Thank, I got a good chuckle out of it. Sorry, but the theses Bastiat promotes have been invalidated long ago. As for "ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas" ("what we see and what we don't see"), he just forgets to push the reasoning a bit further, by ignoring the results of government spending.
If a government is to spend money for anything, it has to take the money from people who probably had some better use planned for that money.
You're saying it would be a "better use", but how do you know ? Say the government takes $100 from you. That's bad, you couldn't buy that new sweater you wanted (most likely made in some far-eastern country anyway, so much for that money actually going into local wages). Suppose these $100 are used to give a new training to some unemployed guy, which helps him find a job later on, hence contributing again to society. Would you have paid this guy's training out of your own will ? No way. Your spending will be directed only to yourself, precisely by "what you can see", never by "what you can't see".
The idea that everything should be private business is pretty much a closed subject, just like putting the state everywhere. Both have dire consequences.
Right, it's not something you spend money on now to make a return later. Clearly.
No, it's not quite the same, really:-).
There are no more one-hit wonders today than there were in the '50s.
How do you know ? I co-wrote an article on the subject last year with a college professor for a University Publication. The main constraint of the labels is that 50% of their sales is done in malls, where they have very limited shelf space, and can only carry the most profitable products.
Okay, but that doesn't have anything to do with anything I've been saying.
You claimed that the capitalist system is the best. I claim that as it is now, it is broken, and can (must, actually) be improved.
It doesn't matter because you do not have to take out a loan to make money. If you work a job[...]
You don't get it. ALL money is created by bank loan (except for gold reserves but these are hardly relevant nowadays, given the total volume of transactions).
What that means is that without an unskilled labour force, things would be more expensive (relatively speaking) for people who are not members of the working class... so less people would be able to buy things, so the company making them would make less money, so their employees would have smaller salaries, so they would even less be able to afford those things, etc... and there goes the economy.
Okay, care to justify that? The wikipedia article didn't really say how effective they were. How can complimentary currencies eliminate unskilled labour?
I didn't phrase that correctly. Complementary currencies help making unskilled people less poor. I can refer you again to his book (though he may be too optimistic about their virtues, but he does have very good points). You can also look at this page : http://www.transaction.net/money/ Or this discussion over an interview of Lietaer : http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/27395 (as you will see from the comments, these currencies aren't the panacea either, but they're an interesting option nonetheless).
Using a currency like ours does not in any way induce a slave like lower class.
It very much does. Money is created by bank loans, which are paid back with interests. Therefore the total amount of money to be paid back is larger than the total amount of money in existence. So some are bound to go bankrupt. That's a short description of the problem, for a more thorough discussion on this, see Lietaer's book to which I referred you in the other thread.
The problem is that unskilled labour is obsolete.
It's as necessary as ever, you gave the reason why yourself : because automation would be more expensive (and it's not always possible anyway). Without these unskilled workers, we wouldn't have cheap clothes, cheap hi-tech gear, or clean offices.
Complementary currencies can do nothing to change this.
They very much can, as their current and past use have demonstrated.
I have never had experiences demonstrate that capitalist systems work less well than any other system.
There are different shades of capitalism, and the current (rather recent) implementation in which companies are required by the stock market to keep 2-digits profitability is broken, even some hard-core capitalists are sounding the alarm bell about this.
How do you think 30-year mortgages are granted
Er, a mortgage or a loan is not an investment:-).
or chemical plants with 20-year repayment schedules are built?
Of course long term private investments haven't disappeared altogether, but they are quickly diminishing. A typical example is the music industry, major labels no longer take the time to nurture talents in hope they will have a great career in 5 or 10 years, they almost only produce one-hit-wonders which last a couple of years at best before falling into oblivion.
I suggest you take a look at "The Future of Money", by Bernard Lietaer, quite an interesting book.
There is a difference between someone that comes to a country starts a business and "produces" something and someone that comes and tries to get welfare.
Oh ok, so you're willing to accept their culture if they "produce something", then ?
Businessmen with an eye for coin found the cheapest labor force at their disposal and worked them
Not businessmen, governments. The immigration waves which built the US or post-WW Europe were decided by the governments, not businessmen. When businessmen use cheap labor force, they do it on a much smaller scale (and nowadays they do it abroad anyway).
I don't think my country or our way of life is the best but it is OURS when you come into it you stop trying to live like you did in your old country and adopt your new one
But your "american" way of life is the very mix of all those immigrants' ways of life:-).
Putting aside the rather ludicrous statement that the value of anything can be judged from its monetary value, the point is that currencies are not neutral. Their design induces some behavior (like ours promotes competition rather than cooperation, and implies that there will always be a slave-like working class at the very bottom of the pyramid). Complementary currencies try to avoid this kind of problem.
Given that complementary currencies are increasingly being used, your last statement that they would rarely be the best currency to use when judging value doesn't really hold.
On the other hand, private businesses must be efficient in order to remain competitive [...]
But experience demonstrates that under the current system, efficiency of private business induces increased inequalities and getting around the laws, which has for ultimate consequences that the capitalist system works less well. It's a good thing that government doesn't have to be efficient in the same way private business is, that allows it to make long term investments which the private sector wouldn't, and without which very little progress would be made.
But you are enjoying vast parts of "their culture" without even realizing it. Ever eaten chinese or italian ? And immigrants pretty much built the US, and re-built Europe after WW-I and again after WW-II. Sorry, this kind of short-sighted xenophobia doesn't work in the real world.
The reason people tend to hate immigrants, and I do have bunch of dislike for them, is that they bring nothing to your country
Riiiight. Not even another culture, or a cheap labor force ? If you were french you'd probably be voting for Jean-Marie Le Pen, our local fascist. He holds exactly the same kind of views.
It's a fact, and it is easy to see that every dollar the government spends is a dollar that is not spent in the private sector
Even if, say, this dollar helps building a road leading to a mall for instance ? Government spending can enable private spending. In fact without government spending there would be very little private spending:-).
Just because he's not as active any more doesn't make his software go away.
Certainly not. I still use fetchmail myself. That's not my point.
you'd have a hard time convincing me that he's not far better than average. Microsoft could almost certainly find a spot where he would be useful
"a spot", yes. If they'd need someone to teach them about the Unix culture and way of programming, for instance. But as a developer in a team, no. It's not only a tech skills problem, he's too close-minded and apparently lacks the human qualities required to integrate oneself in a team.
I've googled and couldn't find anything about him being a Python committer, and he doesn't mention it in his resume (you'd think he would).
As for him having "piles of credits in the Linux kernel", here's the relevant extract from the kernel's CREDITS file :
N: Eric S. Raymond E: esr@thyrsus.com W: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/ D: terminfo master file maintainer D: Editor: Installation HOWTO, Distributions HOWTO, XFree86 HOWTO D: Author: fetchmail, Emacs VC mode, Emacs GUD mode
Call that a "pile" ?
And yes, Python is not outdated, but I leave it to you to find anything else currently relevant in his resume. The guy's stuck in the 80's.
Sorry to burst your bubble if you're a fan. I used to like him too back in 97 when he first published "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", but he's been going downhill ever since.
As for "what rock I've been living under", just google my name.
In short, he would probably make a good addition to just about any team.
Between his oversized ego, his misperception of himself as a highly skilled programmer, his mostly outdated skills, and the fact that when he did try to collaborate to a team (with his kernel build system) he failed by committing a typical beginner's mistake (forgetting the requirements and getting caught in adding new "cool" features), I seriously doubt he would.
I'd be surprised if any software company would hire him other than for purely PR reasons.
If you're going to be cynical about it, you'd better have a wider vision :
What does the public get today? A cure for AIDS.
And millions of people in better health, which therefore are able to work, consume, and in general help to get the economy going (hint : sick people cost a lot of money and can't make any), not counting the fact that knowing AIDS is cured would boost the morale of people, which is also very good for the economy (hint #2 : the more you're worried about the future, the more you save your money).
Economy 101: you fail it
You might want to look on the part which talks about those general interest services which you don't want to make money on, because it hinders the growth of all other domains depending on them.
How is that in any way relevent? Audio software support requests involve problems with audio configuration? Is that really unexpected?
It's unexpected that the answers to these requests involve commands like 'lsmod', or checking the contents of some/proc files to name a few.
I'd expect x.org support requests involve problems with video configuration too.
Rosegarden is not the equivalent of x.org, that would be alsa. Then again Gimp support requests probably involve a few x.org config stuff too, but not in the same ratio. All sound-related programs (audacity, muse, etc...) have the same problem, AFAIK.
Isn't that all normal users want to do?
Er, no, musicians want to do a little bit more, and these are "normal users" in the sense they are not geeks.
Just about 8 out of 10 user support questions we get on rosegarden are actually sound setup problems. This isn't just a hardware support issue, the "final packaging" step on things like Alsa and JACK just isn't there. Yes, distribs should probably do it, but currently none does. No normal user can configure sound on linux as it is, beyond the basic 'play a.wav file'.
In French there is not one instance I can think of where the name of a product was actually used in the language
Of the top of my head : walkman, vespa, frigidaire, kleenex... I'm sure you can find dozens more.
As for the creation of "courriel", there are many similarly created words for technical terms, most quite ridiculous, but some did stuck, although they're almost never used by real techies, only by journalists.
To say the least. There's gotta be a reason why, in my 10 years of working as a software engineer, I've never seen this done on any project in any company.
The reason is that beyond discipline, maintaining code documentation is also a huge time eater (it does save time too but it's no free lunch). That is, even a simple refactoring will take like 3 times as long because you'll have to update the doc accordingly. And when you're working in fragmented time like it's generally the case, the doc quickly falls behind.
In the beginning I actually tried to maintain a coherent code doc for about a year, and eventually gave up. We even have a doxygen-generated code ref which used to be daily generated, but doxygen had trouble with our templates so the result didn't look too good.
I'm afraid both programs are way too evolved for this to achieve any real results. One program would pretty much have to be thrown away and rewritten to the other's fashion.
what specific things I think would bring it closer
No problem with that, as I said a well-detailed feature request on sforge is the best thing to do. Keep it short though, A laundry list of 100+ items won't help:-).
We know that for some people, RG is unstable. For others, it's quite reliable. No, we're not using experimental features. Just like implementing features, we don't have the means to maintain a test suite of dozens of distrib/hw config combinations, and sound is still a bitch to configure properly under Linux. Again, we have a clue about software development, we don't release something which easily crashes on our respective setups. The crashes we can reproduce are generally fixed within 24h. But in many cases, the problem just isn't with our code, and we can't do anything about it.
Anyway, about feature requests: just make it your goal to have RG assume ALL of the features of the various other sequencer programs out there
Get real, these products have resources we'll simply never match. This is a relatively small open source project with all the usual problems applying : lack of time, lack of manpower, slowness in communications because it's all done through email, etc... We have to keep realistic about what we can do. So we prefer to have less features working correctly (and even that is not easy) than a lot of half-broken features.
That said, yes, of course we look at Cubase, Logic, etc... for inspiration, and we listen to users. Purchasing old Ataris is not an option though:-).
Slashdot Mirror
No offence, but you should read some Bastiat.
Thank, I got a good chuckle out of it. Sorry, but the theses Bastiat promotes have been invalidated long ago. As for "ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas" ("what we see and what we don't see"), he just forgets to push the reasoning a bit further, by ignoring the results of government spending.
If a government is to spend money for anything, it has to take the money from people who probably had some better use planned for that money.
You're saying it would be a "better use", but how do you know ? Say the government takes $100 from you. That's bad, you couldn't buy that new sweater you wanted (most likely made in some far-eastern country anyway, so much for that money actually going into local wages). Suppose these $100 are used to give a new training to some unemployed guy, which helps him find a job later on, hence contributing again to society. Would you have paid this guy's training out of your own will ? No way. Your spending will be directed only to yourself, precisely by "what you can see", never by "what you can't see".
The idea that everything should be private business is pretty much a closed subject, just like putting the state everywhere. Both have dire consequences.
Right, it's not something you spend money on now to make a return later. Clearly.
:-).
No, it's not quite the same, really
There are no more one-hit wonders today than there were in the '50s.
How do you know ? I co-wrote an article on the subject last year with a college professor for a University Publication. The main constraint of the labels is that 50% of their sales is done in malls, where they have very limited shelf space, and can only carry the most profitable products.
Okay, but that doesn't have anything to do with anything I've been saying.
You claimed that the capitalist system is the best. I claim that as it is now, it is broken, and can (must, actually) be improved.
It doesn't matter because you do not have to take out a loan to make money. If you work a job[...]
... so less people would be able to buy things, so the company making them would make less money, so their employees would have smaller salaries, so they would even less be able to afford those things, etc... and there goes the economy.
You don't get it. ALL money is created by bank loan (except for gold reserves but these are hardly relevant nowadays, given the total volume of transactions).
What that means is that without an unskilled labour force, things would be more expensive (relatively speaking) for people who are not members of the working class
Okay, care to justify that? The wikipedia article didn't really say how effective they were. How can complimentary currencies eliminate unskilled labour?
I didn't phrase that correctly. Complementary currencies help making unskilled people less poor. I can refer you again to his book (though he may be too optimistic about their virtues, but he does have very good points). You can also look at this page : http://www.transaction.net/money/
Or this discussion over an interview of Lietaer : http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/27395 (as you will see from the comments, these currencies aren't the panacea either, but they're an interesting option nonetheless).
Using a currency like ours does not in any way induce a slave like lower class.
It very much does. Money is created by bank loans, which are paid back with interests. Therefore the total amount of money to be paid back is larger than the total amount of money in existence. So some are bound to go bankrupt. That's a short description of the problem, for a more thorough discussion on this, see Lietaer's book to which I referred you in the other thread.
The problem is that unskilled labour is obsolete.
It's as necessary as ever, you gave the reason why yourself : because automation would be more expensive (and it's not always possible anyway). Without these unskilled workers, we wouldn't have cheap clothes, cheap hi-tech gear, or clean offices.
Complementary currencies can do nothing to change this.
They very much can, as their current and past use have demonstrated.
I have never had experiences demonstrate that capitalist systems work less well than any other system.
:-).
There are different shades of capitalism, and the current (rather recent) implementation in which companies are required by the stock market to keep 2-digits profitability is broken, even some hard-core capitalists are sounding the alarm bell about this.
How do you think 30-year mortgages are granted
Er, a mortgage or a loan is not an investment
or chemical plants with 20-year repayment schedules are built?
Of course long term private investments haven't disappeared altogether, but they are quickly diminishing. A typical example is the music industry, major labels no longer take the time to nurture talents in hope they will have a great career in 5 or 10 years, they almost only produce one-hit-wonders which last a couple of years at best before falling into oblivion.
I suggest you take a look at "The Future of Money", by Bernard Lietaer, quite an interesting book.
There is a difference between someone that comes to a country starts a business and "produces" something and someone that comes and tries to get welfare.
:-).
Oh ok, so you're willing to accept their culture if they "produce something", then ?
Businessmen with an eye for coin found the cheapest labor force at their disposal and worked them
Not businessmen, governments. The immigration waves which built the US or post-WW Europe were decided by the governments, not businessmen. When businessmen use cheap labor force, they do it on a much smaller scale (and nowadays they do it abroad anyway).
I don't think my country or our way of life is the best but it is OURS when you come into it you stop trying to live like you did in your old country and adopt your new one
But your "american" way of life is the very mix of all those immigrants' ways of life
Putting aside the rather ludicrous statement that the value of anything can be judged from its monetary value, the point is that currencies are not neutral. Their design induces some behavior (like ours promotes competition rather than cooperation, and implies that there will always be a slave-like working class at the very bottom of the pyramid). Complementary currencies try to avoid this kind of problem.
Given that complementary currencies are increasingly being used, your last statement that they would rarely be the best currency to use when judging value doesn't really hold.
On the other hand, private businesses must be efficient in order to remain competitive [...]
But experience demonstrates that under the current system, efficiency of private business induces increased inequalities and getting around the laws, which has for ultimate consequences that the capitalist system works less well. It's a good thing that government doesn't have to be efficient in the same way private business is, that allows it to make long term investments which the private sector wouldn't, and without which very little progress would be made.
But you are enjoying vast parts of "their culture" without even realizing it. Ever eaten chinese or italian ? And immigrants pretty much built the US, and re-built Europe after WW-I and again after WW-II. Sorry, this kind of short-sighted xenophobia doesn't work in the real world.
The reason people tend to hate immigrants, and I do have bunch of dislike for them, is that they bring nothing to your country
Riiiight. Not even another culture, or a cheap labor force ? If you were french you'd probably be voting for Jean-Marie Le Pen, our local fascist. He holds exactly the same kind of views.
First of all, currency is the best measure of value
:-).
Except that there are different kinds of currencies
It's a fact, and it is easy to see that every dollar the government spends is a dollar that is not spent in the private sector
:-).
Even if, say, this dollar helps building a road leading to a mall for instance ? Government spending can enable private spending. In fact without government spending there would be very little private spending
Just because he's not as active any more doesn't make his software go away.
Certainly not. I still use fetchmail myself. That's not my point.
you'd have a hard time convincing me that he's not far better than average. Microsoft could almost certainly find a spot where he would be useful
"a spot", yes. If they'd need someone to teach them about the Unix culture and way of programming, for instance. But as a developer in a team, no. It's not only a tech skills problem, he's too close-minded and apparently lacks the human qualities required to integrate oneself in a team.
OK, I stand corrected on this point.
I've googled and couldn't find anything about him being a Python committer, and he doesn't mention it in his resume (you'd think he would).
As for him having "piles of credits in the Linux kernel", here's the relevant extract from the kernel's CREDITS file :
N: Eric S. Raymond
E: esr@thyrsus.com
W: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/
D: terminfo master file maintainer
D: Editor: Installation HOWTO, Distributions HOWTO, XFree86 HOWTO
D: Author: fetchmail, Emacs VC mode, Emacs GUD mode
Call that a "pile" ?
And yes, Python is not outdated, but I leave it to you to find anything else currently relevant in his resume. The guy's stuck in the 80's.
Sorry to burst your bubble if you're a fan. I used to like him too back in 97 when he first published "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", but he's been going downhill ever since.
As for "what rock I've been living under", just google my name.
In short, he would probably make a good addition to just about any team.
Between his oversized ego, his misperception of himself as a highly skilled programmer, his mostly outdated skills, and the fact that when he did try to collaborate to a team (with his kernel build system) he failed by committing a typical beginner's mistake (forgetting the requirements and getting caught in adding new "cool" features), I seriously doubt he would.
I'd be surprised if any software company would hire him other than for purely PR reasons.
If you're going to be cynical about it, you'd better have a wider vision :
What does the public get today? A cure for AIDS.
And millions of people in better health, which therefore are able to work, consume, and in general help to get the economy going (hint : sick people cost a lot of money and can't make any), not counting the fact that knowing AIDS is cured would boost the morale of people, which is also very good for the economy (hint #2 : the more you're worried about the future, the more you save your money).
Economy 101: you fail it
You might want to look on the part which talks about those general interest services which you don't want to make money on, because it hinders the growth of all other domains depending on them.
How is that in any way relevent? Audio software support requests involve problems with audio configuration? Is that really unexpected?
/proc files to name a few.
It's unexpected that the answers to these requests involve commands like 'lsmod', or checking the contents of some
I'd expect x.org support requests involve problems with video configuration too.
Rosegarden is not the equivalent of x.org, that would be alsa. Then again Gimp support requests probably involve a few x.org config stuff too, but not in the same ratio. All sound-related programs (audacity, muse, etc...) have the same problem, AFAIK.
Isn't that all normal users want to do?
Er, no, musicians want to do a little bit more, and these are "normal users" in the sense they are not geeks.
Just about 8 out of 10 user support questions we get on rosegarden are actually sound setup problems. This isn't just a hardware support issue, the "final packaging" step on things like Alsa and JACK just isn't there. Yes, distribs should probably do it, but currently none does. No normal user can configure sound on linux as it is, beyond the basic 'play a .wav file'.
In French there is not one instance I can think of where the name of a product was actually used in the language
Of the top of my head : walkman, vespa, frigidaire, kleenex... I'm sure you can find dozens more.
As for the creation of "courriel", there are many similarly created words for technical terms, most quite ridiculous, but some did stuck, although they're almost never used by real techies, only by journalists.
It does take a bit of discipline
To say the least. There's gotta be a reason why, in my 10 years of working as a software engineer, I've never seen this done on any project in any company.
The reason is that beyond discipline, maintaining code documentation is also a huge time eater (it does save time too but it's no free lunch). That is, even a simple refactoring will take like 3 times as long because you'll have to update the doc accordingly. And when you're working in fragmented time like it's generally the case, the doc quickly falls behind.
In the beginning I actually tried to maintain a coherent code doc for about a year, and eventually gave up. We even have a doxygen-generated code ref which used to be daily generated, but doxygen had trouble with our templates so the result didn't look too good.
How about collaborating with the MuSe guys
:-).
I'm afraid both programs are way too evolved for this to achieve any real results. One program would pretty much have to be thrown away and rewritten to the other's fashion.
what specific things I think would bring it closer
No problem with that, as I said a well-detailed feature request on sforge is the best thing to do. Keep it short though, A laundry list of 100+ items won't help
I hope you don't dismiss everything I've said
Not at all.
We know that for some people, RG is unstable. For others, it's quite reliable. No, we're not using experimental features. Just like implementing features, we don't have the means to maintain a test suite of dozens of distrib/hw config combinations, and sound is still a bitch to configure properly under Linux. Again, we have a clue about software development, we don't release something which easily crashes on our respective setups. The crashes we can reproduce are generally fixed within 24h. But in many cases, the problem just isn't with our code, and we can't do anything about it.
Anyway, about feature requests: just make it your goal to have RG assume ALL of the features of the various other sequencer programs out there
:-).
Get real, these products have resources we'll simply never match. This is a relatively small open source project with all the usual problems applying : lack of time, lack of manpower, slowness in communications because it's all done through email, etc... We have to keep realistic about what we can do. So we prefer to have less features working correctly (and even that is not easy) than a lot of half-broken features.
That said, yes, of course we look at Cubase, Logic, etc... for inspiration, and we listen to users. Purchasing old Ataris is not an option though
In general, ad hominem attacks from somebody who is apparently a core member of the RG team posting as AC don't speak very well for the project.
:
Uh, hello, none of us is clueless or immature enough to ever do that, nor would we even accept to work with someone who would.
Seriously: copy down what we say, make a list of the points, and present them to the dev team, if you're not on it.
Is it really that hard to log a feature request on sforge ? Anyway, we're reading you. No guarantee on when what you ask will be implemented, though.
A detailed table-based comparison between RG, Muse, Cubase, Logic
Why not, if we'd ever have the time for it.
Some full songs recorded with RG, with details of how everything was done.
We do link to some composers who use RG
http://rosegardenmusic.com/resources/links/
though they don't give any detail to how they achieved what they did.