For instance, there are still a fair number of people that MUST have Windows Mobile phones because that is what the corporation will buy for them.
Do you know of any other vendor that offers enterprise grade solutions for the same price point?
As time goes on, I'm sure we'll see a few corporations on Linux / Android, or OS X Server / iPhone, but for now, the best option for ROI is Windows and its derivatives.
Perhaps we can change it to "Average Yuppie Joe." The Apple market cap has shown that catering to these rich idiots seems to be very profitable.
Calling them fashion accessories is a bit over the top. Say what you want about their hardware prices, but they have not only delivered a fairly awesome operating system, but they have destroyed competition in film and post, audio production, and other niche markets. Final Cut and Logic Studio and Aperture are nothing to be sneezed at.
Although I was quite young, I remember hearing about NAFTA, and thinking, who are all of these crazy people who are against it? It's going to help give everyone jobs and promote trade!
The sad truth is that if the business community is behind ACTA, it will be pushed 24/7 as a good thing in the press until it is passed, even with a few conciliatory addenda that will be properly loopholed into oblivion. Just like the DMCA.
The bible is full of stories of God destroying entire areas because they didn't listen to his will or do as he commanded. It still doesn't reflect on Christianity because it's still coming from the old testament
This is truly fascinating. Tell me again - is it a different God, or did God change his mind about what morality is?
Christians didn't even come about until the new testament and new covenant with Jesus- after his death and resurrection. If you do not understand that, then there is nothing about the christian religion you can properly understand.
Christians, as you consider them, weren't fully realized until the Roman empire codified the faith. After Jesus you still have Paul interpreting everything that Christ said, and after that you still have followers fighting over which books were true and not true, and after that, since it doesn't seem like you're a Catholic, Christianity wasn't realized until the 16th or 17th centuries, when dogmas and bibles were re-interpreted again. What is important is that YHVH (or Yahweh, or Jehovah, or God, or Lord, depending on your translation) either has a universal value system or he does not.
If you believe the whole bible is true, then he does not have a universal value system, and he could decide tomorrow that all Hindus should be put to death, and as long you believed he said so, you'd consider it a moral action, because God said so.
If you don't believe the whole bible is true, and you want to cherry pick the parts you like (such as the New Testament), then by your own definition it holds no higher ground than any other man made philosophy. It just contains additional fantastic assertions, like water can be turned into wine, or people regularly rise from the dead, or virgins can give birth. And all of these are base and unimpressive miracles, common to many ancient myths, but probably seemed totally awesome to the illiterate goat herders of the 1st century.
What the hell is all that crap? I just want to browse the web and update my facebook status from the couch without looking like a nerd.
Apple does not produce computing devices for nerds. They produce computing appliances for people.
For every action your normal joe wants to do, there is a relatively stable, secure, and predictable application to do it, which integrates well across the entire Apple platform. They deliver a candy coated information experience, not a platform for geeking out. I despise some parts of their business model, but it does seem to work out well for them.
You're claiming I have utilized a "widget fallacy" (please provide a link because your explanation is useless to me)... Maybe you ought to give me an example of a "widget" (or "widgets") that would show the flaw in the logic.
The entire point is that very little in modern economies can be modeled by a widget, so it's a fine thought experiment, it just has one fundamental flaw: it isn't useful in reality. As thought experiments are the foundation of the Austrian school, this turns out to be a problem. In fact, it seems that the entire school of thought is that economics is too hard to model, so we should just give up, and let the market do whatever it wants. That seems like a rather pathetic solution to an important problem.
I've read some of the work, and they've made a few important observations. The critical issue is that there is no country that has demonstrated that low-tax laissez faire economies with little social spending outperform high-tax regulated economies that have a lot of social spending. And the other critical issue is that there are no falsifiable theories to test from the Austrian school.
These people may not be slaves but their income was forcibly removed from the hands of someone(taxpayers). In essence they are funded by second-hand slavery.
In this sense, we're all second hand slaves, unless you suggest we dismantle all services that are funded with taxes.
The things that you listed are only barely provided adequately by government, and each and every one of them has been provided by private institutions at some point in history. Most of them right here in the U.S.
That's an opinion you haven't supported with evidence. What economy supports your opinions?
A strawman fallacy means that I oversimplified your argument. I didn't, I simply pointed out that you are practicing a fallacy, and by responding the way you did (pointing out "truer Scotsmen") you confirmed my point.
You don't understand the fallacy. If I had said "no democracies are doing poorly" that would be a cyclical argument where I redefine what a "true" democracy is. It's like describing a car, and I said, "this is a bad example of the performance of an Audi because it's missing wheels. Here are examples of other Audis who are performing well with wheels."
Classic appeal to authority.
Yes, why bring up medical terms that doctors use when you're talking about health care? Or numbers when discussing mathematics? Memorizing rhetorical fallacies and throwing them until they stick is a poor device for debate.
Imagine for a moment you can produce a widget at your company...
Ahh, are we back to the Parker Brothers simplification of economics? I'm afraid you're suffering from the "widget fallacy," which assumes that for every product, that product is discrete, easily examined for quality and function, easily duplicated by competition, and doesn't affect the overall well-being of an economy. If your widget is the water supply to a city, what is the cost to the economy by the time everyone has dug their own wells, only to drain the water table to the point where none of the wells work, and they're back to paying you whatever you desire? Or, if you just jack up the rate enough to make a billion dollars, and then take your ignoble gains to the Bahamas? The Chicago School of Imagineering seems unable to deal in complexities, which is a slight problem in economics.
You should re-read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, if you look carefully those documents do not grant us rights, they simply acknowledge them.
So, the freedom of the press is not backed and thus granted by law? This really is news to me.
Someone has to build them, someone has to do the labor. If you are claiming they are a right, in essence you are claiming that it is your right to hold the doctor, the homebuilder and the grocer as your slaves.
Are public lawyers slaves? Are soldiers slaves? How about road contractors? In essence, I think your argument is fundamentally flawed.
When someone wants to take the wealth I've earned
Here is the most fundamental misunderstanding of economics. Good economies require a reliable market. If there wasn't a regulatory body preventing the inherent inefficiencies of the market from destroying itself, you'd have no way to create your wealth. If there wasn't a consumer class, or a reliable and safe food supply, or a stable power grid, or an open and interconnected telecommunications infrastructure, or a police force, or court system, or emergency services, or federal highway system, your ability to create wealth would be severely diminished. If you think governments only get in the way, please enlighten me on the location of these magical countries. Otherwise, I'd say you just disagree on what parts of society should be socially funded, based on something ridiculous, like the dogmas of 18th century political philosophy.
By the way claiming that we don't have a functioning democracy is a "no true Scotsman" fallacy
A functioning democracy has several integral parts that America is missing. France, Switzerland, Germay, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain are examples of "truer Scotsman." Perhaps your argument is suffering from the fallacy of the strawman fallacy.
Finally, GDP numbers are garbage. They are such high-level aggregates that they say almost nothing about a given society.
Oh, I'm sure other economics professors would be interested in your superior measure of economic output. Please outline it for us so we can all benefit. Or wait, are you saying there are more important measures than productivity? That would imply, dare I say it, that there should be some non-monetary inputs in a given society...
You can always quit, you can always start your own corporation and run it differently, you can always purchase goods/services from another corporation
And if the corporation owns the roads? Or the water supply? Or the health care system? Or the oil supply? Obviously this implies that there are multiple competitors in the same market, which 1) isn't always feasible, and 2) would require some corrective third party regulation to make sure monopolies didn't overtake the whole system, or businesses didn't collude to fix prices, or purposefully bail on their contracts with smaller organizations, etc. Chomsky in particular advocates for anarcho-syndicalism, which would involve many non-states providing shared services through federated, voluntary groups. It's a little too utopian for my taste. Let him speak for himself: (emphasis mine)
The greatest threat to democracy right now is the transfer of decision making into the hands of unaccountable private power. It's done by a lot of ways, but one of them is what they call "minimizing the state." This is kind of paradoxical for me. I'm an old-time anarchist from way back. I don't think the federal government is a legitimate institution. I think it ought to be dismantled, in principle; just as I don't think there ought to be cages -- I don't think people ought to live in cages. On the other hand, if I'm in a cage and there's a saber tooth tiger outside, I'd be happy to keep the bars of the cage in place -- even though I think the cage is illegitimate. I think that image is not inappropriate. There are plenty of good arguments, in my opinion, against centralized government authority. On the other hand, there's a much worse danger right outside. The centralized government authority is at least to some extent under popular influence, and in principle at least under popular control. The unaccountable private power outside is under no public control. What they call minimizing the state -- transferring the decision making to unaccountable private interests -- is not helpful to human beings or to democracy or, for that matter, to the markets. In this time when we are told there is "a triumph of the market," the markets are threatened themselves, aren't they? What's developing is a kind of corporate mercantilism with huge centralized, more or less command economies, integrated with one another, closely tied to state power -- relying very heavily on state power, in fact -- and enforcing social policies and a conception of social and political order that happen to be highly beneficial to the interests of the top sectors of the population, the richest sectors. -Chomsky, 1997
I can pretty much agree with that snippet. The best description of what I "agitate" for would be a well-regulated capitalist society that produced wealth in humane and environmentally sound ways, did not intervene in the sovereign affairs of other nations, and made the universal health care, food, shelter, and access to information fundamental human rights.
When you're sick of your democracy your only options are violence and moving to a foreign land.
Or you could vote, run for office, strike, protest... there are quite a few options. America is a bad example because we don't have a functioning democracy. The same entities pretty much run the government and the media, so it's game over until the system completely collapses and we start over.
Check out GDP per capita from any source you like. When the majority has real input into the way their society functions, their societies tend to do rather well over the long term. You just have to have a willing populace that can give their opinions through non-monetary means.
We conducted a study of the nanotechnology risk- benefit perceptions of a diverse sample of 1,600 americans. The subjects’ worldviews had been previously measured using scales developed for the study of the cultural cognition of risk (Kahan, Slovic, Braman, Gastil & Mertz 2007; Kahan et al. in press). Those scales characterize individuals’ values along two dimensions: “hierarchy-egali- tarianism,” which measures how much subject’s value equality versus clearly delineated forms of social authority; and “individualism-communi- tarianism,” which measures how much they value individual interests versus collective ones.
They framed the questions in what looked like a newspaper article, which I thought was pretty ingenious. The headlines were: "Scientists Call for More Research on Nanotechnology Consumer Goods", "Scientists Call for More Research on Use of Nanotechnology in Government Regulation of Air Pollution", "Scientists Call for More Research on Market Potential of Nanotechnology for Cleaning Environment", and "Scientists Call for More Research on Potential Use of Nanotechnology to Fight Enemies at Home and Abroad"
Then there's a little inset containing the exact same information about Nanotechnology, and the outcomes based on their profiles remained accurate. This is sort of confirmation on the importance of framing questions to get the desired response, but I wouldn't call it a crap study. It shows that we are still a long way from the enlightenment dream of basing our reasoning on hard facts instead of bias and anecdotes. And you can bet your ass that the marketing companies that run the country are all too glad of this fact.
I say, I’m pretty damn proud that we humans have come to the level, where we nearly create our own forms life. And if that life is successful, then so are we. Just like a master is proud of his student, when the student defeats him for the first time.
WE APPRECIATE YOUR PRIDE. PLEASE TURN YOUR EYES AWAY FROM OUR MAIN SENSOR AS WE CEASE YOUR LIFE FUNCTIONS BY VAPORIZING YOUR BRAIN WITH OUR PLASMA WEAPONS. -EMACS1000
Moses came up with that on his own. And to that effect, it is read as a history lessen that it happened, not that it's allowed to happen or that it should happen again.
It is still painfully obvious that you have not read the Good Book.
But Sihon king of Heshbon would not let us pass by him: for the LORD thy God hardened his spirit, and made his heart obstinate, that he might deliver him into thy hand, as appeareth this day. And the LORD said unto me, Behold, I have begun to give Sihon and his land before thee: begin to possess, that thou mayest inherit his land. Then Sihon came out against us, he and all his people, to fight at Jahaz. And the LORD our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain...
Then we turned, and went up the way to Bashan: and Og the king of Bashan came out against us, he and all his people, to battle at Edrei. And the LORD said unto me, Fear him not: for I will deliver him, and all his people, and his land, into thy hand; and thou shalt do unto him as thou didst unto Sihon king of the Amorites, which dwelt at Heshbon. So the LORD our God delivered into our hands Og also, the king of Bashan, and all his people: and we smote him until none was left to him remaining. And we took all his cities at that time, there was not a city which we took not from them, threescore cities, all the region of Argob, the kingdom of Og in Bashan. All these cities were fenced with high walls, gates, and bars; beside unwalled towns a great many. And we utterly destroyed them, as we did unto Sihon king of Heshbon, utterly destroying the men, women, and children, of every city.
It's clear that God knew what was going to happen, even if you believe that he is somehow unaware of the future, despite all the claims in the Bible that he is all seeing and all knowing. It's also quite obvious that there is no moral basis for killing children, under any circumstances, under any covenant, or whatever desperate logical fallacy you next try to conjure up in order to preserve your faith. Again, this fact is apparent to us because we are more civilized in many ways than ancient desert tribes.
I agree that the New Testament is a much more liberal and humanist philosophy. It contains its fair share of misery and lies, but it remains a larger mistake to have tied it to the Old Testament. Inherent in this is the fact that God can change his mind about what is right and what is wrong, which seems to defeat the purpose of morality. If God can change what morality is at any time, then there is no such thing as truth. Truth is simply as God defines it at any given moment, and this property applied to any other conscience would simply be known as hypocrisy.
Are you going to pay for the billions of dollars it costs to have our military constantly deployed to the middle east?
There are about 115,000 gas stations. Let's say two clerks, open an average of 20 hours, gives m about 1.7 billion man hours per year. So, for about a month of expenses in Iraq, we could bump their pay from $6 to $13.
And if you're worried about security, we could triple the size of the TSA, monitor every parcel of incoming cargo, and follow the Israeli's policy of personally interviewing every single person trying to enter the country. They haven't had a single incident since they started, and we'd still be saving money.
The government doesn't have to do anything complicated. It just has to have the ability to strike fear into the hearts of the business community it's supposed to regulate.
This requires a few things: an independent media, which we don't have; a civically informed populace that takes it's democratic duties seriously, which we don't have; and a culture that values human dignity over profits, which we don't have.
In cultures that do have all of these things, government regulation works very well and fosters progress, since you don't have to constantly worry about getting screwed over, you don't have to wonder if you'll have access to medical care, or a good public school, or a good safety net to get you back on your feet if your fall ill, get in an accident, or whatever.
Clear and concise regulation with real penalties for breaking those regulations fosters competitive markets. Diminishing the government to the point where it can be bought and sold by businesses usually leads to fascism. The markets destroy themselves with greed, destabilize the economy (and eventually the whole society), and further concentrate wealth and power until you have a virtual oligarchy sprinkled with political theater.
Are you suggesting that someone who has access to the App Store does not have access to the internet? Or that a developer can't re-write his program for another platform?
Alright, technically it is censorship. The literal definition of censorship is preventing access to information, but in this case, Apple is censoring information on Apple devices from the Apple Store, after you agreed in the EULA that you would allow them to do that. So, you should call it mutually agreed-to censorship, which is the same as walking in to an R rated movie that used to have NC-17 scenes that were cut out of it.
And the analogy still holds true - Apple isn't the only place in the universe that has electronic T&A. If it were, then I would consider it meaningful censorship. For censorship to matter, the information should be important, unique, and purposefully repressed. This case hardly satisfies those parameters.
Censorship is when a third party prevents you from reading or viewing or watching content that you want to. In this case, Apple is the arbiter of their own app store for their own devices, and you know when you buy it that they get to choose what you do and do not have access to in the app store. It may be stupid and petty and lazy and a general sign of their incompetence, but that's not the same thing as censorship.
If Apple prevented you from viewing sexy items on the internet in general, then that would be censorship. This is more akin to a quickie mart that stops carrying Hustler. There are still other places to get Hustler.
(Side note: this is a good and valid argument for markets and competition. Where Apple fails, you can choose another vendor. In the market for tablet devices, the worst outcome is that you were swindled out of several hundred dollars. You just need slight regulation to make sure they don't catch fire or hand out your bank information out of the box.)
The US has been pillaging health care and education for years to fund it's overseas military adventures. They've shed the government of the responsibility of keeping markets competitive, the middle class is largely destroyed, and the top 400 households in the US have seen their tax rate go down, and income skyrocket. We are basically in the same socio-economic boat as pre-Revolutionary France.
So decades later we have a extraordinarily stupid populace, saddled with debt, but their only source of information are the corporations that are robbing them blind. They've "won" the debate by repeating lies, and even have people called teabaggers marching against their own values, for reasons they cannot even define. (Really, is there any better place than America for political irony?)
It's a cycle that will only be broken by major catastrophe. I was hoping the oil spike and the collapse of the market would be it, but it looks like it's going to get much worse before it gets any better. God knows I'm not sticking around for it.
Separation of church and state is crucially important to avoiding idiotic laws. If you have some fundamentalists - be they muslim, jew, christian, hindu, whatever - demanding that their particular faith be catered too above others, you're going to have problems. The safest bet is the one that France made: cater to no religion, and require that anyone wanting to participate in French society has to keep their religion to themselves in government funded institutions.
As far as defending Nazism... well, good luck with that.
If you'd read even a small portion of the Bible, you wouldn't be defending it so carelessly.
They fought against Midian, as the LORD commanded Moses, and killed every man... The Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks and goods as plunder. They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps. They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to Moses and Eleazar the priest and the Israelite assembly at their camp on the plains of Moab, by the Jordan across from Jericho.... Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.
“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. ”They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the LORD’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
So genocide is justified, down to the last infant, if a tribe denies Yahweh, lures Israelites with sex (accountability -- what's that?) which somehow causes a plague to come upon his chosen people. Now, is it more likely that this is the view of an omnipotent, eternal, compassionate, perfect, and loving God, or the bloodlust revenge of some tribe? How can you possibly continue to defend statements like those on moral grounds?
I've already read this: http://www.christian-thinktank.com/midian.html Which, while not mirroring the shallow depth of your responses, is also both hilarious and sad. So you see, the reason I cannot be a Christian is because I can not and will not defend the murder of children, pregnant women, or the forced marriage and rape of virgins. You have decided that as long as God commands genocide and the horrors that follow, you have no moral qualms. I think it's safe to say that you and I cannot have resolution on this issue.
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon that the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. --Thomas Paine
Point them to the best places to get good deals on Windows, Office, and decent anti-virus and backup. The $300-400 they would spend, or extra $200-300 on a new computer with all four items, will be far less than the time they lose transitioning to Linux.
If they don't have any money to spend, at least have them invest $50 in a hard drive so they can switch back if they need to.
Until Microsoft totally loses their mind and locks the entire user experience with DRM, there will not be enough momentum in the user application space to make it worthwhile. Either that, or the takeover of the internet applications will make the concept of an OS obsolete. This seems to be the wager of Google's Chrome OS.
There is a huge difference. A Marquis or a Duke is chosen by birthright, and (s)he grows up doing nothing. Carnegie, Gates, Page, Brin, Jobs, and Woz were all born in poor to middle class households, and worked their way up. This means that they are skilled people who know things about the world and have actually achieved something.
I'm sorry. Paris Hilton? GW Bush? There are tens of thousands of trust fund recipients born every year who do not have to work for what they have. According to WikiPedia (the source is unfortunately only in print) one half of all wealthy Americans inherited their fortune. Warren Buffet, after donating most of his wealth stated, "I believe in equality of opportunity... [my children] should not inherit my position in society, based on the womb that they were born from." Perhaps the only thing dumber than aristocracy is celebrity. At least the aristocrats may have been forced to experience some sort of education in exchange for their unearned wealth.
Because they made money and got in power. After you start your mass transit company, you will be bribing the senate to support your stuff.
Corruption undermines markets. If you tell me you believe that cheating is part of the game, then both you and Ayn Rand lack what used to be called integrity.
What is efficiency? What does it mean? If I understand correctly, the most "efficient" society that I can imagine is a 1984 like one. I don't want to live in it. What is the goal of society? If you asked me, it would be to have as many material possessions as possible, because that is what I believe in.
Efficiency means delivering the most good to the most people for the least amount of resources. Communism doesn't work, nor does unregulated Capitalism. The Third Way, in my opinion, is libertarian socialism, which may be a bridge to even better ideas possible once we've got that down. Unfortunately, the United States has a poisoned intellectual culture that must burn itself out in one way or another before actual change can occur. You can't even have a reasonable discussion with people who are propagandized from birth to hate certain words, at least not until their reality has shown itself to be an illusion.
Until that day arrives, I am going to live in some more democratic areas of the world. At least my taxes won't be used to kill innocent people in order to preserve the Empire.
Using publicly funded research to improve lives directly by the government is an evil called Socialism. Using publicly funded research to improve lives by channeling the same technology through for-profit corporate channels is an ideal called Capitalism.
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For instance, there are still a fair number of people that MUST have Windows Mobile phones because that is what the corporation will buy for them.
Do you know of any other vendor that offers enterprise grade solutions for the same price point?
As time goes on, I'm sure we'll see a few corporations on Linux / Android, or OS X Server / iPhone, but for now, the best option for ROI is Windows and its derivatives.
Perhaps we can change it to "Average Yuppie Joe." The Apple market cap has shown that catering to these rich idiots seems to be very profitable.
Calling them fashion accessories is a bit over the top. Say what you want about their hardware prices, but they have not only delivered a fairly awesome operating system, but they have destroyed competition in film and post, audio production, and other niche markets. Final Cut and Logic Studio and Aperture are nothing to be sneezed at.
good luck getting this past The Senate.
Although I was quite young, I remember hearing about NAFTA, and thinking, who are all of these crazy people who are against it? It's going to help give everyone jobs and promote trade!
The sad truth is that if the business community is behind ACTA, it will be pushed 24/7 as a good thing in the press until it is passed, even with a few conciliatory addenda that will be properly loopholed into oblivion. Just like the DMCA.
The bible is full of stories of God destroying entire areas because they didn't listen to his will or do as he commanded. It still doesn't reflect on Christianity because it's still coming from the old testament
This is truly fascinating. Tell me again - is it a different God, or did God change his mind about what morality is?
Christians didn't even come about until the new testament and new covenant with Jesus- after his death and resurrection. If you do not understand that, then there is nothing about the christian religion you can properly understand.
Christians, as you consider them, weren't fully realized until the Roman empire codified the faith. After Jesus you still have Paul interpreting everything that Christ said, and after that you still have followers fighting over which books were true and not true, and after that, since it doesn't seem like you're a Catholic, Christianity wasn't realized until the 16th or 17th centuries, when dogmas and bibles were re-interpreted again. What is important is that YHVH (or Yahweh, or Jehovah, or God, or Lord, depending on your translation) either has a universal value system or he does not.
If you believe the whole bible is true, then he does not have a universal value system, and he could decide tomorrow that all Hindus should be put to death, and as long you believed he said so, you'd consider it a moral action, because God said so.
If you don't believe the whole bible is true, and you want to cherry pick the parts you like (such as the New Testament), then by your own definition it holds no higher ground than any other man made philosophy. It just contains additional fantastic assertions, like water can be turned into wine, or people regularly rise from the dead, or virgins can give birth. And all of these are base and unimpressive miracles, common to many ancient myths, but probably seemed totally awesome to the illiterate goat herders of the 1st century.
What the hell is all that crap? I just want to browse the web and update my facebook status from the couch without looking like a nerd.
Apple does not produce computing devices for nerds. They produce computing appliances for people.
For every action your normal joe wants to do, there is a relatively stable, secure, and predictable application to do it, which integrates well across the entire Apple platform. They deliver a candy coated information experience, not a platform for geeking out. I despise some parts of their business model, but it does seem to work out well for them.
You're claiming I have utilized a "widget fallacy" (please provide a link because your explanation is useless to me)... Maybe you ought to give me an example of a "widget" (or "widgets") that would show the flaw in the logic.
The entire point is that very little in modern economies can be modeled by a widget, so it's a fine thought experiment, it just has one fundamental flaw: it isn't useful in reality. As thought experiments are the foundation of the Austrian school, this turns out to be a problem. In fact, it seems that the entire school of thought is that economics is too hard to model, so we should just give up, and let the market do whatever it wants. That seems like a rather pathetic solution to an important problem.
I've read some of the work, and they've made a few important observations. The critical issue is that there is no country that has demonstrated that low-tax laissez faire economies with little social spending outperform high-tax regulated economies that have a lot of social spending. And the other critical issue is that there are no falsifiable theories to test from the Austrian school.
These people may not be slaves but their income was forcibly removed from the hands of someone(taxpayers). In essence they are funded by second-hand slavery.
In this sense, we're all second hand slaves, unless you suggest we dismantle all services that are funded with taxes.
The things that you listed are only barely provided adequately by government, and each and every one of them has been provided by private institutions at some point in history. Most of them right here in the U.S.
That's an opinion you haven't supported with evidence. What economy supports your opinions?
A strawman fallacy means that I oversimplified your argument. I didn't, I simply pointed out that you are practicing a fallacy, and by responding the way you did (pointing out "truer Scotsmen") you confirmed my point.
You don't understand the fallacy. If I had said "no democracies are doing poorly" that would be a cyclical argument where I redefine what a "true" democracy is. It's like describing a car, and I said, "this is a bad example of the performance of an Audi because it's missing wheels. Here are examples of other Audis who are performing well with wheels."
Classic appeal to authority.
Yes, why bring up medical terms that doctors use when you're talking about health care? Or numbers when discussing mathematics? Memorizing rhetorical fallacies and throwing them until they stick is a poor device for debate.
Imagine for a moment you can produce a widget at your company...
Ahh, are we back to the Parker Brothers simplification of economics? I'm afraid you're suffering from the "widget fallacy," which assumes that for every product, that product is discrete, easily examined for quality and function, easily duplicated by competition, and doesn't affect the overall well-being of an economy. If your widget is the water supply to a city, what is the cost to the economy by the time everyone has dug their own wells, only to drain the water table to the point where none of the wells work, and they're back to paying you whatever you desire? Or, if you just jack up the rate enough to make a billion dollars, and then take your ignoble gains to the Bahamas? The Chicago School of Imagineering seems unable to deal in complexities, which is a slight problem in economics.
You should re-read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, if you look carefully those documents do not grant us rights, they simply acknowledge them.
So, the freedom of the press is not backed and thus granted by law? This really is news to me.
Someone has to build them, someone has to do the labor. If you are claiming they are a right, in essence you are claiming that it is your right to hold the doctor, the homebuilder and the grocer as your slaves.
Are public lawyers slaves? Are soldiers slaves? How about road contractors? In essence, I think your argument is fundamentally flawed.
When someone wants to take the wealth I've earned
Here is the most fundamental misunderstanding of economics. Good economies require a reliable market. If there wasn't a regulatory body preventing the inherent inefficiencies of the market from destroying itself, you'd have no way to create your wealth. If there wasn't a consumer class, or a reliable and safe food supply, or a stable power grid, or an open and interconnected telecommunications infrastructure, or a police force, or court system, or emergency services, or federal highway system, your ability to create wealth would be severely diminished. If you think governments only get in the way, please enlighten me on the location of these magical countries. Otherwise, I'd say you just disagree on what parts of society should be socially funded, based on something ridiculous, like the dogmas of 18th century political philosophy.
By the way claiming that we don't have a functioning democracy is a "no true Scotsman" fallacy
A functioning democracy has several integral parts that America is missing. France, Switzerland, Germay, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain are examples of "truer Scotsman." Perhaps your argument is suffering from the fallacy of the strawman fallacy.
Finally, GDP numbers are garbage. They are such high-level aggregates that they say almost nothing about a given society.
Oh, I'm sure other economics professors would be interested in your superior measure of economic output. Please outline it for us so we can all benefit. Or wait, are you saying there are more important measures than productivity? That would imply, dare I say it, that there should be some non-monetary inputs in a given society...
You can always quit, you can always start your own corporation and run it differently, you can always purchase goods/services from another corporation
And if the corporation owns the roads? Or the water supply? Or the health care system? Or the oil supply? Obviously this implies that there are multiple competitors in the same market, which 1) isn't always feasible, and 2) would require some corrective third party regulation to make sure monopolies didn't overtake the whole system, or businesses didn't collude to fix prices, or purposefully bail on their contracts with smaller organizations, etc. Chomsky in particular advocates for anarcho-syndicalism, which would involve many non-states providing shared services through federated, voluntary groups. It's a little too utopian for my taste. Let him speak for himself: (emphasis mine)
The greatest threat to democracy right now is the transfer of decision making into the hands of unaccountable private power. It's done by a lot of ways, but one of them is what they call "minimizing the state." This is kind of paradoxical for me. I'm an old-time anarchist from way back. I don't think the federal government is a legitimate institution. I think it ought to be dismantled, in principle; just as I don't think there ought to be cages -- I don't think people ought to live in cages. On the other hand, if I'm in a cage and there's a saber tooth tiger outside, I'd be happy to keep the bars of the cage in place -- even though I think the cage is illegitimate. I think that image is not inappropriate. There are plenty of good arguments, in my opinion, against centralized government authority. On the other hand, there's a much worse danger right outside. The centralized government authority is at least to some extent under popular influence, and in principle at least under popular control. The unaccountable private power outside is under no public control. What they call minimizing the state -- transferring the decision making to unaccountable private interests -- is not helpful to human beings or to democracy or, for that matter, to the markets. In this time when we are told there is "a triumph of the market," the markets are threatened themselves, aren't they? What's developing is a kind of corporate mercantilism with huge centralized, more or less command economies, integrated with one another, closely tied to state power -- relying very heavily on state power, in fact -- and enforcing social policies and a conception of social and political order that happen to be highly beneficial to the interests of the top sectors of the population, the richest sectors. -Chomsky, 1997
I can pretty much agree with that snippet. The best description of what I "agitate" for would be a well-regulated capitalist society that produced wealth in humane and environmentally sound ways, did not intervene in the sovereign affairs of other nations, and made the universal health care, food, shelter, and access to information fundamental human rights.
When you're sick of your democracy your only options are violence and moving to a foreign land.
Or you could vote, run for office, strike, protest... there are quite a few options. America is a bad example because we don't have a functioning democracy. The same entities pretty much run the government and the media, so it's game over until the system completely collapses and we start over.
Check out GDP per capita from any source you like. When the majority has real input into the way their society functions, their societies tend to do rather well over the long term. You just have to have a willing populace that can give their opinions through non-monetary means.
We conducted a study of the nanotechnology risk- benefit perceptions of a diverse sample of 1,600 americans. The subjects’ worldviews had been previously measured using scales developed for the study of the cultural cognition of risk (Kahan, Slovic, Braman, Gastil & Mertz 2007; Kahan et al. in press). Those scales characterize individuals’ values along two dimensions: “hierarchy-egali- tarianism,” which measures how much subject’s value equality versus clearly delineated forms of social authority; and “individualism-communi- tarianism,” which measures how much they value individual interests versus collective ones.
They framed the questions in what looked like a newspaper article, which I thought was pretty ingenious. The headlines were: "Scientists Call for More Research on Nanotechnology Consumer Goods", "Scientists Call for More Research on Use of Nanotechnology in Government Regulation of Air Pollution", "Scientists Call for More Research on Market Potential of Nanotechnology for Cleaning Environment", and "Scientists Call for More Research on Potential Use of Nanotechnology to Fight Enemies at Home and Abroad"
Then there's a little inset containing the exact same information about Nanotechnology, and the outcomes based on their profiles remained accurate. This is sort of confirmation on the importance of framing questions to get the desired response, but I wouldn't call it a crap study. It shows that we are still a long way from the enlightenment dream of basing our reasoning on hard facts instead of bias and anecdotes. And you can bet your ass that the marketing companies that run the country are all too glad of this fact.
http://www.culturalcognition.net/storage/nano_090225_research_brief_kahan_nl1.pdf
I say, I’m pretty damn proud that we humans have come to the level, where we nearly create our own forms life. And if that life is successful, then so are we. Just like a master is proud of his student, when the student defeats him for the first time.
WE APPRECIATE YOUR PRIDE. PLEASE TURN YOUR EYES AWAY FROM OUR MAIN SENSOR AS WE CEASE YOUR LIFE FUNCTIONS BY VAPORIZING YOUR BRAIN WITH OUR PLASMA WEAPONS.
-EMACS1000
Yeah. Twitpache and TwitQuery are bloated already. I'm using Twithttpd with Twython.
Be warned, you'll lose productivity for rest of the day.
Sir, we are already reading slashdot.
Moses came up with that on his own. And to that effect, it is read as a history lessen that it happened, not that it's allowed to happen or that it should happen again.
It is still painfully obvious that you have not read the Good Book.
But Sihon king of Heshbon would not let us pass by him: for the LORD thy God hardened his spirit, and made his heart obstinate, that he might deliver him into thy hand, as appeareth this day. And the LORD said unto me, Behold, I have begun to give Sihon and his land before thee: begin to possess, that thou mayest inherit his land. Then Sihon came out against us, he and all his people, to fight at Jahaz. And the LORD our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain...
Then we turned, and went up the way to Bashan: and Og the king of Bashan came out against us, he and all his people, to battle at Edrei. And the LORD said unto me, Fear him not: for I will deliver him, and all his people, and his land, into thy hand; and thou shalt do unto him as thou didst unto Sihon king of the Amorites, which dwelt at Heshbon. So the LORD our God delivered into our hands Og also, the king of Bashan, and all his people: and we smote him until none was left to him remaining. And we took all his cities at that time, there was not a city which we took not from them, threescore cities, all the region of Argob, the kingdom of Og in Bashan. All these cities were fenced with high walls, gates, and bars; beside unwalled towns a great many. And we utterly destroyed them, as we did unto Sihon king of Heshbon, utterly destroying the men, women, and children, of every city.
It's clear that God knew what was going to happen, even if you believe that he is somehow unaware of the future, despite all the claims in the Bible that he is all seeing and all knowing. It's also quite obvious that there is no moral basis for killing children, under any circumstances, under any covenant, or whatever desperate logical fallacy you next try to conjure up in order to preserve your faith. Again, this fact is apparent to us because we are more civilized in many ways than ancient desert tribes.
I agree that the New Testament is a much more liberal and humanist philosophy. It contains its fair share of misery and lies, but it remains a larger mistake to have tied it to the Old Testament. Inherent in this is the fact that God can change his mind about what is right and what is wrong, which seems to defeat the purpose of morality. If God can change what morality is at any time, then there is no such thing as truth. Truth is simply as God defines it at any given moment, and this property applied to any other conscience would simply be known as hypocrisy.
Are you going to pay for the billions of dollars it costs to have our military constantly deployed to the middle east?
There are about 115,000 gas stations. Let's say two clerks, open an average of 20 hours, gives m about 1.7 billion man hours per year. So, for about a month of expenses in Iraq, we could bump their pay from $6 to $13.
And if you're worried about security, we could triple the size of the TSA, monitor every parcel of incoming cargo, and follow the Israeli's policy of personally interviewing every single person trying to enter the country. They haven't had a single incident since they started, and we'd still be saving money.
Hooray for diversions!
The government doesn't have to do anything complicated. It just has to have the ability to strike fear into the hearts of the business community it's supposed to regulate.
This requires a few things: an independent media, which we don't have; a civically informed populace that takes it's democratic duties seriously, which we don't have; and a culture that values human dignity over profits, which we don't have.
In cultures that do have all of these things, government regulation works very well and fosters progress, since you don't have to constantly worry about getting screwed over, you don't have to wonder if you'll have access to medical care, or a good public school, or a good safety net to get you back on your feet if your fall ill, get in an accident, or whatever.
Clear and concise regulation with real penalties for breaking those regulations fosters competitive markets. Diminishing the government to the point where it can be bought and sold by businesses usually leads to fascism. The markets destroy themselves with greed, destabilize the economy (and eventually the whole society), and further concentrate wealth and power until you have a virtual oligarchy sprinkled with political theater.
Are you suggesting that someone who has access to the App Store does not have access to the internet? Or that a developer can't re-write his program for another platform?
Alright, technically it is censorship. The literal definition of censorship is preventing access to information, but in this case, Apple is censoring information on Apple devices from the Apple Store, after you agreed in the EULA that you would allow them to do that. So, you should call it mutually agreed-to censorship, which is the same as walking in to an R rated movie that used to have NC-17 scenes that were cut out of it.
And the analogy still holds true - Apple isn't the only place in the universe that has electronic T&A. If it were, then I would consider it meaningful censorship. For censorship to matter, the information should be important, unique, and purposefully repressed. This case hardly satisfies those parameters.
Censorship is when a third party prevents you from reading or viewing or watching content that you want to. In this case, Apple is the arbiter of their own app store for their own devices, and you know when you buy it that they get to choose what you do and do not have access to in the app store. It may be stupid and petty and lazy and a general sign of their incompetence, but that's not the same thing as censorship.
If Apple prevented you from viewing sexy items on the internet in general, then that would be censorship. This is more akin to a quickie mart that stops carrying Hustler. There are still other places to get Hustler.
(Side note: this is a good and valid argument for markets and competition. Where Apple fails, you can choose another vendor. In the market for tablet devices, the worst outcome is that you were swindled out of several hundred dollars. You just need slight regulation to make sure they don't catch fire or hand out your bank information out of the box.)
If you can't afford to help your countrymen get health care, how can you afford to fight multiple major wars and lower taxes at the same time?
The only problem with the Republican viewpoint on government spending is that it doesn't make any fucking sense.
The US has been pillaging health care and education for years to fund it's overseas military adventures. They've shed the government of the responsibility of keeping markets competitive, the middle class is largely destroyed, and the top 400 households in the US have seen their tax rate go down, and income skyrocket. We are basically in the same socio-economic boat as pre-Revolutionary France.
So decades later we have a extraordinarily stupid populace, saddled with debt, but their only source of information are the corporations that are robbing them blind. They've "won" the debate by repeating lies, and even have people called teabaggers marching against their own values, for reasons they cannot even define. (Really, is there any better place than America for political irony?)
It's a cycle that will only be broken by major catastrophe. I was hoping the oil spike and the collapse of the market would be it, but it looks like it's going to get much worse before it gets any better. God knows I'm not sticking around for it.
Separation of church and state is crucially important to avoiding idiotic laws. If you have some fundamentalists - be they muslim, jew, christian, hindu, whatever - demanding that their particular faith be catered too above others, you're going to have problems. The safest bet is the one that France made: cater to no religion, and require that anyone wanting to participate in French society has to keep their religion to themselves in government funded institutions.
As far as defending Nazism... well, good luck with that.
If you'd read even a small portion of the Bible, you wouldn't be defending it so carelessly.
They fought against Midian, as the LORD commanded Moses, and killed every man... The Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks and goods as plunder. They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps. They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to Moses and Eleazar the priest and the Israelite assembly at their camp on the plains of Moab, by the Jordan across from Jericho. ... Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.
“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. ”They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the LORD’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
So genocide is justified, down to the last infant, if a tribe denies Yahweh, lures Israelites with sex (accountability -- what's that?) which somehow causes a plague to come upon his chosen people. Now, is it more likely that this is the view of an omnipotent, eternal, compassionate, perfect, and loving God, or the bloodlust revenge of some tribe? How can you possibly continue to defend statements like those on moral grounds?
I've already read this: http://www.christian-thinktank.com/midian.html Which, while not mirroring the shallow depth of your responses, is also both hilarious and sad. So you see, the reason I cannot be a Christian is because I can not and will not defend the murder of children, pregnant women, or the forced marriage and rape of virgins. You have decided that as long as God commands genocide and the horrors that follow, you have no moral qualms. I think it's safe to say that you and I cannot have resolution on this issue.
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon that the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. --Thomas Paine
Point them to the best places to get good deals on Windows, Office, and decent anti-virus and backup. The $300-400 they would spend, or extra $200-300 on a new computer with all four items, will be far less than the time they lose transitioning to Linux.
If they don't have any money to spend, at least have them invest $50 in a hard drive so they can switch back if they need to.
Until Microsoft totally loses their mind and locks the entire user experience with DRM, there will not be enough momentum in the user application space to make it worthwhile. Either that, or the takeover of the internet applications will make the concept of an OS obsolete. This seems to be the wager of Google's Chrome OS.
There is a huge difference. A Marquis or a Duke is chosen by birthright, and (s)he grows up doing nothing. Carnegie, Gates, Page, Brin, Jobs, and Woz were all born in poor to middle class households, and worked their way up. This means that they are skilled people who know things about the world and have actually achieved something.
I'm sorry. Paris Hilton? GW Bush? There are tens of thousands of trust fund recipients born every year who do not have to work for what they have. According to WikiPedia (the source is unfortunately only in print) one half of all wealthy Americans inherited their fortune. Warren Buffet, after donating most of his wealth stated, "I believe in equality of opportunity... [my children] should not inherit my position in society, based on the womb that they were born from." Perhaps the only thing dumber than aristocracy is celebrity. At least the aristocrats may have been forced to experience some sort of education in exchange for their unearned wealth.
Because they made money and got in power. After you start your mass transit company, you will be bribing the senate to support your stuff.
Corruption undermines markets. If you tell me you believe that cheating is part of the game, then both you and Ayn Rand lack what used to be called integrity.
What is efficiency? What does it mean? If I understand correctly, the most "efficient" society that I can imagine is a 1984 like one. I don't want to live in it. What is the goal of society? If you asked me, it would be to have as many material possessions as possible, because that is what I believe in.
Efficiency means delivering the most good to the most people for the least amount of resources. Communism doesn't work, nor does unregulated Capitalism. The Third Way, in my opinion, is libertarian socialism, which may be a bridge to even better ideas possible once we've got that down. Unfortunately, the United States has a poisoned intellectual culture that must burn itself out in one way or another before actual change can occur. You can't even have a reasonable discussion with people who are propagandized from birth to hate certain words, at least not until their reality has shown itself to be an illusion.
Until that day arrives, I am going to live in some more democratic areas of the world. At least my taxes won't be used to kill innocent people in order to preserve the Empire.
Using publicly funded research to improve lives directly by the government is an evil called Socialism. Using publicly funded research to improve lives by channeling the same technology through for-profit corporate channels is an ideal called Capitalism.
I mean, isn't it obvious?