Yeah, once more, Israel never misses a chance to miss an opportunity.
Israel's bigger problem is, if they don't find a way to integrate with their regional neighbors, they're not long-term stable.
Israel currently has 1) unquestioned military superiority in the region 2) Nuclear monopoly in the region 3) (basically) unqualified support of the Americans.
Now, those three things are that way now, but will they be that way forever? I'm sure the Crusader kingdoms of the 12 century or so looked pretty stable, too. But eventually the crusaders had to go home.
Israel I'm sure would like to keep their nuclear monopoly, and yes they've said "if the rest of the world won't deal with Iran, then we will", but I'm not sure that they can _do_ anything about Iran's nuclear program. (Or alleged nuclear program, whatever)
It's not like when they hit the Iraqi nuclear site in the 80s, took it out with an air strike. All the Iranian nuke sites are either hardened, or underneath cities, or both.
Also, you attack Iran, they can close the Straight of Hormuz, and not even the full might of the Americans could prevent that. Anybody got a contingency plan for dealing with that?
Actually, that's true, but there's another side to it.
He was trying to buy stuff from Pakistan's AQ Kahn's network. When the Libyans figured out that Kahn had sold them "last year's model", i.e. stuff that would give him low-grade enrichment, or just didn't work very well.
So you're absolutely right, on Quadaffi saying "this nutter's _serious_!" was part of the motivation, but they basically traded intel on the nuclear smuggling ring for goodwill from the Americans.
Smart, really. Nuclear weapons, like chemical and biological ones, aren't really that useful, and they're expensive. The reason they've only ever been used _once_ in war isn't because the world's leaders are just such moral people who would Never Do That, but because dollar for dollar, nuclear and biological and chemical weapons just aren't that effective.
Their motives for wanting nukes, or at least the ability to produce nukes, if they really really had to, are pretty straightforward:
1) Prestige, and "my stuff is better than yours", the equivalent of "keeping up with the jones" only between nations; 2) To make sure nobody else will nuke them, AKA "credible deterrence"; 3) To make sure they won't be invaded by a bigger power (USA, we're looking in _your_ direction).
Look, countries like Iran (and eventually Syria, and Venezuela, and Brazil, and a few others) no longer count on the attempts at international law of the past 60 years to guarantee their territorial sovereignty, so they're looking at the example of North Korea vs Iraq, and figuring out very quickly that the only way to be invasion-proof is to get nukes.
Never mind that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is starting to look, from the point of view of non-nuclear countries, like a system where there's one set of rules for the big guys and another set of rules for everybody else.
You can hardly expect countries like Iran to enthusiastically support that, eh?
Oooooh, the big bad scary Iran is coming for Israel!
Look, even if we take the statements of some of the more wacko members of the Iranian government at face value (which we shouldn't), um, if Jamaica declared that the USA was an illegitimate state and their intention to destroy it as a matter of public policy, would anyone care?
OK, Iran vs Israel isn't quite that big a difference in military power, but seriously guys, c'mon. Israel is what, the 4th or 5th most powerful nation in the world, militarily speaking? (Off the top of my head, they're less powerful than the USA, Russia, China, and...? They probably have as many or more nukes than Britain or France, right?)
Israel vs "the entire combined military forces of every arab country in the region" would still be no contest.
_One_ of Israel's regional neighbors, with whom they've never actually gone to war, maybe-sorta-kinda-possibly getting a handful of nukes, doesn't change that.
Israel's nukes are basically defensive anyway. It means that nobody, not even say, NATO, could invade them. It means that even if they lost conclusively in a conventional war, they have the nukes as a 'last resort' to end that kind of war. But I don't see the Israelis being defeated in a conventional war, by arab countries, um, this side of the heat death of the universe.
I'm not sure how much the Israelis "believe their own PR".
I think they can do the same calculus that you and I are doing here, and conclude that while their nuclear monopoly in the region is nice,
Nukes aren't really very useful offensively. They don't tend to destroy military units. Only really good for cities.
I suspect (or, more accurately, "would like to believe") that the Israeli hard-liners are much like the hard-liners in Iran - that is, they pay a lot of lip service to the threat that the other poses, because it serves their political interests. What they actually believe about the other may be different.
Or, like I said, I hope it is...
I suspect that the military, of both Iran and Israel, have actual grown-ups somewhere in the organization. Of course, 10 years ago I would've said the same about the USA...
Meh, I'm not convinced that if I could wave a magic wand and overnight give Iran a dozen or so nukes, that they'd be any more of a threat to Israel than they are now.
Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons, some of which, IIRC, are on submarines. That's a "credible deterrent".
Contrary to what some here have suggested, the Iranian government is not composed of lunatics. They may have religious beliefs I consider to be nonsense, and policies I find despicable, but they aren't insane. They know they cannot attack Israel. All the stuff they talk about is just to keep the rabble in line.
Sure, Israel could attack, but Iran can close the straight. And there isn't a damn thing the Israelis, or anyone else for that matter, can do about it.
Israel doesn't like the idea of $300/barrel oil any more than anyone else does.
And, like the rulers of Iran, I may not like the Israeli government policies, but they aren't insane, either. They'd like to maintain their nuclear monopoly in the region, but Iran being nuclear armed doesn't change things very much. Israel will still have overwhelming military superiority in the region, and still have the (basically) unqualified support of the USA.
Let me add to your comments by saying that the elephant in the room is that the non-proliferation treaty is basically a joke.
The idea was, get all the non-nuclear powers (or most anyway) agree not to develop nuclear weapons. In exchange, the "big 5" will help them with the very much non-trivial engineering challenges of getting nuclear power up and running. And the nuclear powers agree to give up their nukes.
It simply isn't possible to have a "grown-up conversation" about nukes while the 'big 5' are implicitly advocating one set of rules for them and one set of rules for the rest of the world.
It's better for all to have a non-nuclear-armed world. But if nukes are in play, then the rational strategy for any given state is to maintain "minimum deterrence" - just barely enough nukes to make it undesirable for somebody else to nuke us, and not a single dollar more.
Charles de Gaulle had a line about "no country without nuclear weapons could ever be considered to be fully independent."
The traditional strategy of the great powers of the day was to either bribe or coerce countries to sticking to their NPT obligations.
But you can't do either with Iran. They have oil, so they have enough money. They can close the straight of Hormuz, so you can't treat them like Iraq.
So, there's only one way to get Iran to not work on nukes - you have to actually convince them using, wait for it, rational arguments.
I realize this is a new one for great powers. Using force is attractive because it works. But it's not viable here.
So if the argument they wanna use on Iran is "we get to have nukes and you don't, because, um, because we're special or something" that's not gonna fly.
The only way to convince non-nuclear powers to stay that way is for nuclear powers to become non-nuclear powers.
I can't believe that anybody actually believes in free market principles in 2009.
If free market principles were actually working the way that their evangelists have been claiming for the last 40 or 50 years, then last year's financial crisis should never have happened, because obviously financial services firms would value their reputation enough that they wouldn't engage in bad behavior.
If you lose rudder control, you can use alierons instead, the secondary effect of banking an aircraft is that it will yaw, and vice versa. If you lose elevator control, you can use your elevator trim control to get a similar effect.
So, you'd have to have a total failure of 2 systems at the same time (i.e. rudder _and_ ailerons), which while not impossible, is very unlikely.
I actually had an instructor mention that scenario to me, just as we were strapping into a glider for a flight test, just to fuck with me. He says to me, "Y'know, I had a dream last night, that right after takeoff we lost rudder and aileron...Anyway, you ready for your flight test?"
Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but economics 101 is that something has "value" if it has utility and scarcity. Nobody pays money for air, (ok, oxygen bars, but not really...) because there's generally no scarcity.
So in a world of digital flawless reproductions, what are we to do about the fact that there isn't that level of scarcity previously assumed? I don't think that attempting to enshrine artificial legal restrictions in law and international treaty to pretend we still have scarcity of "goods that can be digitally reproduced" is the solution.
I mean, we're at least on paper, still supposed to be a quasi-democracy. Copyright law isn't a "human right", it's more like a matter of government policy, more like a government's policy on trade or taxation or international relations than it is like fundamental freedoms like speech or association. At least in theory, government policy should reflect the views of the citizenry. So at least theoretically, if a majority of the people think a given policy should be X instead of Y, then government should change that policy or regulation.
"Repeating the "abundant and can be reproduced at zero cost" argument doesn't make it true, even if you heard it from the wise old professor in Econ 101. "
1)Uh, my understanding of Econ 101 was that in an idealized market, the price of a good should approach the _marginal_ cost of production, i.e. the cost to make "just one more" once you're already geared up to produce stuff.
The marginal cost of production of anything that can be digitally copied approaches zero, depending on how you do your accounting I guess.
Look, you know that ad that says "You wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal a handbag" etc? Well, if we actually take that by a more accurate analogy, imagine you had a star trek style replicator. You see me driving my shiny new Jag. You "scan" my Jag with your replicator, and make one for yourself. I don't think that anybody would seriously argue that you've just stolen my car.
"This negates the viability of business models that depend on the sales of digital goods."
Yep, absolutely. If your business model is no longer viable, that's your problem, not mine. I think it's actually pretty outrageous that copyright holders think that they ought to be able to restrict the freedoms of individual citizens in order to protect their business model.
Also, there _are_ examples where someone is able to sell a good or service that is available for free or nearly for free. Think bottled water.
"Producers of such must, by your reasoning, not only accept that anyone can make free copies of their goods, but that it is morally acceptable to do so. You don't explain why this is, you merely assert it."
This feels a lot like shifting the burden of proof to me.
Copyright, as many have pointed out, is not a "natural right" in the same class as freedom of speech or freedom of religion or freedom of assembly.
If copyright holders want to assert that they have the right to restrict what I can do with my computer, then I believe the burden of proof is on copyright holders to explain why they should be able to restrict my freedoms in such a manner.
And I'm looking for a better explanation than "this is how we make a profit".
Look, here's my problem with copyright. When it was first introduced, it was more like an industrial regulation. It was (not in the letter of the law, but in actual application) a restriction on what publishers could do, to prevent publishers from printing your book, selling it, and paying you nothing. It was the "cost of doing business" that you had to accept if you wanted to "get into the book publishing business".
However, what's changed now from the era in which copyright laws were written, is that now the means of reproduction is in the hands of individual citizens, not just those who own a printing press. A law that used to only actually restrict the actions of people who voluntarily enter a particular business now restricts the actions of everyday citizens.
OK, as long as we're being practical, I'll point out that the movie business does not have a piracy problem, at least not in the sense that the music industry does.
Ticket sales are strong. I read recently (please someone feel free to correct me if this is incorrect) that the only times movie ticket sales have been better is at times when the economy overall was doing better.
The reason why Hollywood is financially viable in a way that the music industry is not is that there's no way to pirate "seeing it on the big screen".
OK, maybe we can't say that studios are seeing a "loss" in the area of DVD sales due to piracy, but I'm not inclined to care. The movie industry was profitable before the era of home video, if DVD sales were to drop to zero, then maybe they'll stop producing DVDs entirely (unlikely), but the movie industry is still just fine.
After all, if studios don't go broke after movies like "Waterworld", then I think we can say they're safe as a church, financially speaking.
Excellent point to bring up Cuba's "special period" I think it was called. The statistic I heard was that for a few years, on average, every Cuban citizen missed a meal every day or every other day.
Also one might point out that Cuba has effectively a year-round growing season (potentially, anyway), and a climate where nobody will freeze to death if the electricity and heating is off.
Compare that to North America, and you could foresee an even harsher time.
As a side note, when people criticize Cuba for violations of fundamental freedoms or human rights, I think, hypothetically speaking, if the British Crown had attempted several hundred assassination attempts on the signers of the Declaration of Independence in the first decade or 2, I wonder if the quite excellent founding philosophy of freedom and individual rights would've survived?
I went to see William Gibson do a reading when "spook country" came out. He mentioned how, when he wrote Neuromancer, lots of people criticized it as being a pessimistic view of our future. He said that (this was when nuclear war was much more in the public eye) he thought that, by virtue of the fact that civilization still _exists_ in the future, it was a fundamentally optimistic book.
I can't remember who the quote is from, but the line that sticks out in my head is that "socialism never really gained a foothold in America because working Americans don't see themselves as an oppressed proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires who are just waiting for their turn to win the lottery."
It seems that the USA started with a radical political transformation, then got really really good at crushing rebellion. One could argue that up until the really nasty regimes like under Stalin or Pol Pot or whomever, nobody was better at crushing revolts.
Not to nit-pick, but there's very little evidence that anybody ever thought the world was flat.
There's a reference in one of the works of Thomas Aquinas where he says something like "...we know this as surely as we know the world is round" or something.
That said, I think you're right. 100 years ago, sewage was considered "treated" if it was dumped in a river. 100 years ago, you could hire pinkertons to break up a strike. By many measures things are better off now than they were 100 or 200 or however many years ago you like.
However, some things are arguably worse now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. When my father was my age, he had less education than I have now and he was economically better off than I am today. Yes, I have a cell phone and 2 computers and all that stuff, but the cost of manufacturing per unit of manufactured products has consistently fallen, so that's to be expected.
You know another way we're not better off? Income distribution. Right now, we've got the widest division between rich and poor since the "gilded age" of the late 19th century.
Um, is it any surprise that we have less optimism?
I'm 33 years old. When my dad was my age, he was a mere civil servant, with less education than I have now, and he was able to own a house, 2 cars, and support a family of 4 on his salary alone.
For me, home ownership (granted I live in an expensive city) means either moving out to god-awful suburbs and turning my 20-minute commute into a 90 minute (each way) commute, or requires a lottery win.
When my dad was my age, your median value house had a purchase price of 5X the median income, not 10-15X median income.
We're seeing something unique in recent history - for at least the last 100 years, (maybe more, depending on where you are) most people expected to do better, economically speaking, than their parents did.
I am _already_ not doing as well economically as my parents did when they were my age.
We all thought that automation and industrialism would lead to more leisure time and less work. Well, yeah, that's happened - it's lead to unemployment. Presumably, the unemployed have more leisure time.
"Indeed. The environment is at its most trashed in places where socialist governments run the show. See the train wreck that happened in eastern Europe under the helpful central control of the Soviets, or the rapidly worsening disaster that is China."
You're exactly right. I mean, from the open tar-pits in Sweden, the nuclear waste being dumped into rivers in France, the open cesspools of raw sewage that you see in Norway, to the dioxins in the tap water in the Netherlands, everywhere in the world, socialism leads to trashing the environment.
Oh, wait.
I think you're missing the point when you look at disasters like the Aral sea or similar examples in China. What the former soviets and China have in common is not "socialism", but "totalitarianism".
Anywhere that you don't have a functioning _democracy_, you have rampant environmental degradation. For a really neat case study, contrast Haiti and the Dominican Republic - They're on the same friggin' island, one has had a history of tinpot dictators, one has had a (relatively, for the region anyway...) democratic system. Guess which one's environment is in better shape?
Which is prescribed to a lot of people for ADHD, both adults and children. IIRC, Dick said that "every single thing I wrote before 1973" he wrote while wired to the gills on dexedrine.
Now, I don't know how different the effects of aderhal and some of the newer varieties of stimulants are, but it doesn't seem that creativity is a problem.
So anybody who has an opiate prescription for back pain or post-surgical pain isn't allowed to drive?
What about somebody taking Adderal for ADHD? What about someone who's been prescribed valium or something for anxiety? What about SSRIs? Hey, pretty much every morning, I used to drive to work not only under the influence of, but consuming, nicotine. (If anything, driving under the influence of nicotine withdrawal is what should be illegal...)
I guess my point is: 1) not all drug effects, especially on things like cognitive ability or hand to eye coordination or reaction time, are the same; 2) in North America, we are not used to talking about drugs in a sensible fashion. We've had decades of "drugs are bad, m'kay" being pretty much the most sophisticated discourse on the subject.
There's a parallel problem here, that is the increasing dependence on the breathalyzer in law enforcement.
There _was_ a time before every bloody law-enforcement officer in the developed world had a portable breathalyzer machine in their squad car. Cops somehow managed to tell if a driver was "impaired".
Now, it seems, that it's easier to remove the cop's subjective judgment from the equation, by enshrining.08 BAC in the law. But it's at the expense of atrophying the cop's ability to tell "impaired" from not.
Given that there's not likely to be any "marijuana breathalyzer" anytime soon, this sort of question is gonna have to be addressed sooner or later.
Actually, the idea of a marijuana breathalyzer scares me much more than the inaccuracies in a breathalyzer does - it seems to me that tolerance varies much more in pot users than in say, booze. The amount of weed that my ex-housemate smokes before he leaves for work in the morning will leave me in a state where I can't even stand, let alone operate a vehicle.
Booze is probably a better analogy. (where pot isn't _physically_ addictive, is the general conventional wisdom)
I used to make my own beer, then my own wine, when I was a poor student. I even may have made a still at some point for vodka (when I lived somewhere that was legal, of course!).
Eventually, I discovered that wineries with commercial capacity and decades of experience could do a better job than I could of making wine, and I have more money now, (I guess you could say my time is worth more?) so I just run to the booze store.
I think a booze model for pot would turn out about the same way. I mean, hell, even amongst people I know who have lawn or garden space, how many grow their own vegetables or herbs or something instead of going to the grocery store?
Also, having quit pot and attempted several times to quit cigarettes, I know which one is addictive. In fact, I'm gonna go have a smoke right now.
That and, if the annexed province of Mexico were to achieve statehood, you can pretty much guarantee that they'd send 2 democrats to the senate. (same with Canada)
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Yeah, once more, Israel never misses a chance to miss an opportunity.
Israel's bigger problem is, if they don't find a way to integrate with their regional neighbors, they're not long-term stable.
Israel currently has
1) unquestioned military superiority in the region
2) Nuclear monopoly in the region
3) (basically) unqualified support of the Americans.
Now, those three things are that way now, but will they be that way forever? I'm sure the Crusader kingdoms of the 12 century or so looked pretty stable, too. But eventually the crusaders had to go home.
Israel I'm sure would like to keep their nuclear monopoly, and yes they've said "if the rest of the world won't deal with Iran, then we will", but I'm not sure that they can _do_ anything about Iran's nuclear program. (Or alleged nuclear program, whatever)
It's not like when they hit the Iraqi nuclear site in the 80s, took it out with an air strike. All the Iranian nuke sites are either hardened, or underneath cities, or both.
Also, you attack Iran, they can close the Straight of Hormuz, and not even the full might of the Americans could prevent that. Anybody got a contingency plan for dealing with that?
Actually, that's true, but there's another side to it.
He was trying to buy stuff from Pakistan's AQ Kahn's network. When the Libyans figured out that Kahn had sold them "last year's model", i.e. stuff that would give him low-grade enrichment, or just didn't work very well.
So you're absolutely right, on Quadaffi saying "this nutter's _serious_!" was part of the motivation, but they basically traded intel on the nuclear smuggling ring for goodwill from the Americans.
Smart, really. Nuclear weapons, like chemical and biological ones, aren't really that useful, and they're expensive. The reason they've only ever been used _once_ in war isn't because the world's leaders are just such moral people who would Never Do That, but because dollar for dollar, nuclear and biological and chemical weapons just aren't that effective.
Their motives for wanting nukes, or at least the ability to produce nukes, if they really really had to, are pretty straightforward:
1) Prestige, and "my stuff is better than yours", the equivalent of "keeping up with the jones" only between nations;
2) To make sure nobody else will nuke them, AKA "credible deterrence";
3) To make sure they won't be invaded by a bigger power (USA, we're looking in _your_ direction).
Look, countries like Iran (and eventually Syria, and Venezuela, and Brazil, and a few others) no longer count on the attempts at international law of the past 60 years to guarantee their territorial sovereignty, so they're looking at the example of North Korea vs Iraq, and figuring out very quickly that the only way to be invasion-proof is to get nukes.
Never mind that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is starting to look, from the point of view of non-nuclear countries, like a system where there's one set of rules for the big guys and another set of rules for everybody else.
You can hardly expect countries like Iran to enthusiastically support that, eh?
Oooooh, the big bad scary Iran is coming for Israel!
Look, even if we take the statements of some of the more wacko members of the Iranian government at face value (which we shouldn't), um, if Jamaica declared that the USA was an illegitimate state and their intention to destroy it as a matter of public policy, would anyone care?
OK, Iran vs Israel isn't quite that big a difference in military power, but seriously guys, c'mon. Israel is what, the 4th or 5th most powerful nation in the world, militarily speaking? (Off the top of my head, they're less powerful than the USA, Russia, China, and...? They probably have as many or more nukes than Britain or France, right?)
Israel vs "the entire combined military forces of every arab country in the region" would still be no contest.
_One_ of Israel's regional neighbors, with whom they've never actually gone to war, maybe-sorta-kinda-possibly getting a handful of nukes, doesn't change that.
Israel's nukes are basically defensive anyway. It means that nobody, not even say, NATO, could invade them. It means that even if they lost conclusively in a conventional war, they have the nukes as a 'last resort' to end that kind of war. But I don't see the Israelis being defeated in a conventional war, by arab countries, um, this side of the heat death of the universe.
I'm not sure how much the Israelis "believe their own PR".
I think they can do the same calculus that you and I are doing here, and conclude that while their nuclear monopoly in the region is nice,
Nukes aren't really very useful offensively. They don't tend to destroy military units. Only really good for cities.
I suspect (or, more accurately, "would like to believe") that the Israeli hard-liners are much like the hard-liners in Iran - that is, they pay a lot of lip service to the threat that the other poses, because it serves their political interests. What they actually believe about the other may be different.
Or, like I said, I hope it is...
I suspect that the military, of both Iran and Israel, have actual grown-ups somewhere in the organization. Of course, 10 years ago I would've said the same about the USA...
Meh, I'm not convinced that if I could wave a magic wand and overnight give Iran a dozen or so nukes, that they'd be any more of a threat to Israel than they are now.
Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons, some of which, IIRC, are on submarines. That's a "credible deterrent".
Contrary to what some here have suggested, the Iranian government is not composed of lunatics. They may have religious beliefs I consider to be nonsense, and policies I find despicable, but they aren't insane. They know they cannot attack Israel. All the stuff they talk about is just to keep the rabble in line.
Sure, Israel could attack, but Iran can close the straight. And there isn't a damn thing the Israelis, or anyone else for that matter, can do about it.
Israel doesn't like the idea of $300/barrel oil any more than anyone else does.
And, like the rulers of Iran, I may not like the Israeli government policies, but they aren't insane, either. They'd like to maintain their nuclear monopoly in the region, but Iran being nuclear armed doesn't change things very much. Israel will still have overwhelming military superiority in the region, and still have the (basically) unqualified support of the USA.
Let me add to your comments by saying that the elephant in the room is that the non-proliferation treaty is basically a joke.
The idea was, get all the non-nuclear powers (or most anyway) agree not to develop nuclear weapons. In exchange, the "big 5" will help them with the very much non-trivial engineering challenges of getting nuclear power up and running. And the nuclear powers agree to give up their nukes.
It simply isn't possible to have a "grown-up conversation" about nukes while the 'big 5' are implicitly advocating one set of rules for them and one set of rules for the rest of the world.
It's better for all to have a non-nuclear-armed world. But if nukes are in play, then the rational strategy for any given state is to maintain "minimum deterrence" - just barely enough nukes to make it undesirable for somebody else to nuke us, and not a single dollar more.
Charles de Gaulle had a line about "no country without nuclear weapons could ever be considered to be fully independent."
The traditional strategy of the great powers of the day was to either bribe or coerce countries to sticking to their NPT obligations.
But you can't do either with Iran. They have oil, so they have enough money. They can close the straight of Hormuz, so you can't treat them like Iraq.
So, there's only one way to get Iran to not work on nukes - you have to actually convince them using, wait for it, rational arguments.
I realize this is a new one for great powers. Using force is attractive because it works. But it's not viable here.
So if the argument they wanna use on Iran is "we get to have nukes and you don't, because, um, because we're special or something" that's not gonna fly.
The only way to convince non-nuclear powers to stay that way is for nuclear powers to become non-nuclear powers.
I can't believe that anybody actually believes in free market principles in 2009.
If free market principles were actually working the way that their evangelists have been claiming for the last 40 or 50 years, then last year's financial crisis should never have happened, because obviously financial services firms would value their reputation enough that they wouldn't engage in bad behavior.
How's that working out so far?
Not necessarily.
If you lose rudder control, you can use alierons instead, the secondary effect of banking an aircraft is that it will yaw, and vice versa. If you lose elevator control, you can use your elevator trim control to get a similar effect.
So, you'd have to have a total failure of 2 systems at the same time (i.e. rudder _and_ ailerons), which while not impossible, is very unlikely.
I actually had an instructor mention that scenario to me, just as we were strapping into a glider for a flight test, just to fuck with me. He says to me, "Y'know, I had a dream last night, that right after takeoff we lost rudder and aileron...Anyway, you ready for your flight test?"
Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but economics 101 is that something has "value" if it has utility and scarcity. Nobody pays money for air, (ok, oxygen bars, but not really...) because there's generally no scarcity.
So in a world of digital flawless reproductions, what are we to do about the fact that there isn't that level of scarcity previously assumed? I don't think that attempting to enshrine artificial legal restrictions in law and international treaty to pretend we still have scarcity of "goods that can be digitally reproduced" is the solution.
I mean, we're at least on paper, still supposed to be a quasi-democracy. Copyright law isn't a "human right", it's more like a matter of government policy, more like a government's policy on trade or taxation or international relations than it is like fundamental freedoms like speech or association. At least in theory, government policy should reflect the views of the citizenry. So at least theoretically, if a majority of the people think a given policy should be X instead of Y, then government should change that policy or regulation.
"Repeating the "abundant and can be reproduced at zero cost" argument doesn't make it true, even if you heard it from the wise old professor in Econ 101. "
1)Uh, my understanding of Econ 101 was that in an idealized market, the price of a good should approach the _marginal_ cost of production, i.e. the cost to make "just one more" once you're already geared up to produce stuff.
The marginal cost of production of anything that can be digitally copied approaches zero, depending on how you do your accounting I guess.
Look, you know that ad that says "You wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal a handbag" etc? Well, if we actually take that by a more accurate analogy, imagine you had a star trek style replicator. You see me driving my shiny new Jag. You "scan" my Jag with your replicator, and make one for yourself. I don't think that anybody would seriously argue that you've just stolen my car.
"This negates the viability of business models that depend on the sales of digital goods."
Yep, absolutely. If your business model is no longer viable, that's your problem, not mine. I think it's actually pretty outrageous that copyright holders think that they ought to be able to restrict the freedoms of individual citizens in order to protect their business model.
Also, there _are_ examples where someone is able to sell a good or service that is available for free or nearly for free. Think bottled water.
"Producers of such must, by your reasoning, not only accept that anyone can make free copies of their goods, but that it is morally acceptable to do so. You don't explain why this is, you merely assert it."
This feels a lot like shifting the burden of proof to me.
Copyright, as many have pointed out, is not a "natural right" in the same class as freedom of speech or freedom of religion or freedom of assembly.
If copyright holders want to assert that they have the right to restrict what I can do with my computer, then I believe the burden of proof is on copyright holders to explain why they should be able to restrict my freedoms in such a manner.
And I'm looking for a better explanation than "this is how we make a profit".
Look, here's my problem with copyright. When it was first introduced, it was more like an industrial regulation. It was (not in the letter of the law, but in actual application) a restriction on what publishers could do, to prevent publishers from printing your book, selling it, and paying you nothing. It was the "cost of doing business" that you had to accept if you wanted to "get into the book publishing business".
However, what's changed now from the era in which copyright laws were written, is that now the means of reproduction is in the hands of individual citizens, not just those who own a printing press. A law that used to only actually restrict the actions of people who voluntarily enter a particular business now restricts the actions of everyday citizens.
OK, as long as we're being practical, I'll point out that the movie business does not have a piracy problem, at least not in the sense that the music industry does.
Ticket sales are strong. I read recently (please someone feel free to correct me if this is incorrect) that the only times movie ticket sales have been better is at times when the economy overall was doing better.
The reason why Hollywood is financially viable in a way that the music industry is not is that there's no way to pirate "seeing it on the big screen".
OK, maybe we can't say that studios are seeing a "loss" in the area of DVD sales due to piracy, but I'm not inclined to care. The movie industry was profitable before the era of home video, if DVD sales were to drop to zero, then maybe they'll stop producing DVDs entirely (unlikely), but the movie industry is still just fine.
After all, if studios don't go broke after movies like "Waterworld", then I think we can say they're safe as a church, financially speaking.
"I still fail to see how it is keeping anyone from creating anything. This part of the logic just doesn't add up! "
Go try and make a movie starring Snow White, or a 1/2 dozen other works that were in the public domain until Disney came along and enclosed them.
Excellent point to bring up Cuba's "special period" I think it was called. The statistic I heard was that for a few years, on average, every Cuban citizen missed a meal every day or every other day.
Also one might point out that Cuba has effectively a year-round growing season (potentially, anyway), and a climate where nobody will freeze to death if the electricity and heating is off.
Compare that to North America, and you could foresee an even harsher time.
As a side note, when people criticize Cuba for violations of fundamental freedoms or human rights, I think, hypothetically speaking, if the British Crown had attempted several hundred assassination attempts on the signers of the Declaration of Independence in the first decade or 2, I wonder if the quite excellent founding philosophy of freedom and individual rights would've survived?
I like your #10, but I would've put it higher...
I went to see William Gibson do a reading when "spook country" came out. He mentioned how, when he wrote Neuromancer, lots of people criticized it as being a pessimistic view of our future. He said that (this was when nuclear war was much more in the public eye) he thought that, by virtue of the fact that civilization still _exists_ in the future, it was a fundamentally optimistic book.
I can't remember who the quote is from, but the line that sticks out in my head is that "socialism never really gained a foothold in America because working Americans don't see themselves as an oppressed proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires who are just waiting for their turn to win the lottery."
It seems that the USA started with a radical political transformation, then got really really good at crushing rebellion. One could argue that up until the really nasty regimes like under Stalin or Pol Pot or whomever, nobody was better at crushing revolts.
Not to nit-pick, but there's very little evidence that anybody ever thought the world was flat.
There's a reference in one of the works of Thomas Aquinas where he says something like "...we know this as surely as we know the world is round" or something.
That said, I think you're right. 100 years ago, sewage was considered "treated" if it was dumped in a river. 100 years ago, you could hire pinkertons to break up a strike. By many measures things are better off now than they were 100 or 200 or however many years ago you like.
However, some things are arguably worse now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. When my father was my age, he had less education than I have now and he was economically better off than I am today. Yes, I have a cell phone and 2 computers and all that stuff, but the cost of manufacturing per unit of manufactured products has consistently fallen, so that's to be expected.
You know another way we're not better off? Income distribution. Right now, we've got the widest division between rich and poor since the "gilded age" of the late 19th century.
Um, is it any surprise that we have less optimism?
I'm 33 years old. When my dad was my age, he was a mere civil servant, with less education than I have now, and he was able to own a house, 2 cars, and support a family of 4 on his salary alone.
For me, home ownership (granted I live in an expensive city) means either moving out to god-awful suburbs and turning my 20-minute commute into a 90 minute (each way) commute, or requires a lottery win.
When my dad was my age, your median value house had a purchase price of 5X the median income, not 10-15X median income.
We're seeing something unique in recent history - for at least the last 100 years, (maybe more, depending on where you are) most people expected to do better, economically speaking, than their parents did.
I am _already_ not doing as well economically as my parents did when they were my age.
We all thought that automation and industrialism would lead to more leisure time and less work. Well, yeah, that's happened - it's lead to unemployment. Presumably, the unemployed have more leisure time.
"Indeed. The environment is at its most trashed in places where socialist governments run the show. See the train wreck that happened in eastern Europe under the helpful central control of the Soviets, or the rapidly worsening disaster that is China."
You're exactly right. I mean, from the open tar-pits in Sweden, the nuclear waste being dumped into rivers in France, the open cesspools of raw sewage that you see in Norway, to the dioxins in the tap water in the Netherlands, everywhere in the world, socialism leads to trashing the environment.
Oh, wait.
I think you're missing the point when you look at disasters like the Aral sea or similar examples in China. What the former soviets and China have in common is not "socialism", but "totalitarianism".
Anywhere that you don't have a functioning _democracy_, you have rampant environmental degradation. For a really neat case study, contrast Haiti and the Dominican Republic - They're on the same friggin' island, one has had a history of tinpot dictators, one has had a (relatively, for the region anyway...) democratic system. Guess which one's environment is in better shape?
Which is prescribed to a lot of people for ADHD, both adults and children. IIRC, Dick said that "every single thing I wrote before 1973" he wrote while wired to the gills on dexedrine.
Now, I don't know how different the effects of aderhal and some of the newer varieties of stimulants are, but it doesn't seem that creativity is a problem.
Help us out, let us know what country you're in?
So anybody who has an opiate prescription for back pain or post-surgical pain isn't allowed to drive?
What about somebody taking Adderal for ADHD? What about someone who's been prescribed valium or something for anxiety? What about SSRIs? Hey, pretty much every morning, I used to drive to work not only under the influence of, but consuming, nicotine. (If anything, driving under the influence of nicotine withdrawal is what should be illegal...)
I guess my point is:
1) not all drug effects, especially on things like cognitive ability or hand to eye coordination or reaction time, are the same;
2) in North America, we are not used to talking about drugs in a sensible fashion. We've had decades of "drugs are bad, m'kay" being pretty much the most sophisticated discourse on the subject.
There's a parallel problem here, that is the increasing dependence on the breathalyzer in law enforcement.
There _was_ a time before every bloody law-enforcement officer in the developed world had a portable breathalyzer machine in their squad car. Cops somehow managed to tell if a driver was "impaired".
Now, it seems, that it's easier to remove the cop's subjective judgment from the equation, by enshrining .08 BAC in the law. But it's at the expense of atrophying the cop's ability to tell "impaired" from not.
Given that there's not likely to be any "marijuana breathalyzer" anytime soon, this sort of question is gonna have to be addressed sooner or later.
Actually, the idea of a marijuana breathalyzer scares me much more than the inaccuracies in a breathalyzer does - it seems to me that tolerance varies much more in pot users than in say, booze. The amount of weed that my ex-housemate smokes before he leaves for work in the morning will leave me in a state where I can't even stand, let alone operate a vehicle.
Booze is probably a better analogy. (where pot isn't _physically_ addictive, is the general conventional wisdom)
I used to make my own beer, then my own wine, when I was a poor student. I even may have made a still at some point for vodka (when I lived somewhere that was legal, of course!).
Eventually, I discovered that wineries with commercial capacity and decades of experience could do a better job than I could of making wine, and I have more money now, (I guess you could say my time is worth more?) so I just run to the booze store.
I think a booze model for pot would turn out about the same way. I mean, hell, even amongst people I know who have lawn or garden space, how many grow their own vegetables or herbs or something instead of going to the grocery store?
Also, having quit pot and attempted several times to quit cigarettes, I know which one is addictive. In fact, I'm gonna go have a smoke right now.
That and, if the annexed province of Mexico were to achieve statehood, you can pretty much guarantee that they'd send 2 democrats to the senate. (same with Canada)