People should be able to use money to buy things they want, encouraging more people to supply them. The problem here is that we have decided this shouldn't apply to organs, so the supply is severely restricted.
I'm going to go with serious, and provide the unemotional free market economic response.
Health care does not price naturally. Price elasticity of demand is arbitrarily close to zero for serious illnesses, and informedness is wildly variable. In addition, in the case of transplants, demand mobility is variable based on factors that are not strongly correlated to rational market value.
Using free market theories on markets that do not naturally price is prone to wild variance from observed market behavior.
Either on (1) or off (0). It has no intelligence, but merely executes statements in whatever order listed on its hard drive or flash drive. A modern phone is stupid. Beyond stupid. It doesn't even know what "law" is.
I've written advertising targeting software that knows more about people's purchasing habits than human experts. I've written a music recommendation engine that knows what songs go together better than most people, and in many more genres. I've written text analysis code that can give you synonyms for words as a way of expressing its grasp of each word's meaning.
What would it take to convince you that computers understand abstract concepts?
'I'm seeing this whole meme around the idea that it's us pushing for people only to use facebook.com addresses,' Chin said, 'That was not our intention.'
I dig what you're saying and I do not disagree. I was not saying that my finger-in-the-wind example of the increase in shallow media is a good economic measure, rather that it is a symptom that suggests overfunding that can be readily observed. A red flag that begs a more substantive analysis.
Your suggestions for other and more accurate measures are good ones. Those and more should be explored. Like any public cost when we are far over budget -- particularly one which has increased so rapidly -- we should be able to show that our spending is justifiable. I do not think it is impossible to measure the value of cultural production -- anything that has value can be measured. It may be difficult, and have some confidence intervals that are subject to debate, but we can at least collect the data, publish it, and have the discussion about the formulae. We may not agree on the exact figures, but if we are to continue investing public funds and inhibiting individual freedom to act, it behooves us as a rational society to explore the empirical evidence.
If we are not willing to at least attempt those steps, any conjecture about whether we are spending the right amount -- or that we should continue to invest public resources when our coffers are empty -- is unfounded.
This system has worked very well for fans and artists.
Citation needed. Show me your numbers. On what basis are you positing that we are spending the correct portion of our GDP on the production of copyright works? The continuous expansion of the power and duration of public enforcement of copyright grants over the past 100 years has been done almost entirely without objective economic analysis of whether we are getting good value for our money.
It is at least arguable that we are spending too much on the production of copyright works. That we are dedicating too much of our federal resources to copyright enforcement, making copyright production too profitable, and thereby shifting too much of our productive resources into copyright work production. We have dozens of television channels filled with shows that plumb ever shallower depths. Popular music has shifted from Janis Joplin and Gracie Slick questioning the nature of humanity and the tragedies of the soul to Lady Gaga and Kesha telling us how fun it is -- or how difficult it is -- to be a pampered alcoholic party girl. Why do they not write about suffering to which we can relate? Because they are too rich to know what the life of a normal person is like.
Do we have a shortage of copyright production? Are we underfunding the production of cultural works? Or are we awash in cultural excess and funding corporate drivel art that expresses the most mundane of human desires?
If you are going to claim that we need to continue our expenditure of public funds on copyright grants and enforcement, and that we should continue to allocate so much of our productive resources to the production of copyright works, I want to see some numbers.
how else would you understand them if they were not presented to you ?
I think it is potentially a mistake to believe that our Western political machine wants us to understand Muslim extremism. Irrational fear is a much more effective means of controlling the public than dispassionate analysis.
I might hesitate to say such a thing were the evidence not so painfully clear. I love what my country is supposed to stand for, but it is hard to claim that we are on the path of our principles when there is a push to lift the ban on domestic propaganda.
This is a case of a legal dispute of patents and ownership.
Did you read the article? This is a case of Apple abusing its walled garden authority to assume the role of the judicial and make a summary judgement in favour of the plaintiff. From the article:
"Now it seems that despite the fact that the lawsuit is still in court, Apple has pulled Speak for Yourself from the App Store"
The best and brightest people follow the rules - that's why they are the best.
Following the rules is orthogonal to greatness. Joan of Arc, Steve Jobs, Richard Feynman -- not big on following the rules. Alan Greenspan, Warren Buffet, W. Edwards Deming -- big rule followers. Each extraordinary in his or her own way.
According to the CDC, a child dies every 3 days from an unintentional gun shot.
Far more child pedestrians die every year getting hit by cars, yet we don't gnash our teeth about it. Know why? Because it is such a small number that it is statistically irrelevant in a population of three hundred million. Your intentional portrayal of the statistic as children per day is intentionally disingenuous and demeans the discussion.
If Google services put the businesses paying them above the users they would be ad-laden crap that no-one would use.
Perhaps you didn't read the article. Every single entry in Google Shopping from now on will be a paid placement. It will be 100% ads. I don't think you can get any more ad-laden than 100%.
no paying to influence search result ranking).
Umm, again, perhaps you didn't read the thing you are commenting on. Every single thing displayed will be a paid placement. It is 100% pay-to-play. "Unpaid results will never appear" seems pretty strongly influenced by payment.
Pay-to-play is unrelated to whether Google filters the results based on quality. They filter spam and other shady SEO in their regular search engine, and certainly have the technical chops to do the same in a shopping search engine. The question of shady listings is entirely unrelated to pay-to-play. Including that notion in the discussion is disingenuous.
'We believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date. Higher quality dataâ"whether itâ(TM)s accurate prices, the latest offers or product availabilityâ"should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.'
That is a fine explanation of why you want to have a formal relationship with the retailers that you include in your search engine. Of course, that has nothing to do with it being pay-to-play. The pay-to-play is the part that matters to your users. The quote above is clearly deflecting attention from the change from a search engine (motivated primarily to satisfy the user) to a shopping mall (motivated primarily to satisfy the retailer). That is the part that is significant to users.
it's at least plausible that the few people that could, would.
Show me the evidence. Show me the evidence that Iran has ever officially sanctioned an invasion of undisputed Israeli territory since we have made it clear that we will destroy them if they do. Show me the evidence that Iran has ever officially sanctioned any military action that would result in a full-scale military response from us. Show me the evidence that they do not understand what our eleven carrier strike groups are capable of. Show me the evidence that your fears are well-founded, instead of simply chanting them.
I like your post, and would add one more that I think should be an addendum to every discussion of copyright in the current context:
(4) Without any empirical data showing that current copyright expenditure is lower than the optimal level.
The purpose of copyright is to make our world a better place by rewarding creatives for an activity that the free market cannot naturally price. We choose to create artificial scarcity to establish a profitable market for creative work. When the government steps in to create an artificial market, to set an artificial price, it is a necessary function of the government to seek to set a price that is market optimal.
The degree of copyright enforcement, strength and duration, is how the government establishes the artificial market price. In a perfect free market, that price naturally reaches the optimal level through competitive supply and demand. In a government established artificial market, that price must be consciously selected. We are not making that selection based on empirical data or market measurements. At present, we are blindly accepting the labels' supposition: "More, because we say so."
Do we need more culture? Are we Sparta, powerful but lacking in a cultural record, or are we late Rome, growing weak because of excessive expenditures on entertainment and cultural excess? If the former, we would make our society better by increasing copyright strength and duration. If the latter, by decreasing it.
unleash the dogs of war and start preparing to take out Tel Aviv.
Iran is not seriously considering attacking Tel Aviv. Not now, not any time in the near future. They know exactly what would happen if they attacked Israel. The only possible exception is if they think we are about to attack (in the conventional, air assault and invasion sense, not limited cyberwar) and they are going to get wiped out anyway. They may do some things that seem irrational from our Western perspective, but they are not stupid. They know that starting a shooting war with Israel would be suicide.
Take a minute to really reflect on your hypothesis: What has Iran done -- not talked about, not nationalist tough guy rhetoric, I'm talking real military action -- that suggests they are irrational enough to attack Tel Aviv under the clear and present threat of getting twice what we gave Saddam?
Real geeks hack their tech. And when it comes to cooking, you can buy something that is half as good as what you can build, for twice the price -- as this ridiculous article handily demonstrates. Food hacking (or Modernist Cuisine, if you prefer) is a very big field these days. Want a great steak? Start with sous vide immersion cooking to get the perfect medium rare, then hit it with a flamethrower for the char. Play with your food.
a world without software patents would be 'open slather for anybody who can just go faster than the next person.'
Well, yes -- that is pretty much the essential nature of "Open." Anyone who has the skill, time, and energy can build whatever they want, even if it is based on someone else's work. It has its ups and downs, but saying the software world would be more Open if it were more restrictive is an internally inconsistent statement. It is logically self-contradictory.
There are those who believe that using the system against itself is better than changing the system. Some believe the GPL is better than would be the elimination of software copyright. I actually fall into this camp (though I do believe in reducing the strength and duration of patent and copyright). But it would not be more Open. Open has some shortcomings, and that may lead a rational person to believe that absolute Open-ness is less efficient than some degree of Closed-ness. But that does not mean you can redefine Open to mean partially Closed. Just say you believe in a balance between Open and Closed. It's OK to believe in shades of gray.
Not every question demands an absolutist answer, but rational discourse does rely on words like Open having a clear and unequivocal meaning in a given context. Dilute your hard-core ideology, not the terminology you use to describe it.
Investment income is the reward you get by risking your money by investing in a business... It is not something that should be discouraged
Agreed. Similarly, having an income-earning job should not be discouraged. However, we tax both types of income, so the fact is that we are discouraging both, in order to fund our government. We can all agree we should cut spending, and in the meantime we have to pay our bills, so we will have to tax things. It is just a question of which things we tax and how we balance the taxes.
Aside: There is also the question of whether we have the fiscal discipline to pay our bills even when we don't agree with what those idiots are spending our money on. In my world you don't cut off your nose to spite your face. It's bloody and it makes you look stupid. But I digress.
Right now, our government taxes regular income earners at a higher rate than capital investors. Some will argue the double taxation angle, but it does not hold up to scrutiny of actual corporate fiscal policy. The Sage of Omaha believes there is a problem with capital gains being under-taxed, and it is pretty hard -- maybe impossible -- to find a more hard-assed, ultra-wealthy, fiscal perfectionist than Mr. Buffett.
So, the question is this: Can we show solid empirical evidence that supports our treatment of capital gains versus regular income? Do we know something that has escaped The Oracle? If not, we need to take a very hard and honest look at that policy -- regardless of what our long-held beliefs may be or where our self-interests lie.
He has previously stated this is the bill that you either support, 'or you stand with the child pornographers.'"
Damn, Vic -- must be tough. Most people actually think you are a greater threat than a child pornographer. I mean, I think you are a wildly irrational authoritarian with far more power to harm the Canadian populace than any person with your mind-set should have, but.... well... OK, maybe they're right. I guess you are more of a threat than a child pornographer.
Heh, I guess, maybe you should be careful with the comparisons you draw. You might just wind up on the wrong side.
The productive resources of which you speak are controlled entirely by private individuals. How do you propose to "allocate" them, good, bad, or indifferent?
Copyright is a fiat of government, and it is a variable thing. It is a knob that we can turn up or down to increase or decrease the amount of resources that private individuals choose to dedicate to the production of copyrighted works. When we strengthen copyright, capital lenders are encouraged to shift more resources into the production of copyright goods, because the probable ROI improves. When we weaken it, the resources shift out of copyright production into the next highest ROI alternative application of those resources.
It's the same as anything in our economy works -- except that copyright is a fiat monopoly of government, so it does not naturally self-regulate in a free market like soda pop or automobiles do. Since monopolies do not naturally self-regulate via market forces, we must control the dial manually, by considering whether we are investing too much or too little of our limited resources into the production of copyrighted works, and adjusting the expected reward.
Both Facebook and Google share many business practices and monetizing practices. While Google had the unfortunate timing for their IPO (2004) after dot com bubble burst, the exact same thing could had been said about them. Many slashdotters, however, still believe that Google does the right thing.
I'm not sure who these "Many Slashdotters" are that you refer to -- some sort of expert panel on the morality of corporations I guess -- but they certainly are ignorant, and haven't been reading the website for which they are named. Google has become quite bent, particularly relative to their starting point, and that subject is discussed regularly and extensively on these forums (typically with a few ignorant twits starting the discussion by saying, "But you all love Google!" followed by a chorus of, "Are you daft? No we don't."). From cozying up to the U.S. surveillance state to embracing censorship in China, Google has become far more morally flexible since their IPO.
And bear in mind, Google started off as a hard-core moralist corporation. They were the poster-boys for "what a scientist/moralist company should be" until Eric Schmidt and the public shareholders came along. Facebook is starting with no discernible principles to act as a rudder.
Of course, I agree with your assessment of the investment potential. But that says a great deal more about the flaws in our economic policies than it does about whether Facebook is good for long-term United States growth.
What's your problem with her getting rich for bringing enjoyment to millions of people who felt it was worth their cash?
The question of whether it is an efficient allocation of our productive resources. The free market generally works well for physical goods which have a high cost of reproduction. Copyright goods do not work in a free market, and so government granted exclusive copy-right was created. That fiat of government is not a free market, so using intrinsically free-market concepts like "felt it was worth their cash" is out of context. Prices do not naturally regulate in a monopoly environment, and copy-right is a monopoly on the right to create copies. Choosing the degree of that exclusive privilege grant is a matter of balancing the needs of our society based on what we believe is cost effective.
If we grant too little protection for the creation of media, we become a bleak society lacking in culture. If we grant too much, we become decadent; awash in media spectacle. The objective is to provide enough motivation to creatives to author our cultural narrative, but not so much that we wind up investing too much of our productive resources into entertainment and not enough on advancing our industrial and technological capabilities.
So, what is your opinion? Should we be investing more of our productive resources into the creation of media, or should we be shifting the balance in favor of non-copyright advancement in areas such as industrial production or technology research? The government granted monopoly on the right to manufacture copies is a good thing -- when it is in balance with all the potential uses of productive resources in our economy.
Slashdot Mirror
People should be able to use money to buy things they want, encouraging more people to supply them. The problem here is that we have decided this shouldn't apply to organs, so the supply is severely restricted.
I'm going to go with serious, and provide the unemotional free market economic response.
Health care does not price naturally. Price elasticity of demand is arbitrarily close to zero for serious illnesses, and informedness is wildly variable. In addition, in the case of transplants, demand mobility is variable based on factors that are not strongly correlated to rational market value.
Using free market theories on markets that do not naturally price is prone to wild variance from observed market behavior.
Either on (1) or off (0). It has no intelligence, but merely executes statements in whatever order listed on its hard drive or flash drive. A modern phone is stupid. Beyond stupid. It doesn't even know what "law" is.
I've written advertising targeting software that knows more about people's purchasing habits than human experts. I've written a music recommendation engine that knows what songs go together better than most people, and in many more genres. I've written text analysis code that can give you synonyms for words as a way of expressing its grasp of each word's meaning.
What would it take to convince you that computers understand abstract concepts?
'I'm seeing this whole meme around the idea that it's us pushing for people only to use facebook.com addresses,' Chin said, 'That was not our intention.'
Ahem;
Bullshit.
That is all.
the Department of Justice issued a legal opinion warning about the potential for constitutional violations.
Quick pro-tip, Canada: You're supposed to stuff your DoJ with ex-RIAA lawyers, then you won't have that problem.
I dig what you're saying and I do not disagree. I was not saying that my finger-in-the-wind example of the increase in shallow media is a good economic measure, rather that it is a symptom that suggests overfunding that can be readily observed. A red flag that begs a more substantive analysis.
Your suggestions for other and more accurate measures are good ones. Those and more should be explored. Like any public cost when we are far over budget -- particularly one which has increased so rapidly -- we should be able to show that our spending is justifiable. I do not think it is impossible to measure the value of cultural production -- anything that has value can be measured. It may be difficult, and have some confidence intervals that are subject to debate, but we can at least collect the data, publish it, and have the discussion about the formulae. We may not agree on the exact figures, but if we are to continue investing public funds and inhibiting individual freedom to act, it behooves us as a rational society to explore the empirical evidence.
If we are not willing to at least attempt those steps, any conjecture about whether we are spending the right amount -- or that we should continue to invest public resources when our coffers are empty -- is unfounded.
This system has worked very well for fans and artists.
Citation needed. Show me your numbers. On what basis are you positing that we are spending the correct portion of our GDP on the production of copyright works? The continuous expansion of the power and duration of public enforcement of copyright grants over the past 100 years has been done almost entirely without objective economic analysis of whether we are getting good value for our money.
It is at least arguable that we are spending too much on the production of copyright works. That we are dedicating too much of our federal resources to copyright enforcement, making copyright production too profitable, and thereby shifting too much of our productive resources into copyright work production. We have dozens of television channels filled with shows that plumb ever shallower depths. Popular music has shifted from Janis Joplin and Gracie Slick questioning the nature of humanity and the tragedies of the soul to Lady Gaga and Kesha telling us how fun it is -- or how difficult it is -- to be a pampered alcoholic party girl. Why do they not write about suffering to which we can relate? Because they are too rich to know what the life of a normal person is like.
Do we have a shortage of copyright production? Are we underfunding the production of cultural works? Or are we awash in cultural excess and funding corporate drivel art that expresses the most mundane of human desires?
If you are going to claim that we need to continue our expenditure of public funds on copyright grants and enforcement, and that we should continue to allocate so much of our productive resources to the production of copyright works, I want to see some numbers.
how else would you understand them if they were not presented to you ?
I think it is potentially a mistake to believe that our Western political machine wants us to understand Muslim extremism. Irrational fear is a much more effective means of controlling the public than dispassionate analysis.
I might hesitate to say such a thing were the evidence not so painfully clear. I love what my country is supposed to stand for, but it is hard to claim that we are on the path of our principles when there is a push to lift the ban on domestic propaganda.
He bears a great deal of responsibility for tanking the economy.
One gigantic and catastrophic fuckup does not a fool make. Napoleon was a great general despite his march on Russia.
Warren Buffet is not a rule follower. His value approach to investing is the exception when viewed in relation to most other investors.
If the majority do not follow rules, then being not in the majority does not preclude one from being a rule follower.
This is a case of a legal dispute of patents and ownership.
Did you read the article? This is a case of Apple abusing its walled garden authority to assume the role of the judicial and make a summary judgement in favour of the plaintiff. From the article:
"Now it seems that despite the fact that the lawsuit is still in court, Apple has pulled Speak for Yourself from the App Store"
The best and brightest people follow the rules - that's why they are the best.
Following the rules is orthogonal to greatness. Joan of Arc, Steve Jobs, Richard Feynman -- not big on following the rules. Alan Greenspan, Warren Buffet, W. Edwards Deming -- big rule followers. Each extraordinary in his or her own way.
According to the CDC, a child dies every 3 days from an unintentional gun shot.
Far more child pedestrians die every year getting hit by cars, yet we don't gnash our teeth about it. Know why? Because it is such a small number that it is statistically irrelevant in a population of three hundred million. Your intentional portrayal of the statistic as children per day is intentionally disingenuous and demeans the discussion.
If Google services put the businesses paying them above the users they would be ad-laden crap that no-one would use.
Perhaps you didn't read the article. Every single entry in Google Shopping from now on will be a paid placement. It will be 100% ads. I don't think you can get any more ad-laden than 100%.
no paying to influence search result ranking).
Umm, again, perhaps you didn't read the thing you are commenting on. Every single thing displayed will be a paid placement. It is 100% pay-to-play. "Unpaid results will never appear" seems pretty strongly influenced by payment.
I see tons of shady listings,
Pay-to-play is unrelated to whether Google filters the results based on quality. They filter spam and other shady SEO in their regular search engine, and certainly have the technical chops to do the same in a shopping search engine. The question of shady listings is entirely unrelated to pay-to-play. Including that notion in the discussion is disingenuous.
'We believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date. Higher quality dataâ"whether itâ(TM)s accurate prices, the latest offers or product availabilityâ"should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.'
That is a fine explanation of why you want to have a formal relationship with the retailers that you include in your search engine. Of course, that has nothing to do with it being pay-to-play. The pay-to-play is the part that matters to your users. The quote above is clearly deflecting attention from the change from a search engine (motivated primarily to satisfy the user) to a shopping mall (motivated primarily to satisfy the retailer). That is the part that is significant to users.
it's at least plausible that the few people that could, would.
Show me the evidence. Show me the evidence that Iran has ever officially sanctioned an invasion of undisputed Israeli territory since we have made it clear that we will destroy them if they do. Show me the evidence that Iran has ever officially sanctioned any military action that would result in a full-scale military response from us. Show me the evidence that they do not understand what our eleven carrier strike groups are capable of. Show me the evidence that your fears are well-founded, instead of simply chanting them.
I like your post, and would add one more that I think should be an addendum to every discussion of copyright in the current context:
(4) Without any empirical data showing that current copyright expenditure is lower than the optimal level.
The purpose of copyright is to make our world a better place by rewarding creatives for an activity that the free market cannot naturally price. We choose to create artificial scarcity to establish a profitable market for creative work. When the government steps in to create an artificial market, to set an artificial price, it is a necessary function of the government to seek to set a price that is market optimal.
The degree of copyright enforcement, strength and duration, is how the government establishes the artificial market price. In a perfect free market, that price naturally reaches the optimal level through competitive supply and demand. In a government established artificial market, that price must be consciously selected. We are not making that selection based on empirical data or market measurements. At present, we are blindly accepting the labels' supposition: "More, because we say so."
Do we need more culture? Are we Sparta, powerful but lacking in a cultural record, or are we late Rome, growing weak because of excessive expenditures on entertainment and cultural excess? If the former, we would make our society better by increasing copyright strength and duration. If the latter, by decreasing it.
unleash the dogs of war and start preparing to take out Tel Aviv.
Iran is not seriously considering attacking Tel Aviv. Not now, not any time in the near future. They know exactly what would happen if they attacked Israel. The only possible exception is if they think we are about to attack (in the conventional, air assault and invasion sense, not limited cyberwar) and they are going to get wiped out anyway. They may do some things that seem irrational from our Western perspective, but they are not stupid. They know that starting a shooting war with Israel would be suicide.
Take a minute to really reflect on your hypothesis: What has Iran done -- not talked about, not nationalist tough guy rhetoric, I'm talking real military action -- that suggests they are irrational enough to attack Tel Aviv under the clear and present threat of getting twice what we gave Saddam?
class action lawsuits don't help the victims. Neither does putting murderers in jail.
hahaha -- succinctly said. I hadn't heard that one before. Well played.
Real geeks hack their tech. And when it comes to cooking, you can buy something that is half as good as what you can build, for twice the price -- as this ridiculous article handily demonstrates. Food hacking (or Modernist Cuisine, if you prefer) is a very big field these days. Want a great steak? Start with sous vide immersion cooking to get the perfect medium rare, then hit it with a flamethrower for the char. Play with your food.
Immersion Cooker (about $100 all-in):
http://beach.traxel.com/img/hopped-up/whole-rig.jpg
Weedburner Charring (about $35 at Harbor Freight):
http://beach.traxel.com/img/sous-vide/weedburner-char.jpg
Here's some more info on building your own meat jacuzzi:
http://qandabe.com/2011/70-diy-sous-vide-universal-controller/
a world without software patents would be 'open slather for anybody who can just go faster than the next person.'
Well, yes -- that is pretty much the essential nature of "Open." Anyone who has the skill, time, and energy can build whatever they want, even if it is based on someone else's work. It has its ups and downs, but saying the software world would be more Open if it were more restrictive is an internally inconsistent statement. It is logically self-contradictory.
There are those who believe that using the system against itself is better than changing the system. Some believe the GPL is better than would be the elimination of software copyright. I actually fall into this camp (though I do believe in reducing the strength and duration of patent and copyright). But it would not be more Open. Open has some shortcomings, and that may lead a rational person to believe that absolute Open-ness is less efficient than some degree of Closed-ness. But that does not mean you can redefine Open to mean partially Closed. Just say you believe in a balance between Open and Closed. It's OK to believe in shades of gray.
Not every question demands an absolutist answer, but rational discourse does rely on words like Open having a clear and unequivocal meaning in a given context. Dilute your hard-core ideology, not the terminology you use to describe it.
Investment income is the reward you get by risking your money by investing in a business ... It is not something that should be discouraged
Agreed. Similarly, having an income-earning job should not be discouraged. However, we tax both types of income, so the fact is that we are discouraging both, in order to fund our government. We can all agree we should cut spending, and in the meantime we have to pay our bills, so we will have to tax things. It is just a question of which things we tax and how we balance the taxes.
Aside: There is also the question of whether we have the fiscal discipline to pay our bills even when we don't agree with what those idiots are spending our money on. In my world you don't cut off your nose to spite your face. It's bloody and it makes you look stupid. But I digress.
Right now, our government taxes regular income earners at a higher rate than capital investors. Some will argue the double taxation angle, but it does not hold up to scrutiny of actual corporate fiscal policy. The Sage of Omaha believes there is a problem with capital gains being under-taxed, and it is pretty hard -- maybe impossible -- to find a more hard-assed, ultra-wealthy, fiscal perfectionist than Mr. Buffett.
So, the question is this: Can we show solid empirical evidence that supports our treatment of capital gains versus regular income? Do we know something that has escaped The Oracle? If not, we need to take a very hard and honest look at that policy -- regardless of what our long-held beliefs may be or where our self-interests lie.
He has previously stated this is the bill that you either support, 'or you stand with the child pornographers.'"
Damn, Vic -- must be tough. Most people actually think you are a greater threat than a child pornographer. I mean, I think you are a wildly irrational authoritarian with far more power to harm the Canadian populace than any person with your mind-set should have, but.... well... OK, maybe they're right. I guess you are more of a threat than a child pornographer.
Heh, I guess, maybe you should be careful with the comparisons you draw. You might just wind up on the wrong side.
The productive resources of which you speak are controlled entirely by private individuals. How do you propose to "allocate" them, good, bad, or indifferent?
Copyright is a fiat of government, and it is a variable thing. It is a knob that we can turn up or down to increase or decrease the amount of resources that private individuals choose to dedicate to the production of copyrighted works. When we strengthen copyright, capital lenders are encouraged to shift more resources into the production of copyright goods, because the probable ROI improves. When we weaken it, the resources shift out of copyright production into the next highest ROI alternative application of those resources.
It's the same as anything in our economy works -- except that copyright is a fiat monopoly of government, so it does not naturally self-regulate in a free market like soda pop or automobiles do. Since monopolies do not naturally self-regulate via market forces, we must control the dial manually, by considering whether we are investing too much or too little of our limited resources into the production of copyrighted works, and adjusting the expected reward.
Both Facebook and Google share many business practices and monetizing practices. While Google had the unfortunate timing for their IPO (2004) after dot com bubble burst, the exact same thing could had been said about them. Many slashdotters, however, still believe that Google does the right thing.
I'm not sure who these "Many Slashdotters" are that you refer to -- some sort of expert panel on the morality of corporations I guess -- but they certainly are ignorant, and haven't been reading the website for which they are named. Google has become quite bent, particularly relative to their starting point, and that subject is discussed regularly and extensively on these forums (typically with a few ignorant twits starting the discussion by saying, "But you all love Google!" followed by a chorus of, "Are you daft? No we don't."). From cozying up to the U.S. surveillance state to embracing censorship in China, Google has become far more morally flexible since their IPO.
And bear in mind, Google started off as a hard-core moralist corporation. They were the poster-boys for "what a scientist/moralist company should be" until Eric Schmidt and the public shareholders came along. Facebook is starting with no discernible principles to act as a rudder.
Of course, I agree with your assessment of the investment potential. But that says a great deal more about the flaws in our economic policies than it does about whether Facebook is good for long-term United States growth.
What's your problem with her getting rich for bringing enjoyment to millions of people who felt it was worth their cash?
The question of whether it is an efficient allocation of our productive resources. The free market generally works well for physical goods which have a high cost of reproduction. Copyright goods do not work in a free market, and so government granted exclusive copy-right was created. That fiat of government is not a free market, so using intrinsically free-market concepts like "felt it was worth their cash" is out of context. Prices do not naturally regulate in a monopoly environment, and copy-right is a monopoly on the right to create copies. Choosing the degree of that exclusive privilege grant is a matter of balancing the needs of our society based on what we believe is cost effective.
If we grant too little protection for the creation of media, we become a bleak society lacking in culture. If we grant too much, we become decadent; awash in media spectacle. The objective is to provide enough motivation to creatives to author our cultural narrative, but not so much that we wind up investing too much of our productive resources into entertainment and not enough on advancing our industrial and technological capabilities.
So, what is your opinion? Should we be investing more of our productive resources into the creation of media, or should we be shifting the balance in favor of non-copyright advancement in areas such as industrial production or technology research? The government granted monopoly on the right to manufacture copies is a good thing -- when it is in balance with all the potential uses of productive resources in our economy.