Another important thing people can do, is to start and promote businesses that are chartered as democratic, instead of being based upon a form of feudalism.
Companies should be owned by their workers, and not outside investors. Companies should make decisions democratically, and not by totalitarian do-it-or-be-fired nonsense.
Let's kill serfdom once and for all, and inform the feudal lords they're human too.;-)
Perhaps you're misinterpreting me a bit. If so, it's probably my fault.;-)
Many Libertarians and other free market zealots would like to see nothing more than agencies like the FCC dismantled, because it gives the Government some form control over their lives, that wasn't granted to it in the Constitution.
They would like the Government to do little more than to defend the nation from attack and enforce contracts.
What I was saying, is that certain free market zealots (whom are more often than not, under the impression that their market shouldn't be regulated at all), are prone to using anything that can construe as free market success to bash some other political faction. The fact of the matter is, those credits are Government regulation and taxation, apparently disguised enough to be used as ammunition.
Would a moderator please read the parent?
on
Natural Capitalism
·
· Score: 1
He has very good points, and it'd be a shame for no one to see it, just because he's an AC.
Great idea, and then I can sit on it, and watch the rest of the world turn into a toxic sludge pit.
If I buy that land myself, I want to be able to sue factories for exposing my trees to toxic chemicals via acid rain and smog. While I'm at it, I'll sue them for the deformation of my amphibians, due to exposure to toxic chemicals. I'll also want to sue them for helping to increase my exposure to harmful radiation, and heavy metals in my drinking water.
I will buy all of the pollution credits for your industrial areas.
I'm certain those industries would voluntaraly shut down, because they'd have no credits.
Just out of curiosity, what percentage of your industry moved to an area where it costs them nothing to pollute the air?
It's amusing how people think requiring corporations to buy emissions space is compatible with a 'free market,' and then use it as a weapon against others' social beliefs. It's no different than a law saying "YOU MAY NOT EMIT MORE THAN THIS," other than it finances itself from its own tax. If I had phrased the law as a tax increase and a emissions cap, I'm certain "free market" evangelists would certainly think less of it.
The market would not attempt to work towards a clean environment, unless it could make money specifically at that. This is its failing, since it relies on the requirement of fixing or preventing damage to be more profitable. This demand will only come when it's far too late.
The desire for a healthy environment, fair wages, a good work environment, equal and quality education and health care for all, and any number of other 'just' things for U.S. citizens will never be met by a free market. Its motives are solely to maximize personal profit, not provide a social good.
If we had a real 'free market,' we'd all be working our sixteen hour shifts, waiting to be replaced by automated gas pumps, food dispatch machines, or whatever device that would move us on to the next sweat shop. All this, while we're pumping PCBs into the streams, all the live long day.
In any rate, humans are hardly rational. If capitalists considered the long term effects of their actions, we wouldn't even be in this situation.
example:
If you exploit your laborers, their health, both mentally and physically, will decay, and they'll die. Thus exploiting labor produces a long-term loss of labor, but a short-term benefit of wealth.
So? Look at the Industrial Revolution for England and the U.S. For that matter, look at the movement of business from states with organized labor, to states without it. Then look at the movement of business from the U.S. to Mexico and China.
When given the choice of capital or labor, corporations again and again choose capital. Instead of providing a quality working environment for labor, with decent pay, they relocate wherever they can find cheap, easily exploited labor.
When given a pseudo-free, very much a free market (thank goodness we don't have a real free market;-)), these non-democratic organizations will always consider the short-term benefit to their wallet, over being good human beings.
From the parent of my comment: > For instance, if you need a callback either pass > an object "o" and later call a well-known > function "o.callbackFunction(args)", or pass a > bound method "m=o.callbackFunction", and later > call "m(args)".
From my comment: > Or a lambda expression or a function object.
Perhaps you should read a little more carefully before you comment in an arrogant and condescending fashion. The alternative is somewhat insulting, and very much frustrating.
Java actually supports no inherent threading model, in terms of user vs. kernel. Its attitude is more along the lines of "we leave it up to the implementation, so when in doubt, yield()."
Either way, a purely threaded network solution doesn't scale well for many users, unless you've some less than commodity hardware to run it on.
The C malloc() routine, on Windows, isn't actually Win32. It's actually a thunking call on top of GlobalAlloc and the like.
Cygwin's library has a lot of thunking for POSIX, so it may very well use a less than optimal memory allocation system, as well. There's a non-thunking variant of win32 gcc called mingw32. This might be better suited.
You really don't need to replicate data, when it's stored in a widget, in those archaic and poorly designed systems that do that;-) You could just as easily query the widget, and then store changes back to it. This is somewhat similar, in effect, to doing this by event.
What you'll conserve in memory, you'll lose in execution speed, since you need to use several function calls to retrieve information. Alternatively you could cache model data, and update on hearing of a model being changed, but then you don't conserve memory.
I honestly think Java's MVC memory consumption problems are mostly to do with the class overhead involved, and its interpreted nature.
As for the C MVC question, it was a bit rhetorical. A pure non-caching MVC system would be slower than a statically designed interface and model in one big clump. This is simply a matter of function call overhead and the like.
This, however, really doesn't matter in my opinion. The benefits are clear; ease of extensibility and portability. Proper object oriented C++ will be slower than procedural C, at a specialized task, but the development time difference is clearly in favor of C++ or object oriented C.
Swing's slowness goes beyond MVC, though. Certainly the class and function overhead is part of it, but ony a part. No amount of "proper" MVC coding will remove the unfortunate overheads. A faster VM would certainly help, and perhaps better algorithms in their painting and event dispatch schemes.
And so you would have a C compiler modify a programmer's intent, and implement a memory management system (either on top of malloc, or kernel interfaces) itself?
Perhaps it should also be responsible for providing an implementation for various kernel modules, because the underlying OS's may be suboptimal. And while we're at it, let's have it compile in its own kernel, since the underlying OS's might be suboptimal.
malloc is a C standard library routine. gcc is a compiler suite.
libc shouldn't try to compile my programs, and the C component of gcc shouldn't try to do anything other than compile my code.
You can do non-blocking reads, by using ready() or available() (depending on what stream you're using) and in conjunction with setSoTimeout, this can be quite effective. The writes are a different story, though.
I use this in conjunction with pools of connections with one thread. Then I use groups of the pools as needed. It's not perfect, but it's an improvement when you're taking a large beating.
Sun's approach of trying to force threads on I/O is a bit irritating and non-sensical. Any heavily loaded Java application that spawns all of those threads will choke on most hardware.
I'd also not say that Java is inherently better for network programming, but its default library is simply more robust than C's, which has no inherent networking, very much a framework for it.
I think they're both quite viable, as are Python and Perl. It's simply a matter of what you need, and when you need it.
The latest JDK is only in beta for either Solaris or Linux, which hardly constitutes "Java 2 v1.3" as being available. Plus, this is Java's mantra; "Write once, run anywhere."
Java applications, in general, will start off being memory hogs. This is just allocating memory for the VM, for use with the application when needed. This of course is only part of Java's memory footprint, in any sizeable application.
Even non-graphical Java applications can be slow. For instance, take a look at Sun's own Java compiler for JDK. Compare that to Jikes;-)
C and C++ interface programming is not defined by one paradigm, so it doesn't belong in your statement regarding slow graphical Java applications. You can use any number of design patterns, for any number of toolkits, so it's an inappropriate blanket to group it with AWT. Anyway, If you were to use MVC with C, would you somehow consider the interface faster?
Using the MVC paradigm will not make a Swing application faster. Generally speaking, it means using more classes. This means larger bytecode, and more memory consumption. Of course you can clump more or less all of the interfaces into one class, but this isn't really following the MVC paradigm. If anything, it defeats the purpose.
Swing also has the disadvantage (over normal AWT) of having its widgets implemented in Java. This is why Swing applications feel much more sluggish to even AWT applications. No matter of paradigm can help that.
This, of course, doesn't even cover the tons of drawing problems Swing has.
That said, Swing certainly has a good API; the only interface API I like more is GTK--'s.
It's unfortunate that people take the militia group stance towards this subject. The attitude of "We don't like your stink'n laws, so we ain't gonna follow 'em," doesn't get much done.
If people really want freely redistributable music, the best way to get it, is to develop it, or support a community of those that do.
>You forgot one: > > "But I'm a white American college student, and I'm entitled to everything I want."
Certainly the comment is sarcastic and a bit rude, but it may not be entirely wrong.
I think it's a valid point, even if I'm not certain I entirely agree with it.
I'm just commenting in hopes someone might reconsider its fate. If no one believes it's a valid perspective, then I apologize for wasting everyone's time.
I'm not certain that it's a matter of raw intelligence, per se, but rather it might be the result of selfishness that's generally promoted throughout our lives, by our primitive-animal influenced predatory social and economic systems.
A matter of wisdom, insight, or simply perspective. I'm certain there're many intelligent people that promote stealing, because they really don't care about much other than themselves.
Personally, I think the individuals that really want to liberate music, should develop and promote a community of public domain music, instead of taking the decisions away from others.
What the interests of any paticular monarch are undefined, and mostly irrelevant.
A monarchy is the embodiment of self regulatory Government. A Government that is regulated solely by itself, and not by the people.
The other embodiment of self regulatory Government would be anarchy. Where each person is his own self-regulated world. This, however, is a state of "non Government," which is why I didn't include it. With people that construct multinational corporations, which in turn attempt to dominate each other, and the masses, I'd certainly not suggest we're ready for anarchy.
No, I didn't, but if you want I'll attach "Any adult citizen, not in the territories, D.C., or are currently in prison."
Of course I think the people of D.C. and those in prison should be able to vote, and I think our various territories should be given status as states, assuming it's their desire to become one.
Who was elected would matter more, if people didn't see Government as an entity posed against them. If everyone took it as a social responsibility to be involved with ensuring the dream of democracy isn't squandered, there'd certainly be a larger base of people to vote for. And if people took it as a responsibility, then perhaps some of the injustices commonly practiced (The attempts of the Democrat and Republican parties to maintain their monopoly) could be fixed.
The problem isn't in the Government, it's in the lazy people that squander, or make a joke of their ability to change the world in which they live. Any faults in our Government are simply echoes of a problem much more severe.
The Government already does reflect the will of the people. It's simply they reflect the will of the people that get involved. There is no "automagic" way of fixing anything, which is exactly the point; being a member of a democratic society is work.
If the people respected their right to participate, either directly or indirectly, then the amount of influence that any paticular corporation would become far more equitable. Whether or not this would have an influence on the CDA (Which corporation don't support, btw), or anything else, I can't say for certain. I do, however, know that sitting on your one's ass, not participating in Government, simply ignoring laws you don't support, and whining on public forums how the Government subjugates you, won't change a thing.
I'm not suggesting this is your behavior, but it certainly does compose a good number of the dotters.
You can't feed the hungry by saying "There are hungry people." You can't build a house by thinking "I sure could use a house." Why is it people think that a Government they don't participate in, will somehow reflect their ideals?
Ahh yes, our friends in D.C. can't vote for representatives, since they have none. And if you want to count our various territories, which I don't, since they don't even pay taxes, also can not vote. I wasn't unaware of this, it simply didn't come to mind as I was mentioning what it means to live in a democratic society, even a Republic.
You're apparently under the naive impression that people don't make a difference. Does your one vote really matter in a pile of millions? Maybe, but most likely not in itself. The problem lies in the fact that such a large number of the people feel that as individuals, they don't matter (or care, or hate the Government because they're ignorant) and subsequently, do not vote.
Governor Ventura wasn't an independent. He was originally a member of the Reform Party. He has since discarded it, however.
There are two real independents in Congress, one of which is from my home state. As for local Government, it's composed of a much larger mix than the Federal spectrum, but it too suffers. I think the best thing the Reform Party will ever do, is to help shake up the two party nature of Federal politics.
The Government, however, is more than simply Congressmen and Presidents. It's also very much local, on many different degrees. If you can't afford to run for Governor, you certainly could run for a local Government position, or even state legislature. You could even start a politically oriented organization, to help spread whatever political views you have.
As for the rest of your comment, it's mostly silly. A gross exaggeration of a result of people sitting on their asses, instead of getting involved with their Government. It's much easier for them to bitch, later.
Having a monarch or dictator is the embodiment of self regulation. The Government (the dictator) is in complete control of its actions, without any external influence.
Giving corporations the ability to simply regulate themselves, and go on the honor system, is a bit naive. Given the choice, that corporation wouldn't spend the $1.50 to add safety features to their product. It also wouldn't hesitate to save money by dumping waste in their world's water supply, or to make a buck by clear cutting forests.
If you don't believe they wouldn't do that, I'd advise you to pick up a history book or two at your local library. I think you'll find the early auto industry's opinion on adding safety features to automobiles horrible.
Slashdot Mirror
Another important thing people can do, is to start and promote businesses that are chartered as democratic, instead of being based upon a form of feudalism.
;-)
Companies should be owned by their workers, and not outside investors. Companies should make decisions democratically, and not by totalitarian do-it-or-be-fired nonsense.
Let's kill serfdom once and for all, and inform the feudal lords they're human too.
Perhaps you're misinterpreting me a bit. If so, it's probably my fault. ;-)
Many Libertarians and other free market zealots would like to see nothing more than agencies like the FCC dismantled, because it gives the Government some form control over their lives, that wasn't granted to it in the Constitution.
They would like the Government to do little more than to defend the nation from attack and enforce contracts.
What I was saying, is that certain free market zealots (whom are more often than not, under the impression that their market shouldn't be regulated at all), are prone to using anything that can construe as free market success to bash some other political faction. The fact of the matter is, those credits are Government regulation and taxation, apparently disguised enough to be used as ammunition.
He has very good points, and it'd be a shame for no one to see it, just because he's an AC.
Great idea, and then I can sit on it, and watch the rest of the world turn into a toxic sludge pit.
If I buy that land myself, I want to be able to sue factories for exposing my trees to toxic chemicals via acid rain and smog. While I'm at it, I'll sue them for the deformation of my amphibians, due to exposure to toxic chemicals.
I'll also want to sue them for helping to increase my exposure to harmful radiation, and heavy metals in my drinking water.
I will buy all of the pollution credits for your industrial areas.
I'm certain those industries would voluntaraly shut down, because they'd have no credits.
Just out of curiosity, what percentage of your industry moved to an area where it costs them nothing to pollute the air?
It's amusing how people think requiring corporations to buy emissions space is compatible with a 'free market,' and then use it as a weapon against others' social beliefs.
It's no different than a law saying "YOU MAY NOT EMIT MORE THAN THIS," other than it finances itself from its own tax.
If I had phrased the law as a tax increase and a emissions cap, I'm certain "free market" evangelists would certainly think less of it.
The market would not attempt to work towards a clean environment, unless it could make money specifically at that. This is its failing, since it relies on the requirement of fixing or preventing damage to be more profitable. This demand will only come when it's far too late.
The desire for a healthy environment, fair wages, a good work environment, equal and quality education and health care for all, and any number of other 'just' things for U.S. citizens will never be met by a free market. Its motives are solely to maximize personal profit, not provide a social good.
If we had a real 'free market,' we'd all be working our sixteen hour shifts, waiting to be replaced by automated gas pumps, food dispatch machines, or whatever device that would move us on to the next sweat shop. All this, while we're pumping PCBs into the streams, all the live long day.
Go free market!
They'll be long dead, so why should they care?
;-)), these non-democratic organizations will always consider the short-term benefit to their wallet, over being good human beings.
In any rate, humans are hardly rational. If capitalists considered the long term effects of their actions, we wouldn't even be in this situation.
example:
If you exploit your laborers, their health, both mentally and physically, will decay, and they'll die. Thus exploiting labor produces a long-term loss of labor, but a short-term benefit of wealth.
So? Look at the Industrial Revolution for England and the U.S.
For that matter, look at the movement of business from states with organized labor, to states without it.
Then look at the movement of business from the U.S. to Mexico and China.
When given the choice of capital or labor, corporations again and again choose capital. Instead of providing a quality working environment for labor, with decent pay, they relocate wherever they can find cheap, easily exploited labor.
When given a pseudo-free, very much a free market (thank goodness we don't have a real free market
From the parent of my comment:
> For instance, if you need a callback either pass
> an object "o" and later call a well-known
> function "o.callbackFunction(args)", or pass a
> bound method "m=o.callbackFunction", and later
> call "m(args)".
From my comment:
> Or a lambda expression or a function object.
Perhaps you should read a little more carefully before you comment in an arrogant and condescending fashion. The alternative is somewhat insulting, and very much frustrating.
Not that I get jollies from plugging one of my own projects, but perhaps you should take a look at
http://pysdl.sourceforge.net
It's a Python binding for SDL, SDL_image, SDL_mixer, and SDL_ttf. Currently there is no circle primitive, but adding one would be trivial.
Or a lambda expression or a function object.
Java actually supports no inherent threading model, in terms of user vs. kernel. Its attitude is more along the lines of "we leave it up to the implementation, so when in doubt, yield()."
Either way, a purely threaded network solution doesn't scale well for many users, unless you've some less than commodity hardware to run it on.
The C malloc() routine, on Windows, isn't actually Win32. It's actually a thunking call on top of GlobalAlloc and the like.
Cygwin's library has a lot of thunking for POSIX, so it may very well use a less than optimal memory allocation system, as well.
There's a non-thunking variant of win32 gcc called mingw32. This might be better suited.
You really don't need to replicate data, when it's stored in a widget, in those archaic and poorly designed systems that do that ;-)
You could just as easily query the widget, and then store changes back to it. This is somewhat similar, in effect, to doing this by event.
What you'll conserve in memory, you'll lose in execution speed, since you need to use several function calls to retrieve information.
Alternatively you could cache model data, and update on hearing of a model being changed, but then you don't conserve memory.
I honestly think Java's MVC memory consumption problems are mostly to do with the class overhead involved, and its interpreted nature.
As for the C MVC question, it was a bit rhetorical. A pure non-caching MVC system would be slower than a statically designed interface and model in one big clump. This is simply a matter of function call overhead and the like.
This, however, really doesn't matter in my opinion. The benefits are clear; ease of extensibility and portability. Proper object oriented C++ will be slower than procedural C, at a specialized task, but the development time difference is clearly in favor of C++ or object oriented C.
Swing's slowness goes beyond MVC, though. Certainly the class and function overhead is part of it, but ony a part. No amount of "proper" MVC coding will remove the unfortunate overheads. A faster VM would certainly help, and perhaps better algorithms in their painting and event dispatch schemes.
And so you would have a C compiler modify a programmer's intent, and implement a memory management system (either on top of malloc, or kernel interfaces) itself?
Perhaps it should also be responsible for providing an implementation for various kernel modules, because the underlying OS's may be suboptimal. And while we're at it, let's have it compile in its own kernel, since the underlying OS's might be suboptimal.
malloc is a C standard library routine.
gcc is a compiler suite.
libc shouldn't try to compile my programs, and the C component of gcc shouldn't try to do anything other than compile my code.
You can do non-blocking reads, by using ready() or available() (depending on what stream you're using) and in conjunction with setSoTimeout, this can be quite effective. The writes are a different story, though.
I use this in conjunction with pools of connections with one thread. Then I use groups of the pools as needed. It's not perfect, but it's an improvement when you're taking a large beating.
Sun's approach of trying to force threads on I/O is a bit irritating and non-sensical. Any heavily loaded Java application that spawns all of those threads will choke on most hardware.
I'd also not say that Java is inherently better for network programming, but its default library is simply more robust than C's, which has no inherent networking, very much a framework for it.
I think they're both quite viable, as are Python and Perl. It's simply a matter of what you need, and when you need it.
The latest JDK is only in beta for either Solaris or Linux, which hardly constitutes "Java 2 v1.3" as being available.
;-)
Plus, this is Java's mantra; "Write once, run anywhere."
Java applications, in general, will start off being memory hogs. This is just allocating memory for the VM, for use with the application when needed. This of course is only part of Java's memory footprint, in any sizeable application.
Even non-graphical Java applications can be slow. For instance, take a look at Sun's own Java compiler for JDK. Compare that to Jikes
C and C++ interface programming is not defined by one paradigm, so it doesn't belong in your statement regarding slow graphical Java applications. You can use any number of design patterns, for any number of toolkits, so it's an inappropriate blanket to group it with AWT.
Anyway, If you were to use MVC with C, would you somehow consider the interface faster?
Using the MVC paradigm will not make a Swing application faster. Generally speaking, it means using more classes. This means larger bytecode, and more memory consumption. Of course you can clump more or less all of the interfaces into one class, but this isn't really following the MVC paradigm. If anything, it defeats the purpose.
Swing also has the disadvantage (over normal AWT) of having its widgets implemented in Java. This is why Swing applications feel much more sluggish to even AWT applications. No matter of paradigm can help that.
This, of course, doesn't even cover the tons of drawing problems Swing has.
That said, Swing certainly has a good API; the only interface API I like more is GTK--'s.
You have very good points.
It's unfortunate that people take the militia group stance towards this subject. The attitude of
"We don't like your stink'n laws, so we ain't gonna follow 'em," doesn't get much done.
If people really want freely redistributable music, the best way to get it, is to develop it, or support a community of those that do.
I fear someone with conscience enough to attempt to rationalize their evil, less than someone indifferent to it.
For argumentative discourse, though, it's certainly less frustrating when someone doesn't construct silly reasoning for their position.
In the end, neither is any greater than the other.
Elitism truly is a curse on us all.
>You forgot one:
>
> "But I'm a white American college student, and I'm entitled to everything I want."
Certainly the comment is sarcastic and a bit rude, but it may not be entirely wrong.
I think it's a valid point, even if I'm not certain I entirely agree with it.
I'm just commenting in hopes someone might reconsider its fate. If no one believes it's a valid perspective, then I apologize for wasting everyone's time.
I'm not certain that it's a matter of raw intelligence, per se, but rather it might be the result of selfishness that's generally promoted throughout our lives, by our primitive-animal influenced predatory social and economic systems.
A matter of wisdom, insight, or simply perspective. I'm certain there're many intelligent people that promote stealing, because they really don't care about much other than themselves.
Personally, I think the individuals that really want to liberate music, should develop and promote a community of public domain music, instead of taking the decisions away from others.
What the interests of any paticular monarch are undefined, and mostly irrelevant.
A monarchy is the embodiment of self regulatory Government. A Government that is regulated solely by itself, and not by the people.
The other embodiment of self regulatory Government would be anarchy. Where each person is his own self-regulated world. This, however, is a state of "non Government," which is why I didn't include it. With people that construct multinational corporations, which in turn attempt to dominate each other, and the masses, I'd certainly not suggest we're ready for anarchy.
Thanks, but I'll skip on either.
No, I didn't, but if you want I'll attach "Any adult citizen, not in the territories, D.C., or are currently in prison."
Of course I think the people of D.C. and those in prison should be able to vote, and I think our various territories should be given status as states, assuming it's their desire to become one.
Who was elected would matter more, if people didn't see Government as an entity posed against them. If everyone took it as a social responsibility to be involved with ensuring the dream of democracy isn't squandered, there'd certainly be a larger base of people to vote for.
And if people took it as a responsibility, then perhaps some of the injustices commonly practiced (The attempts of the Democrat and Republican parties to maintain their monopoly) could be fixed.
The problem isn't in the Government, it's in the lazy people that squander, or make a joke of their ability to change the world in which they live. Any faults in our Government are simply echoes of a problem much more severe.
The Government already does reflect the will of the people. It's simply they reflect the will of the people that get involved. There is no "automagic" way of fixing anything, which is exactly the point; being a member of a democratic society is work.
If the people respected their right to participate, either directly or indirectly, then the amount of influence that any paticular corporation would become far more equitable. Whether or not this would have an influence on the CDA (Which corporation don't support, btw), or anything else, I can't say for certain.
I do, however, know that sitting on your one's ass, not participating in Government, simply ignoring laws you don't support, and whining on public forums how the Government subjugates you, won't change a thing.
I'm not suggesting this is your behavior, but it certainly does compose a good number of the dotters.
You can't feed the hungry by saying "There are hungry people." You can't build a house by thinking "I sure could use a house." Why is it people think that a Government they don't participate in, will somehow reflect their ideals?
Perhaps this sort of privacy standard should be part of the WTO?
Ahh yes, our friends in D.C. can't vote for representatives, since they have none.
And if you want to count our various territories, which I don't, since they don't even pay taxes, also can not vote. I wasn't unaware of this, it simply didn't come to mind as I was mentioning what it means to live in a democratic society, even a Republic.
You're apparently under the naive impression that people don't make a difference. Does your one vote really matter in a pile of millions? Maybe, but most likely not in itself. The problem lies in the fact that such a large number of the people feel that as individuals, they don't matter (or care, or hate the Government because they're ignorant) and subsequently, do not vote.
Governor Ventura wasn't an independent. He was originally a member of the Reform Party. He has since discarded it, however.
There are two real independents in Congress, one of which is from my home state. As for local Government, it's composed of a much larger mix than the Federal spectrum, but it too suffers. I think the best thing the Reform Party will ever do, is to help shake up the two party nature of Federal politics.
The Government, however, is more than simply Congressmen and Presidents. It's also very much local, on many different degrees. If you can't afford to run for Governor, you certainly could run for a local Government position, or even state legislature. You could even start a politically oriented organization, to help spread whatever political views you have.
As for the rest of your comment, it's mostly silly. A gross exaggeration of a result of people sitting on their asses, instead of getting involved with their Government. It's much easier for them to bitch, later.
Having a monarch or dictator is the embodiment of self regulation. The Government (the dictator) is in complete control of its actions, without any external influence.
Giving corporations the ability to simply regulate themselves, and go on the honor system, is a bit naive. Given the choice, that corporation wouldn't spend the $1.50 to add safety features to their product. It also wouldn't hesitate to save money by dumping waste in their world's water supply, or to make a buck by clear cutting forests.
If you don't believe they wouldn't do that, I'd advise you to pick up a history book or two at your local library. I think you'll find the early auto industry's opinion on adding safety features to automobiles horrible.