The party supports the preservation of current civil rights in telephony and on the Internet; in particular, it opposes the European data retention policies and Germany's new Internet censorship law called Zugangserschwerungsgesetz. It also opposes artificial monopolies and various measures of surveillance of citizens.
The party favors the civil right to information privacy and reforms of copyright, education, computer science and genetic patents.
It promotes in particular an enhanced transparency of government by implementing open source governance and providing for APIs to allow for electronic inspection and monitoring of government operations by the citizen.
It is aimed at minimizing government involvement into some specific areas, but anything that is aimed at minimizing government involvement is anti-establishment and may just be a special case of libertarian movement.
there should be live streaming of the planet done constantly by many satellites at different latitudes/longitudes, resolutions, frequencies, all sorts of options.
Copyright is part of regulations, which inhibit business formation.
In this case the inhibition comes in form of protection of Microsoft against redistribution of the product bought from them by third parties. Copyright laws do not allow alternative channels of distribution, which would compete with the original creator/provider. You may or may not see this is a 'good' thing, but regardless of the moral objections it prevents competition in distribution of the material from forming by government protection. Also copyright laws are used to prevent variations of work from being distributed, so if somebody bought a disk with any MS application, modified the code and started selling it as well, they would be prosecuted for copyright violation.
It applies to all such works, for example music, writings, software, movies, etc.
Then there are patents, which are even worse in many ways, because they prevent distribution of implementations of ideas by third parties.
You claimed that all monopolies are created by government.
- I am still claiming it.
Monopolies are systems that are maintained by government regulations, taxation, laws, subsidies. Monopolies do not form in absence of government, in absence of government economies of scale can form, but if they are not serving the public interest of low cost and high value, then they will lose customers to somebody who will provide lower cost and higher value.
Government created the Internet (apranet) and now Google has a monopoly on searching the Internet.
1. Google is not a monopoly.
2. TCP/IP was only one protocol out of variety of other protocols that already existed prior to government involvement. Internet did not have to start from Arpanet, it did only due to money, which as usually was stolen from the people and thrown at military and other government agencies.
PSTN did not need government intervention to become reality. Phone and radio communications are not far removed from other types of communications, so Internet can as well form with completely private entities.
As far as copyright law goes. Everyone that writes software has the same equal protection. How did copyright law give microsoft the advantage over their competitors that benefit equally from said law?
- Nobody was in business of selling software, systems were sold prior to Gates realizing what he had in front of him with government copyright protections.
He understood the value of government protection of copyright and was the first to use it to his advantage in software development and incidentally he became probably the richest person due to software sales.
- excellent. Then you have the most important vote of all - vote of your dollars.
You can spend your money elsewhere, and that's the only message that counts. Getting government into this will only worsen the situation in the long run, as all government involvement does.
Can you explain to me what is your specific problem with Microsoft?
Free Market allows economies of scale to exist, if a company dominates the market for some time it only means that this is the cheapest product that can be provided at the best quality that can be provided for some time.
Obviously competitors were forming while Microsoft had its success. From Apple to Free software, competition was coming on line.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a company that dominates market for some amount of time, of-course Microsoft gained tremendously from government providing it the protection of copyright law as an example. OTOH Microsoft gained tremendously from getting its first real sales contract with IBM, which is a large company and enjoyed various government protections as well as contracts for a century.
Monopolies are only created by government intervention. The lawsuit is brought forward by companies, who are afraid of incoming competition from a larger entity, but the only real monopolies are always enjoying government protection.
Free Market is market that is free of GOVERNMENT intervention, not a market that has no larger economies of scale. Consumers gain from economies of scale, and in this case especially, this is a good move for consumers, as they will see increase of competition, not decrease of it. Government cannot create free market by decree, it only destroys free market by regulations, taxes, subsidies and by creating franchises.
Again and again there is nothing wrong with the merger, it will create more pressure in this market, notice that it is not consumers, who are coming out with the lawsuit, just as always, it is the competing companies, who are afraid they will have to do actual real competition, find ways to cut prices, figure out how to increase customer satisfaction.
In my top comment I gave a link, which provides data that MIT is not collecting, because MIT is looking only at final goods sold in USA, and since USA exports the inflation to other nations, who buy US dollars and debt, and those other nations produce the stuff USA consumes (53 Billion USD/month trade deficit), it's those other nations that suffer the rising prices immediately, while USA is kept isolated from the very inflation it creates. However the consumer goods are now beginning to reflect the real inflation back at US consumers.
Inflation as calculated by methods used during Nixon's administration is over 11% right now, though numbers I calculate are just a bit higher than that.
Don't forget, during Nixon 4% inflation was enough for government to start price and wage controls (which don't work, they create shortages and black markets).
- you believe my comment is a troll, what should I think about yours?
Really? There were approximately 2 billion shares traded on the New York Stock exchange today. No investors? Really?
- really. You have just described the very nature of current "investment" strategy, which is arbitrage, making the difference between buying and selling, and HFT is just a way to take that concept to its natural maximum efficiency. There is no investment there because the companies' stocks are not bought as a business, not to get dividends, not to participate in their operations.
100% of the point of corporations is to protect investors from liability due to the actions of the corporation in order to encourage them to utilize their capital in productive ways. That is THE fundamental feature of a corporation.
- and this should not be done by government protection.
If a company wants to limit its liabilities, it must do so with private mechanisms - buying enough insurance coverage to minimize the damage to the company that its actions can bring upon itself.
As to actions that bring about criminal liability - companies should not be protected by government from criminal actions any more, than an individual is protected against criminal liability, otherwise the moral hazard basically makes the company into a potential criminal.
Basically you are saying that we should do away with the entire modern economy and go back to something vaguely akin to feudalism.
- no, I am saying we should not be forced to pay for socializing of the costs of doing business.
The companies need to buy enough insurance to limit their liability and they should have practices that limit that liability as well. So BP shouldn't have 70Million USD cap for deep water drilling for example, and banks shouldn't have FDIC.
This would make BP buy more private insurance and price that into the cost of business, and it would cause BP to approach the safety standards in a much more careful way without any government involvement, which is preferable from point of view of the entire market and the planet.
The banks would be forced to buy enough private insurance that would help them get and keep their customers, while not taking insane risks with 97% of deposits (unless there is an explicit agreement with the depositors that this is what will be done in exchange for lucrative returns on that investment, so depositors would be aware of the risk.)
In all cases the failures of businesses would be limited to their shareholders and investors/lenders and would not damage the entire economy.
No. That is a stupid question with an unsubstantiated premise and no evidentiary support.
- except that there is clear support for this fact in the numbers I gave as a link in the original comment. Don't forget that the moment Nixon defaulted on the promise to pay gold for federal reserve notes, the price of gold shot up from $42 and went up all the way to $800, and was only interrupted and pushed back to under $300 by Volcker's actions, who allowed interest rates to go above 20% in 1981.
Compared to what? Currency only has value in relation to something else so what is the something else you are comparing to?
- and if you clicked on the links I gave in the original comment, you would have known.
You may want to patronize this video to get some general understanding of the problem.
The link in the original comment is to my journal, where I explain that HFT is just a normal improvement in efficiency of the process of gambling, that the market is involved in. When I say: there are no investors, what I mean is that people are trading only to make the difference between the buy and sell orders, not to hold the stock for dividends, which would have been the actual investment into a company. What is happening is arbitrage, not investment, which means the stock market is a large casino, a gambling device, not an investment device, and I explain there why that is.
Nothing wrong with HFT itself, which is just taking the gambling part and making it a more efficient process. What's wrong, is that the investment part has been destroyed as a concept by the government monetary and economic policies.
As to recessions - they are normal way to clear out the excesses created by boom parts of the business cycle, which in turn are mostly creation of the federal reserve. The politicians don't allow recessions to run their course, and turn them into depressions.
I predicted the next QE long time ago, it's going on now, the market is just waiting for an honest announcement by the Fed.
What is "normally" in the world, where government provides 70 Million USD liability cap for deep water drilling, as an example? Or where FDIC is created to keep most banks in business?
However limited liability is not just a free market concept (though it can be), it is a government construct, when a corporation is created, it can registered with the government as such by default.
The academia would serve the public much better in terms of education provided to the students, if instead most of the worthless economics courses they'd concentrate on monetary policy and government involvement in banking.
Basically HFT is a symptom of a sickness of the market, it's not a sickness in itself, it's just a more efficient way to gamble in the casino.
You are right, it affects more than just the stocks that are being played by HFT. It affects prices of those stocks, but it also affects the entire market. The flash crash that happened a while back was HFT side effect, certainly it affect the entire market in a bad way (either push it down to nothing or push it up to the maximum number that can be calculated with the hardware/software that is used for price calculations.) This can't possibly be healthy for the rest of the economy.
SEC was specifically notified about Jonathan Lebed's new pump and dump scam involving his company 'NIA', SEC is doing nothing about it. They've known about it since at least 23rd of May of this year.
Without limited liability, only people who were already incredibly rich could hold power in companies
- not true. Government takes the risk out of investment, but it does so by socializing the cost of that investment. A company can still operate by buying appropriate level of insurance, so BP for example, would have to buy enough insurance to cover for some levels of damage, but it also would have much stricter safety controls in place, to prevent levels of liability that would exceed the bought coverage (and nobody wants to ask their insurance to make payments, don't forget, your premiums go up if you actually use your insurance too much.)
TIPS? OUCH! Did I forget to mention that government reported CPI numbers are cooked? They are reversed engineered to make it look like inflation is tiny. BTW., they are about to revise how they are cooking the CPI numbers to make it seem even smaller.
The real inflation is north of 10%, I count closer to 13%.
Here is what I think of the 3 month t-bills and inflation that is created to maintain them.
And if you want to know my advice on investment, all you have to do is look at years and years of my comments here, maybe a story that was submitted but never made it to the front page.
maybe the market would have been healthier and better off with private enterprise and fewer publicly held large monstrosities that pass for businesses, where people would actually have to be liable for decisions they made and they would actually get proper insurance for any liability coverage, maybe the cost of doing business would be more adequately reflected, maybe the oil spills would be few and between, as there would be more caution as to how the drilling is done?
This wouldn't stop all of the problems and there always would be scam artists out there, but at least they wouldn't have current levels of government protection. What about politicians, why are they protected against any real liability that their actions to (against) the public good are causing?
Slashdot Mirror
Pirate Party is basically libertarian.
Here is from wiki:
The party supports the preservation of current civil rights in telephony and on the Internet; in particular, it opposes the European data retention policies and Germany's new Internet censorship law called Zugangserschwerungsgesetz. It also opposes artificial monopolies and various measures of surveillance of citizens.
The party favors the civil right to information privacy and reforms of copyright, education, computer science and genetic patents.
It promotes in particular an enhanced transparency of government by implementing open source governance and providing for APIs to allow for electronic inspection and monitoring of government operations by the citizen.
It is aimed at minimizing government involvement into some specific areas, but anything that is aimed at minimizing government involvement is anti-establishment and may just be a special case of libertarian movement.
There is no such thing as a 'natural monopoly', but there are economies of scale and there are government created monopolies - franchises and AT&T was one of these, and over 3000 companies were destroyed by the government to achieve that.
Ever wondered why Canada is the only industrialized company without a car synonymous with it? Heck, even once communist Russia still has Lada.
- Lada? I thought you said a car.
there should be live streaming of the planet done constantly by many satellites at different latitudes/longitudes, resolutions, frequencies, all sorts of options.
Copyright is part of regulations, which inhibit business formation.
In this case the inhibition comes in form of protection of Microsoft against redistribution of the product bought from them by third parties. Copyright laws do not allow alternative channels of distribution, which would compete with the original creator/provider. You may or may not see this is a 'good' thing, but regardless of the moral objections it prevents competition in distribution of the material from forming by government protection. Also copyright laws are used to prevent variations of work from being distributed, so if somebody bought a disk with any MS application, modified the code and started selling it as well, they would be prosecuted for copyright violation.
It applies to all such works, for example music, writings, software, movies, etc.
Then there are patents, which are even worse in many ways, because they prevent distribution of implementations of ideas by third parties.
The interface-- well, can we just admit that Apple came along and ate everyone else's lunch in the cell phone industry?
- they have a somewhat interesting interface, but I am not going to say that their interface is what I want.
I use Nokia 6303c - that's all I want in a phone and I took the camera out as well and disabled all feature that are not the phone itself.
You give me a phone that has no numeric pad, and you'll see how quickly it ends up in the closest river.
You claimed that all monopolies are created by government.
- I am still claiming it.
Monopolies are systems that are maintained by government regulations, taxation, laws, subsidies. Monopolies do not form in absence of government, in absence of government economies of scale can form, but if they are not serving the public interest of low cost and high value, then they will lose customers to somebody who will provide lower cost and higher value.
Government created the Internet (apranet) and now Google has a monopoly on searching the Internet.
1. Google is not a monopoly.
2. TCP/IP was only one protocol out of variety of other protocols that already existed prior to government involvement. Internet did not have to start from Arpanet, it did only due to money, which as usually was stolen from the people and thrown at military and other government agencies.
PSTN did not need government intervention to become reality. Phone and radio communications are not far removed from other types of communications, so Internet can as well form with completely private entities.
As far as copyright law goes. Everyone that writes software has the same equal protection. How did copyright law give microsoft the advantage over their competitors that benefit equally from said law?
- Nobody was in business of selling software, systems were sold prior to Gates realizing what he had in front of him with government copyright protections.
Open Letter to Hobbyists by Bill Gates.
He understood the value of government protection of copyright and was the first to use it to his advantage in software development and incidentally he became probably the richest person due to software sales.
Uh, I'm a customer and I oppose the merger.
- excellent. Then you have the most important vote of all - vote of your dollars.
You can spend your money elsewhere, and that's the only message that counts. Getting government into this will only worsen the situation in the long run, as all government involvement does.
Gas giants are wannabe stars. They are Pauly Shores of the night skies.
Can you explain to me what is your specific problem with Microsoft?
Free Market allows economies of scale to exist, if a company dominates the market for some time it only means that this is the cheapest product that can be provided at the best quality that can be provided for some time.
Obviously competitors were forming while Microsoft had its success. From Apple to Free software, competition was coming on line.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a company that dominates market for some amount of time, of-course Microsoft gained tremendously from government providing it the protection of copyright law as an example. OTOH Microsoft gained tremendously from getting its first real sales contract with IBM, which is a large company and enjoyed various government protections as well as contracts for a century.
You are welcome.
40% of the third graders in Auburn are not reading at grade level. Superintendent Katy Grodin says to the goal is to fix that number.
- what, they are going to fix this to be 20%?
What do they think iPads do exactly?
Monopolies are only created by government intervention. The lawsuit is brought forward by companies, who are afraid of incoming competition from a larger entity, but the only real monopolies are always enjoying government protection.
Free Market is market that is free of GOVERNMENT intervention, not a market that has no larger economies of scale. Consumers gain from economies of scale, and in this case especially, this is a good move for consumers, as they will see increase of competition, not decrease of it. Government cannot create free market by decree, it only destroys free market by regulations, taxes, subsidies and by creating franchises.
Again and again there is nothing wrong with the merger, it will create more pressure in this market, notice that it is not consumers, who are coming out with the lawsuit, just as always, it is the competing companies, who are afraid they will have to do actual real competition, find ways to cut prices, figure out how to increase customer satisfaction.
The original report is most likely nonsense.
I don't believe that this was just what is reported.
In my top comment I gave a link, which provides data that MIT is not collecting, because MIT is looking only at final goods sold in USA, and since USA exports the inflation to other nations, who buy US dollars and debt, and those other nations produce the stuff USA consumes (53 Billion USD/month trade deficit), it's those other nations that suffer the rising prices immediately, while USA is kept isolated from the very inflation it creates. However the consumer goods are now beginning to reflect the real inflation back at US consumers.
Inflation as calculated by methods used during Nixon's administration is over 11% right now, though numbers I calculate are just a bit higher than that.
Don't forget, during Nixon 4% inflation was enough for government to start price and wage controls (which don't work, they create shortages and black markets).
I shouldn't feed the trolls but...
- you believe my comment is a troll, what should I think about yours?
Really? There were approximately 2 billion shares traded on the New York Stock exchange today. No investors? Really?
- really. You have just described the very nature of current "investment" strategy, which is arbitrage, making the difference between buying and selling, and HFT is just a way to take that concept to its natural maximum efficiency. There is no investment there because the companies' stocks are not bought as a business, not to get dividends, not to participate in their operations.
100% of the point of corporations is to protect investors from liability due to the actions of the corporation in order to encourage them to utilize their capital in productive ways. That is THE fundamental feature of a corporation.
- and this should not be done by government protection.
If a company wants to limit its liabilities, it must do so with private mechanisms - buying enough insurance coverage to minimize the damage to the company that its actions can bring upon itself.
As to actions that bring about criminal liability - companies should not be protected by government from criminal actions any more, than an individual is protected against criminal liability, otherwise the moral hazard basically makes the company into a potential criminal.
Basically you are saying that we should do away with the entire modern economy and go back to something vaguely akin to feudalism.
- no, I am saying we should not be forced to pay for socializing of the costs of doing business.
The companies need to buy enough insurance to limit their liability and they should have practices that limit that liability as well. So BP shouldn't have 70Million USD cap for deep water drilling for example, and banks shouldn't have FDIC.
This would make BP buy more private insurance and price that into the cost of business, and it would cause BP to approach the safety standards in a much more careful way without any government involvement, which is preferable from point of view of the entire market and the planet.
The banks would be forced to buy enough private insurance that would help them get and keep their customers, while not taking insane risks with 97% of deposits (unless there is an explicit agreement with the depositors that this is what will be done in exchange for lucrative returns on that investment, so depositors would be aware of the risk.)
In all cases the failures of businesses would be limited to their shareholders and investors/lenders and would not damage the entire economy.
No. That is a stupid question with an unsubstantiated premise and no evidentiary support.
- except that there is clear support for this fact in the numbers I gave as a link in the original comment. Don't forget that the moment Nixon defaulted on the promise to pay gold for federal reserve notes, the price of gold shot up from $42 and went up all the way to $800, and was only interrupted and pushed back to under $300 by Volcker's actions, who allowed interest rates to go above 20% in 1981.
Compared to what? Currency only has value in relation to something else so what is the something else you are comparing to?
- and if you clicked on the links I gave in the original comment, you would have known.
You may want to patronize this video to get some general understanding of the problem.
The link in the original comment is to my journal, where I explain that HFT is just a normal improvement in efficiency of the process of gambling, that the market is involved in. When I say: there are no investors, what I mean is that people are trading only to make the difference between the buy and sell orders, not to hold the stock for dividends, which would have been the actual investment into a company. What is happening is arbitrage, not investment, which means the stock market is a large casino, a gambling device, not an investment device, and I explain there why that is.
Nothing wrong with HFT itself, which is just taking the gambling part and making it a more efficient process. What's wrong, is that the investment part has been destroyed as a concept by the government monetary and economic policies.
The answer to the question you ask - I do understand all of those concepts. Do you? Here is a good primer for you to start.
As to recessions - they are normal way to clear out the excesses created by boom parts of the business cycle, which in turn are mostly creation of the federal reserve. The politicians don't allow recessions to run their course, and turn them into depressions.
I predicted the next QE long time ago, it's going on now, the market is just waiting for an honest announcement by the Fed.
What is "normally" in the world, where government provides 70 Million USD liability cap for deep water drilling, as an example? Or where FDIC is created to keep most banks in business?
However limited liability is not just a free market concept (though it can be), it is a government construct, when a corporation is created, it can registered with the government as such by default.
The academia would serve the public much better in terms of education provided to the students, if instead most of the worthless economics courses they'd concentrate on monetary policy and government involvement in banking.
Basically HFT is a symptom of a sickness of the market, it's not a sickness in itself, it's just a more efficient way to gamble in the casino.
You are right, it affects more than just the stocks that are being played by HFT. It affects prices of those stocks, but it also affects the entire market. The flash crash that happened a while back was HFT side effect, certainly it affect the entire market in a bad way (either push it down to nothing or push it up to the maximum number that can be calculated with the hardware/software that is used for price calculations.) This can't possibly be healthy for the rest of the economy.
SEC was specifically notified about Jonathan Lebed's new pump and dump scam involving his company 'NIA', SEC is doing nothing about it. They've known about it since at least 23rd of May of this year.
NIA is pumping and dumping Agria Corp (GRO) and Mega Precious Metals (MGP:CN) stock
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8M7Q9T4NfI
http://politicalmetals.com/2011/05/23/the-nia-friend-or-foe-the-schiff-vs-nia-debate/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZItpZ0TWXk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOclEsKHtc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeqD_NRCeTs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQWSBobEbcA
http://fetch.noxsolutions.com/schiff/audio/pa_20110902_low.mp3 - at 1:10 of the show.
SEC does nothing to protect anybody, it's all BS for show.
Without limited liability, only people who were already incredibly rich could hold power in companies
- not true. Government takes the risk out of investment, but it does so by socializing the cost of that investment. A company can still operate by buying appropriate level of insurance, so BP for example, would have to buy enough insurance to cover for some levels of damage, but it also would have much stricter safety controls in place, to prevent levels of liability that would exceed the bought coverage (and nobody wants to ask their insurance to make payments, don't forget, your premiums go up if you actually use your insurance too much.)
TIPS? OUCH! Did I forget to mention that government reported CPI numbers are cooked? They are reversed engineered to make it look like inflation is tiny. BTW., they are about to revise how they are cooking the CPI numbers to make it seem even smaller.
The real inflation is north of 10%, I count closer to 13%.
Here is what I think of the 3 month t-bills and inflation that is created to maintain them.
And if you want to know my advice on investment, all you have to do is look at years and years of my comments here, maybe a story that was submitted but never made it to the front page.
maybe the market would have been healthier and better off with private enterprise and fewer publicly held large monstrosities that pass for businesses, where people would actually have to be liable for decisions they made and they would actually get proper insurance for any liability coverage, maybe the cost of doing business would be more adequately reflected, maybe the oil spills would be few and between, as there would be more caution as to how the drilling is done?
This wouldn't stop all of the problems and there always would be scam artists out there, but at least they wouldn't have current levels of government protection. What about politicians, why are they protected against any real liability that their actions to (against) the public good are causing?