No, thank God, I've never had that particular, ahem, priviledge. In fact, I'm proud to say I've never managed anything in my life. I suppose, by the Dilbert principle, this means that I'm insufficiently incompetent.
The bulk of income is in the middle class of this country.
Yes, of course. I should have been more precise. The middle class of this country is incredibly wealthy compared to the workers who produce most of their consumer goods. I tend to lump us in with the rich, since we're nearly as bad from a global perspective. Oh, but I forgot, all those other prople are the wrong color and speak the wrong language, I guess they don't really count. Ha. It all depends on what you mean by rich.
Actually, here's another thought: It turns out there's a real shortage of skill & talent out there in pretty much EVERY industry, since we're nearing full employment, and uh, that means they're treating us employees pretty damn good.
Again, you're only thinking about the US (which is the only place on Earth which matters, right?). Try to explain all this to the little girl who made your ram some time.
First off I want to say that I think Katz is right on with this one. We hippies have been saying all this for decades.
However, I don't tend to see "corporatism" as something new and surprising, nor is it all that surprising that it should arise in the supposedly individualistic and egalitarian US.
Corporatism is simply the natural and perhaps inevitable conclusion of the rise of the Bourgoisie (sp?), which has been going on for centuries. History books are quick to point out that the rise of the democratic republic was made possible by the shift in wealth from the Nobles to the Bourgoisie. However, they also have a tendency to pretend that the Bourgoisie, in their enlightened benevolence, created the republic in the interests of the people, in order to prevent evil monarchial oppression from ever happening again. Any cynic can see why this is obviously not the case. Power is always an end in and of itself. In the history of class struggle, one class displaces another as the ruling class in order to gain and hold power for itself, never to actually put an end to oppression (and yes, I am drawing on Marx somewhat for this. Marx was right about a lot of things. Live with it).
The problem that the textbooks tend to miss is, the democratic republic, at least in its idealistic form, is not the ideal environment to secure the hegemony of the Bourgoisie. It was a step in the right direction for them, since it takes power away from the Nobles without completely giving it to the people, and it creates a power vacuum which is only too easy for those with money to fill. However, it has several significant disadvantages as well. It gives the people a voice, however weak. It creates this enormously powerful entity (government) which, though largely under corporate control, still has to respond to influences other than market pressures (horror of horrors!). Governments create safety regulations and worker's rights laws and environmental protections and all that cumbersome stuff. This is why so many corps have been migrating to countries with weaker governments. Thus I think that the democratic republic is becoming more of a hinderance than a help, and will probably be phased out at some point.
I think that the Bourgeoisie created the democratic republic in the first place to make corporations possible. Corporations can't even exist without government charter, but our eighteenth century merchants found monarchies to be too powerful and difficult to control. By creating a government of, by and for the (rich) people and ousting the nobles from power, they created a good (but not completely ideal) environment for them to sieze and hold power. Now that their power base is secure (and you can be assured that it is secure. Corporatism is much more entrenched than Katz seems to realize.), I think they will begin phasing out governments entirely, since once a corporation has enough power it no longer really needs a government to legitemize it. When seen this way, our good old democratic republic seems to be nothing more than a bridge between monarchy and corporatism.
We must remember that monarchism ended because the rich realized that the real power is wielded by those with money, not by those who hold land and title. This fact hasn't changed. A ruling class doesn't really care what system it rules under, so long as it rules. I think the recent "globalization" trend really amounts to nothing more than the rich finally deciding to take us off the training wheels of democratic republic, and shift us over to their preferred form of government, global corporatism. This will finally (and perhaps irrevocably) place all power in the hands of the super-rich. The problem is, by the time we've realized it, it's already too late. Look around. The deed is done, and all that's left is to make it official.
"Old pirates yes they rob I; Sold I to the merchant ships..." --Bob Marley
Actually, I would submit that the right to smoke buds and have blue hair is more important than security for your future. If they take away your freedom, how much happiness is your precious security going to bring you?
"Any society which will sacrifice a little freedom for a little order will get and deserve neither"--Thomas Jefferson
"The more man smoke herb, the more Babylon fall."--Bob Marley
Corporations serve The People more slavishly and more fanatically than any government does.
Oh really? And which people are those? The ones who own stock, of course! And to a lesser extent the consumers, although the arrogance of corporations towards their consumers can sometimes be staggering. Nonetheless, corporations have no need to serve any people other than their shareholders and consumers! In particular, if, as is increasingly the case, the workers who produce a good are not the same people who buy it (frequently these days they don't even live in the same country), there is no reason whatsoever for the corporation to protect the interests of the workers. All it has to do is keep them alive and working, and frequently it doesn't even have to do that, it can just go somewhere else!
Furthermore, even assuming that things homogenize to the extent that everybody is a consumer of every major corp, corporatism (in the sense of corps wielding political power) still poses a serious threat to our notions of liberty and equality. This is because corps care about money not people. Think about it. The people whom you claim are served so slavishly by corps must be rich people. How else do they have the money to "vote with their dollars"? Thus corporations will always favor the interests of the rich over those of the poor, simply because the rich can afford to buy more of their products. Of course, our existing system of pseudo-politics serves the same purpose, but at least it was designed on the principle of equality, one man one vote (and thank God the sexist bias of this statement has been abandoned!). What you are proposing sounds to me like some sort of "corporate democracy" in which the people's interests are supposedly represented because of their economic influence over corps. But in practice this will always amout to government of, by, and for the rich.
Moreover, I question your wordplay. "Individualism" and "communisim" are nothing alike. Actually, "corporatism" is much more similar to communism. In communism, the needs of the individual are subordinated to those of the state. The state is held to represent "the people" so completely that the interests of the people and of the state are held to be identical. In corporatism, the needs of the individual are subordinated to the needs of the corporation. Via the argument you've presented, people claim that corporations represent the people so totally that the interests of corporations are equated with those of the people. Sounds kinda like communism to me. Individualism, on the other hand, holds that the freedom of the individual takes precedence over the interests of any collective body, corporate or governmental or religious or whatever. Katz isn't against success. What he seems to object to is the success of a large group of people at the expense of individual freedom and rights. There's a difference.
To some extent, we all have to be individualists, because we are all individuals. People can be pretty enthusiastic about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the one, until they are the one in question.
"--Yes, we're all different! --I'm not" --Monty Python, "The Life of Brian"
"Aside from the roads, the aquiducts, sanitation, civil order, peace, public safety, and baths, what have the Romans ever done for us?!?!" -Monty Python, "The Life of Brian"
I think that regardless of your opinion of the quality of this particular piece of journalism, you have to acknowledge that this is a serious problem and people need to be thinking about it. Who cares about statistics? Lying with statistics is easy. Consider the following points:
1) The manufacture of electronic components does certainly involve the use of large amounts of various solvents. Many of them are particularly nasty, (I've worked with toluene and methyl ethyl ketone, for instance, and they're no joke), and it is to be noted that chemists use fume hoods and gloves even when working with acetone. Of course, it's also worth noting that chemists have pretty bad work-related fatality and illness statistics. Anyway, the point is that the high-tech industry certainly uses large amounts of toxic chemicals, that much you can't really argue with.
2) It will inevitably be cheaper and quicker, at least in the short term, to deal with these chemicals in an irresponsible manner than it would be to deal with them responsably. Protective equipment is expensive.
From there you can do the math for yourself. I don't see how the conclusions in this article are unbelievable or even surprising. One would expect the electronics industry to have these kinds of problems, regardless of whether the specific claims of the article are true or backed up by statistics. What's really scary is that this will almost certainly get worse as the industry moves more and more into the third world.
I think this is an issue of which people in the tech industry need to be much more aware. Consumer awareness could put pressure on manufacturers to be more clean. At the very least, it's something to think about as we sit down in front of our computers.
After all they believe that facism is about hating Jews, not about controlling ideas.
This is a brilliant insight! I don't think I've ever heard it put so well. This is a major mistake our culture has made in reacting to Naziism. People tend to focus so much on the racism (which is of course a horrible thing) that they forget that Facism is simply the logical extreme of patriotism. The Nazis were, first and foremost, about the supremacy of the German people. All their actions were directed towards the goal of suppressing any kind of opposition to their supremacy. Controlling ideas and anonymous reporting and killing all the Jews were all just logical (to them, anyway) means to this end.
Corporations have the same problem, though it usually takes a different form. Their total commitment to the bottom line causes them to take any means to the end of profit, regardless of the ethical implications. Whenever any goal (supremacy of your nation, profit, economic growth, religious evangelism, political victory, etc. etc.) takes precedence over morals, you run the risk of committing serious oppression.
We must remember that the Nazis burned books as well as people, and that both were part of the same line of reasoning.
There is a difference between opposing what someone says and opposing their right to say it. Nobody is arguing that WAVE should not be legal, or that they should be prevented from expressing their view. We simply disagree with that view, and with the action they propose to take based on it.
This issue is not about suppressing Pinkerton's speech. This is about preventing them from taking action. There's a difference. The fact that I'm in favor of freedom of speech doesn't mean that I have to agree with everything anyone says.
Furthermore, I don't think that the freedom to turn someone in to an anonymous hotline is equivalent to freedom of speech. Of course people have the freedom to say whatever they want about their peers to whomever they choose to say it to. The question is about what is done with this sort of speech once it's said. Do you see what I mean? WAVE proposes to set up an organized system for recording and catagorizing people's accusations against their peers. On the one hand, listening more carefully to what children have to say about their environment is a good thing, and certainly parents and school officials and so forth should be encouraged to do so. However, the question is, is a private security company like Pinkerton the right entity to be listening to the concerns of children? There's certainly a danger in paying too little attention to what kids have to say. There is also a danger of paying too much attention, or the wrong kind of attention.
Everyone has the freedom to cry "witch!" Problems start happening when people actually listen.
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."--Voltaire
How do they test for the existance of unknown variables again?
It is indeed a very interesting subject. Well, let's see if I can remember this... what you do is, you take a couple of photons (or neutrons, or particles of your choice, but photons are easy to work with), and you cause them to interact in such a way that they are "entangled". This means that they are jointly described by a common two-body wavefunction. In other words, their states of being are fundamentally linked. The simple way to do this with photons involves polarizing a laser beam (I think. I'm not an experimentalist, so I'm sure it's much more complicated than that, and please correct me if I'm wrong). Anyway, you set up two particles in an entangled state. You then separate the particles, being very careful not to disturb their entanglement (this is apparently tricky). Now, suppose that you observe one of the particles. In the case of photons, this means measuring the polarization. Now, when you measure the polarization, you collapse the wavefunction, and since both particles are described by the same wavefunction, you collapse the wavefunction for the other particle as well. This means that by measuring the polarization of one photon, you've effectively measured the polarization of the photon across the room as well.
Now here's the kicker: in the Copenhagen interpretation of QM, the second particle doesn't have a polarization until the wavefunction collapses. This means that by performing a measurement at one end of the laboratory, you've (apparently instantaneously) created the polarization of the other photon at the other end of the lab. Thus the disagreement between QM and local realism.
What J.S. Bell did was to put all this on mathematical footing. He started with the assumption of local realism, that is to say, that the second photon does have a real polarization before measurement, and that no influence can be connecting the two particles (no faster-than-light information transfer). He uses these assumptions to derive a set of inequalities, called Bell's Inequalities, which the statistics of the measurements (at both ends) in such an experiment should obey if local realism is true. A number of people (including Ray Chao at Berkeley) have performed such experiments, and they find that Bell's Inequalities are violated in exactly the way predicted by QM. Thus the experimental evidence seems to indicate that local realism is false, and supports QM. No experiment is ever final, of course, but the evidence is pretty strong.
Sadly enough, it's also been shown that it's impossible to use this effect to transfer information, since you have to have the data from both ends of the experiment to see the effect (aw shucks).
I would have to disagree (though I also prefer Sakurai to Cohen-Tannoudji, so who am I to judge?). "Consciousness" as such doesn't have to play a role in the axioms or even the interpretation of QM, but some sort of "observer" usually does. Why does there have to be a difference between the ideas of "coupling to the thermal bath" and "becoming known to the mind of God"?
I'm not sure that I agree that the film is an observer. If the film wasn't there and the photons just hit the wall instead, would not the wave function still collapse? Does this mean that walls are observers too? Why not simply consider the universe itself as an observer, and thus in some sense aware if not exactly conscious?
There's still Von Neumann's collapse of the infinite regress. I don't get the impression that measurement theory is a fully settled issue (Ray Chao, at Berkeley, for instance, is still working on it, and there's this guy at Harvard whose name I can't remember at the moment who has some really wacked out theories on the subject, involving cloud chambers and how we're like them). I think there's still significant question about the nature of observation and so forth, such that I don't think we can definitively say whether the film is an observer or not.
"He was in the world, and the world knew him not"
on
The Mind of God
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Sorry to disappoint you but, no, there isn't any hidden spirituality in physics. Spirituality is an attribute of the human mind, not one of the world around us.
A couple of points in response to this:
Quantum Mechanics seriously blurs the distinction between "the human mind" and "the world around us." The observer and the observed are not separate systems, but are inescapably linked, part of the same whole system. Furthermore, one gets the sense, in studying Quantum Mechanics (which is what I do for a living, btw, I'm a physics grad student), that the whole system is in some sense self-aware. Einstein isn't the only physicist who uses God as a metaphor in physics. I've heard professors say things like "Bell's Theroem means that God himself doesn't know where a particle is before the collapse of the wave function." Anyway, there is at the very least a place for spirituality in Quantum Mechanics.
Since we are part of "the world around us," and spirituality, or rather, I would say, simply spirit, is a part of us, it is therefore a part of the world. Spirit is a property we posess, as can be seen with a little introspection, though it's tricky and depends on your point of view. If you're ever lucky enough to meet God, you'll see that spirit is clearly a property he posesses as well (in much greater abundance). Therefore, why shouldn't physics have something to say about this aspect of the Universe? I think separating ourselves from our science is a major mistake. Objectivity is the epistemological stance of which objectification is the social practice. Or, to put it another way, spirituality, religion, mysticism, God, miracles, and so on, are all clearly part of human experience. I think that science should have more to say about this than to simply dismiss it as blind superstition, and its results as mere coincidence.
Furthermore, many of the founders of Quantum Mechanics disagreed with you. Bohr, for instance, took the Taoist yin-yang as his coat of arms when he was knighted. He wasn't kidding around. He saw a deep connection between Taoism and QM, and make no mistake, Taoism is profoundly spiritual.
I personally believe that God is the Universal Observer. When we say that the wave function has collapsed because an observation took place, it was God who did the observing. However, regardless of your personal beliefs about the nature of God, I think that physics provides an excellent context in which to ask questions about the nature of reality. It doesn't necessarily provide the answers, mind you, but it does provide us with a good vocabulary for asking the questions.
Actually, Bell's Theorem gives us a way to empirically distinguish between QM and the view you advocate, which is called "local realism". Any "hidden variables" theory leads to certain statistical predictions on a particular type of experiment, predictions which are in disagreement with QM. Evidence collected in the past couple of decades strongly favors QM against local realism. This suggests that we abandon either the idea that no influence propagates faster than light, or the idea that there is an underlying deterministic reality behind QM. These are both ideas to which Einstein was dearly attached, thus his difficulty in accepting QM in the first place.
It is still possible that there is a nonlocal realistic theory underlying QM, but locality, or Einstein causality as it's sometimes called, is pretty well established, whereas realism is difficult if not impossible to establish. I don't see why people are so attached to reality anyway.
I think Jon Katz probably knows what a firewall is. Ever heard of a metaphor?
This actually brings up an interesting point about responses to Jon's articles in general. People have a disturbing tendency to nit-pick the details of his articles without listening to the general idea of what he's saying. Instead of talking about his word choice, how about saying something about his argument? Does this event have any implications about net freedom? If so, are they good or bad? Are big corporations trying to control the internet, and if so, what do you think about it?
What concerns me most about this article is the growing trend of prosecuting people in other countries for violating US laws on the internet. How do you think Americans would feel if the People's Republic of China were to start arresting American citizens for violating Chinese censorship laws on the net? After all, dispite all their efforts to the contrary, Chinese citizens can get around the barriers and access content from the states which is illegal in China. Furthermore, unlike this Canadian site, many sites with such content don't even make a token attempt to restrict access to the US only. The question is, if someone sitting here in America posts to an American-hosted site material which is illegal in China, can this reasonably be considered a violation of Chinese law just because some Chinese people may be able to access it? Likewise, if someone in Canada posts to a Canadian site material which is illegal in the US, is this a violation of US law? The international nature of the net makes the question of where a crime is committed and whose juristiction it falls under very difficult. I think the whole issue needs to be reexamined, and recent cases have set a dangerous precedent of the US acting as international policeman for the net.
The necessary involvement of humans in the process suggests a way to fight against this sort of technology, as a society I mean. If instead of submitting to the inevitable pressure to conform this produces, a large enough segment of the population were to go about deliberately (and entirely legally, this is important) failing to conform to the normal standards of behavior, the number of false alarms could be driven up to the point where it is impossible to pay attention to them all. With a bit of luck, this would result in the machines simply being ignored most of the time.
Fat chance of that happening though, I suppose. In any case this is seriously scary; a real move towards totalitarianism on an unprecedented scale.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to say tell that to all the prisoners of the war on drugs, for instance. They've been saying "no" to the current (clearly unjust) drug laws for decades, for all the good it's done them.
On the other hand, you have a point; direct refusal by the people has been known to work. For instance, in the Spokane free speech fight of 1910, the local government tried to outlaw speaking in the street to prevent union agitation. Well, they got together enough workers to each take their turn up on the soap box, say "fellow workers", and get arrested, that they filled the jails. They put such a tax burden on the city that they had to repeal the ordinance. They won through direct action, and as Utah Phillips says, it comes to us highly recommended.
Now the problem with this is that it would have to happen on a massive scale to have any effect in today's society. It requires a huge number of individuals to sacrifice their personal freedom for the general good. How likely is that, and how reasonable as a method of changing society? I don't know. Might be worth a try though.
"Freedom is something you assume. Then you wait for someone to try to take it away from you. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free."-Campbell
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No, thank God, I've never had that particular, ahem, priviledge. In fact, I'm proud to say I've never managed anything in my life. I suppose, by the Dilbert principle, this means that I'm insufficiently incompetent.
The bulk of income is in the middle class of this country.
Yes, of course. I should have been more precise. The middle class of this country is incredibly wealthy compared to the workers who produce most of their consumer goods. I tend to lump us in with the rich, since we're nearly as bad from a global perspective. Oh, but I forgot, all those other prople are the wrong color and speak the wrong language, I guess they don't really count. Ha. It all depends on what you mean by rich.
Actually, here's another thought: It turns out there's a real shortage of skill & talent out there in pretty much EVERY industry, since we're nearing full employment, and uh, that means they're treating us employees pretty damn good.
Again, you're only thinking about the US (which is the only place on Earth which matters, right?). Try to explain all this to the little girl who made your ram some time.
However, I don't tend to see "corporatism" as something new and surprising, nor is it all that surprising that it should arise in the supposedly individualistic and egalitarian US.
Corporatism is simply the natural and perhaps inevitable conclusion of the rise of the Bourgoisie (sp?), which has been going on for centuries. History books are quick to point out that the rise of the democratic republic was made possible by the shift in wealth from the Nobles to the Bourgoisie. However, they also have a tendency to pretend that the Bourgoisie, in their enlightened benevolence, created the republic in the interests of the people, in order to prevent evil monarchial oppression from ever happening again. Any cynic can see why this is obviously not the case. Power is always an end in and of itself. In the history of class struggle, one class displaces another as the ruling class in order to gain and hold power for itself, never to actually put an end to oppression (and yes, I am drawing on Marx somewhat for this. Marx was right about a lot of things. Live with it).
The problem that the textbooks tend to miss is, the democratic republic, at least in its idealistic form, is not the ideal environment to secure the hegemony of the Bourgoisie. It was a step in the right direction for them, since it takes power away from the Nobles without completely giving it to the people, and it creates a power vacuum which is only too easy for those with money to fill. However, it has several significant disadvantages as well. It gives the people a voice, however weak. It creates this enormously powerful entity (government) which, though largely under corporate control, still has to respond to influences other than market pressures (horror of horrors!). Governments create safety regulations and worker's rights laws and environmental protections and all that cumbersome stuff. This is why so many corps have been migrating to countries with weaker governments. Thus I think that the democratic republic is becoming more of a hinderance than a help, and will probably be phased out at some point.
I think that the Bourgeoisie created the democratic republic in the first place to make corporations possible. Corporations can't even exist without government charter, but our eighteenth century merchants found monarchies to be too powerful and difficult to control. By creating a government of, by and for the (rich) people and ousting the nobles from power, they created a good (but not completely ideal) environment for them to sieze and hold power. Now that their power base is secure (and you can be assured that it is secure. Corporatism is much more entrenched than Katz seems to realize.), I think they will begin phasing out governments entirely, since once a corporation has enough power it no longer really needs a government to legitemize it. When seen this way, our good old democratic republic seems to be nothing more than a bridge between monarchy and corporatism.
We must remember that monarchism ended because the rich realized that the real power is wielded by those with money, not by those who hold land and title. This fact hasn't changed. A ruling class doesn't really care what system it rules under, so long as it rules. I think the recent "globalization" trend really amounts to nothing more than the rich finally deciding to take us off the training wheels of democratic republic, and shift us over to their preferred form of government, global corporatism. This will finally (and perhaps irrevocably) place all power in the hands of the super-rich. The problem is, by the time we've realized it, it's already too late. Look around. The deed is done, and all that's left is to make it official.
"Old pirates yes they rob I; Sold I to the merchant ships..." --Bob Marley
"Any society which will sacrifice a little freedom for a little order will get and deserve neither"--Thomas Jefferson
"The more man smoke herb, the more Babylon fall."--Bob Marley
Oh really? And which people are those? The ones who own stock, of course! And to a lesser extent the consumers, although the arrogance of corporations towards their consumers can sometimes be staggering. Nonetheless, corporations have no need to serve any people other than their shareholders and consumers! In particular, if, as is increasingly the case, the workers who produce a good are not the same people who buy it (frequently these days they don't even live in the same country), there is no reason whatsoever for the corporation to protect the interests of the workers. All it has to do is keep them alive and working, and frequently it doesn't even have to do that, it can just go somewhere else!
Furthermore, even assuming that things homogenize to the extent that everybody is a consumer of every major corp, corporatism (in the sense of corps wielding political power) still poses a serious threat to our notions of liberty and equality. This is because corps care about money not people. Think about it. The people whom you claim are served so slavishly by corps must be rich people. How else do they have the money to "vote with their dollars"? Thus corporations will always favor the interests of the rich over those of the poor, simply because the rich can afford to buy more of their products. Of course, our existing system of pseudo-politics serves the same purpose, but at least it was designed on the principle of equality, one man one vote (and thank God the sexist bias of this statement has been abandoned!). What you are proposing sounds to me like some sort of "corporate democracy" in which the people's interests are supposedly represented because of their economic influence over corps. But in practice this will always amout to government of, by, and for the rich.
Moreover, I question your wordplay. "Individualism" and "communisim" are nothing alike. Actually, "corporatism" is much more similar to communism. In communism, the needs of the individual are subordinated to those of the state. The state is held to represent "the people" so completely that the interests of the people and of the state are held to be identical. In corporatism, the needs of the individual are subordinated to the needs of the corporation. Via the argument you've presented, people claim that corporations represent the people so totally that the interests of corporations are equated with those of the people. Sounds kinda like communism to me. Individualism, on the other hand, holds that the freedom of the individual takes precedence over the interests of any collective body, corporate or governmental or religious or whatever. Katz isn't against success. What he seems to object to is the success of a large group of people at the expense of individual freedom and rights. There's a difference.
To some extent, we all have to be individualists, because we are all individuals. People can be pretty enthusiastic about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the one, until they are the one in question.
"--Yes, we're all different! --I'm not" --Monty Python, "The Life of Brian"
Or something like that.
1) The manufacture of electronic components does certainly involve the use of large amounts of various solvents. Many of them are particularly nasty, (I've worked with toluene and methyl ethyl ketone, for instance, and they're no joke), and it is to be noted that chemists use fume hoods and gloves even when working with acetone. Of course, it's also worth noting that chemists have pretty bad work-related fatality and illness statistics. Anyway, the point is that the high-tech industry certainly uses large amounts of toxic chemicals, that much you can't really argue with.
2) It will inevitably be cheaper and quicker, at least in the short term, to deal with these chemicals in an irresponsible manner than it would be to deal with them responsably. Protective equipment is expensive.
From there you can do the math for yourself. I don't see how the conclusions in this article are unbelievable or even surprising. One would expect the electronics industry to have these kinds of problems, regardless of whether the specific claims of the article are true or backed up by statistics. What's really scary is that this will almost certainly get worse as the industry moves more and more into the third world.
I think this is an issue of which people in the tech industry need to be much more aware. Consumer awareness could put pressure on manufacturers to be more clean. At the very least, it's something to think about as we sit down in front of our computers.
This is a brilliant insight! I don't think I've ever heard it put so well. This is a major mistake our culture has made in reacting to Naziism. People tend to focus so much on the racism (which is of course a horrible thing) that they forget that Facism is simply the logical extreme of patriotism. The Nazis were, first and foremost, about the supremacy of the German people. All their actions were directed towards the goal of suppressing any kind of opposition to their supremacy. Controlling ideas and anonymous reporting and killing all the Jews were all just logical (to them, anyway) means to this end.
Corporations have the same problem, though it usually takes a different form. Their total commitment to the bottom line causes them to take any means to the end of profit, regardless of the ethical implications. Whenever any goal (supremacy of your nation, profit, economic growth, religious evangelism, political victory, etc. etc.) takes precedence over morals, you run the risk of committing serious oppression.
We must remember that the Nazis burned books as well as people, and that both were part of the same line of reasoning.
This issue is not about suppressing Pinkerton's speech. This is about preventing them from taking action. There's a difference. The fact that I'm in favor of freedom of speech doesn't mean that I have to agree with everything anyone says.
Furthermore, I don't think that the freedom to turn someone in to an anonymous hotline is equivalent to freedom of speech. Of course people have the freedom to say whatever they want about their peers to whomever they choose to say it to. The question is about what is done with this sort of speech once it's said. Do you see what I mean? WAVE proposes to set up an organized system for recording and catagorizing people's accusations against their peers. On the one hand, listening more carefully to what children have to say about their environment is a good thing, and certainly parents and school officials and so forth should be encouraged to do so. However, the question is, is a private security company like Pinkerton the right entity to be listening to the concerns of children? There's certainly a danger in paying too little attention to what kids have to say. There is also a danger of paying too much attention, or the wrong kind of attention.
Everyone has the freedom to cry "witch!" Problems start happening when people actually listen.
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."--Voltaire
It is indeed a very interesting subject. Well, let's see if I can remember this... what you do is, you take a couple of photons (or neutrons, or particles of your choice, but photons are easy to work with), and you cause them to interact in such a way that they are "entangled". This means that they are jointly described by a common two-body wavefunction. In other words, their states of being are fundamentally linked. The simple way to do this with photons involves polarizing a laser beam (I think. I'm not an experimentalist, so I'm sure it's much more complicated than that, and please correct me if I'm wrong). Anyway, you set up two particles in an entangled state. You then separate the particles, being very careful not to disturb their entanglement (this is apparently tricky). Now, suppose that you observe one of the particles. In the case of photons, this means measuring the polarization. Now, when you measure the polarization, you collapse the wavefunction, and since both particles are described by the same wavefunction, you collapse the wavefunction for the other particle as well. This means that by measuring the polarization of one photon, you've effectively measured the polarization of the photon across the room as well.
Now here's the kicker: in the Copenhagen interpretation of QM, the second particle doesn't have a polarization until the wavefunction collapses. This means that by performing a measurement at one end of the laboratory, you've (apparently instantaneously) created the polarization of the other photon at the other end of the lab. Thus the disagreement between QM and local realism.
What J.S. Bell did was to put all this on mathematical footing. He started with the assumption of local realism, that is to say, that the second photon does have a real polarization before measurement, and that no influence can be connecting the two particles (no faster-than-light information transfer). He uses these assumptions to derive a set of inequalities, called Bell's Inequalities, which the statistics of the measurements (at both ends) in such an experiment should obey if local realism is true. A number of people (including Ray Chao at Berkeley) have performed such experiments, and they find that Bell's Inequalities are violated in exactly the way predicted by QM. Thus the experimental evidence seems to indicate that local realism is false, and supports QM. No experiment is ever final, of course, but the evidence is pretty strong.
Sadly enough, it's also been shown that it's impossible to use this effect to transfer information, since you have to have the data from both ends of the experiment to see the effect (aw shucks).
I'm not sure that I agree that the film is an observer. If the film wasn't there and the photons just hit the wall instead, would not the wave function still collapse? Does this mean that walls are observers too? Why not simply consider the universe itself as an observer, and thus in some sense aware if not exactly conscious?
There's still Von Neumann's collapse of the infinite regress. I don't get the impression that measurement theory is a fully settled issue (Ray Chao, at Berkeley, for instance, is still working on it, and there's this guy at Harvard whose name I can't remember at the moment who has some really wacked out theories on the subject, involving cloud chambers and how we're like them). I think there's still significant question about the nature of observation and so forth, such that I don't think we can definitively say whether the film is an observer or not.
A couple of points in response to this:
Quantum Mechanics seriously blurs the distinction between "the human mind" and "the world around us." The observer and the observed are not separate systems, but are inescapably linked, part of the same whole system. Furthermore, one gets the sense, in studying Quantum Mechanics (which is what I do for a living, btw, I'm a physics grad student), that the whole system is in some sense self-aware. Einstein isn't the only physicist who uses God as a metaphor in physics. I've heard professors say things like "Bell's Theroem means that God himself doesn't know where a particle is before the collapse of the wave function." Anyway, there is at the very least a place for spirituality in Quantum Mechanics.
Since we are part of "the world around us," and spirituality, or rather, I would say, simply spirit, is a part of us, it is therefore a part of the world. Spirit is a property we posess, as can be seen with a little introspection, though it's tricky and depends on your point of view. If you're ever lucky enough to meet God, you'll see that spirit is clearly a property he posesses as well (in much greater abundance). Therefore, why shouldn't physics have something to say about this aspect of the Universe? I think separating ourselves from our science is a major mistake. Objectivity is the epistemological stance of which objectification is the social practice. Or, to put it another way, spirituality, religion, mysticism, God, miracles, and so on, are all clearly part of human experience. I think that science should have more to say about this than to simply dismiss it as blind superstition, and its results as mere coincidence.
Furthermore, many of the founders of Quantum Mechanics disagreed with you. Bohr, for instance, took the Taoist yin-yang as his coat of arms when he was knighted. He wasn't kidding around. He saw a deep connection between Taoism and QM, and make no mistake, Taoism is profoundly spiritual.
I personally believe that God is the Universal Observer. When we say that the wave function has collapsed because an observation took place, it was God who did the observing. However, regardless of your personal beliefs about the nature of God, I think that physics provides an excellent context in which to ask questions about the nature of reality. It doesn't necessarily provide the answers, mind you, but it does provide us with a good vocabulary for asking the questions.
No offense intended, and God bless...
--Eliduc
It is still possible that there is a nonlocal realistic theory underlying QM, but locality, or Einstein causality as it's sometimes called, is pretty well established, whereas realism is difficult if not impossible to establish. I don't see why people are so attached to reality anyway.
This actually brings up an interesting point about responses to Jon's articles in general. People have a disturbing tendency to nit-pick the details of his articles without listening to the general idea of what he's saying. Instead of talking about his word choice, how about saying something about his argument? Does this event have any implications about net freedom? If so, are they good or bad? Are big corporations trying to control the internet, and if so, what do you think about it?
What concerns me most about this article is the growing trend of prosecuting people in other countries for violating US laws on the internet. How do you think Americans would feel if the People's Republic of China were to start arresting American citizens for violating Chinese censorship laws on the net? After all, dispite all their efforts to the contrary, Chinese citizens can get around the barriers and access content from the states which is illegal in China. Furthermore, unlike this Canadian site, many sites with such content don't even make a token attempt to restrict access to the US only. The question is, if someone sitting here in America posts to an American-hosted site material which is illegal in China, can this reasonably be considered a violation of Chinese law just because some Chinese people may be able to access it? Likewise, if someone in Canada posts to a Canadian site material which is illegal in the US, is this a violation of US law? The international nature of the net makes the question of where a crime is committed and whose juristiction it falls under very difficult. I think the whole issue needs to be reexamined, and recent cases have set a dangerous precedent of the US acting as international policeman for the net.
Fat chance of that happening though, I suppose. In any case this is seriously scary; a real move towards totalitarianism on an unprecedented scale.
Ironically enough, they have.
You're right though, of course, about lack of organization and ignorance.
On the other hand, you have a point; direct refusal by the people has been known to work. For instance, in the Spokane free speech fight of 1910, the local government tried to outlaw speaking in the street to prevent union agitation. Well, they got together enough workers to each take their turn up on the soap box, say "fellow workers", and get arrested, that they filled the jails. They put such a tax burden on the city that they had to repeal the ordinance. They won through direct action, and as Utah Phillips says, it comes to us highly recommended.
Now the problem with this is that it would have to happen on a massive scale to have any effect in today's society. It requires a huge number of individuals to sacrifice their personal freedom for the general good. How likely is that, and how reasonable as a method of changing society? I don't know. Might be worth a try though.
"Freedom is something you assume. Then you wait for someone to try to take it away from you. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free."-Campbell