The fact that you can't sell yourself into slavery through contract does not make contracts where you voluntarily limit your speech invalid. Similarly, your comment about racism has very little merit. In fact, you don't actually know that more black students get sports scholarships at Kent State, you are just guessing. But even if there were, not letting them use Facebook would be no more discrimination than giving more scholarships to minorities in the first place!
Re:Where to draw the line on user ignorance?
on
Dealing with Phishing
·
· Score: 4, Funny
That's how you separate the geeks from the boys (not with a crowbar, as has been joked)
Greeks. You're thinking Greeks and boys.
Ancient Greeks that is, you know Sparta and catamites and all that. Your average modern Greek is a fairly religious fellow who frowns on that sort of thing (at least in public, unless there are no women left in the bar at closing time.)
It's true, no matter how rich you are, there's only so much coke you can stuff up your nose and so many hookers you can screw in a day. If anyone is interested in funding a study to determine what those maximum values are, please contact me.
How can you say that a situation never existed when it exists today? Or do you know of some (decent) land that is unowned that I can go to and raise food? If there is no land that is unowned today, then I am dependant for sustenance on property owners, plain and simple.
There is an owning class. I'm not talking about "owning my self," that's a ridiculous red herring. I'm talking 90% of the natural resources in the world being owned by 10% of the population. Again I say: owning property is removing the right to life from others who do not own property.
I am familiar with Locke, and while his arguments are good, and I support his definition over the one we have now, his arguments don't take everything into account. Specifically, what amount of previously unowned land should an individual be allowed to mix their labor with? What happens to the land when that person dies? How much control over that land should society be allowed to excercise, i.e. he is polluting and ruining it for future generations, should we be allowed to stop him?
My arguments are not based on any idea of intrinsic ownership. Remember, I believe that property is a pragmatic right derived from a community who agrees to uphold the right to property in its members. Without society, we have the rule of the strong, and anyone can take any property they can hold by force against others. With society, we have a contract: You uphold my rights, I uphold yours.
The society is free to set those rights as agreed by the members. But when society agrees to exclude others from natural resources, we must recognize that, unless those others agree for their own reasons, we have devolved back to the level of holding by force, with no moral high ground to stand on. We are forcing others to accept a contract they have no part of.
Okay, "a right to eat" is perhaps not the best way to put it. How about "a right not to be forced into situations where one can't provide for oneself?" The real question in my mind is, do property owners have the right to force non-property owners into situations where they can not provide for themeselves?
Well, I think we can both agree that charity shouldn't be forced. I would go a step farther than you and say, if a society values charity, it should be free to withdraw rewards from those who do not give back. Not allowing a society to withdraw rewards is the same as enslaving the society to the individual.
Abortion issues aside, I would agree that the right to life is fundamental. I would not want any part of a society that did not honor that. Free expression, free association, access to a fair and equitable justice system: all very basic rights. While I feel that all of the rights outlined in the UN human rights list are important to a functional society, I'm not sure how many of them are fundamental.
I believe in owning my efforts. But ownership of land is different. If all land is owned, which it will eventually be under any propertarian system, then those who do not own will be the slaves of those who do. We can talk more than origins, most property now is owned by less than 10% of the population, and they most definitely did NOT work for it. Besides, all real property was stolen at some point. Just because someone sells me a stolen bike for $10 doesn't make that bike morally mine.
Why does the starving man have a moral right to your bread that you worked for? Because the whole system that was set up to let you work for that bread was set up by society, including the concept of ownership which potentially excludes that man from being able to feed himself. You profit from the system, he suffers, he has a right to your bread because by fencing him off your property you stole from him the opportunity to make his own bread.
If you want to have bread that he is not entitled to, here are the steps that you must take: 1.) The property that you raise the wheat on must be off planet or someplace else that a human through his own efforts could not reach. Under the ocean maybe. Anything else, and you are stealing his bread to begin with. 2.) You must not use any techniques derived from knowledge imparted by society. Learning those techniques comes with a price: you uphold the rules of your society, and if society says you feed the hungry, you feed the hungry or you take nothing from society.
Don't like it? Give back everything society has given to you and go do it completely on your own.
Well, my point is that it won't escalate that far. It's like MAD, MS knows Europe has the doomsday device, EU knows MS has the doomsday device, they both just play nice. Copyright laws are not international, in that any country can invalidate any copyright it wants to, and the Berne convention just means you have to treat copyrights in a certain way. No copyright, no problem. National laws still trump the WTO, too. Sure, there are sanctions, but there were trade wars before the WTO, this is just more of the same. Last I checked, the WTO doesn't have a standing army to enforce its decisions. A big megacorp still can't trump a powerful government when said government gets its back up. But there are repurcussions, that's why I called it "EU's Nuclear Option"
But you are right, likeliest scenario: MS pays and that's that.
Good point. I'm really not sure where I stand on the issue, honestly I really just want people to stop with the handwaving and emotionalism and find the truth, whether that is that guns reduce crime, increase it, or do nothing. Right now it seems the pro gun folks have slightly more evidence on their side, but until the handwaving stops, I really can't be sure how much of it is massaged to make a point.
If you fence off all the land and the sea, then anyone who isn't a land owner is now a slave, as the only food they can procure is food provided by landowners. By not garaunteeing a right to eat, you are saying that it is okay to imprison people and starve them to death. If the owning class supplants the state, is the common man any better off? What gives any man to fence off what was once communal and declare it his own. Does that man not then need to initiate force to keep others off his property? Property is a communally derived right, and should be subject to the decisions of the community, because it enforces contracts on third parties.
Too bad God isn't very clear on what rights Man should have. Too bad His every word is interpreted throught he mouths of Men.
I find it interesting that the link you provide is to a car enthusiast site. The title is "Death Van for China: Mobile Execution Chamber Makes for a Morbid Conversion Van." What? Are they advocating that people buy these things and trick them out, maybe put wall to wall shag carpeting, a waterbed, and some disco lights in them?
"Hey baby, want to take a ride in my death van? Oh yeah, I'll give YOU a lethal injection!"
I see your point, in that fundamental rights are those things you could do even if no one else was around to stop you from doing them. But if no one else was around, you could eat anything. As it is, people will try to stop you from eating things they think of as theirs. By "right to food" I really mean that no one has the right to initiate force to keep me from eating any naturally growing thing I damn well like. They also do not have the right to fence off all land so that there is no naturally growing thing with which I can feed myself. This is honestly the same as imprisoning someone and refusing to feed them. Do you think we should have the right to imprison the poor and not feed them? Because that's what it sounds like you are advocating.
I am not property! I do not own myself, that's ridiculous. I am not my own slave. The concept of owning people is repugnant. It is also circular reasoning, in that you are trying to justify the concept of ownership through an example of ownership. I'm saying the concept is invalid. Finally, there is a big difference between owning myself, owning a tool or thing I made, and owning a piece of real property. It doesn't take much State sponsored initiation of force to help me keep myself free. It takes a little more State sponsored initiation of force for me to keep the products of my labor free. It takes a great deal of State sponsored initiation of force to keep my real property free.
I really don't understand how you can be so hypocritical as to state: "Declaring my inalienable Right to speak, think, worship (or not) as I choose requires nothing of my fellow Citizens other than they not oppress me." and then turn around and espouse property ownership as a basic right. This requires that your fellow citizens, having signed no contract and gotten no recompense, must not go on your property or use your resources. You are oppressing them. By putting up a fence and shooting whoever comes on "your" land, YOU are initiating force, no matter how you want to twist reality to state the opposite.
That being said, we are both anarchists at heart and we quibble over details. I do not want anyone forcing me to do things with my time and labor, either. Everyone should be entitled to the products of our labor. However, we live in a society. In the wild, all my labor would accryue to me. In society, I am making use of the infrastructure of society to produce with my labor. I am using the accumulated knowledge of society to do so. There is an unwritten societal contract wherein I get certain things and society gets certain things.
Ideally, If I didn't like the contract there would be someplace else I could go and shop around for a better contract. But in an Stateless ownership society, eventually, all space will be owned. In this case, how is the owning class different from a State in regards to those who don't own? Or do you recommend a system of redistributing wealth so that everyone owns something?
The National Academy of Sciences conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott's work, and found: [11]
There is no credible evidence that "right-to-carry" laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime.
I know, I know, that rascally National Academy of Scientists is full of liberal commie tree huggers, of course they would say that.
In the publishing business, managing your fonts is an important part of doing business. Technically, I'm not even sure that customers are allowed to include fonts, but they do it all the time. Typefaces are not copyrightable, but computer generated fonts count as programs, and so they are copyrightable. Generally speaking, if I bought a page layout program, "PageFoo," and my printing house did not own a copy, I could not include a copy of PageFoo with my files to enable that printing house to print them out. Is it technically legal to do the same with font files unless the license permits this? I don't think so. Does everyone do it anyway? Yes. Do publishers keep customer font around in case the customer forgets to send it in? All the time.
I've heard that a black hole will do it, but what with Hawking Radiation and all, even that's not certain. You can certainly alter information to a point where the original is unretrievable. Also, what is the difference between data and information? I think information implies meaning, which implies a consciousness capable of perceiving meaning. If the Universe undergoes the heat death, there won't be any consciousnesses capable of processing information. At maximum entropy, there won't be any structures capable of holding ordered data, let alone processing it.
So MS pulls out of the EU market. This is a government we are talking about. You know, the ones who make and enforce copyrights? They would be free to rule that, as a punishment, Microsoft's copyrights are no longer valid in the EU.
I love the Important Capitals. They show that you are speaking of Fundamentally Important Things.
Funny, I would put the right to have enough to eat as more basic than the right to bear arms, while I'm sure you'd call that socialism. I call protecting your government sanctioned monopoly on your property socialism. What do non-property owners get out of upholding the rights of property holders? The government is subsidizing your right to hold private property by protecting your property through the initiation of force.
There are no Fundamental Human Rights. There are only rights that we as a society deem important. Appeal to authority all you like, capitalize any word you want, that still doesn't change the fact that without society, there are no rights. With society, there are only the rights that society says are important. Just because you use Important Capitals and call it Fundamental doesn't mean anyone has to agree with you. We as a society choose what rights to uphold based on pragmatism, not Nature, and not God.
The US interpretation of basic human rights does not coincide with the UN definition of basic human rights. By UN standards, the US does not provide most basic human rights. As the UN definition is more all-encompasing, wouldn't it be fair to say their list is even more basic and important? Or does the fact that the US did it a certain way automatically mean that that list is the best, most fundamental list of rights?
I thought to myself, hey, here's a chance to bash libertarians, and everyone who knows me knows how much I love me some libertarian bashing. Well, according to wikipedia, they economy is not doing too badly. The well known libertarian think tank Mises Institute even has an article entitled "Stateless in Somalia, and loving it." It is from Mises, so take it with a grain of salt.
Damn, I so wanted you to be right about this I went and looked up some facts to back you up, only the damn facts aren't cooperating!
Classes are a little like castes, but slightly less rigid. Class determines how you are raised, what you believe in, and to a large extent, how you are fucked up. Owning class people are raised to believe that no one is their friend, everyone is at most a temporary ally who may stab you in the back at any moment. They are taught that there is the guy who weilds the stick, and there is the guy who gets beat, and those are your only two options in life, so might as well be the guy weilding the stick. They are taught that they deserve to be the guy weilding the stick, because they are better, and the lower classes need to be kept in line or the whole system will fall apart. The ruling class never has to question their assumptions because no one has the power to call them on their shit.
Middle class people are taught not to stick out, not to make a fuss, to do what the Joneses do, to put on a happy face and maybe you will make it into the ruling class someday. If you screw up, you may fall into the lower class. The middle classes are taught that if everyone pulls together, we can all have the good life. The middle class only has to question their assumptions when their assumptions butt up against those of the ruling class. Unlike the ruling class, the middle class can have real friendships, although not as close and open as those of working class people
The lower class is taught that they do not matter, they are replaceable cogs. They are shown that they are lower than slaves, because a slave owner would never allow their valuable property to die, whereas a free poor person WILL be left to die if they do not produce. Working class people can have very close friendships in a rough, in-the-trenches kind of way. They have to depend on each other, they know what it means to have someone's back, and how important it is that someone has yours.
These are broad generalizations, and don't even begin to cover all the ramifications of class, but serve to illustrate that class based analysis of society brings useful insight. Although class analysis was pioneered by Marx, it is not solely the province of Communism. As an aside, the ruling class of course HATES class based analysis in a "pay no attention to the man behind the mirror" sort of way.
It saddens me that you feel the only real motivation for people is money. Most of the happiest people I know do what they love to do, not what brings them the most money. In fact, external incentives such as monetary reward debase and devalue real intrinsic motivations. When one is motivated only by survival, or by selfish profit, one loses the ability to discern what one's true internal motivations even are. One plays the game to get ahead, but in the process forgets where one was really going, and getting ahead becomes the whole of the goal.
However, the first part of your last point is unassailable. If we can make the least common denominator acceptable, meaning food, clean water, clothing and shelter, control over ones immediate environment, and a place to fit into society and feel valued for ones contribution no matter how small, then everything else is just details. That is the basic starting point for a just and equitable society.
Opportunity and incentive to acheive more come in many forms. As open source software shows, excellent people produce just for the bragging rights. The best artists in history have made the most beautiful contributions while living in utter squalor, having to choose between food and paint. Would Renoir's paintings have been more beautiful if had been a financial success in his lifetime? Yet I still agree that a certain amount of extra reward for extra or excellent effort is useful and equitable. I feel that in a real meritocracy, even those judged as possessing less merit would find it fair that those who were smarter and those who worked harder got slightly more. As long as everyone's basic needs were met, that is.
As for the last part of you last point, we need to break "the highest classes" down further, into th
And I predict that the failure of both HD formats will be blamed on pirates. The solution will be to install DRM in a chip in everyone's head, which can also conveniently project commercials into your auditory and optic nerves.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's one article about a mole robot for digging conduit tunnels.
And another about a robot for laying conduit in sewers.
And those are just the first two hits on a google search for "underground conduit robot."
That joke never gets old...
The fact that you can't sell yourself into slavery through contract does not make contracts where you voluntarily limit your speech invalid. Similarly, your comment about racism has very little merit. In fact, you don't actually know that more black students get sports scholarships at Kent State, you are just guessing. But even if there were, not letting them use Facebook would be no more discrimination than giving more scholarships to minorities in the first place!
That's how you separate the geeks from the boys (not with a crowbar, as has been joked)
Greeks. You're thinking Greeks and boys.
Ancient Greeks that is, you know Sparta and catamites and all that. Your average modern Greek is a fairly religious fellow who frowns on that sort of thing (at least in public, unless there are no women left in the bar at closing time.)
The More You Know(tm)
It's true, no matter how rich you are, there's only so much coke you can stuff up your nose and so many hookers you can screw in a day. If anyone is interested in funding a study to determine what those maximum values are, please contact me.
How can you say that a situation never existed when it exists today? Or do you know of some (decent) land that is unowned that I can go to and raise food? If there is no land that is unowned today, then I am dependant for sustenance on property owners, plain and simple.
There is an owning class. I'm not talking about "owning my self," that's a ridiculous red herring. I'm talking 90% of the natural resources in the world being owned by 10% of the population. Again I say: owning property is removing the right to life from others who do not own property.
I am familiar with Locke, and while his arguments are good, and I support his definition over the one we have now, his arguments don't take everything into account. Specifically, what amount of previously unowned land should an individual be allowed to mix their labor with? What happens to the land when that person dies? How much control over that land should society be allowed to excercise, i.e. he is polluting and ruining it for future generations, should we be allowed to stop him?
My arguments are not based on any idea of intrinsic ownership. Remember, I believe that property is a pragmatic right derived from a community who agrees to uphold the right to property in its members. Without society, we have the rule of the strong, and anyone can take any property they can hold by force against others. With society, we have a contract: You uphold my rights, I uphold yours.
The society is free to set those rights as agreed by the members. But when society agrees to exclude others from natural resources, we must recognize that, unless those others agree for their own reasons, we have devolved back to the level of holding by force, with no moral high ground to stand on. We are forcing others to accept a contract they have no part of.
Okay, "a right to eat" is perhaps not the best way to put it. How about "a right not to be forced into situations where one can't provide for oneself?" The real question in my mind is, do property owners have the right to force non-property owners into situations where they can not provide for themeselves?
Well, I think we can both agree that charity shouldn't be forced. I would go a step farther than you and say, if a society values charity, it should be free to withdraw rewards from those who do not give back. Not allowing a society to withdraw rewards is the same as enslaving the society to the individual.
Abortion issues aside, I would agree that the right to life is fundamental. I would not want any part of a society that did not honor that. Free expression, free association, access to a fair and equitable justice system: all very basic rights. While I feel that all of the rights outlined in the UN human rights list are important to a functional society, I'm not sure how many of them are fundamental.
I believe in owning my efforts. But ownership of land is different. If all land is owned, which it will eventually be under any propertarian system, then those who do not own will be the slaves of those who do. We can talk more than origins, most property now is owned by less than 10% of the population, and they most definitely did NOT work for it. Besides, all real property was stolen at some point. Just because someone sells me a stolen bike for $10 doesn't make that bike morally mine.
Why does the starving man have a moral right to your bread that you worked for? Because the whole system that was set up to let you work for that bread was set up by society, including the concept of ownership which potentially excludes that man from being able to feed himself. You profit from the system, he suffers, he has a right to your bread because by fencing him off your property you stole from him the opportunity to make his own bread.
If you want to have bread that he is not entitled to, here are the steps that you must take:
1.) The property that you raise the wheat on must be off planet or someplace else that a human through his own efforts could not reach. Under the ocean maybe. Anything else, and you are stealing his bread to begin with.
2.) You must not use any techniques derived from knowledge imparted by society. Learning those techniques comes with a price: you uphold the rules of your society, and if society says you feed the hungry, you feed the hungry or you take nothing from society.
Don't like it? Give back everything society has given to you and go do it completely on your own.
Well, my point is that it won't escalate that far. It's like MAD, MS knows Europe has the doomsday device, EU knows MS has the doomsday device, they both just play nice. Copyright laws are not international, in that any country can invalidate any copyright it wants to, and the Berne convention just means you have to treat copyrights in a certain way. No copyright, no problem. National laws still trump the WTO, too. Sure, there are sanctions, but there were trade wars before the WTO, this is just more of the same. Last I checked, the WTO doesn't have a standing army to enforce its decisions. A big megacorp still can't trump a powerful government when said government gets its back up. But there are repurcussions, that's why I called it "EU's Nuclear Option"
But you are right, likeliest scenario: MS pays and that's that.
Good point. I'm really not sure where I stand on the issue, honestly I really just want people to stop with the handwaving and emotionalism and find the truth, whether that is that guns reduce crime, increase it, or do nothing. Right now it seems the pro gun folks have slightly more evidence on their side, but until the handwaving stops, I really can't be sure how much of it is massaged to make a point.
If you fence off all the land and the sea, then anyone who isn't a land owner is now a slave, as the only food they can procure is food provided by landowners. By not garaunteeing a right to eat, you are saying that it is okay to imprison people and starve them to death. If the owning class supplants the state, is the common man any better off? What gives any man to fence off what was once communal and declare it his own. Does that man not then need to initiate force to keep others off his property? Property is a communally derived right, and should be subject to the decisions of the community, because it enforces contracts on third parties.
Too bad God isn't very clear on what rights Man should have. Too bad His every word is interpreted throught he mouths of Men.
I find it interesting that the link you provide is to a car enthusiast site. The title is "Death Van for China: Mobile Execution Chamber Makes for a Morbid Conversion Van." What? Are they advocating that people buy these things and trick them out, maybe put wall to wall shag carpeting, a waterbed, and some disco lights in them?
"Hey baby, want to take a ride in my death van? Oh yeah, I'll give YOU a lethal injection!"
I see your point, in that fundamental rights are those things you could do even if no one else was around to stop you from doing them. But if no one else was around, you could eat anything. As it is, people will try to stop you from eating things they think of as theirs. By "right to food" I really mean that no one has the right to initiate force to keep me from eating any naturally growing thing I damn well like. They also do not have the right to fence off all land so that there is no naturally growing thing with which I can feed myself. This is honestly the same as imprisoning someone and refusing to feed them. Do you think we should have the right to imprison the poor and not feed them? Because that's what it sounds like you are advocating.
I am not property! I do not own myself, that's ridiculous. I am not my own slave. The concept of owning people is repugnant. It is also circular reasoning, in that you are trying to justify the concept of ownership through an example of ownership. I'm saying the concept is invalid. Finally, there is a big difference between owning myself, owning a tool or thing I made, and owning a piece of real property. It doesn't take much State sponsored initiation of force to help me keep myself free. It takes a little more State sponsored initiation of force for me to keep the products of my labor free. It takes a great deal of State sponsored initiation of force to keep my real property free.
I really don't understand how you can be so hypocritical as to state: "Declaring my inalienable Right to speak, think, worship (or not) as I choose requires nothing of my fellow Citizens other than they not oppress me." and then turn around and espouse property ownership as a basic right. This requires that your fellow citizens, having signed no contract and gotten no recompense, must not go on your property or use your resources. You are oppressing them. By putting up a fence and shooting whoever comes on "your" land, YOU are initiating force, no matter how you want to twist reality to state the opposite.
That being said, we are both anarchists at heart and we quibble over details. I do not want anyone forcing me to do things with my time and labor, either. Everyone should be entitled to the products of our labor. However, we live in a society. In the wild, all my labor would accryue to me. In society, I am making use of the infrastructure of society to produce with my labor. I am using the accumulated knowledge of society to do so. There is an unwritten societal contract wherein I get certain things and society gets certain things.
Ideally, If I didn't like the contract there would be someplace else I could go and shop around for a better contract. But in an Stateless ownership society, eventually, all space will be owned. In this case, how is the owning class different from a State in regards to those who don't own? Or do you recommend a system of redistributing wealth so that everyone owns something?
I know, I know, that rascally National Academy of Scientists is full of liberal commie tree huggers, of course they would say that.
In the publishing business, managing your fonts is an important part of doing business. Technically, I'm not even sure that customers are allowed to include fonts, but they do it all the time. Typefaces are not copyrightable, but computer generated fonts count as programs, and so they are copyrightable. Generally speaking, if I bought a page layout program, "PageFoo," and my printing house did not own a copy, I could not include a copy of PageFoo with my files to enable that printing house to print them out. Is it technically legal to do the same with font files unless the license permits this? I don't think so. Does everyone do it anyway? Yes. Do publishers keep customer font around in case the customer forgets to send it in? All the time.
I've heard that a black hole will do it, but what with Hawking Radiation and all, even that's not certain. You can certainly alter information to a point where the original is unretrievable. Also, what is the difference between data and information? I think information implies meaning, which implies a consciousness capable of perceiving meaning. If the Universe undergoes the heat death, there won't be any consciousnesses capable of processing information. At maximum entropy, there won't be any structures capable of holding ordered data, let alone processing it.
So MS pulls out of the EU market. This is a government we are talking about. You know, the ones who make and enforce copyrights? They would be free to rule that, as a punishment, Microsoft's copyrights are no longer valid in the EU.
I love the Important Capitals. They show that you are speaking of Fundamentally Important Things.
Funny, I would put the right to have enough to eat as more basic than the right to bear arms, while I'm sure you'd call that socialism. I call protecting your government sanctioned monopoly on your property socialism. What do non-property owners get out of upholding the rights of property holders? The government is subsidizing your right to hold private property by protecting your property through the initiation of force.
There are no Fundamental Human Rights. There are only rights that we as a society deem important. Appeal to authority all you like, capitalize any word you want, that still doesn't change the fact that without society, there are no rights. With society, there are only the rights that society says are important. Just because you use Important Capitals and call it Fundamental doesn't mean anyone has to agree with you. We as a society choose what rights to uphold based on pragmatism, not Nature, and not God.
The US interpretation of basic human rights does not coincide with the UN definition of basic human rights. By UN standards, the US does not provide most basic human rights. As the UN definition is more all-encompasing, wouldn't it be fair to say their list is even more basic and important? Or does the fact that the US did it a certain way automatically mean that that list is the best, most fundamental list of rights?
Who decides?
I thought to myself, hey, here's a chance to bash libertarians, and everyone who knows me knows how much I love me some libertarian bashing. Well, according to wikipedia, they economy is not doing too badly. The well known libertarian think tank Mises Institute even has an article entitled "Stateless in Somalia, and loving it." It is from Mises, so take it with a grain of salt.
Damn, I so wanted you to be right about this I went and looked up some facts to back you up, only the damn facts aren't cooperating!
Classes are a little like castes, but slightly less rigid. Class determines how you are raised, what you believe in, and to a large extent, how you are fucked up. Owning class people are raised to believe that no one is their friend, everyone is at most a temporary ally who may stab you in the back at any moment. They are taught that there is the guy who weilds the stick, and there is the guy who gets beat, and those are your only two options in life, so might as well be the guy weilding the stick. They are taught that they deserve to be the guy weilding the stick, because they are better, and the lower classes need to be kept in line or the whole system will fall apart. The ruling class never has to question their assumptions because no one has the power to call them on their shit.
Middle class people are taught not to stick out, not to make a fuss, to do what the Joneses do, to put on a happy face and maybe you will make it into the ruling class someday. If you screw up, you may fall into the lower class. The middle classes are taught that if everyone pulls together, we can all have the good life. The middle class only has to question their assumptions when their assumptions butt up against those of the ruling class. Unlike the ruling class, the middle class can have real friendships, although not as close and open as those of working class people
The lower class is taught that they do not matter, they are replaceable cogs. They are shown that they are lower than slaves, because a slave owner would never allow their valuable property to die, whereas a free poor person WILL be left to die if they do not produce. Working class people can have very close friendships in a rough, in-the-trenches kind of way. They have to depend on each other, they know what it means to have someone's back, and how important it is that someone has yours.
These are broad generalizations, and don't even begin to cover all the ramifications of class, but serve to illustrate that class based analysis of society brings useful insight. Although class analysis was pioneered by Marx, it is not solely the province of Communism. As an aside, the ruling class of course HATES class based analysis in a "pay no attention to the man behind the mirror" sort of way.
It saddens me that you feel the only real motivation for people is money. Most of the happiest people I know do what they love to do, not what brings them the most money. In fact, external incentives such as monetary reward debase and devalue real intrinsic motivations. When one is motivated only by survival, or by selfish profit, one loses the ability to discern what one's true internal motivations even are. One plays the game to get ahead, but in the process forgets where one was really going, and getting ahead becomes the whole of the goal.
However, the first part of your last point is unassailable. If we can make the least common denominator acceptable, meaning food, clean water, clothing and shelter, control over ones immediate environment, and a place to fit into society and feel valued for ones contribution no matter how small, then everything else is just details. That is the basic starting point for a just and equitable society.
Opportunity and incentive to acheive more come in many forms. As open source software shows, excellent people produce just for the bragging rights. The best artists in history have made the most beautiful contributions while living in utter squalor, having to choose between food and paint. Would Renoir's paintings have been more beautiful if had been a financial success in his lifetime? Yet I still agree that a certain amount of extra reward for extra or excellent effort is useful and equitable. I feel that in a real meritocracy, even those judged as possessing less merit would find it fair that those who were smarter and those who worked harder got slightly more. As long as everyone's basic needs were met, that is.
As for the last part of you last point, we need to break "the highest classes" down further, into th
And I predict that the failure of both HD formats will be blamed on pirates. The solution will be to install DRM in a chip in everyone's head, which can also conveniently project commercials into your auditory and optic nerves.
Only after it calculates Bill Gates' taxes and beats Kasparov at chess, apparently.
This is funny in the context of the article. RTFA before you mod, m'kay?