I think the most useful thing would be to test schools and group them regardless of country so we can try to figure out the common elements among them. Insisting that all the educations in the United States are as similar as all the educations in Monaco is ludicrous.
This is a superset of your idea, which I think is a good one.
If you have to pay a monthly subscription, then the game should be free, unless they have a mechanism to allow the creation of user hosted worlds. You shouldn't have to lay down $50, and then not be able to use the game.
You make a good point, however there are some things to consider:
First, distribution. The game is around 3 gigs in size, and they're using BitTorrent for the patches. Yeah, it's big. With a publisher and full rollout they can make that available in stores. $50 means a publisher will make their money back quickly, which means you get very good service. At $50 you get some real supply going.
Second, your first month is included. That just about works out to being equal to Blizzard's cut of the box price.
Third (and most important): serial number bans for cheating or chronic character abuse only works when a serial number costs money, and works to the degree that the serial number costs money. At $50 a pop, most people are only willing to go really nuts once.
Lastly, the "pre-order effect" (which may or may not be present with pure-subscription) relieves the stress of the large capital investment Blizzard made in investment. Makes the game much cheaper to make.
I think 10/10 is "good in ways I didn't expect." WoW is definitely that. I keep finding things I didn't even know I wanted.
Side note: Made in USA by Paul Graham has some good points.
Then again, reviewing systems are all different. I spent a while thinking about them as a sub-topic of grading systems. The whole thing depends on your philosophy.
I think part of the reason we put in numerical or categorical grades is to give a light to view the rest of the review by - I've read some 90% reviews that read like condemnations of bugs and misfeatures, and some 60%'s that seemed like praise. At least when you have the number, you know the tone of the article.
I'm on an RP server, and people DO RP. The GMs on one server started handing out 3-hour bans like candy for OOC conversations. That solved the issue PDQ.
Not sure about the naming troubles, but I haven't seen any "external" names.
Not only do people RP, they're helpful. And given the huge variety of appearances and such, people are interested to see odd things. I'm a gnome, and showing up on the NE island was a Big Thing for a lot of people (it was quite a trek).
Also, people are hacking the emote system to get an approximation of "look" ("You see CruelCoconut, the cruelest warlock to ever sail the seas of the world. The needle stuck in her shirt and the skinning knife next to it indicate her crafts.").
As for languages your character doesn't understand: that's there. My demonic minion is always kvetching in Demonic, and if the dwarves switch over to Dwarvish I can't understand a word.
In-game there is a mail system. Letters are instantaneous, parcels take a while. You can even send C.O.D!
If you have any other questions, reply and I'll try to answer.
I regularly team up with random people to complete quests. I help them get their quests done, they help me get mine done, we share the loot...everybody has a good time.
One feature that really helps this out is all the different looting controls available to the group leader. Creature tagging (the first group to do serious damage to a creature "tags" it, and only they get the experience and loot from killing it) also helps.
I tend to favor "Round Robin" looting, which alternates among people in the group who gets to loot. If you need a quest item off a creature and the active looter doesn't, however, you can still get it.
And since it shows what your groupmates pick up, it makes a lot of grind communication useless, leaving more time for other things.
Actually, it's interesting how, with Blizzard's elimination of a lot of things that were unnecessary (asking if someone got X, figuring out whose turn it is to loot, etc), the interactions have become more meaningful, rather than nonexistant.
I like that. Means that most people wanted to interact more, but were denied by the system.
There's a certain amount of money people are willing to pay for basic functionality, and then on top of that you add the amount you'd be willing to pay for a fully open-sourced card.
Add the two up, there you go.
As there is no competitor for the open-source aspect of the card, that's pretty much the only factor.
Most of the (IMHO) well-designed either weakly or dynamically typed languages that I've used don't use the same operator for concatenation as addition.
Perl: . versus +
Common Lisp: concatenate versus +
It is very frustrating to have both automagical type and have operators that do radically different things depending upon type.
Thanks for your considered reply. I hope to reply more in-depth later.
I'd like to quickly address one issue:
Amazing what a bit of hand-waving can solve, eh?
I don't mean this to be hand-waving. I'm saying "no matter what, you can get it" to say that even if things are difficult financially, they can still be accomplished - in direct contravention of systems where you must please an authority. In such case, things may not be possible at all.
This is not to say that money is superior in every case, just in this case, and it's an aspect people don't consider.
It's just like air and oceans, you know. You can't really own it, just manage it, because it's everybody's and nobody's at the same time.
I can understand your motivations for this statement, but I think it rests upon some (unspoken) flawed assumptions and goals. I hope I'm not reading too much into what you say.
A common reason people make this statement is because they wish to eliminate the burden of divying up property. Deciding whose claim is the superior, dealing with the shouting and screaming between different greedy parties, and trying to help those who have none.
The assumption is that if you have no ownership of the resource, this is eliminated. The problem remains, however, that the resource must by allocated. If not in ownership, then at least in some rights: exploitation, enjoyment, etc. The reason for this is that some elements of the resource are more desirable than others - according to the view of people, and there is not enough of the most desirable portions to give to everyone.
Disliking ownership is mistaking a symptom for the problem itself. The problem is that there is more desire than there is supply, even for radio waves. No matter how you allocate the resource, some will go without what they want.
So the question becomes "yes, but should people be allowed to buy it?" It seems so arbitrary and callous to divide things by who has the most money.
There are two aspects to this: first off, when you only have to pay money for something, it can be done. Somehow. If you want it badly enough, you can get it. You may have to settle for a less-attractive lot, you may have to make outrageous sacrifices of your personal or professional life, but it can be done.
When a resource is allocated by a board with a charter, by a court system, by a charity, or even by a dictator you may not be able to get some of the resource. At all. There may be no sacrifice you could make that would get you even the homliest of homesteads. You may argue the best case of being "deserving" but what about those people who want very badly, but are not seen as deserving? An example would be nudists buying land: if they were required to convince a board that they should have the land, it might never happen.
Secondly, consider the problem of using a system to allocate things involving deciding who has the worthier claim. This system has a definite problem: we do not all agree on what is fair. No way to please all of the people all of the time. So, it becomes more important who is in power than what is fair according to you. PJ O'Rourke once said "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
There is no way to remove the pain of dividing things up, you can only move it around. When people wish to be relieved of the burden of deciding between two unpleasant outcomes, they usually do not mean having someone else make the decision for them, and that's the only other option available.
Slight nitpick: Spain has the Catalonian Seperatists, and they have killed people. One faction was known to be training with Al'Qaeda. Then again, people don't really worry about them.
Might also want to remember Ireland & Britain's little "tiff."
Another easy one: Chechneya.
And I'd hate to ignore large portions of Africa and South America.
I think you're right about the middle east, but I'm not sure that it's cultural, except in the broadest sense of a coming-together of history, government, and power.
A man once said "it's easier to worship a picture on the wall."
Not many people like prophets or wise men in the flesh: they have this bad habit of saying things you find inconvenient. When they're a picture...well, they can't remind you or get in the way of your "interpretations."
That's not a good reason to restrict smoking. The real reason it should be restricted is because second hand smoke violates the rights of others. This reason is consistent with all the current restrictions except the age restriction. The age restriction is to protect minors from "harm" before they become adults and can decide what is harmful for themselves.
You might find it a better construct to consider that minors operate with the consent of their parents. Most every product out there has "implicit consent" - we consider that it's sufficiently out of the ordinary for a parent to object to the minor's purchasing said product that the parents should have to make special arrangements to have it be otherwise.
Cigarettes, guns, alcohol, etc, etc do not have implicit consent, as it would be considered ordinary to not allow your child to purchase them - so the parent has to purchase them. It's legal for a child to drink, but the parents have to buy and provide the alcohol.
This avoids the need for a "harm" reason (which can get sketchy), and rests firmly within the fact that the child is a minor.
Secondly, you might want to look into the whole "second hand smoke is harmful" bit, if that's what you're arguing. There's no good evidence for this proposition. In fact, there seems to be good counter evidence. Bullshit had a good episode on this, and I believe there are some good links online.
If you're arguing that it violates the others because it is noxious, you might want to consider your opinion a bit more: the same argument can be applied to pornography, swearing, certain jokes and private conversations, and more. I'm not so sure that's a direction you want to go without some clear test that shows how smoking is different from the others.
I'd like to take this moment to point out that many of the finest logical minds of their time were Christian and dealt within that frame of mind.
I offer up St. Thomas Aquinas as a shining example of this. He used the bible as proof, yes, but this was because he was making statements within the church. He also took the time to understand and improve the arguments of those he was opposed to. Much of modern thought concerning Aristotle is due to Aquinas's notes.
Our construct of human rights is based on the belief in God's Plan - you can thank Locke for that.
The teachings of Christ were very clear on respect and love for others, and respect for the workings of God. Several Christian friends of mine shake their heads at the actions of the Fervid Few, suggesting that these busy-bodies busy themselves with the state of their own soul, and not put themselves upon their neighbor.
Oh, and I'm not a Christian by the way, I'm just familiar with the works - it's really a lovely religion, except for the nuts.
Who cares if it gets offtopic? This could be interesting.
You've met the first requirement for a working system: deal in money. Hayek has an interesting section on money in his book The Road to Serfdom, which I will parapharase here: when you take money from someone, you affect the least of their needs. When you give money to someone, you supply the greatest of their needs.
So, when your redistribution plan only deals in money, you are helping people more and hurting them less than if you did anything else.
Milton Friedman (a Republican libertarian - rare beast these days) recommended that we have a flat-percent income tax, with an interesting feature: it's graded below a certain amount.
How it works is this: you pick an amount on which a person could live. X, we'll say. Then, if you make less than 2X, you get money instead of paying taxes. You get 50% of the difference between what you make, and 2X, so at 0 income, you get X.
What's interesting about this is that it's a universal form of welfare, and it encourages you to make more money. For every extra dollar you earn, you're making 50 cents more - a net profit. It's actually more profitable to make money than it is to stay on welfare, at every point.
You can prank with the points and percentages over time.
Why do I mention this? It's somewhat similar to your idea of income redistribution, but it provides a total system for welfare.
However, both of these ideas have a few problems: what people often desperately need is not cost-of-living but cost-of-not-dying: drugs, doctors, etc. Or the complaint is that the subsidy they're receiving does not allow them to live where they want.
These are limited-good phenomena: solving one side entails hurting another. Further, if you attempt to solve them, you enter the non-monetary realm, where you have to decide who is the more deserving of things.
Personally, I think that many of our problems stem from the large and intricate role our government plays in the public sphere: we limit the number of doctors medical schools can put out, then we wonder why the price of medicine goes up.
And it would be even better if all people contributed equally to society, instead of some choosing to be supported by it. The utopia of socialism ends where human laziness and greed begin.
The fundamental problem of socialism is the allocation of scarce goods. There will always be goods which are scarce, even in a society of such plenty that you can have any object you want for free.
These are things such as:
Location
Multiple people will want the same place. This is settled now by an auction or negotiation. What do you do without money besides arbitrary allocation?
Services
As fewer people are needed to produce the physical goods of society, we have seen an explosion in the variety of services available. There are never enough service providers to serve everyone. How do you allocate them, then?
Fashion
Some physical goods and some service providers are perceived as better than others - often for the most transitory of things, such as a name. These things are chosen because they are unequally available, so what do you do then?
There are other problems, but this one might be seen as the fundamental one, and it has nothing to do with some people living off the fat of others.
Patents are supposed to further innovation by rewarding the inventors. The argument is that if you didn't reward the inventor, then they would not spend the time to make the invention.
It was my understanding that the foundation of patents was not to foster innovation, but to encourage releasing information about inventions to the public - this is the reason patents are time limited.
Copyright was the IP creation that was created because, otherwise, no one would spend the time to make creative works.
I think the reasoning is important, as if you consider it from the viewpoint of "providing information on recreating a work in return for limited protection," some things make sense that would not under "encouraging innovation through limited monopoly" - and vice versa.
Not sure about the business methods patents. At the least, demonstrating you have an actual invention should be rather tricky.
Technically, under the law, they ARE a singular entity. That's the entire idea behind a corporation: the company is a seperate entity, and if any part of the entity breaks the law, the entity as a whole can be sued for it. It allows for individuals to evade financial consequences if their company is held responsible for something.
Your post is good, I'm just emphasizing a point that some people miss.
All you have to do to sue a corporation is prove that X was done, and it was done somewhere inside the corporation. You do not have to know who did it. Otherwise you are stuck trying to figure out who did what and where - and they're damned sure not going to be cooperative.
Of course, if the corporation can come up with an individual fellow and show how his actions violated company policy, then they can cut him loose, and you can sue him directly[1].
Win/win for a plaintiff.
[1] - This is partially why corporations have document retention policies. In most cases, it is quite legal for a company to destroy all records as soon (or within 90 days) as a transaction is completed. By keeping documents around, they can redirect a messy lawsuit to the person responsible. If they keep their books clean, then they can also avoid charges of creating an environment hospitable to fraud.
I think of it more this way: a scientific explanation of evolution adds nothing to their lives, whereas the story of god creating all things as they are adds quite a bit to their lives.
On the one hand is dry fact, on the other is a first-to-last long-before-me-and-on-after-me element to their lives.
It's hardly a surprise that they'd take the latter.
Science alienates many because it focuses on what is (or *probably is*) and what we can know, rather than what things mean to us. Every time you see a new breakthrough in science, you'll always see what it *means* in mainstream papers.
When you discuss evolution with some people, they'll argue with you that you're saying a horrible thing: that their uncle is a monkey. Because that's what it means to them if you're right.
On another point: I believe religion is 10% philosophy and 90% culture. By this I mean that a very small minority thinks about their beliefs and actively chooses them because they believe them to be right. The rest accept the beliefs and primarily participate in the culture of the religion. There's nothing wrong with this - how they live their life is how they view their religion. Sounds good to me.
This "cultural participation" leads to some of the effects that we see: people trying to shape the rest of their lives in accordance with their religion (government, casual activities, etc), incorporation of statements such as "good Christian men" into the vernacular, and a further separation from peoples of other religions - other cultures.
I think these two observations explain quite a bit of what we see, and I live in the heart of Creationist Country.
Last thought: I think that a lot of the furor over "evolution in schools" could be solved by appealing to the people's desire for their children to be educated: the school's function is to teach current science and its foundations so that kids can understand what is going on in the scientific world. It is the parents' responsibility to teach about God.
First off, on the issue of Standard Oil: most such monsters don't do well unless the government props them up. Ma Bell was getting crushed by competition until the government regulated the phone service and set up a monopoly. Why did they do this? Because it was thought that price wars hurt the consumer.
U. S. Steel came to power in a similar way, as did Standard Oil. Here is an essay by Roy Childs that discusses the issue (the first part is a bit boring, but it gets better).
Large businesses continually seek regulation so as to squeeze out their competition.
My point of the example is that if the RIAA somehow did manage to raise the price on all RIAA CDs to $25, they would be destroyed. At that price, it becomes worth it to find indie talent and put venture capital behind a new label.
The RIAA succeeds not by jacking up prices, but by keeping their prices low enough and distribution wide enough that people aren't really pushed to buy anything else, and there's not enough money to be made in a startup.
Over time, the RIAA has gotten greedier and greedier: they keep adding layers of fat internally, and they have to support all of them. When they raise their prices high enough, one of them will break from the pack and reform, or an outsider will eat their lunch.
That is, of course, unless the RIAA somehow gets a government-granted monopoly.
The other side of it is that they have a partial monopoly: most radio stations 24x7 RIAA commercials. As long as the cost of broadcasting is artificially inflated like it is now, it will remain that way.
That's my view on the matter. I might be wrong.
The MS anti-trust trial was horrible. Some people at MS should've gone to jail for perjury. However, I'm not so sure they should've been under litigation for anti-trust. Their illegal actions in other negotiations (such as what Cringely has been talking about for a while) were enough.
Besides, even though the case folded, MS is still going to go away. If you're going to blame anyone for the whole incident, you might as well blame the executives with the mantra "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft."
You can see the first steps of where Microsoft is going with the DMCA (no reverse engineering), attacks on the GPL, and increased use of patents. If we can prevent them from using the government against us, I think they'll die off.
Note that I say "us." I am a believer in Free Software. I view it as the only honest way to do business in software, and I think it's a market correction for all the crap software we've had to deal with for so many years.
But I think that Free Software will win in the end because it's The Right Thing, because it's what the current great programmers like to work with. I don't think we should mandate the use of Free Software, nor discourage the use of closed software. Like I said, I think it will win on its merits.
Having said that, of course, I think that if a local government doesn't consider a better, cheaper alternative when they're considering a large project, that they're doing the taxpayers a disservice.
So, there you go. As you said, we come from different angles on government and market regulation, so it's difficult for us to hear exactly what the other is saying and not the concepts that we read into it. I appreciate you being clear, I hope I've done a similar job.
It's been nice talking to you, I've enjoyed what you've had to say. Catch you around sometime.
The free market is NOT about serving the most people. Its just a common effect of the market to serve more people, better. Yet we *know* this is not the case with health care in the US: there are lots of people with little or no care, and lots with really great health care.
The US health care market is one of the most free, however it is not free in one very important way: it has effective price minima.
One of the best ways to inflate the price of a product in a market is to limit the supply. You can only do this if you've cornered the market, or are the government. In this case, it's the government.
The government limits:
The number of doctors - through restrictions on the number of graduates allowed from medical schools.
The amount and availability of new treatments - through the FDA.
The lower-bound on the cost of production of medicine - FDA regulation of production plants.
That's just off the top of my head, but I think it covers the major points. These all serve to raise the cost of medicine.
Markets have always been regulated to balance the other aspects of life (like fairness) with the power of production it enables. The balance of regulating the market excesses (like DRM,) against enjoying the production benefits (like cheap software,) needs to be changed: both in software IP laws, and drug research. Its not just a single issue of using Linux/FOSS in Brazil, but many issues of freeing information, and consequently reducing the power of vested interests. The issue is how to regulate.
Legitimate markets (as opposed to black markets) are supposed to operate within the law. The excesses you describe are either laws not being enforced, or laws which need to be changed. True "natural monopolies" are very rare, most of the time a company needs the government to bludgeon to death its competition so that the company may be without competition.
This "operation within the law" is not regulation of the market, as it is not directed at the market, but at individuals in the market. Much as how convicting someone of murder does indeed remove him from certain markets, but one would not say that it's "regulating the market."
If the RIAA has its way 100% should we say 'oh well, thats the market then' or should we be mad as hell at the political system which made it happen?
If the RIAA "had its way" and managed to get all its members to raise the price on their CDs to $25 apiece, then we probably should say "well, that's the market." If the RIAA "had its way" and got expansion of copyright powers, government enforcement of copyright, and had a mandated minimum price of $25 per CD, then we should scream bloody murder at a political system that allowed this to happen.
One is a function of the market, the other is a government action and is not under the power of the market.
The level of advancement in medicine in the past 150 years has been many, many, many times what it was before that. 1776 they were still bleeding people with leeches.
I don't think we need to reign in profit levels so much as stop supporting them so heavily: requiring physicians to write perscriptions, requiring a pharmacy to sell drugs, requiring FDA approval to sell a drug, etc. These all serve to eliminate competition, creating an un-free market.
Want to see a much more free medical market than human? Take a look at Vetrinary medicine. Cost in medicine, check-ups, procedures, etc, etc, etc is very low. Part of this is because they're not humans, so some things can be done you wouldn't with humans, but at the same time the variation in cost is much lower than with humans.
One of my rats had a mammary tumor, recently. Cost to get it removed (anaesthesia, surgery, medicine, etc) was $50. Some mocked me for having such a procedure done on a rat, but this just serves to prove a point: the cost for major surgery on many animals is so low that it's not that big of a pocketbook decision.
Oh, and keep in mind that a pet rat is considered an exotic animal, and not many vets know how to work on them. Even with this catch, I was able to get an appointment for the removal in under 2 weeks.
When my mother had an internal tumor removed, it was extremely expensive, and it took pulling some strings to get an operation in a reasonable timeframe.
I'm not saying that people should be treated like animals, but I am saying that the market can help quite a bit.
Oh, and I might add that the success rate on operations on animals is around the same as for humans.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the most useful thing would be to test schools and group them regardless of country so we can try to figure out the common elements among them. Insisting that all the educations in the United States are as similar as all the educations in Monaco is ludicrous.
This is a superset of your idea, which I think is a good one.
If you have to pay a monthly subscription, then the game should be free, unless they have a mechanism to allow the creation of user hosted worlds. You shouldn't have to lay down $50, and then not be able to use the game.
You make a good point, however there are some things to consider:
First, distribution. The game is around 3 gigs in size, and they're using BitTorrent for the patches. Yeah, it's big. With a publisher and full rollout they can make that available in stores. $50 means a publisher will make their money back quickly, which means you get very good service. At $50 you get some real supply going.
Second, your first month is included. That just about works out to being equal to Blizzard's cut of the box price.
Third (and most important): serial number bans for cheating or chronic character abuse only works when a serial number costs money, and works to the degree that the serial number costs money. At $50 a pop, most people are only willing to go really nuts once.
Lastly, the "pre-order effect" (which may or may not be present with pure-subscription) relieves the stress of the large capital investment Blizzard made in investment. Makes the game much cheaper to make.
I think 9/10 is "nothing to complain about."
I think 10/10 is "good in ways I didn't expect." WoW is definitely that. I keep finding things I didn't even know I wanted.
Side note: Made in USA by Paul Graham has some good points.
Then again, reviewing systems are all different. I spent a while thinking about them as a sub-topic of grading systems. The whole thing depends on your philosophy.
I think part of the reason we put in numerical or categorical grades is to give a light to view the rest of the review by - I've read some 90% reviews that read like condemnations of bugs and misfeatures, and some 60%'s that seemed like praise. At least when you have the number, you know the tone of the article.
I'm on an RP server, and people DO RP. The GMs on one server started handing out 3-hour bans like candy for OOC conversations. That solved the issue PDQ.
Not sure about the naming troubles, but I haven't seen any "external" names.
Not only do people RP, they're helpful. And given the huge variety of appearances and such, people are interested to see odd things. I'm a gnome, and showing up on the NE island was a Big Thing for a lot of people (it was quite a trek).
Also, people are hacking the emote system to get an approximation of "look" ("You see CruelCoconut, the cruelest warlock to ever sail the seas of the world. The needle stuck in her shirt and the skinning knife next to it indicate her crafts.").
As for languages your character doesn't understand: that's there. My demonic minion is always kvetching in Demonic, and if the dwarves switch over to Dwarvish I can't understand a word.
In-game there is a mail system. Letters are instantaneous, parcels take a while. You can even send C.O.D!
If you have any other questions, reply and I'll try to answer.
I regularly team up with random people to complete quests. I help them get their quests done, they help me get mine done, we share the loot...everybody has a good time.
One feature that really helps this out is all the different looting controls available to the group leader. Creature tagging (the first group to do serious damage to a creature "tags" it, and only they get the experience and loot from killing it) also helps.
I tend to favor "Round Robin" looting, which alternates among people in the group who gets to loot. If you need a quest item off a creature and the active looter doesn't, however, you can still get it.
And since it shows what your groupmates pick up, it makes a lot of grind communication useless, leaving more time for other things.
Actually, it's interesting how, with Blizzard's elimination of a lot of things that were unnecessary (asking if someone got X, figuring out whose turn it is to loot, etc), the interactions have become more meaningful, rather than nonexistant.
I like that. Means that most people wanted to interact more, but were denied by the system.
There's a certain amount of money people are willing to pay for basic functionality, and then on top of that you add the amount you'd be willing to pay for a fully open-sourced card.
Add the two up, there you go.
As there is no competitor for the open-source aspect of the card, that's pretty much the only factor.
Oh, I'm with you on the operator overloading bit. I think it's a small issue of appropriate overloading.
For instance:
Doesn't make quite as much sense to have string + string = concatenation. Just something I've noticed.
Good point about robustness, though.
SLW: thanks for saying what needed to be said in a concise and well-reasoned way. There's far too little of that in this world.
Most of the (IMHO) well-designed either weakly or dynamically typed languages that I've used don't use the same operator for concatenation as addition.
It is very frustrating to have both automagical type and have operators that do radically different things depending upon type.
Thanks for your considered reply. I hope to reply more in-depth later.
I'd like to quickly address one issue:
Amazing what a bit of hand-waving can solve, eh?
I don't mean this to be hand-waving. I'm saying "no matter what, you can get it" to say that even if things are difficult financially, they can still be accomplished - in direct contravention of systems where you must please an authority. In such case, things may not be possible at all.
This is not to say that money is superior in every case, just in this case, and it's an aspect people don't consider.
It's just like air and oceans, you know. You can't really own it, just manage it, because it's everybody's and nobody's at the same time.
I can understand your motivations for this statement, but I think it rests upon some (unspoken) flawed assumptions and goals. I hope I'm not reading too much into what you say.
A common reason people make this statement is because they wish to eliminate the burden of divying up property. Deciding whose claim is the superior, dealing with the shouting and screaming between different greedy parties, and trying to help those who have none.
The assumption is that if you have no ownership of the resource, this is eliminated. The problem remains, however, that the resource must by allocated. If not in ownership, then at least in some rights: exploitation, enjoyment, etc. The reason for this is that some elements of the resource are more desirable than others - according to the view of people, and there is not enough of the most desirable portions to give to everyone.
Disliking ownership is mistaking a symptom for the problem itself. The problem is that there is more desire than there is supply, even for radio waves. No matter how you allocate the resource, some will go without what they want.
So the question becomes "yes, but should people be allowed to buy it?" It seems so arbitrary and callous to divide things by who has the most money.
There are two aspects to this: first off, when you only have to pay money for something, it can be done. Somehow. If you want it badly enough, you can get it. You may have to settle for a less-attractive lot, you may have to make outrageous sacrifices of your personal or professional life, but it can be done.
When a resource is allocated by a board with a charter, by a court system, by a charity, or even by a dictator you may not be able to get some of the resource. At all. There may be no sacrifice you could make that would get you even the homliest of homesteads. You may argue the best case of being "deserving" but what about those people who want very badly, but are not seen as deserving? An example would be nudists buying land: if they were required to convince a board that they should have the land, it might never happen.
Secondly, consider the problem of using a system to allocate things involving deciding who has the worthier claim. This system has a definite problem: we do not all agree on what is fair. No way to please all of the people all of the time. So, it becomes more important who is in power than what is fair according to you. PJ O'Rourke once said "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
There is no way to remove the pain of dividing things up, you can only move it around. When people wish to be relieved of the burden of deciding between two unpleasant outcomes, they usually do not mean having someone else make the decision for them, and that's the only other option available.
Slight nitpick: Spain has the Catalonian Seperatists, and they have killed people. One faction was known to be training with Al'Qaeda. Then again, people don't really worry about them.
Might also want to remember Ireland & Britain's little "tiff."
Another easy one: Chechneya.
And I'd hate to ignore large portions of Africa and South America.
I think you're right about the middle east, but I'm not sure that it's cultural, except in the broadest sense of a coming-together of history, government, and power.
A man once said "it's easier to worship a picture on the wall."
Not many people like prophets or wise men in the flesh: they have this bad habit of saying things you find inconvenient. When they're a picture...well, they can't remind you or get in the way of your "interpretations."
That's not a good reason to restrict smoking. The real reason it should be restricted is because second hand smoke violates the rights of others. This reason is consistent with all the current restrictions except the age restriction. The age restriction is to protect minors from "harm" before they become adults and can decide what is harmful for themselves.
You might find it a better construct to consider that minors operate with the consent of their parents. Most every product out there has "implicit consent" - we consider that it's sufficiently out of the ordinary for a parent to object to the minor's purchasing said product that the parents should have to make special arrangements to have it be otherwise.
Cigarettes, guns, alcohol, etc, etc do not have implicit consent, as it would be considered ordinary to not allow your child to purchase them - so the parent has to purchase them. It's legal for a child to drink, but the parents have to buy and provide the alcohol.
This avoids the need for a "harm" reason (which can get sketchy), and rests firmly within the fact that the child is a minor.
Secondly, you might want to look into the whole "second hand smoke is harmful" bit, if that's what you're arguing. There's no good evidence for this proposition. In fact, there seems to be good counter evidence. Bullshit had a good episode on this, and I believe there are some good links online.
If you're arguing that it violates the others because it is noxious, you might want to consider your opinion a bit more: the same argument can be applied to pornography, swearing, certain jokes and private conversations, and more. I'm not so sure that's a direction you want to go without some clear test that shows how smoking is different from the others.
I'd like to take this moment to point out that many of the finest logical minds of their time were Christian and dealt within that frame of mind.
I offer up St. Thomas Aquinas as a shining example of this. He used the bible as proof, yes, but this was because he was making statements within the church. He also took the time to understand and improve the arguments of those he was opposed to. Much of modern thought concerning Aristotle is due to Aquinas's notes.
Our construct of human rights is based on the belief in God's Plan - you can thank Locke for that.
The teachings of Christ were very clear on respect and love for others, and respect for the workings of God. Several Christian friends of mine shake their heads at the actions of the Fervid Few, suggesting that these busy-bodies busy themselves with the state of their own soul, and not put themselves upon their neighbor.
Oh, and I'm not a Christian by the way, I'm just familiar with the works - it's really a lovely religion, except for the nuts.
Who cares if it gets offtopic? This could be interesting.
You've met the first requirement for a working system: deal in money. Hayek has an interesting section on money in his book The Road to Serfdom, which I will parapharase here: when you take money from someone, you affect the least of their needs. When you give money to someone, you supply the greatest of their needs.
So, when your redistribution plan only deals in money, you are helping people more and hurting them less than if you did anything else.
Milton Friedman (a Republican libertarian - rare beast these days) recommended that we have a flat-percent income tax, with an interesting feature: it's graded below a certain amount.
How it works is this: you pick an amount on which a person could live. X, we'll say. Then, if you make less than 2X, you get money instead of paying taxes. You get 50% of the difference between what you make, and 2X, so at 0 income, you get X.
What's interesting about this is that it's a universal form of welfare, and it encourages you to make more money. For every extra dollar you earn, you're making 50 cents more - a net profit. It's actually more profitable to make money than it is to stay on welfare, at every point.
You can prank with the points and percentages over time.
Why do I mention this? It's somewhat similar to your idea of income redistribution, but it provides a total system for welfare.
However, both of these ideas have a few problems: what people often desperately need is not cost-of-living but cost-of-not-dying: drugs, doctors, etc. Or the complaint is that the subsidy they're receiving does not allow them to live where they want.
These are limited-good phenomena: solving one side entails hurting another. Further, if you attempt to solve them, you enter the non-monetary realm, where you have to decide who is the more deserving of things.
Personally, I think that many of our problems stem from the large and intricate role our government plays in the public sphere: we limit the number of doctors medical schools can put out, then we wonder why the price of medicine goes up.
And it would be even better if all people contributed equally to society, instead of some choosing to be supported by it. The utopia of socialism ends where human laziness and greed begin.
The fundamental problem of socialism is the allocation of scarce goods. There will always be goods which are scarce, even in a society of such plenty that you can have any object you want for free.
These are things such as:
Location Multiple people will want the same place. This is settled now by an auction or negotiation. What do you do without money besides arbitrary allocation? Services As fewer people are needed to produce the physical goods of society, we have seen an explosion in the variety of services available. There are never enough service providers to serve everyone. How do you allocate them, then? Fashion Some physical goods and some service providers are perceived as better than others - often for the most transitory of things, such as a name. These things are chosen because they are unequally available, so what do you do then?There are other problems, but this one might be seen as the fundamental one, and it has nothing to do with some people living off the fat of others.
Patents are supposed to further innovation by rewarding the inventors. The argument is that if you didn't reward the inventor, then they would not spend the time to make the invention.
It was my understanding that the foundation of patents was not to foster innovation, but to encourage releasing information about inventions to the public - this is the reason patents are time limited.
Copyright was the IP creation that was created because, otherwise, no one would spend the time to make creative works.
I think the reasoning is important, as if you consider it from the viewpoint of "providing information on recreating a work in return for limited protection," some things make sense that would not under "encouraging innovation through limited monopoly" - and vice versa.
Not sure about the business methods patents. At the least, demonstrating you have an actual invention should be rather tricky.
Technically, under the law, they ARE a singular entity. That's the entire idea behind a corporation: the company is a seperate entity, and if any part of the entity breaks the law, the entity as a whole can be sued for it. It allows for individuals to evade financial consequences if their company is held responsible for something.
Your post is good, I'm just emphasizing a point that some people miss.
All you have to do to sue a corporation is prove that X was done, and it was done somewhere inside the corporation. You do not have to know who did it. Otherwise you are stuck trying to figure out who did what and where - and they're damned sure not going to be cooperative.
Of course, if the corporation can come up with an individual fellow and show how his actions violated company policy, then they can cut him loose, and you can sue him directly[1].
Win/win for a plaintiff.
[1] - This is partially why corporations have document retention policies. In most cases, it is quite legal for a company to destroy all records as soon (or within 90 days) as a transaction is completed. By keeping documents around, they can redirect a messy lawsuit to the person responsible. If they keep their books clean, then they can also avoid charges of creating an environment hospitable to fraud.
Oh, great. Just what we need: napalm resistant plants.
Actually, we have these already. Well, of a sort. Many plants, when burned, grow back very, very quickly.
Some plants even require a big fire in order for them to reproduce.
Nice post, Justin.
I think of it more this way: a scientific explanation of evolution adds nothing to their lives, whereas the story of god creating all things as they are adds quite a bit to their lives.
On the one hand is dry fact, on the other is a first-to-last long-before-me-and-on-after-me element to their lives.
It's hardly a surprise that they'd take the latter.
Science alienates many because it focuses on what is (or *probably is*) and what we can know, rather than what things mean to us. Every time you see a new breakthrough in science, you'll always see what it *means* in mainstream papers.
When you discuss evolution with some people, they'll argue with you that you're saying a horrible thing: that their uncle is a monkey. Because that's what it means to them if you're right.
On another point: I believe religion is 10% philosophy and 90% culture. By this I mean that a very small minority thinks about their beliefs and actively chooses them because they believe them to be right. The rest accept the beliefs and primarily participate in the culture of the religion. There's nothing wrong with this - how they live their life is how they view their religion. Sounds good to me.
This "cultural participation" leads to some of the effects that we see: people trying to shape the rest of their lives in accordance with their religion (government, casual activities, etc), incorporation of statements such as "good Christian men" into the vernacular, and a further separation from peoples of other religions - other cultures.
I think these two observations explain quite a bit of what we see, and I live in the heart of Creationist Country.
Last thought: I think that a lot of the furor over "evolution in schools" could be solved by appealing to the people's desire for their children to be educated: the school's function is to teach current science and its foundations so that kids can understand what is going on in the scientific world. It is the parents' responsibility to teach about God.
First off, on the issue of Standard Oil: most such monsters don't do well unless the government props them up. Ma Bell was getting crushed by competition until the government regulated the phone service and set up a monopoly. Why did they do this? Because it was thought that price wars hurt the consumer.
U. S. Steel came to power in a similar way, as did Standard Oil. Here is an essay by Roy Childs that discusses the issue (the first part is a bit boring, but it gets better).
Large businesses continually seek regulation so as to squeeze out their competition.
My point of the example is that if the RIAA somehow did manage to raise the price on all RIAA CDs to $25, they would be destroyed. At that price, it becomes worth it to find indie talent and put venture capital behind a new label.
The RIAA succeeds not by jacking up prices, but by keeping their prices low enough and distribution wide enough that people aren't really pushed to buy anything else, and there's not enough money to be made in a startup.
Over time, the RIAA has gotten greedier and greedier: they keep adding layers of fat internally, and they have to support all of them. When they raise their prices high enough, one of them will break from the pack and reform, or an outsider will eat their lunch.
That is, of course, unless the RIAA somehow gets a government-granted monopoly.
The other side of it is that they have a partial monopoly: most radio stations 24x7 RIAA commercials. As long as the cost of broadcasting is artificially inflated like it is now, it will remain that way.
That's my view on the matter. I might be wrong.
The MS anti-trust trial was horrible. Some people at MS should've gone to jail for perjury. However, I'm not so sure they should've been under litigation for anti-trust. Their illegal actions in other negotiations (such as what Cringely has been talking about for a while) were enough.
Besides, even though the case folded, MS is still going to go away. If you're going to blame anyone for the whole incident, you might as well blame the executives with the mantra "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft."
You can see the first steps of where Microsoft is going with the DMCA (no reverse engineering), attacks on the GPL, and increased use of patents. If we can prevent them from using the government against us, I think they'll die off.
Note that I say "us." I am a believer in Free Software. I view it as the only honest way to do business in software, and I think it's a market correction for all the crap software we've had to deal with for so many years.
But I think that Free Software will win in the end because it's The Right Thing, because it's what the current great programmers like to work with. I don't think we should mandate the use of Free Software, nor discourage the use of closed software. Like I said, I think it will win on its merits.
Having said that, of course, I think that if a local government doesn't consider a better, cheaper alternative when they're considering a large project, that they're doing the taxpayers a disservice.
So, there you go. As you said, we come from different angles on government and market regulation, so it's difficult for us to hear exactly what the other is saying and not the concepts that we read into it. I appreciate you being clear, I hope I've done a similar job.
It's been nice talking to you, I've enjoyed what you've had to say. Catch you around sometime.
considering that you just dropped about a kilobuck on HDDs
Man, they're always doing funny prices like $24.95, $13.78, etc. Now they're doing powers of two?
Damn. Well, $5.12 doesn't buy what it used to. Just my $0.02
The free market is NOT about serving the most people. Its just a common effect of the market to serve more people, better. Yet we *know* this is not the case with health care in the US: there are lots of people with little or no care, and lots with really great health care.
The US health care market is one of the most free, however it is not free in one very important way: it has effective price minima.
One of the best ways to inflate the price of a product in a market is to limit the supply. You can only do this if you've cornered the market, or are the government. In this case, it's the government.
The government limits:
That's just off the top of my head, but I think it covers the major points. These all serve to raise the cost of medicine.
Another effect raises the cost of medicine: our current price structure of insurance.
Markets have always been regulated to balance the other aspects of life (like fairness) with the power of production it enables. The balance of regulating the market excesses (like DRM,) against enjoying the production benefits (like cheap software,) needs to be changed: both in software IP laws, and drug research. Its not just a single issue of using Linux/FOSS in Brazil, but many issues of freeing information, and consequently reducing the power of vested interests. The issue is how to regulate.
Legitimate markets (as opposed to black markets) are supposed to operate within the law. The excesses you describe are either laws not being enforced, or laws which need to be changed. True "natural monopolies" are very rare, most of the time a company needs the government to bludgeon to death its competition so that the company may be without competition.
This "operation within the law" is not regulation of the market, as it is not directed at the market, but at individuals in the market. Much as how convicting someone of murder does indeed remove him from certain markets, but one would not say that it's "regulating the market."
If the RIAA has its way 100% should we say 'oh well, thats the market then' or should we be mad as hell at the political system which made it happen?
If the RIAA "had its way" and managed to get all its members to raise the price on their CDs to $25 apiece, then we probably should say "well, that's the market." If the RIAA "had its way" and got expansion of copyright powers, government enforcement of copyright, and had a mandated minimum price of $25 per CD, then we should scream bloody murder at a political system that allowed this to happen.
One is a function of the market, the other is a government action and is not under the power of the market.
The level of advancement in medicine in the past 150 years has been many, many, many times what it was before that. 1776 they were still bleeding people with leeches.
I don't think we need to reign in profit levels so much as stop supporting them so heavily: requiring physicians to write perscriptions, requiring a pharmacy to sell drugs, requiring FDA approval to sell a drug, etc. These all serve to eliminate competition, creating an un-free market.
Want to see a much more free medical market than human? Take a look at Vetrinary medicine. Cost in medicine, check-ups, procedures, etc, etc, etc is very low. Part of this is because they're not humans, so some things can be done you wouldn't with humans, but at the same time the variation in cost is much lower than with humans.
One of my rats had a mammary tumor, recently. Cost to get it removed (anaesthesia, surgery, medicine, etc) was $50. Some mocked me for having such a procedure done on a rat, but this just serves to prove a point: the cost for major surgery on many animals is so low that it's not that big of a pocketbook decision.
Oh, and keep in mind that a pet rat is considered an exotic animal, and not many vets know how to work on them. Even with this catch, I was able to get an appointment for the removal in under 2 weeks.
When my mother had an internal tumor removed, it was extremely expensive, and it took pulling some strings to get an operation in a reasonable timeframe.
I'm not saying that people should be treated like animals, but I am saying that the market can help quite a bit.
Oh, and I might add that the success rate on operations on animals is around the same as for humans.