The California retail energy market was never de-regulated, in fact it was OVER-regulated. The California wholesale market was partiall de-regulated, and this is why there was a crisis -- too much government.
Check out this article on the reality behind California. The government let wholesale prices fluctuate but did NOT let retail prices fluctuate. When wholesale prices started to go up based on decreased supply (created by government's mandates!), the companies could not buy energy at a profit since they were forced to sell it at a loss. Hence, rolling blackouts.
You just won my side of the argument -- the only monopolies that exist are those that are created by the State. Only one monopoly exists, in reality, the monopoly over the use of force. Only the State can use force "legally" and only the State uses that force to create monopolies in industry, such as a monopoly for electrical distribution, gas distribution and telephone distribution. The monopoly over the use of force is what creates those monstrosities, not the free market of natural competitive forces.
It is bunk based on one sentence that is mostly repeated in thought throughout the entry:
If not constrained by the public utility commision, the company would likly charge a far higher price and earn an abnormal profit on its capital.
That is not true. All "natural monopolies" are constantly hounded by new competition. _ALL_ of them. No one just sits back and holds a monopoly -- if they don't constantly compete, they'll be overcome by competition. This has happened in all of history to all companies and governments -- something better comes along.
It is the regulation side of game that creates the most havok for any given market and many consumers within the market. The only monopoly that exists in life is the monopoly over the use of force -- and it is that monopoly that we call government that creates the sustaining momopolies that make life bad for the rest of us.
Well-established economic theory? You mean like Keynes' well-established economic theory?
The Mises Institude has a great PDF on the Myth of the Natural Monopoly. I recommend you read that entirely, just as I read your Wikipedia mumbo jumbo, before saying that anything is well established in economic theory.
How is the telco market NOT an ideal market? In almost every situation where we saw subsidies, we saw a market restrained from providing new and better efficiencies for consumers due to the typical side-effects of subsidization: redtape, mandates, and a bigger barrier to entry than previously existed.
You can refute it, but your refutations don't hold water. That's why I posted "chicken and egg and chicken and egg" because the common refutation is "Well, we have to regulate it because we spent tax dollars on building the infrastructure." Well, why did you do that? "Because we had to since no one would have sold land to provide the service in the first place." How do you know that? "Well, because."
All I have to do it point to J.J. Hill's amazing life story -- he built a network of efficient businesses that the consumers loved, he helped thousands through government's mad depressions, he destroyed the myth that only government can create anything large scale, and he did it without any help from anyone but his own fingers, capital, networking and time.
That Wikipedia entry is bunk, plain and simple. Natural monopolies do not exist unless they do the nearly impossible: offer such a good quality of service at such a low price that competition would not give the consumer ANY advantage. If that is the case, then the natural "monopoly" is the best that is possible -- why do we need government to try to do better if there IS no better?
Name an natural monopoly -- they don't exist. What does exist, for a very short period of history, is a company that works so hard that it gives its customers the best they could ever wish for. When another company can trump the first, that short period of historical dominance goes away.
I just wrote about it today, as well as smacking the callous disregard for free market truth at Wikipedia, at my anarcho-capitalism blog.
Thanks for the article -- I've seen similar ones, but that encompasses quite a bit of the facts that need to be addressed.
I believe that nearly _ALL_ chemicals can cause harm to fetuses. I don't think there is any "safe" product out there that can't harm or kill someone if used incorrectly. That being said, I also think that many items that cause harm can ALSO increase health based on its usage. Even cigarette smoking has a good amount of positives in clinical studies, especially in people with memory loss and age-related mental issues. This is why I am against the national governments telling people what to do and what not to do. DDT should be a community-selected issue. If you're dealing with massive mosquito-borne diseases, there is a CBA that should be performed to see if the benefits outweigh the costs.
The issue is a lot more complicated than either of us can debate in this forum, but I believe the issues must be brought back up, especially when it comes to governments that would rather see millions die over a few generations than a few thousand be slightly mentally hampered while in the womb. Long term studies on these mental problems also should be looked into by privately funded research companies and organizations -- I'd happily give a few hundred dollars for research. Yet we can't use DDT in much of the world, and I believe that is a bigger problem that was created by fiat and mandate than by research and reality.
Really? The country's first railroads were incredible expensive, and EVERY ONE that was subsidized by the government needed more subsidies to exist. Yet the most successful railroad was completely built with private money and absolutely no land grants or eminent domain acquisitions (see the history of James J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad for proof). Railroads that used subsidies either failed or asked for more money, but Hill rolled right along, adding onto his network with profits and providing competition for the cronies who said it couldn't be done.
If consumers want something, they will pay for it. We don't need government to acquire land for telephone cables and wires, private companies would buy the land at whatever cost is necessary to build what consumers want. We just have never allowed private competition to do it -- it is ALWAYS illegal to try to provide a competing service to the State-licensed ones. Try building private roadways and you'll see how impossible it is -- not because people don't want to sell you land, but other people want to stop you from buying that land to make your own development.
Rockefeller's oil "monopoly" was good for the consumers. Read DiLorenzo's How Capitalism Saved America for amazing insight in what Rockefeller did to create the most amazing market in existence. He lowered the price of oil dozens of times over what competitors were charging, and created new industries out of his vertical marketing of previously inefficient businesses. Rockefeller should have been praised, not sued.
Land line service was so heavily subsidized for GENERATIONS that there was never a push to wireless communications, which was the big "push" to get land line providers to up the ante on their bandwidth. We had so many preferential subsidies of the local telcos that they didn't want to give more than the law required -- namely cheap and basic 9.6k service. It was slight de-regulation of other industries that caused the Internet boom, but we'd have been there much sooner had the market allowed for competition, which we didn't have for generations.
Free markets don't implode, there has never been proof of a monopoly in a free market or a market that has fallen apart because government stayed out of it. There are thousands of market proofs that the opposite is true.
Google's partially right to make these threats -- they're mad because companies that continue to receive monopoly powers, preferential treatment, restrictive licensing rules and even public subsidies should not be given even more power over the media distribution system. Yet the end result of Google's threats will only be MORE government control of the media, not less.
Net Neutrality is bunk -- it means ZERO. We don't need net neutrality, we don't want it, and we won't get it. What we need is a realistic free market playing field of open competition for anyone who wants to jump into the business. Let's stop all the regulations, taxes, tariffs, fees and restrictions on media companies and let them compete openly. IPTV is probably the future -- who cares about airwaves when everything is going digital and coming over a landline? Yet the phone companies still get preferential treatment from the national, state and local governments, and giving them both preferential treatment and the right to control their pipeline's access is tipping the system towards the cronies, not the consumers.
The consumers want one thing -- competition. Competition happens when government stays away from the market. The more we let government "regulate" net neutrality or attempt to create a level playing field, the more we'll see our prices go up, our service levels go down, and competition get wiped out of the market.
Google shouldn't be clamoring against the cronies, they should be threatening the government. Nothing would please me more than Google taking on a pro-independence role the day after an anniversary of the last time our citizens kicked the government in the teeth and sent them packing.
Re:Co-oping Internet networks the capitalist way
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$5 Social Wi-Fi Router
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There are usually much smaller providers who will give you what you want. Also, if you incorporate the co-op as a business (very inexpensive in most areas), you'd be exactly the same as any business running multiple users. Our ISP knows fully what we're doing and they haven't complained yet, and we field all the tech support problems (at a cost, of course) that our neighbors have.
We're also looking into some community social networking solutions for addressing concerns within our communities, something that I think is a great opportunity to give everyone locally the chance to speak. I know our local government isn't happy about our forum, especially since we give everyone a chance to debate. The village meetings are worthless as you have to give all your information to be logged forever, and you also have to practically beg to get more than 5 minutes of microphone time.
In the long run, I see huge opportunities to bring freedom back to the people, through capitalist means.
Co-oping Internet networks the capitalist way
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$5 Social Wi-Fi Router
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This is a great idea, and one I think will gain a lot of strength as information providers find ways to subsidize lower-cost connections to their services (especially Google). I already co-op with a half dozen of my neighbors to share our Internet bandwidth through WiFi. I don't charge for access, the router is open to all, but it does have a landing page that requests that they pay for what they use. So far our bill is paid about 8 months into the future.
In our neighborhood we already have 4 high speed internet providers, so competition is fierce but pricing is still fairly high due to local government idiocy (they want all the providers to pay a fee to be allowed to serve the area). We even have 2 medium-speed wireless providers who serve our area too, but they're also a bit expensive due to the village fees (how would the village stop them, though?)
This is the right step in the direction of providing inexpensive or free bandwidth to everyone. We don't need cities or governments paying for it, we just need the end profit-makers to subsidize the initial cost. Our connection should happily support 50 households (or more) for basic Internet usage, and if they want to use higher speed services, they're more than free to select from one of the providers available. For more, paying $5 a month for a decent 6 Mbps connection is well worth it, even if we frown on Bittorrent or other massive leach programs.
I've already talked to 3 other people in my neighborhood who are interested in doing the same thing. The plus side is that we communicate better (through a private forum) with each other than I've ever seen in a neighborhood I've lived in. We talk about security issues, odd cars on the streets, and all sorts of issue that people used to think we needed government for.
I really support these systems and would love to know if there is a way to privately sponsor some of these routers so that they're free, or even sponsor the bandwidth charges of people who offer this service to others through their own connection. Anyone know?
How is there time to submit well-formulated arguments about MARKETS on slashdot? For more of my opinion, just follow my link. I write about this stuff almost every day. For better formulated arguments, go hit The Mises Institute or check out Dr. DiLorenzo's latest book, How Capitalism Saved America.
I have to disagree completely. We pay so much for highways and roadways in taxes and fees that we don't directly notice, but we don't know what options might have become available to use had we not had so many subsidies offering "cheap" roadways.
I've lately become enamored with private planes and flying. One of my neighbors (actually, he lives about 2 miles from me) has 2 private runways in his backyard. He lands his 4 passenger and 6 passenger prop planes on his lawn. Safely. For years.
Most of his flying is to other private runways such as his, that dot almost every area and region in the U.S. How do we know we wouldn't all be flying inexpensive planes rather than cars? Maybe the highways have made it easy to rip us off with gas taxes and excessive tolls because they were built. They were built before the real boom in inexpensive airplanes began (I can purchase a reasonable Cessna in great shape for less than US$20K).
While the fuel cost is likely higher, we really don't have a competitive marketplace yet because it was stillborn for so many years while the auto industry pandered to Congress to build more roadways at taxpayers expense rather than let the free market of billions of consumer decisions create what we really want and need.
I'm not putting any faith in the highways, either. My best friend is the son of the largest highway contractor in a big western state, and he's told me how much collusion and theft occurs every day in that industry. Thank government? Not for this mess.
competition is a given; but without regulation, what will stop collusion and monopolistic practices? The size of your competitors is probably the largest barrier to entry into a market.
Regulation CREATES collusion and monopoly -- it gives companies incentive to team up to promote more anti-business policies that regulations all create. Without business regulation we see a MORE competitive marketplace.
the actions of individual consumers will be to the greater good of society; without subsidies and punitive taxes, how can you direct markets towards longer-term social goals?
Social goals are every changing, and NO society or group has anything close to a unified goal for society. Society is best served when every individual is free to choose his own actions as long as those actions don't harm the physical body or property of another. Let each man do what he wants, as long as he does not come to your land and hurt your body. Everything else offers more competition, better prices, better quality products and a more prosperous society through competitive desires rather than false equality.
that dependence on global markets is a good thing; without tariffs you can't protect nascent domestic markets, or protect established domestic markets during the transition to a global market, and without regulation how do you prevent dumping?
Dumping doesn't exist for long. When a country subsidizes their industry to allow dumping, we all profit from cheap goods at the expense of the citizens of that country doing the dumping. Let people dump! We can capitalize on cheaper products to build our own new industry. As for protecting nascent domestic markets, name one that was protected by tariffs. Tarrifs only protect dying markets such as steel and sugar and soy and other markets that are ultracompetitive and not worth our time or energy when we have other markets to tap. I have not seen one market that requires a tariff to build it up -- only to keep other markets hurting at the expense of the tariff.
For me, I use a combination of RSS feeds that pull from news.google.com and blogsearch.google.com. I guess I've become a google fanboy but only because they offer such great tools (and APIs) for me to feed my need for information, opinions and conflict. Now that I basically have my own "wire" to all sorts of news on all my favorite topics, as well as OpEd ("blogs"), I can get what I want when I want rather than using a site like slashdot or digg.
The great thing about this is that I tend to filter out sites that DON'T have an open comment forum at the end of the article. I still come to slashdot daily (RSS!) for the comments, but I also pay more attention to the everyman comments at other sites. I'm in it for the response of the readers, not necessarily for the "facts" in the article.
Actually, slashdot was owned by the GNAA, but Malda and his cronies had a coup to overthrow them and replace OSTG as the new overlords, which I for one welcomed. In the end we all got modded down.
I don't agree with the article at all, and I definitely don't agree with the top 50 article. In the long run, nothing matters in history. The consumers have been, and always will be, the only important unit or group in any market transaction. Without demand, supply matters little. Even if demand is created because of a new supply of a new item or service, it matters little as that demand is fixed -- it would have gone elsewhere.
Slashdot is definitely slowing down. So what? Digg is a mess, too. All I see on various blogs lately is "Click my ads!" and "Help me digg up my submission!" Nice.
I'm a free market believer because I believe in ultimate freedom for the consumer. The only way that can happen is if the producers are given the chance to compete without favoritism, preferential grants or subsidies, or anti-market entry taxes, tariffs and regulations. It doesn't matter WHO the person is that discovers a new market or makes it better, it matters that the consumers are given the ability to voice what they want, no matter if it is immoral or even considered illegal by the previous generation.
Slashdot will be gone in years or decades. So will Digg. So will Business 2.0. Who cares, as long as consumers consume, and producers can create what new consumers desire.
I believe that the problem has nothing to do with money -- this is why we will disagree and there is no point in trying to agree. Money does not corrupt, ever. It can't corrupt. Money is merely a store of time to be redeemed in the future to save you time. You spend money so you don't have to build something or do something yourself. Money can't corrupt.
Only power corrupts. Power corrupts terribly when it is POLITICAL power. Corporate power is NOT corrupting UNLESS it is united with political power. There are no bad capitalist companies, there are only bad companies that are united with the State for preferential treatment.
You want to fix the system? Start hanging politicians who violate their oath to uphold whatever Constitution they're supposed to protect. The U.S. Constitution should see a Congress that meets 2 weeks a year and _does no harm_ but what we see today is complete ineptitude by the voting masses. I don't think voting makes the difference -- the power to do whatever a politician wants is the REAL problem.
Forget campaign finance reform, how about following-the-Constitution reform?
Terrible idea. Campaign finance reform only creates cronyism and preferential treatment of a select few (2 party system). How I spend my money is how I express myself, and it should be completely unregulated. There are 3 reasons why we have a 2 party system: 1: the debates are closed, 2: the money that is acceptable in a campaign is heavily regulated to prefer the 2 main parties and 3: it is harder to get a third party candidate on a ballot in terms of ballot signatures.
Campaign finance has only made it harder to get rid of incumbents, not easier. Don't think that taxpayer funded campaigns would make a difference -- we already live in that world, and it is a failure.
I don't believe in campaigns anyway... Just vote like I do.
I maintain about 12 blogs on various topics, originally because I would repeat myself so often in e-mail every day to various people. The blogs were initially a time-saving tool for my friends, family and customers. Over time the blogs started gaining an audience, and using RSS much of that audience returns daily. By hyperlinking the various blogs with one another, the audience grows even more-so. Sure, they're fringe topics, but the fact that outsiders can now look into my e-mails and start commenting on them is a very big step to me gaining more information to make my businesses more profitable.
In the past 6 months I even started to help some of my corporate customers create their own blogs. By next week my company will maintain 6 corporate blogs which seem to be making big strides in keeping my customers' customers happy and informed. Again, fringe topics, but who cares if the production creates a profit (financial or informational).
I think a lot of old-media promoters will find many ways to downplay the strength of the lone blogger, but it is more than just fringe opinions and a dozen return readers -- it is about creating that "social networking" structure within your social group, and then finding ways to involve your group with others. I believe it is working very well, and I think the future is huge for bloggers, wikis and all sorts of odd social-networking web interfaces.
...Gateway announced a few weeks ago that they will not be attending a Japanese Conference this year due to conflicting schedules. Various regular attenders noted a man with a fake moustache at the convention who looked very similar to Gateway's usual promoter.
Education in China is primarily publicly funded -- just like in the US. In the US we have similar problems: cartels of licensed industries (Engineers, Architects, Doctors, Dentists, Teachers, anything licensed) control the number of slots of available future workers. More workers in a given licensed industry means more competition which means lower prices ("wages") for that cartelized industry.
The AMA in America has lobbied Congress to reduce the number of medical students. The long term effect? Higher medical prices.
State licensing is the reason why China doesn't allow more schools to be opened. It is also the reason why the U.S. has such huge subsidies for college (easy State loans, etc) and why many licensed jobs bring in so much money even though they may not necessarily be more difficult than lower paying unlicensed jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Both sites I linked to are not Right Wing, they're actually liberal sites -- classical liberal.
The second article has a link to the normally left wing NY Times: What the World needs now is DDT. Good article.
Here's another link refuting Carson's garbage, not from a right wing site, either.
The California retail energy market was never de-regulated, in fact it was OVER-regulated. The California wholesale market was partiall de-regulated, and this is why there was a crisis -- too much government.
Check out this article on the reality behind California. The government let wholesale prices fluctuate but did NOT let retail prices fluctuate. When wholesale prices started to go up based on decreased supply (created by government's mandates!), the companies could not buy energy at a profit since they were forced to sell it at a loss. Hence, rolling blackouts.
You just won my side of the argument -- the only monopolies that exist are those that are created by the State. Only one monopoly exists, in reality, the monopoly over the use of force. Only the State can use force "legally" and only the State uses that force to create monopolies in industry, such as a monopoly for electrical distribution, gas distribution and telephone distribution. The monopoly over the use of force is what creates those monstrosities, not the free market of natural competitive forces.
I read it. Twice, actually.
It is bunk based on one sentence that is mostly repeated in thought throughout the entry:
If not constrained by the public utility commision, the company would likly charge a far higher price and earn an abnormal profit on its capital.
That is not true. All "natural monopolies" are constantly hounded by new competition. _ALL_ of them. No one just sits back and holds a monopoly -- if they don't constantly compete, they'll be overcome by competition. This has happened in all of history to all companies and governments -- something better comes along.
It is the regulation side of game that creates the most havok for any given market and many consumers within the market. The only monopoly that exists in life is the monopoly over the use of force -- and it is that monopoly that we call government that creates the sustaining momopolies that make life bad for the rest of us.
Well-established economic theory? You mean like Keynes' well-established economic theory?
The Mises Institude has a great PDF on the Myth of the Natural Monopoly. I recommend you read that entirely, just as I read your Wikipedia mumbo jumbo, before saying that anything is well established in economic theory.
How is the telco market NOT an ideal market? In almost every situation where we saw subsidies, we saw a market restrained from providing new and better efficiencies for consumers due to the typical side-effects of subsidization: redtape, mandates, and a bigger barrier to entry than previously existed.
You can refute it, but your refutations don't hold water. That's why I posted "chicken and egg and chicken and egg" because the common refutation is "Well, we have to regulate it because we spent tax dollars on building the infrastructure." Well, why did you do that? "Because we had to since no one would have sold land to provide the service in the first place." How do you know that? "Well, because."
All I have to do it point to J.J. Hill's amazing life story -- he built a network of efficient businesses that the consumers loved, he helped thousands through government's mad depressions, he destroyed the myth that only government can create anything large scale, and he did it without any help from anyone but his own fingers, capital, networking and time.
That Wikipedia entry is bunk, plain and simple. Natural monopolies do not exist unless they do the nearly impossible: offer such a good quality of service at such a low price that competition would not give the consumer ANY advantage. If that is the case, then the natural "monopoly" is the best that is possible -- why do we need government to try to do better if there IS no better?
Name an natural monopoly -- they don't exist. What does exist, for a very short period of history, is a company that works so hard that it gives its customers the best they could ever wish for. When another company can trump the first, that short period of historical dominance goes away.
I just wrote about it today, as well as smacking the callous disregard for free market truth at Wikipedia, at my anarcho-capitalism blog.
Thanks for the article -- I've seen similar ones, but that encompasses quite a bit of the facts that need to be addressed.
I believe that nearly _ALL_ chemicals can cause harm to fetuses. I don't think there is any "safe" product out there that can't harm or kill someone if used incorrectly. That being said, I also think that many items that cause harm can ALSO increase health based on its usage. Even cigarette smoking has a good amount of positives in clinical studies, especially in people with memory loss and age-related mental issues. This is why I am against the national governments telling people what to do and what not to do. DDT should be a community-selected issue. If you're dealing with massive mosquito-borne diseases, there is a CBA that should be performed to see if the benefits outweigh the costs.
The issue is a lot more complicated than either of us can debate in this forum, but I believe the issues must be brought back up, especially when it comes to governments that would rather see millions die over a few generations than a few thousand be slightly mentally hampered while in the womb. Long term studies on these mental problems also should be looked into by privately funded research companies and organizations -- I'd happily give a few hundred dollars for research. Yet we can't use DDT in much of the world, and I believe that is a bigger problem that was created by fiat and mandate than by research and reality.
Really? The country's first railroads were incredible expensive, and EVERY ONE that was subsidized by the government needed more subsidies to exist. Yet the most successful railroad was completely built with private money and absolutely no land grants or eminent domain acquisitions (see the history of James J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad for proof). Railroads that used subsidies either failed or asked for more money, but Hill rolled right along, adding onto his network with profits and providing competition for the cronies who said it couldn't be done.
If consumers want something, they will pay for it. We don't need government to acquire land for telephone cables and wires, private companies would buy the land at whatever cost is necessary to build what consumers want. We just have never allowed private competition to do it -- it is ALWAYS illegal to try to provide a competing service to the State-licensed ones. Try building private roadways and you'll see how impossible it is -- not because people don't want to sell you land, but other people want to stop you from buying that land to make your own development.
Rockefeller's oil "monopoly" was good for the consumers. Read DiLorenzo's How Capitalism Saved America for amazing insight in what Rockefeller did to create the most amazing market in existence. He lowered the price of oil dozens of times over what competitors were charging, and created new industries out of his vertical marketing of previously inefficient businesses. Rockefeller should have been praised, not sued.
Land line service was so heavily subsidized for GENERATIONS that there was never a push to wireless communications, which was the big "push" to get land line providers to up the ante on their bandwidth. We had so many preferential subsidies of the local telcos that they didn't want to give more than the law required -- namely cheap and basic 9.6k service. It was slight de-regulation of other industries that caused the Internet boom, but we'd have been there much sooner had the market allowed for competition, which we didn't have for generations.
Free markets don't implode, there has never been proof of a monopoly in a free market or a market that has fallen apart because government stayed out of it. There are thousands of market proofs that the opposite is true.
D
D
T
Too much junk science out there to acknowledge something that we should still be using, I guess.
Google's partially right to make these threats -- they're mad because companies that continue to receive monopoly powers, preferential treatment, restrictive licensing rules and even public subsidies should not be given even more power over the media distribution system. Yet the end result of Google's threats will only be MORE government control of the media, not less.
Net Neutrality is bunk -- it means ZERO. We don't need net neutrality, we don't want it, and we won't get it. What we need is a realistic free market playing field of open competition for anyone who wants to jump into the business. Let's stop all the regulations, taxes, tariffs, fees and restrictions on media companies and let them compete openly. IPTV is probably the future -- who cares about airwaves when everything is going digital and coming over a landline? Yet the phone companies still get preferential treatment from the national, state and local governments, and giving them both preferential treatment and the right to control their pipeline's access is tipping the system towards the cronies, not the consumers.
The consumers want one thing -- competition. Competition happens when government stays away from the market. The more we let government "regulate" net neutrality or attempt to create a level playing field, the more we'll see our prices go up, our service levels go down, and competition get wiped out of the market.
Google shouldn't be clamoring against the cronies, they should be threatening the government. Nothing would please me more than Google taking on a pro-independence role the day after an anniversary of the last time our citizens kicked the government in the teeth and sent them packing.
There are usually much smaller providers who will give you what you want. Also, if you incorporate the co-op as a business (very inexpensive in most areas), you'd be exactly the same as any business running multiple users. Our ISP knows fully what we're doing and they haven't complained yet, and we field all the tech support problems (at a cost, of course) that our neighbors have.
We're also looking into some community social networking solutions for addressing concerns within our communities, something that I think is a great opportunity to give everyone locally the chance to speak. I know our local government isn't happy about our forum, especially since we give everyone a chance to debate. The village meetings are worthless as you have to give all your information to be logged forever, and you also have to practically beg to get more than 5 minutes of microphone time.
In the long run, I see huge opportunities to bring freedom back to the people, through capitalist means.
This is a great idea, and one I think will gain a lot of strength as information providers find ways to subsidize lower-cost connections to their services (especially Google). I already co-op with a half dozen of my neighbors to share our Internet bandwidth through WiFi. I don't charge for access, the router is open to all, but it does have a landing page that requests that they pay for what they use. So far our bill is paid about 8 months into the future.
In our neighborhood we already have 4 high speed internet providers, so competition is fierce but pricing is still fairly high due to local government idiocy (they want all the providers to pay a fee to be allowed to serve the area). We even have 2 medium-speed wireless providers who serve our area too, but they're also a bit expensive due to the village fees (how would the village stop them, though?)
This is the right step in the direction of providing inexpensive or free bandwidth to everyone. We don't need cities or governments paying for it, we just need the end profit-makers to subsidize the initial cost. Our connection should happily support 50 households (or more) for basic Internet usage, and if they want to use higher speed services, they're more than free to select from one of the providers available. For more, paying $5 a month for a decent 6 Mbps connection is well worth it, even if we frown on Bittorrent or other massive leach programs.
I've already talked to 3 other people in my neighborhood who are interested in doing the same thing. The plus side is that we communicate better (through a private forum) with each other than I've ever seen in a neighborhood I've lived in. We talk about security issues, odd cars on the streets, and all sorts of issue that people used to think we needed government for.
I really support these systems and would love to know if there is a way to privately sponsor some of these routers so that they're free, or even sponsor the bandwidth charges of people who offer this service to others through their own connection. Anyone know?
How is there time to submit well-formulated arguments about MARKETS on slashdot? For more of my opinion, just follow my link. I write about this stuff almost every day. For better formulated arguments, go hit The Mises Institute or check out Dr. DiLorenzo's latest book, How Capitalism Saved America.
I have to disagree completely. We pay so much for highways and roadways in taxes and fees that we don't directly notice, but we don't know what options might have become available to use had we not had so many subsidies offering "cheap" roadways.
I've lately become enamored with private planes and flying. One of my neighbors (actually, he lives about 2 miles from me) has 2 private runways in his backyard. He lands his 4 passenger and 6 passenger prop planes on his lawn. Safely. For years.
Most of his flying is to other private runways such as his, that dot almost every area and region in the U.S. How do we know we wouldn't all be flying inexpensive planes rather than cars? Maybe the highways have made it easy to rip us off with gas taxes and excessive tolls because they were built. They were built before the real boom in inexpensive airplanes began (I can purchase a reasonable Cessna in great shape for less than US$20K).
While the fuel cost is likely higher, we really don't have a competitive marketplace yet because it was stillborn for so many years while the auto industry pandered to Congress to build more roadways at taxpayers expense rather than let the free market of billions of consumer decisions create what we really want and need.
I'm not putting any faith in the highways, either. My best friend is the son of the largest highway contractor in a big western state, and he's told me how much collusion and theft occurs every day in that industry. Thank government? Not for this mess.
competition is a given; but without regulation, what will stop collusion and monopolistic practices? The size of your competitors is probably the largest barrier to entry into a market.
Regulation CREATES collusion and monopoly -- it gives companies incentive to team up to promote more anti-business policies that regulations all create. Without business regulation we see a MORE competitive marketplace.
the actions of individual consumers will be to the greater good of society; without subsidies and punitive taxes, how can you direct markets towards longer-term social goals?
Social goals are every changing, and NO society or group has anything close to a unified goal for society. Society is best served when every individual is free to choose his own actions as long as those actions don't harm the physical body or property of another. Let each man do what he wants, as long as he does not come to your land and hurt your body. Everything else offers more competition, better prices, better quality products and a more prosperous society through competitive desires rather than false equality.
that dependence on global markets is a good thing; without tariffs you can't protect nascent domestic markets, or protect established domestic markets during the transition to a global market, and without regulation how do you prevent dumping?
Dumping doesn't exist for long. When a country subsidizes their industry to allow dumping, we all profit from cheap goods at the expense of the citizens of that country doing the dumping. Let people dump! We can capitalize on cheaper products to build our own new industry. As for protecting nascent domestic markets, name one that was protected by tariffs. Tarrifs only protect dying markets such as steel and sugar and soy and other markets that are ultracompetitive and not worth our time or energy when we have other markets to tap. I have not seen one market that requires a tariff to build it up -- only to keep other markets hurting at the expense of the tariff.
For me, I use a combination of RSS feeds that pull from news.google.com and blogsearch.google.com. I guess I've become a google fanboy but only because they offer such great tools (and APIs) for me to feed my need for information, opinions and conflict. Now that I basically have my own "wire" to all sorts of news on all my favorite topics, as well as OpEd ("blogs"), I can get what I want when I want rather than using a site like slashdot or digg.
The great thing about this is that I tend to filter out sites that DON'T have an open comment forum at the end of the article. I still come to slashdot daily (RSS!) for the comments, but I also pay more attention to the everyman comments at other sites. I'm in it for the response of the readers, not necessarily for the "facts" in the article.
Actually, slashdot was owned by the GNAA, but Malda and his cronies had a coup to overthrow them and replace OSTG as the new overlords, which I for one welcomed. In the end we all got modded down.
The last post. On slashdot. Ever. Poor Rob!
I don't agree with the article at all, and I definitely don't agree with the top 50 article. In the long run, nothing matters in history. The consumers have been, and always will be, the only important unit or group in any market transaction. Without demand, supply matters little. Even if demand is created because of a new supply of a new item or service, it matters little as that demand is fixed -- it would have gone elsewhere.
Slashdot is definitely slowing down. So what? Digg is a mess, too. All I see on various blogs lately is "Click my ads!" and "Help me digg up my submission!" Nice.
I'm a free market believer because I believe in ultimate freedom for the consumer. The only way that can happen is if the producers are given the chance to compete without favoritism, preferential grants or subsidies, or anti-market entry taxes, tariffs and regulations. It doesn't matter WHO the person is that discovers a new market or makes it better, it matters that the consumers are given the ability to voice what they want, no matter if it is immoral or even considered illegal by the previous generation.
Slashdot will be gone in years or decades. So will Digg. So will Business 2.0. Who cares, as long as consumers consume, and producers can create what new consumers desire.
Hey Misean friend, your website isn't responding. Drop me an e-mail.
I believe that the problem has nothing to do with money -- this is why we will disagree and there is no point in trying to agree. Money does not corrupt, ever. It can't corrupt. Money is merely a store of time to be redeemed in the future to save you time. You spend money so you don't have to build something or do something yourself. Money can't corrupt.
Only power corrupts. Power corrupts terribly when it is POLITICAL power. Corporate power is NOT corrupting UNLESS it is united with political power. There are no bad capitalist companies, there are only bad companies that are united with the State for preferential treatment.
You want to fix the system? Start hanging politicians who violate their oath to uphold whatever Constitution they're supposed to protect. The U.S. Constitution should see a Congress that meets 2 weeks a year and _does no harm_ but what we see today is complete ineptitude by the voting masses. I don't think voting makes the difference -- the power to do whatever a politician wants is the REAL problem.
Forget campaign finance reform, how about following-the-Constitution reform?
Terrible idea. Campaign finance reform only creates cronyism and preferential treatment of a select few (2 party system). How I spend my money is how I express myself, and it should be completely unregulated. There are 3 reasons why we have a 2 party system: 1: the debates are closed, 2: the money that is acceptable in a campaign is heavily regulated to prefer the 2 main parties and 3: it is harder to get a third party candidate on a ballot in terms of ballot signatures.
Campaign finance has only made it harder to get rid of incumbents, not easier. Don't think that taxpayer funded campaigns would make a difference -- we already live in that world, and it is a failure.
I don't believe in campaigns anyway... Just vote like I do.
I maintain about 12 blogs on various topics, originally because I would repeat myself so often in e-mail every day to various people. The blogs were initially a time-saving tool for my friends, family and customers. Over time the blogs started gaining an audience, and using RSS much of that audience returns daily. By hyperlinking the various blogs with one another, the audience grows even more-so. Sure, they're fringe topics, but the fact that outsiders can now look into my e-mails and start commenting on them is a very big step to me gaining more information to make my businesses more profitable.
In the past 6 months I even started to help some of my corporate customers create their own blogs. By next week my company will maintain 6 corporate blogs which seem to be making big strides in keeping my customers' customers happy and informed. Again, fringe topics, but who cares if the production creates a profit (financial or informational).
I think a lot of old-media promoters will find many ways to downplay the strength of the lone blogger, but it is more than just fringe opinions and a dozen return readers -- it is about creating that "social networking" structure within your social group, and then finding ways to involve your group with others. I believe it is working very well, and I think the future is huge for bloggers, wikis and all sorts of odd social-networking web interfaces.
...Gateway announced a few weeks ago that they will not be attending a Japanese Conference this year due to conflicting schedules. Various regular attenders noted a man with a fake moustache at the convention who looked very similar to Gateway's usual promoter.
Education in China is primarily publicly funded -- just like in the US. In the US we have similar problems: cartels of licensed industries (Engineers, Architects, Doctors, Dentists, Teachers, anything licensed) control the number of slots of available future workers. More workers in a given licensed industry means more competition which means lower prices ("wages") for that cartelized industry.
The AMA in America has lobbied Congress to reduce the number of medical students. The long term effect? Higher medical prices.
State licensing is the reason why China doesn't allow more schools to be opened. It is also the reason why the U.S. has such huge subsidies for college (easy State loans, etc) and why many licensed jobs bring in so much money even though they may not necessarily be more difficult than lower paying unlicensed jobs.