We waste a ton of money on nonsensical programs that should (and would) be done by the private sector.
For example, look at the airline security theater, don't you think that its in American Airlines, United and Delta's best interest to provide enough security to remove the threat of hijackings but not need a full cavity search? Instead, we have the FAA providing asinine rules on what you can and can't take on board a plane, rather than delegating those decisions to the airlines. Because of the FAA restrictions, flying is pretty terrible, because of that fewer people are flying, because fewer people are flying airlines have to cut costs which makes flying even worse, which makes fewer people fly and so on. If airlines (or airports) could be in charge of their own security, we'd be safer (we'd be looking at actual security and not security theater) and flying would be a much more pleasant experience.
We've got a terribly bloated military focused on offense rather than defense. Because of this, we end up creating more enemies which makes us be less safe in the long run. We're spending billions of dollars on unneeded overseas military bases. Sure, it might make sense to have a base or two in a foreign country, especially in some of the "hotter" regions of the world, but do we really need over 10 bases in Japan? Do we really need bases in Spain, Italy, the UK, Bulgaria, Bahrain, Singapore, the UAE, and many, many, other countries? No.
We've got a messed up welfare system, a screwed up financial system, a mess with farm subsidies and just about everything the government touches turns into a bureaucratic hellhole.
No, we're not going to get rid of the national debt by cutting PBS, we're not going to save much money by closing the Washington Monument for tours. But there is a ton of waste, but its in the stuff that the politicians don't want to touch (welfare, the military, farm subsidies, financial sector, etc.) because the public is either ignorant about it or enjoys getting free money at the expense of everyone else.
Show me how you can -truly- counterfeit gold/silver, the only things that have been historically always accepted as money. Sure, you can try to fake it with brass/white metal but under any sort of inspection it fails miserably, its density won't be close to gold and so it will either be the wrong weight or wrong diameter. You can try to fake gold with tungsten but, in all but the largest bars, a simple punch (like what you see on silver/gold bullion ranging from antiquity to present) will bring the counterfeit to light.
Sure, you can counterfeit fiat currency but it isn't money and it will be counterfeited all the time by the issuing authorities. The deathblow of EVERY fiat currency has been death by hyperinflation. The US dollar and bitcoin are no exceptions.
Yes, it is a natural right because it is an extension of the right to protect your life. Just as owning a printing press is an extension of the right to free speech.
And, so long as you can store a nuclear bomb safely (which is unlikely considering the multitude of accidents that have happened from so called "experts" but I suppose could be possible) to avoid violating the rights of those around you, you should be able to own an M-28 Davy Crockett.
So long as what you have isn't harming anyone else, it should be perfectly legal to own.
The answer is to make it easier to buy your product then it is to pirate it.
Price it right, make sure ANYONE can download it (in other words, make sure you have a way of getting money from someone in the US and UK just as easily as you've got a way from a guy in China or India to download your game) and make it easy to find where you can buy it.
If someone really wants to pirate your software, they will. But make sure that the pirated version isn't a superior version to what you offer.
But above all else, you want users, its a whole lot better to be known for a game that everyone's heard of and played and 75% of the people didn't buy then it is to be the creator of a game that no one's heard of and played but the few users who did play the game bought it.
Why would I care if Facebook is tracking on every internet page? What does Facebook do with that information? Do they sell it to "Rapists-R-Us"? Or do they instead sell it to marketers who's job it is to make better products. What a terrible tragedy it is that people want to sell me things that I think I'd like! What a terrible tragedy that marketers can look and see that I like band X and live in general location Y and schedule a tour there if they think there's enough interest.
-shrug- if you don't like tracking, block the cookies. If you don't like Facebook don't have a Facebook account. If you don't like ads use adblock.
No, DRM hasn't "worked" for video and books. Its been made less annoying, but it still hasn't "worked" and it won't "work" in the future. Two reasons why this has happened:
1) eBooks have apps for just about anything. You can read your Kindle on your Kindle, on your iPhone, on your Android, on your PC, on your Mac, etc. And there is a bonus to using these services because theoretically it should keep track of where you are in your book. But when Amazon eventually stops supporting X, customers are screwed.
2) Video is limited by sheer size, downloading a library of 100 songs takes up, what, less than half a gigabyte? Downloading a library of 100 movies in full HD can easily take up several hundred gigabytes. Video is also limited by what devices really "work" for it, you're unlikely to want to watch Netflix on your new iWatch on its 3 inch display. They've also done streaming which makes the DRM more bearable.
But the problems that are inherent in DRM is that it punishes people who want to buy things legitimately, but can't. Just look at region-locking which is often paired with DRM, you're essentially telling someone that if you want what we're selling, you need to acquire it through illegitimate means. I'm sure there's lots of non-Americans who'd pay for Hulu, I'd easily pay the BBC to have access to iPlayer, but instead I pay for VPN/Proxy to access it illegitimately.
How about we stop it with the nanny-state crap and FUD about online and have parents -gasp- parent? You know, like tell you kids basic stuff like don't give out addresses online, don't go meet people online, etc. This will be a never ending battle, anytime a kid does something stupid and gets hurt because of it people will petition the government to "do something" and slowly the internet gets regulated to death.
Seriously, how hard is it to tell your kid don't tell someone where you are and don't meet them?
Except you have a device to create infinite amounts of candy for free using only a single piece of candy and then being told that you can't, not because of any real limitations, but because someone told you that you can't.
The sooner we get rid of artificial scarcity the better.
Part of the reason there's not much interest in next-gen consoles is because, frankly, they haven't come up with many good games yet for them. How many great games are out there for the Wii-U? Er... New Super Mario Bros. U and um... games that have been out for a while on the 360 and PS3? How many great games are out there for the 3DS? Other than remakes, there's Mario Kart, Super Mario 3D Land and Fire Emblem Awakening (which has, admittedly become my latest obsession and perhaps is worth getting a 3DS simply for that game). How many great PS4 games are people waiting for? There really aren't that many great games that have been announced for it.
But, this whole "MS is dying" thing keeps on getting repeated year after year and like before, it is wrong.
MS is not going to lose the desktop to Linux. If they were going to lose the desktop to Linux they would have lost it in 2007/2008 when a combination of a bad OS (Vista) and a new and confusing office suite (Office 2007) could have spelled bad news for MS. But they survived. How is 2013 different than 2007? The desktop market will remain firmly Microsoft's as long as WINE doesn't fully work and as long as proprietary, niche, software companies still release only on Windows (or Windows/OS-X).
Regnal names are used for a number of reasons, for one it adds a bit of "dynasty" to the papacy since Catholics believe that the Popes are an unbroken continuation from Peter, it helps to give more cohesion to the naming. Also, it avoids pitfalls such as having the name of Peter (for example, someone might be born Peter but would not want to take the regnal name of Peter II for obvious reasons!) or to avoid a stigma associated with the name. For example, when Charles Prince of Wales will take the throne he most likely will not be called Charles III because Charles I and Charles II had disastrous reigns and legacies. Instead he will pick something like George VIII since all of the Georges (except for George IV) had pretty respectable reigns.
Ah yes, because Switzerland is such an/unsafe/ country....
Switzerland is a model of how to build a sane foreign policy and a sane military (although they should abolish the draft and have a 100% volunteer army) .
As odd as it may sound, no one wakes up one morning and says "Hey, I feel like being a terrorist!" things like invasions and occupations create terrorists. Supporting right-wing dictators (like the US did throughout the cold war and even beyond) creates terrorists. Drone strikes on civilians create terrorists.
The US has a completely flawed foreign policy, especially as it relates to nuclear arms. They have this idea that apparently in 2013 no one should be able to replicate basic nuclear science that the US did way back in the 1940s! Rather than a sane foreign policy of friendship, understanding and unrestricted trade.
Except that there are still a lot of truly -fun- and awesome commercial games out there. Yeah, there's a bunch of crap commercial games out there (and a lot of crap indie games) but a properly done commercial game tends to outclass even the greatest indie games simply because they can afford the talent, hardware and polish that indie games will never have.
Wake me up when there's an indie equivalent to Fire Emblem (and no, Battle for Wesnoth is not the same thing...) or indeed RPGs in general.
Why is it that developed nations lead in X disease and Y disease? A lot of it has to do with the fact that we screen for and treat these diseases rather than letting them go by unnoticed as they do in most of the less-developed world. Prior to modern medicine, a lot of now easily curable or treatable illnesses were fatal. Just look through a history book and you can see that a decent amount of children died not long after birth. Because of this, you've got people who are predisposed to getting sick living relatively normal, healthy lives in the west but in less developed nations these people would have died during childhood. Because of this we get this "skewed" idea that less developed nations are "healthier" which is not correct, it just is that those who aren't healthy have already died.
The ideal thing is to let vendors sell us whatever they choose but let us modify/unlock/break them however we wish. This allows for the most freedom on both sides.
Eastern KS/Western MO are actually pretty good places for high-tech companies. You've got pretty good infrastructure (Google Fiber anyone?) , a good base of educated workers and a much, much friendlier business environment when compared to silicon valley.
Firefox for Android was important when it was first envisioned because the default browser for Android sucked. Today the default browser is Chrome and its much, much, more usable. About the only thing I think Firefox is better than the stock Android browser (Chrome) is that you can get reliable adblock working for it, something you can't do (or at least couldn't do) with the stock browser.
Keeping your wealth in fiat currency (dollars, bitcoin, used napkins, etc.) is stupid. Sure, people accept US dollars right now, people also accepted Zimbabwe Dollars, people also accepted the Papiermark, etc. And when hyperinflation hit, it hits suddenly and hard. Indeed in the months leading up to the hyperinflation of the Papiermark, German economists said the real danger was DEflation!
Putting faith in fiat currency is like claiming you're immortal.
Gold has value because it has unique properties. As does silver, aluminum, etc. Indeed every physical object has unique properties which give them value. Aluminum is good for making soda cans out of (along with a lot of other things), you can't substitute lead for aluminum and get the same product. Because these things are physical, they also have scarcity. Oxygen is incredibly useful, but its also virtually limitless making its value (in normal situations) quite low. Gold, while arguably less useful than oxygen is much more scarce and has a known rarity.
Bitcoins though do not have unique properties, they exist as nothing more than electrons and variables in a computer system. As they are only data, they have no real scarcity. Now, Bitcoins may be -artificially- scarce, but there's no physical limitation to suddenly printing a couple trillion Bitcoins. You might have faith that they won't just suddenly appear and indeed that faith may be quite reasonable, but there's nothing physically stopping that. On the other hand, try conjuring up more gold. The alchemists of old couldn't do it and indeed there's no easy way of creating gold with modern science (it's possible, but certainly not practical and won't be practical during our lifetimes). Gold has true scarcity, Bitcoin (and other fiat currencies) do not.
Bitcoin requires faith in Bitcoin, faith that:
A) The service will keep running
B) The service is secure (you can't physically hold bitcoins like you can gold)
C) The service will continue operating (with mining and the like) as is and there won't be any major changes that will devalue a bitcoin.
Gold requires faith that:
A) We haven't invented a Star-Trek style replicator
They're both "nothing" and neither are real money.
There's nothing separating a bitcoin, a US dollar or a napkin that says $10000 1337 D0ll@rz on it. They all have next to no intrinsic value, although they all could be used as an exchange mechanism.
Historically, there's been a 100% failure rate for fiat currencies. Despite the conveniences of bitcoin it is still fiat currency just like the Zimbabwe Dollar, the US dollar and the napkin that I doodled $10000 1337 D0ll@rz on.
How many hyper-deflations have occurred? 0.
How many hyper-inflationary events have occurred? A lot. (Zimbabwe, Germany, Hungary, Former Soviet Republics, etc.)
The idea of this gigantic "deflationary spiral" is also a myth
How is gold costly to store? Its no more costly than paper money.
There's no reason why gold has to be different than cash in how you store it. Assuming you don't have fractional-reserve banking (which is by definition fraudulent) you could have a gold-based debit card, gold-based ATMs, heck, you could even have gold-based paper money (like the US had in the form of gold certificates).
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We waste a ton of money on nonsensical programs that should (and would) be done by the private sector.
For example, look at the airline security theater, don't you think that its in American Airlines, United and Delta's best interest to provide enough security to remove the threat of hijackings but not need a full cavity search? Instead, we have the FAA providing asinine rules on what you can and can't take on board a plane, rather than delegating those decisions to the airlines. Because of the FAA restrictions, flying is pretty terrible, because of that fewer people are flying, because fewer people are flying airlines have to cut costs which makes flying even worse, which makes fewer people fly and so on. If airlines (or airports) could be in charge of their own security, we'd be safer (we'd be looking at actual security and not security theater) and flying would be a much more pleasant experience.
We've got a terribly bloated military focused on offense rather than defense. Because of this, we end up creating more enemies which makes us be less safe in the long run. We're spending billions of dollars on unneeded overseas military bases. Sure, it might make sense to have a base or two in a foreign country, especially in some of the "hotter" regions of the world, but do we really need over 10 bases in Japan? Do we really need bases in Spain, Italy, the UK, Bulgaria, Bahrain, Singapore, the UAE, and many, many, other countries? No.
We've got a messed up welfare system, a screwed up financial system, a mess with farm subsidies and just about everything the government touches turns into a bureaucratic hellhole.
No, we're not going to get rid of the national debt by cutting PBS, we're not going to save much money by closing the Washington Monument for tours. But there is a ton of waste, but its in the stuff that the politicians don't want to touch (welfare, the military, farm subsidies, financial sector, etc.) because the public is either ignorant about it or enjoys getting free money at the expense of everyone else.
Show me how you can -truly- counterfeit gold/silver, the only things that have been historically always accepted as money. Sure, you can try to fake it with brass/white metal but under any sort of inspection it fails miserably, its density won't be close to gold and so it will either be the wrong weight or wrong diameter. You can try to fake gold with tungsten but, in all but the largest bars, a simple punch (like what you see on silver/gold bullion ranging from antiquity to present) will bring the counterfeit to light.
Sure, you can counterfeit fiat currency but it isn't money and it will be counterfeited all the time by the issuing authorities. The deathblow of EVERY fiat currency has been death by hyperinflation. The US dollar and bitcoin are no exceptions.
Yes, it is a natural right because it is an extension of the right to protect your life. Just as owning a printing press is an extension of the right to free speech.
And, so long as you can store a nuclear bomb safely (which is unlikely considering the multitude of accidents that have happened from so called "experts" but I suppose could be possible) to avoid violating the rights of those around you, you should be able to own an M-28 Davy Crockett.
So long as what you have isn't harming anyone else, it should be perfectly legal to own.
The answer is to make it easier to buy your product then it is to pirate it.
Price it right, make sure ANYONE can download it (in other words, make sure you have a way of getting money from someone in the US and UK just as easily as you've got a way from a guy in China or India to download your game) and make it easy to find where you can buy it.
If someone really wants to pirate your software, they will. But make sure that the pirated version isn't a superior version to what you offer.
But above all else, you want users, its a whole lot better to be known for a game that everyone's heard of and played and 75% of the people didn't buy then it is to be the creator of a game that no one's heard of and played but the few users who did play the game bought it.
Why would I care if Facebook is tracking on every internet page? What does Facebook do with that information? Do they sell it to "Rapists-R-Us"? Or do they instead sell it to marketers who's job it is to make better products. What a terrible tragedy it is that people want to sell me things that I think I'd like! What a terrible tragedy that marketers can look and see that I like band X and live in general location Y and schedule a tour there if they think there's enough interest.
-shrug- if you don't like tracking, block the cookies. If you don't like Facebook don't have a Facebook account. If you don't like ads use adblock.
Myself, I really couldn't care less.
No, DRM hasn't "worked" for video and books. Its been made less annoying, but it still hasn't "worked" and it won't "work" in the future. Two reasons why this has happened:
1) eBooks have apps for just about anything. You can read your Kindle on your Kindle, on your iPhone, on your Android, on your PC, on your Mac, etc. And there is a bonus to using these services because theoretically it should keep track of where you are in your book. But when Amazon eventually stops supporting X, customers are screwed.
2) Video is limited by sheer size, downloading a library of 100 songs takes up, what, less than half a gigabyte? Downloading a library of 100 movies in full HD can easily take up several hundred gigabytes. Video is also limited by what devices really "work" for it, you're unlikely to want to watch Netflix on your new iWatch on its 3 inch display. They've also done streaming which makes the DRM more bearable.
But the problems that are inherent in DRM is that it punishes people who want to buy things legitimately, but can't. Just look at region-locking which is often paired with DRM, you're essentially telling someone that if you want what we're selling, you need to acquire it through illegitimate means. I'm sure there's lots of non-Americans who'd pay for Hulu, I'd easily pay the BBC to have access to iPlayer, but instead I pay for VPN/Proxy to access it illegitimately.
How about we stop it with the nanny-state crap and FUD about online and have parents -gasp- parent? You know, like tell you kids basic stuff like don't give out addresses online, don't go meet people online, etc. This will be a never ending battle, anytime a kid does something stupid and gets hurt because of it people will petition the government to "do something" and slowly the internet gets regulated to death.
Seriously, how hard is it to tell your kid don't tell someone where you are and don't meet them?
Except you have a device to create infinite amounts of candy for free using only a single piece of candy and then being told that you can't, not because of any real limitations, but because someone told you that you can't.
The sooner we get rid of artificial scarcity the better.
Part of the reason there's not much interest in next-gen consoles is because, frankly, they haven't come up with many good games yet for them. How many great games are out there for the Wii-U? Er... New Super Mario Bros. U and um... games that have been out for a while on the 360 and PS3? How many great games are out there for the 3DS? Other than remakes, there's Mario Kart, Super Mario 3D Land and Fire Emblem Awakening (which has, admittedly become my latest obsession and perhaps is worth getting a 3DS simply for that game). How many great PS4 games are people waiting for? There really aren't that many great games that have been announced for it.
But, this whole "MS is dying" thing keeps on getting repeated year after year and like before, it is wrong.
MS is not going to lose the desktop to Linux. If they were going to lose the desktop to Linux they would have lost it in 2007/2008 when a combination of a bad OS (Vista) and a new and confusing office suite (Office 2007) could have spelled bad news for MS. But they survived. How is 2013 different than 2007? The desktop market will remain firmly Microsoft's as long as WINE doesn't fully work and as long as proprietary, niche, software companies still release only on Windows (or Windows/OS-X).
Regnal names are used for a number of reasons, for one it adds a bit of "dynasty" to the papacy since Catholics believe that the Popes are an unbroken continuation from Peter, it helps to give more cohesion to the naming. Also, it avoids pitfalls such as having the name of Peter (for example, someone might be born Peter but would not want to take the regnal name of Peter II for obvious reasons!) or to avoid a stigma associated with the name. For example, when Charles Prince of Wales will take the throne he most likely will not be called Charles III because Charles I and Charles II had disastrous reigns and legacies. Instead he will pick something like George VIII since all of the Georges (except for George IV) had pretty respectable reigns.
Ah yes, because Switzerland is such an /unsafe/ country....
Switzerland is a model of how to build a sane foreign policy and a sane military (although they should abolish the draft and have a 100% volunteer army) .
As odd as it may sound, no one wakes up one morning and says "Hey, I feel like being a terrorist!" things like invasions and occupations create terrorists. Supporting right-wing dictators (like the US did throughout the cold war and even beyond) creates terrorists. Drone strikes on civilians create terrorists.
The US has a completely flawed foreign policy, especially as it relates to nuclear arms. They have this idea that apparently in 2013 no one should be able to replicate basic nuclear science that the US did way back in the 1940s! Rather than a sane foreign policy of friendship, understanding and unrestricted trade.
Except that there are still a lot of truly -fun- and awesome commercial games out there. Yeah, there's a bunch of crap commercial games out there (and a lot of crap indie games) but a properly done commercial game tends to outclass even the greatest indie games simply because they can afford the talent, hardware and polish that indie games will never have.
Wake me up when there's an indie equivalent to Fire Emblem (and no, Battle for Wesnoth is not the same thing...) or indeed RPGs in general.
Correlation != causation.
Why is it that developed nations lead in X disease and Y disease? A lot of it has to do with the fact that we screen for and treat these diseases rather than letting them go by unnoticed as they do in most of the less-developed world. Prior to modern medicine, a lot of now easily curable or treatable illnesses were fatal. Just look through a history book and you can see that a decent amount of children died not long after birth. Because of this, you've got people who are predisposed to getting sick living relatively normal, healthy lives in the west but in less developed nations these people would have died during childhood. Because of this we get this "skewed" idea that less developed nations are "healthier" which is not correct, it just is that those who aren't healthy have already died.
The ideal thing is to let vendors sell us whatever they choose but let us modify/unlock/break them however we wish. This allows for the most freedom on both sides.
Eastern KS/Western MO are actually pretty good places for high-tech companies. You've got pretty good infrastructure (Google Fiber anyone?) , a good base of educated workers and a much, much friendlier business environment when compared to silicon valley.
Firefox for Android was important when it was first envisioned because the default browser for Android sucked. Today the default browser is Chrome and its much, much, more usable. About the only thing I think Firefox is better than the stock Android browser (Chrome) is that you can get reliable adblock working for it, something you can't do (or at least couldn't do) with the stock browser.
Keeping your wealth in fiat currency (dollars, bitcoin, used napkins, etc.) is stupid. Sure, people accept US dollars right now, people also accepted Zimbabwe Dollars, people also accepted the Papiermark, etc. And when hyperinflation hit, it hits suddenly and hard. Indeed in the months leading up to the hyperinflation of the Papiermark, German economists said the real danger was DEflation!
Putting faith in fiat currency is like claiming you're immortal.
Gold has value because it has unique properties. As does silver, aluminum, etc. Indeed every physical object has unique properties which give them value. Aluminum is good for making soda cans out of (along with a lot of other things), you can't substitute lead for aluminum and get the same product. Because these things are physical, they also have scarcity. Oxygen is incredibly useful, but its also virtually limitless making its value (in normal situations) quite low. Gold, while arguably less useful than oxygen is much more scarce and has a known rarity.
Bitcoins though do not have unique properties, they exist as nothing more than electrons and variables in a computer system. As they are only data, they have no real scarcity. Now, Bitcoins may be -artificially- scarce, but there's no physical limitation to suddenly printing a couple trillion Bitcoins. You might have faith that they won't just suddenly appear and indeed that faith may be quite reasonable, but there's nothing physically stopping that. On the other hand, try conjuring up more gold. The alchemists of old couldn't do it and indeed there's no easy way of creating gold with modern science (it's possible, but certainly not practical and won't be practical during our lifetimes). Gold has true scarcity, Bitcoin (and other fiat currencies) do not.
Bitcoin requires faith in Bitcoin, faith that:
A) The service will keep running
B) The service is secure (you can't physically hold bitcoins like you can gold)
C) The service will continue operating (with mining and the like) as is and there won't be any major changes that will devalue a bitcoin.
Gold requires faith that:
A) We haven't invented a Star-Trek style replicator
They're both "nothing" and neither are real money.
There's nothing separating a bitcoin, a US dollar or a napkin that says $10000 1337 D0ll@rz on it. They all have next to no intrinsic value, although they all could be used as an exchange mechanism.
Historically, there's been a 100% failure rate for fiat currencies. Despite the conveniences of bitcoin it is still fiat currency just like the Zimbabwe Dollar, the US dollar and the napkin that I doodled $10000 1337 D0ll@rz on.
Deflation is a silly thing to be worried about.
How many hyper-deflations have occurred? 0.
How many hyper-inflationary events have occurred? A lot. (Zimbabwe, Germany, Hungary, Former Soviet Republics, etc.)
The idea of this gigantic "deflationary spiral" is also a myth
http://mises.org/daily/1254
Does a good job of explaining it.
How is gold costly to store? Its no more costly than paper money.
There's no reason why gold has to be different than cash in how you store it. Assuming you don't have fractional-reserve banking (which is by definition fraudulent) you could have a gold-based debit card, gold-based ATMs, heck, you could even have gold-based paper money (like the US had in the form of gold certificates).
Yep, there's lots of people who go on vacation to North Korea, certainly not something for everyone but it would be interesting nonetheless.
...You hope.
I've got more faith in a supreme pizza than I do the supreme court...
Just privatize the USPS or remove the monopoly and let the free market take its course like it should have back in 1844...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company
It all started in 1844...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company