Keep your dirty Randian nonsense to yourself. What you do in the privacy of your own home is your own business, but posting excerpts of Ayn Rand's work in public is the literary equivalent of leaving a flaming bag of dog crap on someone's doorstep. She's literally one of the worst, most boring, heavy handed authors I've ever read and her philosophy is bogus, elitist dreck. It exists only to provide excuses to selfish asshats for their anti-social behavior. For anyone with half a brain or more, reading Ayne Rand feels like bathing in pig shit.
There's one class that pops into mind immediately, that's auto dealerships. I love the commercials with the legalese in the audio equivalent of fine print. Here in Albuquerque there's one commercial where they say all that "tax, title, and dealership fees" crap at the beginning, spoken lower than the low talker from Seinfeld, faster than an auctioneer on crack, under music designed to sound like music from the station it's playing on. Then there's a short pause and the actual commercial starts.
I'm curious, when's the last time you heard a commercial or saw an ad that just touted the benefits of a product? Advertising, marketing and public relations these days are basically scientific hoodoo mind control. The fact that this shit has been proven to influence people not based on facts but on the psychology of fear and desire pretty much negates the concept of perfect information in the market, which pretty much negates the concept of the free market itself.
Nah, Doc my man, they just hate you, because you are a liberal who won't just lay down and die when they bark at you, like liberals are supposed to do. You come back swinging and they hate that, that's their prerogative.
Try using that good old fashioned liberal conciliatory tone once in a while, you know, "I can see your point, and it is valid, and I respect your right to have it, but in my opinion..." Oh wait, that's for namby-pamby hippie liberals who actually give a fuck how those asshats feel. Here's another idea: kick 'em in the nuts, then kick 'em again for me.
The Mondragon Cooperative of Spain provides a good example of both how to place limits on ownership and an alternative to (unregulated) lending for profit.
For not responding to my flaming tone, and presenting a well thought out series of counter arguments, I am hereby marking you as a friend. People like you are the reason I keep coming back to slashdot.
Okay, agreed. Cooperation isn't the only way to get things done. What I took issue with is the opposite extreme, that competition is the only valid strategy.
I tend to get a little... overexcited in my discussions sometimes. You are of course right, both phenomenon are important. I agree with what you say in another post, actual reality is the middle ground between the two.
The internal good feeling of being true to one's self is the only real reason to do anything.
And the Dairy Council is a direct example of competitors cooperating, how can that be a false argument? Dairy producers compete in the same market, yet they cooperate. One would think that in a world of complete competition, direct competitors in a marketplace would never cooperate. One would think that corporations would be run with internally competing divisions. Yet we see the opposite. When competitors cooperate, we see that competition is not the end-all, be-all. We see that when we look only for competition, that is all we find, and we ignore the cooperation that is also happening, even between so-called competitors.
I'm not saying competition doesn't have it's place, but the pernicious sort of system where someone is required to lose in order for others to win has no place in a modern, rational world. If you want a more insightful look at this issue than I can provide, you might want to read the book "Finite and Infinite Games." Here's an excerpt.
Guess who just got marked as a friend? Take a look at the wikipedia article on experimental economics. Modern economic "selfish actor" theory is wrong, wrong, wrong. I'll write more after I've had a chance to read and digest a bit more of what you've written. From what I've read so far, we are cut from the same cloth.:)
How do our cells compete to distribute resources? Why do cells die when told to? Cells that only compete have a name: cancer. One flora or fauna overwhelming the rest is the end result of competition, not cooperation!
People are not intrinsically motivated by competition. There is no proof that competition motivates people to greater heights. There is no proof that in a cooperative environment people would get barely enough to survive. Rather than addressing my legitimate points, you are just making shit up.
Redundancy is perfectly possible in a cooperative environment, it just happens only where it is needed. Once again, you ignore my arguments and create a straw man. I will ask again: name me a corporation where there are multiple competing internal units. There aren't any, it has been tried, it doesn't work. Corporations have been able to succeed by cooperating with their competitors, the Dairy Council and the Blue Diamond Almond Growers Cooperative spring to mind.
In short, your arguments are flawed, do not address my valid points and are based on an emotional attachement to the merits of competition. Your arguments are comically reminiscent of the "5 minute argument" sketch my sig alludes to. You just state the opposite of what I state. You call that an argument? I have given you an example of direct competitors cooperating for mutual gain, now please try to explain why corporations never use internal competition between divisions.
Good, someone else gets it! More interesting to me than kin selection in the creation of cooperation and altruism is the Handicap Principle. Basically altruism boils down to one of three causes: kin selection, reciprocity, or the handicap principle.
Private ownership of capital and lending for profit are my problems with capitalism. I believe that everyone deserves the fruits of their own labor. However, private ownership of capital and lending for profit lead to the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, which eventually leads to us all being slaves of the owning class. So in my opinion there need to be limits placed on private ownership of capital. Not so small as to discourage hard work, innovation, and excellence in general, not so high as to lead to the afformentioned "We're all slaves to the owning class" problem.
As practiced, I can't begin to enumerate all the problems, but the problems of capitalism in pratice all stem from the same two root problems mentioned above, I believe.
Free Market types that are gung ho for government granted monopolies are usually criminally sociopathic hypocrites. Does that answer your last question?
I'll say the same thing to you I said above. You still have to evaluate and decide which systems to adopt as your own. How do you do that? What tools do you use to decide what tools to use?
I am advocating a position of cynicism, in the ancient Greek school of philosophy context, not the modern context where it is closer to nihilism. Do not believe or disbelieve anything, merely weight the possiblities based on all the other ideas one has considered. Doing this, one can take the best parts from all philosophies and moral systems one encounters and discard the garbage.
Yes, bees and other eusocial animals are a great example, not only because they cooperate, but because of the genetics involved. If evolution is about survival of the fittest individual how do non-breeding individuals such as drone bees ever evolve?
Hehe, I said anti-capitalist, not anti-free-market. I would love to see a system such as you propose. But I'm no lassez faire free market fanboi, either. There are some areas where government regulation is needed. Such as keeping the markets free, regulating natural monopolies, and dealing with externalities.
Life is not just competition. Our ability to cooperate gives us an edge over animals that don't. Your cells cooperation in making you what you are is a prime example, as is the whole ecosystem of helpful creatures you have living in and on you, and without whom you would be unable to digest things or fight off infections nearly as well.
Competition destroys intrinsic motivation. People are motivated to do things for personal reasons that have little to do with competition. When competition reigns supreme, this intrinsic motivation is weakened and people start doing things for reasons that conflict with their innate self.
Competition duplicates effort. When industries compete, they duplicate each other's effort and waste time, brainpower, and materials. Find me one example of a large and successful corporation that is run internally on competition rather than cooperation. Corporations know that cooperation is the only viable strategy, because they have actually tried the alternative and competition failed miserably.
In short, competition is not what nature is based on, and it is no good model for effectiveness in human society.
Hmm, how about figuring it out for yourself rather than blindly adopting someone else's ideology? History tells us about plenty of folks who set out in what their ideology told them was a good general direction and ended up aiding something abhorent. I don't reject or accept anything, I entertain ideas: "Here little idea, come into my head. How do you like all the other ideas here? Let's ask them how they like you." This way, every idea, good or bad, contributes something. But I do it on my terms, not because someone told me it was the right thing to believe.
You are obviously not a member of his intended audience. He was talking to the Suits in Suitanese. He's just pitching open source to the kind of people who shoot their wad when they hear the word "profit." As distasteful as that is, he may actually be on to something.
As a fanatical anti-capitalist myself, I approached the article in the same way. However, I think he was honestly just trying to promote open source to a particular audience, one who presently equates it with some kind of communism.
If you are, you haven't looked hard. ClamAV for antivirus. As for spyware, there isn't really any written for Solaris or Redhat, so no need for anti-spyware. There are a lot of security auditing tools, though. Do your own research.
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You do realize that this is just a way of funnelling government entitlements through Jesus, right?
It's just a myth. Even frogs aren't that stupid. OTOH, it's a great metaphor. Anyone have any ideas for a good replacement?
Keep your dirty Randian nonsense to yourself. What you do in the privacy of your own home is your own business, but posting excerpts of Ayn Rand's work in public is the literary equivalent of leaving a flaming bag of dog crap on someone's doorstep. She's literally one of the worst, most boring, heavy handed authors I've ever read and her philosophy is bogus, elitist dreck. It exists only to provide excuses to selfish asshats for their anti-social behavior. For anyone with half a brain or more, reading Ayne Rand feels like bathing in pig shit.
There's one class that pops into mind immediately, that's auto dealerships. I love the commercials with the legalese in the audio equivalent of fine print. Here in Albuquerque there's one commercial where they say all that "tax, title, and dealership fees" crap at the beginning, spoken lower than the low talker from Seinfeld, faster than an auctioneer on crack, under music designed to sound like music from the station it's playing on. Then there's a short pause and the actual commercial starts.
I'm curious, when's the last time you heard a commercial or saw an ad that just touted the benefits of a product? Advertising, marketing and public relations these days are basically scientific hoodoo mind control. The fact that this shit has been proven to influence people not based on facts but on the psychology of fear and desire pretty much negates the concept of perfect information in the market, which pretty much negates the concept of the free market itself.
Nah, Doc my man, they just hate you, because you are a liberal who won't just lay down and die when they bark at you, like liberals are supposed to do. You come back swinging and they hate that, that's their prerogative.
Try using that good old fashioned liberal conciliatory tone once in a while, you know, "I can see your point, and it is valid, and I respect your right to have it, but in my opinion..." Oh wait, that's for namby-pamby hippie liberals who actually give a fuck how those asshats feel. Here's another idea: kick 'em in the nuts, then kick 'em again for me.
The Mondragon Cooperative of Spain provides a good example of both how to place limits on ownership and an alternative to (unregulated) lending for profit.
For not responding to my flaming tone, and presenting a well thought out series of counter arguments, I am hereby marking you as a friend. People like you are the reason I keep coming back to slashdot.
Okay, agreed. Cooperation isn't the only way to get things done. What I took issue with is the opposite extreme, that competition is the only valid strategy.
I tend to get a little... overexcited in my discussions sometimes. You are of course right, both phenomenon are important. I agree with what you say in another post, actual reality is the middle ground between the two.
The internal good feeling of being true to one's self is the only real reason to do anything.
And the Dairy Council is a direct example of competitors cooperating, how can that be a false argument? Dairy producers compete in the same market, yet they cooperate. One would think that in a world of complete competition, direct competitors in a marketplace would never cooperate. One would think that corporations would be run with internally competing divisions. Yet we see the opposite. When competitors cooperate, we see that competition is not the end-all, be-all. We see that when we look only for competition, that is all we find, and we ignore the cooperation that is also happening, even between so-called competitors.
I'm not saying competition doesn't have it's place, but the pernicious sort of system where someone is required to lose in order for others to win has no place in a modern, rational world. If you want a more insightful look at this issue than I can provide, you might want to read the book "Finite and Infinite Games." Here's an excerpt.
Guess who just got marked as a friend? Take a look at the wikipedia article on experimental economics. Modern economic "selfish actor" theory is wrong, wrong, wrong. I'll write more after I've had a chance to read and digest a bit more of what you've written. From what I've read so far, we are cut from the same cloth. :)
How do our cells compete to distribute resources? Why do cells die when told to? Cells that only compete have a name: cancer. One flora or fauna overwhelming the rest is the end result of competition, not cooperation!
People are not intrinsically motivated by competition. There is no proof that competition motivates people to greater heights. There is no proof that in a cooperative environment people would get barely enough to survive. Rather than addressing my legitimate points, you are just making shit up.
Redundancy is perfectly possible in a cooperative environment, it just happens only where it is needed. Once again, you ignore my arguments and create a straw man. I will ask again: name me a corporation where there are multiple competing internal units. There aren't any, it has been tried, it doesn't work. Corporations have been able to succeed by cooperating with their competitors, the Dairy Council and the Blue Diamond Almond Growers Cooperative spring to mind.
In short, your arguments are flawed, do not address my valid points and are based on an emotional attachement to the merits of competition. Your arguments are comically reminiscent of the "5 minute argument" sketch my sig alludes to. You just state the opposite of what I state. You call that an argument? I have given you an example of direct competitors cooperating for mutual gain, now please try to explain why corporations never use internal competition between divisions.
Good, someone else gets it! More interesting to me than kin selection in the creation of cooperation and altruism is the Handicap Principle. Basically altruism boils down to one of three causes: kin selection, reciprocity, or the handicap principle.
Private ownership of capital and lending for profit are my problems with capitalism. I believe that everyone deserves the fruits of their own labor. However, private ownership of capital and lending for profit lead to the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, which eventually leads to us all being slaves of the owning class. So in my opinion there need to be limits placed on private ownership of capital. Not so small as to discourage hard work, innovation, and excellence in general, not so high as to lead to the afformentioned "We're all slaves to the owning class" problem.
As practiced, I can't begin to enumerate all the problems, but the problems of capitalism in pratice all stem from the same two root problems mentioned above, I believe.
Free Market types that are gung ho for government granted monopolies are usually criminally sociopathic hypocrites. Does that answer your last question?
I'll say the same thing to you I said above. You still have to evaluate and decide which systems to adopt as your own. How do you do that? What tools do you use to decide what tools to use?
I am advocating a position of cynicism, in the ancient Greek school of philosophy context, not the modern context where it is closer to nihilism. Do not believe or disbelieve anything, merely weight the possiblities based on all the other ideas one has considered. Doing this, one can take the best parts from all philosophies and moral systems one encounters and discard the garbage.
Yes, bees and other eusocial animals are a great example, not only because they cooperate, but because of the genetics involved. If evolution is about survival of the fittest individual how do non-breeding individuals such as drone bees ever evolve?
Ah, true, but one can not go blindly accepting them. One must still evaluate them and decide for oneself which to adopt, that's my point.
Hehe, I said anti-capitalist, not anti-free-market. I would love to see a system such as you propose. But I'm no lassez faire free market fanboi, either. There are some areas where government regulation is needed. Such as keeping the markets free, regulating natural monopolies, and dealing with externalities.
Life is not just competition. Our ability to cooperate gives us an edge over animals that don't. Your cells cooperation in making you what you are is a prime example, as is the whole ecosystem of helpful creatures you have living in and on you, and without whom you would be unable to digest things or fight off infections nearly as well.
Competition destroys intrinsic motivation. People are motivated to do things for personal reasons that have little to do with competition. When competition reigns supreme, this intrinsic motivation is weakened and people start doing things for reasons that conflict with their innate self.
Competition duplicates effort. When industries compete, they duplicate each other's effort and waste time, brainpower, and materials. Find me one example of a large and successful corporation that is run internally on competition rather than cooperation. Corporations know that cooperation is the only viable strategy, because they have actually tried the alternative and competition failed miserably.
In short, competition is not what nature is based on, and it is no good model for effectiveness in human society.
Hmm, how about figuring it out for yourself rather than blindly adopting someone else's ideology? History tells us about plenty of folks who set out in what their ideology told them was a good general direction and ended up aiding something abhorent. I don't reject or accept anything, I entertain ideas: "Here little idea, come into my head. How do you like all the other ideas here? Let's ask them how they like you." This way, every idea, good or bad, contributes something. But I do it on my terms, not because someone told me it was the right thing to believe.
You are obviously not a member of his intended audience. He was talking to the Suits in Suitanese. He's just pitching open source to the kind of people who shoot their wad when they hear the word "profit." As distasteful as that is, he may actually be on to something.
As a fanatical anti-capitalist myself, I approached the article in the same way. However, I think he was honestly just trying to promote open source to a particular audience, one who presently equates it with some kind of communism.
If you are, you haven't looked hard. ClamAV for antivirus. As for spyware, there isn't really any written for Solaris or Redhat, so no need for anti-spyware. There are a lot of security auditing tools, though. Do your own research.
It matters because ideology trumps everything to some people, and they won't get involved in open source if they think it is in some way "communist."
Personal Computer Manufacturers Create Incomprehensible Acronyms