He's not really wrong, but neither are you. You're measuring different things.
FWIW, I would much rather have lived in the US during the 1950's-1960's. Of course I did, which may bias me, but I've talked to a few ex-patriate Russians (though I don't know whether they were actually "Russians" rather than just from the Cacausian area of the USSR) and they agreed with me about preferences.
The problem is expecting an egalitarian society with people doing the optimizing. If there's a centralized position of power, it will be grabbed by those who figure they can use it to benefit themselves. Some of them will also intend to benefit some additional group of people.
This kind of thing has happened over and over. The avoidance of it may be a part of what caused the Catholic Church to ban the marriage of priests. (The major reason was so that their descendants couldn't inherit.) The Mandrinate was a good idea (well, compared to the alternatives) when it was actually based around competitive examinations. After those in power made it hereditary it became just another corrupt aristocracy. IIUC, in Constantinople the bureaucrats were required to be castrated. This kept the corruption of a hereditary aristocracy from appearing...but exposed a whole new variety of corruption.
I think centralized controls are incompatible with an egalitarian society...as long as humans are running things. And a distributed system of controls (e.g. the ideal free market) seems to be incompatible with efficiency.
FWIW, distributed systems may be inherently inefficient. Consider the scaling problems of mesh networks, or the rapid way that internet connections were reduced in number via backbones trunks. The original rule was you should have at least two totally independent routes to each of your major links. These days you can't do that even by using separate ISP companies.
I would go further than "doesn't matter". As jobs are increasingly automated, people who are capable of enjoying not being employed become increasingly socially beneficial.
In past eras many of the "idle rich" became authors, philosophers, artists, etc. Some became quite good at it. James Branch Cabell, e.g., is still in print about a century later. It's not clear how many such people society has room for, but they only arise from those who don't need to work for a living. (This is in opposition to those like Charles Dickens who did need to work for a living. The style is quite different.)
I'll go further and say that nobody on Earth has ever seen a Communist government. There are, and have been, communist governments, but they were always at the village level or smaller. Communism is difficult to implement, requires a charismatic leader to maintain, and even then doesn't scale well. Most successful communist groups were religious in nature. The exceptions were, I believe without exception, Utopian. (Any counter examples?)
Actually, it can be done neither with Capitalism nor Communism. Sorry, but Communism has single points of failure which those seeking power can acquire to increase their power at the expense of everyone else. Capitalism has the same problem, but with more distributed "single points of failure".
Either could plausibly work if control were implemented via an appropriately optimizing AI, but in the first place our current AIs aren't up to the job, and in the second place, those currently holding positions of power would be reluctant to give them up...and any AI that would coerce them to do so would be unlikely to perform optimally at control (from our point of view).
A likely plausible scenario is increasingly capable AI hollowing out middle management until there are only a few humans running everything, who will eventually retire in favor of an AI rather than in favor of some other human. Calling the resulting system either Capitalism or Communism seems a bit abusive of the term, though it would likely share some characteristics of each. I call this likely as it seems already well in process, though the end-point is, at this stage, a guess.
It's worth noting that when human life is being sustained by such a system there will need to be some mechanism to limit the human population. War will be right out, but plague is a possibility, as is birth control, but birth control will tend to either be compulsory or be evolved away from. Larry Niven's "birth right lotteries" is possible, if improbable. (He even includes what happens when the system gets corrupted. I find his answer possible, but implausible.) But perhaps the population will automatically limit itself. Certainly that's the current experience in technically advanced urban countries, but I have my suspicion that this may be due to widespread sub-critical levels of poisoning with weird chemicals (weed killers, petroleum distillates, etc.).
It's not news, if you didn't know that months ago you weren't paying attention. This, of course, doesn't mean it's not important.
FWIW, my evaluation is that Sanders was picked to run as the designated loser, and accepted that role in order to promote his ideas. I believe that he knew from the start that he didn't have much of a chance, and that the deck had already been stacked against him. Certainly that was my evaluation at the time of the televised Democratic Candidates Debate, and I've seen no reason to change my mind.
I'd take that more seriously if he wasn't on both sides of just about every issue. One side normally gets the most press, but if you go looking you can also find where he staked a claim on the other side.
Sorry, a bit of research shows that Regan only "amended" the bracero program. Since I remember it as "canceling the program" that must have been quite an amendment.
That's only a part of the answer. Urbanites don't like, and actually can't usually do, a reasonable job of replacing field workers. To do so they'd need a pre-training similar to boot-camp. My mother tries to work in a cotton field once. She gave up after a day, not because the work didn't pay enough (that wasn't why she was doing it), but because it was too physically demanding. Her life as a school teacher, "single" mother*, etc. hadn't prepared her. She was in her early 30's at the time.
*"single" mother: My father was in the navy, stationed where dependents were not welcome. Sometimes on a ship, sometimes in the Aleutians.
If you substitute "Jews" for "the Other", either that tells us more about you than about anything else, or you are referring to Trump's bedside reading.
The legitimate reason for saying that is that Trump is modeling much of his campaign on the campaign of Hitler. This is true, and he is reported to be explicitly inspired by Hitler. And Hitler was predominately against the Jews. (Though also against all other manifestations of "the Other", e.g. Gypsies.)
The illegitimate reason for saying that is that when you read the grandparent post, or listen to Trump's speeches you hear him campaigning against Jews. Actually he's primarily campaigning against Muslims and Latinos. (And to the person who says I'm ignoring nuance, that's the appropriate action to take when listening to a rabble-rousing speech.)
One important thing to note is that despite the official recovery from a recession, most of the population isn't seeing much recovery. And this is a characteristic that was true in Italy and Germany during the 1930's...though I'm not sure that at that point much of anyone was seeing a recovery.
I'd be a lot happier if Trump were basing his plans around Mussolini.
Unfortunately, I believe that Hilary still supports the TPP. I accept that she's willing to (paraphrase)"put a bill before congress to undo the Citizens United decision", but there are an awful lot of bills that could do that, and she didn't even promise to fight to get it passed..
I'm just extremely dubious that I'll be able to convince myself to vote for Hillary, even with Trump as the Republican candidate.
I'm not saying it would go down better, and I'm not saying that if they are in a monopoly situation they should have the right to do that. (Are they?) But promising unlimited service is promising to do the impossible, an should therefore be considered fraud. And anyone damaged by that fraud should be able to sue them for damages, court costs, lawyers fees, and a bit for the uncertainty of getting a reasonable verdict.
So they should switch people to a generous, but specific, level of service. But they shouldn't have the right to coerce them unless they are not a monopoly. So if they are this would require them petitioning the state utilities commission (or some such) to implement their solution.
Maybe all this is what's going on, but it sounds as if they are still promising unlimited service...only also limited. Which sounds like fraud to me. I'll agree if you say that only a fool would expect actual unlimited service, but there are a lot of fools*...and it is, or should be, just as illegal to practice fraud on them as on someone who knows better.
*Most people are fools outside of their areas of expertise. You and I as well as others. I, e.g., have to trust a car repairman who says he has fixed some problem...or that some problem needs to be fixed.
Sorry, was this a WIRELESS connection? And they had the users grandfathered in when their contracts expired? With unlimited accounts? Something doesn't match anything I've ever experienced. Wireless connections that I've been aware of always has enough limitations on them that I never seriously considered them.
However, my assertion was that in a monopoly situation the monopoly holder does not have the ethical right, and should not have the legal right (and often doesn't) to unilaterally change the terms. This case is a bit of an edge case, as the users are operating under an expired contract, but I believe that if it is a monopoly situation (Wireless? and Unlimited? Something doesn't match.) then they should need the approval of a utility commission or some such. If it isn't a monopoly situation, then the reasoning doesn't apply.
I disagree. They should switch them all to contracts specifying the amount of data they are allowed to download without paying extra, and the costs/KB for each each KB over the limit. Say switch them to a plan with a limit of 110GB/month, and some reasonable cost for excess downloads. But be honest and specific.
As they are frequently in a monopoly situation, I deny that they are either ethically or legally within their rights to cancel a user. That said, unlimited download is clearly not a reasonable thing to offer at any sane price. But a monopoly should not have the right to make that decision.
IIRC the first usage of the term by ISPs referred to the amount of time you could be connected rather than the amount of data you could transmit. Or that's the way I understood it. Unfortunately, (again IIRC) the term wasn't really defined, and other people interpreted it in other ways. Then the ad people really swung into it, and unlimited was made to seem a lot more important.
In actuality your amount of transmission was never really unlimited, because you had a limited bit rate, and there's only 24 hr's/day. You could make the same argument about connection time, but there few people would think it the ISPs job to provision your day with more than 24 hours.
That said, I believe the the only appropriate response is to cancel ALL "unlimited" plans, and offer to convert them to "24 hrs/day connect time, nnn GB/month" plans, or some such, with the ability to purchase additional transaction amounts if you go over your nnn GB at an agreed upon price. Unfortunately, even though this is (in general) a monopoly situation, most ISPs find honesty impossible to contemplate...certainly their PR departments do.
Unfortunately, while the Republicans like this kind of law, they don't like it as much as the Democrats do. BOTH major parties are on the take from various groups that support this kind of law.
But the Democrats are worse, about this, than the Republicans. The sponsors of the MPAA and the RIAA give more to the Democrats.
You also need to be prepared for state laws making it illegal for a municipality to intrude into what should be commercial space. (This has already happened, but I don't know in how many states, or which ones. IIRC it was somewhere near Chicago, but not Illinois.)
People frequently pirate GPL software. When discovered the demanded payment is usually opening of the source code.
I will grant that without copyright laws the GPL would be more like the BSD or MIT licenses. I wouldn't find that horrible...if there weren't any copyright laws. As it is, I prefer the GPL to ensure that the works written won't be copyrighted and claimed against the original authors.
Another part of the problem is patent laws. The GPL2 wouldn't have any teeth without copyright laws, but the GPL3 attempts to ensure that patents also cannot be used to unreasonably attack GPL3 derivative works. Given patent laws I'm not sanguine about how well this would work, but it's an attempt.
Not an unreasonable answer. And immoral one, perhaps, but not unreasonable. You can't sue the US govt. in a US court unless it agrees to allow you to do so.
An excellent question. If AT&T has any sense it's the GPL, as it retains ownership of the copyright, but the article didn't even use the word license.
That said, I believe that the "Linux Foundation" is an association of companies with no community representatives. They often makes statements that try to convince people that the Linux community feels in some particular way, but it's frequently a way that only benefits the corporate interests.
That's possible, but my guess would be that they implemented a large number of features that the kernel didn't even contemplate (and would insist on relegating to user space). Feature creep is a constant problem.
Another thing is, AT&T probably didn't HAVE user space separate from the kernel, as the entire application was intended as a software defined network.
This is highly case dependent. There are purposes for which government is so far superior to private groups that any comparison is silly. And also the other way around. The problem is in the huge middle ground.
My feeling is that any monopoly should be owned and operated by the government...and that it should be forbidden to suppress competition. But the devil is in the details. Does that mean it should charge exorbitant prices? Well, no... So what *does* it mean?
And it's worth noting that the agreement to the Louisiana Purchase was illegal. He didn't have the authority, and Congress didn't give permission. (I don't think they even gave permission afterwards, but they generally agreed it was a good idea.)
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He's not really wrong, but neither are you. You're measuring different things.
FWIW, I would much rather have lived in the US during the 1950's-1960's. Of course I did, which may bias me, but I've talked to a few ex-patriate Russians (though I don't know whether they were actually "Russians" rather than just from the Cacausian area of the USSR) and they agreed with me about preferences.
The problem is expecting an egalitarian society with people doing the optimizing. If there's a centralized position of power, it will be grabbed by those who figure they can use it to benefit themselves. Some of them will also intend to benefit some additional group of people.
This kind of thing has happened over and over. The avoidance of it may be a part of what caused the Catholic Church to ban the marriage of priests. (The major reason was so that their descendants couldn't inherit.) The Mandrinate was a good idea (well, compared to the alternatives) when it was actually based around competitive examinations. After those in power made it hereditary it became just another corrupt aristocracy. IIUC, in Constantinople the bureaucrats were required to be castrated. This kept the corruption of a hereditary aristocracy from appearing...but exposed a whole new variety of corruption.
I think centralized controls are incompatible with an egalitarian society...as long as humans are running things. And a distributed system of controls (e.g. the ideal free market) seems to be incompatible with efficiency.
FWIW, distributed systems may be inherently inefficient. Consider the scaling problems of mesh networks, or the rapid way that internet connections were reduced in number via backbones trunks. The original rule was you should have at least two totally independent routes to each of your major links. These days you can't do that even by using separate ISP companies.
I would go further than "doesn't matter". As jobs are increasingly automated, people who are capable of enjoying not being employed become increasingly socially beneficial.
In past eras many of the "idle rich" became authors, philosophers, artists, etc. Some became quite good at it. James Branch Cabell, e.g., is still in print about a century later. It's not clear how many such people society has room for, but they only arise from those who don't need to work for a living. (This is in opposition to those like Charles Dickens who did need to work for a living. The style is quite different.)
I'll go further and say that nobody on Earth has ever seen a Communist government. There are, and have been, communist governments, but they were always at the village level or smaller. Communism is difficult to implement, requires a charismatic leader to maintain, and even then doesn't scale well. Most successful communist groups were religious in nature. The exceptions were, I believe without exception, Utopian. (Any counter examples?)
Actually, it can be done neither with Capitalism nor Communism. Sorry, but Communism has single points of failure which those seeking power can acquire to increase their power at the expense of everyone else. Capitalism has the same problem, but with more distributed "single points of failure".
Either could plausibly work if control were implemented via an appropriately optimizing AI, but in the first place our current AIs aren't up to the job, and in the second place, those currently holding positions of power would be reluctant to give them up...and any AI that would coerce them to do so would be unlikely to perform optimally at control (from our point of view).
A likely plausible scenario is increasingly capable AI hollowing out middle management until there are only a few humans running everything, who will eventually retire in favor of an AI rather than in favor of some other human. Calling the resulting system either Capitalism or Communism seems a bit abusive of the term, though it would likely share some characteristics of each. I call this likely as it seems already well in process, though the end-point is, at this stage, a guess.
It's worth noting that when human life is being sustained by such a system there will need to be some mechanism to limit the human population. War will be right out, but plague is a possibility, as is birth control, but birth control will tend to either be compulsory or be evolved away from. Larry Niven's "birth right lotteries" is possible, if improbable. (He even includes what happens when the system gets corrupted. I find his answer possible, but implausible.) But perhaps the population will automatically limit itself. Certainly that's the current experience in technically advanced urban countries, but I have my suspicion that this may be due to widespread sub-critical levels of poisoning with weird chemicals (weed killers, petroleum distillates, etc.).
It's not news, if you didn't know that months ago you weren't paying attention. This, of course, doesn't mean it's not important.
FWIW, my evaluation is that Sanders was picked to run as the designated loser, and accepted that role in order to promote his ideas. I believe that he knew from the start that he didn't have much of a chance, and that the deck had already been stacked against him. Certainly that was my evaluation at the time of the televised Democratic Candidates Debate, and I've seen no reason to change my mind.
I'd take that more seriously if he wasn't on both sides of just about every issue. One side normally gets the most press, but if you go looking you can also find where he staked a claim on the other side.
Sorry, a bit of research shows that Regan only "amended" the bracero program. Since I remember it as "canceling the program" that must have been quite an amendment.
Well, why did Regan cut off the bracero program then? He *preferred* that the immigrants be illegal so they wouldn't have any rights.
That's only a part of the answer. Urbanites don't like, and actually can't usually do, a reasonable job of replacing field workers. To do so they'd need a pre-training similar to boot-camp. My mother tries to work in a cotton field once. She gave up after a day, not because the work didn't pay enough (that wasn't why she was doing it), but because it was too physically demanding. Her life as a school teacher, "single" mother*, etc. hadn't prepared her. She was in her early 30's at the time.
*"single" mother: My father was in the navy, stationed where dependents were not welcome. Sometimes on a ship, sometimes in the Aleutians.
If you substitute "Jews" for "the Other", either that tells us more about you than about anything else, or you are referring to Trump's bedside reading.
The legitimate reason for saying that is that Trump is modeling much of his campaign on the campaign of Hitler. This is true, and he is reported to be explicitly inspired by Hitler. And Hitler was predominately against the Jews. (Though also against all other manifestations of "the Other", e.g. Gypsies.)
The illegitimate reason for saying that is that when you read the grandparent post, or listen to Trump's speeches you hear him campaigning against Jews. Actually he's primarily campaigning against Muslims and Latinos. (And to the person who says I'm ignoring nuance, that's the appropriate action to take when listening to a rabble-rousing speech.)
One important thing to note is that despite the official recovery from a recession, most of the population isn't seeing much recovery. And this is a characteristic that was true in Italy and Germany during the 1930's...though I'm not sure that at that point much of anyone was seeing a recovery.
I'd be a lot happier if Trump were basing his plans around Mussolini.
Unfortunately, I believe that Hilary still supports the TPP. I accept that she's willing to (paraphrase)"put a bill before congress to undo the Citizens United decision", but there are an awful lot of bills that could do that, and she didn't even promise to fight to get it passed..
I'm just extremely dubious that I'll be able to convince myself to vote for Hillary, even with Trump as the Republican candidate.
I'm not saying it would go down better, and I'm not saying that if they are in a monopoly situation they should have the right to do that. (Are they?) But promising unlimited service is promising to do the impossible, an should therefore be considered fraud. And anyone damaged by that fraud should be able to sue them for damages, court costs, lawyers fees, and a bit for the uncertainty of getting a reasonable verdict.
So they should switch people to a generous, but specific, level of service. But they shouldn't have the right to coerce them unless they are not a monopoly. So if they are this would require them petitioning the state utilities commission (or some such) to implement their solution.
Maybe all this is what's going on, but it sounds as if they are still promising unlimited service...only also limited. Which sounds like fraud to me. I'll agree if you say that only a fool would expect actual unlimited service, but there are a lot of fools*...and it is, or should be, just as illegal to practice fraud on them as on someone who knows better.
*Most people are fools outside of their areas of expertise. You and I as well as others. I, e.g., have to trust a car repairman who says he has fixed some problem...or that some problem needs to be fixed.
Sorry, was this a WIRELESS connection? And they had the users grandfathered in when their contracts expired? With unlimited accounts? Something doesn't match anything I've ever experienced. Wireless connections that I've been aware of always has enough limitations on them that I never seriously considered them.
However, my assertion was that in a monopoly situation the monopoly holder does not have the ethical right, and should not have the legal right (and often doesn't) to unilaterally change the terms. This case is a bit of an edge case, as the users are operating under an expired contract, but I believe that if it is a monopoly situation (Wireless? and Unlimited? Something doesn't match.) then they should need the approval of a utility commission or some such. If it isn't a monopoly situation, then the reasoning doesn't apply.
I disagree. They should switch them all to contracts specifying the amount of data they are allowed to download without paying extra, and the costs/KB for each each KB over the limit. Say switch them to a plan with a limit of 110GB/month, and some reasonable cost for excess downloads. But be honest and specific.
As they are frequently in a monopoly situation, I deny that they are either ethically or legally within their rights to cancel a user. That said, unlimited download is clearly not a reasonable thing to offer at any sane price. But a monopoly should not have the right to make that decision.
IIRC the first usage of the term by ISPs referred to the amount of time you could be connected rather than the amount of data you could transmit. Or that's the way I understood it. Unfortunately, (again IIRC) the term wasn't really defined, and other people interpreted it in other ways. Then the ad people really swung into it, and unlimited was made to seem a lot more important.
In actuality your amount of transmission was never really unlimited, because you had a limited bit rate, and there's only 24 hr's/day. You could make the same argument about connection time, but there few people would think it the ISPs job to provision your day with more than 24 hours.
That said, I believe the the only appropriate response is to cancel ALL "unlimited" plans, and offer to convert them to "24 hrs/day connect time, nnn GB/month" plans, or some such, with the ability to purchase additional transaction amounts if you go over your nnn GB at an agreed upon price. Unfortunately, even though this is (in general) a monopoly situation, most ISPs find honesty impossible to contemplate...certainly their PR departments do.
Unfortunately, while the Republicans like this kind of law, they don't like it as much as the Democrats do. BOTH major parties are on the take from various groups that support this kind of law.
But the Democrats are worse, about this, than the Republicans. The sponsors of the MPAA and the RIAA give more to the Democrats.
You also need to be prepared for state laws making it illegal for a municipality to intrude into what should be commercial space. (This has already happened, but I don't know in how many states, or which ones. IIRC it was somewhere near Chicago, but not Illinois.)
People frequently pirate GPL software. When discovered the demanded payment is usually opening of the source code.
I will grant that without copyright laws the GPL would be more like the BSD or MIT licenses. I wouldn't find that horrible...if there weren't any copyright laws. As it is, I prefer the GPL to ensure that the works written won't be copyrighted and claimed against the original authors.
Another part of the problem is patent laws. The GPL2 wouldn't have any teeth without copyright laws, but the GPL3 attempts to ensure that patents also cannot be used to unreasonably attack GPL3 derivative works. Given patent laws I'm not sanguine about how well this would work, but it's an attempt.
Not an unreasonable answer. And immoral one, perhaps, but not unreasonable. You can't sue the US govt. in a US court unless it agrees to allow you to do so.
An excellent question. If AT&T has any sense it's the GPL, as it retains ownership of the copyright, but the article didn't even use the word license.
That said, I believe that the "Linux Foundation" is an association of companies with no community representatives. They often makes statements that try to convince people that the Linux community feels in some particular way, but it's frequently a way that only benefits the corporate interests.
That's possible, but my guess would be that they implemented a large number of features that the kernel didn't even contemplate (and would insist on relegating to user space). Feature creep is a constant problem.
Another thing is, AT&T probably didn't HAVE user space separate from the kernel, as the entire application was intended as a software defined network.
This is highly case dependent. There are purposes for which government is so far superior to private groups that any comparison is silly. And also the other way around. The problem is in the huge middle ground.
My feeling is that any monopoly should be owned and operated by the government...and that it should be forbidden to suppress competition. But the devil is in the details. Does that mean it should charge exorbitant prices? Well, no... So what *does* it mean?
And it's worth noting that the agreement to the Louisiana Purchase was illegal. He didn't have the authority, and Congress didn't give permission. (I don't think they even gave permission afterwards, but they generally agreed it was a good idea.)