Business people can tend to be unwise by waving a technological wand before completely realizing the consequences. I doubt, though, that government-controlled science is any wiser since this tendency is present in most people anyway, be they in business or not. The reason that the highly profitable bits are profitable is because they are useful. People don't pay for things that aren't useful in their eyes.
I think your statement about waving the technological wand is accurate, but I think your last two statements are not true. Something that is profitable is not necessarily useful. For instance Monsanto developed the sterile Terminator seed which is not at all useful to small farmers who save seeds for use as next year's crop. It is useful to the *owners* of Monsanto because it forces the customers to come back next year to buy another batch of seeds. The addition of DVD region codes is another situation in which a technology (I use the term loosely) to prevent people playing DVD's outside their region isn't wanted by customers. It's there to give control and increased profits to owners, not to satisfy customers. This are many more examples where the interests of owners and customers are not the same, and whenever they clash the owners always win. They are after all decides what's for sale, and we can take it or leave it.
You are right though in thinking that customers do force business to conform in certain ways to their expectations. For instance a car which blows up all the time isn't going to be purchased by many people, but scrimping on other safety equipment will occur. We all remember how long it took for car manufacturers to put in seat belts, then air bags... Will these car companies go out of business? They haven't yet. For a business to survive it must satisfy both its customers and its owners, otherwise it will lose market share and new investment respectively. Both are essential to corporate survival, and there is a constant tension between the two. And it will be there as long as a market economy exists.
The market forces people to work efficiently and go for the most useful aspects of science, which, in the short run are the actual benefits to humanity, and, in the long run are the underlying theoretical structures. A company that invests time in advancing the theoretical will profit later on when its deeper knowledge allows it to outperform all the rest in practicalities that have the potential to help the "here and now" which is the only life we actually live, by definition.
Replace useful with profitable in your first sentence and I'm happy. Nobody goes into business to be useful as far as I know, most people look for stocks with growth potential and good return on investment, not usefulness. As far as companies investing in long term research and development, it generally doesn't happen on a large scale by business alone. Usually government does it, often in conjunction with business. That's really what the HGP is all about, and research grants in general. Once a technology has matured enough, it is handed over to the private sector, sometimes for free. Computers, aircraft, the internet, these were all carefully helped along by government until they were big enough to survive in the private sector.
date in a few years, the original company will be forced to share its secrets, making a serious checkmate impossible. Perhaps many people don't like this scenario because they are prejudiced against businesses that have served customers well enough to have been able to grow in capacity to serve -- i.e. "big business."
You mean like Microsoft? J
It amazes me that the selfsame people are so much in favor of government which is both bigger and wields actual violent power.
Government and business aren't the enemies you make them out to be, they are actually close friends who work together. In fact the violence that government wields is generally used FOR business, almost never against it. Whether it is Britain using its gunboats to open up China for opium trading, Desert Storm, or just cops breaking up a picket line it is doing it for business. Yeah, government goes after some businesses for pollution and whatnot, but by and large they work together as a team. I don't like either of them.
Celera hasn't even by their own definition sequenced the entire genome of Drosophila. What they have done is sequenced most of, or all of the euchromatic region. The highly repetitive heterochromatic DNA that is clustered around the centromeric regions and makes up an estimated 30% of Drosophila genome is not sequenced. There may even be some B-heterochromatic regions which are also unclonable which is a serious problem in trying to sequence highly repetive DNA. While these regions don't have the glamour of the gene-rich euchromatin (it is often referred to as junk DNA for that reason) they can effect everything from gene expression to chromosome pairing.
And to the few posts I have read which think that this is some sort of private enterprise success story versus a slow blundering government, it isn't. It is a classic example of business going after the highly profitable bits and leaving the taxpayer to fund the basic research. The same basic research which incidentally made it all possible in the first place.
This is key: People are paid based on the rarity of their talent, not on the importance of the work. Sewage workers are incredibly important to society, but they are paid based on the large number of people that can do that work.
People are not paid on the rarity of their talent, they are paid whatever they can get on the marketplace and the two are quite different things. A talented flute player make only make $20K/year, while a mediocore programmer may make several times that. Bill Gates made billions more in the 90 than he did in the 80s, his talent wasn't any more rare, he was just making money on rising stock prices. He certainly wasn't any more talented or working any harder.
Let's face what the market pays people for is total bullshit. A hockey player makes millions while an over-worked nurse struggles to get by? I don't know why you feel the need to justify such a grossly flawed system?
I'm not sure an attempt to shut down.com would work. We geeks are just too individualistic. In many cases, we define ourselves by our contempt for authority, even our own. How many would follow union bosses?
We don't need union bosses, we could dispense with them entirely and run the whole show as an internet based direct democracy.
Yes, it failed. The reasons for its failure, however, extend far beyond just corruption and greed. Despite popular opinion, your entire communist country could be composed of people who're every bit as benevolent as mother theresa, and you'd still fail. The reason is quite simple: Central Planning doesn't work. No matter how nice the people in power (nor, for the matter, the workers)are, it doesn't mean they're going to (or capable of, even) allocating resources half efficiently.
Central planning doesn't work? That'd be news to people in Russia whose economy even by capitalist standards (GDP, industrial output, etc...) has totally collapsed since "communism" has collapsed. Not to mention other indicators of life quality, like say life expectancy, suicide rate, etc... I don't understand how central planning failed when it built up a peasent economy into a superpower, launched the first sateliate into orbit, and produced a highly skilled and educated workforce. Just what are you measuring as economic success here? If you compare Russia to a country with equivalent population, resouces, industrial development like say Brazil in 1917 then Russia actually looks much better by comparison. It also fought two world wars to boot...
And BTW the country was called the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" USSR, not "Union of Soviet Communist Republics" so not even they claimed it was communist.
And as far as allocating resouces efficiently, markets hardly do that well. I mean markets don't allocate labour efficiently (unemployment), and will do things like allocate more resouces to building Bill Gates mansion than to developing drugs for diseases that people without money have. Even perfectly efficient markets (which don't exist) create incentives for producing scarcity, pollution and unsafe products and working conditions.
I'm not a communist (I'm an anarchist) so I obviously don't believe in central planning (I like decentralized, democractic, computer aided, bottom up planning). Nonetheless to say central planning doesn't work is just factually wrong. I never understood how right wingers claimed the USSR was a big threat while at the same time saying its economy didn't work...
Slashdot Mirror
Business people can tend to be unwise by waving a technological wand before completely realizing the consequences. I doubt, though, that government-controlled science is any wiser since this tendency is present in most people anyway, be they in business or not. The reason that the highly profitable bits are profitable is because they are useful. People don't pay for things that aren't useful in their eyes.
I think your statement about waving the technological wand is accurate, but I think your last two statements are not true. Something that is profitable is not necessarily useful. For instance Monsanto developed the sterile Terminator seed which is not at all useful to small farmers who save seeds for use as next year's crop. It is useful to the *owners* of Monsanto because it forces the customers to come back next year to buy another batch of seeds. The addition of DVD region codes is another situation in which a technology (I use the term loosely) to prevent people playing DVD's outside their region isn't wanted by customers. It's there to give control and increased profits to owners, not to satisfy customers. This are many more examples where the interests of owners and customers are not the same, and whenever they clash the owners always win. They are after all decides what's for sale, and we can take it or leave it.
You are right though in thinking that customers do force business to conform in certain ways to their expectations. For instance a car which blows up all the time isn't going to be purchased by many people, but scrimping on other safety equipment will occur. We all remember how long it took for car manufacturers to put in seat belts, then air bags... Will these car companies go out of business? They haven't yet. For a business to survive it must satisfy both its customers and its owners, otherwise it will lose market share and new investment respectively. Both are essential to corporate survival, and there is a constant tension between the two. And it will be there as long as a market economy exists.
The market forces people to work efficiently and go for the most useful aspects of science, which, in the short run are the actual benefits to humanity, and, in the long run are the underlying theoretical structures. A company that invests time in advancing the theoretical will profit later on when its deeper knowledge allows it to outperform all the rest in practicalities that have the potential to help the "here and now" which is the only life we actually live, by definition.
Replace useful with profitable in your first sentence and I'm happy. Nobody goes into business to be useful as far as I know, most people look for stocks with growth potential and good return on investment, not usefulness. As far as companies investing in long term research and development, it generally doesn't happen on a large scale by business alone. Usually government does it, often in conjunction with business. That's really what the HGP is all about, and research grants in general. Once a technology has matured enough, it is handed over to the private sector, sometimes for free. Computers, aircraft, the internet, these were all carefully helped along by government until they were big enough to survive in the private sector.
date in a few years, the original company will be forced to share its secrets, making a serious checkmate impossible. Perhaps many people don't like this scenario because they are prejudiced against businesses that have served customers well enough to have been able to grow in capacity to serve -- i.e. "big business."
You mean like Microsoft? J
It amazes me that the selfsame people are so much in favor of government which is both bigger and wields actual violent power.
Government and business aren't the enemies you make them out to be, they are actually close friends who work together. In fact the violence that government wields is generally used FOR business, almost never against it. Whether it is Britain using its gunboats to open up China for opium trading, Desert Storm, or just cops breaking up a picket line it is doing it for business. Yeah, government goes after some businesses for pollution and whatnot, but by and large they work together as a team. I don't like either of them.
Celera hasn't even by their own definition sequenced the entire genome of Drosophila. What they have done is sequenced most of, or all of the euchromatic region. The highly repetitive heterochromatic DNA that is clustered around the centromeric regions and makes up an estimated 30% of Drosophila genome is not sequenced. There may even be some B-heterochromatic regions which are also unclonable which is a serious problem in trying to sequence highly repetive DNA. While these regions don't have the glamour of the gene-rich euchromatin (it is often referred to as junk DNA for that reason) they can effect everything from gene expression to chromosome pairing.
And to the few posts I have read which think that this is some sort of private enterprise success story versus a slow blundering government, it isn't. It is a classic example of business going after the highly profitable bits and leaving the taxpayer to fund the basic research. The same basic research which incidentally made it all possible in the first place.
Anarchists are socialists, see the anarchist FAQ at:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/
This is key: People are paid based on the rarity of their talent, not on the importance of the work. Sewage workers are incredibly important to society, but they are paid based on the large number of people that can do that work.
People are not paid on the rarity of their talent, they are paid whatever they can get on the marketplace and the two are quite different things. A talented flute player make only make $20K/year, while a mediocore programmer may make several times that. Bill Gates made billions more in the 90 than he did in the 80s, his talent wasn't any more rare, he was just making money on rising stock prices. He certainly wasn't any more talented or working any harder.
Let's face what the market pays people for is total bullshit. A hockey player makes millions while an over-worked nurse struggles to get by? I don't know why you feel the need to justify such a grossly flawed system?
I'm not sure an attempt to shut down .com would work. We geeks are just too individualistic. In many cases, we define ourselves by our contempt for authority, even our own. How many would follow union bosses?
We don't need union bosses, we could dispense with them entirely and run the whole show as an internet based direct democracy.
Yes, it failed. The reasons for its failure, however, extend far beyond just corruption and greed. Despite popular opinion, your entire communist country could be composed of people who're every bit as benevolent as mother theresa, and you'd still fail. The reason is quite simple: Central Planning doesn't work. No matter how nice the people in power (nor, for the matter, the workers)are, it doesn't mean they're going to (or capable of, even) allocating resources half efficiently.
Central planning doesn't work? That'd be news to people in Russia whose economy even by capitalist standards (GDP, industrial output, etc...) has totally collapsed since "communism" has collapsed. Not to mention other indicators of life quality, like say life expectancy, suicide rate, etc... I don't understand how central planning failed when it built up a peasent economy into a superpower, launched the first sateliate into orbit, and produced a highly skilled and educated workforce. Just what are you measuring as economic success here? If you compare Russia to a country with equivalent population, resouces, industrial development like say Brazil in 1917 then Russia actually looks much better by comparison. It also fought two world wars to boot...
And BTW the country was called the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" USSR, not "Union of Soviet Communist Republics" so not even they claimed it was communist.
And as far as allocating resouces efficiently, markets hardly do that well. I mean markets don't allocate labour efficiently (unemployment), and will do things like allocate more resouces to building Bill Gates mansion than to developing drugs for diseases that people without money have. Even perfectly efficient markets (which don't exist) create incentives for producing scarcity, pollution and unsafe products and working conditions.
I'm not a communist (I'm an anarchist) so I obviously don't believe in central planning (I like decentralized, democractic, computer aided, bottom up planning). Nonetheless to say central planning doesn't work is just factually wrong. I never understood how right wingers claimed the USSR was a big threat while at the same time saying its economy didn't work...