Of course. Copyright encourages one thing and one thing only, and that is to find the one hit in a thousand and milk it for all that it is worth.
And for that one hit, talent plays a small quite small role. usually it is just a matter of a combination of doing the right thing at the right time and having the right contacts, and when luck strikes you can leverage it all and become a multi billion dollar business. Ok, that would be software. But it functions in much the same way as the music industry, although even more drastically due to businesses wanting software homonisation.
Meanwhile, everyone but the few at the top is left with a smaller part of the total revenue share, and will sell their products using real value adding. The reason filesharing is so hated by the big companies is that they focus on selling things without value adding as selling just the copy is more profitable. And they can maintain the marketing needed to increase the likelyhood of hits. Therefore they are hurt more than the smaller artists that get a bigger percentage of their income from things like performances.
I've covered this several times in other response to other comments.
Actually you havn't. All you have done is show that there are others who don't follow the scientific method by keeping their data closed and that the public scientific community has been polluted by none-verifiable pseudo-science.
Public science can not be done with closed data. Science can be conducted at in a closed circle as long as everyone with access to that circle has access to the data (that would be the case with medical companies). But such science is not directly useful for the public scientific community as they can't use it nor build upon it. Unverifyable data is the same as no data.
You're wrong.
I may be wrong on some things and the exact availability of data needed to allow for verification and repetition can be argued. But from what I saw in just this discussion, your accuracy rating is quite bad.
"information should be free. Scarcity is bad; we won't get to post-scarcity (which only the very mean, in the literal sense, shouldn't want) if we continue to allow for artificial, weapons-enforced, scarcity"
No need to put academic in front of it. The argument holds just as well without.
We have to remember the purpose of IP law - when it ceases to encourage the production and publication of intellectual works, it is no longer serving its purpose."
I would add reproduction in the above list. What point is it to have lots of excellent works of art when 90% of your population can only afford to see a few of them. Which btw is a big reason why copyright is failing now. With current reproduction capabilities, the increase of production/publication is more than negated by the reduction of reproduction.
But otherwise I agree. Anyone who thinks ordinary property laws are there to protect the individual has failed to understand what society is about. Laws are supposed to be there to make society function better, improving the living as a sum of all. Depending on the values and morals of the society, that sometimes means having laws where individuality is promoted and individuals protected. Or sometimes it means sacrificing one for the good of the many.
Personally I think copyright needs two big changes. First of all, sampling should be extended to allow far more, including reuse of characters and environments from other works of art. Basic ideas shouldn't be copyrighted, only their presentation. Secondly, non-commercial as in private copying needs to become legal. The cost of not having it legal is becoming too huge for society to carry.
Of course, continous debate and evaluation is needed to ensure that our current production doesn't collapse. But any copyright that isn't atleast moving in that kind of direction doesn't have the interests of a modern zero cost copying society in mind.
Because that is what you are implying. They either need to provide an exact repeatable process of getting the data they have used, or the data itself. Otherwise it isn't science, but hogwash.
under a license or NDA.
Such an NDA is incompatible with science by default. If you can't present the data needed to reach the result, you have no place presenting the result itself. Because it fails to meet the basic critieria of science.
Doesn't matter if the result is right or wrong. It doesn't belong in the scientific arena.
BSD licensed code directly benefits directly from a 5 year copyright as it would get access to GPL:ed code after 5 years, while losing little to nothing. GPL code loses its source code protection after 5 years, with little to no gain. Closed software loses its binary protection after five years, with little to no gain. (and thanks to RMS there will most likely be an anti time bomb clause in the next party program version)
The RMS suggestion would effectivly aim to remove any disadvantage that GPL:ed code suffers by basically forcing GPL into law. And further punish closed software by having them reveal source code in addition to the binary code becoming free.
While it is definitly possible, I am not sure I like the consequences of forcing someone to reveal source code. It has too many bad implications with it.
Now it's treated as little more than casino gambling. It hardly matters if a company actually has a product or not anymore as long as it looks like the stock will go up. Long term stability isn't even a consideration
Too much money entered the stock market, plain and simple. Most stocks are overvalued nowadays if you look at the basic numbers. And if you are wondering which numbers I am talking about. Simple. It is all about dividend yield and expected future dividend yield.
In a sane reality, you would hold stock to get yield. Unless you have a lot of stock in which case you also get some influence. But the whole idea of buying a stock so you can resell it at a higher price is stupid. Because potential buyers should be basing their decisions on the same dividend yield factors as you. The real reason to sell or buy is about the amount of liquidity you have/need and your trust in the future yield prognosis of the specific company.
This is a stupid thing to say, and you are stupid for having said it. Lots of software still requires that you be administrator.
In that case you have four choices.
1. You explictly trust it and run that specific application in admin mode. 2. You run it in a virtual machine. 3. You run it in a sandbox (I like sandboxie). 4. You don't run it and use something else.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that this applies to even non-admin mode. All applications should be run in a virtual machine or sandboxed unless they are explicitly trusted. These are things that any modern operating system should be able to handle (not that any do by default, except possibly some rare linux/bsd variant).
One thing to note is that at the time when 14+14 years was proposed, it took a long time to spread a work of art. Today, with the economy moving at a far faster pace, something like 5+5 years would probably be more sane.
I have yet to hear Rickard Falkvinge adequately address this inequity in his planned copyright policy.
It is RMS that wants GPL to be get special treatment, not the other way around. If you want to release source code, it should fall under the same copyright laws as everything else.
If the copyright laws gets weaker, this directly hurts GPL, because GPL heavily relies on the current strict copyright laws to maintain its full power. If you want a strong GPL, you should be a copyright proponent. It is that simple. Copyright and GPL go hand in hand.
The pirate party doesn't believe in forcing anyone to make stuff public. But once something is public, the party believes that the public should have certain rights to it. Independent of the type of copyrighted material, be it source code or binary code.
Really, do you know what their big mistake is. They are using the wrong argument. They should have just said that game violence is obscene by their community standards. Because we all know that obscenity is the one thing that trumphs free speech in the US.
And in case someone brings it up. Of course, violence on film isn't obscene. It is art according to the same local community standards.
The original demonic summoning of the C++ spec was done using a piece of the tower of babel, a succubus and 2 top laywers arguing over who shouldn't be sacrificed. What ingredients were they using this time, and why did it fail?
This is the perfect example of narrowmindedness that can be very costly in business and destructive in politics.
It occurs when people make judgements from their own experience and fail to count in that people who live in a different culture/subculture are affected by that judgement.
Opera has a 0.5% marketshare in the US, while it has a 25% market share in Russia. If you are working for a multinational company or a company selling to many different target groups, you have to research such things instead of relying on your gut instinct.
The same is even more true in politics as politicians are supposed to make decisions for a whole country that has lots of subcultures. I know it is popular to talk down on politicians and say that most of them are corrupt greedy bastards. But many of the decisions they make aren't just because they are corrupt per se (*), but because the subculture from which they get their ideas come has corrupt group thinking. And people have a tendency to fail to look beyond their own subculture too closely.
(*) Of course you can find really corrupt people also. I am just trying to point out that it isn't that simple most of the times.
Re:Postal addresses identify houses!I
on
P.I.I. In the Sky
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My IP doesn't shuffle randomly. Does that mean that it gets protected under privacy laws unlike the dynamic ones?
- You must have noticed that with patents, once an item covered by the patent is sold, it is out of control of the patent proprietor.
When a book is sold it is out of the control of the book owner in the exact same manner. With neither patents nor copyrighted items are you are allowed to duplicate the effort. But you are allowed to apply the first sale doctrine.
(and if they were not met, you can do something about it)
As long as the patent isn't owned by a coorporation who can play the mutually assured destruction card (a.k.a. the defensive patent doctrine). Oh, and you would have to afford to spend a huge amount of money on litigation, praying that you win.
You must have noticed that patents have a limit of 20 years (and maintenance fees have to be paid).
While the time limit is indeed shorter, the effect is much greater, as patents directly limit what others can do, and there is only a limited amount of ways to do any specific procedure. History is full of examples where patents have slowed down specific industrial advancements for 20 years.
The biggest difference between patents and copyright, is that patents only directly affect businesses, which makes it more acceptable. But I still believe that the patent system needs just as much as a reform as the copyright system.
Pirates WANT the games, they just don't want to pay for them.
They don't want to pay overprice for the production of a copy. And no, you don't get to calculate in the production of the first copy. Either you do it by the capitalistic model, and price only based on scarcity (a.k.a supply) and demand, or you do it by the socialistic model and have the goverment sponsor the whole production of the item in question. If you mix the two you just get fascism, where the goverment/people pay the costs while the businessmen profits.
I don't mind if you want to have socialism and capitalism in the same society. It isn't a bad idea at all. But you have to be very strict about the borders because as soon as capitalism and socialism collides, you have the perfect mix for corruption and waste.
Which means in my book that they're not pirates, but parasites.
The parasites would be the monopolistic guilds that has successfully lobbied to restrict the spread of information for their own profit. They have been leeching from society for a long time.
Pirates simply exchange stuff at market value, which happens to be next to zero due to the ease of duplicating information. Some pirates don't even trade, but simply give it away as they innatly know that it makes society as a whole richer, without costing them anything.
I really can't stand Starcraft (and Warcraft 3) emphasis on micromanagement.
The problem with base building RTS games in general is that they have to have a quick pace or players will get bored while building their bases or between battles. But once actual combat begins, you need more control over the units, and that same quick pace will make adequate control near impossible.
I have always wished that Starcraft and other RTS games for matter implemented some kind of "bullet time" mechanism for multiplayer, where each player can slow the game down for some time using a rechargable gage. Or possibly an automatic slow down when units were engaged in battle.
Starcraft had one thing though that was incredible for its time, and that was that each unit had a purpose throughout the whole game. Later units had unique purposes, but they didn't simply replace the earlier ones. I think that is what made it such a popular game for many.
You can use the repaired toilet as much as you want just as you can play a purchased track as much as you want
I see what you did there. Try to equate "use" with "play". A nice little deception to confuse the reader. And even "use" is a deception, when it should be "do whatever you want with".
Was this supposed to be a wisecrack? Because it wasn't wise, and you sound like you're on crack. No one owns the world. So sane people don't act like they own it.
Yes,noone owns the world. But we would be better of if more people acted like they did. Because then they wouldn't go around polluting it like they do.
No, neither of these are good ways. We write laws to deal with them. If a company is dumping crap in the river, you outlaw it, and if they keep doing it, people go to jail.
So you are saying that we should send people producing/using cars to jail because they produce an externalty?
You give no example of how "Subsidies hurts", and moreover a tax break is not a subsidy.
Sigh. Wasn't "overproduction of the subsidised goods" clear enough? Like ethanol corn for example. Or food in general for that matter (although food is subsidised exactly because the goverment wants overproduction).
Also, subsidies usually enumerate the subsidised products and therefore fail to include alternative products and new inventions, all-in-all causing stagnation on the market. Finally, my personal opinion is that subsidies are easier to corrupt, but I have nothing concrete on that one.
But I think self-interest is stronger than revenge- I don't see people going to town hall to fight for their right to get back at their neighbor with further property destruction.
It isn't revenge. It is just that they need somewhere to dump their own garbage that isn't their own backyard. It is pure destructive self-interest.
Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC
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VLC 1.0.0 Released
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· Score: 1
as it will play ANYTHING
Try playing my low framerate mkv files (screen captured go lectures). VLC chokes badly on low framerate mkv containers.
I have a problem with people who act like they own the world.
I have a problem with all those people who don't own the world and also act like they don't.
What you fail to see is that making energy more expensive raises the prices of everything but this could be done just as easily by cutting or eliminating taxes on green technology,
Subsidising or taxing are the two ways of dealing with externalities. Subsidising is always the wrong way as it doesn't aim to represent the price of the externalty. With subsidies you simply get overproduction of the subsidised goods.
without hurting the economy at large.
Subsidies hurts the economy atleast as much as taxes. And usually more.
History - you think unbridled capitalism allows evil corporations to plunder and abuse the environment
No. That would be greed and power. And you can find greed equally well among communists, capitalists or whatever.
The rich guy wants a beautiful backyard full of nature and has the means to defend it. The poor guy doesn't have the time or money to lobby the government or corporations to protect nature.
Of course, that just proves that you have learned nothing from the current economic crisis, which is that rich guys aren't logical, just like poor guys aren't logical.
The rich guy will gladly dump tons of shit on his neighbours background when the neighbour isn't watching. And his neighbour will do the same. And they both end up with shitty backyards because most of their lobbying will go towards preventing laws forbidding shit dumping.
it's certainly not a big enough issue in my life to bring in a party that is not in agreement in my other views on healthcare, education, individual liberties...
Ask yourself. How big is the difference for you between the existing parties in issues that the pirate party doesn't focus on? How big is the difference for you between existing parties and the pirate party in issues it does focus on?
Right now the pirate party is rising in populartity exactly because the difference between exising parties is small and the gap between existing parties and the pirate party is big. And people are starting to care. Especially in issues concerning privacy, as most goverments seems to like the idea of a "1984 society".
I would hazard to guess that a common opinion among people who vote on the pirate party is that the economy will go on working much the same independent of which party is in power, so better to vote on a party that focus on some important issues that aren't on the left-right scale.
Finally, the pirate party actually does have some opinions in the areas of healthcare (patent reform), education (ensuring the access to information) and individual liberties (privacy).
Progressive taxation actually has quite a good historic track record. And not suprisingly so as it keeps a balance between the have's and have not's in the market.
The powers that be have been very good at obfuscating the truth though, confusing high top margin taxes (which is good) with total tax pressure (which is bad). That propaganda has been going on for the last 30 years or so atleast.
THe money has to come from somewhere whether it be from raising prices, firing workers or reducing investment it will indirecty affect others who don't actually pay the tax directly.
Yes, but that is simply money redistribution. There is no destruction of wealth involved except for the administrative costs of the externalty tax. For every worker fired, someone else will have the money to hire a worker because he has to pay a lower percentage taxes as he is polluting less.
Of course, there is always the possibility that the goverment will use a new tax as an opportunity to raise the total tax pressure with less protests. But you really can't blame the tax for that.
Still, I disagree with the grandparent. If you want to do progressive taxation, you should do it directly on income. The purpose of externality taxes is to put a value on externalties and as such progressive taxation on those doesn't make any sense. It just makes the market more complex and less efficent.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course. Copyright encourages one thing and one thing only, and that is to find the one hit in a thousand and milk it for all that it is worth.
And for that one hit, talent plays a small quite small role. usually it is just a matter of a combination of doing the right thing at the right time and having the right contacts, and when luck strikes you can leverage it all and become a multi billion dollar business. Ok, that would be software. But it functions in much the same way as the music industry, although even more drastically due to businesses wanting software homonisation.
Meanwhile, everyone but the few at the top is left with a smaller part of the total revenue share, and will sell their products using real value adding. The reason filesharing is so hated by the big companies is that they focus on selling things without value adding as selling just the copy is more profitable. And they can maintain the marketing needed to increase the likelyhood of hits. Therefore they are hurt more than the smaller artists that get a bigger percentage of their income from things like performances.
I've covered this several times in other response to other comments.
Actually you havn't. All you have done is show that there are others who don't follow the scientific method by keeping their data closed and that the public scientific community has been polluted by none-verifiable pseudo-science.
Public science can not be done with closed data. Science can be conducted at in a closed circle as long as everyone with access to that circle has access to the data (that would be the case with medical companies). But such science is not directly useful for the public scientific community as they can't use it nor build upon it. Unverifyable data is the same as no data.
You're wrong.
I may be wrong on some things and the exact availability of data needed to allow for verification and repetition can be argued. But from what I saw in just this discussion, your accuracy rating is quite bad.
What property are you talking about? Information isn't property.
"information should be free. Scarcity is bad; we won't get to post-scarcity (which only the very mean, in the literal sense, shouldn't want) if we continue to allow for artificial, weapons-enforced, scarcity"
No need to put academic in front of it. The argument holds just as well without.
We have to remember the purpose of IP law - when it ceases to encourage the production and publication of intellectual works, it is no longer serving its purpose."
I would add reproduction in the above list. What point is it to have lots of excellent works of art when 90% of your population can only afford to see a few of them. Which btw is a big reason why copyright is failing now. With current reproduction capabilities, the increase of production/publication is more than negated by the reduction of reproduction.
But otherwise I agree. Anyone who thinks ordinary property laws are there to protect the individual has failed to understand what society is about. Laws are supposed to be there to make society function better, improving the living as a sum of all. Depending on the values and morals of the society, that sometimes means having laws where individuality is promoted and individuals protected. Or sometimes it means sacrificing one for the good of the many.
Personally I think copyright needs two big changes. First of all, sampling should be extended to allow far more, including reuse of characters and environments from other works of art. Basic ideas shouldn't be copyrighted, only their presentation. Secondly, non-commercial as in private copying needs to become legal. The cost of not having it legal is becoming too huge for society to carry.
Of course, continous debate and evaluation is needed to ensure that our current production doesn't collapse. But any copyright that isn't atleast moving in that kind of direction doesn't have the interests of a modern zero cost copying society in mind.
Their job is to do research.
Their job is to do unscientific research?
Because that is what you are implying. They either need to provide an exact repeatable process of getting the data they have used, or the data itself. Otherwise it isn't science, but hogwash.
under a license or NDA.
Such an NDA is incompatible with science by default. If you can't present the data needed to reach the result, you have no place presenting the result itself. Because it fails to meet the basic critieria of science.
Doesn't matter if the result is right or wrong. It doesn't belong in the scientific arena.
BSD licensed code directly benefits directly from a 5 year copyright as it would get access to GPL:ed code after 5 years, while losing little to nothing. GPL code loses its source code protection after 5 years, with little to no gain. Closed software loses its binary protection after five years, with little to no gain. (and thanks to RMS there will most likely be an anti time bomb clause in the next party program version)
The RMS suggestion would effectivly aim to remove any disadvantage that GPL:ed code suffers by basically forcing GPL into law. And further punish closed software by having them reveal source code in addition to the binary code becoming free.
While it is definitly possible, I am not sure I like the consequences of forcing someone to reveal source code. It has too many bad implications with it.
Don't confuse capitalism and the free market. Capitalism is about property. The free market is about trading.
On the rest I agree with you.
Now it's treated as little more than casino gambling. It hardly matters if a company actually has a product or not anymore as long as it looks like the stock will go up. Long term stability isn't even a consideration
Too much money entered the stock market, plain and simple. Most stocks are overvalued nowadays if you look at the basic numbers. And if you are wondering which numbers I am talking about. Simple. It is all about dividend yield and expected future dividend yield.
In a sane reality, you would hold stock to get yield. Unless you have a lot of stock in which case you also get some influence. But the whole idea of buying a stock so you can resell it at a higher price is stupid. Because potential buyers should be basing their decisions on the same dividend yield factors as you. The real reason to sell or buy is about the amount of liquidity you have/need and your trust in the future yield prognosis of the specific company.
This is a stupid thing to say, and you are stupid for having said it. Lots of software still requires that you be administrator.
In that case you have four choices.
1. You explictly trust it and run that specific application in admin mode.
2. You run it in a virtual machine.
3. You run it in a sandbox (I like sandboxie).
4. You don't run it and use something else.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that this applies to even non-admin mode. All applications should be run in a virtual machine or sandboxed unless they are explicitly trusted. These are things that any modern operating system should be able to handle (not that any do by default, except possibly some rare linux/bsd variant).
One thing to note is that at the time when 14+14 years was proposed, it took a long time to spread a work of art. Today, with the economy moving at a far faster pace, something like 5+5 years would probably be more sane.
I have yet to hear Rickard Falkvinge adequately address this inequity in his planned copyright policy.
It is RMS that wants GPL to be get special treatment, not the other way around. If you want to release source code, it should fall under the same copyright laws as everything else.
If the copyright laws gets weaker, this directly hurts GPL, because GPL heavily relies on the current strict copyright laws to maintain its full power. If you want a strong GPL, you should be a copyright proponent. It is that simple. Copyright and GPL go hand in hand.
The pirate party doesn't believe in forcing anyone to make stuff public. But once something is public, the party believes that the public should have certain rights to it. Independent of the type of copyrighted material, be it source code or binary code.
Really, do you know what their big mistake is. They are using the wrong argument. They should have just said that game violence is obscene by their community standards. Because we all know that obscenity is the one thing that trumphs free speech in the US.
And in case someone brings it up. Of course, violence on film isn't obscene. It is art according to the same local community standards.
My big question.
The original demonic summoning of the C++ spec was done using a piece of the tower of babel, a succubus and 2 top laywers arguing over who shouldn't be sacrificed. What ingredients were they using this time, and why did it fail?
This is the perfect example of narrowmindedness that can be very costly in business and destructive in politics.
It occurs when people make judgements from their own experience and fail to count in that people who live in a different culture/subculture are affected by that judgement.
Opera has a 0.5% marketshare in the US, while it has a 25% market share in Russia. If you are working for a multinational company or a company selling to many different target groups, you have to research such things instead of relying on your gut instinct.
The same is even more true in politics as politicians are supposed to make decisions for a whole country that has lots of subcultures. I know it is popular to talk down on politicians and say that most of them are corrupt greedy bastards. But many of the decisions they make aren't just because they are corrupt per se (*), but because the subculture from which they get their ideas come has corrupt group thinking. And people have a tendency to fail to look beyond their own subculture too closely.
(*) Of course you can find really corrupt people also. I am just trying to point out that it isn't that simple most of the times.
My IP doesn't shuffle randomly. Does that mean that it gets protected under privacy laws unlike the dynamic ones?
- You must have noticed that with patents, once an item covered by the patent is sold, it is out of control of the patent proprietor.
When a book is sold it is out of the control of the book owner in the exact same manner. With neither patents nor copyrighted items are you are allowed to duplicate the effort. But you are allowed to apply the first sale doctrine.
(and if they were not met, you can do something about it)
As long as the patent isn't owned by a coorporation who can play the mutually assured destruction card (a.k.a. the defensive patent doctrine). Oh, and you would have to afford to spend a huge amount of money on litigation, praying that you win.
You must have noticed that patents have a limit of 20 years (and maintenance fees have to be paid).
While the time limit is indeed shorter, the effect is much greater, as patents directly limit what others can do, and there is only a limited amount of ways to do any specific procedure. History is full of examples where patents have slowed down specific industrial advancements for 20 years.
The biggest difference between patents and copyright, is that patents only directly affect businesses, which makes it more acceptable. But I still believe that the patent system needs just as much as a reform as the copyright system.
Pirates WANT the games, they just don't want to pay for them.
They don't want to pay overprice for the production of a copy. And no, you don't get to calculate in the production of the first copy. Either you do it by the capitalistic model, and price only based on scarcity (a.k.a supply) and demand, or you do it by the socialistic model and have the goverment sponsor the whole production of the item in question. If you mix the two you just get fascism, where the goverment/people pay the costs while the businessmen profits.
I don't mind if you want to have socialism and capitalism in the same society. It isn't a bad idea at all. But you have to be very strict about the borders because as soon as capitalism and socialism collides, you have the perfect mix for corruption and waste.
Which means in my book that they're not pirates, but parasites.
The parasites would be the monopolistic guilds that has successfully lobbied to restrict the spread of information for their own profit. They have been leeching from society for a long time.
Pirates simply exchange stuff at market value, which happens to be next to zero due to the ease of duplicating information. Some pirates don't even trade, but simply give it away as they innatly know that it makes society as a whole richer, without costing them anything.
I really can't stand Starcraft (and Warcraft 3) emphasis on micromanagement.
The problem with base building RTS games in general is that they have to have a quick pace or players will get bored while building their bases or between battles. But once actual combat begins, you need more control over the units, and that same quick pace will make adequate control near impossible.
I have always wished that Starcraft and other RTS games for matter implemented some kind of "bullet time" mechanism for multiplayer, where each player can slow the game down for some time using a rechargable gage. Or possibly an automatic slow down when units were engaged in battle.
Starcraft had one thing though that was incredible for its time, and that was that each unit had a purpose throughout the whole game. Later units had unique purposes, but they didn't simply replace the earlier ones. I think that is what made it such a popular game for many.
You can use the repaired toilet as much as you want just as you can play a purchased track as much as you want
I see what you did there. Try to equate "use" with "play". A nice little deception to confuse the reader. And even "use" is a deception, when it should be "do whatever you want with".
Was this supposed to be a wisecrack? Because it wasn't wise, and you sound like you're on crack. No one owns the world. So sane people don't act like they own it.
Yes,noone owns the world. But we would be better of if more people acted like they did. Because then they wouldn't go around polluting it like they do.
No, neither of these are good ways. We write laws to deal with them. If a company is dumping crap in the river, you outlaw it, and if they keep doing it, people go to jail.
So you are saying that we should send people producing/using cars to jail because they produce an externalty?
You give no example of how "Subsidies hurts", and moreover a tax break is not a subsidy.
Sigh. Wasn't "overproduction of the subsidised goods" clear enough? Like ethanol corn for example. Or food in general for that matter (although food is subsidised exactly because the goverment wants overproduction).
Also, subsidies usually enumerate the subsidised products and therefore fail to include alternative products and new inventions, all-in-all causing stagnation on the market. Finally, my personal opinion is that subsidies are easier to corrupt, but I have nothing concrete on that one.
But I think self-interest is stronger than revenge- I don't see people going to town hall to fight for their right to get back at their neighbor with further property destruction.
It isn't revenge. It is just that they need somewhere to dump their own garbage that isn't their own backyard. It is pure destructive self-interest.
as it will play ANYTHING
Try playing my low framerate mkv files (screen captured go lectures). VLC chokes badly on low framerate mkv containers.
I have a problem with people who act like they own the world.
I have a problem with all those people who don't own the world and also act like they don't.
What you fail to see is that making energy more expensive raises the prices of everything but this could be done just as easily by cutting or eliminating taxes on green technology,
Subsidising or taxing are the two ways of dealing with externalities. Subsidising is always the wrong way as it doesn't aim to represent the price of the externalty. With subsidies you simply get overproduction of the subsidised goods.
without hurting the economy at large.
Subsidies hurts the economy atleast as much as taxes. And usually more.
History - you think unbridled capitalism allows evil corporations to plunder and abuse the environment
No. That would be greed and power. And you can find greed equally well among communists, capitalists or whatever.
The rich guy wants a beautiful backyard full of nature and has the means to defend it. The poor guy doesn't have the time or money to lobby the government or corporations to protect nature.
Of course, that just proves that you have learned nothing from the current economic crisis, which is that rich guys aren't logical, just like poor guys aren't logical.
The rich guy will gladly dump tons of shit on his neighbours background when the neighbour isn't watching. And his neighbour will do the same. And they both end up with shitty backyards because most of their lobbying will go towards preventing laws forbidding shit dumping.
I am not a pirate party offical, but...
it's certainly not a big enough issue in my life to bring in a party that is not in agreement in my other views on healthcare, education, individual liberties...
Ask yourself. How big is the difference for you between the existing parties in issues that the pirate party doesn't focus on? How big is the difference for you between existing parties and the pirate party in issues it does focus on?
Right now the pirate party is rising in populartity exactly because the difference between exising parties is small and the gap between existing parties and the pirate party is big. And people are starting to care. Especially in issues concerning privacy, as most goverments seems to like the idea of a "1984 society".
I would hazard to guess that a common opinion among people who vote on the pirate party is that the economy will go on working much the same independent of which party is in power, so better to vote on a party that focus on some important issues that aren't on the left-right scale.
Finally, the pirate party actually does have some opinions in the areas of healthcare (patent reform), education (ensuring the access to information) and individual liberties (privacy).
Progressive taxation actually has quite a good historic track record. And not suprisingly so as it keeps a balance between the have's and have not's in the market.
The powers that be have been very good at obfuscating the truth though, confusing high top margin taxes (which is good) with total tax pressure (which is bad). That propaganda has been going on for the last 30 years or so atleast.
THe money has to come from somewhere whether it be from raising prices, firing workers or reducing investment it will indirecty affect others who don't actually pay the tax directly.
Yes, but that is simply money redistribution. There is no destruction of wealth involved except for the administrative costs of the externalty tax. For every worker fired, someone else will have the money to hire a worker because he has to pay a lower percentage taxes as he is polluting less.
Of course, there is always the possibility that the goverment will use a new tax as an opportunity to raise the total tax pressure with less protests. But you really can't blame the tax for that.
Still, I disagree with the grandparent. If you want to do progressive taxation, you should do it directly on income. The purpose of externality taxes is to put a value on externalties and as such progressive taxation on those doesn't make any sense. It just makes the market more complex and less efficent.