You are an idiot with reading comprehension problems. The quote I was responding to was "It's shocking how the current generation is all about "gimme, gimme, gimme". I want free stuff!!!" Emphasis added. So, are you talking about evil corporations, or are you talking about the current generation which is in no position to be controlling evil corporations? Or do you even know what you're talking about?
Hi Dave. You bore me, and I'm in no mood to look through your asinine posts to point out all the specific ways you've distorted the truth, lied by omission, and supported authoritarian thinking. Everyone who has ever read your posts knows I'm right anyway.
- protesting segregation and apartheid - protesting Vietnam, getting arrested, even college students with draft deferments - protesting against Nixon and Watergate Real selfish. Just look what's going on today. Oh yeah. Nothing. That's exactly my point. The baby boomers are doing nothing today. You have been resting on your tiny little laurels for decades. It was a few members of your generation that did great things. The rest of you went to est seminars and tried to see how far up your own asses you could stick your heads.
Me! Me! Me! It's all about Me!
It even shows in your post, you try to make it seem as if baby boomers have been the only generation to protest. You discount the contributions of the current generation not because they haven't done anything, but because they aren't you, and thus are profoundly uninteresting to you self-involved boomers. Therefore, you have no idea what they may or may not have done, but simply assume they couldn't possibly be as great as you.
Maybe it's because I was raised by you selfish boomers that I despise your smug, arrogant, self centered and perpetually lazy attitude.
It's shocking how the current generation is all about "gimme, gimme, gimme". I want free stuff!!! Really? Is that what you see? Where are you looking, and who are you listening too? Because from where I'm sitting, it isn't the current generation that's the problem, it's the 'Me' generation. The baby boomers are the most selfish generation imaginable, at least in America.
The people who post on Slashdot are neither overly angry, or far left. Most of us are centrists, but to people used to the echo chambers of the far right, I'm sure we must seem far left. Madison is hardly to the left of Moscow.
Dave's postings are definitely sycophantic apologies for power and authoritarianism. He just happens to be an excellent propagandist. And you consider them to be reasonable and backed up with facts because of your political leanings. His facts are suspect, and his conclusions far to the right of anything any decent American would find reasonable.
What a happy world this would be if economics behaved in practice the way it should in theory. In reality, what is created is not what is truly valuable to society, but that which nets the biggest profit, through chicanery, manipulation, deceit and force.
The man single-handedly averted a third world war (I firmly believe). Are you serious, or just trolling? What world war, how might it have started, and what did Karl Rove do to avert it?
That really explains quite a bit about dear Mr. Schroeder. I have always thought he must be some kind of propagandist, now I have hard evidence. I think we should take pains to point out his pedigree every time the man posts one of his sycophantic apologies for power and authoritarianism. People need to know why he's saying the things he does, it puts it in perspective.
Wow, I'm going to look up trade secret laws now. Not that I don't believe you, I just want to know how they work, because if you are right about this, then I was very mistaken.
You bring up a good point about corporations, and about ethics as well. Food for thought, thanks.
I am aware of these arguments, but I have seen no indication that they would hold water in the real world. What happened to the public utilities in the former USSR and South America that were privatized? Efficiency went down and prices went up.
What you propose may work in some sense, over a large enough scope of time, given a fair and equitable starting position, but it does so by imposing local costs that are not fair. It's well and good to say that things even out over time, new systems are developed to replace inefficient monopolies, people can find alternatives to driving (really?!?) but these things take time, and in the mean time, people are getting screwed over.
You talk a good game in the abstract, but when you get down to the concrete mechanics and actualities, you are forced into more and more untenable positions. Your ideas appeal because they are simple, but the world isn't. Trusting that things will even out if we just let everyone do what they want doesn't sound like much of a game plan to me. We need more experimentation to see how these ideas actually play out.
Hong Kong is certainly a good example, and lends credence to many of your ideas. In fact, if I hadn't seen the facts about Hong Kong, we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion as I would have considered your ideas too far out there for consideration. But I say the jury is still out.
What of externalities? How would you deal with pollution? And finally, how do we get to a level playing field, which I consider to be a necessary first step prior to any adoption of a a laissez-faire system?
I knew that I phrased that wrong. What if you are an employee who did not sign an NDA, but you have access to that information? The information is not protected by copyright, it made up of simple facts. What it to keep you from sharing that with others?
And I agree with you. Sort of. Stealing corporate secrets is only wrong if they are under copyright or you've signed some sort of NDA. As you mention, prices are facts and not subject to copyright. Therefore, the wrongdoing in this case hinges on whether or not the leaker had signed some sort of NDA. However, it is not likely anyone who hasn't signed an NDA would have legitimate access to that information, and so that person should have to defend their actions in court.
A person's decision to uphold the rights of others should never hinge on whether you like them, agree with their politics, or the actions they have taken outside of the issue at hand. It shouldn't matter whether they are a big fish or a small fry. Rights must be universal.
Sorry to keep this brief, I'm trying to shoehorn this discussion into a day full of installing Linux on VMware on Blades. What you are speaking of sounds similar to Proudhon's Mutualism or Chesterton and Belloc's Distributism.
I agree with the principle of avoiding centralized authority, in fact, I've been thinking up ways to form a socialist economy inside a free market system. It hinges on avoiding the problem of free riders taking advantage of the positive externalities of an educated populace, social support networks, and low income disparity that socialism provides, without recourse to force. Simply make it a part of the contract of joining such a society that one will never do business of any sort with those who do not contribute to those positive externalities. Don't want to help support others? You will not have the opportunity to do business with those that do, then. Perfectly fair, don't you think?
Each owner has a vested interest in achieving the highest profit possible, and if that can be done through collusion, what would stop it? How would people without money move? Without land, and permission to travel across someone else's land, how would people get to these other markets? Without purchasing local property, where will these new businesses situate?
I thought democracy was the obvious answer to sharing within larger sociological units.
Natural monopoly applies to things like roads, sewers, or electrical lines, where the first mover advantage is overwhelming. A second player in these markets is always at a distinct disadvantage. Where would you even put a second road between points A and B? How many different, competing sewer systems can you shoehorn into an area? What keeps the owners of these systems from abusing their market positions?
This discussion has helped me clarify some of my own thoughts, which is the heart of dialectic, and why I discuss things like this on the Internet. I hope some of my challenges have helped you similarly. Ideally, we don't challenge each other to 'win' the debate, but to make each of our ideas stronger by considering and addressing the concerns brought up by others who think differently than we do.
That depends. For instance, if the lease were simply granted and no payments were due, but you could be kicked off for not using the land personally, or polluting, that would be quite different.
First, a concern is not ownership. How can you even conflate the two? Would it help if I had stated it as "a concern?" Second, you fail basic reading comprehension. I plainly state my issue is ownership of natural resources, not personal property or ideas.
In the real world rights derive from contract. We are trying to discuss what rights everyone can agree to, and why some sets of rights might not be agreeable to all people. Freedom from being murdered is universally accepted. Property is not.
The point is not to allow anyone to walk through your farm at will, taking your vegetables. The point is to disallow the ownership of so much property as to impact others ability to look after themselves.
Of course individuals do not share a collective mind. No need to state the obvious. Individual rights allow people to pursue their goals without harming others, but property rights allow individuals to harm others by excluding them, without recompense or agreement, from having the means to support themselves. If all property is owned, a non-owner must purchase property from an owner. If that owner does not wish to sell, but instead lease the right to use said property, the non-owner has no choice but to accept whatever terms are offered. What is to keep property owners from colluding with each other to set the most profitable terms for themselves possible? Even if there are alternatives to the local labor market, non-owners may not have the resources to reach those alternative markets and may be stuck dealing with the local labor market.
Your example thus applies equally to a free market system.
There are real world examples of monopolies forming without government assistance. For instance, natural monopolies. And monopolies are not the only issue. Those with money and power have a vested interest in keeping and expanding that power. They are a small group with similar interests and motivations that are different from the larger group of people without money and power. It requires no stretch of the imagination to suppose they would collude with each other.
I see your point, even though you are, as usual, being an asshole. It would seem though, that you do not have a legitimate underlying concern. You have a concern with the way decisions are made in our society. You have as much as admitted that, if the decisions were arrived at legitimately, then you would have no argument whatsoever. We pay for roads collectively, and therefore, we, the collective have the right to dictate how they are used. Otherwise, you are saying it is legitimate to force me to pay for something I have no say over. Or, alternatively, you are saying democracy itself doesn't work. In either case, I think you are the authoritarian with boundary issues.
The fact is, our roads were paid for through all of our taxes, and we the people do have a right to say how they are used. You simply have no grounds for doing whatever you like on our roads. You have an issue with how decisions are made in our country, and that is legitimate, I feel the same way.
If you read some of my replies to others, I have actually now been mostly convinced that preemptive prosecution of DUI without some other crime is not legitimate. If anything though, your "contributions" to the discussion made it harder for me to come to that decision. You are a fanatical zealot, and it is not in my nature to compromise with fanatics.
I now think that perhaps there should be prior cause, but the addition of impairment to an accident situation should be grounds for much greater culpability. If you kill someone with a car while drunk, it should be considered first degree murder, not vehicular manslaughter.
The reason I say "mostly" and "perhaps" is safety. Who can measure the convenience of driving against the sum totality of a human life? Drunks are notoriously bad decision makers, and the threat of punishment often does not deter them. It is safer to physically remove them from the road.
Would you say that a store has a right to refuse service to a drunk? How about a privately owned toll road? If so, then why not publicly owned roads?
Let us not be pedantic and take things to their extremes. Obviously, one needs to advocate some finite sociological unit capable of making legitimate claims to ownership. You claim the individual is the smallest unit capable of making that claim. I claim some larger group is the smallest unit. I can't say with certainty what the smallest unit would be, but it is somewhere between the individual and every creature in the universe.
Can you speak to my concerns regarding unfettered ownership of resources and the potential for the reduction of a large class of people to slaves? Do you simply not see these as legitimate concerns, or do you see a way to alleviate those concerns within your proposed system?
You do own the home, you lease the land under it from the collective. It's not an uncommon belief system, in some ways all of socialism (as opposed to communism which does away with all private and personal property) is predicated on these same assumptions. Some wiki links to get you started:
You may find it interesting that the early Anarchists such as Proudhon, who wrote Property is Theft! disagreed vehemently with the early communists. They saw communism as leading to the same sort of concentration of power as capitalism. Turns out they were right.
If one has no guarantee of a place to live, or land on which to raise food, then one is a slave to those who provide such things. Freedom in a society is always a trade-off of one sort of freedom for another. I find it valuable to trade the freedom of absolute possession of land for the freedom of having guaranteed access to the means of production.
Good point. I've changed my mind and now think you are right. No penalty for DWI, but a very, very large additional penalty for CWI (Crashing While Intoxicated.)
Slashdot Mirror
You are an idiot with reading comprehension problems. The quote I was responding to was "It's shocking how the current generation is all about "gimme, gimme, gimme". I want free stuff!!!" Emphasis added. So, are you talking about evil corporations, or are you talking about the current generation which is in no position to be controlling evil corporations? Or do you even know what you're talking about?
Hi Dave. You bore me, and I'm in no mood to look through your asinine posts to point out all the specific ways you've distorted the truth, lied by omission, and supported authoritarian thinking. Everyone who has ever read your posts knows I'm right anyway.
Me! Me! Me! It's all about Me!
It even shows in your post, you try to make it seem as if baby boomers have been the only generation to protest. You discount the contributions of the current generation not because they haven't done anything, but because they aren't you, and thus are profoundly uninteresting to you self-involved boomers. Therefore, you have no idea what they may or may not have done, but simply assume they couldn't possibly be as great as you.
Maybe it's because I was raised by you selfish boomers that I despise your smug, arrogant, self centered and perpetually lazy attitude.
Perhaps this double penetration strategy should be tested on the new three-way servers.
I guess you shouldn't have tuned out, now look what you're stuck with.
Twice.
Shocking. The open source community wants software to be open source, that seems pretty consistent to me.
The people who post on Slashdot are neither overly angry, or far left. Most of us are centrists, but to people used to the echo chambers of the far right, I'm sure we must seem far left. Madison is hardly to the left of Moscow.
Dave's postings are definitely sycophantic apologies for power and authoritarianism. He just happens to be an excellent propagandist. And you consider them to be reasonable and backed up with facts because of your political leanings. His facts are suspect, and his conclusions far to the right of anything any decent American would find reasonable.
What a happy world this would be if economics behaved in practice the way it should in theory. In reality, what is created is not what is truly valuable to society, but that which nets the biggest profit, through chicanery, manipulation, deceit and force.
That really explains quite a bit about dear Mr. Schroeder. I have always thought he must be some kind of propagandist, now I have hard evidence. I think we should take pains to point out his pedigree every time the man posts one of his sycophantic apologies for power and authoritarianism. People need to know why he's saying the things he does, it puts it in perspective.
Wow, I'm going to look up trade secret laws now. Not that I don't believe you, I just want to know how they work, because if you are right about this, then I was very mistaken.
You bring up a good point about corporations, and about ethics as well. Food for thought, thanks.
I am aware of these arguments, but I have seen no indication that they would hold water in the real world. What happened to the public utilities in the former USSR and South America that were privatized? Efficiency went down and prices went up.
What you propose may work in some sense, over a large enough scope of time, given a fair and equitable starting position, but it does so by imposing local costs that are not fair. It's well and good to say that things even out over time, new systems are developed to replace inefficient monopolies, people can find alternatives to driving (really?!?) but these things take time, and in the mean time, people are getting screwed over.
You talk a good game in the abstract, but when you get down to the concrete mechanics and actualities, you are forced into more and more untenable positions. Your ideas appeal because they are simple, but the world isn't. Trusting that things will even out if we just let everyone do what they want doesn't sound like much of a game plan to me. We need more experimentation to see how these ideas actually play out.
Hong Kong is certainly a good example, and lends credence to many of your ideas. In fact, if I hadn't seen the facts about Hong Kong, we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion as I would have considered your ideas too far out there for consideration. But I say the jury is still out.
What of externalities? How would you deal with pollution? And finally, how do we get to a level playing field, which I consider to be a necessary first step prior to any adoption of a a laissez-faire system?
I knew that I phrased that wrong. What if you are an employee who did not sign an NDA, but you have access to that information? The information is not protected by copyright, it made up of simple facts. What it to keep you from sharing that with others?
And I agree with you. Sort of. Stealing corporate secrets is only wrong if they are under copyright or you've signed some sort of NDA. As you mention, prices are facts and not subject to copyright. Therefore, the wrongdoing in this case hinges on whether or not the leaker had signed some sort of NDA. However, it is not likely anyone who hasn't signed an NDA would have legitimate access to that information, and so that person should have to defend their actions in court.
A person's decision to uphold the rights of others should never hinge on whether you like them, agree with their politics, or the actions they have taken outside of the issue at hand. It shouldn't matter whether they are a big fish or a small fry. Rights must be universal.
Sorry to keep this brief, I'm trying to shoehorn this discussion into a day full of installing Linux on VMware on Blades. What you are speaking of sounds similar to Proudhon's Mutualism or Chesterton and Belloc's Distributism.
I agree with the principle of avoiding centralized authority, in fact, I've been thinking up ways to form a socialist economy inside a free market system. It hinges on avoiding the problem of free riders taking advantage of the positive externalities of an educated populace, social support networks, and low income disparity that socialism provides, without recourse to force. Simply make it a part of the contract of joining such a society that one will never do business of any sort with those who do not contribute to those positive externalities. Don't want to help support others? You will not have the opportunity to do business with those that do, then. Perfectly fair, don't you think?
Each owner has a vested interest in achieving the highest profit possible, and if that can be done through collusion, what would stop it? How would people without money move? Without land, and permission to travel across someone else's land, how would people get to these other markets? Without purchasing local property, where will these new businesses situate?
I thought democracy was the obvious answer to sharing within larger sociological units.
Natural monopoly applies to things like roads, sewers, or electrical lines, where the first mover advantage is overwhelming. A second player in these markets is always at a distinct disadvantage. Where would you even put a second road between points A and B? How many different, competing sewer systems can you shoehorn into an area? What keeps the owners of these systems from abusing their market positions?
This discussion has helped me clarify some of my own thoughts, which is the heart of dialectic, and why I discuss things like this on the Internet. I hope some of my challenges have helped you similarly. Ideally, we don't challenge each other to 'win' the debate, but to make each of our ideas stronger by considering and addressing the concerns brought up by others who think differently than we do.
That depends. For instance, if the lease were simply granted and no payments were due, but you could be kicked off for not using the land personally, or polluting, that would be quite different.
First, a concern is not ownership. How can you even conflate the two? Would it help if I had stated it as "a concern?" Second, you fail basic reading comprehension. I plainly state my issue is ownership of natural resources, not personal property or ideas.
In the real world rights derive from contract. We are trying to discuss what rights everyone can agree to, and why some sets of rights might not be agreeable to all people. Freedom from being murdered is universally accepted. Property is not.
The point is not to allow anyone to walk through your farm at will, taking your vegetables. The point is to disallow the ownership of so much property as to impact others ability to look after themselves.
Of course individuals do not share a collective mind. No need to state the obvious. Individual rights allow people to pursue their goals without harming others, but property rights allow individuals to harm others by excluding them, without recompense or agreement, from having the means to support themselves. If all property is owned, a non-owner must purchase property from an owner. If that owner does not wish to sell, but instead lease the right to use said property, the non-owner has no choice but to accept whatever terms are offered. What is to keep property owners from colluding with each other to set the most profitable terms for themselves possible? Even if there are alternatives to the local labor market, non-owners may not have the resources to reach those alternative markets and may be stuck dealing with the local labor market.
Your example thus applies equally to a free market system.
There are real world examples of monopolies forming without government assistance. For instance, natural monopolies. And monopolies are not the only issue. Those with money and power have a vested interest in keeping and expanding that power. They are a small group with similar interests and motivations that are different from the larger group of people without money and power. It requires no stretch of the imagination to suppose they would collude with each other.
I see your point, even though you are, as usual, being an asshole. It would seem though, that you do not have a legitimate underlying concern. You have a concern with the way decisions are made in our society. You have as much as admitted that, if the decisions were arrived at legitimately, then you would have no argument whatsoever. We pay for roads collectively, and therefore, we, the collective have the right to dictate how they are used. Otherwise, you are saying it is legitimate to force me to pay for something I have no say over. Or, alternatively, you are saying democracy itself doesn't work. In either case, I think you are the authoritarian with boundary issues.
The fact is, our roads were paid for through all of our taxes, and we the people do have a right to say how they are used. You simply have no grounds for doing whatever you like on our roads. You have an issue with how decisions are made in our country, and that is legitimate, I feel the same way.
If you read some of my replies to others, I have actually now been mostly convinced that preemptive prosecution of DUI without some other crime is not legitimate. If anything though, your "contributions" to the discussion made it harder for me to come to that decision. You are a fanatical zealot, and it is not in my nature to compromise with fanatics.
I now think that perhaps there should be prior cause, but the addition of impairment to an accident situation should be grounds for much greater culpability. If you kill someone with a car while drunk, it should be considered first degree murder, not vehicular manslaughter.
The reason I say "mostly" and "perhaps" is safety. Who can measure the convenience of driving against the sum totality of a human life? Drunks are notoriously bad decision makers, and the threat of punishment often does not deter them. It is safer to physically remove them from the road.
Would you say that a store has a right to refuse service to a drunk? How about a privately owned toll road? If so, then why not publicly owned roads?
Let us not be pedantic and take things to their extremes. Obviously, one needs to advocate some finite sociological unit capable of making legitimate claims to ownership. You claim the individual is the smallest unit capable of making that claim. I claim some larger group is the smallest unit. I can't say with certainty what the smallest unit would be, but it is somewhere between the individual and every creature in the universe.
Can you speak to my concerns regarding unfettered ownership of resources and the potential for the reduction of a large class of people to slaves? Do you simply not see these as legitimate concerns, or do you see a way to alleviate those concerns within your proposed system?
You do own the home, you lease the land under it from the collective. It's not an uncommon belief system, in some ways all of socialism (as opposed to communism which does away with all private and personal property) is predicated on these same assumptions. Some wiki links to get you started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_is_theft
You may find it interesting that the early Anarchists such as Proudhon, who wrote Property is Theft! disagreed vehemently with the early communists. They saw communism as leading to the same sort of concentration of power as capitalism. Turns out they were right.
If one has no guarantee of a place to live, or land on which to raise food, then one is a slave to those who provide such things. Freedom in a society is always a trade-off of one sort of freedom for another. I find it valuable to trade the freedom of absolute possession of land for the freedom of having guaranteed access to the means of production.
Good point. I've changed my mind and now think you are right. No penalty for DWI, but a very, very large additional penalty for CWI (Crashing While Intoxicated.)