Have a drink from my infinite glass of water, the first sip is free. Dumbass, just because economists have BELIEVED the economy can expand infinitely in a finite world doesn't make it so. Ever heard of little discipline called physics?
Yeah I'm sure living conditions are real great for Vietnamese Nike workers, say why don't you quit your Irish driving school job and go there then? Oh not for you, eh? You ARE a racist shithead exploiter, or at least a wannabe, how nice.
I'd be surprised if we even ever get 100 people off planet. The amount of energy it would take is just staggering, and we will be VERY lucky to maintain any sort of standard of living HERE on earth after peak oil hits in a maximum of 20 years. So no I'm not willing to offhandadly trash our beautiful living planet so a few greedy shitheads can go out into space. Note this does not mean I'm against science. I think much cheaper unmanned probes to gain scientific knowledge are a wonderful idea, but it's sheer fantasy to think there will be a mass migration off our planet and it encourages people to be irresponsible with our limited resources.
Yeah monopolies and cartels never happen that why Microsoft never happened, and everyone has a Fox news style media empire that reaches hundreds of millions of people a day in their basement how silly of me. Of course posting to a slashot forum equals having the power over policy and wealth of Rupert Murdoch how could I have not seen that?
Any other childish fallacies you hold that you would like me to crush?
My point was if you are going to be an asshole on purpose and cause great misery and destruction and then obfuscate your evil deeds with a pseudoscience called "economics" don't be surprised that when people figure out your scam that they don't like you. People don't like being scammed and mocked, screw that, yes I'm speaking very directly, oh gasp how terrible I might hurt some upper middle class exploiters FEELINGS.
And I call bullshit on the fundamental premise of your post, there is a difference between "owning" (which is really just existing) your body and the very basic housing you need to survive and "property" which can be unlimited in it's extent while other people suffer in great misery. Native Americans for example "owned" their own bodies, tools, and houses with no idea whatsoever of the abstraction of a possible infinite accumulation of property.
Economists in my opinion are the rationalizers of the great evil of 10 percent of the U.S. population owning as much as the bottom 40% of the poorest people in the world. Paying people less than a dollar an hour while your have billions as Phil Knight who owns Nike does is evil.
No Phil is not 10,000 times more "productive" than one of his workers in Vietnam who works in stifling hot conditions for 12 hour shifts with few bathroom breaks so she can go back to a tiny shack and a plate of beans and rice.
As far as I'm concerned by providing the intellectual version of spin in fancy charts and statistical analysis that are based on on fundamentally flawed premises economists serve much the same function in society as Nazi propagandists like Goebbels did, i.e. putting a happy face on misery and destruction. And what are some of these false premises?
1. Economics is predicated on the idea of infinite expansion and in fact it's necessary for the economy to function. Clearly this is a fallacy because infinite expansion is not possible on a finite planet. Why is infinite expansion part of economics, because banks when they give out loans by creating a loan account in essence create money out of nothing, and that newly created money must be paid back by expanded production or the whole pyramid scheme of bank financing collapses because banks loan out more money than they have in savings and checking accounts.
2. Currency speculation can expand the money supply without actually creating more productive activity. This in turn leads to bubbles like the Asian financial crisis, the great depression, the dot com bust, and the current perilous housing market are just 4 examples of. Thus fundamental instability in capital financing again leads to great suffering throughout the world.
3. Pure capitalism leads to monopolies which destroy the competition that Adam Smith's self organizing principles of economics are based on. Yet most supply side economic theory does nothing to reign in pernicious monopolies and their distorting effects on society. Do I really need to talk about Microsoft here on slashdot? Look up Bechtel, Haliburton, Shell in Nigeria, Coke in India, Union Carbide in Bhopal, Nike in Vietnam, and when you have read of the great suffering these companies have caused feel free to shove your charts and graphs up your ass.
4. Pure capitalism has no easy way to quantify externalities and thus encourages pollution as long as the pollution doesn't directly damage the property owners own property.
5. Closely related pure capitalism cannot distinguish destructive activity from non destructive activity except through the wild guess of "opportunity cost." Thus for example war by the U.S. and Israel is very profitable for Boeing the Carlyle group and their friends and guess what again causes great suffering in the world. And rebuilding the destroyed societies as vassals of U.S. multinationals is also a "gain" for the GDP.
So if your claim that I made a "typo" is based on some economic terminology I'll pass and use my own terms thanks.
I also recommend you read "The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism"
Where a Stanford business school PHD takes down the fundamentally flawed assumptions in contemporary economic theory that underpins the globalist juggernaut.
Other than Apple computer and a few medical advances that are only available to the supper rich, I'd say, yep. The environment is shit, millions have neither health nor even decent shelter, and kids are painfully ignorant of even basic history, science, literature, art, etc. While we may have few technical accomplishments under our belt we have peaked as a culture or a decent place to live for all but the upper 10% of the "middle" class.
And then imagine a world in which the British crushed the American revolution, the FBI entrapped Dr. Martin Luther King, and strike organizers who brought us the 40 hour work week were jailed forever. For that's what would have happened had your world been true in the past. In short imagine a stagnant world where no social change is possible because the forces of control are invincible. Sometimes secrecy is needed to hide and gain strength before overthrowing the forces of evil. We MUST preserve freedom because the outlines of the evil we may need to crush in the future may not be clear to us now, but I'd hazard a guess they are spelled G O V E R N M E N T. Thomas Jefferson said the tree of liberty must occasionally be watered with the blood of patriots. In a world where no one can secretly write manifestos to organize people, store arms in secret, etc, the organization necessary to overthrow tyranny could NEVER arise. It would be like the end of 1984 "imagine a boot heel stomping on a human face forever.
My meme along these lines in the ninja anarchist library castles. The basic idea is to set up a solar powered server with several terrabytes of storage and high powered wi-fi (remember we are talking Mad Max here so rules and regs re outtie). The basic idea is that if civilization crumbles that engineering knowledge, ethics, history, agriculture, art, etc, can be saved so we don't just have to start from scratch as ignorant peasants. As I said on my blog treefunk.net/forum/ it would cost about 3000 dollars and even if the end of the world doesn't happen it's still cool for the price of a beat to shit used car
The sad thing is I typed "out" instead of "our" because I was rushing to get the joke in first. Must get a life, must get a life... Can I order it online, maybe with some jolt to go?
You 100% missed the point of the article. The reason we don't have Hunter Thompson quality writers is that we stopped writing about human experience and substituted stilted writing about tech. A machine is never going to be as interesting as an intense human experience like driving through the desert high on illegal drugs. Now that's fine if we WANT to chose to write boring tech articles instead of literature. But please don't confuse that with more or less technically detailed tech articles it is an entirely different issue.
On a slightly more serious note the way we live is going to be over in roughly 50-60 years anyway. We are currently in a race between global warming, peak oil, and war in the middle east to see which will end the viability of fossil fuels as a source of energy. While the pessimists may be exaggerating to say we are in the crisis now, certainly in 15 years it will be a full on depression inducing economic crisis. What are the energy alternatives? Coal, and nuclear basically to provide the kind of power that is equivalent to todays energy output. Both of these sources of energy have severe problems. For nuclear all my research indicates that we have roughly 40 years of easily obtainable Uranium left and that's at current rates of consumption, far less if we ramp up to say France's level of using nukes. Then there is the obvious problem of the nuclear fuel cycle in the age of terrorism. If EVERY city has at least one nuke plant the whole society will have to go into lock down mode as obviously we can't let terrorists get even radioactive waste or it can be used for a dirty bomb. As far as I'm concerned we already live in something close to a police state (hence the original topic 1984) ubiquitous nuclear power would make it that much worse and for roughly 40 years more power, no thanks.
As for coal to assume we can keep exponentially expanding our energy usage with a fossil fuel just seems laughable, it's just asking for runaway CO2 induced global warming, Venus ring a bell?
Biofuels, nyat, it's a crime to grow food crops to fuel cars when people are already starving in the world. To turn over half our agricultural lands to biofuel production so Americans can continue to commute to their mini mansions in SUVs is un-possible.
That leaves niche energy sources like wind, solar, and hydro. Places like the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. for example may be fairly well off in terms of electricity as they already get a lot of their electricity from hydro, most places won't be so lucky. I'd be very surprised if we could reach even 20% of our current energy output in the U.S. with alternative energy and that's current output with NO growth that our current economic system is predicated on for survival. Constant growth BTW is another fundamental flaw in economics. No finite closed system like the earth can support compound growth forever.
So there you have it, your globe spanning corporations are doomed anyway within the life of currently living people, might as well get used to the idea and figure out to make the transition as graceful as possible. Our current model of exploiting people and planet for a quick buck is not sustainable in the long run. And yes I hope we retain say a basic communications infrastructure and say medicine at the level Cuba has (they use 1/8th the U.S.'s energy and have comparable life spans to the U.S.) but the model of global corporate plunder is going to get snuffed by mother nature you can count on it.
You missed my point entirely. My point is that a distro like Ubuntu is just as easy to install as Windows XP and just as usable for e-mail, web surfing, and basic photo editing which is what 90% of mainstream people use computers for. Yet people don't even know this because poorly distributed information, vendor lock in, and FUD. Your "business economic theory" you were encouraging me to read up on ASSUMES "rational actors" yet rational actors are a-priori impossible when there is not transparent information and phenomena like vendor lock in. The problems with economic theory and how they lead to poor choices in actual markets was the point of my post.
Further I suspect many people would be appalled at what Microsoft pays programmers in India. Note I say I suspect because i don't know because that information because it is VERY hard to find, but if it follows so called market values, i.e. what owners are willing to pay it is no doubt appallingly low pay for EXACTLY the same work that would net you a hundred grand a year in the U.S. That not only exploits workers in India but puts downward pressure on coders wages here.
In some ways corporations are more socialist than co-ops ironically. Again the profit motive encourages large corporations to externalize their costs by say dumping pollution into the environment where the costs of the sickness the pollution causes are born by society at large. Co-ops not operating under the constraints of the profit system have much less pressure to externalize their costs and thus ironically despite being collectives operate overall in a far less socialist fashion than large corporations. Look up externalities in that "dismal science" "business economics" text book of yours. Or do they skip talking abpout externalites now days? Hmmmmmm...
The limited liability corporation that is now considered a person, and that is under legal obligation to return maximum profit to investors creates incentives to lie. The reason is simple if you can produce a product for the least cost by polluting the environment, and screwing the workers, and consumers don't know the conditions the product is made in you will make the most profit and the greatest return on investment. Thus it's in your self interest to lie to your customers about the way your product is produced. This lying in turn destroys the transparent information consumers need for the market to operate correctly under "rational actor theory" which is a fundamental premise of economics. Corporations thus actually destroy markets and tend towards monopoly, lying, and corruption. It is this sort of blatant contradiction that is at the heart of economic theory and which plays out in the real world in the disgusting exploitation seen in economic globalization that makes me loath economists as apologists for evil that causes suffering. Nike ring a bell? Microsoft? Union Carbide in Bhopal? Do I really need to keep giving examples of how this plays out or do you get the point already?
And yes there is an alternative it's co-ops that share profits fairly, small businesses, open source software development, and other such business models that allow for multiple actors in a market thus allowing for competition, yet without the blatant exploitation and degraded environment the corporate capitalist model inevitably produces. Visit your local food co-op, community garden, and fire up Ubuntu Linux some time. You might learn something far more valuable than you will learn from an economics text book.
Don't assume all us "hippy" alternative people are stupid and haven't thought this out.
The best value for your dollar would be Linux for 90+% of people. Too bad Microsoft's billions they spend spreading FUD scare people from actually finding that out. Being a rational actor as economic theory demands is NOT possible if information is unequally distributed and not transparant and truthful in its nature. It looks like economic theory made another false assumption that is not met under actual emperical conditions you see in real markets, oops.
And guess what I'm typing this from the Firefox browser under Ubuntu, total cost free, and developed using cooperative principles. No socialism or coercion involved either to arrive at that open, democratic, free (in all senses of the word) development model.
How do you you like them apples? Or should I say lack of Apples?
Would that be the same business economics that would say Windows is the best operating system because it made Bill Gates makes the most money? Oops. As far as I'm concerned economics is an advanced snow job to try to convince people that it's in their best interest to receive a small amount of pay and to use up the planets resources at an exponentially growing rate such that our generation may be the last one to live any kind of decent life whatsoever so the current generation of Americans can buy mounds of cheap crap at Wal-Mart. Yes economics involves a lot of advanced calculus using derivatives and integrals and some fancy statistical techniques as well. Yet if the fundamental assumptions are wrong or biased then all those fancy 3-d charts and graphs are meaningless. For example does a greater GNP equal a happier life? Not if the things we are producing kill us with stress and pollution, and only 1% of the population really benefits from the increased wealth. I'm old school and back in the day there was a saying about bad code, garbage in garbage out, or GIGO. From what I can see most economics that assume the economies can grow forever and mainly benefit a small elite while stripping the planet of resources is GIGO. There are limits both to our resources and to how long people in the third world will put up with being driven off their land when we dump GMOd agricultural produce on their markets, and then how long they'll put up with working in factories after being made landless and homeless for less than a buck an hour while their drinking water and other fundamental needs have been "privatized" by the IMF. Bechtel was driven out of Bolivia by angry mobs after the IMF contracted them to privatize Bolivia's water supply.
Who's going to be the next multinational corporation to be driven out of a country by an angry mob? Hint WTO meetings need to be held on isolated islands because the G8 leaders and business interests are loathed so much by people for the terrible suffering they have caused.
So again I don't want to hear any crap about economics. Corporate globalization causes many people to suffer so a VERY few can live in obscene luxury despite what direction a graph may point in your economics textbook. There are graphs that are abstract and deceptive, and then there are empirical FACTS on the ground I suggest you do some reading about the facts on the ground. Start here:
No asshole who runs an oil company deserves a 400 million dollar retirement package:
"Where are the excess profits going? One flow is into the huge executive salaries and retirement packages. ExxonMobil's retired CEO, Lee Raymond, got his rubber-stamp board to give him one man a $400 million going away package."
There is NOTHING they have done to deserve that compensation period, end of story. Not only did they not work harder than the person cleaning the toilet they worked FAR less hard. Don't be surprised that this sort of rip off results in anger when people find out about it. By engaging in way excessive greed in the long run you will kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Georgie boys popularity is in the 30s, people are starting to figure out what you strip the assets and run corporate con artists are all about.
For example Charles Hurowitz made hundreds of millions of dollars stripping assets from Pacific Lumber and logging the Redwood forests of Humboldt county at an unsustainable rate. Not only did that cause landslides that killed people, floods, and irreparable environmental damage, but it ruined the town of Scotia, and destroyed a family owned lumber company. See this article for details
So don't even give me that bullshit about how the market fairly compensates people for hard work, more often than not the market produces barren eco-systems, ripped off workers, and corporate crooks who fly the coop with hundreds of millions of dollars leaving wrecked communities and bankrupt corporations in their wake.
And no I don't believe in the government either, your best bet is to ALWAYS scrutinize large unaccountable organizations that have control over your life or resources. Screw both the U.S. government and the corporations for the terrible suffering and destruction both have caused in the world.
You left out one little fact that the OWNERS CHOOSE to pay the more common job that much less. Don't pretend like it's a law of physics take some damn responsibility for the greed and avarice of corporate owners and managers. You conservatives like responsibility unless it's your ox getting gored then you whine and beg for corporate welfare like defense contracts, and you try to avoid responsibility for the DESCIONS of the amount you CHOOSE to pay. ASSHOLES!!!!!!!
So many errors in logic it's hard to even know where to begin.
You said: "But if you turned Big Brother into a democratically-appointed surveillance system that could only watch and didn't have the Thought Police, well, then Orwell's story becomes about as spooky as Minority Report. Less, even."
How can you have a true democracy and the sort of secrecy the Bush admen (or any police state) engages in? If you don't know what the government is doing you don't know what you are voting for and democracy is dead, it's just that simple.
You said: "Nope. I presume that someone, either man or God, is observing me every minute of every day. I exercise my freedoms as I see fit, with the full expectation that someone will observe and, eventually, I will be called to account for my actions. (This is one of the surprisingly modern parts of Christianity, bow -- "and what you whisper in shadows will be shouted from rooftops" and all that.)"
By that standard we'd still be the British commonwealth of the Americas and we'd still have a U.S.S.R. All those nasty dissidents would have been "called to account" by the laws of those respective nations. Does it ever occur to you that laws can be wrong and sometimes the good guys are held "accountable" by bad people? Remember everything Nazi Germany, the U.S.S.R., and 1760s Britain did to the U.S. did was LEGAL in their respective countries.
Finally you said: "(There, now I'm being superior.)"
If by that you mean being a smug elitist asshole. An attitude entirely toxic to the openness necessary for democracy to function.
Slashdot Mirror
Have a drink from my infinite glass of water, the first sip is free. Dumbass, just because economists have BELIEVED the economy can expand infinitely in a finite world doesn't make it so. Ever heard of little discipline called physics?
Yeah I'm sure living conditions are real great for Vietnamese Nike workers, say why don't you quit your Irish driving school job and go there then? Oh not for you, eh? You ARE a racist shithead exploiter, or at least a wannabe, how nice.
I'd be surprised if we even ever get 100 people off planet. The amount of energy it would take is just staggering, and we will be VERY lucky to maintain any sort of standard of living HERE on earth after peak oil hits in a maximum of 20 years. So no I'm not willing to offhandadly trash our beautiful living planet so a few greedy shitheads can go out into space. Note this does not mean I'm against science. I think much cheaper unmanned probes to gain scientific knowledge are a wonderful idea, but it's sheer fantasy to think there will be a mass migration off our planet and it encourages people to be irresponsible with our limited resources.
Yeah monopolies and cartels never happen that why Microsoft never happened, and everyone has a Fox news style media empire that reaches hundreds of millions of people a day in their basement how silly of me. Of course posting to a slashot forum equals having the power over policy and wealth of Rupert Murdoch how could I have not seen that?
Any other childish fallacies you hold that you would like me to crush?
My point was if you are going to be an asshole on purpose and cause great misery and destruction and then obfuscate your evil deeds with a pseudoscience called "economics" don't be surprised that when people figure out your scam that they don't like you. People don't like being scammed and mocked, screw that, yes I'm speaking very directly, oh gasp how terrible I might hurt some upper middle class exploiters FEELINGS.
The sig is the little tag below your responses which you can set in your user prefernces.
...shove it where the sun don't shine
2 04872-9747219?v=glance&n=283155
And I call bullshit on the fundamental premise of your post, there is a difference between "owning" (which is really just existing) your body and the very basic housing you need to survive and "property" which can be unlimited in it's extent while other people suffer in great misery. Native Americans for example "owned" their own bodies, tools, and houses with no idea whatsoever of the abstraction of a possible infinite accumulation of property.
Economists in my opinion are the rationalizers of the great evil of 10 percent of the U.S. population owning as much as the bottom 40% of the poorest people in the world. Paying people less than a dollar an hour while your have billions as Phil Knight who owns Nike does is evil.
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/10/2KZ5.html
No Phil is not 10,000 times more "productive" than one of his workers in Vietnam who works in stifling hot conditions for 12 hour shifts with few bathroom breaks so she can go back to a tiny shack and a plate of beans and rice.
As far as I'm concerned by providing the intellectual version of spin in fancy charts and statistical analysis that are based on on fundamentally flawed premises economists serve much the same function in society as Nazi propagandists like Goebbels did, i.e. putting a happy face on misery and destruction. And what are some of these false premises?
1. Economics is predicated on the idea of infinite expansion and in fact it's necessary for the economy to function. Clearly this is a fallacy because infinite expansion is not possible on a finite planet. Why is infinite expansion part of economics, because banks when they give out loans by creating a loan account in essence create money out of nothing, and that newly created money must be paid back by expanded production or the whole pyramid scheme of bank financing collapses because banks loan out more money than they have in savings and checking accounts.
2. Currency speculation can expand the money supply without actually creating more productive activity. This in turn leads to bubbles like the Asian financial crisis, the great depression, the dot com bust, and the current perilous housing market are just 4 examples of. Thus fundamental instability in capital financing again leads to great suffering throughout the world.
3. Pure capitalism leads to monopolies which destroy the competition that Adam Smith's self organizing principles of economics are based on. Yet most supply side economic theory does nothing to reign in pernicious monopolies and their distorting effects on society. Do I really need to talk about Microsoft here on slashdot? Look up Bechtel, Haliburton, Shell in Nigeria, Coke in India, Union Carbide in Bhopal, Nike in Vietnam, and when you have read of the great suffering these companies have caused feel free to shove your charts and graphs up your ass.
4. Pure capitalism has no easy way to quantify externalities and thus encourages pollution as long as the pollution doesn't directly damage the property owners own property.
5. Closely related pure capitalism cannot distinguish destructive activity from non destructive activity except through the wild guess of "opportunity cost." Thus for example war by the U.S. and Israel is very profitable for Boeing the Carlyle group and their friends and guess what again causes great suffering in the world. And rebuilding the destroyed societies as vassals of U.S. multinationals is also a "gain" for the GDP.
So if your claim that I made a "typo" is based on some economic terminology I'll pass and use my own terms thanks.
I also recommend you read "The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1887208038/002-0
Where a Stanford business school PHD takes down the fundamentally flawed assumptions in contemporary economic theory that underpins the globalist juggernaut.
Other than Apple computer and a few medical advances that are only available to the supper rich, I'd say, yep. The environment is shit, millions have neither health nor even decent shelter, and kids are painfully ignorant of even basic history, science, literature, art, etc. While we may have few technical accomplishments under our belt we have peaked as a culture or a decent place to live for all but the upper 10% of the "middle" class.
And then imagine a world in which the British crushed the American revolution, the FBI entrapped Dr. Martin Luther King, and strike organizers who brought us the 40 hour work week were jailed forever. For that's what would have happened had your world been true in the past. In short imagine a stagnant world where no social change is possible because the forces of control are invincible. Sometimes secrecy is needed to hide and gain strength before overthrowing the forces of evil.
We MUST preserve freedom because the outlines of the evil we may need to crush in the future may not be clear to us now, but I'd hazard a guess they are spelled G O V E R N M E N T. Thomas Jefferson said the tree of liberty must occasionally be watered with the blood of patriots. In a world where no one can secretly write manifestos to organize people, store arms in secret, etc, the organization necessary to overthrow tyranny could NEVER arise. It would be like the end of 1984 "imagine a boot heel stomping on a human face forever.
Typo?
...yesterday exactly why?
" YouTube Gore spoof has murky origins Sat Aug 05, '06 12:08 AM Rejected"
Yes I know no complaints, yet I dare to anyway, bye, bye karma, nice knowing you.
Oh yeah books for when the power goes out completly, oops...
My meme along these lines in the ninja anarchist library castles. The basic idea is to set up a solar powered server with several terrabytes of storage and high powered wi-fi (remember we are talking Mad Max here so rules and regs re outtie). The basic idea is that if civilization crumbles that engineering knowledge, ethics, history, agriculture, art, etc, can be saved so we don't just have to start from scratch as ignorant peasants. As I said on my blog treefunk.net/forum/ it would cost about 3000 dollars and even if the end of the world doesn't happen it's still cool for the price of a beat to shit used car
...now I can run the holodeck in my moms basement. Oh, wait that might trip a circuit breaker, nevermind...
The sad thing is I typed "out" instead of "our" because I was rushing to get the joke in first. Must get a life, must get a life... Can I order it online, maybe with some jolt to go?
welcome out Linux running soda machine overlords.
You 100% missed the point of the article. The reason we don't have Hunter Thompson quality writers is that we stopped writing about human experience and substituted stilted writing about tech. A machine is never going to be as interesting as an intense human experience like driving through the desert high on illegal drugs. Now that's fine if we WANT to chose to write boring tech articles instead of literature. But please don't confuse that with more or less technically detailed tech articles it is an entirely different issue.
On a slightly more serious note the way we live is going to be over in roughly 50-60 years anyway.
We are currently in a race between global warming, peak oil, and war in the middle east to see which will end the viability of fossil fuels as a source of energy. While the pessimists may be exaggerating to say we are in the crisis now, certainly in 15 years it will be a full on depression inducing economic crisis. What are the energy alternatives? Coal, and nuclear basically to provide the kind of power that is equivalent to todays energy output. Both of these sources of energy have severe problems. For nuclear all my research indicates that we have roughly 40 years of easily obtainable Uranium left and that's at current rates of consumption, far less if we ramp up to say France's level of using nukes. Then there is the obvious problem of the nuclear fuel cycle in the age of terrorism. If EVERY city has at least one nuke plant the whole society will have to go into lock down mode as obviously we can't let terrorists get even radioactive waste or it can be used for a dirty bomb. As far as I'm concerned we already live in something close to a police state (hence the original topic 1984) ubiquitous nuclear power would make it that much worse and for roughly 40 years more power, no thanks.
As for coal to assume we can keep exponentially expanding our energy usage with a fossil fuel just seems laughable, it's just asking for runaway CO2 induced global warming, Venus ring a bell?
Biofuels, nyat, it's a crime to grow food crops to fuel cars when people are already starving in the world. To turn over half our agricultural lands to biofuel production so Americans can continue to commute to their mini mansions in SUVs is un-possible.
That leaves niche energy sources like wind, solar, and hydro. Places like the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. for example may be fairly well off in terms of electricity as they already get a lot of their electricity from hydro, most places won't be so lucky. I'd be very surprised if we could reach even 20% of our current energy output in the U.S. with alternative energy and that's current output with NO growth that our current economic system is predicated on for survival. Constant growth BTW is another fundamental flaw in economics. No finite closed system like the earth can support compound growth forever.
So there you have it, your globe spanning corporations are doomed anyway within the life of currently living people, might as well get used to the idea and figure out to make the transition as graceful as possible. Our current model of exploiting people and planet for a quick buck is not sustainable in the long run. And yes I hope we retain say a basic communications infrastructure and say medicine at the level Cuba has (they use 1/8th the U.S.'s energy and have comparable life spans to the U.S.) but the model of global corporate plunder is going to get snuffed by mother nature you can count on it.
Yep they sure nuff did code Linux down on the farm, ye hah!
You missed my point entirely. My point is that a distro like Ubuntu is just as easy to install as Windows XP and just as usable for e-mail, web surfing, and basic photo editing which is what 90% of mainstream people use computers for. Yet people don't even know this because poorly distributed information, vendor lock in, and FUD. Your "business economic theory" you were encouraging me to read up on ASSUMES "rational actors" yet rational actors are a-priori impossible when there is not transparent information and phenomena like vendor lock in. The problems with economic theory and how they lead to poor choices in actual markets was the point of my post.
Further I suspect many people would be appalled at what Microsoft pays programmers in India. Note I say I suspect because i don't know because that information because it is VERY hard to find, but if it follows so called market values, i.e. what owners are willing to pay it is no doubt appallingly low pay for EXACTLY the same work that would net you a hundred grand a year in the U.S.
That not only exploits workers in India but puts downward pressure on coders wages here.
In some ways corporations are more socialist than co-ops ironically. Again the profit motive encourages large corporations to externalize their costs by say dumping pollution into the environment
where the costs of the sickness the pollution causes are born by society at large. Co-ops not operating under the constraints of the profit system have much less pressure to externalize their costs and thus ironically despite being collectives operate overall in a far less socialist fashion than large corporations. Look up externalities in that "dismal science" "business economics" text book of yours. Or do they skip talking abpout externalites now days? Hmmmmmm...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
The limited liability corporation that is now considered a person, and that is under legal obligation to return maximum profit to investors creates incentives to lie. The reason is simple if you can produce a product for the least cost by polluting the environment, and screwing the workers, and consumers don't know the conditions the product is made in you will make the most profit and the greatest return on investment. Thus it's in your self interest to lie to your customers about the way your product is produced. This lying in turn destroys the transparent information consumers need for the market to operate correctly under "rational actor theory" which is a fundamental premise of economics. Corporations thus actually destroy markets and tend towards monopoly, lying, and corruption. It is this sort of blatant contradiction that is at the heart of economic theory and which plays out in the real world in the disgusting exploitation seen in economic globalization that makes me loath economists as apologists for evil that causes suffering. Nike ring a bell? Microsoft? Union Carbide in Bhopal? Do I really need to keep giving examples of how this plays out or do you get the point already?
And yes there is an alternative it's co-ops that share profits fairly, small businesses, open source software development, and other such business models that allow for multiple actors in a market thus allowing for competition, yet without the blatant exploitation and degraded environment the corporate capitalist model inevitably produces. Visit your local food co-op, community garden, and fire up Ubuntu Linux some time. You might learn something far more valuable than you will learn from an economics text book.
Don't assume all us "hippy" alternative people are stupid and haven't thought this out.
The best value for your dollar would be Linux for 90+% of people. Too bad Microsoft's billions they spend spreading FUD scare people from actually finding that out. Being a rational actor as economic theory demands is NOT possible if information is unequally distributed and not transparant and truthful in its nature. It looks like economic theory made another false assumption that is not met under actual emperical conditions you see in real markets, oops.
And guess what I'm typing this from the Firefox browser under Ubuntu, total cost free, and developed using cooperative principles. No socialism or coercion involved either to arrive at that open, democratic, free (in all senses of the word) development model.
How do you you like them apples? Or should I say lack of Apples?
Would that be the same business economics that would say Windows is the best operating system because it made Bill Gates makes the most money? Oops. As far as I'm concerned economics is an advanced snow job to try to convince people that it's in their best interest to receive a small amount of pay and to use up the planets resources at an exponentially growing rate such that our generation may be the last one to live any kind of decent life whatsoever so the current generation of Americans can buy mounds of cheap crap at Wal-Mart. Yes economics involves a lot of advanced calculus using derivatives and integrals and some fancy statistical techniques as well. Yet if the fundamental assumptions are wrong or biased then all those fancy 3-d charts and graphs are meaningless. For example does a greater GNP equal a happier life? Not if the things we are producing kill us with stress and pollution, and only 1% of the population really benefits from the increased wealth. I'm old school and back in the day there was a saying about bad code, garbage in garbage out, or GIGO. From what I can see most economics that assume the economies can grow forever and mainly benefit a small elite while stripping the planet of resources is GIGO. There are limits both to our resources and to how long people in the third world will put up with being driven off their land when we dump GMOd agricultural produce on their markets, and then how long they'll put up with working in factories after being made landless and homeless for less than a buck an hour while their drinking water and other fundamental needs have been "privatized" by the IMF. Bechtel was driven out of Bolivia by angry mobs after the IMF contracted them to privatize Bolivia's water supply.
http://www.democracyctr.org/bechtel/
Who's going to be the next multinational corporation to be driven out of a country by an angry mob? Hint WTO meetings need to be held on isolated islands because the G8 leaders and business interests are loathed so much by people for the terrible suffering they have caused.
So again I don't want to hear any crap about economics. Corporate globalization causes many people to suffer so a VERY few can live in obscene luxury despite what direction a graph may point in your economics textbook. There are graphs that are abstract and deceptive, and then there are empirical FACTS on the ground I suggest you do some reading about the facts on the ground. Start here:
http://globalexchange.org/
No asshole who runs an oil company deserves a 400 million dollar retirement package:
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"Where are the excess profits going? One flow is into the huge executive salaries and retirement packages. ExxonMobil's retired CEO, Lee Raymond, got his rubber-stamp board to give him one man a $400 million going away package."
http://counterpunch.org/nader07292006.html
There is NOTHING they have done to deserve that compensation period, end of story. Not only did they not work harder than the person cleaning the toilet they worked FAR less hard. Don't be surprised that this sort of rip off results in anger when people find out about it. By engaging in way excessive greed in the long run you will kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Georgie boys popularity is in the 30s, people are starting to figure out what you strip the assets and run corporate con artists are all about.
For example Charles Hurowitz made hundreds of millions of dollars stripping assets from Pacific Lumber and logging the Redwood forests of Humboldt county at an unsustainable rate. Not only did that cause landslides that killed people, floods, and irreparable environmental damage, but it ruined the town of Scotia, and destroyed a family owned lumber company. See this article for details
http://www.northcoastjournal.com/072006/cover0720
So don't even give me that bullshit about how the market fairly compensates people for hard work, more often than not the market produces barren eco-systems, ripped off workers, and corporate crooks who fly the coop with hundreds of millions of dollars leaving wrecked communities and bankrupt corporations in their wake.
And no I don't believe in the government either, your best bet is to ALWAYS scrutinize large unaccountable organizations that have control over your life or resources. Screw both the U.S. government and the corporations for the terrible suffering and destruction both have caused in the world.
You left out one little fact that the OWNERS CHOOSE to pay the more common job that much less. Don't pretend like it's a law of physics take some damn responsibility for the greed and avarice of corporate owners and managers. You conservatives like responsibility unless it's your ox getting gored then you whine and beg for corporate welfare like defense contracts, and you try to avoid responsibility for the DESCIONS of the amount you CHOOSE to pay. ASSHOLES!!!!!!!
So many errors in logic it's hard to even know where to begin.
You said: "But if you turned Big Brother into a democratically-appointed surveillance system that could only watch and didn't have the Thought Police, well, then Orwell's story becomes about as spooky as Minority Report. Less, even."
How can you have a true democracy and the sort of secrecy the Bush admen (or any police state) engages in? If you don't know what the government is doing you don't know what you are voting for and democracy is dead, it's just that simple.
You said: "Nope. I presume that someone, either man or God, is observing me every minute of every day. I exercise my freedoms as I see fit, with the full expectation that someone will observe and, eventually, I will be called to account for my actions. (This is one of the surprisingly modern parts of Christianity, bow -- "and what you whisper in shadows will be shouted from rooftops" and all that.)"
By that standard we'd still be the British commonwealth of the Americas and we'd still have a U.S.S.R. All those nasty dissidents would have been "called to account" by the laws of those respective nations. Does it ever occur to you that laws can be wrong and sometimes the good guys are held "accountable" by bad people? Remember everything Nazi Germany, the U.S.S.R., and 1760s Britain did to the U.S. did was LEGAL in their respective countries.
Finally you said: "(There, now I'm being superior.)"
If by that you mean being a smug elitist asshole. An attitude entirely toxic to the openness necessary for democracy to function.