No sources, eh? Just pulled those figures out of your ass to make a point, did you? Your assertions aren't worth very much if aren't willing to back them up with even a biased pro-free-market source. I couldn't find a Forbes list of wealthiest people. I found Forbes list of wealthiest Americans, and Forbes list of Billionaires, which was informative. They count Bill Gates as "Self Made" while all the biographies I've read of the man say he came from money. Maybe not billionaire level money, but money got him the opportunity to make his billions.
Similar story for most eveyone else on the list. Besides Oprah, most of them came from at least upper middle class backgrounds.
As for your other claims, I agree that many (if not 80%, as you claim) people who get windfalls lose their money, because they were not indoctrinated with owning class values and don't know how to manage it. As for the families you list as having lost all their money, it's not true. The Vanderbilts may not be as rich as they were, but they still count a few millionaires amongst their number. In 1957 the Dodge widows donated 1,500 acres and $2 million to Michegan State University. As for the other, I think the stories are similar, meaning the families are far from utterly bankrupt.
I think the problem is bigger than you would like to believe, but I'm sure you have your reasons for defending the status quo of wealth and power.
I went to look up the exact definition of solar system on wikipedia, and wouldn't you know it, the number of solar systems has tripled in the last six months!
A few more thoughts. You haven't meditated enough on the concept of infinity. And you're WAY too caught up on meaning. You know what Bodhidarma said when asked the meaning of life? "Three pounds of flax." But I think he was being way too specific.
You forgot the infinite part. Read Borges'"The Library of Babel". Like I said, you need to read more of the classics, so you know what's already been done, and so you have a few more pieces in your tinkertoy set.
Company spokesman says, "Ooops. Our bad. Please, Mr. Government, whatever you do to punish us, don't give us lots of money. We hate that." Government officials are trying to determine how much money to punish them with.
Jeebus, buddy, why start with love? Why not just start with randomness? You have enough of that, you automatically have everything else you mentioned. And you have an infinite amount of that. Any particular slice of that randomness might define a starting condition, a set of rules to eveolve the starting condition, or a point along that evolution.
Love is such a hokey place to start. Why not shoot higher? Start with awareness, or consciousness, or reference, or division or some other abstract concept that hasn't already been done to death. Love. Fegh. I did that one when I was four. Not that it's not nice and all, but starting from there necessarily leads to some mind numbing inconsitencies when you think far enought through the implications.
Here's a fun one: You start with a lack of any definition whatsoever. This lack of definition necessarily includes all possible definitions as well as all lack of definition, to say it doesn't is to define it. So zero is not nothingness any more than it is the lack of nothingness. Some definitions imply a set of laws and a starting condition, also conveniently contained within our infinite undefined nothingness. Zero becomes one because it needs something to refer to it, and one becomes two for the same reason. The Ain Soph becomes the Way, which becomes Yin and Yang. Yang is nothing, refering to everything. Yin is everything, refering to nothing, and the way is the laws which move the two forward, becoming the ten-thousand things (or the world, as it is called in Buddhist philosophy.) I just made that one up off the top of my head.
Honestly, you kids these days, you think you invented this shit. Gah, stinks of the dharma, doesn't have a teacher to indoctrinate him into a particular path: this is what we get. "It's all love!" Well, you know where that leads?
God is love. Love is blind. Stevie Wonder is blind. Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God.
Seriously, you should read a bit more of the classics.
Without regulation, it would be lawful to trade copies of any software, period. For that matter, without regulation it would not be illegal for me to take a dump on your front lawn. And it would not be illegal for you to kill me for it. Or for looking at you funny, for that matter. Very few people argue for no laws whatsoever. It then becomes very like the apocryphal story about Mark Twain, who supposedly met a woman and asked if she would sleep with him for $10,000, to which she responded certainly. Then he asked if she would sleep with him for $10, to which she responded "What kind of a woman do you think I am?" and he said, "My dear, we've already established that. Now we're just haggling over the price." Well, we're just haggling over how much regulation is good.
I'm familiar with all the counter arguments involving natural rights and intiation of force. Going on to someone else's property is not intitiation of force. Fencing that property off in the first place, in order to mix your labor with it and claim some kind of 'natural right' to keep it is initiation of force. That kind of justification is tantamount to saying that the bicycle I "found" parked on the street and then painted a new color is mine because I mixed my labor with it.
Microsoft is not the only company to use unfair practices such as leveraging monopoly power to game the free market, and there have been plenty of cases (such as the railroads, or the canals before them) where (for instance) the high marginal cost of entry into a market provides that power, rather than the regulation of intellectual property. And as I pointed out, the regulation of real property is no less coercive than the regulation of intellectual property. The free market also has other weaknesses and failure modes which can be gamed in a similar fashion to provide unfair advantage and lock out real competition.
A lot is also of the Microsoftian variety, where a corporation leverages their domination of a market to provide a steady and unearned source of income. Without regulation, this kind of rent seeking would predominate, and the free market would collapse due to a lack of any kind of checks and balances against this kind of economic, as opposed to regulatory manipulation. Sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't proposition.
I suggest creating super smart robots to rule over us with an iron fist, as we are obviously incapable of doing it ourselves. Did I mention I get to program the robots?;-)
But, but, but saving your eternal soul is infinite ends for finite means. Anything is justified! Including holding you at sword-point, forcing you to convert, and then lopping your head off so you can't recant. Yay! Your eternal sould has been saved. Sorry about the decapitation, but you'll thank me in heaven. Not that any Christian has ever or would ever think of doing something like that, that's what those heathen Taliban extremists do. Inqui-what? I CAN'T HEAR YOU! LALALALALA.
I think there's plenty of blame to go around. Aren't the companies part of the system? Didn't these same companies, or their predecessors, use their money and power to change the system to favor them? I'm so tired of people trying to blame the government for teh failures of the free market. The market system failed first, and fucked the government, not the other way around.
Damn. Sounds like the US really overstepped their bounds then. I was just assuming he advertised in US venues and I didn't realize he had tried to reduce US participation. Shoulda RTFA, I guess.
A valid point, if true. I won't trust your numbers blindly but I will look into it, as I am (despite appearances) not married to any particular ideology and simply want to find a system that works, given the facts of human nature and the way the world works. Could you point me at some sources?
Stop skipping jury duty? Not only have I gone to every jury summons I have gotten (twice, never chosen, grrr) I know full well about my rights as a juror, which you could have explained better. The jury is the final check in a series of checks and balances. If congress enacts an unjust law, the rpesident signs it and the courts uphold it but twelve random people off the streets think (on average, over the course of many cases) it is unjust, then that law should not stand.
Thanks for bringing it up. Although it is obvious to you and I why it is important, many people don't understand, or even think it is an injustice. They don't know about the history, they don't know about the Star Chamber system of "justice" that juries were designed to protect against, and they have never heard of the . These are all things I mention when I raise the issue.
How can a true free market stay free when money and power accumulate into fewer and fewer hands? It's like having a democracy where a president can game the system to give themselves more power: it's not stable. In markets where there is a significant first mover advantage, where the cost for additional players to enter the market are high, or where, through monopoly manipulations of other barriers to entry (such as we see Microsoft use, and they aren't a government granted monopoly like a utility, either), the monopoly player can set the prices, leading to concentration of wealth. When wealth is concentrated, ownership is concentrated. Non owners become dependent on owners for their livelyhood. More money means more ability to decide the valuation of things. The system collapses into, well to be frank, what we have now, no matter how free it starts.
Dammit, I knew I should have used a car analogy. Say you live in the UK and (via remote control) run over someone in the US, wait, that doesn't work. Okay, say you were a Nazi... No, that's not right either. Free market! DRM! USPATRIOT Act! Encryption! Gambling just wants to be free! I got nothing.
Yeah, exactly. Not wrong, but probably technically illegal. Hopefully things like this will get people to try to change the law. But the government of many states currently enjoys a cushy monopoly on gambling. So it will take a concerted effort. Given gambling's questionable moral standing, it's doubtful whether enough people who gamble will stand up for their rights.
He broke the law in the US. He offered a service to people in the US. That service is illegal to offer to people in the US. He visited the US, so everything was under US jurisdiction. Just because the web server isn't in the US doesn't mean that people leave the US when they visit the server, you know. Not that I think gambling should be illegal, but this does seem to be legitimate under the law. All the more reason to change the law.
Say I live in a hypothetical country where murder is legal, and I call up a hitman in the US to come hunt you down and kill you. Then I visit the US to dance on your grave. Should I be arrested? Minus the sensationalism, this is the same thing.
China is a perfectly cromulent country, and having that many data points would do nothing but embiggen the results. I mean, making incoherent posts is just so purple monkey dishwasher.
We get that concentration because of unfettered capitalism. It is not a falure of democracy, rather a failure of the free market perpetrated upon an innocent democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
I sent in a picture of Foghorn Leghorn.
No sources, eh? Just pulled those figures out of your ass to make a point, did you? Your assertions aren't worth very much if aren't willing to back them up with even a biased pro-free-market source. I couldn't find a Forbes list of wealthiest people. I found Forbes list of wealthiest Americans, and Forbes list of Billionaires, which was informative. They count Bill Gates as "Self Made" while all the biographies I've read of the man say he came from money. Maybe not billionaire level money, but money got him the opportunity to make his billions.
Similar story for most eveyone else on the list. Besides Oprah, most of them came from at least upper middle class backgrounds.
As for your other claims, I agree that many (if not 80%, as you claim) people who get windfalls lose their money, because they were not indoctrinated with owning class values and don't know how to manage it. As for the families you list as having lost all their money, it's not true. The Vanderbilts may not be as rich as they were, but they still count a few millionaires amongst their number. In 1957 the Dodge widows donated 1,500 acres and $2 million to Michegan State University. As for the other, I think the stories are similar, meaning the families are far from utterly bankrupt.
I think the problem is bigger than you would like to believe, but I'm sure you have your reasons for defending the status quo of wealth and power.
I went to look up the exact definition of solar system on wikipedia, and wouldn't you know it, the number of solar systems has tripled in the last six months!
A few more thoughts. You haven't meditated enough on the concept of infinity. And you're WAY too caught up on meaning. You know what Bodhidarma said when asked the meaning of life? "Three pounds of flax." But I think he was being way too specific.
You forgot the infinite part. Read Borges'"The Library of Babel". Like I said, you need to read more of the classics, so you know what's already been done, and so you have a few more pieces in your tinkertoy set.
Company spokesman says, "Ooops. Our bad. Please, Mr. Government, whatever you do to punish us, don't give us lots of money. We hate that." Government officials are trying to determine how much money to punish them with.
Jeebus, buddy, why start with love? Why not just start with randomness? You have enough of that, you automatically have everything else you mentioned. And you have an infinite amount of that. Any particular slice of that randomness might define a starting condition, a set of rules to eveolve the starting condition, or a point along that evolution.
Love is such a hokey place to start. Why not shoot higher? Start with awareness, or consciousness, or reference, or division or some other abstract concept that hasn't already been done to death. Love. Fegh. I did that one when I was four. Not that it's not nice and all, but starting from there necessarily leads to some mind numbing inconsitencies when you think far enought through the implications.
Here's a fun one: You start with a lack of any definition whatsoever. This lack of definition necessarily includes all possible definitions as well as all lack of definition, to say it doesn't is to define it. So zero is not nothingness any more than it is the lack of nothingness. Some definitions imply a set of laws and a starting condition, also conveniently contained within our infinite undefined nothingness. Zero becomes one because it needs something to refer to it, and one becomes two for the same reason. The Ain Soph becomes the Way, which becomes Yin and Yang. Yang is nothing, refering to everything. Yin is everything, refering to nothing, and the way is the laws which move the two forward, becoming the ten-thousand things (or the world, as it is called in Buddhist philosophy.) I just made that one up off the top of my head.
Honestly, you kids these days, you think you invented this shit. Gah, stinks of the dharma, doesn't have a teacher to indoctrinate him into a particular path: this is what we get. "It's all love!" Well, you know where that leads?
God is love.
Love is blind.
Stevie Wonder is blind.
Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God.
Seriously, you should read a bit more of the classics.
And that, sir, was pure genius! That made my day. I'm still laughing as I type this.
Without regulation, it would be lawful to trade copies of any software, period. For that matter, without regulation it would not be illegal for me to take a dump on your front lawn. And it would not be illegal for you to kill me for it. Or for looking at you funny, for that matter. Very few people argue for no laws whatsoever. It then becomes very like the apocryphal story about Mark Twain, who supposedly met a woman and asked if she would sleep with him for $10,000, to which she responded certainly. Then he asked if she would sleep with him for $10, to which she responded "What kind of a woman do you think I am?" and he said, "My dear, we've already established that. Now we're just haggling over the price." Well, we're just haggling over how much regulation is good.
I'm familiar with all the counter arguments involving natural rights and intiation of force. Going on to someone else's property is not intitiation of force. Fencing that property off in the first place, in order to mix your labor with it and claim some kind of 'natural right' to keep it is initiation of force. That kind of justification is tantamount to saying that the bicycle I "found" parked on the street and then painted a new color is mine because I mixed my labor with it.
Microsoft is not the only company to use unfair practices such as leveraging monopoly power to game the free market, and there have been plenty of cases (such as the railroads, or the canals before them) where (for instance) the high marginal cost of entry into a market provides that power, rather than the regulation of intellectual property. And as I pointed out, the regulation of real property is no less coercive than the regulation of intellectual property. The free market also has other weaknesses and failure modes which can be gamed in a similar fashion to provide unfair advantage and lock out real competition.
If you're blue and you don't know
where to go to why don't you go
where fashion sits (take it, 98)
Hroowra owra riis!
A lot is also of the Microsoftian variety, where a corporation leverages their domination of a market to provide a steady and unearned source of income. Without regulation, this kind of rent seeking would predominate, and the free market would collapse due to a lack of any kind of checks and balances against this kind of economic, as opposed to regulatory manipulation. Sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't proposition.
;-)
I suggest creating super smart robots to rule over us with an iron fist, as we are obviously incapable of doing it ourselves. Did I mention I get to program the robots?
It's called rent seeking and it's yet another example of the ways in which an unregulated free market fails miserably.
But, but, but saving your eternal soul is infinite ends for finite means. Anything is justified! Including holding you at sword-point, forcing you to convert, and then lopping your head off so you can't recant. Yay! Your eternal sould has been saved. Sorry about the decapitation, but you'll thank me in heaven. Not that any Christian has ever or would ever think of doing something like that, that's what those heathen Taliban extremists do. Inqui-what? I CAN'T HEAR YOU! LALALALALA.
He probably posted anon so as to not get modded off topic. But the meta mod system has been down for two days, in case you hadn't noticed.
I think there's plenty of blame to go around. Aren't the companies part of the system? Didn't these same companies, or their predecessors, use their money and power to change the system to favor them? I'm so tired of people trying to blame the government for teh failures of the free market. The market system failed first, and fucked the government, not the other way around.
Damn. Sounds like the US really overstepped their bounds then. I was just assuming he advertised in US venues and I didn't realize he had tried to reduce US participation. Shoulda RTFA, I guess.
Dammit, shoulda previewed. That last link goes to the Fully Informed Jury Association.
A valid point, if true. I won't trust your numbers blindly but I will look into it, as I am (despite appearances) not married to any particular ideology and simply want to find a system that works, given the facts of human nature and the way the world works. Could you point me at some sources?
Stop skipping jury duty? Not only have I gone to every jury summons I have gotten (twice, never chosen, grrr) I know full well about my rights as a juror, which you could have explained better. The jury is the final check in a series of checks and balances. If congress enacts an unjust law, the rpesident signs it and the courts uphold it but twelve random people off the streets think (on average, over the course of many cases) it is unjust, then that law should not stand.
Thanks for bringing it up. Although it is obvious to you and I why it is important, many people don't understand, or even think it is an injustice. They don't know about the history, they don't know about the Star Chamber system of "justice" that juries were designed to protect against, and they have never heard of the . These are all things I mention when I raise the issue.
How can a true free market stay free when money and power accumulate into fewer and fewer hands? It's like having a democracy where a president can game the system to give themselves more power: it's not stable. In markets where there is a significant first mover advantage, where the cost for additional players to enter the market are high, or where, through monopoly manipulations of other barriers to entry (such as we see Microsoft use, and they aren't a government granted monopoly like a utility, either), the monopoly player can set the prices, leading to concentration of wealth. When wealth is concentrated, ownership is concentrated. Non owners become dependent on owners for their livelyhood. More money means more ability to decide the valuation of things. The system collapses into, well to be frank, what we have now, no matter how free it starts.
Dammit, I knew I should have used a car analogy. Say you live in the UK and (via remote control) run over someone in the US, wait, that doesn't work. Okay, say you were a Nazi... No, that's not right either. Free market! DRM! USPATRIOT Act! Encryption! Gambling just wants to be free! I got nothing.
Yeah, exactly. Not wrong, but probably technically illegal. Hopefully things like this will get people to try to change the law. But the government of many states currently enjoys a cushy monopoly on gambling. So it will take a concerted effort. Given gambling's questionable moral standing, it's doubtful whether enough people who gamble will stand up for their rights.
He broke the law in the US. He offered a service to people in the US. That service is illegal to offer to people in the US. He visited the US, so everything was under US jurisdiction. Just because the web server isn't in the US doesn't mean that people leave the US when they visit the server, you know. Not that I think gambling should be illegal, but this does seem to be legitimate under the law. All the more reason to change the law.
Say I live in a hypothetical country where murder is legal, and I call up a hitman in the US to come hunt you down and kill you. Then I visit the US to dance on your grave. Should I be arrested? Minus the sensationalism, this is the same thing.
China is a perfectly cromulent country, and having that many data points would do nothing but embiggen the results. I mean, making incoherent posts is just so purple monkey dishwasher.
We get that concentration because of unfettered capitalism. It is not a falure of democracy, rather a failure of the free market perpetrated upon an innocent democracy.