Yet despite these, we've not seen any dip in piracy.
Of course not. Why should you expect that. Your argument is exactly the same as the one the music industry is using when talking about lost sales. The whole point of copyright is to increase the price of IP artifically which inevitbly makes consumers afford less pieces of IP.
Copyright may very well encourage the creation of new works of art, but it will also always discourage the spread of those same works of art. If piracy weren't possible, society would be just as much less wealthy as the piracy makes us wealthier (and I am talking real wealth here, as in people having access to more information). And that is excluding the extra competitive pressure that piracy provides on IP industries, reducing the monopoly inefficency factor.
Anyway, looking at piracy numbers is just stupid as it says nothing. Look at the real industry numbers instead. Digital music are up (record year). Concert numbers are up (record year). Movie industry is up (record year). Game industry is up (record year).
That is real money that people are paying. Not fake money that people didn't have in the first place.
"what I don't understand is why they need to understand network technology."
It isn't so much failing to understand the technology itself as failing to understand how society thinks about and uses the technology. The old legislators has proven to be completly oblivious.
When you have the swedish minster of justice, Beatrice Ask, on national television saying "Now the industries and adults will make sure that we get this in order" as a comment on the new IPRED law that basically allows for private police.
Adults? The top EU parliament candidate for the Pirate Party is 48 years old. OK, he is older than the average member. But that isn't really strange, because the internet is used more by the younger generations. The 18-30 bracket is where you will find a huge representation. According to Beatrice Ask, I guess they are all children.
And then you have the prime minister saying "We don't want to criminilize a whole generation" before calmly going on and criminilizing a whole generation.
There is a reason why the Pirate Party is growing rapidly. People are slowly waking up to the hypocrisy. And they are also realizing that the neither of the big parties are to be trusted.
a chronic lack of wealth has a negative effect on sociality
The pirate bay alone distributes millions of works of art daily. And at a damn low cost. If that isn't creating wealth, I don't know what is.
Of course, you will not see it directly in the GDP, because things that can be produced for free isn't worth anything economically, which goes to show just how messed up the subject of economics really is. Introduce replicators into a country and watch the GDP collapse as noone is willing to pay for expensive goods produced by factories, nor for shopkeepers that just distribute factory goods.
What really happens economically speaking is that the relative economic value of a product decreases as production effectivity increases while the real value remains the same. You can generally compensate for such changes by using product baskets to compare economies (although that has its own problems). But if the margin cost of a goods suddenly drops to near zero you'll start to see that goods disappearing completly from the economy, because it is no longer worth making actual transactions with the product. People will just trade it for free on the side. Does that mean that the society is worse off? Of course, not.
Wouldn't that mean that the people who write those books, companies that create all those applications, games etc and artists and recording companies who write and produce all that music, and studios who make all those movies would be out of business instantly?
If they can't manage to convince people to pay for their services, yes.
Of course, you can find many examples of people who manage to make money even for the IP they use is free. And if a good deal of the IP industry goes away, the remaining part should have an easier time to find people willing to pay.
Everything will end up in a new equilibrium. But one thing is clear, the total consumption/usage of information will be higher, because everyone will be able to afford it. It will be about as cheap as air literally, to take another zero margin cost product.
The price of copyright is always that the total spread of the information decreases. That is the simple economic nature of it. There is nothing you can do to change that.
How would they justify the investment in money, time and work that they made if only one copy will ever be sold?
If they can't, they shouldn't. There is obviously enough cheaper material on the market to satisfy everyone. The market is better served by people who see business opportunities.
Pork barrel schemes don't create jobs, they only move them from the wealth-creating part of the economy to the wealth-destroying part.
I hate that fucking deceptive lie (sorry about the language, but I get so pissed every time I see it). I follow a couple of relativly big popular capitalistic blogs. Lots of great and interesting commentary, but once in a while the writers spew out crap like the above. It immediatly shows just how stuck they are in their ideological thinking (goverment bad, private business good, me go trade stocks now).
The above lie is based on a rather sofisticated memo "Goverment can't create wealth, it can only tax it". It sounds convincing, but is nothing more than a cheap capitalistic memo used to confuse.
How does it work? Simple, you take all the entitities in an economy except one and put them on one side. You put the remaining entity on the other side. Now you can say that the alone entity can't produce any wealth, because it has to charge money and resources from the other side to do so. You can do the same manuever for any entity, including the goverment.
And, yes, taxes are just the goverment charging for its services. It sucks that the goverment has a monopoly as well as a life time contract with you (or until you leave the country), but that is just the way it is.
"Like how they "increased" from $4+ to about $2.50 over the last year?"
A drop because of the huge recession combined with the end of an oil speculation bubble.
Still, it won't change the facts. We are currently coasting at the peak oil level. How long we will remain there, I don't know. But once it starts to go down and supply starts dropping at a couple of percent per year, prices will really hit the roofs.
Of course, Europe has been taxing gasoline as an externalty for quite some time which is why they have a larger focus on transportation that doesn't require burning fossile fuel.
Personally I just don't know which of the dissatisfaction parties I should vote for, Piratpartiet or Sverigedemokraterna, pro-pirates or pro-nationalism and less immigrants.
Well, for the EU parliament I think the pirate party agenda is more interesting. It is more simple forward looking and may have even more impact on the international plane than on the national one.
SD simply feels like a more conservative party. Sure, go ahead on vote of them when you think the rest of the parties are mishandling the immigration politics. But it feels far more like an issue on the national level.
By copying and distributing the work of others you reduce the income they get in reward for their work.
No. By copying and distributing the work of others you increase the amount of art reproduced in the world, making society richer and more wealthy.
Take it to the extreme: if everyone in the world got hold of movies, music or software for free, why would artists and developers continue producing original works if they're receiving no reward for it?
They wouldn't. But if supply of new IP got that low, some people would be willing to pay for new IP. Supply and Demand, you know.
Also, even though fewer works of art may get produced, the total distribution of works of art would increase, Leading to a richer society. And those who no longer work with producing art can go and do something else that society benefits from.
Everyone who believes in liberty is against wealth redistribution, since by its nature it denies liberty.
Are you kidding me. Is that the kind of bullshit that comes out of todays economic libertarians. Ah well, it doesn't surprise me. You take after your conservative neighbours.
Maybe you should read up on your freedom brothers, the social libertarians. You know, the ones that agree with economic libertarians on personal freedom issues, but think the economic libertarians are crazy for believing that you can have real freedom when most of the wealth is owned and controlled by the few. (OK, that is a slight simplification of social libertarian ideology, but I hope you get my point)
I find that many US libertarians have a very perverted sense of freedom defined around private property. Freedom isn't to own the food in my refrigirator. Freedom is to know that I will be able to eat when I am hungry. And freedom for a society is when everyone knows that they'll be able to when they are hungry.
The average tax burden for Americans is -- just in direct taxes -- about 40 percent of our income.
The tax/GDP ratio of the US is 28.3 percent. That is one of the lowest of all developed countries. And that is for a country that is having a huge expensive army and regularly conducts expensive wars.
Americans complaining about taxes sound really ignorant. Especially when they have willing halved the top margin income tax in the last 30 years while high income people have skyrocketed their salaries. If the rich aren't paying for the goverment, the middle class will.
If you had proposed that to a Founding Father, you'd likely have been hanged or shot.
That is just stupid. The founding fathers lived in an low tech, low populated agriculture society. High taxes doesn't make sense in such a society.
Somehow geeks can't get it through their heads that providing bandwidth costs money
Actually, most geeks get that. Electricity also costs money to provide. That doesn't mean that I am paying 50 times the market price to my electricity provider. And that is where the crux is.
Utility providers are in the business of providing adequate access between the utility backbones and end consumers, charging basically flat fees to do that, and then additionally charging the market price plus transaction fees for the amount of resources taken from the backbone.
However, these ISPs aren't doing that. Instead they are providing inadequate access to the utility backbone and charging huge extra amounts just to make that access adequate. The actual backbone bandwidth costs are minor in their equation.
Wait how the hell does Dick get $150 when Sam only had $100?
Just a typo
"Dick: Cash $150 Debt: $150" should be "Dick: Cash $100 Debt: $150" which becomes evident when you look at the next action which is Dick paying $100 for the Farm and having $0 left.
What's going to happen when the reality of America's dependence fossil fuels meets the reality of climate change?
It will meet "peak X" first, where X is each of the fossile fuels that the US (and rest of the world) depend on. Oil is already in the peak stage. When it starts dropping we will see oil supply drop a couple of percent per year. And that will cause real panic in the countries that depend on fossile fuel to transport most their goods and employees. And no, you can't just find more oil. We have been finding less oil than we have been consuming for a good many years now. That is all part of the equation.
As for coal. The so called 500 year US coal reserve in the 1970s is less than 200 years of reserve now. Exponential growth in consumption is a bitch. And those 200 years are still estimated based on consumption remaining stagnant. That such misleading estimations are even used and believed shows just how stupid most people are. Coal won't last very long, especially if oil runs out.
The real reason for investing heavily in clean energy sources, is because the countries that does such investment before fuel prices rocket because of limited supply, will have a huge advantage.
Also, most people seems to think that prices will slowly go up as supply decreases. That is a complete misunderstanding of how the economy works. A small gap in the supply can easily double or triple the cost of a goods, if the demand is urgent enough. And oil is definitly quite urgent, considering how much the world rely on it for transportation. (the US more so than others)
While I have read many "fall of the US empire" stories, I personally think that the thing that the biggest bane of the US may very well be the large distances between work, shopping and home. Cities constructed in such a way are very sensititve to a drop in fossile fuel supply.
But it isn't development time that is sold. So my original point stands. It isn't supply & demand.
I wasn't even meaning to bring up talk about piracy. I just wanted to point out that treating monopoly industries using supply & demand models is incorrect and something which is done way too often.
Economic activity happens when money changes hands for goods and services. Not when something is produced.
And that reasoning is what brought the great USofA to its knees in 2008. Wall Street are full of people with that mindset and it has cratered the whole economy as it all became about shuffling around goods and services while nothing real ever was produced. Lots of "economic activity" but no wealth.
The true answer is that wealth and economic prosperity is created from producing things that are wanted, and then efficenctly allow the buyers to buy those items. Middlemen (traders) are needed for that to work, but they should never be the focus of the economy as they have been for a good while.
In the scenario below, Dick will loan money from Sam so that he can buy a farm from Sam. After the farm is bought, Dick will work to produce carrots which will enable him to pay back his loan. (including the interest that you are claiming can't be repaid because it doesn't exist)
* Start - Sam: Cash $100 Farm: 1 - Dick: Cash $0
* Sam loans $100 to Dick with a $50 interest - Sam: Cash $0 Loan: $150 Farm: 1 - Dick: Cash $150 Debt: $150
* Dick buys farm from Sam for $100 - Sam: Cash $100 Loan: $150 - Dick: Cash $0 Debt: $150 Farm: 1
* Dick works hard and grows carrots on his farm. Finally, he sells some of his carrots to Sam for $100 - Sam: Cash $0 Loan: $150 Carrots: Lots - Dick: Cash $100 Debt: $150 Farm: 1
* Dick repays $100 of his debt - Sam: Cash $100 Loan: $50 Carrots: Lots - Dick: Cash $0 Debt: $50 Farm: 1
* Dick works ons his farm to produce some more carrots that he sells to sam - Sam: Cash $50 Loan: $50 Carrots: Huge amounts - Dick: Cash $50 Debt: $50 Farm: 1
* Dick repays the rest of his loan - Sam: Cash $100 Loan: $50 Carrots: Huge amounts - Dick: Cash $0 Debt: $50 Farm: 1
I hope that should give you a good idea of how real economy works. Where did the extra $50 in interest come from? Simple, it came from the work that Dick did so that he could sell carrots to Sam. Dick had no problem paying back $150 in an economy where only $100 exists. Why did it work? Because money circulates.
The exact same thing is true with banks. What they demand in interest is an expectation to get some of your production in exchange for providing you with liquidity so you can increase your production. Of course, when that liquidity is wasted on speculating in stocks and houses instead of actual investment, everything goes bad.
The only problem is, that because you only gave out X dollars, but expect X+interest dollars back, which do not exist, because they were not given out in the fist place,
Not true. The thing you are missing is money circulation. I can easily pay back $10 with only a single dollar. As long as the one I am paying back to keeps buying services from me.
That doesn't mean that fractional reserve banking is problem free. The really problem occurs when you have people at the top who start accumulating money wanting to get richer and richer. In the scenario I described above, the one lending out the money has a huge amount of power, because if he doesn't pay enough from you, you won't be able to pay back the loan, and you will have to default. That is what happens in crashes.
But the worst happens before the crashes. As those people who has the money doesn't want the money to just sit still doing nothing, they "invest" it. But the problem is that most idiots on wall street and main street have no clue what a real investment is. An investment is spending money in something that gives real productive returns.
When money gets loaned out for non investments you get bubbles. Sometimes the bubble can be in a real type of goods that is used for speculation which drives up prices (housing). And sometimes it can be pure speculation that doesn't even involve any real productive stuff (stocks, derivates, financial papers, gold). But it will always crash.
Just a small note about gold. I prefer to group it with financial type speculation, because gold in general works far more like a currency than as a commodity. It simply have never had much real world usefulness compared to its cost. Its value lies purely in hedging against fear.
I do think that the current monetary system needs to be changed. But I am also sure that going back to the gold standard or just getting rid of fractional reserve banking without introducing anything else is a bad idea.
Trickle down has never been anything but a code name for tax the rich less so they can lend money to the less rich, collecting interest all the time. And to make it even better, trickle down taxing is driven by goverment loans that they get from...guess who. It is nice to be rich and have the goverment pay tax...err...interest to you.
Ok, that may be slightly cyncical. But really, that is how it looks to me.
IANAL, but such a clause sounds extremly questionable legally speaking.
The right to disagree is a very fundamental right. I doubt that courts would allow you to just give up that right as it would imbalance the whole contract section of the law.
Now, someone in another thread said that the license is backwards compatible so it may be of no interest here. But I am just curious about that clause in specific as it seems to be used in more than one open source license, and I just can't see how the courts would allow it to be leglly enforceable.
Umm, it wouldn't. That is the whole point. You only put down fiber once. And then it is done forever (well, until nature runs its course), because data transport over fiber is so damn good upgradeable.
And that you actually asked that question and answered it with a false answer shows that you really have no clue what you are talking about.
Substitute "highway" for "shared neighborhood road" and I certainly agree.
Sorry, no can do. All users pays the same for the road.
You don't think the argument makes sense? In that case I can't say much more to convince you. Of course, I hope you don't intend to study any advanced logic course in the future because then you'll have to deal with very similar ideas.
Journalism itself is driven by the same ideals. Protect the source. Not, because the journalist wants to hide the truth. But because with protecting the source, the journalist would never be able to discover the truth in the first place.
And in that case, you really have no moral authority.
Ok. You are basically calling most journalists hypocrites and saying they have no moral authority. I agree that it isn't a simple dilemma. But don't rush to name calling.
If I assert that buying it for $200,000 cheats both the owner and the bank out of money
Noone likes word benders. Cheating as used in gaming is a very clear concept, which is to against the rules or sometimes percieved rules of the game.
And no, you aren't cheating anyone out of money as the rules in the case you mentioned are very clear. You can of course come up with far more fuzzy scenario where you can debate if it is cheating or not. As for the morality of the situation. Discuss that all you want, but it isn't cheating.
But here we are talkinga bout games that explicity define buying gold as cheating. There is no doubt or unclarity about it.
Or would you say that breaking any rule is immoral, regardless of the morality of the rule itself?
True. Rulebreaking and immorality doesn't go hand in hand. But when it comes to gaming which is a selectivly voluntary activity you'll have to work harder to convince me that a specific rule violation isn't immoral. Especially considering...
Isn't the "morality" of cheating gaming the system to harm others for your benefit?
Gold selling has wrecked MMO economies. I quit an MMO because of the rampant gold selling, and I am certainly not alone. Goldsellers and Bots are also quite hated if you read most MMO boards.
Also, if you buy gold nowadays, it is very likely that you directly or indirectly are dealing with account hackers that steal (seems like the right term in this case) gold.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet despite these, we've not seen any dip in piracy.
Of course not. Why should you expect that. Your argument is exactly the same as the one the music industry is using when talking about lost sales. The whole point of copyright is to increase the price of IP artifically which inevitbly makes consumers afford less pieces of IP.
Copyright may very well encourage the creation of new works of art, but it will also always discourage the spread of those same works of art. If piracy weren't possible, society would be just as much less wealthy as the piracy makes us wealthier (and I am talking real wealth here, as in people having access to more information). And that is excluding the extra competitive pressure that piracy provides on IP industries, reducing the monopoly inefficency factor.
Anyway, looking at piracy numbers is just stupid as it says nothing. Look at the real industry numbers instead. Digital music are up (record year). Concert numbers are up (record year). Movie industry is up (record year). Game industry is up (record year).
That is real money that people are paying. Not fake money that people didn't have in the first place.
"what I don't understand is why they need to understand network technology."
It isn't so much failing to understand the technology itself as failing to understand how society thinks about and uses the technology. The old legislators has proven to be completly oblivious.
When you have the swedish minster of justice, Beatrice Ask, on national television saying "Now the industries and adults will make sure that we get this in order" as a comment on the new IPRED law that basically allows for private police.
Adults? The top EU parliament candidate for the Pirate Party is 48 years old. OK, he is older than the average member. But that isn't really strange, because the internet is used more by the younger generations. The 18-30 bracket is where you will find a huge representation. According to Beatrice Ask, I guess they are all children.
And then you have the prime minister saying "We don't want to criminilize a whole generation" before calmly going on and criminilizing a whole generation.
There is a reason why the Pirate Party is growing rapidly. People are slowly waking up to the hypocrisy. And they are also realizing that the neither of the big parties are to be trusted.
a chronic lack of wealth has a negative effect on sociality
The pirate bay alone distributes millions of works of art daily. And at a damn low cost. If that isn't creating wealth, I don't know what is.
Of course, you will not see it directly in the GDP, because things that can be produced for free isn't worth anything economically, which goes to show just how messed up the subject of economics really is. Introduce replicators into a country and watch the GDP collapse as noone is willing to pay for expensive goods produced by factories, nor for shopkeepers that just distribute factory goods.
What really happens economically speaking is that the relative economic value of a product decreases as production effectivity increases while the real value remains the same. You can generally compensate for such changes by using product baskets to compare economies (although that has its own problems). But if the margin cost of a goods suddenly drops to near zero you'll start to see that goods disappearing completly from the economy, because it is no longer worth making actual transactions with the product. People will just trade it for free on the side. Does that mean that the society is worse off? Of course, not.
Wouldn't that mean that the people who write those books, companies that create all those applications, games etc and artists and recording companies who write and produce all that music, and studios who make all those movies would be out of business instantly?
If they can't manage to convince people to pay for their services, yes.
Of course, you can find many examples of people who manage to make money even for the IP they use is free. And if a good deal of the IP industry goes away, the remaining part should have an easier time to find people willing to pay.
Everything will end up in a new equilibrium. But one thing is clear, the total consumption/usage of information will be higher, because everyone will be able to afford it. It will be about as cheap as air literally, to take another zero margin cost product.
The price of copyright is always that the total spread of the information decreases. That is the simple economic nature of it. There is nothing you can do to change that.
How would they justify the investment in money, time and work that they made if only one copy will ever be sold?
If they can't, they shouldn't. There is obviously enough cheaper material on the market to satisfy everyone. The market is better served by people who see business opportunities.
Pork barrel schemes don't create jobs, they only move them from the wealth-creating part of the economy to the wealth-destroying part.
I hate that fucking deceptive lie (sorry about the language, but I get so pissed every time I see it). I follow a couple of relativly big popular capitalistic blogs. Lots of great and interesting commentary, but once in a while the writers spew out crap like the above. It immediatly shows just how stuck they are in their ideological thinking (goverment bad, private business good, me go trade stocks now).
The above lie is based on a rather sofisticated memo "Goverment can't create wealth, it can only tax it". It sounds convincing, but is nothing more than a cheap capitalistic memo used to confuse.
How does it work? Simple, you take all the entitities in an economy except one and put them on one side. You put the remaining entity on the other side. Now you can say that the alone entity can't produce any wealth, because it has to charge money and resources from the other side to do so. You can do the same manuever for any entity, including the goverment.
And, yes, taxes are just the goverment charging for its services. It sucks that the goverment has a monopoly as well as a life time contract with you (or until you leave the country), but that is just the way it is.
"Like how they "increased" from $4+ to about $2.50 over the last year?"
A drop because of the huge recession combined with the end of an oil speculation bubble.
Still, it won't change the facts. We are currently coasting at the peak oil level. How long we will remain there, I don't know. But once it starts to go down and supply starts dropping at a couple of percent per year, prices will really hit the roofs.
Of course, Europe has been taxing gasoline as an externalty for quite some time which is why they have a larger focus on transportation that doesn't require burning fossile fuel.
Personally I just don't know which of the dissatisfaction parties I should vote for, Piratpartiet or Sverigedemokraterna, pro-pirates or pro-nationalism and less immigrants.
Well, for the EU parliament I think the pirate party agenda is more interesting. It is more simple forward looking and may have even more impact on the international plane than on the national one.
SD simply feels like a more conservative party. Sure, go ahead on vote of them when you think the rest of the parties are mishandling the immigration politics. But it feels far more like an issue on the national level.
By copying and distributing the work of others you reduce the income they get in reward for their work.
No. By copying and distributing the work of others you increase the amount of art reproduced in the world, making society richer and more wealthy.
Take it to the extreme: if everyone in the world got hold of movies, music or software for free, why would artists and developers continue producing original works if they're receiving no reward for it?
They wouldn't. But if supply of new IP got that low, some people would be willing to pay for new IP. Supply and Demand, you know.
Also, even though fewer works of art may get produced, the total distribution of works of art would increase, Leading to a richer society. And those who no longer work with producing art can go and do something else that society benefits from.
it's the rights of the creator of that work to have a say in how and when its reproduced that are being preserved.
No it is the right of the creator to have a say in how and when his own copy is reproduced.
However, when he has made a copy and given it away, he no longer should have any say in how that copy is used, including copying.
What part of you taking something from me does not make me less free?
Vote Libertarian, for the right to sell yourself to slavery. Freedom at its best.
Everyone who believes in liberty is against wealth redistribution, since by its nature it denies liberty.
Are you kidding me. Is that the kind of bullshit that comes out of todays economic libertarians. Ah well, it doesn't surprise me. You take after your conservative neighbours.
Maybe you should read up on your freedom brothers, the social libertarians. You know, the ones that agree with economic libertarians on personal freedom issues, but think the economic libertarians are crazy for believing that you can have real freedom when most of the wealth is owned and controlled by the few. (OK, that is a slight simplification of social libertarian ideology, but I hope you get my point)
I find that many US libertarians have a very perverted sense of freedom defined around private property. Freedom isn't to own the food in my refrigirator. Freedom is to know that I will be able to eat when I am hungry. And freedom for a society is when everyone knows that they'll be able to when they are hungry.
The average tax burden for Americans is -- just in direct taxes -- about 40 percent of our income.
The tax/GDP ratio of the US is 28.3 percent. That is one of the lowest of all developed countries. And that is for a country that is having a huge expensive army and regularly conducts expensive wars.
Americans complaining about taxes sound really ignorant. Especially when they have willing halved the top margin income tax in the last 30 years while high income people have skyrocketed their salaries. If the rich aren't paying for the goverment, the middle class will.
If you had proposed that to a Founding Father, you'd likely have been hanged or shot.
That is just stupid. The founding fathers lived in an low tech, low populated agriculture society. High taxes doesn't make sense in such a society.
Somehow geeks can't get it through their heads that providing bandwidth costs money
Actually, most geeks get that. Electricity also costs money to provide. That doesn't mean that I am paying 50 times the market price to my electricity provider. And that is where the crux is.
Utility providers are in the business of providing adequate access between the utility backbones and end consumers, charging basically flat fees to do that, and then additionally charging the market price plus transaction fees for the amount of resources taken from the backbone.
However, these ISPs aren't doing that. Instead they are providing inadequate access to the utility backbone and charging huge extra amounts just to make that access adequate. The actual backbone bandwidth costs are minor in their equation.
Wait how the hell does Dick get $150 when Sam only had $100?
Just a typo
"Dick: Cash $150 Debt: $150" should be "Dick: Cash $100 Debt: $150" which becomes evident when you look at the next action which is Dick paying $100 for the Farm and having $0 left.
What's going to happen when the reality of America's dependence fossil fuels meets the reality of climate change?
It will meet "peak X" first, where X is each of the fossile fuels that the US (and rest of the world) depend on. Oil is already in the peak stage. When it starts dropping we will see oil supply drop a couple of percent per year. And that will cause real panic in the countries that depend on fossile fuel to transport most their goods and employees. And no, you can't just find more oil. We have been finding less oil than we have been consuming for a good many years now. That is all part of the equation.
As for coal. The so called 500 year US coal reserve in the 1970s is less than 200 years of reserve now. Exponential growth in consumption is a bitch. And those 200 years are still estimated based on consumption remaining stagnant. That such misleading estimations are even used and believed shows just how stupid most people are. Coal won't last very long, especially if oil runs out.
The real reason for investing heavily in clean energy sources, is because the countries that does such investment before fuel prices rocket because of limited supply, will have a huge advantage.
Also, most people seems to think that prices will slowly go up as supply decreases. That is a complete misunderstanding of how the economy works. A small gap in the supply can easily double or triple the cost of a goods, if the demand is urgent enough. And oil is definitly quite urgent, considering how much the world rely on it for transportation. (the US more so than others)
While I have read many "fall of the US empire" stories, I personally think that the thing that the biggest bane of the US may very well be the large distances between work, shopping and home. Cities constructed in such a way are very sensititve to a drop in fossile fuel supply.
But it isn't development time that is sold. So my original point stands. It isn't supply & demand.
I wasn't even meaning to bring up talk about piracy. I just wanted to point out that treating monopoly industries using supply & demand models is incorrect and something which is done way too often.
Economic activity happens when money changes hands for goods and services. Not when something is produced.
And that reasoning is what brought the great USofA to its knees in 2008. Wall Street are full of people with that mindset and it has cratered the whole economy as it all became about shuffling around goods and services while nothing real ever was produced. Lots of "economic activity" but no wealth.
The true answer is that wealth and economic prosperity is created from producing things that are wanted, and then efficenctly allow the buyers to buy those items. Middlemen (traders) are needed for that to work, but they should never be the focus of the economy as they have been for a good while.
In the scenario below, Dick will loan money from Sam so that he can buy a farm from Sam. After the farm is bought, Dick will work to produce carrots which will enable him to pay back his loan. (including the interest that you are claiming can't be repaid because it doesn't exist)
* Start
- Sam: Cash $100 Farm: 1
- Dick: Cash $0
* Sam loans $100 to Dick with a $50 interest
- Sam: Cash $0 Loan: $150 Farm: 1
- Dick: Cash $150 Debt: $150
* Dick buys farm from Sam for $100
- Sam: Cash $100 Loan: $150
- Dick: Cash $0 Debt: $150 Farm: 1
* Dick works hard and grows carrots on his farm. Finally, he sells some of his carrots to Sam for $100
- Sam: Cash $0 Loan: $150 Carrots: Lots
- Dick: Cash $100 Debt: $150 Farm: 1
* Dick repays $100 of his debt
- Sam: Cash $100 Loan: $50 Carrots: Lots
- Dick: Cash $0 Debt: $50 Farm: 1
* Dick works ons his farm to produce some more carrots that he sells to sam
- Sam: Cash $50 Loan: $50 Carrots: Huge amounts
- Dick: Cash $50 Debt: $50 Farm: 1
* Dick repays the rest of his loan
- Sam: Cash $100 Loan: $50 Carrots: Huge amounts
- Dick: Cash $0 Debt: $50 Farm: 1
I hope that should give you a good idea of how real economy works. Where did the extra $50 in interest come from? Simple, it came from the work that Dick did so that he could sell carrots to Sam. Dick had no problem paying back $150 in an economy where only $100 exists. Why did it work? Because money circulates.
The exact same thing is true with banks. What they demand in interest is an expectation to get some of your production in exchange for providing you with liquidity so you can increase your production. Of course, when that liquidity is wasted on speculating in stocks and houses instead of actual investment, everything goes bad.
No, it isn't. Supply and Demand isn't applicable to software and other IP, because there is an unlimited supply.
More accurate is to say that it is a matter of Demand & Demand. Which is what drives all monopoly based industries.
The only problem is, that because you only gave out X dollars, but expect X+interest dollars back, which do not exist, because they were not given out in the fist place,
Not true. The thing you are missing is money circulation. I can easily pay back $10 with only a single dollar. As long as the one I am paying back to keeps buying services from me.
That doesn't mean that fractional reserve banking is problem free. The really problem occurs when you have people at the top who start accumulating money wanting to get richer and richer. In the scenario I described above, the one lending out the money has a huge amount of power, because if he doesn't pay enough from you, you won't be able to pay back the loan, and you will have to default. That is what happens in crashes.
But the worst happens before the crashes. As those people who has the money doesn't want the money to just sit still doing nothing, they "invest" it. But the problem is that most idiots on wall street and main street have no clue what a real investment is. An investment is spending money in something that gives real productive returns.
When money gets loaned out for non investments you get bubbles. Sometimes the bubble can be in a real type of goods that is used for speculation which drives up prices (housing). And sometimes it can be pure speculation that doesn't even involve any real productive stuff (stocks, derivates, financial papers, gold). But it will always crash.
Just a small note about gold. I prefer to group it with financial type speculation, because gold in general works far more like a currency than as a commodity. It simply have never had much real world usefulness compared to its cost. Its value lies purely in hedging against fear.
I do think that the current monetary system needs to be changed. But I am also sure that going back to the gold standard or just getting rid of fractional reserve banking without introducing anything else is a bad idea.
traditional "trickle down"
Trickle down has never been anything but a code name for tax the rich less so they can lend money to the less rich, collecting interest all the time. And to make it even better, trickle down taxing is driven by goverment loans that they get from...guess who. It is nice to be rich and have the goverment pay tax...err...interest to you.
Ok, that may be slightly cyncical. But really, that is how it looks to me.
includes a "or later version" clause.
IANAL, but such a clause sounds extremly questionable legally speaking.
The right to disagree is a very fundamental right. I doubt that courts would allow you to just give up that right as it would imbalance the whole contract section of the law.
Now, someone in another thread said that the license is backwards compatible so it may be of no interest here. But I am just curious about that clause in specific as it seems to be used in more than one open source license, and I just can't see how the courts would allow it to be leglly enforceable.
And why would more fiber need to be laid down?
Umm, it wouldn't. That is the whole point. You only put down fiber once. And then it is done forever (well, until nature runs its course), because data transport over fiber is so damn good upgradeable.
And that you actually asked that question and answered it with a false answer shows that you really have no clue what you are talking about.
Substitute "highway" for "shared neighborhood road" and I certainly agree.
Sorry, no can do. All users pays the same for the road.
Now go hide under the bridge you fucking troll.
You don't think the argument makes sense? In that case I can't say much more to convince you. Of course, I hope you don't intend to study any advanced logic course in the future because then you'll have to deal with very similar ideas.
Journalism itself is driven by the same ideals. Protect the source. Not, because the journalist wants to hide the truth. But because with protecting the source, the journalist would never be able to discover the truth in the first place.
And in that case, you really have no moral authority.
Ok. You are basically calling most journalists hypocrites and saying they have no moral authority. I agree that it isn't a simple dilemma. But don't rush to name calling.
If I assert that buying it for $200,000 cheats both the owner and the bank out of money
Noone likes word benders. Cheating as used in gaming is a very clear concept, which is to against the rules or sometimes percieved rules of the game.
And no, you aren't cheating anyone out of money as the rules in the case you mentioned are very clear. You can of course come up with far more fuzzy scenario where you can debate if it is cheating or not. As for the morality of the situation. Discuss that all you want, but it isn't cheating.
But here we are talkinga bout games that explicity define buying gold as cheating. There is no doubt or unclarity about it.
Or would you say that breaking any rule is immoral, regardless of the morality of the rule itself?
True. Rulebreaking and immorality doesn't go hand in hand. But when it comes to gaming which is a selectivly voluntary activity you'll have to work harder to convince me that a specific rule violation isn't immoral. Especially considering...
Isn't the "morality" of cheating gaming the system to harm others for your benefit?
Gold selling has wrecked MMO economies. I quit an MMO because of the rampant gold selling, and I am certainly not alone. Goldsellers and Bots are also quite hated if you read most MMO boards.
Also, if you buy gold nowadays, it is very likely that you directly or indirectly are dealing with account hackers that steal (seems like the right term in this case) gold.