I was thinking that something 5x the size of a palm v screen would be about the size of a standard paperback book... Maybe 3x or 4x would do.
I like the rechargable battery on my Palm V. It routinely lasts for over a week on a single charge with moderate use. Much of that use consists of reading newspaper content via avant-go web clipping, which is about as intensive as reading an ebook. Making the battery replacable would be a useful feature...
If someone is working as a prostitute, and he/she could be earning less money doing something with fewer risks, then he or she is choosing voluntarily to subject him/herself to risks in order to earn a higher wage.
As long as it's voluntary, there is nothing wrong with it. It's interesting that you bring up prostitution, a profession so "reprehensible" that it has been made illegal in a lot of places, but yet it still offers so much appeal to certain people that they willingly break the law in order to work in the industry. To some people, earning a higher wage is worth a great deal of risks. I include in this category people who work on skyscrapers, race car drivers, deep sea divers, etc. Are all of these people exploited just because their job is dangerous? Shouldn't people be able to choose a job that matches both their salary requirements and their risk tolerance?
I think that if people started realizing that protectionist trade policies are identical to a tax on everyone and a welfare check distributed to workers in a particular industry.
To make my views clear, I think that unions are a good thing, so long as membership isn't required. Unions help to organize workers into a unit that can engage in collective bargaining and can help to equalize the market power of firms and employees. When membership is required, however, those who would voluntarily do without union benefits in exchange for work (in the case of a strike) are left without that choice.
Sure, protectionist trade policies may benefit a handful of workers, but they're no different from giving that handful of workers immunity from prosecution for bank robbery, and then helping them stage a heist.
Non-free trade may benefit a few workers in a particular industry, however
The things you mention are not parts of capitalism, but examples of fraud and crime committed by people everywhere, not just in America.
Corporations are just a way for a bunch of individuals to organize themselves economically. This economic organization is (at least for corporations that survive) profit oriented. Profit happens when someone sees an opportunity to fill a void that is being unfilled. The bonus to the individual who takes the risk or sees the opportunity is known as profit. It doesn't usually last long, since others enter the market and create competition.
As long as everybody plays by the rules (no fraud), then all corporations do is offer everyone else more options in terms of the goods and services they may buy and more employment options.
One can be in favor of lesses faire capitalism and still oppose fraud.
You are mistaken in your assertion that the trend toward socialism in the US has been productive. One can only imagine what life would be like if we didn't have all of the social welfare, subsidies to industry, a rediculously complicated tax code and matching burocracy to manage it, etc. There would be trillions more dollars available to people like you (wage slaves) to start your own business and create even more wealth. There is currently a big wedge in between investors and the recipients of start-up capital: It's called capital gains tax, and it means that your enterprise is automatically 20% less desirable to investors.
Obviously, some minimal taxation is necessary, but every dollar you pay to the government may or may not be allocated in the best possible way, since politicians are often pressured into deal making and favor-granting.
The problem of politicians giving handouts has nothing to do with the commonly villainized group (lobbyists) but everything to do with the lack of public scrutiny of the records of their public servants. The public doesn't really care, so these things happen. Campaign finance "reform" will only make contributions harder to track, which will make legislators more immune to informational campaigns showing how they were clearly bought by corporations.
You haven't offered any proof that the majority of workers are underpaid and exploited.
Are the workers slaves? Are they being forced to work? If the answer is no, then they are not being exploited, they are merely securing for themselves the best employment out of all of the available options.
If a nation is unstable politically, few firms will want to invest in it for fear that their holdings will be nationalized or that war will break out. If a nation has a bunch of unskilled workers, firms may be hesitant to make the initial investment if they fear that protectionist trade policies abroad will make the market evaporate.
The key to moving in the direction of 100% free trade is in building an understanding among people (workers) that it always benefits them in the long run. Rather than pandering to unions, politicians should be inspiring people to obtain skills in new and growing industries.
A corporation is simply a way that a bunch of rugged individualists may organize themselves economically.
Things like corporate taxation create a divergence between the interests of the individual stakeholders and the corporate entity, since the corporation may find itself partially in the business of avoiding taxes, etc., as well as the perception that the corporation is anything more than an agreement between individuals intended to formalize apects of an agreement about economic activity.
Another negative side-effect of corporate taxation is that government becomes addicted to the proceeds, and burocrats offer tax incentives in exchange for favors, etc. This is a process that is deeply hidden from the view of consumers and stakeholders.
SUVs don't cause more accidents compared to other vehicles. If they were they'd be way more expensive to insure. I went from a 4 door sedan in my last lease to a smaller SUV in this one, and I pay $30 less per month in insurance fees. Same insurance company, same plan, etc.
If AMD can survive, then there is room for others internationally. Right now margins in the chip industry are (I believe) fairly small. They are only likely to get smaller as chips become more and more of a commodity. Intel still makes most of its money selling chips that are less analogous to a commodity product but more analgous to a botique product. As the tide turns toward increasing commoditization, it will also reduce the liklihood that patentable advantages will determine who rules the market. Instead, pure production efficiency will determine which companies lead and which follow.
A workable DRM solution will have to accomodate all of the distribution and usage issues that you speak of. Right now DRM is too rigid. It would be more reasonable if DRM allowed you to copy it, burn it, etc, for the appropriate fee (if any) for each of those actions.
People often appear to have good intentions. In the case of protectionist trade policy, the good intentions end up having harmful effects. For a detailed (but very accessible) explanation of this concept, see the book Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman. Friedman won a Nobel prize for his innovative and brilliant work in economics.
Now for my brief sentiments on the issue:
It all comes down to efficient allocation of capital. When capital is allocated inefficiently (to a worker who costs more to do the same work) we all suffer. It is easy to point to the job held by the worker and to praise the subsidy for creating employment, but the invisible consequences are much more severe and hard to measure: In order to pay for the subsidy, all of us had to pay higher taxes. Those taxes went to the industry to which the subsidy was given. You and I might not have spent those dollars in that industry if the decision had been up to us. Therefore, the subsidized industry continues to be nursed along while other industries that we would have spent those tax dollars on voluntarily are left with a capital shortage, causing them to be unable to grow, and creating a scarcity of their products, which leads to higher prices. So, while we paid more in taxes, we also end up paying more for other things that we want. Why? So that we can keep an industry on domestic soil that someone somewhere else has figured out how to do more efficiently. We are effectively providing workers in that industry with welfare and ZERO incentive to read the newspaper (or Slashdot) and learn about what other industries may offer opportunities. All along, we could have purchased the subsidized goods from workers overseas, allowing the economies of those nations to obtain the capital needed to create increased competition, higher quality, and even lower prices.
This is one of the issues that politicians really have the nation hoodwinked on. The politicians' hearts are in the wrong place since they only want votes, and it's easy to buy them with subsidies.
As for people like Andy Grove, he has definite interests in the issue, since his company is based in the US. There are dozens of other Andy Groves around the world who will make better chips if we allow capital to flow to them, where it may be most efficiently used.
He is right. Americans have every reason to want 100% free trade, out of purely selfish interests and with no concern for anyone overseas.
Free trade means cheaper prices for American consumers, and it creates an incentive for Americans to do what we do best, rather than things that other workers can do cheaper or better.
Subsidies are equivalent to hidden taxes on the goods that subsidized workers produce, and are effectively a price-support mechanism. Ironically, governments have learned that flat out price support mechanisms don't work, but they continue to insist on subsidies.
I've often wondered why nobody has come up with an ebook reader that is based on the original Palm V (or Vx). Just make the screen 5x larger but keep the same thickness. The device could probably sell for less than $150 these days, and it could have basic PDA features. The idea here is to embrace the KISS strengths of a Palm, the thinness of the Palm V, and add a larger screen so that it's possible to read an e-book on the thing w/o constantly scrolling.
Don't expect DRM to go away. It represents the future of selling content. The only thing that will make people want to get off their butts and create a more practical ebook reader device is the idea that if they do publishers will want to release content for it. Publishers will only do this if they can prevent theft through measures such as DRM.
I don't see how this analogy holds, or even makes sense for automobiles.
Do you honestly think that if a particular brand of automobile actually caused more accidents, that people wouldn't avoid it on their own, if for no other reason than the fact that insurance premiums would be outlandish?
If you own an ISP with colocation services and frequent Windows worms cause your bandwidth to get swamped now and then, raise the price on Windows hosting to cover your bandwidth costs...
Uh, then buy some parts on PriceWatch and build your own machine. I mean, it's simple enough and just about as cheap as you can go for a new pc (except for the occasional awesome promotion from Dell)...
People should take responsibility for the security of the software they use. Experts can publish statistics, but a lot of the discussion about the "phenomenon" of Microsoft and its impact on security is rather absurd.
Deregulation didn't break the machine, it merely allowed the machine's flaws to become obvious.
In a fully deregulated system (deregulated both at the wholesale and consumer level) there would be no need to worry about a decrepit old machine, since there would be clear price signals telling companies when it makes more sense to try alternative methods of solving the "transporting power" problem, such as building a new smaller plant in the target location, shipping natural gas, or (gasp) voluntarily reducing power consumptoin because prices are high during the heat of the summer.
Most of the US has been duped into believing that government regulation is necessary in the area of electrical power. This is absolutely untrue. Regulating the grid (or prices at the consumer level) creates monopolies that can't be broken, and who we must all pay for through our taxes.
The reason deregulation failed was because it was done asymmetrically... How well would you be able to walk if gravity only applied to one half of your body. Markets responded to "deregulation" exactly as one might have predicted. The missing piece was that consumers continued to be able to buy electricity at unnaturally low prices, and so they had no incentive to turn down the AC to a level where the existing infrastructure could provide power at a reasonable price.
The "big machine" analogy sounds inviting at first, until one realizes that the answer is to allow big government to maintain the big machine.
Someone who steals a product is not quite a customer.
This is like saying that it's silly to prosecute a robber who walked into a jewelry store during business hours and bought a new battery for his watch while he got a good look at the floor plan.
The logic being that if an idea (or part of it) existed before, was otherwise patentable but had gone unpatented, that it was simply not of sufficient value to its creator to warrant patenting it. This happens all the time when amateur inventors fail to realize the value of their inventions.
It doesn't matter whether it existed before... patents are what you do when you want to protect your right to make money from an invention. If the original inventor didn't patent it, then the rights are up for grabs.
Interesting comment. I have personally noticed a difference in the quality of the material written by Ayn Rand herself, and by that written by some of her modern followers.
It's not about standing up to the power companies. The deregulation scheme was doomed from the start since it only deregulated the wholesale side. If the retail side had been deregulated, price signals would have moderated usage. Markets didn't fail, but politicians did, only Davis didn't fail by not standing up to the Power companies, he failed by not fully deregulating the industry (retail and wholesale).
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking that something 5x the size of a palm v screen would be about the size of a standard paperback book... Maybe 3x or 4x would do.
I like the rechargable battery on my Palm V. It routinely lasts for over a week on a single charge with moderate use. Much of that use consists of reading newspaper content via avant-go web clipping, which is about as intensive as reading an ebook. Making the battery replacable would be a useful feature...
If someone is working as a prostitute, and he/she could be earning less money doing something with fewer risks, then he or she is choosing voluntarily to subject him/herself to risks in order to earn a higher wage.
As long as it's voluntary, there is nothing wrong with it. It's interesting that you bring up prostitution, a profession so "reprehensible" that it has been made illegal in a lot of places, but yet it still offers so much appeal to certain people that they willingly break the law in order to work in the industry. To some people, earning a higher wage is worth a great deal of risks. I include in this category people who work on skyscrapers, race car drivers, deep sea divers, etc. Are all of these people exploited just because their job is dangerous? Shouldn't people be able to choose a job that matches both their salary requirements and their risk tolerance?
I think that if people started realizing that protectionist trade policies are identical to a tax on everyone and a welfare check distributed to workers in a particular industry.
To make my views clear, I think that unions are a good thing, so long as membership isn't required. Unions help to organize workers into a unit that can engage in collective bargaining and can help to equalize the market power of firms and employees. When membership is required, however, those who would voluntarily do without union benefits in exchange for work (in the case of a strike) are left without that choice.
Sure, protectionist trade policies may benefit a handful of workers, but they're no different from giving that handful of workers immunity from prosecution for bank robbery, and then helping them stage a heist.
Non-free trade may benefit a few workers in a particular industry, however
Are you serious?
The things you mention are not parts of capitalism, but examples of fraud and crime committed by people everywhere, not just in America.
Corporations are just a way for a bunch of individuals to organize themselves economically. This economic organization is (at least for corporations that survive) profit oriented. Profit happens when someone sees an opportunity to fill a void that is being unfilled. The bonus to the individual who takes the risk or sees the opportunity is known as profit. It doesn't usually last long, since others enter the market and create competition.
As long as everybody plays by the rules (no fraud), then all corporations do is offer everyone else more options in terms of the goods and services they may buy and more employment options.
One can be in favor of lesses faire capitalism and still oppose fraud.
You are mistaken in your assertion that the trend toward socialism in the US has been productive. One can only imagine what life would be like if we didn't have all of the social welfare, subsidies to industry, a rediculously complicated tax code and matching burocracy to manage it, etc. There would be trillions more dollars available to people like you (wage slaves) to start your own business and create even more wealth. There is currently a big wedge in between investors and the recipients of start-up capital: It's called capital gains tax, and it means that your enterprise is automatically 20% less desirable to investors.
Obviously, some minimal taxation is necessary, but every dollar you pay to the government may or may not be allocated in the best possible way, since politicians are often pressured into deal making and favor-granting.
The problem of politicians giving handouts has nothing to do with the commonly villainized group (lobbyists) but everything to do with the lack of public scrutiny of the records of their public servants. The public doesn't really care, so these things happen. Campaign finance "reform" will only make contributions harder to track, which will make legislators more immune to informational campaigns showing how they were clearly bought by corporations.
Uh... are you under the impression that there is only a fixed amount of wealth to go around? If so, that is a false assumption.
If you want to buy my Apple //c (with matching monitor, mouse and modem) please reply and make an offer...
You haven't offered any proof that the majority of workers are underpaid and exploited.
Are the workers slaves? Are they being forced to work? If the answer is no, then they are not being exploited, they are merely securing for themselves the best employment out of all of the available options.
If a nation is unstable politically, few firms will want to invest in it for fear that their holdings will be nationalized or that war will break out. If a nation has a bunch of unskilled workers, firms may be hesitant to make the initial investment if they fear that protectionist trade policies abroad will make the market evaporate.
The key to moving in the direction of 100% free trade is in building an understanding among people (workers) that it always benefits them in the long run. Rather than pandering to unions, politicians should be inspiring people to obtain skills in new and growing industries.
A corporation is simply a way that a bunch of rugged individualists may organize themselves economically.
Things like corporate taxation create a divergence between the interests of the individual stakeholders and the corporate entity, since the corporation may find itself partially in the business of avoiding taxes, etc., as well as the perception that the corporation is anything more than an agreement between individuals intended to formalize apects of an agreement about economic activity.
Another negative side-effect of corporate taxation is that government becomes addicted to the proceeds, and burocrats offer tax incentives in exchange for favors, etc. This is a process that is deeply hidden from the view of consumers and stakeholders.
SUVs don't cause more accidents compared to other vehicles. If they were they'd be way more expensive to insure. I went from a 4 door sedan in my last lease to a smaller SUV in this one, and I pay $30 less per month in insurance fees. Same insurance company, same plan, etc.
If AMD can survive, then there is room for others internationally. Right now margins in the chip industry are (I believe) fairly small. They are only likely to get smaller as chips become more and more of a commodity. Intel still makes most of its money selling chips that are less analogous to a commodity product but more analgous to a botique product. As the tide turns toward increasing commoditization, it will also reduce the liklihood that patentable advantages will determine who rules the market. Instead, pure production efficiency will determine which companies lead and which follow.
A workable DRM solution will have to accomodate all of the distribution and usage issues that you speak of. Right now DRM is too rigid. It would be more reasonable if DRM allowed you to copy it, burn it, etc, for the appropriate fee (if any) for each of those actions.
People often appear to have good intentions. In the case of protectionist trade policy, the good intentions end up having harmful effects. For a detailed (but very accessible) explanation of this concept, see the book Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman. Friedman won a Nobel prize for his innovative and brilliant work in economics.
Now for my brief sentiments on the issue:
It all comes down to efficient allocation of capital. When capital is allocated inefficiently (to a worker who costs more to do the same work) we all suffer. It is easy to point to the job held by the worker and to praise the subsidy for creating employment, but the invisible consequences are much more severe and hard to measure: In order to pay for the subsidy, all of us had to pay higher taxes. Those taxes went to the industry to which the subsidy was given. You and I might not have spent those dollars in that industry if the decision had been up to us. Therefore, the subsidized industry continues to be nursed along while other industries that we would have spent those tax dollars on voluntarily are left with a capital shortage, causing them to be unable to grow, and creating a scarcity of their products, which leads to higher prices. So, while we paid more in taxes, we also end up paying more for other things that we want. Why? So that we can keep an industry on domestic soil that someone somewhere else has figured out how to do more efficiently. We are effectively providing workers in that industry with welfare and ZERO incentive to read the newspaper (or Slashdot) and learn about what other industries may offer opportunities. All along, we could have purchased the subsidized goods from workers overseas, allowing the economies of those nations to obtain the capital needed to create increased competition, higher quality, and even lower prices.
This is one of the issues that politicians really have the nation hoodwinked on. The politicians' hearts are in the wrong place since they only want votes, and it's easy to buy them with subsidies.
As for people like Andy Grove, he has definite interests in the issue, since his company is based in the US. There are dozens of other Andy Groves around the world who will make better chips if we allow capital to flow to them, where it may be most efficiently used.
He is right. Americans have every reason to want 100% free trade, out of purely selfish interests and with no concern for anyone overseas.
Free trade means cheaper prices for American consumers, and it creates an incentive for Americans to do what we do best, rather than things that other workers can do cheaper or better.
Subsidies are equivalent to hidden taxes on the goods that subsidized workers produce, and are effectively a price-support mechanism. Ironically, governments have learned that flat out price support mechanisms don't work, but they continue to insist on subsidies.
I've often wondered why nobody has come up with an ebook reader that is based on the original Palm V (or Vx). Just make the screen 5x larger but keep the same thickness. The device could probably sell for less than $150 these days, and it could have basic PDA features. The idea here is to embrace the KISS strengths of a Palm, the thinness of the Palm V, and add a larger screen so that it's possible to read an e-book on the thing w/o constantly scrolling.
Don't expect DRM to go away. It represents the future of selling content. The only thing that will make people want to get off their butts and create a more practical ebook reader device is the idea that if they do publishers will want to release content for it. Publishers will only do this if they can prevent theft through measures such as DRM.
I don't see how this analogy holds, or even makes sense for automobiles.
Do you honestly think that if a particular brand of automobile actually caused more accidents, that people wouldn't avoid it on their own, if for no other reason than the fact that insurance premiums would be outlandish?
If you own an ISP with colocation services and frequent Windows worms cause your bandwidth to get swamped now and then, raise the price on Windows hosting to cover your bandwidth costs...
Uh, then buy some parts on PriceWatch and build your own machine. I mean, it's simple enough and just about as cheap as you can go for a new pc (except for the occasional awesome promotion from Dell)...
People should take responsibility for the security of the software they use. Experts can publish statistics, but a lot of the discussion about the "phenomenon" of Microsoft and its impact on security is rather absurd.
If you don't like Microsoft, for whatever reason, don't buy their software...
If the benefits outweight the risks for you, then buy their software.
If not, don't.
I don't see why it's considered so interesting whenever some "expert" comments on the security of Microsoft software.
Deregulation didn't break the machine, it merely allowed the machine's flaws to become obvious.
In a fully deregulated system (deregulated both at the wholesale and consumer level) there would be no need to worry about a decrepit old machine, since there would be clear price signals telling companies when it makes more sense to try alternative methods of solving the "transporting power" problem, such as building a new smaller plant in the target location, shipping natural gas, or (gasp) voluntarily reducing power consumptoin because prices are high during the heat of the summer.
Most of the US has been duped into believing that government regulation is necessary in the area of electrical power. This is absolutely untrue. Regulating the grid (or prices at the consumer level) creates monopolies that can't be broken, and who we must all pay for through our taxes.
The reason deregulation failed was because it was done asymmetrically... How well would you be able to walk if gravity only applied to one half of your body. Markets responded to "deregulation" exactly as one might have predicted. The missing piece was that consumers continued to be able to buy electricity at unnaturally low prices, and so they had no incentive to turn down the AC to a level where the existing infrastructure could provide power at a reasonable price.
The "big machine" analogy sounds inviting at first, until one realizes that the answer is to allow big government to maintain the big machine.
Someone who steals a product is not quite a customer.
This is like saying that it's silly to prosecute a robber who walked into a jewelry store during business hours and bought a new battery for his watch while he got a good look at the floor plan.
Patented prior art.
The logic being that if an idea (or part of it) existed before, was otherwise patentable but had gone unpatented, that it was simply not of sufficient value to its creator to warrant patenting it. This happens all the time when amateur inventors fail to realize the value of their inventions.
It doesn't matter whether it existed before... patents are what you do when you want to protect your right to make money from an invention. If the original inventor didn't patent it, then the rights are up for grabs.
Interesting comment. I have personally noticed a difference in the quality of the material written by Ayn Rand herself, and by that written by some of her modern followers.
What does this mean in light of this article?
It's not about standing up to the power companies. The deregulation scheme was doomed from the start since it only deregulated the wholesale side. If the retail side had been deregulated, price signals would have moderated usage. Markets didn't fail, but politicians did, only Davis didn't fail by not standing up to the Power companies, he failed by not fully deregulating the industry (retail and wholesale).