers. When the jobs available were simple assembly-line piecework, children could be made useful. Today most of those jobs are performed by machines.
So perhaps child labor laws caused children to stop working sooner than they otherwise would have, but government intervention is not required to prevent employer abuse of employees. Ultimately, there's one reason and only one reason employers treat their employees well-- because they know they'll leave if they don't.
OSHA's regulations will do little more than politicize the employer-employee relationship. If an employee really cares about ergonomics he can buy ergonomically correct equipment himself or agree to take lower pay in exchange for better conditions. If an employee really doesn't care about it, he's not going to use it even if employers do pay for it. Ultimately, it should be up to the employee to decide if ergonomic measures are worth the cost.
If I want to choose to destroy my body, that's my right. It's not like I don't have a choice of jobs, and the same is true of most people who sit in front of computers for a living. Most of them are not menial laborers, and they can find better conditions if they want to. It's absurd to pretend that employees are helpless victims being forced into jobs that give them debilitating injuries. You choose your job, and if you don't like one, you're free to take another.
On the other hand, OSHA's regulations offer infinite potential for mischief. One disgruntled employee could, for example, fake a RSI and force a whole office to undergo OSHA-mandated redisigns of their workplaces. Or over-zealous bureaucrats can force workers to adopt dubious safety measures even the employees themselves want. This is the government we're talking about, and governments are crawling with lawyers. The moment you give them the power to dictate working conditions, they will use that power in unexpected and harmful ways.
The above combined with the compliance costs of these regulations make them clearly not worth adopting. I for one am hoping that President Bush cancels them on taking office.
I guess my question is: why are monopolies inevitable? If we had a government that simply enforced property rights, how would companies coerce others to use their products? Are you saying that government is intrinsically corrupt and will always serve the special interests no matter what? If not, then what policies do you think will lessen the tendency? If so, then isn't the last thing you want an even larger and more powerful government?
It's called "the great Libertarian offer," although you might not be able to order it in time for the election. The basic ideas are also at his web site, to: www.harrybrowne.org
Are publicly funded programs eliminated?
At the federal level, most of them would be. Harry Browne has a whole book on what he'd do, so it can't be summarized to easily, but the basics are:
* Sell of unneeded government assets. There are trillions of dollars in mineral reserves, land, old military bases, etc that the government has no Constitutional business owning. Browne estimates this would bring at least 5 trillion in.
* Use the proceeds to pay down the national debt and buy private retirement anuities for those currently dependent on social security. For younger workers, free them from the social security tax so they can afford to save for retirement.
* Cut most government programs. Return the money saved to taxpayers by ending the income tax. The Constitutional functions of the government would be funded by excise and sales tax.
* End corporate welfare. This fits in with the above, but it deserves some emphasis, as it's one of the biggest costs to the Federal government.
* Repeal regulatory agencies whose primary effect is to protect large firms from competition by harrassing their competitors, such as the FDA, ICC, EPA, OSHA, etc.
* End the drug war. Free federal prisoners convicted of non-violent drug crimes.
* End US imperialism abroad. The Browne administration will oversee an orderly withdrawal of our troops from foreign nations. Stop bullying other countries, bombing their cities, propping up their dictators, and giving their rebels weapons. Cut the military to the size needed for a purely defensive military force.
There's much more, obviously, but those are the high points. A Libertarian government would be about 10% of its present size, with most of its current functions handled by the states or the private sector. I think you'd see much more rapid growth, much more rapid progress for the poor and disadvantaged, much less corporate power over government, less threat of terrorism abroad, less drug-war-fueled crime, and many other benefits.
I understand the concern, but I think you have the cause and effect reversed. Corporate power isn't the opposite of government power. They are one and the same thing. Corporations get the power *through government.*
Your example of the media is an excellent one. The media are among the most heavily regulated industries in the nation. The government has effectively monopolized the cable market, and has given billions in free spectrum to broadcast journalists. Corporations are now pushing for limiting "pirate" radio stations.
The other thing to keep in mind about the media is: what's the alternative? Having the government run the media would be even worse, and corporations are always going to conspire to use the power of government to their advantage. Ultimately, the only way to prevent corporations and/or government from using the media to their own advantage is for consumers to be alert to the biases they hold. If that doesn't happen, there's no way we can prevent the monied interests from using their power to disadvantage the rest of us.
In terms of the broader issue of monopolies and market power, I think you'll find that in most cases monopolies are created by the government. This is true in the cases of public utilities, phone, cable, and to a lesser extent trucking, taxi service in many states, pharmaceutical companies, and many others. Regulatory agencies like th FDA, ICC, and EPA exist primarily to protect the interests of the big firms in the industries they regulate.
If you look at purely free markets, history does not bear out your position. A good example is Standard Oil. They had about an 85% market share in 1890. At that point they had driven the price of oil down by an order of magnitude. They certainly tried to monopolize their industry after that, but in fact their market share *declined* from 85% to about 65% by the time of the breakup in 1910 or so.
In other words, Standard Oil was certainly big and powerful, but without the help of government, they were unable to take or keep a monopoly on the industry, and in the process of trying, they drove down prices and benefited consumers immensely.
Contrast this with AT & T, which in the 1920's was in the same position. Their telephone patent had expired, and they were losing market share to smaller competitors. They lobbied for more government regulation of their industry, and effectively achieved a government-imposed monopoly. Had the government left them alone, they might still have a large market share, but there would likely not be the regional monopolies in local service we see today.
The pattern is the same in virtually any industry you pick-- those with the most government interference show the greatest concentrations of economic power. Nor should this be surprising. As leftists like to point out, our politicians are bought and paid for by special interests. Why, then, should we be surprised when government interference ends up helping rather than hurting those special interests?
Sadly, too many Libertarians (especially online) make really bad arguments. Those Libertarians who have thought about the issues in some depth and read more than Atlas Shrugged have a much more nuanced world-view than simply believing that everyone needs to look out for himself and ignore others. Libertarianism is a political theory, not a philosophical one. It holds only that Big Government is destructive of society, not that individual shouldn't help one another. The choice is not between cooperation and selfishness. The choice is between voluntary relationships and coercive ones. Voluntary relationships promote harmony, and progress. Coercive means lead to strife and special interest wrangling. Indeed, one of the strongest arguments for libertarianism is that Big Government destroys the good will and cooperative spirit that voluntary relationships promote. There are of course many other reasons-- government programs are inefficient, threatening to civil liberties, benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, and many other bad things. But please don't dismiss Libertarianism because of the stupidity of a handful or Randroids. An idea is not responsible for the intelligence of its adherents.
Every universe that can exist, does exist
Says who? How do you know?
Certainly, accepting this doesn't make one whit of difference to us isolated here in our own reality. But that's not the point really
It's precisely the point. We are creatures of limited knowledge, and so we must consider things from our own perspective. We can fantisize about meta-universes in which we can see people who can't see each other, but we will never occupy such a position, and so there's no point in taking those fantizies seriously. In the real world we must take reality as we see it.
And of those potential individuals, every life that can be lived by them, is indeed lived somewhere.
This is a bald assertion, and one that you can't possibly prove.
We can infer, from the measurements we make, other facts about the universe for which we do not possess evidence of a more direct nature.
Sure. That's what I meant by "tools to extend them." But our perceptions are still ultimately limited, and the information we recieve is still bound by our five senses. You might be able to build an immensely complicated collider to detect subatomic particles, but the output is still read in through your eyes.
The problem with the alternate universes hypothesis or anything like it is that we have no means of testing it either directly or indirectly. There is no way to test the proposition "there exist specific things that we cannot observe through any means," yet that is essentially what the alternate universe hypothesis says. Since universes by definition don't interact with one another, there's no way anyone in this universe can gain meaningful information about any other. No amount of deductive logic can ascertain facts without any empirical data. All reasoning ultimately rests on the observation of the senses to have any meaning.
the sine qua non of life in any form is a structure that can encode information in a stable and consistent manner but with the flexibility to react and adapt to its environment
I mostly agree with this. I just think people are a little too quick to assume that our form of life (or approximations thereof) are the only forms possible. It may be that the range of suitable-entropy universes is still pretty narrow, but there are certainly more options than just the precise values that we have here.
I suspect that your reaction is symptomatic of the spirit of the times we live in, where so many now glibly reject the scientists' assertion of an objective reality
I must admit I'm a bit puzzled by this, as I consider it to be quite the opposite. It is the "parallel universe" hypothesis that is not grounded in objective reality. It is a poetic, intuitive, and ultimately groundless assertion. I accept the existence of an objective reality. Indeed, I think the existence of objective reality must go hand in hand with the rejection of claims not grounded in reality.
For something to be grounded in reality, it must on some level be grounded in the evidence of the senses. Otherwise there is no rational basis for separating the true from the false. The multiverse hypothesis has no grounding in empirical evidence, and is therefore an unscientific and non-empirical hypothesis. It is the multiverse that is "cozy and New-Agey." It's plausible and sounds good, but it can never be proven or disproven.
The question for me is: do I want smaller government?
If the answer is yes, then it's stupid to support anyone who doesn't also want smaller government. Harry Browne and Howard Phillips are the only Presidential candidates who have proposed reductions in government programs. Voting for anyone else isn't just a vote for the lesser of two evils. It's a vote that will continue to take us in the wrong direction.
Harry Browne won't win this year. So you don't have to worry about him implementing his more radical proposals. But voting for him is the only way you can send the clear message that you want smaller government.
As for the extremeness of his proposals, let me point out that incrementalism doesn't work when it comes to getting smaller government. If a candidate ran on a platform of cutting various government programs by 10% and eliminating a few of them, he would attract the ire of the special interests that depend on those programs without offering any substantial tax relief to the taxpayers. Only a single, decisive stroke in the opening months of a presidential term has any chance of bringing about major reductions in government.
Not only that, but any government programs you leave reduced but still in place will quickly grow back to their former size the next time a D or R takes office. A partial cut of the SS tax can easily be re-instated in the next election. It is much harder to do so if people are used to keeping every dollar they earn.
If smaller government is what you want, you need to vote for a candidate who supports it. Even if you think Harry Browne does go to far, it's still better to go in the right direction than to continue supporting those who are making the government bigger. And given that he's not going to win, his getting a lot of votes will primarily cause his ideas to get put on the table more often, something that can only do good regardless of whether you ultimately support his positions.
If the number of universes is likely to be much greater than 1, do we have any reason to assume it is finite at all?
I generally agree with this analysis if we assume that the multiverse exists and the only question is how many universes it contains. My only problem is that that's not a very good assumption. It's intellectually satisfying that there would be other universes with different properties, but there is no direct evidence for it. The only "evidence" we have is the fact that we think it would make sense for them to exist.
Human beings are creatures of limited knowledge. We can only percieve those things that amenable to our five sense and the tools we build to enhance them. When making factual statements, therefore, we have to restrict them to things that are detectable by the five senses or tools that extend them. Otherwise there is no arbiter of what is right or wrong.
We might think that it is shockingly implausible that there be only one universe and that it happens to have properties that are conducive to life. But this reflects only our opinions. To turn this into a factual statement we would need to find some way to directly observe those other universes. Until then it is just idle speculation.
So *if* we assume that there are many universes with the values of those magic numbers randomly distributed among them, then it's a good guess that there are a whole lot of them. But until we find direct evidence that that assumption is correct, the question remains fundamentally unanswerable.
1.The 6 numbers are connected.
2.They are not connected, but there are enough universes that it's not surprising one of them is like this one.
3.The universe we live in was intentionally, intelligently designed with the properties it has.
The more basic point I made, though, was that two and three are from our perspective indistinguishable from simple random chance. Unless you can either give me a way of communicating directly with God or of viewing alternative universes, there is no way, even in theory, to distinguish your second and third cases.
So I think the correct response is to note that this is interesting, look for connections, but if none are forthcoming, we should recognize that we don't have an explanation and probably never will.
It's not clear to me what it means to say that alternate universes "exist" if there's no chance that this universe will ever interact with them. If they are completely undetectable and have no influence on the phenomena we can see, what does it mean to say that they exist? And even if they do exist in some philosophical sense, what's the point of arguing about whether they exist if we can never resolve the question?
But the claim is not just that the universe would be different in some arbitrary way, it would be different in a way that leads to a largely undifferentiated universe with no chance for anything complex to develop. Unless you can fit that into your definition of life, his point stands.
This is true to an extent. However, I doubt anyone has (or for that matter even could) predict all possible permutations of changing those variables. It might be that the aspects of the universe that we consider important would cease to be interesting, but that other aspects would become complex under some permutations. Or it might be that there are other combinations that allow for sufficient complexity for life to emerge.
Light is light. A photon is a photon. They happen to have some particle-like properties and some wave-like properties. It doesn't perfectly fit either.
Light is no more "really" a wave than it's "really" a particle. It's light-- a unique phenomenon for which "wave" and "particle" are imperfect approximations.
With that said, i think you're right. We don't need to invoke magical alternative universes to explain interference patterns. It makes for a nice story, but it has no necessary relationship with reality.
I have two problems with this line of reasoning.
First, there's the problem of selection bias. We have a sample size of precisely 1. If other universes exist, we have no way of observing them and seeing if the exhibit the same properties. So for all we know the other universes did happen and we just happen to be in the one that produced us. There's no cosmic mystery there.
The analogy of the 21 guns missing fails because we are able to observe the causal process before and after, and we have some experience that guns are supposed to hit. We have no such information about the origins of the universe. For all we know, there is some underlying interconnectedness to the 6 numbers that make it inevitable that they take the values they take.
Secondly, we have no way of knowing that our form of life is the only one possible. A universe with different constants might not produce us, but it might very well produce other things that fit a more expansive definition of life. If you're going to make expansive statements about the "multiverse," it's absurd to act like Carbon-based human life is the only possible kind.
More fundamentally, our knowledge is limited by our perceptions. We will almost certainly never know what happened "before" the Big Bang. And unless there is some radical change in physics as we understand it, we will never be able to observe other dimensions in the "multiverse." Therefore, this sort of pseudo-philosophical musings, while interesting, are never going to reach any closure. You can always posit the existence of multiverses and extra dimensions and invisible unicorns. But if you have no evidence for their existence, they are no more than musings.
Engineering is all about tradeoffs. If you're designing an airplane or the power system for a hospital, you can't afford any errors under any circumstances, so you over-engineer everything and spend most of your resources on the debugging to make absolutely sure there are no bugs.
If you're writing a word processor, you don't want to lengthen your development cycle by a month to fix a problem that only affects 1 in 100000 users. You don't want to double the price of your product so you can chase down the last few bugs that causes poor formatting of certain files.
In the tradeoff between bug-fixes and cost/time, you choose based on how mission-critical an app is. You'd be crazy to use Red Hat 7 to run an airplane. But if you're running someone's desktop machine, it's just fine.
It's just not possible to iron out all bugs without astronomical cost. To make that the standard would cripple the industry and make us wait twice as long for already-delayed software. In most cases I'm willing to accept buggy software with new features. If you aren't, stick with an older version. But don't demand that the rest of us be prevented from seeing a release until all bugs are released to your satisfaction.
If that happened, you'd realize how they bought off all the politicians
As opposed to Netscape and Sun, who lobbied like hell to get the DOJ to go after them? I don't like lobbyists, but Microsoft would be foolish to ignore the government now that it has shown that it's not willing to stand by and let the free market take its course. If Microsoft's competitors are willing to use the law to beat them, why shouldn't they fight fire with fire?
Microsoft was largely apolitical prior to the antitrust case. They believed that they could focus on their products and not worry about political lobbying. The antitrust case proved them wrong, and has prompted them to spend extra to make up lost ground. So they buy up representatives.
One of the biggest costs of the antitrust case may be the politicization of our industry. The Federal government is a 600-poung gorilla. Once it gets involved in high tech, it's not going to leave. And it's a far greater threat to innovation that Microsoft could possibly be.
So even if Microsoft did do some sleazy things, it's far more important that the computer business remain unpoliticized than that we get a futile breakup. The more companies use the law to win after losing in the marketplace, the more we will come to resemble every other industry, in which those with the most money have the most influence, and innovation and small businesses are squashed.
So if I post an opinion different from that of the majority of slashdotters, I'm a troll? How does that attitude promote open debate? If everyone is expected to conform to the anti-Microsoft orthodoxy, what's the point of even having a discussion system? Why not just incorporate the official slashdot line into the text of the story and forget about any messy discussions or disagreements?
The link you gave seems to be just a picture of the front cover. I'm not about to go out and buy the magazine just to refute your post. Besides, I doubt it talks in detail about the economics or history of antitrust law, which is what I'm most interested in.
Hint: it does not apply when two products have always been sold together.
I.E. has pretty much always been bundled with Windows. And Apple *has* sold hardware without Mac OS (A/UX, for example) and Mac OS without hardware (cloners) I don't see a difference.
Besides, why should that distinction be legally relevant? Are you saying that Microsoft would have been just fine if they had chosen to integrate IE into Windows from the start rather than allowing it to be downloaded separately?
In any event, the purpose of a forum like this is to discuss ideas. I'm sure others have hashed out most of the arguments on both sides elsewhere, but if slashdot participants don't have the opportunity to peruse those materials online it doesn't contribute much to the discussion. If the Wired article does such a good job of refuting the points I made, then surely you can briefly sumarrize those refutations for me.
Microsoft is excercizing its rights under the law. They have every right to mount a vigorous defense of the actions.
Personally, I don't blame them. Antitrust law is so vague and fluid that there's pretty much no way they could obey it and still be competitive. Antitrust law is continually twisted to fit the circumstances of whoever the current victims are. The defendent is then asked to come in and prove that they didn't do things that weren't considered crimes when they did them.
Antitrust law applies a new set of rules to companies once they cross a magic threshhold into the realm of "monopoly." There is no clear definition of what constitutes a monopoly, and in practice the determination is entirely determined by what the judge determines is the "relevant market," for which there are no clear or consistent guidelines.
Microsoft hasn't done anything that other companies haven't done many times before. Apple, for example, clearly has a monopoly on operating systems for PowerPC computers. Not only that, but they have a monopoly on Mac OS hardware as well. In other words, they are "tying" their hardware to their software. How is that any diferent from what Microsoft is doing?
The only difference I can see is that Microsoft has a larger market share. This seems to me a ridiculous basis on which to make law. Equality before the law is fundamental to our system of justice, and I see no reason why a large company should be held to a different set of rules than small companies are.
Antitrust law should be repealed. They are arbitrary, over-reaching, and vague. They change with every company, court, and prosecutor. And ultimately they serve only to protect incompetent companies from more capable competition. This can be seen in all the major antitrust cases-- Brown shoe, Standard Oil, Alcoa, etc. Market forces will inevitably erode monopolies that are inefficient. No government intervention is needed, and in practice it only makes things worse.