It should be boo for Yahoo, hope they burn. Last I herd, Yahoo corporate policy has not offered the tiniest twich of regret for turning people over to China's government who sufferd suvere punishments for exercising free speech. Since it is so easy to switch search engines, and not that much harder to switch to a 3rd party email account, I can't imagine why anyone would want to do business with them any more - and I'm the kinda of guy that would still buys Nikes mande in sweat shops. If they want to respect China's laws to stay in China's market, then I say great. Lets tell them to go to hell, and let China be their only market.
The high tech economy dampens the business cycle because it reduces excessive inventories. It does so in three ways. First, modern forecasting methods are much more accurate than the rough methods of forecasting used earlier (say prior to WW II). Second, the quantity, quality, and timeliness of the data going into modern forecasting models is much better than available previously. Finally, modern manufacturing is much more adaptable to changing product mixes forecasted by these models.
That is a wonderfull explanation of why it would dampen the business cycle under a gold based system. But under a paper based system, that means that production immediately stops as soon as the system is saturated with too much debt. And if they print up money, it immediately raises prices faster than pay.
A review of economic history shows that the modern business cycle is less volatile than older business cycles.
Nah, not really. Go to your local mega mart and look around. All that stuff there is tangible wealth. Then go to a gas station and ask them how much gas they can sell you. Probably as much as you can buy. That's tangible wealth. Most of the giant, crappy houses that you are so worried about aren't made of paper. They are tangible wealth.
So what, there is industry and business in a gold based system too. Half the industrial revolution happened on gold. This "lets print up money and create wealth" attitude might actually work if printing up money didn't water down the supply that is already out there, if it didn't take control from private savers and put in into the hands of central planners, if it didn't increase the general debt load... but by definition it does.
By far, the most valuable asset that most people possess is their ability to work. This is how you get a loan for a house, the bank expects you to be able to work in the future; most of the time, that bet works out pretty well. When someone who makes $75,000(in today's monopoly money) loses $500,000, it sucks, but it also equates to about 7 years of work. If you are 40, that isn't that huge a deal. It sucks, it makes their life more difficult, but they are perfectly able to soldier on, they have 4 (maybe 5?) times that much labor left in them.
Well, if you rape someone they will probably come out a stronger person in the end. So waht are you saying?
All that will happen if the paper economy collapses is that people with a lot of paper wealth won't have it anymore. It will suck, but it will suck less than the Great Depression.
No it will be far worse than the great depression. During the great depression, you had destruction of debt based wealth, but not distruction of money. During this one, you will have both. Buddy, you have no clue what you're in for. When paper money dies, all jobs will die with it, but most property will likely be confiscated by creditors long beforehand. In sum, nobody will have property, nobody will have savings, and nobody will be able to invest.
The primary function of a currency is to engender trade; it is easier to trade with someone if you can trade in some common abstract unit. As long as that unit isn't freely available to market participants(it it 'scarce') it doesn't matter much what it is. As other responses have said, it doesn't matter a whole lot where that scarcity comes from, the fed is just as good as the relative concentration of a particular element in easily reachable parts of the earths crust.
No, the function of money is also a store of value, a unit of account, and a way of keeping track of things. When you kill those, then it predestines it to loose it's function to engender trade. It tells people lies eg. "buying a house is a good investment", when it actually is a poor allocation of resources. Lies like, "this money has this much value" when it doesn't and won't. The more it gets watered down, the more it forces people to get rid of it immediately, even if it would otherwise be in their best interest to save for a while. It eventually makes rational trade and investment impossible.
FYI, the federal reserve act happened in 1911, the great depression in 1930. The great depression was caused precicely because they could loan out more money than they had gold to back it up. The solution to the great depression was not to pay off the overbearing debt by printing up money, but to avoid the oversupply of debt. With gold, you can't loan out more gold than there is gold - you can only do that with paper.
This is a side issue, but I hear a lot of economics BS out there and every time I hear it I get pissed off.
First off, an efficient high tech economy means that the "business cycle" is going to be more drastic and harsh not magically soft land and smooth out like every body preaches now days. "soft landing?", It is absolutely insane for people to say that.
Second off, during the late 1800s the US economy experienced a period where efficient factory production drove down costs for every year for nearly half a century. This also had the effect of driving down pay and driving down profit margins, but it drove down costs faster than both - so people still did well. Now fast forward to 2006, and the US is going into the information age full blast, and hard drive farms that would cost over a million dollars yesterday, now cost a few hundred and can be held in your hand. In addition, overseas labor is driving down costs even more. But today there is one huge 'bigger than life' problem... we have TOO MUCH FREAKING DEBT... and our payment obligations are not going to go down even when pay and profit margins do. Translation: the US is in deep shit. (they will probably have to hyperinflate to stop a systemic collapse)
Third off, having these huge amounts of debt and all these stock market bubbles and all these housing bubbles (today) is not a normal part of a free market economy. They happen specifically because investment is financed thru the banks, which is financed thru the Federal reserve, which is financed by nothing. I mean, when they need money to loan out - they print it up and loan it out. That means that over time, more and more money goes into circulation driving up prices, driving up debt, and driving out private savings. Hey lookie! The US has record high debt, record high housing prices, and record low savings. Hmmmmm.
Fourth off, if we used money like gold that couldn't be printed up out of thin air. That would naturally limit the amount of debt in the economy and force finances to come from savings instead of print-ups. That would kill bubbles, but more importantly put investment power back into the hands of private savers instead of central bankers and government.
In sum, the US economy is about to make a radical shift as the housing bubble violently pops and when it does the US will be in deep shit. This will happen because everything you have been taught about central banking and paper money is BS. Loaning out "modern" paper money (instead of real money like gold) leads to irrational allocation of resources that causes inflation, bubbles, too much debt, and puts investment power into the hands of inefficient central planners (bankers) instead of private individuals. Seriously, name one institution who ever thought they had too much money. At this point it is beond repair, so people would be very wise to collect guns, food storage, and gold like no tomorrow because all freaking satanic hell is about to break loose.
In fact, they are not only anti free market, they are genocidal. Like how they held back safety devices for 20 years in automobiles while over million people died in auto accidents. Like how US pharmacuticals sued the African nations in the world court to stop making AIDS medication generics while over a million people died of AIDS. In the future 3d printers and nanotech are going to move manufacturing out of the factory and back into the home, and those who believe in patnets will want to extend the coercive power of government into every last persons life to collect royalities and revenue streams. Dont think so? Just look at what happened with copyrights - 30 years ago, no one would have believed that they would go this far either.
Screw national security, how about search, how about for business and commerce, how about for for culturial exchange and global interaction. The chances of me getting attacked by a terrorist are less than getting hit by lightning, the chances with dealing with foriegn cultures, foriegn business and commerce are rapidly approaching 100%. There are 4 billion people out there who have the potential to mutually benifit from clean communication. Please don't patrinoze me, I'm not too worried about getting nailed by terrorists, but am very bothered by the possibility of having my individual liberties nickeled and dimed to death.
Well, you know. If people had the source code to drivers, and to packages, and had an attitude that favored free software over proprietary software. Then all those problems about driver crashing, cleanup, security, icon placement, would tend to solve themselves wouldn't they?
Now that I got that off my chest, you may now proceed to mod me to minus infinity and wine about a bunch of irritating things in Linux.
Lately I've noticed that the hysteria about global warming and kyoto has reached an all time high. At fitst I had trouble understanding why, as it certainly wasn't out of concern for the environment. Then it hit me, the US has huge and massive coal reserves and there are a lot of orginisations, like OPEC, who are desperate to make sure we never make economical use of them. By some measures, I've herd that coal-gasification can be competitive at $35 per barrel and that there is enough coal to provide it for several 100 years.
Like most shams, the easiest way to understand that it's misleading is not to look at the pitch, but at the costs. In this case, massive curtailment of peoples property and liberties to ensure global warming is contained. History is filled with thousands of desperate scenarios where in order to stop disaster it was necissary for the masses to give up their liberties right away. Without exception, every single one of them were frauds. How's that for a statistic.
You don't get it. That argument makes about as much sense as requiring knife permits for the sake of stopping knifings. If they were out to stop deaths, then they could fine or press criminal charges against a vendor who is negligent in food preperation and causes people to get sick, not put them thru a bunch of bureauocracy and fees. It is also a very compelling argument for a buyer beware attitude and patronizing businesses with a good reputation. The fact that they have these rules in place and they still didn't stop people in the US from getting sick should be telling.
The truth is that most people need is the power to help themselves, not aid. For example, if a person in LA went down to the store, bought and cooked up some hot-dogs, and then sold them on the street corner - he would likely be in jail, taxed, and fined over 40K before the night was out - and then be forced to get permits and inspections at great expense to himself. I'm sorry, no argument about government protecting people can justify that kind of behavior.
In Africa, a large amount of US aid was used to build a milk plant. But it was not near any cows or roads, and ended up shutting down. Those kinds of mistakes are much more rare in the private sector, because there is accountabillity and control. Many aid loans were blown by corrupt leaders, who then left it to the citizens to pay back.
In many countries, investors are more than happy to build factories, roads, mines, infrastructure, and the jobs that go with them. But not if government officials demand bribes, permits, taxes, and high fees at every step of the process, and not if they demand high fees on everything imported and exported, and not if the judiciary is so corrupt or slow that they have no recource if land or other items are taken from them. If you had 100 million dollars, would you put it in Venesuela or North Korea right now? People who have paid a bitter price. That's a lot of money, and then they wonder why they have employment problems.
In China, millions of people died from hunger until the farmers were able to have property rights, then the problem disapeared and the economy started to boom. Really, who would slave away on a farm where they own none of the take and none of the land. Once again, the people in China didn't need charity nor help from the government, what they needed was property rights. Charity would have prolonged the problem and made it worse. What they needed was the power to help themselves, once they got it then the poverty problems took care of themselves naturally.
In all fairness, the wrong he did was not copying, not selling, but defrauding the people he sold to to believe they had a valid key when they didn't. In that sense, he is no more a criminal then Microsoft is every day for criminalizing people for mere act of copying.
The two different kinds of debt are not leveraged debt vs consumer debt, but rather consumpsion debt vs investment in production debt. Leverage can be heathy when used for productive activity, but not healthy when used for paper productivity. Sure, when they pump a bunch of money out there, people can bet on stocks, housing, whatever, but that does nothing for the economy. By now that should be obvious from the housing bubble and the dot.com bubble before it. (BTW, it will also be obvious soon, because the liquidity out there can't be drained from the system until the bond market implodes forcing gold to a mininum floor of $1600/oz - gold is in anything but a bubble)
Gold does way more than sit in the ground, it serves as honest accounting. Name one person, or institution who ever thought they had too much money. Also, a tailor suit cost $20 in dollars in 1911, and now costs over $1500 dollars - which is proof that the interst in dollars has not exceded the real value.
My credit is none, not bad... "none" - as in no credit history at all, the report shows up as a blank page. (you should see how shocked people look when that happens) And the funny thing is that I haven't suffered a bit because of it. I havent had the "privelage" of loading up on credit cards at high interest, I haven't have the "privelage" or dealing with EZ furniture corp, and EZ fast wheelie dealer under high pressure sales pitches, and I haven't had the "pirvelage" of buying a house at outrageous prices just before the market crashes. Not using credit also forces me to do something else that is really rare now days - savings (I recommend precious metals for long term savings).
Of course, one might say... "that's nice for you, but us folks in the real world are too poor to save for cars and homes"... to which I respond. If you are too poor to save, then you are too poor to go into debt. In fact that's part of the problem.... people are lying to themselves. They are pretending they are rich, when they are not. They are pretending like they are middle class, or upper middle class, when they are not. They are pretending that all stop-lights on all streets will always be green, when they won't. Sure, some credit is ok when used for productive activity, but lets face it - most credit is used for ego. For getting a nicer house, nicer car, and nicer furntiure that you can afford. Of course, there is always medical bills - but in all fairness, high medical costs are not a problem in places where all care is paid for out of pocket and not by the government. In all fairness, our debt system helps hide the problems in our medical system.
Which brings me to another point. In a normal economy, you have a near fixed amount of money (eg gold), and over time that tends to keep prices constant while limiting the amount of debt. But we don't live in a normal economy. We live in an economy where whenever money is needed for a loan, the federal reserve bank prints it up and loans it out (thru other banks). So over time, society tends to become over saturated in debt, and over time prices always go up, and over time savers get punished. (hmmmm, lookie where we are now.... to much debt, high prices, and no savings.... hmmmm) Moral - the gig is up. People who are smart will get out of debt no matter what, and buy precious metals with any spare pennies they can afford.
Screw you, I wrote the bitter protest against copyrights http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=147420&cid =12354088 I am probably the anti-christ of paid shills, and I'm speaking from experience. I've seen all sorts of clever cute schemes to control content, and treat sites like content portals and they have all failed. If fact, MSN and AOL were so blinded by content strategies that google drove in twenty freight trains right under their nose. This is noting other than another play at the content strategy on another level. It will fail for the same reason that all the other ones did right down to the bbs level, like delphi. Those rail road regulations that were supposed to make things fair, what it really did was create so many new rules in the industry that any new competitors were locked out. Content priority and data control, no I am not worried about that, people will find ways to out smart it. Regulatory lock in, history has taught is is almost destiny once the government gets involved. Keep the government the fuck out!
The truth of the matter is that we don't need any new laws pro or con. Pro Net nutrality reminds me of all those laws that forced the railroad barrons to charge fair prices and offer reasonable services. Well, anyone who wants to know how that turned out only needs to look at the sorry state of Amtrack in the US today. Anti net neutrality laws remind me of those Airline services who were too afraid to tell their own customers what type of carryons they could have - so what did they do, they got the government to pass a law requiring the regulation of carryons. Anyone who has been on a plane knows how "responsive" and "enjoyable" the service is.
The truth of the matter is that there are plenty of new technologies coming down the pike like wi-max (with a 32 mile radius). There are plenty of market forces that will put the phone and cable companies out to dry if they try to jerk arround people by throttling some peoples content and not others. For God's sake, what has come over people. Users in the IT industry do not need the government to save us from crappy content practices, they need the government to get the hell out. Even if they did get the US to pass such a neutrality law, will they get every other country on the planet to do it too? Will they have regulations that say you can't throttle traffic routed thru other countries? Will the have laws the controll how traffic is routed? Seriously, how far do people want to go with this. Using Government to force neutrality is the wrong tool for the job. When was the last time the government has ever helped us? ever! I hope it is not lost on people that the more we turn to government for help, the more beholden we are to them. The more we turn to the government for help, the more it will lock in short term local "solutions" at the expense of long term global ones.
All to often, I think people confuse the physical world with the information world. In the physical world, if everyone on the planet used your car - that would deprive your uses and take from your resources. But if everyone in the world uses your code, that increases your reputation, the need and demand for your service, the opportunities to get in on other cool projects, and increases your overall personal respect.
Where people are no longer able to impose the copyright cartel model of business, I think there would be a natural pressure to make code more open because people who didn't would loose out in the race. Look at Solaris. When Linux started gaining ground, the only way they could compete is by opening the source. They knew if they didn't - innovators would not consider innovating on their code base and that would increase the risk of them becomming irrelavent.
... is that the GPL is pro copyright because it's a license. Wrong! The success of the GPL is the ultimate proof that all those arguments like... "copyrights are pro creator, pro business, an incentive, protection, pro commecial..."... are lies, frauds, and scams. Copyrights like any coerced monopoly or any personal "right to sue" for market share will slow business, hurt individuals, are predatory rather than protectional, and are a disincentive to creation and productive behavior. The GPL basically fought fire with fire. The greatest victory of the GPL is that it broke the software industry copyright cartel and is forcing them to compete off of merits and service rather than off of threats and control.
If you mugged people in secret, the solution is not to change your ways to 'conveys the appropriate sense of openness, transparency and collaboration.', the solution is to stop mugging people. Well, the same is true with patents. The solution is not to make them more open and transparent (BTW when government says that, it means the opposite will happen), the solution is to get rid of patents or do as much as possible to go in that direction.
Patents are a fraud, by giving an inventor a 'protective' monopoly on one invention, they also lock out his access to 10 million others. Thanks for nothing, and then people wonder why the only inventors left are rogue individual tinkerers who don't collaberate with anyone else. And then they wonder why the cost of R&D explodes thru the roof under a patent system.
I hope people understand that in a world without patents, the market would center arround invention related services. But with patents, the market centers arround invention related controls. FYI, laywers, government, and large conglomerates are good at controling things, inventors are good at inventing things. Only a fool would think inventors benefit the most from a patent system.
Patents are worse than a false peoperty right, they held back inventions like air bags, and anti lock breaks for 20 years while countless thousands died. They are responsible for millions of Africans dying from AIDS being deprived of generic medications (people who tried were sued in the world cort). They are responsible for millions of medicaitons with bizare chemichal side effects being forced on us while natural remedies are regulated and driven out of the market. The fact that every industry has incompatable parts, and the huge environmental waste that comes from that is not a normal market event, but specifically caused by patetns. They lock out millions of inventions that are natural progressions, and would have been invented anyhow. If you want to see what happens to an industry when patents fail, all you need to do is look at the IBM compatable PC and how when IBM and Intel lost their lawsuits over controlling the interface, a nuclear explosion of business and creativity happened in the PC industry. Patents are worse than a hinderance, they are genocidal.
The problem with Vista has been that innovation and technology growth in Linux follows a trajectory similar to e^x where in the Microsoft space it follows a growth pattern similar to ln(x). When things start out, the appearance is that the ln(x) formula grows at a spectacular rate compaired to e^x, but after a few iterations the exponential growth blows everything else away.
Agreed, what he also forgot to mention is how growth in Linux exploded while growth in FreeBSD didn't. That had everything in the world to do with the fact that people who made a fork of Linux couldn't sue people who coppied it, but people who made a closed fork of FreeBSD could.
Sometimes a group of individuals will take an initiative, start to move in a direction - and then someone will run to the front of the crowd and say that he is leading them when he really isn't. This is the case with ESR. Even though he looks like a leader because he is always out in front giving direction, the truth is that he is a follower and it shows because the future is not about ipods, or embeded devices, or 64 bit platforms, but about freedom and liberty in the information age. If you have the freedom, then all the rest of the stuff will eventually follow. If you don't have the freedom, then the other stuff really doesn't matter much.
Notice how linux took off inspite of not being "enterprise UNIX" like SCO, or "for the data center" like Sun, or "pro corporate commecrial software" like Microsoft. This is because contrary to popular belief, (ESR and) the corporate world does not lead, but follows. And who do they follow: individuals exercising their liberty to act in their own best interest. And how do you guarantee liberty in the information age, by having the minimal amount of restrictions on what people can copy by not using proprietary software whenever possible.
The problem with Lessig is that his position is not anti-copyright, but reform copyright enough to find a "happy" middle ground. While this sounds nice, the RIAA and MPAA understand very cleary that this is an all or nothing battle and have been using him to confuse and appease the masses from the front-door while they ram down harsher than ever copyright restriction laws and lawsiuts thru the back door. Is he refusing to take a total stand against copyrights because he has some deep moral understanding about the nature of free information that we dont? No. He is doing it because he does not want to be considered "radical" even if that radical position is the truth. We shouldn't follow him, because he is following us by pandering to the masses instead of the facts. While this might help him get good book sells, it will not help liberty in the information age which is really the goal.
Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent!!!
It should be boo for Yahoo, hope they burn. Last I herd, Yahoo corporate policy has not offered the tiniest twich of regret for turning people over to China's government who sufferd suvere punishments for exercising free speech. Since it is so easy to switch search engines, and not that much harder to switch to a 3rd party email account, I can't imagine why anyone would want to do business with them any more - and I'm the kinda of guy that would still buys Nikes mande in sweat shops. If they want to respect China's laws to stay in China's market, then I say great. Lets tell them to go to hell, and let China be their only market.
That is a wonderfull explanation of why it would dampen the business cycle under a gold based system. But under a paper based system, that means that production immediately stops as soon as the system is saturated with too much debt. And if they print up money, it immediately raises prices faster than pay.
You need to read up on the great depression.
So what, there is industry and business in a gold based system too. Half the industrial revolution happened on gold. This "lets print up money and create wealth" attitude might actually work if printing up money didn't water down the supply that is already out there, if it didn't take control from private savers and put in into the hands of central planners, if it didn't increase the general debt load ... but by definition it does.
Well, if you rape someone they will probably come out a stronger person in the end. So waht are you saying?
No it will be far worse than the great depression. During the great depression, you had destruction of debt based wealth, but not distruction of money. During this one, you will have both. Buddy, you have no clue what you're in for. When paper money dies, all jobs will die with it, but most property will likely be confiscated by creditors long beforehand. In sum, nobody will have property, nobody will have savings, and nobody will be able to invest.
No, the function of money is also a store of value, a unit of account, and a way of keeping track of things. When you kill those, then it predestines it to loose it's function to engender trade. It tells people lies eg. "buying a house is a good investment", when it actually is a poor allocation of resources. Lies like, "this money has this much value" when it doesn't and won't. The more it gets watered down, the more it forces people to get rid of it immediately, even if it would otherwise be in their best interest to save for a while. It eventually makes rational trade and investment impossible.
FYI, the federal reserve act happened in 1911, the great depression in 1930. The great depression was caused precicely because they could loan out more money than they had gold to back it up. The solution to the great depression was not to pay off the overbearing debt by printing up money, but to avoid the oversupply of debt. With gold, you can't loan out more gold than there is gold - you can only do that with paper.
This is a side issue, but I hear a lot of economics BS out there and every time I hear it I get pissed off.
... we have TOO MUCH FREAKING DEBT ... and our payment obligations are not going to go down even when pay and profit margins do. Translation: the US is in deep shit. (they will probably have to hyperinflate to stop a systemic collapse)
First off, an efficient high tech economy means that the "business cycle" is going to be more drastic and harsh not magically soft land and smooth out like every body preaches now days. "soft landing?", It is absolutely insane for people to say that.
Second off, during the late 1800s the US economy experienced a period where efficient factory production drove down costs for every year for nearly half a century. This also had the effect of driving down pay and driving down profit margins, but it drove down costs faster than both - so people still did well. Now fast forward to 2006, and the US is going into the information age full blast, and hard drive farms that would cost over a million dollars yesterday, now cost a few hundred and can be held in your hand. In addition, overseas labor is driving down costs even more. But today there is one huge 'bigger than life' problem
Third off, having these huge amounts of debt and all these stock market bubbles and all these housing bubbles (today) is not a normal part of a free market economy. They happen specifically because investment is financed thru the banks, which is financed thru the Federal reserve, which is financed by nothing. I mean, when they need money to loan out - they print it up and loan it out. That means that over time, more and more money goes into circulation driving up prices, driving up debt, and driving out private savings. Hey lookie! The US has record high debt, record high housing prices, and record low savings. Hmmmmm.
Fourth off, if we used money like gold that couldn't be printed up out of thin air. That would naturally limit the amount of debt in the economy and force finances to come from savings instead of print-ups. That would kill bubbles, but more importantly put investment power back into the hands of private savers instead of central bankers and government.
In sum, the US economy is about to make a radical shift as the housing bubble violently pops and when it does the US will be in deep shit. This will happen because everything you have been taught about central banking and paper money is BS. Loaning out "modern" paper money (instead of real money like gold) leads to irrational allocation of resources that causes inflation, bubbles, too much debt, and puts investment power into the hands of inefficient central planners (bankers) instead of private individuals. Seriously, name one institution who ever thought they had too much money. At this point it is beond repair, so people would be very wise to collect guns, food storage, and gold like no tomorrow because all freaking satanic hell is about to break loose.
In fact, they are not only anti free market, they are genocidal. Like how they held back safety devices for 20 years in automobiles while over million people died in auto accidents. Like how US pharmacuticals sued the African nations in the world court to stop making AIDS medication generics while over a million people died of AIDS. In the future 3d printers and nanotech are going to move manufacturing out of the factory and back into the home, and those who believe in patnets will want to extend the coercive power of government into every last persons life to collect royalities and revenue streams. Dont think so? Just look at what happened with copyrights - 30 years ago, no one would have believed that they would go this far either.
Screw national security, how about search, how about for business and commerce, how about for for culturial exchange and global interaction. The chances of me getting attacked by a terrorist are less than getting hit by lightning, the chances with dealing with foriegn cultures, foriegn business and commerce are rapidly approaching 100%. There are 4 billion people out there who have the potential to mutually benifit from clean communication. Please don't patrinoze me, I'm not too worried about getting nailed by terrorists, but am very bothered by the possibility of having my individual liberties nickeled and dimed to death.
Well, you know. If people had the source code to drivers, and to packages, and had an attitude that favored free software over proprietary software. Then all those problems about driver crashing, cleanup, security, icon placement, would tend to solve themselves wouldn't they?
Now that I got that off my chest, you may now proceed to mod me to minus infinity and wine about a bunch of irritating things in Linux.
Lately I've noticed that the hysteria about global warming and kyoto has reached an all time high. At fitst I had trouble understanding why, as it certainly wasn't out of concern for the environment. Then it hit me, the US has huge and massive coal reserves and there are a lot of orginisations, like OPEC, who are desperate to make sure we never make economical use of them. By some measures, I've herd that coal-gasification can be competitive at $35 per barrel and that there is enough coal to provide it for several 100 years.
Like most shams, the easiest way to understand that it's misleading is not to look at the pitch, but at the costs. In this case, massive curtailment of peoples property and liberties to ensure global warming is contained. History is filled with thousands of desperate scenarios where in order to stop disaster it was necissary for the masses to give up their liberties right away. Without exception, every single one of them were frauds. How's that for a statistic.
You don't get it. That argument makes about as much sense as requiring knife permits for the sake of stopping knifings. If they were out to stop deaths, then they could fine or press criminal charges against a vendor who is negligent in food preperation and causes people to get sick, not put them thru a bunch of bureauocracy and fees. It is also a very compelling argument for a buyer beware attitude and patronizing businesses with a good reputation. The fact that they have these rules in place and they still didn't stop people in the US from getting sick should be telling.
The truth is that most people need is the power to help themselves, not aid. For example, if a person in LA went down to the store, bought and cooked up some hot-dogs, and then sold them on the street corner - he would likely be in jail, taxed, and fined over 40K before the night was out - and then be forced to get permits and inspections at great expense to himself. I'm sorry, no argument about government protecting people can justify that kind of behavior.
In Africa, a large amount of US aid was used to build a milk plant. But it was not near any cows or roads, and ended up shutting down. Those kinds of mistakes are much more rare in the private sector, because there is accountabillity and control. Many aid loans were blown by corrupt leaders, who then left it to the citizens to pay back.
In many countries, investors are more than happy to build factories, roads, mines, infrastructure, and the jobs that go with them. But not if government officials demand bribes, permits, taxes, and high fees at every step of the process, and not if they demand high fees on everything imported and exported, and not if the judiciary is so corrupt or slow that they have no recource if land or other items are taken from them. If you had 100 million dollars, would you put it in Venesuela or North Korea right now? People who have paid a bitter price. That's a lot of money, and then they wonder why they have employment problems.
In China, millions of people died from hunger until the farmers were able to have property rights, then the problem disapeared and the economy started to boom. Really, who would slave away on a farm where they own none of the take and none of the land. Once again, the people in China didn't need charity nor help from the government, what they needed was property rights. Charity would have prolonged the problem and made it worse. What they needed was the power to help themselves, once they got it then the poverty problems took care of themselves naturally.
In all fairness, the wrong he did was not copying, not selling, but defrauding the people he sold to to believe they had a valid key when they didn't. In that sense, he is no more a criminal then Microsoft is every day for criminalizing people for mere act of copying.
The two different kinds of debt are not leveraged debt vs consumer debt, but rather consumpsion debt vs investment in production debt. Leverage can be heathy when used for productive activity, but not healthy when used for paper productivity. Sure, when they pump a bunch of money out there, people can bet on stocks, housing, whatever, but that does nothing for the economy. By now that should be obvious from the housing bubble and the dot.com bubble before it. (BTW, it will also be obvious soon, because the liquidity out there can't be drained from the system until the bond market implodes forcing gold to a mininum floor of $1600/oz - gold is in anything but a bubble)
Gold does way more than sit in the ground, it serves as honest accounting. Name one person, or institution who ever thought they had too much money. Also, a tailor suit cost $20 in dollars in 1911, and now costs over $1500 dollars - which is proof that the interst in dollars has not exceded the real value.
My credit is none, not bad ... "none" - as in no credit history at all, the report shows up as a blank page. (you should see how shocked people look when that happens) And the funny thing is that I haven't suffered a bit because of it. I havent had the "privelage" of loading up on credit cards at high interest, I haven't have the "privelage" or dealing with EZ furniture corp, and EZ fast wheelie dealer under high pressure sales pitches, and I haven't had the "pirvelage" of buying a house at outrageous prices just before the market crashes. Not using credit also forces me to do something else that is really rare now days - savings (I recommend precious metals for long term savings).
... "that's nice for you, but us folks in the real world are too poor to save for cars and homes" ... to which I respond. If you are too poor to save, then you are too poor to go into debt. In fact that's part of the problem .... people are lying to themselves. They are pretending they are rich, when they are not. They are pretending like they are middle class, or upper middle class, when they are not. They are pretending that all stop-lights on all streets will always be green, when they won't. Sure, some credit is ok when used for productive activity, but lets face it - most credit is used for ego. For getting a nicer house, nicer car, and nicer furntiure that you can afford. Of course, there is always medical bills - but in all fairness, high medical costs are not a problem in places where all care is paid for out of pocket and not by the government. In all fairness, our debt system helps hide the problems in our medical system.
.... to much debt, high prices, and no savings .... hmmmm) Moral - the gig is up. People who are smart will get out of debt no matter what, and buy precious metals with any spare pennies they can afford.
Of course, one might say
Which brings me to another point. In a normal economy, you have a near fixed amount of money (eg gold), and over time that tends to keep prices constant while limiting the amount of debt. But we don't live in a normal economy. We live in an economy where whenever money is needed for a loan, the federal reserve bank prints it up and loans it out (thru other banks). So over time, society tends to become over saturated in debt, and over time prices always go up, and over time savers get punished. (hmmmm, lookie where we are now
Screw you, I wrote the bitter protest against copyrightsd =12354088 I am probably the anti-christ of paid shills, and I'm speaking from experience. I've seen all sorts of clever cute schemes to control content, and treat sites like content portals and they have all failed. If fact, MSN and AOL were so blinded by content strategies that google drove in twenty freight trains right under their nose. This is noting other than another play at the content strategy on another level. It will fail for the same reason that all the other ones did right down to the bbs level, like delphi. Those rail road regulations that were supposed to make things fair, what it really did was create so many new rules in the industry that any new competitors were locked out. Content priority and data control, no I am not worried about that, people will find ways to out smart it. Regulatory lock in, history has taught is is almost destiny once the government gets involved. Keep the government the fuck out!
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=147420&ci
The truth of the matter is that we don't need any new laws pro or con. Pro Net nutrality reminds me of all those laws that forced the railroad barrons to charge fair prices and offer reasonable services. Well, anyone who wants to know how that turned out only needs to look at the sorry state of Amtrack in the US today. Anti net neutrality laws remind me of those Airline services who were too afraid to tell their own customers what type of carryons they could have - so what did they do, they got the government to pass a law requiring the regulation of carryons. Anyone who has been on a plane knows how "responsive" and "enjoyable" the service is.
The truth of the matter is that there are plenty of new technologies coming down the pike like wi-max (with a 32 mile radius). There are plenty of market forces that will put the phone and cable companies out to dry if they try to jerk arround people by throttling some peoples content and not others. For God's sake, what has come over people. Users in the IT industry do not need the government to save us from crappy content practices, they need the government to get the hell out. Even if they did get the US to pass such a neutrality law, will they get every other country on the planet to do it too? Will they have regulations that say you can't throttle traffic routed thru other countries? Will the have laws the controll how traffic is routed? Seriously, how far do people want to go with this. Using Government to force neutrality is the wrong tool for the job. When was the last time the government has ever helped us? ever! I hope it is not lost on people that the more we turn to government for help, the more beholden we are to them. The more we turn to the government for help, the more it will lock in short term local "solutions" at the expense of long term global ones.
All to often, I think people confuse the physical world with the information world. In the physical world, if everyone on the planet used your car - that would deprive your uses and take from your resources. But if everyone in the world uses your code, that increases your reputation, the need and demand for your service, the opportunities to get in on other cool projects, and increases your overall personal respect.
Where people are no longer able to impose the copyright cartel model of business, I think there would be a natural pressure to make code more open because people who didn't would loose out in the race. Look at Solaris. When Linux started gaining ground, the only way they could compete is by opening the source. They knew if they didn't - innovators would not consider innovating on their code base and that would increase the risk of them becomming irrelavent.
... is that the GPL is pro copyright because it's a license. Wrong! The success of the GPL is the ultimate proof that all those arguments like ... "copyrights are pro creator, pro business, an incentive, protection, pro commecial..." ... are lies, frauds, and scams. Copyrights like any coerced monopoly or any personal "right to sue" for market share will slow business, hurt individuals, are predatory rather than protectional, and are a disincentive to creation and productive behavior. The GPL basically fought fire with fire. The greatest victory of the GPL is that it broke the software industry copyright cartel and is forcing them to compete off of merits and service rather than off of threats and control.
If you mugged people in secret, the solution is not to change your ways to 'conveys the appropriate sense of openness, transparency and collaboration.', the solution is to stop mugging people. Well, the same is true with patents. The solution is not to make them more open and transparent (BTW when government says that, it means the opposite will happen), the solution is to get rid of patents or do as much as possible to go in that direction.
Patents are a fraud, by giving an inventor a 'protective' monopoly on one invention, they also lock out his access to 10 million others. Thanks for nothing, and then people wonder why the only inventors left are rogue individual tinkerers who don't collaberate with anyone else. And then they wonder why the cost of R&D explodes thru the roof under a patent system.
I hope people understand that in a world without patents, the market would center arround invention related services. But with patents, the market centers arround invention related controls. FYI, laywers, government, and large conglomerates are good at controling things, inventors are good at inventing things. Only a fool would think inventors benefit the most from a patent system.
Patents are worse than a false peoperty right, they held back inventions like air bags, and anti lock breaks for 20 years while countless thousands died. They are responsible for millions of Africans dying from AIDS being deprived of generic medications (people who tried were sued in the world cort). They are responsible for millions of medicaitons with bizare chemichal side effects being forced on us while natural remedies are regulated and driven out of the market. The fact that every industry has incompatable parts, and the huge environmental waste that comes from that is not a normal market event, but specifically caused by patetns. They lock out millions of inventions that are natural progressions, and would have been invented anyhow. If you want to see what happens to an industry when patents fail, all you need to do is look at the IBM compatable PC and how when IBM and Intel lost their lawsuits over controlling the interface, a nuclear explosion of business and creativity happened in the PC industry. Patents are worse than a hinderance, they are genocidal.
The problem with Vista has been that innovation and technology growth in Linux follows a trajectory similar to e^x where in the Microsoft space it follows a growth pattern similar to ln(x). When things start out, the appearance is that the ln(x) formula grows at a spectacular rate compaired to e^x, but after a few iterations the exponential growth blows everything else away.
Agreed, what he also forgot to mention is how growth in Linux exploded while growth in FreeBSD didn't. That had everything in the world to do with the fact that people who made a fork of Linux couldn't sue people who coppied it, but people who made a closed fork of FreeBSD could.
Sometimes a group of individuals will take an initiative, start to move in a direction - and then someone will run to the front of the crowd and say that he is leading them when he really isn't. This is the case with ESR. Even though he looks like a leader because he is always out in front giving direction, the truth is that he is a follower and it shows because the future is not about ipods, or embeded devices, or 64 bit platforms, but about freedom and liberty in the information age. If you have the freedom, then all the rest of the stuff will eventually follow. If you don't have the freedom, then the other stuff really doesn't matter much.
Notice how linux took off inspite of not being "enterprise UNIX" like SCO, or "for the data center" like Sun, or "pro corporate commecrial software" like Microsoft. This is because contrary to popular belief, (ESR and) the corporate world does not lead, but follows. And who do they follow: individuals exercising their liberty to act in their own best interest. And how do you guarantee liberty in the information age, by having the minimal amount of restrictions on what people can copy by not using proprietary software whenever possible.
Oh really. Hmmm, how about pricing out their $32,000 enterprise servers with an IBM x86 farm equivalent?
The problem with Lessig is that his position is not anti-copyright, but reform copyright enough to find a "happy" middle ground. While this sounds nice, the RIAA and MPAA understand very cleary that this is an all or nothing battle and have been using him to confuse and appease the masses from the front-door while they ram down harsher than ever copyright restriction laws and lawsiuts thru the back door. Is he refusing to take a total stand against copyrights because he has some deep moral understanding about the nature of free information that we dont? No. He is doing it because he does not want to be considered "radical" even if that radical position is the truth. We shouldn't follow him, because he is following us by pandering to the masses instead of the facts. While this might help him get good book sells, it will not help liberty in the information age which is really the goal.