I hope that the "Nader ruined everything" argument will die a swift and permanent death after this election if Kerry loses.
Everyone who's informed enough to think, "Hey, I'll vote for Nader" is informed enough to know that John Kerry is infinitesimally less likely to win if they vote Nader instead of him.
So in January 2005, if people are bitching about "spoilers", I don't think I'll have anything charitable to say to them.
The "accident of birth" isn't a particularly bad thing. Sure, you can end up with Nero and Caligula, but you can also get Marcus Aurelius. With democracy, you're guarranteed to end up stuck perpetually with scumbag opportunists after a while.
The fiat dollar stores value only moderately better than unrefridgerated seafood. Ok, so I'm exaggerating quite a bit, but you should be able to get the point.:-)
People will spend money, to consume present goods and invest in capital for the creation of future goods even if their money's value is slowly increasing or decreasing.
You won't suddenly not need food and water today, if you can buy more food with the same amount of money next year. Producers won't suddenly stop investing in machinery, factories, etc, because their money might go up one percent next year (forgoing all the potential profit to be made this year).
Just as with our fiat dollar that loses its value steadily you won't spend every dollar as soon as you get it and only hold non-dollar assets (ie there won't instantly be disasterous hyperinflation where you need wheelbarrows full of greenbacks for a loaf of bread).
You ought to take a look at some of the writings by Austrian economists on your points. Mises.org and LewRockwell.com have plenty of 'gold bugs' who've addressed your concerns. (Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Gary North, etc)
To briefly address #2, 3: 2) The US Gov't tried this, and discovered Gresham's Law. It was always setting the ratio of gold:silver wrong, so one metal was always held, while the other would be spent.
3) As Mises pointed out, any amount of money is enough for any economy so long as it is relatively fixed. There's no reason 1 oz of gold would have to be worth $20 or $35 as it used to be. It could be what the market price is today closer to $400 per oz. There would be no 'massive deflation', and prices would remaim relatively unchanged.
The advantage of a relatively fixed supply of currency, is deflation in fact. As more goods become available through increased productivity with the same amount of money, prices fall and standards of living rise. (It'd be quite nice to in effect be gaining 2% real income every year without a rise in wages, don't you think?)
This is different from the massive credit contractions called deflation during depressions/recessions/panics/whatever you care to call them.
I had a PSX and a stack of games that got to be about one meter high. One of the key selling points for me with getting a PS2 was that I wasn't going to need to keep a PSX around to play the ones I hadn't finished (or just felt like playing again).
People who have lots of X-Box games aren't going to want to have to hope that four years from now when their original X-Box is long broken that they can find a working used one and toss cash into it. They would much rather just play old games on the new console.
KOTOR, and its upcoming sequel, are still going to be fun to go back and play a few years down the road, you know.
The state laws weren't overturned by the addition of Federal laws regulating SPAM.
Anyone hear of Terry Nichols? He was convicted in Federal Court for conspiracy (and murder, iirc), and he's now being tried in at least one state court for the same crime with basically the same charges.
There are a number of other criminal laws you can face double jeopardy on (although the legal system doesn't consider the same charge twice double jeopardy if it's prosecuted at different levels of gov't), so why would 'CAN SPAM' laws be any different?
My point, is that the only reason MS did something "wrong" is because somebody made up a law about it. A 'mala prohibita' issue, not a 'mala en se' one.
It doesn't make any sense to "level the playing field" on any and every occassion for the sake of doing so. We have MS that made an OS, that basically made most people happy, become successful. They now have piles of cash (and talented employees, patents, copyrights, etc) and would like to become more successful.
Unless MS can only expand by using force or defrauding people, then software buyers should be the ones to decide what company most deserves success in a new niche, not the government.
Bad analogy. Microsoft are the only sandwich stand, and they're giving the soda and ice cream away _free_, thus destroying the market for these goods. Their market value is effectively $0, and your competitors can't compete with that.
Not true. There's a market for most anything at a (cost > $0) if that competing product has a greater value to the customer than what he's paying for it.
Millions of people pay for cable and satelite TV even though broadcast TV is free. People even pay more to get a full time movie channel. Often $50-120/mo when all is said and done. That's about $1000 per year for something to vegetate in front of.
Millions are paying for XM radio even though AM/FM are free as well.
Offer a better product, promote it, and people will pay you for it. Linux distribution companies essentially give away copies of a similar product to what Microsoft sells, and it hasn't reduced the value of Windows to $0.
There are actually people out there who buy those retail upgrades you know.;-)
it is when the company has killed off competition via illegal means.
"Illegal" means whatever the government decides it does. Unless Steve Ballmer is using force, threat of force, theft, or fraud to 'kill of competition', then MS isn't doing anything wrong by its customers not buying from its competitors.
Yeah, I mean how could ignorance of the law possibly be an excuse?
It isn't like people are supposed to be aware of enough laws that a dead tree version of all those laws could be used to press to death a person in punishment for their violating the law.
Um, no. There's nothing wrong with utilizing the success you've earned to become more successful.
Suppose I open up a stand selling lunch sandwiches. Because I make good sandwiches I gain a virtual monopoly in the town I operate in. So, using money I earned with sandwich sales, I expand and begin selling soda and ice cream. As a result, I put the ice cream vendor in town on the brink of bankruptcy.
What's wrong with that example? Perhaps it wouldn't occur to you, but I didn't put the town's ice cream vendor on the brink of bankruptcy. My customers did by their choice to buy ice cream from me.
So, would you punish me for satisfying the wants of my customers?
Or maybe you'd punish my customers for acting in their own best interests?
Either way I don't think you'd have any moral high ground. It's called 'market competition' you either behave competitively, or your customers will go elsewhere.
So, the economic balance does not explain the US failure to correct this economically damaging condition, there must have been another reason. Probably plain old bribes, or just stupidity from the part of the Bush government to see the economic benefit to have sound markets with sound competition.
There is nothing 'economically damaging' to the average European about what MS is accused of. If a company goes out of businesses because it isn't competitive, too bad. This is a case of corporate welfare for Real Networks, and it comes at the expense of consumers.
This is really one of the stupidest things I've ever read.
First of all, a half billion dollar fine for including a digital media player that people don't even have to use is kind of extreme on its face seeing as no one was coerced or defrauded.
Aside from that, Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in the OS market or the digital media player market (if the latter 'market' even exists). No matter how many of MS's competitors try to get gov'ts to bitch slap MS. There are still dozens of competitors, both commercial and open source, in both.
[I vaguely seem to recall a penguin mascot used by a competitor in the OS market that can't be competed with because as we all know from the RIAA/MPAA "you can't compete with free."]
Including Windows Media Player with Windows doesn't prevent me from using WinAmp or QuickTime or XMMS or RealOne or anything else. Microsoft hasn't made WMP9 able to play.RM or.MOV files, so if I wanted to watch awful quality streaming video I'd still need to install Real Player. (QuickTime isn't bad, so I use it.)
I've also never seen a GUI-based desktop OS that didn't have a digital media player included with it. Let's face it, one of the major uses for PCs is surfing the Internet and using multimedia content.
I am also quite interested to learn who would buy an OS upgrade when there is nothing new in it, and it has fewer features than the previous version? Maybe the 'Competition Commisioner' could answer that for me?
The dollar is most likely over-valued. If it were not, US exports to the rest of the world would be less expensive, and the US would not have as huge a trade deficit as it does now. A decrease in the value of the dollar would result in fewer imports, and greater domestic production which would have a stimulative effect on the economy.
The stock market is not a reliable indicator of overall economic performance or recovery as it is very heavily influenced by perceptions and not reality. It tends to play catchup to actual trends rather than lead them. (As it should if it has any real significance. Does anything else improve before the thing it is said to reflect improves? Of course not.)
So, I'm guessing your immediate way to improve the standard of living is to give everyone $500 checks from the Federal Government? Or tax the hell out of the people who fund the multi-billion dollar factories and R&D labs that made possible the device you're reading this on? (Or the dozen or so other devices you could be reading this on? PDA, laptop, desktop, cellphone, etc.)
As the poorest people in the US live better than the Caesars of Rome and others that ruled empires that the sun never set on, then that "5% of the wealth" doesn't sound so shabby.
Who cares if a Rockefeller has 20 billion dollars, when most everyone who has far, far less is hardly starving and dying of plague? Don't you have anything better to do than be envious of your neighbors? "The grass is greener on the otherside of the fence so I'll go dump some salt to make us equal."
And for another thing, if cheap hydrogen power is easily possible, then why wouldn't a large corporation jump on it, patent every possible aspect, and rake in the profits and royalties for the next 20 or so years? And am I also to believe we could build machines that can do everything a person can do, maintain and repair themselves, and improve themselves? Don't people mock the viability of most "self-healing servers"?
"If the war was, instead, about democracy, why are the Iraqi people, including Saddam's proven enemies, excluded from authority?" Are we supposed to go on the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" idea? Maybe the US should have just left Germany completely after WWII to the care of Uncle Joe Stalin who is world renowned for being such a kind and caring guy?
And proclaiming Iraq a colony after less than two months might be a tad premature, wouldn't you say?
"Why are taxes being cut when teachers and librarians are being laid off?" Maybe the government is actually reducing its expenditures at the same time it temporarily reduces its tax inflows? What some would call "fiscal responsibility"?
"An old liberal dream of world federalism, nations united as democratic partners in global governance, is replaced by a program of American unipolarity, world government administered by fiat from Washington. And who in Washington questions this?" As opposed to unelected bureacrats from nations run by violent, murderous tyrants governing the world populace by an unelected committee's fiat is better? Why? Because it is more popular?
Democracy is absolutely nothing more than popularity, afterall. Rule, by the mob. (I'd love to hear an explaintion as to what more democracy is if anyone disagrees?)
I filled out and sent in a $50 rebate for a GF3 Ti 200 videocard I purchased on Black Friday.
I waited and I realized at about 6.5 months I'd yet to receive the thing.
So I send an email in to the company and ask what is up with it.
I get no reply.
I send another the next week.
Still no reply.
Two days later I get the check in the mail. Seems like a remarkable coincidence to me if it just suddenly arrived more than six months later as soon as I complain.
What they are doing is quite simple. Why be the bad guy, and potentially face boycotts (at least from geeks who will just pirate your wares anyway) when you could let the MPAA do it for you?
I know this won't go over on/. well, but gov't red tape isn't the best solution to most problems. Being ripped off by fraudulent mechanics is a more severe problem than mechanics not knowing what they are doing. Certification doesn't fix that. The majority of people's problems with PC repair places has to do with them being to goddamned stupid to backup data that is oh so valuable to them.
A book written by someone setting out to show gun control reduces crime that discovered that the opposite was overwhelmingly true.
Not wanting to just point you to a few conservative or NRA (or whoever's) websites and articles which will have an obvious bias, check a pretty basic and vannilla Google search of the title and author.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope that the "Nader ruined everything" argument will die a swift and permanent death after this election if Kerry loses.
Everyone who's informed enough to think, "Hey, I'll vote for Nader" is informed enough to know that John Kerry is infinitesimally less likely to win if they vote Nader instead of him.
So in January 2005, if people are bitching about "spoilers", I don't think I'll have anything charitable to say to them.
The "accident of birth" isn't a particularly bad thing. Sure, you can end up with Nero and Caligula, but you can also get Marcus Aurelius. With democracy, you're guarranteed to end up stuck perpetually with scumbag opportunists after a while.
The fiat dollar stores value only moderately better than unrefridgerated seafood. Ok, so I'm exaggerating quite a bit, but you should be able to get the point. :-)
People will spend money, to consume present goods and invest in capital for the creation of future goods even if their money's value is slowly increasing or decreasing.
You won't suddenly not need food and water today, if you can buy more food with the same amount of money next year. Producers won't suddenly stop investing in machinery, factories, etc, because their money might go up one percent next year (forgoing all the potential profit to be made this year).
Just as with our fiat dollar that loses its value steadily you won't spend every dollar as soon as you get it and only hold non-dollar assets (ie there won't instantly be disasterous hyperinflation where you need wheelbarrows full of greenbacks for a loaf of bread).
You ought to take a look at some of the writings by Austrian economists on your points. Mises.org and LewRockwell.com have plenty of 'gold bugs' who've addressed your concerns. (Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Gary North, etc)
To briefly address #2, 3:
2) The US Gov't tried this, and discovered Gresham's Law. It was always setting the ratio of gold:silver wrong, so one metal was always held, while the other would be spent.
3) As Mises pointed out, any amount of money is enough for any economy so long as it is relatively fixed. There's no reason 1 oz of gold would have to be worth $20 or $35 as it used to be. It could be what the market price is today closer to $400 per oz. There would be no 'massive deflation', and prices would remaim relatively unchanged.
The advantage of a relatively fixed supply of currency, is deflation in fact. As more goods become available through increased productivity with the same amount of money, prices fall and standards of living rise. (It'd be quite nice to in effect be gaining 2% real income every year without a rise in wages, don't you think?)
This is different from the massive credit contractions called deflation during depressions/recessions/panics/whatever you care to call them.
I had a PSX and a stack of games that got to be about one meter high. One of the key selling points for me with getting a PS2 was that I wasn't going to need to keep a PSX around to play the ones I hadn't finished (or just felt like playing again).
People who have lots of X-Box games aren't going to want to have to hope that four years from now when their original X-Box is long broken that they can find a working used one and toss cash into it. They would much rather just play old games on the new console.
KOTOR, and its upcoming sequel, are still going to be fun to go back and play a few years down the road, you know.
As of 6/21/2004 at 1 PM EST, Hotmail isn't blocking gmail invites. (Or emails from gmail.com.) I got an invite and a confirmation today at that time.
Does this virus run on Wintel64 boxes that have one of the NX bit hardware protection? I think that was supposed to prevent buffer overruns...
The state laws weren't overturned by the addition of Federal laws regulating SPAM.
Anyone hear of Terry Nichols? He was convicted in Federal Court for conspiracy (and murder, iirc), and he's now being tried in at least one state court for the same crime with basically the same charges.
There are a number of other criminal laws you can face double jeopardy on (although the legal system doesn't consider the same charge twice double jeopardy if it's prosecuted at different levels of gov't), so why would 'CAN SPAM' laws be any different?
My point, is that the only reason MS did something "wrong" is because somebody made up a law about it. A 'mala prohibita' issue, not a 'mala en se' one.
It doesn't make any sense to "level the playing field" on any and every occassion for the sake of doing so. We have MS that made an OS, that basically made most people happy, become successful. They now have piles of cash (and talented employees, patents, copyrights, etc) and would like to become more successful.
Unless MS can only expand by using force or defrauding people, then software buyers should be the ones to decide what company most deserves success in a new niche, not the government.
Bad analogy. Microsoft are the only sandwich stand, and they're giving the soda and ice cream away _free_, thus destroying the market for these goods. Their market value is effectively $0, and your competitors can't compete with that.
;-)
Not true. There's a market for most anything at a (cost > $0) if that competing product has a greater value to the customer than what he's paying for it.
Millions of people pay for cable and satelite TV even though broadcast TV is free. People even pay more to get a full time movie channel. Often $50-120/mo when all is said and done. That's about $1000 per year for something to vegetate in front of.
Millions are paying for XM radio even though AM/FM are free as well.
Offer a better product, promote it, and people will pay you for it. Linux distribution companies essentially give away copies of a similar product to what Microsoft sells, and it hasn't reduced the value of Windows to $0.
There are actually people out there who buy those retail upgrades you know.
it is when the company has killed off competition via illegal means.
"Illegal" means whatever the government decides it does. Unless Steve Ballmer is using force, threat of force, theft, or fraud to 'kill of competition', then MS isn't doing anything wrong by its customers not buying from its competitors.
Yeah, I mean how could ignorance of the law possibly be an excuse?
It isn't like people are supposed to be aware of enough laws that a dead tree version of all those laws could be used to press to death a person in punishment for their violating the law.
Good thing capital punishment was outlawed!
Um, no. There's nothing wrong with utilizing the success you've earned to become more successful.
Suppose I open up a stand selling lunch sandwiches. Because I make good sandwiches I gain a virtual monopoly in the town I operate in. So, using money I earned with sandwich sales, I expand and begin selling soda and ice cream. As a result, I put the ice cream vendor in town on the brink of bankruptcy.
What's wrong with that example? Perhaps it wouldn't occur to you, but I didn't put the town's ice cream vendor on the brink of bankruptcy. My customers did by their choice to buy ice cream from me.
So, would you punish me for satisfying the wants of my customers?
Or maybe you'd punish my customers for acting in their own best interests?
Either way I don't think you'd have any moral high ground. It's called 'market competition' you either behave competitively, or your customers will go elsewhere.
This is really one of the stupidest things I've ever read.
.RM or .MOV files, so if I wanted to watch awful quality streaming video I'd still need to install Real Player. (QuickTime isn't bad, so I use it.)
First of all, a half billion dollar fine for including a digital media player that people don't even have to use is kind of extreme on its face seeing as no one was coerced or defrauded.
Aside from that, Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in the OS market or the digital media player market (if the latter 'market' even exists). No matter how many of MS's competitors try to get gov'ts to bitch slap MS. There are still dozens of competitors, both commercial and open source, in both.
[I vaguely seem to recall a penguin mascot used by a competitor in the OS market that can't be competed with because as we all know from the RIAA/MPAA "you can't compete with free."]
Including Windows Media Player with Windows doesn't prevent me from using WinAmp or QuickTime or XMMS or RealOne or anything else. Microsoft hasn't made WMP9 able to play
I've also never seen a GUI-based desktop OS that didn't have a digital media player included with it. Let's face it, one of the major uses for PCs is surfing the Internet and using multimedia content.
I am also quite interested to learn who would buy an OS upgrade when there is nothing new in it, and it has fewer features than the previous version? Maybe the 'Competition Commisioner' could answer that for me?
The Goatse.cx page is proof to me that there is something to the claim about media desensitizing people. ;)
The dollar is most likely over-valued. If it were not, US exports to the rest of the world would be less expensive, and the US would not have as huge a trade deficit as it does now. A decrease in the value of the dollar would result in fewer imports, and greater domestic production which would have a stimulative effect on the economy.
The stock market is not a reliable indicator of overall economic performance or recovery as it is very heavily influenced by perceptions and not reality. It tends to play catchup to actual trends rather than lead them. (As it should if it has any real significance. Does anything else improve before the thing it is said to reflect improves? Of course not.)
So, I'm guessing your immediate way to improve the standard of living is to give everyone $500 checks from the Federal Government? Or tax the hell out of the people who fund the multi-billion dollar factories and R&D labs that made possible the device you're reading this on? (Or the dozen or so other devices you could be reading this on? PDA, laptop, desktop, cellphone, etc.)
As the poorest people in the US live better than the Caesars of Rome and others that ruled empires that the sun never set on, then that "5% of the wealth" doesn't sound so shabby.
Who cares if a Rockefeller has 20 billion dollars, when most everyone who has far, far less is hardly starving and dying of plague? Don't you have anything better to do than be envious of your neighbors? "The grass is greener on the otherside of the fence so I'll go dump some salt to make us equal."
And for another thing, if cheap hydrogen power is easily possible, then why wouldn't a large corporation jump on it, patent every possible aspect, and rake in the profits and royalties for the next 20 or so years? And am I also to believe we could build machines that can do everything a person can do, maintain and repair themselves, and improve themselves? Don't people mock the viability of most "self-healing servers"?
"If the war was, instead, about democracy, why are the Iraqi people, including Saddam's proven enemies, excluded from authority?"
Are we supposed to go on the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" idea? Maybe the US should have just left Germany completely after WWII to the care of Uncle Joe Stalin who is world renowned for being such a kind and caring guy?
And proclaiming Iraq a colony after less than two months might be a tad premature, wouldn't you say?
"Why are taxes being cut when teachers and librarians are being laid off?"
Maybe the government is actually reducing its expenditures at the same time it temporarily reduces its tax inflows? What some would call "fiscal responsibility"?
"An old liberal dream of world federalism, nations united as democratic partners in global governance, is replaced by a program of American unipolarity, world government administered by fiat from Washington. And who in Washington questions this?"
As opposed to unelected bureacrats from nations run by violent, murderous tyrants governing the world populace by an unelected committee's fiat is better? Why? Because it is more popular?
Democracy is absolutely nothing more than popularity, afterall. Rule, by the mob.
(I'd love to hear an explaintion as to what more democracy is if anyone disagrees?)
I filled out and sent in a $50 rebate for a GF3 Ti 200 videocard I purchased on Black Friday.
I waited and I realized at about 6.5 months I'd yet to receive the thing.
So I send an email in to the company and ask what is up with it.
I get no reply.
I send another the next week.
Still no reply.
Two days later I get the check in the mail. Seems like a remarkable coincidence to me if it just suddenly arrived more than six months later as soon as I complain.
What they are doing is quite simple. Why be the bad guy, and potentially face boycotts (at least from geeks who will just pirate your wares anyway) when you could let the MPAA do it for you?
I know this won't go over on /. well, but gov't red tape isn't the best solution to most problems. Being ripped off by fraudulent mechanics is a more severe problem than mechanics not knowing what they are doing. Certification doesn't fix that. The majority of people's problems with PC repair places has to do with them being to goddamned stupid to backup data that is oh so valuable to them.
Is 16x according to my estimates. So I guess my 32x burner is actually 2* burners?
No one here has ever heard of "Services for UNIX" for Windows 2000 Servers?
A book written by someone setting out to show gun control reduces crime that discovered that the opposite was overwhelmingly true.
Not wanting to just point you to a few conservative or NRA (or whoever's) websites and articles which will have an obvious bias, check a pretty basic and vannilla Google search of the title and author.
Best wishes with your research!